Barbarian

It's an unfortunate situation. The tightening of restrictions around direct access to the URLs a page is accessing definitely improves security (think about how many random malware add-ons tech illiterate people install), but also makes filter lists much more difficult to implement.

Ublock Origin Lite is fully V3 compliant. They work around the issue by having a "basic" filter mode that hands off their list to the browser and trusts Chrome itself to do the filtering, rather than the add-on. You can also give it full permissions on a site by site basis, which will then work almost exactly like Ublock Origin.

Abandon consoles. Embrace the inevitability of the PC master race.

Modern Romania isn't totalitarian. Thankfully, these days the old ladies just snoop on everyone to gossip and complain passively aggressively, not to report to the state. I'd argue that's an improvement.

Deadly serious. By the end of communism, they had over a million informants. You had to make the assumption that everyone you talked to and every old lady on a park bench was an informant.

Funny story, I know someone who was recruited to inform on her colleagues at work, but after the third time in a row she told them everything is wonderful, everyone is happy and productive, she was promptly fired (as an informant, not from the factory).

So, I watched that third link in its entirety. It was pretty interesting. I think the core idea is that NK isn't some absolutely insane bizarro land, which I actually agreed with beforehand. It did not disprove the fact that NK is an authoritarian dictatorship. The only thing it did prove (which again, I knew about beforehand) is that western media likes to exaggerate the faults to hyperbolic levels. I honestly think that the average north korean would live a better life without the Kim family (or any other family regime) ruling over them. This doesn't mean that they force people to have specific hairstyles at gunpoint or execute politicians for slouching during speeches (as the video joked about), but they still direct a large portion of the states wealth towards friends and family.

I think you should really honestly consider the fact that two wrongs don't make a right. NK and the USA do terrible things. Instead of litigating which one is worse, maybe we should focus on how to make better alternatives, like you've done with this alternative to Reddit.

It's actually a bit deeper than that, at least from my Romanian perspective. Our old ladies were literally hired by our security services to monitor and report on everything going on in their neighbourhoods. They were essentially human CCTVs, facial recognition and behavioural pattern matchers all rolled into one while being paid pennies.

sheer pointless tyranny of the 40k Imperium

Absolutely. I think for the majority of the writers, the pointlessness of it all is the main theme.

I absolutely adore WH40k lore. It's just so ridiculously over the top.

Because of this, a quarter of my YT recommendations are random incels moaning about the "woke infiltration" of the WH40k community, when those same people have probably never set foot in a games workshop store in their lives. The people who actually show up in person, are part of the community, they're in on the joke. They get the satire.

I have no goddamn clue how you can simultaneously know about how absolutely batshit insane the entire government structure of the empirium is, read about how the empirium frequently just forgets about entire solar systems due to their incompetence and paranoia, and still think this is somehow pro-fascist literature.

The funniest is them just absolutely ignoring the whole Roboute Guilliman thing where he wakes up, looks around, and is so appaled and shocked by what the empirium had become that he nearly noped the fuck out of there before getting a pep talk from his dad.

Vlad was done dirty by Matthias Corvinus and the papacy. He wasn't exactly a nice guy to his enemies (and by modern standards, like every other contemporary ruler, he'd be considered a monster), but a lot of the cruelty was greatly exaggerated and some parts were wholly invented.

EDIT: It also doesn't help that Romanian fascists actually liked the casting of Vlad as this incredibly overblown brutal ruler. They wrote poems and stories praising his brutality as a positive thing in service of a strong state.

That specific BBC article is what I was talking about. It's not publicly available testimony, it's information gathering by the SK state about NK from defectors.

To all of those stories, they seem like strawmen. I've not heard anything that ridiculous. Just that NK is an authoritarian regime that rewards friends and family of the regime at the expense of the well being of the populace. Kinda like a red veneer over Saudi Arabia, similar system.

So why aren't you asking why the US is allowed to participate when they commit far worse atrocities?

I didn't even ask why NK isn't allowed to participate. Why are you giving me an argument I didn't make?

1st link:

Defectors can expect to receive the six-figure payout if they cross the border with intelligence that helps enhance South Korea's security.

That... is actually very reasonable, and does not support or diminish your argument.

2nd link: I'm sorry, but DPRK news room doesn't exactly scream unbiased.

3rd link: The tone and channel name seems comedic at first glance, but I'll watch it and get back to you. Plenty of comedians doing real journalism these days anyway, so that shouldn't be a mark against him.