Instagram - I don’t know of any FOSS instagram clients that are actively maintained. Can you use it on the web with uBlock Origin enabled to minimize trackers, and try to get the contacts you care most about onto a less invasive platform?
Location tracking: there are other options that you could use, though they generally requires you to set up your own server in addition to installing the app.
You could also use an OsmAnd integration to avoid the need for a server, e.g., using their Telegram location tracker or regularly sending lat/long via SMS (though I couldn’t find an existing solution for this).
At least as of October the DJI Fly app was reported working under GrapheneOS, see https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/2527
My understanding from https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/904-grapheneos-pixel-6-dji-fly-app-compatibility was that it requires broad storage access to work. Did you try adjusting the Storage Scopes configuration to get it to run?
I was able to read it by clicking the stop button mid-refresh, but it took me a few tries.
Per the Wired article, the Palestinian employee who was fired, Madly Espinoza, asked for and received permission to wear her keffiyeh, which was rescinded a few weeks later. She followed the new instructions and asked for and received approval to wear pro-Palestinian jewelry. She was then fired. Her termination documents did not state a reason.
For anyone who didn’t click into the original post and whose client didn’t include its text, here are the instructions for opting out:
Opt-out. You can decline this agreement to arbitrate by emailing an opt-out notice to arbitration-opt-out@discord.com within 30 days of April 15, 2024 or when you first register your Discord account, whichever is later; otherwise, you shall be bound to arbitrate disputes in accordance with the terms of these paragraphs. If you opt out of these arbitration provisions, Discord also will not be bound by them.
Note that the forced arbitration clause applies only to Discord users in the US. The class action waiver appears to apply regardless.
This is also not a new addition to their TOS, but it does appear to require opting out again even if you already did, and to grant an additional opt out opportunity if you didn’t.
Why is “Israeli” in quotes?
If a law requires then intent then of course intent is relevant.
When someone asks you “Hey, why do you think X? I looked at <insert resource here> and it didn’t add up” and you respond by insulting them and refusing to actually answer their questions, you’re more likely to get them to disagree with you than to agree with you. There’s therefore very little risk for a CIA plant to do that - nobody is going to be convinced by them, but they’ll fit into the community just fine.
Read over the conversations I had with Cayde and then ask yourself: if I came into the conversation undecided and largely uneducated about the topic, would the way Cayde engaged be at all likely to convince me? If not, what would my likely take-away be?
If people like me would, on average, be less likely to engage in the future, then that should answer your question.
Add to that the encouragement to edit the article. If members of this community are being watched by some intelligence orgs, seeing edits on the site could enable them to better link the activity, especially if someone used an account that they didn’t create fresh for their edits. That may sound like a bit of a reach but every little bit of extra information adds up, and that’s literally what surveillance orgs do.
Thanks for the context on Tibet. The analogy helped, too, since I have a lot more familiarity with events related to e.g., the destruction of Confederate statues. I’ll have to go back and re-read the Tropes mention and so on but it makes sense to me now why mentioning the destruction of that culture without a disclaimer would be problematic / explicitly bigoted (still not sure “racist” is the right term but even if so my opposition would be solely pedantic and I’m not trying to police word choices like that).
FLG
I’ll be honest re the FLG - reading up on this yesterday was the first time I’d ever even heard of them. They’re not a very likable group.
Given what you’ve shared, it makes sense to me that their claims shouldn’t be taken at face value. That said, if people who haven’t harmed anyone are being imprisoned solely because of their beliefs, regardless of how poorly informed those beliefs are - which this New York Times article discusses - then it’s fair to criticize the state for those actions.
I still don’t see how it isn’t ignorant to hold the belief that “unironically mentioning the FLG means you’re a racist white edgelord,” when referring to someone talking about the subject matter of a show that has that subject matter, and given that as far as I can tell the imprisonment of those people is not even contested by the state.
China Uncensored is directly affiliated with Falun Gong.
That seems like pretty important context for the TvTropes article, and its omission is suspicious.
Organ harvesting
If you actually read that article, the evidence presented is laughable.
I didn’t read the whole article, though I read the counterpoints section in its entirety. From what I did read, the lines you cited were the least compelling. Importantly, there’s an entire “Evidence” section; the bit you quoted was from the section on Verdicts and Reporting.
Specifically, the following all have more merit IMO:
You’re right that none of this is definitive, especially given the bias of many of the sources, but as a whole it is clear that something other than the official account is or was happening. I’m not fully convinced one way or the other, but the arguments were compelling enough for several major governments to speak out against it and pass laws in response. Calling the evidence laughable feels shortsighted.
I’ve also been unable to find rebuttals to the specific evidence. As a contrast, the World Trade Center “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams so it must have been an inside job” conspiracy theories prompted government investigations and a ton of debunking articles that I can easily find via a web search. When I try to find debunkings of this, the best I can find is articles like this one, in which Chinese government officials admit that they used to harvest organs from prisoners, but state that they don’t anymore.
With what I’ve read so far, to believe that this is made up, I basically would have to say that the evidence itself was fabricated and ignore the discrepancies in the data, assuming that there’s some reasonable explanation for them but not seeking it out. I’m not interested in engaging in willful ignorance like that.
