The First Nation plans to formalize its partnership with the Fort Peck Sioux Tribes, in Montana, next week by signing a memorandum of understanding to advance the trade corridor and its infrastructure development.
The corridor intends to use traditional routes traversing Dakota territories in Saskatchewan, Alberta, Manitoba and into the United States, reviving the historic Oceti Sakowin trade network, a historic alliance of seven Dakota, Lakota and Nakota Indigenous groups united by kinship, language and spiritual beliefs. The shared trade routes historically facilitated economic and military ties across their territories. “We have a lot of history, and even to this day, ties linking us to our relatives,” said Rodger Redman, chief of the nation.
Redman said this corridor is not symbolic, but rather an economic engine for the countries. Standing Buffalo is located in a region rich with critical minerals vital to global industries including renewable energy and technology. By owning the corridor, Indigenous nations can control the movement of these resources and expand economic opportunities for their communities.
Veteran Palestine campaigner #sarahwilkinson who was reportedly subjected to severe mistreatment in an Israeli prison, has now been detained by UK police at Heathrow Airport for interrogation. as the UK moves inexerbobaly toward a more aunthortarian state
Stripped of her phone and money, Wilkinson stands accused of documenting the Israeli genocide in #Gaza through her social media accounts. To make clear this occurred to Sarah LAST YEAR. I think Sarah is on her way to Turkey atm?
The UK fascists gotta get their licks in too it seems. After all they probably think she's a terrorist or something for daring to have the courage to speak out.
I couldn't even finish this report because I got too disgusted with what this fucking traitor (and his entire support network through Koch, Fox, Newsmax, Heritage, etc.) has done to the world.
It's particularly useful for doing research, as most major websites, that don't need accounts, work well enough (you will get CloudFlare Captchas). So research your VPN with tor browser, then use your commercial VPN to log in to social media sites that block logging in from tor, or watch your video content that will be too slow over tor. Both tools have a use.
Proton, in my opinion, make the best VPN for people who need both mobile device support and port forwarding so they can be a good citizen with all those linux ISOs they torrent. I don't use their desktop client (I prefer to rawdog OpenVPN and Wireguard) but people like those.
Proton's email is dogshit. Don't get me wrong, it is awesome for making burners that many websites don't insta-block (although that is shifting). But you don't own your data unless you regularly run their nonsense client to tunnel into their servers. So if Proton goes shit tomorrow? All your emails are gone. Not a HUGE issue if you regularly fetch those but... yeah.
I've been backburnering it for other reasons but folk like (Not That) Will Smith and many others have been very big supporters of Fastmail and, looking at it, it seems pretty nice. And it fits my use case of using an email address at a domain I own so that I can just move between services depending on pricing and how evil corporations are in a given month.
Just to elaborate a bit. Migrating from JohnSmith@gmail to JohnSmith@hotmail to JohnSmith_75151515@proton is a massive undertaking.
Migrating from John@SmithDotOrg hosted by Foo to John@SmithDotOrg hosted by Bar is potentially under an hour depending on how you manage that domain and so forth.
But you don't own your data unless you regularly run their nonsense client to tunnel into their servers. So if Proton goes shit tomorrow? All your emails are gone. Not a HUGE issue if you regularly fetch those but... yeah.
Tbf most people don't download offline copies, they just let all their email live on their provider's servers and never think twice.
Personally, I've used either Outlook or Gmail since 2000 and haven't ever had an issue getting access to my emails.
That is an important point. For all that Microsoft and Google do to enshitify email, all the spying, all the privacy invasions they do monitoring your every click, contact, and the content of every email, they are extremely reliable at storing those emails. If you move away from them, there is a non-zero chance that is greater than the above companies that your new provider will go belly-up and you lose access to email. So there is an incentive to download things, at least periodically, and store them somewhere. If you use a mail client, that's very easy. This is an aspect of tech literacy, like backing up your files in more than one place generally, that very few are taught.
The 3, 2, 1 rule of backups should be taught to school children. Instead, big tech go out of their way to abstract away the problem behind layers of infantilizing services. It works well, until it doesn't.
I mean that was the initial selling point for Gmail wasn't it? Don't worry about deleting or archiving anything, ever, you can just search for it... Basic file management skills sidelined.
As I said. Works great until it doesn't. In hindsight, Gmail has been extremely reliable for most people, but that wasn't true for some other Google services. I do think a lot of people have probably lost their email because of their password management skills though.
No one gives a single flying fuck about owning their email generally. The number of people who actually care about that aspect basically can be counted on one hand compared to the total number of even technical people who understand what that means.
Proton, Mullvad, PIA, are a few decent options. Be careful about anything that isn't widely trusted by the community as there are so many un-trustworthy providers out there that are basically shilling old-school spyware/malware. Also, for getting decent performance, they should also be using a modern protocol like wireguard underneath, not something like OpenVPN or L2TP or something like that. You will want port-forwarding if you use it for torrents, and that narrows it down extremely.
I'm pretty sure PornHub is just the most well-known example and they happen to own something like 5 others of the top ten most visited porn sites on the net.
If VPNs get outlawed for some reason in AZ, Tor is another option. Make sure you download it from their site sonce there are fake Tor apps in the playstores
Every single one of you idiots is fine with paying extra to access a free service. VPN! VPN! Gotta have a VPN to fool everyone!
You didn't need a VPN before, because religious nazis have to control every single fucking thing. Control that porn! Control that "R" rated movie! Control those words in songs! Control the words in books! All religious movements.
Stop supporting religions, you stupid fucks. Requring a VPN is just saying that poor people don't get free porn, because they can't afford a VPN. Which is yet another thing that religious dickheads do.
Most people are woefully unprepared to shop for a VPN from a reputable provider, meaning most people are going to end up subjected to even more surveillance and potentially attacks on their devices.
Most people also are not prepared to manage when to and not-to use it, so will get slower internet all of the time.
This will create lists of VPN users at both the ISPs and the VPN companies that will be usable by later christo-fascist governments.
This will ultimately get laws passed against consumer-facing VPN services, making it harder for people to protect themselves from other attacks.
More honey-pot VPN services will start up to support that list-gathering for future christo-fascist governments looking to build dossiers on as many people as possible.
I could go on and on. And nothing about the above has anything to do with porn.
I was with you until the last sentence. As someone who is not religious in the slightest, I have no problem with people being religious as long as it's not forced in me.
Nope, garbage shit for assholes who want to control idiots. And yes it is being forced on you, that's how Christian national terrorism works, if you don't think it is, I'm sorry, but you're also an idiot
My issue is that the ones who aren't bothering you with it are essentially not doing so because they know other people in their group are already handling that for them. Religions, especially those you named, come with a mandate to spread themselves and force others to comply with their standards.
It's kind of like a really selfish kid who would steal all your lunch every day, but he's not strong enough to do so, so instead he's just nice and kind and smiles at you and lets you be. But if he ever gets strong enough, he'll start taking your lunch every single day forever.
