anon6789

I don’t know much at all about the Middle East, but it seems as though they’ve contributed a lot to the modern world for a very long time, and I don’t get why anyone would treat them as lesser people. All the religions and various groups of different people living there have all seemed to be treated very poorly for one reason or another, despite them often being the allies of Europe or the Americas. Governments just can’t seem to stop meddling.

Appreciate you getting me caught up. Sounds like every bridge will continue to be burned behind this administration. 😖

After looking them up, the PMF is aligned with Iraq, though not their official military, and they were allies to the US fighting the Islamic State, but since they are funded by the Iranian gov and are mainly Shia, even though they have been good allies to America in the past, they’re now being attacked unless the Iraqi gov disarms them.

While being funded by, and formerly sworn loyal to Iran, it sounds like Iraq legitimized them in 2016 into a still mainly independent, but now non-politically aligned force under supervision of the Iraqi supreme military leader. This is why they have been doing things such as guarding the US embassy in Baghdad as mentioned in the article.

Despite seemingly following the rules and agreements with them, they’re still “too-Iranian” for the US leadership and this was a series of “warnings” to give up their weapons to the official Iraqi military? That seems to make this whole story make sense, at least in line with how the US government seems to operate these days. Have I got the gist of it now? Thank you for your help.

So I’m a bit confused since I’m not familiar with many of the factions involved…

The US attacked bases, not on the Iraq-Iran border, but in central Iraq. There’s been no Iranian ground troop movement in other countries yet that I’m aware of, so whom exactly was the US supposed to be attacking?

I don’t think I’ve missed a day for at least 2.5 years.

I think it’s hard seeing the actions and misdeeds of our leaders becoming more transparent. Like you said, I don’t think the world is worse, but it feels more in our face. Before we had real time communication across the world, we’d never know a thing about all these things all over. I don’t think I can devote that much time to stuff on that scale. It feels good focusing on the microcosm around me.

I want to continue to look for things close to me I can work with. Someone’s got to worry about things in a national or global scale, but it doesn’t need to be me, and I’m ok with that.

I just try to stay informed of what’s going on, but I don’t sweat the global or national news anymore. I try to see how I can help my friends and coworkers and my neighborhood more instead. Those are issues I can chip away at and see progress with.

I feel the ones being the loudest in these communities aren’t actually doing much in real life or they’d be a little more constructive in what they say here. People interested in making society better, I’d think, would have to take a bit more of an open arms approach when dealing with people they don’t really know or you’re hurting your movement more than helping it. With the world getting worse rather quickly, I don’t have time for talkers like that.

I agree with you, but I’ve only really seen the worse attitudes in the big news and politics communities.

I think it’s a few outspoken users that are just standing out more, but I don’t really read those posts or interact with them anymore.

The regular hobby and interest communities all feel friendly and active still, at least what income across.

This is the biggest change from my perspective as well. 3 years ago, I could participate in the news and politics posts, but I feel very discouraged since the patience and nuance feels gone.

How much of it is individuals vs how much is the US pissing people off, I couldn’t say, but the amount of people looking to push personal agendas has taken over the main communities and I won’t comment there anymore for the most part.

I scroll them for headlines and read the article if it’s from a good source and mostly skip the comments.

Every other community has largely improved though. There is a bit more attitude I think, but everything is much better here than at reddit. I just got diagnosed with sleep apnea and now that I’ve been feeling better I’m catching up on manga, so I’ve been scrolling reddit some for those topics, and whenever I check out other random topics while I’m there, it is way trashier than I remember.

I’m still getting new followers and commenters in my posts, so the userbase still seems to be growing here.

You can also not rake or otherwise dispose of leaves and other forms of yard waste. A lot of invertebrates depend on fallen leaves to lay their eggs or need them for insulation over the winter. Other animals also use leaves for things too.

Lol I never got much anime culture. My friend that let me borrow that stuff I haven’t seen in forever, and no one else due the most part has ever been interested in watching anything with me.

The posters seem cool. The magnet mounting is pretty exciting so you can swap stuff out nicely. I’ll have to give them a deeper look.

The first things I remember watching were Lensman, Akira, Iria:Zeiram, and Armitage that I borrowed from a friend after asking what this anime stuff was all about.

I was always a huge animation fan, and as a 20 year old, stuff like Batman the Animated Series was still great, but this anime stuff was definitely offering things geared with an older age bracket in mind. They were as diverse in content as a movie, just animated.

What I have always loved about animation is there are no limits to what can be done, because things like physics or actor safety aren’t concerns, and having outrageous shapes, colors, giant robots, aliens, transforming objects, etc can all fit in perfectly with the overall aesthetic of the animated world, so the most outlandish or impossible things don’t feel out of place.

All this, along with subject matter as childish or mature as I desired was perfect for me.