I can see why someone might be annoyed at an assertion of this as a fact, but to call such an assertion racist / white supremacist is nonsensical at best.
In other words, nobody's actually collected any real evidence and it's all just speculation and inference. It's made up.
Inference involves making a conclusion by taking evidence and applying logic and reasoning. Not sure why you think that’s “made up.”
Many of the people pushing the narrative have incentive to lie about China.
This seems to be the case, but unfortunately the opposite - that those rebutting the narrative have incentive to lie for China - also seems to be true.
Thanks again for all the extra info/context you’ve shared and for helping me to better understand this.
—-
Quotes below are from the wikipedia article - specifically the numbered list of evidence I mentioned above.
Tribunal:
In June 2019, the tribunal published their final judgment which unanimously concluded that crimes against humanity had been committed.[67] The tribunal's report said "forced organ harvesting has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale and ... Falun Gong practitioners have been one—and probably the main—source of organ supply."[67] The tribunal estimated between 60,000 and 90,000 transplant operations occurred per year, much more than the official figures of 10,000 from the Chinese government.[1][68] The chair of the tribunal said "there is no evidence of the practice having been stopped and the tribunal is satisfied that it is continuing."[68]
Wait times:
Researchers and medical professionals have expressed concern about the implications of the short organ transplant wait times offered by Chinese hospitals. Specifically, they say these wait times are indicative of a pool of living donors whose organs can be removed on demand.[35] This is because organs must be transplanted immediately after death, or must be taken from a living donor (kidneys must be transplanted within 24–48 hours; livers within 12 hours, and hearts within 8 hours).[90]
Medical testing:
One man, Wang Xiaohua, was imprisoned in a labor camp in Yunnan in 2001 when he and twenty other Falun Gong detainees were taken to a hospital. They had large quantities of blood drawn, in addition to urine samples, abdominal x-rays, and electrocardiogram. Hospital staff did not tend to physical injuries they had suffered in custody. This pattern was repeated in several other interviews.
Hospital / prison / detention center statements:
In one such call to a police detention center in Mishan city, an official said that they had five to eight Falun Gong practitioners under the age of 40 who were potential organ suppliers. When asked for details on the background of these individuals, the official indicated that they were male Falun Gong prisoners from rural areas.[102]
Israel arrests:
Israeli authorities arrested several men involved in mediating transplants of Chinese prisoners' organs for Israelis. One of the men had stated in an undercover interview that the organs came from "people who oppose the regime, those sentenced to death and from prisoners of the Falun Gong."[138]
So, in your mind the CIA works for china...
How is it possible to think that?
No, Cayde is a CIA plant who is only pretending to hold those views to antagonize people who might be receptive to their arguments by acting rude, ignorant, and incompetent. I figured that out and called them on it. It’s pretty obvious in hindsight.
To be completely fair, I’m not 100% sure on this. The alternative is that Cayde is actually a rude, incompetent, and hypocritical liar. Regardless, there isn’t a difference to me between the two possibilities. If you’re a compulsively lying asshole who can’t articulate an argument, it doesn’t matter whether you agree with me or not; I want nothing to do with you.
It’s also likely that the account I just replied to is one of Cayde’s (or at least is another plant). Their comments read basically the same and if I hadn’t read the usernames beforehand I’d have assumed they were the same person.
It’s pretty obvious that you’re just another of CIA Agent Cayde’s accounts, so allow me to repeat myself:
I’m not interested in talking to a CIA plant, so fuck off.
I’m not interested in talking to a government plant. Fuck off.
I provided counterpoints, and you clearly know more than your sea-lioning suggests, you claim to seem surprised at some of wikipedia's banal and weak and soft-footed criticisms of your racist neoliberal arguments, which means you are lying, since I would expect a raging capitalist drone and sinophobe to know the counterarguments to your "arguments" better than that, or you pathetically easy to manipulate into believing nonsense by capitalist news media.
As if. You haven’t provided a single counterpoint to anything I’ve said, nor did I claim surprise at anything on Wikipedia. You do realize that multiple people have commented in this thread, right?
I asked for specific quotes, from the page, that you believe validate your claim from the title of your post - which you’d need to find anyway if you were planning on editing the page to address those issues - and instead of replying with them, you replied with:
I just gave you multiple examples in multiple, but especially one of my comments, you capitalist bootlicker. Your smarmy smugness and aloof-acting nature is hypocritical and disgusting. You are spewing racist bullshit and denying it's racist.
Pretty sure that reply was meant for someone else. Giving you the benefit of the doubt here, and still operating in good faith, I checked to see if you had responded with that information to someone else, read your lengthy comment, and then went back to the page to see if the things you cited were actually there. And oh hey, turns out they don’t. Literally your first claim is unfounded - a search for the word “totalitarian” on the page returned 0 results.
Anything I point you to, even occasional pieces from the same neoliberal sources, you dismiss out of hand. I'm not your fucking mother.
You haven’t shared a single link with me so I don’t know what neoliberal sources you’re talking about.