The religious people who aren't forcing it down your throat either (1) think someone else is doing it for them so they don't have to, or (2) don't think they could get away with it without being counterproductive to their cause, and are waiting for a more opportune moment.
These are people who believe that they factually know what constitutes objective good. Imagine if raping children was legal and you knew your neighbor was raping children. You might just leave him alone about it because, what can you do? But the moment you have an opportunity to vote for a law to outlaw it, the moment you have a chance to kill him and get away with it, etc. you'll try to act against him. Your polite indifference to him is a lie, because from your perspective he is committing an absolute and unforgivable wrongdoing that MUST be stopped. This is how religious people are to you, except for instead of it being about reasonable things like raping children, it's about stupid bullshit that makes no sense, like the fact you don't pray every day at a certain time, or the fact that you're attracted to the same sex, or the fact that you don't want the ten commandments posted in schools.
The problem is that by its very existence and prevalence you have to contend with religion's bullshit effecting your life.
So honestly you should be against people being religious and try and discourage it. Though yeah its not super helpful to look at individual religious people and hate them openly. That's a good way to just harden them right back against you.
Pretty much a default that religion, given the opportunity, will seek to push its rules and values on others. Doesn’t matter if it’s a medicine man or someone sitting on the local school board. I don’t have a problem with religious people in principle either, the problem is that even if you do meet a decent couple of people who appear to keep their religion to themselves there’s hundreds of thousands in their “club” that are going to fuck with things. Kinda like being in the republican party - even if they’re decent people, aren’t bootlickers, aren’t homophobes, etc… they still vote for, support, and associate with a group that does a lot of shitty things.
There is an important distinction between being religious and supporting organized churches. 'Religious people' aren't any more of a threat to you than gay people are. Churches, particularly the Catholic Church in Christianity, that don't even follow their religion's teachings, are the problem.
You don't need an organized group to have people who compromised on logic forcing their views on others. Sure, an organized group can be more efficient, but it is also more visible as a threat.
The solution to the root cause of this (asshole politicians) and all the other fucked up shit going on, is to vote. Vote for a candidate that won't do shit like this. If you want to do extra, donate time or some money to a candidate you like.
There is a difference between intellectual intelligence and emotional. People have needs that intellectual responses don't satisfy such as "what happens to us after death?", "how do I deal with the loss of a loved one?", "does anyone care about me?", "is there more to the universe than just random chance?", etc.
I get that. And believies can’t be based on reason. They’re just there. But it does generally require the ignoring of facts about the world around us. Like the same thing happens after death as before birth. You deal with loss by grieving. I don’t think they’re stupid, just regularly ignoring the simple answers to those questions.
No, the problem is accepting uncritically anything that comes from a self-defined leader, and, even in the absence of that, accepting that any critical input in a social system should come from people that have compromised on logic and reason at some level.
Our Democrat governor signed it. Why she signed this I still don't really understand. She's been using her veto power quite a bit and yet this one gets to go through. Ridiculous.
All politicians are united in their love of surveillance, as it allows them to subjugate the population via panopticon-induced threats. "We are always watching, so don't try anything"
The National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA) said skeleton staffing means visitors will be "probably on your own" with limited facilities available to them.
The National Park Service (NPS), which oversees 433 sites, said on Tuesday it was keeping national parks partially open, but placing more than half its workforce on furlough, or leave.
Conservation groups and former rangers have objected to the sites being kept open during the shutdown, arguing that the decision puts both visitors and park resources at risk.
Social Security Administration Commissioner Frank Bisignano was named to the newly created position of CEO of the IRS on Monday, making him the latest member of the Trump administration to be put in charge of multiple federal agencies.
As IRS CEO, Bisignano will report to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who currently serves as acting commissioner of the IRS, the Treasury Department says. It is unclear whether Bisignano’s newly created role at the IRS will require Senate confirmation.
The Treasury Department said in a statement that Bisignano will be responsible for overseeing all day-to-day IRS operations while also continuing to serve in his role as commissioner of the Social Security Administration.
London’s Metropolitan Police arrested another 492 people over the weekend after a protest Saturday in Trafalgar Square, as the Starmer government accelerated its crackdown on opposition to the Gaza genocide.
The entirely peaceful protest was held to oppose the proscription of Palestine Action. It was organised by Defend Our Juries and attended by over 1,000 people. Of the arrests, 488 were for holding up signs declaring, “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action”.
Asked if this was a “dark step” to limit the fundamental right to protest, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood replied that that having a freedom “doesn’t mean you have to use it at every moment of every day”.
A country actively kidnapping people off the streets, removing due process and habeus corpus, deporting prisoners to random countries, building concentration camps, and deploying troops on the streets has a score of 84/100. Forgive me for not feeling particularly free with my score of 91.
Having a read of this I think it's fair to say boiling down a nation's "freedom" to a single number is a silly unacademic metric, before even getting into the likelihood of bias and manipulation.
If it looks like a ~~duck~~ fascist, swims like a ~~duck~~ fascist, and quacks like a ~~duck~~ fascist, then it probably is a ~~duck~~ fascist. Regardless of what a likely bias think tank's research may say.
They aren't now, either. 2024 was after the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, too, which was the biggest restriction on the right to protest in a long time and would be more significant than the change being discussed.
It's a bit worrying that people are just taking this incorrect headline from a propaganda rag at face value.
What? Are you saying that all protests have already been declared illegal? Go ahead and cite this declaration you just made up. And also explain the hundreds of thousands of protesters who have not been arrested recently on various causes, from pro-Palestine marches to anti-immigration ones.
If you haven't gone nuts and don't actually believe this thing that isn't happening has already happened, then the arrests of people are irrelevant because they're not part of proposed changes.
Folks who get really up in their feelings about the Trump/Harris election seem to forget that Harris was taking campaign advice from this guy. It's so easy to forget how absolutely poisoned so-called "Liberal Democracy" has become with a broad strain of fascist tendency.
On the one hand, you've got a guy who is looking to literally lay siege to cities in the US that didn't vote for him. On the opposite side of the pond, they're doing mass-arrests of anyone with a "Please Stop Killing Brown People" bumper sticker. And in the middle, a sea of smug dipshits posting "You got what you voted for".
Have you seen their fiction? Even in sci-fi, they're the center of the fucking universe. Galactic Space Empire HQ, located in NYC/LA/San Francisco of course.
As opposed to British fiction where everything os centered around London? George Orwell thought London would be the center of the Anglo-American axis back in 1948 while the British Empire crumbled around him.
Similar issue, yes. It's said that you should write what you know, my point is more that Americans seem incapable of producing fiction where the lower 48 aren't the nexus of the universe, not that the British weren't also doing the same thing centuries earlier.
Aliens sure seem to visit London all the god damn time in Dr. Who. People write literature about the places and people they know. Why would an American write a book about aliens visiting Berlin?
