The original AP source:

CBS is just syndicating it, and fuck CBS.

Email wall* to be clear. Meaningfully different from a paywall – and imo also shittier since I’m paying with my spammability rather than my money that supports the journalists. But easier to negotiate with a sock email.

“The investors are simultaneously strong and weak.”

The time to read the Grayzone source? I mean I could just dismiss it out-of-hand for what it is (again, like if someone linked to Breitbart), but it’s still sometimes casually interesting to read what fringe conspiracy websites write. As for the “research” (quick and shallow; I won’t dignify this by not using scare quotes) and writing, I type at 110 WPM, I’ve been writing as a hobby for 10 years (okay, this one doesn’t show very well), and I’ve been researching as a hobby for 10 years. Quickly perusing an article, seeing what its sources are, and seeing what else has been written about the article’s focus elsewhere is very straightforward. What I did isn’t nearly on the level of research I’d normally do. That’s not a brag; that’s saying I’m not wasting real time on this nonsense.

The fact that it is so disputed and the details are not fully known

Oh, you’re trying to end this in a draw because you know your position is unspeakably awful and indefensible to sane people, so backing down from “the rebels did it and it’s effectively impossible the regime did it because muh 2 km”, you’re now pivoting to it just being oh so murky and will we ever truly know?

No. Bashar al-Assad perpetrated it. Serious organizations don’t equivocate about this. Goddamn spineless that you’re pulling this “uwu it’s just too hard for anyone to say” bullshit. I could at least half-respect (as stupid and awful as it is) that you had an outspoken belief, but now it’s clear you’ll just say whatever muddies the waters the best because you value propagandizing over the truth. And here I thought the opposite might be true when you came out with unequivocal “al-Assad did nothing wrong” rhetoric (albeit with an objectively fucked version of “truth”). But no, you’re just really bad at it.

If you read the reporting from Grayzone, you’d have seen that the study done by MIT

Oh hey, good news: I did! And it’s bullshit. It funnily links to a NYT article covering it (I guess they’re credible if and only if they’re supporting your side). It also leaves out that credible organizations like HRW (which I’ll say, preemptively, I know you’re going to dismiss, but you’re going to dismiss anyone against your war crime denial in bad faith, so I don’t give a shit and neither should anyone else) pointed out at the time rebels didn’t have the means to do this.

Moreover, it conspicuously fails to mention a later debunking of the notion that the Lloyd and Postol’s conclusion is some kind of slam dunk:

When questioned about this in a recent interview with the Turkish website Diken Hersh dismissed the Volcano rockets, seemingly because he believes a range of “a mile” somehow means they should be discounted as important to his narrative. Hersh refers to the work of Ted Postol and Richard Lloyd who believe the range of the rockets is about 2km. But this range issue isn’t the problem Hersh appears to think.

Video footage from both sides of the conflict has allowed researchers to accurately find the positions of government controlled areas on 21 August. The Russian-language news site ANNA News posted two dozen videos showing “Operation al-Qaboun”, a Syrian government military operation running from June to August 2013. Embedded with Syrian forces, they were able to film the progress of the operation to clear positions between Jobar and Qaboun, a strip of land about 2km away from the 21 August impact sites.

Videos from opposition groups show the other side of the fighting, including attacks on checkpoints and government movements. Based on this information it appears that the front lines were about 2km away from the furthest impact sites of rockets used on 21 August. Only two rockets landed at the 2km maximum range described by Lloyd and Postol, with the reported impact sites of the remaining rockets being between 1.5km-1.8km away. It has been possible to confirm the precise impact locations of some of the rockets by a combination of GPS information, satellite map imagery, photographs and videos, and around a dozen impact sites were reported by local groups in eastern Ghouta. Hersh’s belief that the 2km rocket range is enough to dismiss them from his narrative is clearly misguided.

Despite Hersh’s claims we can clearly see that the rockets were used by the Syrian government, and within range of government controlled territory.

Your funeral if you want to keep denying well-established war crimes only still denied by e.g. the Russian government, fringe, tankie propagandist outlets, and said outlets’ moron readership. Whereas outlets like MintPress and The Grayzone may precede their reputations here with readers who aren’t well-informed about propaganda outlets, they surely do know that someone coming in here with apologia for al-Assad is batshit insane.

I wasn’t sure you’d let yourself get baited this hard into revealing who you really are, but here we are, I guess.

I love how you’re using fucking The Grayzone to support this – understanding that most readers here won’t have heard of it and its well-earned notorious reputation. Yeah, fucking no shit The Grayzone also denies al-Assad’s atrocities. This is like defending a claim by InfoWars by linking to Breitbart. “Get owned, liberal” in both cases.

