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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/50660303

China has built not only a military to coerce Taiwan, but an army of lawyers to intimidate and constrain it. In 2025, Beijing’s lawfare campaign shifted decisively from largely declaratory threats to active enforcement. The objective is not legal resolution but deterrence: raising the personal cost of engagement with Taiwan’s democracy and normalising coercion under the fig leaf of law.

Archived

According to Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council, reported cases of Taiwanese citizens going missing, being detained for questioning, or having their personal freedom restricted rose from single-digit monthly figures in 2024 to double-digit figures throughout 2025. By late November, 221 cases had been reported to the Mainland Affairs Council and the Straits Exchange Foundation, compared with 55 across all of 2024.

[...]

This trend sits alongside a more overt legal escalation: Beijing’s move to ‘prosecute’ alleged Taiwanese ‘separatists’. Chinese authorities are increasingly simulating formal criminal process against named individuals outside their jurisdiction. This approach asserts an explicitly extraterritorial claim: that the Chinese Communist Party can investigate, list and punish Taiwanese citizens regardless of nationality, residence or international law. These actions are intended to chill political speech, constrain international engagement with Taiwan, and signal that support for Taiwanese democracy carries personal costs.

[...]

These actions are legally meaningless outside of China. But that is beside the point. As instruments of lawfare, they serve three purposes. First, they justify Beijing’s coercive measures under the guise of enforcing its own domestic laws. Second, they blur the boundary between lawful political expression and criminal behaviour thereby raising perceived legal risk for journalists, activists and influencers. Third, they reinforce Beijing’s narrative that Taiwan’s democracy itself is a hostile disinformation actor, rather than a legitimate political system.

For policymakers, the implication is clear. Lawfare is no longer a supporting domain of effort in Beijing’s Taiwan strategy; it is a central instrument of pressure. Recognising and responding to this shift, through clearer diplomatic signalling, coordinated responses to transnational repression, and support for Taiwan’s legal resilience, will be essential to managing cross-strait stability in the years ahead.

[...]

How efficient would it be to build gigantic dipping turkeys next to lakes and oceans for power? I am legitimately curious about what practical problems this proposal would have. Does the device just break apart at that scale?

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Came across this on the r/selfhosted community. Still very much in the alpha stages, but it's already got a Docker image you can try out for yourself, or try out the demo server.

Tried it earlier today, couldn't get the voice/video chat to work right away on my self-hosted setup but the real-time chat was very snappy. Looks promising.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/42997966

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNr_QgIfReQ&t=27s

Feb. 8, 2026

On February 3, Aliya Rahman — a U.S. citizen and resident of Minneapolis, Minnesota — testified before a bicameral public forum at the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C.

The session on the violent tactics and use of force by agents of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was convened by U.S. senator Richard Blumenthal (Democrat, Connecticut) and U.S. congressman Robert Garcia (Democrat, California). Other testimony came from Miramar Martinez, who was shot five times by DHS agents in Chicago, Illinois, and from family members of Renee Nicole Good, who was murdered by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent in Minneapolis on January 7.

Rahman, who is autistic and has a traumatic brain injury, was on her way to a doctor’s appointment on January 13. She got stuck in a traffic jam created by an ICE operation in Minneapolis; Rahman was dragged from her vehicle by federal agents, cuffed, and taken to the Whipple federal building, where ICE processes immigrants targeted for deportation.

A few years ago I built a glorified home server PC, I'm considering dropping a decent video card into it and trying to use it hooked up to a TV as a Linux running Steam machine-esque system, but I'm not sure if it's worth it based on the other specs. I know the CPU in particular could use an upgrade, but as is should I bother dropping something like an RTX 5070 in it?

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/LnrBDw

A federal grand jury on Tuesday declined to indict Democratic lawmakers who posted a video urging service members and intelligence officials to disobey any illegal orders from the Trump administration, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The declination is a rebuke of the administration’s efforts to paint the six lawmakers — all of whom served in either the military or intelligence services — as dangerously undermining the president’s authority as commander in chief.

woop woop

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/42997527

In the NJ Primary, 'Abolish ICE' Looks Like A Winning Message

Opinion - Michelle Goldberg Feb. 9, 2026

https://archive.ph/2tFLT

When Analilia Mejia, the former political director of Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, held town halls during her recent congressional primary race in New Jersey, she’d invite people to stay afterward for a training on nonviolent resistance to ICE. Voters, she told me, are desperate “to understand how rising authoritarianism functions, how it’s moved in other countries, how we can best resist it through nonviolence, noncompliance and education.” Running in a special election to fill the seat formerly held by New Jersey’s new governor, Mikie Sherrill, Mejia was determined to do “more than just traditional politics,” she said.

Her rivals in last week’s crowded contest also criticized ICE. But Mejia, the daughter of Colombian and Dominican immigrants and a veteran of the progressive Working Families Party, was unique in the clarity of her opposition. She called for ICE to be abolished, not just reformed. And she tied the agency’s violent rampages — seen most starkly in Minnesota — to President Trump’s broader assault on American democracy, while seeking to imbue people with a sense that they could fight back.