skytrim

Nope. That is not the issue.

In UK, media is struggling to raise enough revenue from either ads or subscriptions. Many MSM titles have introduced a paywall where users are forced to fund the service by either commiting to a subscription or turning off ad-bkockers and seeing ads. In contrast, Guardian's 'unique selling point' was that it would 'never' do this which was why people should prefer it to other news sources. Then, without acknowledging what it was doing, Guardian quietly introduced the same paywall as everyone it had criticised. My complaint is not about funding a service but about the hypocrisy of a service saying 'I would never do that' and then quietly doing it.

Moreover, this change is not consistent - you do not always see this paywall when visiting the Guardian. This paywall seems to be in 'trial' stage where Guardian is testing to see how much push-back they get from users. We either push-back or Guardian goes same way as rest of British MSM. That would be an irreversible loss. I think what Guardian is doing is not help its own survival long-term.

I see no difference between Guardian strategy and changes in other media (YouTube or Netflix, for example), where the owners are struggling to generate as much revenue as they expect (as they used to do). Instead of asking why their content is not popular, or why users are leaving/using ways to by-pass ads or subscriptions, they just try to squeeze out as much revenue as they can from those still willing to pay subs or see ads, while their once reliable 'goose who lays golden eggs' slowly stops laying. I say Guardian deserves to die if it does not keep track of what readers want and it is only ensuring its own death by trying to cash in on the remaining goodwill of a dwindling readership instead of attracting readers back or reaching out to new readers.

They are going up a cul-de-sac and it has no good end for Guardian. I cannot save them from themselves so I just have to find alternatives which are better at this than the parts of the industry that are dying out.

Aljazeera is good. I once read CSM and thought it surprisingly good, not what I expected from the title, but that was around 1980s - have never seen it in recent years!

Cheers!

"finest silks and linens' washed in orphans tears and the blood of martyrs.

No thanks - I know where he's been.

In Britain our most powerful parties are competing to kiss Trump's massive arse - our Prime Minister 'likes and respects Trump'. Honestly, Starmer, get a room! Ugh! I am sick of being shamed by my politicians.

I hope Canada elects leaders who will tell Trump to get lost. You need Zelenskyy energy. You deserve it. Give 'Uncle Spam' hell, Canada!

'Masters of the Return' like dangerous politicians, toxic influencers, child-molesters, con artists, neighbours-from-hell, serial adulterers (to give a few examples) keep recycling the same old behaviours because behind what they do is a pathology, a closed loop with no exit ramp, a compulsion they rarely have enough insight to acknowledge or control. How do these parasites/predators keep finding victims to exploit? Because society constantly creates a supply of new victims to use. Behind every victim there is a matching pathology, usually going back to childhood abuse or neglect, that sets them up to be abused.

Thus in a society like Britain, we have a minority of sociopaths and psychopaths (1% or less), a large group of people with sub-optimal childhood experiences (some measures might say as many as 80% have poor childhoods and thus grew up to some degree vulnerable to be exploited in adult life), that leaves very few citizens who had a good enough start in life to not become either an abuser or a victim (maybe as few as 19% or one in five of us).

What is a shock to me is that the ideal of how we should be, is actually a minority experience. Few people are what we call 'normal'. Actually, 'normal' is the exception not the rule. Our politics has not kept pace with reality. We need politics to see itself as a branch of therapeutics - see it as necessary in order to heal society. Sadly, politics is one area of life which has very few 'normal' people in it - not even one in five MPs is psychologically healthy, more than 1% are sociopaths. People like that cannot fix politics any more than they can fix their own pathologies. Starmer and his Cabinet are same as Farage and Reform, in that they are not mentally healthy and not offering the kind of politics we actually need.

If I had to guess, I'd say this level of pathology is required by capitalism and will only end if we curtail capitalism to protect ourselves i.e. capitalism harms us in childhood, we grow up exploitable, and capitalism duly exploits us - ultimately it is profitable to hurt kids. To be able to exploit people capitalism requires a supply of sociopaths, so such people are not just tolerated under capitalism but promoted into powerful positions and weaponised to exploit the rest. The good news is that just by being normal, giving your kids and others close to you a healthy, well-nurtured, psychologically normal life - being just normal humans, good mams and dads, happy kids - is actually radical politics and helps the push back against tyranny. I reckon this is one deep reason why capitalists hate stuff that promotes good human relations e.g. woke stuff, gender politics, trans rights, stuff that heals and empowers 'ordinary people' who would otherwise have just been victims. A happy child will not grow up to be anyone's doormat. That's the hidden revolution going on right now.