I removed the numbered citation indicators from that quote for elegance (because they serve no purpose here), but it’s well-referenced, which is why I put it there with a link such that anyone was welcome to trivially check those references.

Sometimes I wish a hell existed so that tankies like you could wind up there for constantly, full-throatedly denying atrocities – famine-induced genocides, cultural genocides, chemical attacks on civilians. You don’t give a single, solitary shit about “anti-imperialism”; you just want a monopoly on imperialism.

info that mainstream media purposely omits

Oh, you mean like denying al-Assad’s 2013 chemical attack on Ghouta? I’m glad they’re telling the real truth that the slimy MSM wants to keep hidden. (Of course I know you do mean that, because you’re a fucking tankie disgrace.)

Regardless of whether this particular article is true or not (haven’t attempted to verify), most people probably don’t know of this source and should. This garbage fire of a source doesn’t belong on a news community.

MintPress News has reposted content from Russian state media outlets RT and Sputnik, and is listed as a “partner” of PeaceData, a Russian fake news site run by the Internet Research Agency. A report from New Knowledge includes MintPress News as part of the “Russian web of disinformation,” and the site has published fake authors attributed to the GRU, the Russian military intelligence agency. MintPress News defended Russia’s invasion of Crimea, stating that Ukraine’s post-revolution government was illegitimate.

Keep your trash in .ml, please.

Here’s an article from The Hill instead of fucking Unilad as a source.

Here’s the original article from Mozilla instead of this third-party AI slop regurgitating it.

So crazy I did not need to open this to know they were talking about ICE

What makes that even a little bit crazy? They, unlike any other group in the US, have been referred to specifically with the phrase “fascist paramilitary invaders” countless times over the last few months. It’s crazy that ICE did everything they’ve done, but it’s not crazy at all you recognized it.

You saw the epithet they’ve been referred to as, saw it’s in the US, and, like, yeah, obviously. Even if you’d never seen the epithet, what other possible organization would make you think “paramilitary” and “invaders” – not the formal military and from outside California.

“Look, we want to control the world, not destroy it.”

—Moscow to Tucker

who still wants a television in this century?

This is so out-of-touch it’s unreal.

—Someone who doesn’t still want a television in this century

Used to have a coworker who’d recently immigrated from the UK to the US. While we were working, I told him I was going to wear a fanny pack somewhere. The expression he gave me immediately told me something was wrong; he looked like I’d just said something really profane but didn’t understand what, so I thought maybe he didn’t know what a “fanny pack” was and only knew “fanny” as euphemistic slang for a butt. It took a solid minute at least before we figured out this was a false friend.

It was on that day that he learned what “fanny pack” means (and what “fanny” means in the US and Canada) and that I learned that “fanny” is all kinds of vulgar in the UK.

I know it’s not a lot, but when I was doing some UI work on PCSX2, I tried the screen reader Orca on Linux to see what a blind person’s experience interacting with the UI was like. It was unusable. There was practically nothing. (Apparently on macOS it was kind of okay, but not because of anything the PCSX2 application was doing correctly.) It was staggering how terrible the experience was; even the tab ordering through the UI elements wasn’t enforced, so the element focus was like a game of connect-the-dots darting around the window. We weren’t using any – even trivial – accessibility functionality in Qt. To this day, I think most of that still needs to be done, as I only managed with my minimal knowledge to fix some low-hanging fruit (which would hopefully have at least helped a little).

What prompted me to try this? PS2 games are such a visual experience, after all. A fan replied to our Mastodon account saying that 1) he was totally blind from birth, 2) he loved playing PS2 games growing up, and 3) his favorite one was OutRun 2006 (yes, the high-speed racing game). This wasn’t a gag; he was visibly blind and detailed his experience. This wasn’t a one-off either; multiple users who note that they’re totally blind in their bio have followed the account. It really humanized something I’d conceptualized generically as something you should do because it’s a good thing to do. The most succinct way to put the lesson I was smacked in the face with was: “If you build it, they will come.”

That is, I know for sure that it’s not just a formality when I enforce it.

I think it might be fractured as a feature on Lemmy, which is why putting it in the body is also allowed.

On Voyager, once I upload an image, there’s a little stick figure button that lets me “Add an accessible caption” (the alt text). On desktop, there’s an “Alt Text” option that shows up once I’ve uploaded an image.

Since I have no clue if all UIs do this or if users know where it is, body posts are fine if slightly less(?) useful for accessibility.