I’ve seen tons of anime at this point, and there are so many great titles it’s hard to name just a few good ones. Overall, One Piece is amazing, such rich and diverse characters and islands, and it seems the creator has always had a strong vision of the story he wanted to tell, as stuff from 20 years ago still fits perfectly with new lore being revealed today in a way that feels intentional, not just how do we keep new stuff canon with the old stuff. Gintama is equally amazing. It starts very bland and boring, but holy heck, does the story go places by the end! Like One Piece, there is so much content and the world and characters are explorer so thoroughly that they feel like real people and lived in places, not just set pieces. Gintama also has a ton of parady of other anime, so if you’ve been a long time fan, there’s so many jokes and bits and spoofs, that there’s just jokes on jokes for whole episodes. Both these series can make you laugh until you cry while also having some of the deepest emotional moments because I know more about these characters “lives” than I do about a lot of real people. You get invested in characters after a few hundred episodes! 😆

There have been plenty of anime that just weren’t for me. With specific exceptions, I’m not big on the isekai stuff (someone in the modern era is transported as-is or is reincarnated in another world) because so many feel like rip offs or cheap fan service.

I wouldn’t call it a bad experience, but Farming Life in Another World was my big disappointment. I liked the premise. Was curious to learn about the farming. The animation style looked great. The character designs were beautiful. It even had an adorable giant spider family, but instead of being scary, they ate potatoes. But there was no real farming or world building. The show was basically beautiful women (and women is sometimes stretching the age) one after the other moving to the village to help on the farm and sleep with the main character. 😒

I asked manga readers if it got better and was told if I didn’t like it by the point I was at, it wasn’t going to get better. Reincarnated as a Slime is similar, though has some things done not as ideally visually for me, it’s got a million times more plot and while it has fan service and some questionably agreed characters, nobody is actually doing anything with anyone else so whatever.

I’m on a Nebula guest pass this week someone generously gave me when I talked about having a hard time finding AI things.

It’s a very stark contrast scrolling through the 2 feeds next to each other!

Nebula has a more Fediverse feel. I don’t believe it has any kind of real recommendation algorithm, it just has a few suggested categories, like this is Women’s Month, so they highlight female creators. Less people contributing, but every video looks watchable even if it’s not something I have interest in. The main issue I’ve had is getting used to a more Netflix looking system to find videos, and just the fact since everything looks interesting, I haven’t actually watched much since it’s stuff I want to watch when I can actually pay attention instead of it just being moreso background noise. For the $60 a year or whatever it is, it is looking quite tempting.

Scrolling YouTube next to it feels much more like looking at Facebook. Clear algorithm based feed. Lots of mental junk food type recommendations. Real content looks the same as AI. I’m on premium and still have to hear the in-video ad reads. Much more variety (almost no electronic music production or synth type stuff I could find on Nebula, not much on animation, for example) but you have to wade through a lot of crud to find the good stuff.

Food Not Bombs is what I had been looking at, but the local-ish group seemed inactive. I just looked it up again though and they posted some updates about how they’ve been reorganizing. I feel feeding people is something positive, pretty much regardless of actual need. Everyone needs to eat. I think it’s the Sikhs that do a community kitchen, and I always thought that was very inspiring. They operate in a place with a high immigrant population and I saw in their updates a lot about supporting the unrecognized indigenous people of the area too, which seemed very cool.

Chacos (sturdy sandals) are able to be rebuilt Ship of Theseus style. A resole is half the price of a new pair, but you can swap out straps or hardware as desired. I need to send mine in.

Don’t go judging a man’s actions before walking a mile in his shoes! 😜

I’m much the same. I volunteer at the wildlife rescue here, so I see the work being done and know the money is going to a good place. If they need something for us to get things done, I chip in. It’s also very rewarding, a lot of fun, and I get to meet great people and learn cool things.

I’d like to do something for the poor or homeless too, but I haven’t found the right opportunity yet, plus I need to address some personal health stuff before taking on more responsibility.

I think both of you have valid experiences. Not everyone uses social media the same way. From switching from being a lurker to being a poster, it’s gotten me to focus more on how people interact with content. I operate more like QuadratureSufer to find smaller creators, but plenty are going to do as you’ve seen of just subbing a few big groups and letting content trickle up to them. They’ll get the real popular stuff, but may miss things people subbing to the source will get to enjoy.

Ultimately both are valid approaches, but if nothing ever gets crossposted up to the big subs, that’s just less eyes possible on the small subs for people that dont browse way down /All. Posting something from a big comm down to a small one doesn’t seem beneficial since why would one interact with it on the small comm when there will be less commenting going on there? That’s my personal thoughts at least.

Sorry. Addendum: I see no issue with cross posting without asking. We post to get our message out there and cross posting aids in that process. I like that seeing our posts have been cross posted is easier to see these days on web Lemmy and many apps, as if my stuff is cross posted, I just like to know about it so I can answer any questions, since I focus on more educational subjects.

If anything, I’d prefer to see people cross post from small communities to bigger ones, since they will give exposure to the smaller communities. But the meme and news comms are already pretty big, so cross posting from one big group to another just feels like cluttering up people’s feeds with duplicates.