If anyone’s acting in bad faith, it’s you. Though I think I’ve just realized the truth. I’ve been had - you’re actually a CIA plant who’s supposed to make CPC sympathizers look bad. Sorry bud, you’ve done a great job making an ass of yourself but, despite your assertion that I’m a bigot, I just think you, specifically, are incompetent.
Anyway, carry on with the irrationally angry “communist” act. Maybe you’ll pull someone else in, Agent Cayde. Personally, I’ll look for intelligent discussions elsewhere.
I’m not arguing in good faith because I’ve shared where I got my information from and because I asked you to provide a source backing up your own claims? Yeah, that tracks /s
What is this lib shit? If they write unironically about organ harvesting, FLG and Tibet in the second paragraph of the intro, they're a bunch of racist white edgelords.
First of all, if you think that criticizing a government for its failings is racist then, simply put, you’re wrong. Likewise re white supremacy. If the government were taking actions that were less favorable to white people and someone were criticizing those actions, then you’d have an argument, but that’s not what’s happening here.
Tibet
I’m by no means an expert but I specifically find your mention of Tibet curious - are you saying that you disagree that the Tibetans have been persecuted? Would you then argue that this wikipedia article is entirely spurious? If so I’d love if you could provide some evidence to back up that claim.
organ harvesting
Just reading over the Wikipedia page, I see that this is contested, but the argument that it has been happening are much stronger, and the only cited counterargument involves the demand for immunosuppressant drugs, which I would be unsurprised to learn that literally any developed nation has the capability to produce themselves.
Why do you think this is false?
FLG
Please, elaborate as to why you think mentioning the FLG is racist.
This article is full of misinformation and reads like the rantings of an angry and incompetent MAGA propagandist.
Does it make sense to have robust protections for an event that will have 65,000 civilians present - and where the equipment and personnel involved can be deployed to other high profile events afterward, even if there isn’t a specific drone threat? Yes.
This year’s Super Bowl in Las Vegas has better protections against rogue drones than the many small U.S. bases in the Middle East like Tower 22
“Many small US bases,” huh? And the author thinks that each of them should be better protected than the Super Bowl? That doesn’t make a ton of sense to me. Is this in a heavy casualty zone or something? No - we’ve had 3 casualties, total, across all bases, since this engagement started.
Don’t get me wrong - I think our soldiers should be kept safe. Leave it to me and I’d have every single one of those soldiers back on US soil. That would keep them safe but probably wouldn’t make the author happy.
Unlike Tower 22, this year’s Super Bowl will enjoy a host of “hardened” measures including electromagnetic weapons that can incapacitate drones.
The bases have anti-drone tech, but they also have drones and one was returning at the same time as the attack, which likely is why a large part of why the attack was successful. Does the author think that the super bowl defenses would have foiled such an attack? He implies as much but gives no evidence in support of that claim.
In fact, the entire region is a no-drone zone. So sure, we can deploy the super bowl defenses to those bases - they just have to understand that their drones will be shot down, too.
To be honest, from my uneducated point of view, the defenses described for the bases sound more sophisticated than the ones in place at the Super Bowl, not less.
That all said, the author’s other article has this tidbit:
Just a week before the attack, the military announced an $84 million contract to work on a replacement to the TPS-75, a mobile, ground-based radar array from the 1960s.
So the military is literally in the process of improving their defenses and they just haven’t been built yet? Strange, in this article the author said there hadn’t been any efforts to improve them.
Compare this hypervigilance with the glib way the Biden administration has discussed the terrorist drone that slipped past military defenses and killed three Americans and injured 41 others.
Glib how? This is what I found for their response:
The president, in the written statement, called it a “despicable and wholly unjust attack” and said the service members were “risking their own safety for the safety of their fellow Americans, and our allies and partners with whom we stand in the fight against terrorism. It is a fight we will not cease.”
Doesn’t sound glib to me.
For the most part. You know, besides the deaths of three National Guard soldiers from Georgia. Working class people with families — the supposed focus of the Biden administration’s “foreign policy for the working class.” But who cares about them?
I imagine at least the victims of the 85 retaliatory attacks the US made cared.
It’s unclear what the author wants, other than to wave a “Let’s Go Brandon” flag around while getting drunk and posting misinformation.
I did, and if your complaint is just that the page insults the Chinese government, you should edit the post title to say as much. But as it is, that is not what it says. So if you stand by what you wrote, please quote three examples each of the page’s:
content. I would ask for just one, but you said it’s “astounding” how much of it there was, so asking for three seems appropriate.
If you’re in the US, unpaid overtime is only permissible if you’re salaried exempt. To be salaried exempt:
Check out https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/17a-overtime for more details on the above.
It’s quite possible you’re eligible for back-paid overtime.
Note also that the minimum exempt wages are increasing in July.
Re your “cover my expenses just to exist” bit and the follow-up about employers catching on and pushing abusive shit… if this is related to a disability make sure to look into getting that on record and seeking an accommodation. If your primary job duty is X and they’re pushing you to do Y, but your disability makes Y infeasible, then it’s a pretty reasonable accommodation to ask to not have to do Y (assuming your HCP agrees, of course).