Thanks for this breakdown, I can see why people are protesting. The situation is fucked

I always find it tricky to understand how tools all relate to each other in an ecosystem and this is a great example of why: the fact that Ansible can do this task, but Teraform would be better suggests that they are tools that have different purposes, but some overlap. What would you say is Ansible’s strong suit?

Thanks for this recommendation. Diverse perspectives are important in underscoring that the Israeli people are not a monolith, and that they are distinct from the state of Israel.

I often see people online speaking about Israelis as though all of them are in favour of the ongoing genocide, when this is simply not the case. That’s not to say that Netanyahu’s control of the media hasn’t led to a depressingly high proportion of Israelis to see themselves as righteous victims — years of state propaganda has unfortunately had an impact. However, there are journalists and activists (Jewish or otherwise) who are working to challenge this rhetoric.

No it won’t. Eco-fascist rhetoric like this is unproductive because it ignores the fact that the people who are most shielded from the harms of climate change are the ones most responsible for it.

Billionaires and others who are profiting most from pillaging the planet’s resources are not the ones at risk here.

(N.b. I am not calling you an eco-fascist, just that this framing is commonly used by eco-fascists. Part of why I highlight this is because your use of this rhetoric may not be intentional)

I’m super dubious because Starmer has done very little to earn my trust, but I would be very keen to be surprised, or even proven wrong

I saw an article recently that looked at the rates of suicide in Israeli soldiers. One guy, who featured heavily in the article, had killed himself after being an IDF bulldozer driver. The article tried to dial up sympathy for him, but additional coverage (in response to this article) highlighted that this guy had posted some pretty horrifying stuff on social media — stuff like videos and photos of him in Gaza, being pretty jovial as he drove through bodies and buildings. I wonder whether the PTSD he experienced afterwards was a sort of moral immune system, and that once he was away from the kind of military camaraderie that normalises atrocities, if he began to reflect on his part in this genocide. At least for him, we’ll never know.

A Jewish, anti-Zionist friend who lived in Israel for a while said that it was disturbing to see how much the Holocaust was leveraged to make people feel scared and insecure. I imagine many members of the IDF do genuinely believe that most, if not all Palestinians hate all Jews and want them to die. That way, they can enthusiastically participate, believing that they are on the side of justice.

I once punched a Nazi at a gig, and I did enjoy it, because it feels good to be righteous and angry. Enough so that it makes me anxious about how easy it would be to lean into anger if it feels righteous.

Who is David Kinne and what did he do?

I was agreeing with you for the entirety of your comment (as someone with friends in healthcare), until you said

“What they call burnout, really is moral injury”

And then I was aggressively agreeing with you. I do not hear this aspect spoken about nearly enough. I was in hospital during COVID for non COVID reasons and I remember one terrible night where there was only one nurse on the ward, when two were needed to dispense medications like morphine. I was fortunate that I wasn’t needing medication like that, but many on the ward did. The entire night, sick and injured people were crying from pain as the solitary nurse sounded increasingly desperate as she explained to them that she needed to wait until she had backup and that she had been promised (and that, failing that, help should definitely arrive with the morning shift).

Prior to that night, my opinion of that nurse was that she was the kind of unpleasant that made me wonder “why has this person gone into healthcare when they seem to hate people so much?”. After that harrowing night, I realised the depth of the agony that her job involved and the inhumanity not just for the patients who were unable to receive medication, but for staff like her too. This was during COVID, so it’s unsurprising that the hospital was struggling for staff, but services were struggling long before COVID too.

I often think about her, and what she represents; I wonder how she was when she first started the job, and if perhaps her brusque manner evolved as the moral injury wore her down and hardened her exterior.

I got the impression from the summary that “broadly welcomed” may include opinions like “there’s a lot of work to do on the implementation front, but this sounds like a step in the right direction”, as is common when there’s a big and complex problem. Unions are used to being given loads of assurances at the beginning when policies are declared, and then gradually over time, the concessions in a bill get eroded. “Broadly welcomed” could mean that 27 of the unions have sentiments that are roughly 65% positive on this, and 1 of them (the quoted one) is 60% negative. In this case, maybe including a quote from the mostly negative union also captures some of the sentiments of the 35% negatives from the main bulk. If this is the only quote included, it is weird, but I imagine the full article has more perspectives.

Edit: Reading the full article deepened this impression — apparently this is a big enough endeavour that it’s expected to be on the drawing board for at least 2 years? Another union (TUC) said that “this bill highlights Labour’s commitment to upgrade rights and protections for millions” — language like “highlights Labour’s commitment” is fairly fluffy, which suggests to me an angle of “starting this early in your elected window bodes well for your intentions, hopefully we can keep this up for long enough that we get a practical change”

In addition, the union who gave the negative quote are a small businesses union, and whilst I’m definitely on the side of the workers over businesses, I also think it’s important to recognise that legislation like this tends to put a disproportionate burden on small businesses compared to the mega-corporations (who can lobby more and also absorb impacts easier).

This announcement is good news, but Starmer has moved the goalposts on past promises so many times that any optimism I might feel is tempered by a “I’ll believe it when I see it”. Time will tell, I suppose. !Remindme 2 years (this is a joke, I don’t think Lemmy has a RemindMe bot)

That’s actually helpful, thanks

Seconding the FOSS advice from the perspective of a fellow learner.

I’m a scientist first and foremost, so I’m learning programming on the side. A lot of code that’s written by scientists is pretty grim, so attempting to understand and contribute to FOSS projects has been useful in understanding how a complex project is organised, and how to read code as well as write it.

Contributing can be pretty small, even opening a git issue for a problem, or adding some info to an existing issue. You won’t be able to just dive in and start solving problems all over, and it can feel overwhelming to try as a relative beginner, but it massively improved my skills.

“In Sweden, having drugs in the bloodstream is punishable with prison”

Oh wow, I didn’t know that

What do you expect her to do instead?

What’s your favourite scent/scent note? (Either scent to work with if you make perfumes, or just something you personally enjoy for your own use)

I need to add that to my quotes book, it’s great

I can’t help but wonder whether some people are aiming to scapegoat her. Like, this is a huge trial, with many defendants (I’m unsure whether anyone else besides her was sentenced to death at the first trial), but maybe pinning more stuff on her will make others (who may be more culpable for some of the charges than she is) less likely to get the death penalty.

Last year, I called out a friend for excessively blaming the Greens for various local council decisions/inefficiencies. They had the impression that the Greens had far more seats than they actually did (iirc, they only had 2, out of a total of almost 40). When I pointed this out to them, they were surprised, and we later reflected that they had likely inadvertently bought into propaganda that scapegoats the Greens.

One of the projects that the Greens had most loudly been opposed to in the area was one that looked like some genuinely pretty dodgy developments as part of a failing scheme led by councillors who had approved a bunch of other half complete failures.

“helping” seems like an odd word to use for “threatened at gunpoint”.

I think I saw a paper on this kind of thing over a year ago. Iirc, it said that engagement is lower on Mastodon, but higher quality.

As we saw with the COVID pandemic, even in “1st world countries”, poorer people were disproportionately affected. Fewer humans won’t help when the majority of harm to the Earth is perpetuated by a small fraction who would be disproportionately represented in a world where the majority of people died.

I sympathise with your sentiment, because it often does feel like humans are the problem, but the reality is that we’re not. Although it can feel weirdly comforting to think of humans as inherently and innately destructive, thinking this way is a pipeline to eco-fascism, which doesn’t offer productive ways forward.