Also, how long ago do you think 1948 was? Because it wasn't "centuries" ago. And the most prominent American sci-fi authors do not have their stories revolve around the US. The Foundation, Dune, Star Wars, and the Expanse were all written by American authors and only one of them has any characters from the USA
1948 was before black people were given equal rights in the US, so as far as I am concerned it should have been centuries ago. Stop dick measuring with the previous garbage empire like their shortcomings somehow excuse your own.
edit:
Was it my support of civil rights or my pointing out how silly it is to compare yourself to a condemnable empire as a defense that made you mad?
I would love to discuss German, Indian, and Chinese sci-fi, but none of it seems to be very popular on the international stage so unfortunately we can't discuss it. The guy i responded to complained that American media focuses so much on America, while citing only Star Trek, but that's literally how media is in every country, so i cited British media because that's what i am familiar with as i am a dual citizen of both countries.
And perhaps associating the racist policies living people grew up with as something that happened centuries ago is why we can't make much progress today.
Where have i tried to use the British Empire to measure social progress? I mentioned an example of English literature where ot is comical to think England would be the nexus of power, which someone then said doesn't count because it was from "centuries ago". Now i don't even know what y'all are trying to yell about, as a thread about the British descent into fascism turned into American literature to whatever the hell you are even talking about at this point
Nobody's yelling, you are clearly having a minor meltdown.
Another user mentioned the valid point of American media being pretty self fellating when it comes to who is treated as the centre of civilisation, and you spat out your binky and decided to bring the UK into this. He responded that yes, Britain has been doing this for centuries (as empires tended to back before mainstream telecommunication), and you wilfully misunderstood his point, prattled on about doctor who and 1984.
I merely responded that measuring your dick against the British empire is a pretty fucking low bar, because that is what you did. I also reminded you that if you don't think 1948 was long enough ago (as you implied), maybe consider the social changes that have taken place.
You been running in circles answering questions nobody asked and misreading responses; a clear sign that you have gotten emotional and are not equipped to engage in this conversation as a reasonable actor.
The person you originally responded to was correct, you were wrong. Maybe learn from that instead of doubling down and randomly bringing the UK into it. To once again repeat, THIS particular thread is in response to someone correctly observing that American media is pretty self fellating when it comes to who is treated as the centre of civilisation.
Because lets face it, no matter how bad the UK might be, the US is in a far worse position right now. Crying about it and pointing fingers just makes you look petulant. If you can't deal with criticism of your country maybe you should stay out of discussions where it might come up?
Thanks! I have almost worked through my backlog of sci-fi books and have been looking for something new while i wait the next book in the captives war series to come out
Sorry I didn’t make any claims as to what constitutes a “full” democracy
I'd settle for what defines "democracy" at all. I've seen folks claim El Salvador is a democracy while Nicaragua isn't, entirely because the government of El Salvador is politically aligned with the US and the Nicaraguans are not.
IRV is just FPTP+
I don't really care what flavor of election system you think is the right one. However you square it, you can have shit candidates win popular mandates. There is no system that'll keep people you don't like out of office, shy of a dictatorship that puts you in charge.
There’s a reason why politicians keep suggesting it
I don't really care what flavor of election system you think is the right one.
You're against logic and reason?
However you square it, you can have shit candidates win popular mandates. There is no system that'll keep people you don't like out of office, shy of a dictatorship that puts you in charge.
I'm not interested in a system that will keep people I don't like out of office. I'm interested in a system that represents the will of the people, rather than the will of a select rich and powerful few.
If you're willing to care, you might find one.
Suggesting it? Thirteen states have now banned ranked-choice voting as municipalities decide on whether to adopt it
I don't see the problem here, like I said, it's worse than FPTP.
I met an Aussie in Thailand who claimed that ranked ballot elections are undemocratic, that recent Australian protests were not racist, that immigration was a huge problem in Australia, that Australians are not actually racist at all, and that recent Australian protests were about protesting Palestine, and not racist at all.
Im going tongo tin foil haters a bit with the implication:
If you have a faist government why not just bring back the royal family as the leaders?
I get that facism is different than monarchism but many of the key distinctions aren't that significant imo, in that they both lean heavily towards autocracy and both Aggressively punish dissent.
Palestine Action sprayed red paint on two Airbus Voyager aircraft to “break the chains of oppression” in Gaza — and drew swift condemnation from British politicians.
hand on hip and wagging scolding finger "Oi mate, yous can't soiy that, it's prohibited language! You're noit allowed to suppoht a group declared terrohrist feh sproiy paintin' a jumbo jet!"
Spraying military aircraft with red paint isn't terrorism by any stretch of the imagination. Who does it terrorize? And supporting an organisation whose members sprayed fighter jets with paint isn't terrorism either. There's no justification for the UK government's use of anti-terrorist legislation against these protesters.
By contrast, supporting a regime that has been openly committing genocide for years and uses torture and murder to intimidate its opponents could well qualify as terrorism.
And runs political interference campaigns at the highest levels of its allies to gain unlimited support. We label other countries foreign actors waging hybrid warfare for a lot less. It's crazy.
People that were against terrorism legislation argued this until they were blue In the face and people people told them don't worry, the government is totally not going to abuse these powers.
When Keir Starmer was a solicitor he defended people, successfully, for the same kind of thing. This isn’t terrorism, this is my government taking away our rights to protest.
People are ignoring their proscription to bring attention to the insanity of it and hope to force the government to back down. It’s mainly old people being arrested; including priests. I would do it myself but it’s hard when you’ve got work and being in jail would hinder that.
I'd argue that the Liberals are a little farther down the line. This administration isn't finished bullying women, intellectuals, non-Caucasians and the queer community to death, they're just getting started.
Happened in the 1910s, even. Hence the old quip about Bernie Sanders killing Rosa Luxemburg.
dumbass liberals eventually ended up lined up against the same walls the communists and socialists were lined up against
Or marched out into the snows of Russia to seize more Lebensraum for the imperial core. Or just bombed to death in Dresden or Berlin when the front lines collapsed.
If you’re a liberal today and defending this fascist suppression against Palestine Action: you’re next.
The hard math of living in a fascist state is standing up and getting shot today or ducking and hiding in hopes you won't get shot tomorrow.
Liberals made their bed back in 2009. We're all just living in the aftermath.
Met Police said many of those arrested needed carrying away after they refused to walk from Trafalgar Square – but Amnesty International says arresting hundreds of people at the demonstration is ‘not the job of police’
The WSWS described the 2014 Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine as a coup backed by the United States and Germany in which the Ukrainian far-right coalition of organizations Right Sector and political party Svoboda would have played a "crucial role".[13] Furthermore, the WSWS criticized the coverage of the Russo-Ukrainian War in 2014 by the majority of German media outlets, describing it was one-sided and "anti-Russian propaganda". Thus, leading outlets such as Der Spiegel and Die Zeit would have been clamouring for military action against Russia and attacking the President of Russia Vladimir Putin, "who is portrayed as a new Hitler and an aggressor".
