When I started out, I used to change distros like socks lol While you do have to reinstall programs, having a separate /home partition means that you can keep your stuff between changes

Bombs were falling on civilian targets nowhere near Kosovo. Various bridges, schools, hospitals, a chemical plant in Pančevo that almost destroyed the entire city, the Chinese embassy, a bomb fragment fell literally in my family’s garden. Hundreds of civilians died, my grandma almost impaled on a table from a bomb shockwave and the glass shattered onto the cradle I was in (I was 1 year old at the time), but luckily my mom placed protection around me just in case. This was on the far north of Serbia.

To be clear, OP is a tankie who shouldn’t be given any attention or a platform (I checkes their post history), but the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 was a campaign that caused untold suffering to countless civilians (be it in injuries, deaths, or just going through every day not knowing whether you and your loved ones will be alive tomorrow) that had absolutely nothing to do with Kosovo, something that left scars in society that are still felt. It was not simply “disturbing a genocide”. Not to mention that it was an attack launched without the approval of the UN.

There are a lot of disturbing videos available on reddit. The police chasing and beating the living hell out of people on the ground, the director of the police claiming on national television that the protesters didn’t allow an ambulance to pass, even though there is a video showing the ambulance passing through the crowd of protestors only to be stopped by the police, who then used the situation to commence a surprise charge at the protesters. And all this because we want… check this… elections. Something our overlord used to hold every 2 years, but now he’s scared.

Probably because they are.

The entire infrastructure of modern civilization rests on a single digit number of companies. How is this acceptable to anyone? Why is everyone just okay with this?

I always tell that to people hahahaha, through I’m from 1998.

But don’t we have to be alive until 2101? Don’t centuries start with a 1? That would make it 102 for you and 103 for me.

If you like black metal, Praznina and The Stone are amazing Serbian bands. Praznina’s 2023 album “Čovek koji Nije” is one of my all time favourites

I still cannot come to terms with the fact that people find it completely normal that modern civilization rests on a handful of companies. If Google, Microsoft and Meta were to disappear tomorrow, half the planet would collapse given how many completely depend on their infrastructure. This by itself should be enough to induce a mania of local development and decentralized structures, but alas.

This was partly explored in Erich Fromm’s work “Escape from Freedom” and “The Anatomy of Human Destruction”, but basically, if I understood correctly, sadistic personalities use it as a means of defence against loneliness and isolation. By exerting power over another, they temporarily lose the painful feeling of being alone. Abusive people tend to be miserable when their victims leave them and they have nobody to control.

Nobody gains anything from cruelty, it’s a symptom that something’s terribly wrong with the person in the first place. Even animals don’t display acts of cruelty in the wild, they do so only when confined to cages and subjected to other inhumane treatment.

Just finished watching it, and honestly that’s the idea I got after those red flags that jumpscared me when I was watching that linux sucks video. I think I watched them up until 2018, and I remember finding them entertaining and they always ended on a postive note, but I knew absolutely nothing about Lunduke apart from those 4 or 5 videos, that’s why I was so shocked to find out that he’s a generic right wing parrot.

As a sidenote, Niccolò seems like a really cool guy. Thanks for sharing the video, I subbed

I really liked his “Linux sucks” presentations when I watched them many years ago, but I didn’t know anything about him beyond that. Then some time last year I saw that he made another one, and I decided to watch it mainly for nostalgia, and I was shocked to see so many points about how linux companies are woke, something about opensuse firing anyone who was right-wing and redhat doing some white shaming move or something. I paused, checked his actual channel and holy shit. More than 90% was anti-woke “journalism”, and has been for years now. I was severely disappointed.

A small correction: there is no leader. The students themselves decide everything on plenary sessions and every decision is executed by working groups that are formed afterwards. You always have different people executing the decisions to avoid any one person being seen as a “leader”. And we are slowly shifting to citizens themselves forming local groups in their neighbourhoods with the same organisation.

But yes, the students asked that only Serbian flags be shown, because these are protests that have support from a wide range of people, from anarchist vegans to ultra nationalists, so they want to prevent any division. That doesn’t stop some right wing dipshits to bring Russian flags, even though Russia explicitly condemned the prorests as a “coloured revolution”, but what can you do.

While some EU representatives from the parliament have been supportive, the EU has a negative image because officials still act like everything’s in order. Ursula is set to meet with our psychopathic dictator, and Marta Kos wrote how she had a constructive talk concerning Serbia’s steps towards EU integration with the guy who tried to cause a bloodbath during the 15 mins of silence a few days ago. A guy who also officially (as a president under the Serbian constitution) has about as much say as I do concerning these things.

Honestly, we avoided a massive tragedy at that moment. People described that it sounded like a car or airplane was coming at them at full speed, so they instinctively ran away from the roads. People further away didn’t see or hear anything, they just saw a crowd running in panic and so they ran as well. I was maybe 50-100m away from where it happened, and all we heard was noise, yells, and then people running, so the people around me also started running, but we all stopped after maybe 5s.

A lot of people think that our overlord wanted to cause a stampede which would lead to thousands of injuries and just chaos in order to discredit the protests. Or maybe they wanted to launch the cannon after the 15 mins of silence were over, which would cause mass confusion since nobody would have any idea what was going on, but triggered it early. In any case, the psychopath used an illegal weapon to attack people literally standing still and being quiet.

I’m convinced that at least 400k people were present, probably more. I’ve never seen such a crowd in my life, and I’ve been on most protests since 2020.

EDIT: The organisation that usually counts this stuff said around 300k, and maybe more, they couldn’t make a precise count because people were constatntly moving from place to place. Still the biggest one is Serbian history.

I’d add Adrienne Cowan from Seven Spires and Melissa Bonny from Ad Infinitum to that list. But, as you said, in symphonic metal you’d be hard pressed to find a band without an amazing female vocalist.

It’s hard to really give a true representation of the general atmoaphere in Serbia during these times. For as long as I’ve been conscious, Serbia was a land of cynics and depression. Negativity was the norm, and even I said back in November that these protests would last until new year / Christmas, then the students will go back home to get drunk or whatever and that will be the end of it. If someone had told me 3 months ago that almost the entire country would be optimistic about the future, that there would be a real chance to finally end the rule of SNS, that students would walk over 100km to places and be greeted as liberators by huge masses, fireworks and food, I’d ask them what movie were they watching. Also protests are being held all over the country, so much so that someone made a website to keep track of the future ones: kudanaprotest.rs

The next big gathering will be in Niš on the 1st of March.