I am a new lemmy user. I am also feeling a bit lost and noticing there are gaps in the fediverse. I assume if a resource does not exist, I need to create it but I am not able to be a mod of a new community, too ill to volunteer the hours as I cannot predict my health beyond a day or so. So, it seems I need to first find a potential community by posting in general communities like this one, find others interested in making a community (including volunteers willing to mod the community), then together we make a community. I am willing to help create a community on disability/accessibility with you if you are interested?

I have disabilities (mainly communication but also mobility) and accessility issues (cannot talk or use a telephone, house-bound) my problems crop up mainly in offline life but sometimes online. I would like to help create a place where people can (1) describe accessibility problems (2) describe solutions they found (3) describe how they challenged the ableism behind accessibility problems, who supported them, and what push-back they experienced and (4) work out an effective politics for empowering disabled and making access a government priority. I'd like to welcome participation from anyone, anywhere, not have content limited to a specific nationality/language or first world (depending on having mods that can work in different languages - perhaps something to aim for down the road if there is enough participation?)

I am also interested in history of disability and access - I attach a photo of a dish I own. Bought for £5 from eBay. It is from late C18th/early C19th, about 200 years old. The porcelein body was created in China and imported to Europe and reflects both cultures in a complex intersection I cannot fully comprehend. The decoration uses western 'transfer' technology and eastern hand-applied colouring. It shows a family group in a garden including an elderly lady in a wheeled-chair. I am intrigued by this object/image because I cannot work out if this is a Chinese representation of a European disability aid, or a European representation of a Chinese disability aid or a cross-over hybridisation of both. I collect ceramics and never saw this design before. I wonder how common it was to put disabled people on crockery intended for an internation trade mass market. I wonder if this decoration was accepted because the disabled person was 'exotic' and it was 'Chinese ethnicity' that was being consumed by western buyers and they did not see the 'disability', or if they were focused on the 'disability' in the image and overlooked ethnicity, or if the mix of novelty, exoticism, orientalism, eroticism, gender, ethnicity, racism, disability and loads of other stuff was in the relationship people had to each other and symbolised in making, trading or owning this curious object and it was never easy to pin down its 'meaning' for anyone, at any time, in any culture. I sense there is an academic paper waiting to be written about this. I welcome discussion on such 'high brow' topics. Maybe I need to help create two new communities - one for 'activism' and another for 'cultural studies / woke disability studies'?

A world at peace, true peace based on justice and happiness not enforced by oppression and brainwashing, is my hope. It's what humans need. It's what I need :-) I would prefer democracy, votes, laws, regulations, social norms all coming together to deliver that. Right now, it is others who are 'moving fast and breaking stuff' so my puzzle is how to slow 'em down and mend stuff before it goes too far to save anything good. Can I do that without violence or not? I prefer not but is it my choice? I am not the powerful one here, it's the guys with guns and nukes who are running this show, and they seem hell-bent on violence. Do I let them roll over me or take a stand, however token? I am old enough to remember Tiananmen Square protests and that guy standing in front of a column of tanks asking the soldiers to go back to barracks and not brutalise peaceful protesters. I witnessed the Hong Kong pro-democracy protests. I ask myself have I the guts to do as much? Will I be a coward and let the tanks roll? Just being honest and thinking aloud. And worried, very worried, about where things are headed.

In my head Discord = toxicity. Not sure how it got that rep for me but it has gotten it. Thus, wont lose sleep if it dies out. Perhaps I am wrong. Reviewing rationality of this prejudice is on my ToDo List after a million other things...

And someone (on the Far-Right) is always trying to buy Wikipedia, monetise it, X-ify it, or take it down. I think Wikipedia is abusive - exploits volunteer unpaid labour - should have been created by an NGO like UN and kept safe for mankind like our Library of Alexandria. But it is what it is. Preppers download the whole site regularly in order to have that knowledge under their control in case is ever gets taken down or spoilt and they are rebuilding civilisation post-Armageddon. I keep meaning to download it myself (note to self: do that soon you lazy b. no more excuses!)