[14]About the shootdown of the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in 2014, the WSWS stated that "Washington has presented not one shred of evidence that Flight MH17 was brought down by a missile either fired by the anti-Kiev forces or supplied by Moscow". Regarding the assassination of Boris Nemtsov in 2015, David North wrote for the WSWS that he was wondering if the United States was planning a coup to replace Putin with a "Western-friendly oligarch".[15] On February 22, 2022 the WSWS issued a statement opposing Putin's invasion of Ukraine, calling for the unity of Russian and Ukrainian workers against both Putin and NATO.[16]
Is it so hard to find a socialist organisation that isn't just simple contrarians?
I guess they at least oppose the (2022) Russian invasion of Ukraine so they're not completely bonkers. Not Chinese propaganda level, but still disappointing.
I guess they at least oppose the (2022) Russian invasion of Ukraine so they’re not completely bonkers. Not Chinese propaganda level, but still disappointing.
They frequently portray Ukraine as an aggressor in its war, rather than Russia (they call the Kursk incursion of Ukraine the "imperialist-backed incursion of Russia", and they write that Taiwan's ruling party DPP "must renounce its confrontational approach to China" in an obvious disconnection from reality that Russia started the war in Ukraine, and China is becoming increasingly aggressive against Taiwan including threats of an military invasion - Source, but you'll find ample evidence that this site is conveying authoritarian talking points in practically all its reports, and barely properly citing a source for their claims).
How did the DPP rise as “the opposition” in the late 1980s? What role did the KMT and US imperialism play in this development? What do social democrats and Stalinists mean when they say “peace”?
It's a good source if it reports on the fascist behaviors of the UK government. With this trend, how long do you think western media will be able to report freely on this stuff?
90% chance the mossad has a bunch of videos of Starmer and his cabinet diddling kids, or engaging in animality with pigs, whatever is the depravity du jour was in his heyday.
Meanwhile the nazis march against london with Stephen Yaxley-Lennon at the helm. 0 actual enforcement. The funniest part is Yaxley-Lennon was invited by an israeli minister to visit Israel...
Can you imagine travelling back to 1943 and telling people in the camps that their sacrifice would be the fertilizer of a new wave of the same ideological poison that deprived them of dignity and life. This is just heartbreaking... What's even the point of resisting anymore?
Indeed. My opinion stems from the fact that Ghislaine Maxwell's father was suspected of being a Mossad agent and Epstein himself had ties to some Israel government figures.
Resisting tyranny is how everything good in the world is possible. The way to have lives worth living is to defeat tyrants and their ideologies. We defeated the Nazis but not fascism. Now we have to defeat the ideological descendants of the Nazis.
If we don't defeat fascism, neoliberalism, and capitalism now the turn around time for the next fascist movement will be measured in years not decades. We have seen as much with the Biden administration. They failed to meaningfully hold Trump and MAGA to account for the insurrection or fundamentally fix the underling systemic issues that they are symptoms of and now we are living under fascist rule.
We don't have dignified lives or liberal democracies to go back to. The way to get something better is with socialist democracies where workers own corporations and the political process. Until then it's liberty or death. We benefited from a free democracy. If anyone is to enjoy that again we must resist now and until we are all free.
Starmer is terrified of Reform. So he's taken the really smart stance of pulling Labour to the right to court a demographic that would never vote Labour anyway, and in the meantime utterly piss off his core base.
Yeah, it's very sad since I think people are more willing to vote Labour if they were just better. Now their voter base is more likely to stay at home instead of going to the voting booth. Weird move by Starmer since he was in the march against the Iraq war himself.
It's so depressing. I remember the election that Ed Miliband lost, and how many of us were unsurprised that people found no appeal in Tory-lite as opposed to the regular Tories; Labour implicitly conceded to the Tories by affirming the idea that austerity was the only way to go. Now the same is happening with Reform.
If Labour really wanted to challenge Reform, they'd challenge Reform's base assumptions. They'd argue, for example, that reducing immigration won't solve the housing crisis or NHS wait times, because those essential services are suffering from over a decade of chronic underinvestment. They don't need to fight on Reform's terms, because if they do, Labour will lose — again.
A campaign by Israeli-backed British Jewish groups of anti-semitism slanders against Corbyn (so extreme that at one point a Jewish Holocaust Survivor was deemed an anti-semite to get at Corbyn by association) toppled him down from Labour Party leadership, to be replaced by these types, who as soon as they got control of the Labour Party started purging it of people who had voiced Leftwing ideas and support for Corbyn.
Essentially Labour was emptied from the inside and its shell was filled with supporters of a foreign ethno-Fascist regime.
Power Duopolies, such as those found in countries with First Past The Post systems, suffer from similar problems as the Power Monopolies in one party systems, such as how there is a path to power which is entirelly unaccountable to voters, of just taking over one of the Power Duopoly parties from the inside and then let the normal back-and-forth of the duopoly system - since people only ever have 2 options, naturaly the power goes back an forth as people vote for the "lesser" evil that then turns into the "greater" evil so they vote for the other "lesser" evil - bring that party back to power.
Funilly enough, in the UK that seems to have been done to both of the Power Duopoly parties, first to the Tories during the Leave Referendum and after that to the Labour Party when Israel joined with the Liberals (and I don't mean the LibDem Party, I mean Blairites) and even the Tories to overthrow Corbyn (who was openly a defender of the rights of Palestinians) and replaced him with the Liberals who then proceeded to make sure there was nobody left-of-center in that party.
If you look at the US, you see the very same phenomenon transforming the Republicans from a Conservative Party to a Fascist one, as well as how the Democrats have be thoroughly taken over by those serving the interests of Israel and of Billionaires.
I think that the less rigged a country's voting system is for "stability" (read: for making sure only the same handful of big parties has power and they seldom have to do it as part of a cohalition) the more robust it is to this kind of taking over of a large party as an unaccountable way to get power, mainly because more parties have to be taken over and people will migrate more easilly way from a party when it stops representing them (there is no such thing as tactically voting for the "lesser" evil in a Proportional Vote system).
In my own experience, if all the voting systems rigged to benefit size, there is a broader phenomenon of larger parties existing which which are usually in power (though often in cohalitions) and which attract the kind of people with no scruples who go into politics to become wealthy from selling access to power (i.e. the corrupt).
However in the two other countries I lived in beyond the UK, one of which had Proportional Vote and the other Multi-representative Electoral Circles (so, not as bad as FPTP, but still Mathematically rigged), I have not seen a case of the larger parties being obviously taken over as means to get to power like I saw in the UK, though I've seen smaller parties being created and/or supported by foreign money and then eating up some of the vote of the large parties.
Certainly were I am now - Portugal, which has Multi-representative Electoral Circles - of the two new Far-Right parties which were created not that long ago, one of which for sure got money from the Fascists in Brasil and the other also likely had funding from abroad (the campaign phamplets and other materials in their very first elections were both far too expensive for a small party and using the kind of design and slogan style one finds in International Marketing campaigns in huge contrast with other small parties), probably American (they're an ultra-neoliberal party created a couple of years after Steven Bannon came to Europe with money he openly said was to fund far-right parties), though there I don't know for certain. Both of those parties are taking votes away from the large rightwing party but also partialy from all the way into the leftwing (the more Fascist of the two is even picking traditional working class votes that used to go into a Communist Party)
Every party HS a different system. The conservatives have their MPs select two candidates in multiple rounds of voting to put in front of all their members.
Labour has a system where a candidate needs to have a minimum support from their MPs too but it's still an election from labour members and supporters. They rank their candidates I believe
This is so self defeating... Palestine Action should have never been declared a "terrorist organization" in the same category as Al Qaeda and Daesh. People see right through that and it causes a backlash. Nd the UK government doubling down on the backlash creates even more backlash. I mean anyone can see that at this point that the government has lost the political battle on this one and is just chugging through due to the sunk cost fallacy. This is only paving the way for the Right to do a comeback. Fucking centrist liberals man, god damn.
Not rioting is better. Peaceful protest, and thousands getting locked up, is what creates the conditions that might enable real social change.
If that doesn't work, then you have a proper riot (i.e. of the kind that isn't bread and butter to the powers that be). Edit - lot of downvotes here. You need to read a bit of revolutionary theory. No doubt there are Americans downvoting, who of course don't have a leg to stand on based on what they did with their exhorbitant ly privileged society./ YOu are showing your ignorance.
In a culture of peace, true justice could emerge; it would manifest as support of those who experience violence and rehabilitation of those that feel they need to turn to violence to get their way.
Justice and peace are usually not framed as concepts that exist in a vacuum which one chooses between, but rather as interdependent concepts.
I believe that when we choose violence and retribution over nonviolence and rehabilitation/restoration, our manifestation of justice reflects that.
MLK didn’t reject peace – he rejected complacency and false order. My belief in restorative justice and nonviolence is directly aligned with his legacy, not in opposition to it.
A culture of peace is proactive, inclusive, and cooperative. I am not the white moderate he spoke of.
Edit: Just still blown back from the notion that I'm somehow a white moderate for advocating for the same peaceful nonviolent action MLK was. Hit the books friend - you're wrong and here are direct quotes to clarify the situation for those reading:
“And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? ... It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.”
I'm not concerned about tranquility and the status quo. I agree with MLK that a riot is the language of the unheard. Just like him I still advocate for nonviolent action, while not disowning anyone - especially the unheard.
First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"
I'm not saying the latter statement, not even a little bit - not ever. I am an advocate of direct, nonviolent action and positive peace, as opposed to the negative peace MLK criticized. I'm not attached to false order and I value justice over it. I am deeply concerned about justice and humanity and I don't advocate for moderate and ineffectual action that doesn't affect the status quo.
Just because I chose peace and advocated for a culture of peace, doesn't mean I'm ignoring the role of true justice creating true peace. There's a lot of nuance here and the question was a trap to begin with. If I could go back in time, I would've answered peace and justice and just left it at that.
I disagree. We're past the point where peaceful protests will create change. It's abundantly obviously that those in charge do not care. And they also got it in their heads that AI makes us less necessary.
If leaders and executives won't listen to reason, then it's time to instil fear into them. Remind them there are so many more of us than them, and that their positions are a service to us, not a privilege or an entitlement.
Angry rioters do fucked up shit. Watch LA 92. All that violence and anger turned in on itself, attacked the most vulnerable, weasled into racial divisions.
With a more organised direction for that energy, the city could have been paralyzed, rotten cops and the judges could have been run out of LA and real systemic change could have begun.
I mean sure you can use the chaos to try and get cover for something specific. But generally, people rioting are on-tilt and looking for easy targets that look like their oppressors. Then, everybody gets catharsis and the riot disappears.
It's just lazy. but, better than nothing, i guess.
Peaceful only works when the people in power have a conscience and are willing to come to a peaceful resolution. When they want to eliminate your ability to tell them no, then rioting becomes the path forward.
Although in the UK there was some old graffiti that said 'a nation of sheep, owned by wolves'.
I would say it is more 'a nation of sheep, governed by wolves, owned by pigs. We've all heard of wolves in sheep's clothing, well we have a lot of pigs in sheep's clothing. And the wolves and the pigs interbreed freely, so we have all manner of porcine lupine combinations.'
And what do you do when everyone who would dare to do anything is locked up by peacefully protesting? You're going to run out of bodies, before you realise you're fucked.
Not an american, you are still being silly. Also you sound american with all that rollover attitude to authority. They are outlawing peaceful protesting, the solution is not to keep doing the same thing but with more smugness.
Peaceful protests are most effective when they're backed by the threat of violence. It's not the keg that forces concessions, it's the fear of the powder within. The cops have no issue beating up defenseless victims in the name of "order". Only when they're at risk themselves do they think twice.
For that, the protests need to be large enough that escalation becomes an actual concern. Pre-gunpowder armies stacked their infantry deep, because more people behind you makes you bolder in face of the enemy before you. The larger the crowd, the more dangerous the potential rioters become.
Premature escalation might get the bold vanguard beaten and made examples of. Only when there's enough support to keep the momentum going can riots effectively serve as an "or else" to the peaceful demands.
Not American. You are wrong. We are lucky that many have more sense than cowardice because to do exactly what your opponent wants att any point in a rape is bordering malicious
As an American, it's super disheartening to read stories about European governments being fascist assholes as well. It's nice to imagine there's somewhere to go to escape it.
Yeah, which means they should know better more than anyone else. There's also the fact that the Nazis were inspired by Jim Crow, so Europe alone doesn't get the blame.
I honestly believe the anti American sentiment from Europeans on the internet comes from them hoping the origin of racism and facism is connected more to America than Europe. European facism, racism, and sexism has done more damage than any other group on the face of the earth
B) The fact that an article on World Socialist Web Site is linking to posts by Amnesty UK and Defend our Juries (three organizations that should all know better by now) on Xitter.
Jesus
At an absolute bare minimum, the last two should be cross posting everything to Mastodon, and the first should be linking to the Mastodon accounts whenever available.
Oh, look! Amnesty UK has a Mastodon account that they're not fucking using, apparently never have.
I'm looking into installing a door lock w/ key pad at home for two use cases:
I'm out of town and need to allow someone to enter my home, in an emergency or for any reason.
Nice to have - "oh shit, did I lock the door" - ability to lock the door remotely from my phone, would also solve use case #1 by unlocking remotely.
If there are no privacy respecting / self hosted apps for remote control (use case #2), then a "dumb" electronic lock w/ key pad that enables me to set a PIN that I can give to a friend or neighbor in a pinch and then reset the PIN after I get home, that would be good enough. If no such keypad/electronic locks exist, then my backup plan is to just make a few copies of my key for trusted friends & family and/or hide a key, but I'd like to explore the keypad route.
I use a keypad lock that has z-wave in it and tie it back to home assistant. I access home assistant through my wireguard vpn and lock or unlock as i please.
If you find one, see if you can get it to work with Home Assistant. I already cross-posted this to the Home Assistant community, so they might chime in as well.
Anything connected to the Internet is inherently vastly less secure. Fortunately, your two usecases can be addressed with a "dumb" keypad lock with two features:
Multiple access codes. Set a different code for each trusted party, as well as an extra code that you can give out in case of emergency, which you can reprogram once you return.
Automatic locking. Set a timeout for the deadbolt to re-engage after a set period of time. If you forget to lock the door, it simply locks itself.
This is the route I took. All manual, multiple codes. There is a code for the gate, and a code for the door, per person I implicitly trust. With some 23 cameras on the property, I'm well aware of just about anything going down on my property while I am away.
LOL Well, it would seem like it works out that way but the only interior cams I have are in the living room and there is one in the lab. I'm not really into sex tapes. They always seem like a good idea at the time, but they have the potential to become quite litigious, and I try to stay out of courtrooms.
I've got one like this. A standard NON-CONNECTED keypad lock from the big box hardware store. I set a few extra codes and hand them out (and change hem) as needed.
Fair warning: anything like this that you may want to buy has almost certainly been defeated, especially anything that is a combo lock. The only systems I've seen that are actually somewhat secure are the types that have a separate keypad and lock mechanism, and require electricity in the door frame latch.
I prefer an old school security door with key for my home, any electronic doorlock is hackeable, more with online functions. Same as generally "smarthomes" are never private.
It's a 'dumb' solution, but you might be better off with a key safe. My mother in law uses one, and it lets the family have access if she's working or on holiday and something needs doing.
The PIN can be changed quite easily, and there's no chance of being locked out due to a power / battery failure.
Something that uses the Matter protocol might be what you’re looking for. My understanding is that they can be disconnected from the internet (only able to communicate with your Matter controller over your local network) and still work.
The comments are funny... I run Home Assistant (using ZigBee, so devices have no Internet connectivity) at home but I also lock pick, for fun.
Sure, your "smart" or "connected" gadgets can be hacked but don't get fooled by believing your "dumb" locks are safe!
As somebody pointed out check the LockPickingLawyer... but if you believe it's complicated buy yourself a lock-picking training kit for 30€. Sure you won't open "fancy" locks easily but you can open a lot of locks by training for like 1h. Get a kit, watch few videos, train while paying attention, repeat while watching a movie (basically blind picking) and you'll get surprised how quickly it comes. If you have very fancy lock (the ones that cost more than 200€) then you need better tooling, like 1000€ automated ones, but that still requires little skill and need a minute to pop a lock (so I heard, this I never tried).
So yes, please, do NOT buy a connected lock if you believe that's unsafe BUT also do not imagine you are safer with a "traditional" cheap one.
PS: full disclosure, I do not have a connected lock but it's not because I think they are more unsafe, just because I didn't bother. I'm not convinced of the utility for the price. That said if you have suggestions, I'm all ears.
PS2: as with similar questions on software, depends on your thread model. If you have to deter playful teenagers or drunkards, sure, it'll hopefully slow them down enough so that they give up. If you are facing professionals it won't matter either way, safer to get insurance for the outcome.
Much like securing your network and devices, unfortunately, there isn't anything that renders 100% protection. I'm fond of saying 'For each and every technology, there exists, or is soon to exist, an equal, yet undoing technology.' Technology doesn't stand still, but it always wields a double edged sword.
Indeed, and that's why I enjoy lock picking. You get to actually understand the technology and its limits. It's a playful pastime but IMHO it's an interesting reminder.
That being said... I do believe 1 protection exist and is close to 100% : computational complexity. The math behind encryption is the closest we have to a perfect lock. The fact that governments have to put artificial limits on it says a lot.
The Swedish activist Greta Thunberg has been detained by Israel and reportedly maltreated by her Israeli captors after she was kidnapped, along with hundreds of other activists, from Gaza’s territorial waters on Friday.
When did she do that? I've lways thought of her as liberal with rich parents who get's to do high-publicity protests that achieve nothing and distract from the economic problem.
That might have been the case some years ago when she was very young, but it is clear that her political consciousness has evolved significantly since then. How many of us can say that we held the same political views as teenagers as we do now?
Y'all got to take the word "distract" out of your vocabulary. Israel is not committing genocide to distract from the Epstein files.
I don't really know or care much about Greta Thuneberg. But I wouldn't criticize her unless my activism was objectively more effective than hers...and I don't think that describes either of us.
I mean she's great, gave a voice to what a lot of people have been thinking for decades before she was born. Maybe what most people think today. But there is really nothing that's effective. It's not dissing her, it's just that the machine is too strong and it's able to even use the opposition to itself for the machines purpose, like the article says.Usually. It didn't work with Greta, so she's just ignored.
I actually teach how to plan, execute, and assess political and social impact, beyond practicing it in my orgs. Are you aware there are plenty of disciplines working exactly on this? Your rethoric is just a way to justify your inaction. If nothing can change, it means you're exempted from your responsibilities. Too easy.
Your teach? Wow. I thought you are a psychic since you know everything about me from one Lemmy post lol.
I hope you aren't such s duche with you students. Anyway, in any case it makes sense to asses effectiveness every now and then. For academic purposes of nothing else.
We have also not abandoned many systems many times, that's not an argument. Show me the effect and disruption. I'm not against it, just right now there isn't much there.
You can say she was the head of that flotilla and without her it would be at least much smaller and you are right, but in this case, considering what Israel did to them and there is still a lack of any real effects.
It's incredibly hard to prove things like this so if you don't believe it you don't, but I don't think the effects are just meant to be directly bringing food to Gaza. If that were the only way to measure it you'd be right. But the only thing which could possibly stop Israel is strong political pressure from the West and we are getting closer to that, the world is angry about it in a way they weren't before. Even Germany, the most hard-line Israel supporter is changing its stance. These massive protests in Italy wouldn't have been like this otherwise. Yeah maybe I'm wrong because these things are nebulous and slow but that's how activism is and I think those things are real changes.
"We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings." Ursula K Le Guin
It's been done before, even under more oppressive conditions. It can and will be done again.
I get it. You find it comforting to believe there's nothing you can do to change things, so you refuse to consume anything that would challenge that notion. Otherwise, you might feel obligated to do something you aren't willing to do, like join a cause or think critically about how you might make change.
I suppose ignorance is bliss, after all, but if you did want to challenge that notion, I'm happy to share the following:
The global change in public sentiment regarding Palestine and its occupation by a settler-colonialist force, including 60% of Jews in the US recognizing that Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza (up from 27% in late 2023).
International governments recognizing the state of Palestine. A move, albeit performative, indicating that governments are feeling major public pressure to act. And that was before the solidarity protests and general strikes across europe that are breaking out today.
The successes of the BDS movement. Billions of dollars in divestments have been won from genocidal collaborators like Coca-Cola, Teva, Caterpillar, Microsoft, and countless more, even by governments and retirement indexes, along with 250+ wins in the US alone
Other campaigns; like The Oakland People's Arms Embargo, and the recently launched AIPAC Out!; uncovering Israel's American collaborators at every level, in a way that is accessible and therefore actionable to the public.
That's only what I could name off the top of my head
It is in this context alone that we see serious peace talks taking place, with Trump and other US negotiators getting directly involved, and Israel actually seemingly motivated to engage in negotiations on Hamas's terms (i.e. their demands for a permanent ceasefire, unrestricted humanitarian aid, full IOF withdrawal, prisoners exchange, resisting the disarmament of their people, etc). That deal most certainly won't be enough, but it's a start. We both know that Israel wouldn't even come to the table without overwhelming pressure to do so. The cracks in the empire are showing and the empire is desperate to close them, but the thing about cracks is they tend to permanently weaken the structures that stand on them.
The term "liberal" is toxic. Liberal's are disliked by "the right" and by progressives. They are truly useless snowflakes that do nothing but virtue signal and sell everything and everyone out that threatens their convenience and comforts.
I don't think it is toxic, as much as it is almost always misused. Read the following and tell me how many people you know have been using the term correctly.
For leftists that's exactly who we're talking about when we say liberals. The right to private property and equality and the consent of the governed are logically incompatible. Right liberals (e.g. US Republican party) emphasise the former, and moderate liberals (e.g. US Democratic party) pay lip service to the latter while only actually protecting the former. It's really only about property in the end.
I wouldn’t say those three things are inherently logically incompatible, but there would be a lot of grey areas.
The power structure of the federal government doesn’t make it any easier to actually exercise the federal government to accomplish helpful objectives, but making things worse is a relatively easy exercise.
The focus on state level politics seems much more meaningful to actually accomplish any goals, since at least there is not as big of a hurdle where land and money have more power/representation than real people.
They are not logically incompatible, but we will have to make clear and specific decisions about where one ends and the other begins.
Unless you are asking me to live in a society where I must share my toothbrush with others because I am not allowed to keep any private property.
I do believe in private property: with modest, reasonable limits. Which we can and will discuss the details of over time, and I understand that will likely become a heated discussion at times, but I believe it is an inevitable and necessary one. Does that disqualify me from being a leftist? Does it make me a liberal too? Let me know.
Private property in this context means things which generate/are used to generate capital, not just any kind of object which people might have and use. The important distinction is that capital is social, it is a means of coercing others to do work for you. That's true for a factory, where people work for the owner, or for a rented property where the tenant must work to pay the owner. It's true in a way even for wages - when you spend money you are buying the products of people's labour (which under capitalism was not produced in a just way). It's not the case for your toothbrush.
The distinction that liberalism made was that everyone should in theory be allowed to own private property rather than royals appointed by divine right and hereditary nobility they delegated some power to. Not that in the 1700s we were suddenly allowed to have our own clothes for the first time in history.
Isn't it though? I didn't make my toothbrush. It came from the toothbrush factory. In fact, it's an electric toothbrush. Which presumably requires a lot of somewhat high tech inputs and resources to create. Would someone have developed this innovation without some economic pressure to do so? I'm not totally convinced. I think there is some role for capital in that sense. Maybe I'm wrong.
Thank you for taking my somewhat tongue in cheek comment so generously though. My humor is not always placed appropriately and doesn't always come across well, but it sometimes provokes people to respond, and I'm simply trying to learn and keep an open mind, and I appreciate your time and effort in sharing your knowledge.
This isn’t at all to say her original stance was misguided. It is to say that she recognises genocide and ecocide come from the same root. Systems of power that destroy ecosystems also destroy people, also destroy planets, also destroy worlds. She is in many ways simply displaying a logical consistency, as much as a moral one, about the interconnected nature of the evils that plague our civilisation. And this is where she broke with a liberal class who see evils selectively and in terms framed and dictated by empire.
hear hear! Too many people who love the “first they came for” poem who still think Palestine is a pesky wedge issue being used against their boys in blue.
And you got leftist piling on liberals for some reason
Edit: oh shit I'm in .ml my bad(not really) lol hey at least you don't ban dissent I guess
Edit 2: Leftists once again can't see the forest for the trees with your ideological purity test pitted against defeating a common enemy. For people so smart you really need to understand that your power lies with NUMBERS
Wait so Greta is a liberal and doing right but other liberals are enables but leftists are ... checks notes... circle jerking themselves to completion over a captured "ally"? Make it make sense
Economic liberalism is associated with markets and private ownership of capital assets. Economic liberals tend to oppose government intervention and protectionism in the market economy when it inhibits free trade and competition, but tend to support government intervention where it protects property rights, opens new markets or funds market growth, and resolves market failures.[2]
Economic liberalism is associated with markets and private ownership of capital assets. Economic liberals tend to oppose government intervention and protectionism in the market economy when it inhibits free trade and competition, but tend to support government intervention where it protects property rights, opens new markets or funds market growth, and resolves market failures.[2]
People who call themselves liberal are not economic liberal you completely dense morons. In the sense that the government can't seize your shit for no reason well ddduuuuhhhhh MOST people are going to feel that way that doesn't mean we can't tax the shit out of billionaires or drag them out into the street
A millionaire with 999M$ is a person but +1$ make him not a person anymore? How you judge that? Where is the line in this shit ideology that the personal liberty above all stops people to gain more riches?
You not wanting to understand what we're telling you does not make us the morons.
edit:
In the sense that the government can't seize your shit [...] that doesn't mean we can't tax the shit out of billionaires
Doesn't it? Where do you draw the line between taxes and government seizure, especially in the context of capital owners? Also, wouldn't it be far more effective for the government to simply own the means of production and operate at the behest of the people? Does taxing capitalists more while still allowing them to have full control over the means of production - which they'll use to influence the people and government in their favor - not simply set up the same situation we find ourselves in now, just some amount of time down the road?
I would say it does set that up (in fact it has in the past, just look at what was in the new deal and how it's been eroded since it was signed. Assuming you're familiar with US history...), and that is why liberalism is incompatible with anti-capitalism.
No, liberalism means INDEPENDENT of the economic system I believe in personal liberty. Billionaires shitting on everything INTERFERES with my and my peoples personal liberty therefore it must be destroyed
So which neoliberal dems are referring to themselves as liberals? No, it is a derrogatory perjative to both the nazis and the leftists at this point, by design. Most of the dems are going to claim to be either progressive or conservative
lol that's not what I'm referring to. What they call themselves doesn't matter, what matters is whether their policies/laws and/or philosophy/ideology align with neoliberal principals. In other words; we only care about the material reality of the matter. This is because Marxists follow a framework called dialectical materialism.
Words, especially those which a politician or lawmaker uses to market themselves to the public, are not material. They can't be measured in any meaningful way and they don't necessarily reflect reality. (You can, however, measure the material indications and effects of those words if you're inclined to do so, but that's besides my point.)
"Personal liberty" is what allows capitalists to exploit us. They have all the "liberty" you think you have. The "liberty" to put lies in the media, to pay you less than the value of your labor in order to extract a profit, to charge extortionist prices for healthcare and other basic needs, to influence politics and to crush competing public industries. These are all the things that "liberty" gets you under capitalism. "Personal liberty above all" != working class liberation.
Communism operates under what was referred to by Marx as a 'dictatorship of the proletariat', which we regard as complete liberation of the working class, because it allows the public to have control which is simply not possible under the liberal framework of "personal liberty for all". Under the liberal framework, even the smallest most democratic intervention is decried as "government overreach"; that is, if it is even made democratically possible in the first place.
Which isn't totally incorrect, because what you're talking about isn't "personal liberty for all". You exclude billionaires. Us socialists/communists exclude capitalists as a whole, because the sole interest of a capitalist is to enrich themselves at the direct expense of the working class and our liberty. Billionaires are certainly the worst and most visible offenders, but a materialist lens allows one to see that each and every capitalist serves interests that are fundamentally in conflict with those of the working class. To operate any other way would be to betray their own interests, and wouldn't make for a very effective result.
Liberation will only come when the working class has the power to decide collectively how our resources will be used, which will only come when we have majority control over the means of production, which will eventually lead to the capitalist class becoming completely obsolete. Liberation means being able to provide for our needs above anything else; for the sake of our humanity alone, and from the work that we are already doing; rather than our labor power being extracted for private gains and our needs provided only to the extent that it serves capitalists' profit motives.
Why is that? Have you ever spent time thinking about how that would be any more or less possible under the current system than, say, seizing the wealth of billionaires and socializing it back to the working class? How would the latter ever be possible by any means short of revolution, especially now if Trump gets his way? What will you do when the ruling class doesn't put that kind of relief on the table? How much oppression and destruction will you consent to, if you believe liberation is not possible and things can only get worse from here?
If you don't believe in it, you won't fight for it. It's a self fulfilling prophecy. That's exactly why our system does everything in its power; both to obscure revolutionary working class history, and to inflate the state's ability to repress dissent. So I'll repeat this until the day I die: it's been done before under worse circumstances.
Russians and Cubans were under brutal dictatorship. Haitians were completely enslaved by one of the most powerful colonial forces in their time. Vietnamese guerillas successfully fought off invasion by the single most militaristic nation in the world, and they aren't alone in having done so (see North Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq, so on). If I could speculate, I'd say China's political and economic situation in 1950 is a pretty reasonable outcome for the direction we're heading now in the US. Regardless of how you feel about what came after each of these struggles, the factual reality is that these weren't armies sponsored by any state. These were working class people fighting directly against the states that profited from their exploitation.
All of those people got organized and won liberation from their domestic oppressors, doing their part to weaken the empire, despite what would seem as insurmountable odds to a disorganized worker. It's on us now to organize ourselves against our own oppressors, to get them off both our backs and theirs, and we can't do that without maintaining optimism about our ability to win should we fight. We know that Fascism can only exist for so long until it cannibalizes itself. As a collective we are capable of beating it long before that comes to pass. If we allow the state to beat that optimism out of us then we are only greatly delaying our liberation and doing the ultimate disservice to our people.
"We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words." - Ursula K. Le Guin
I hear you and I don't want to diminish your hope because I do think the younger generation sees the benefit of it. I just think you'd have to convince the right it's a good idea
I don't think we should waste our time trying to convince fascists of anything (most of whom are the wealthy elites we outnumber anyways), other than by carrying out the consequences of their actions. Their interests are simply not aligned with ours.
That's okay though, because threshold number of people required to disrupt the system and make real change is much smaller than you would think. All it takes is coordination between those of us that believe in upholding the dignity of the working class, and we gain that coordination by organizing and spreading class consciousness.
The thing is that most of the everyday people in the US already agree with us. Even Republican voters. Most people believe that housing, food, and healthcare should be affordable; that there should be real solutions to homelessness and crime; even bodily autonomy (pro-choice, gender affirming care) is popular among the people. It's just that neither party puts up real solutions, both of them make excuses for why those things are not possible, and the Republicans are really good at making up scapegoats and creating non-solutions that sound really good to someone already conditioned to accept them, which the Democrats generally play along with and split the difference rather than putting up any real challenge or counter-argument.
As for the aesthetics of socialism, even Castro eventually had to spell out that it was, in fact, socialism that was responsible for all the gains they had made since their revolution - that the bogeymen they were so afraid of were simply projections made by their former oppressors. Working class consciousness doesn't have to be 100% before anything can ever happen. It can grow as a result of our success after the fact.
::: spoiler Excerpt from Fidel Castro's Speech on Marxism-Leninism
Formation of the ORI
These forces were called upon to unite in a single organization, and we organized the ORI. It was not easy, it was also a lengthy process; but, in the end, we organized the Integrated Revolutionary Organizations.
Sectarian attitudes are gradually disappearing; so are the attitudes of exclusivism. In the same way, people are no longer being excluded because they are socialists, and, consequently, sectarianism and similar attitudes are disappearing. Some attitudes of extremism are also disappearing. Extremism, which is often called "the measles," should, of course, not be confused with revolutionary firmness. Extremism is another manifestation of the petit bourgeois spirit in the revolutionary movement which we must fight against just as we have to fight against sectarianism.
There are many things our people have already had time to learn. They have had time to get rid of some of the prejudices that many people had who depicted socialism as something terrible something inhuman, something harsh, something enslaving, which is exactly all that imperialism is and which it accuses socialism of being.
Well, we are in a socialist regime. How different is this socialist regime from everything that had been said about socialism So much so that even those who have had problems, like the reactionary clergy, who have had problems with the Revolution, can't blame the socialists for them, can't say the socialists tried to close the churches, prohibit and persecute religious ideas. On the contrary, Aware that religious sentiment is a part of the feelings of some people, revolutionary power must respect the religious sentiment of that part of the people. It does respect it, and gives it every facility. It was those who waged war on the revolutionary regime who said that they would be deprived of parental authority over their children. And the people have learned the truth. Who were they who took away parental rights? Saboteurs who murdered young men and women, counter-revolutionary criminals who murdered a 16-year-old teacher and deprive his mother forever of parental rights, of affection, of warmth and the hope of having her son at home again.
Not only did they murder him; they tortured him. Why did they torture him? Did they torture him, as the Batista secret police used to do, to force a secret from a revolutionary? No, they did not torture him to get any secrets out of him. They tortured him because they were sadists, because of their love of torture, because that boy was there teaching. What secret could he have had? Thus, it was not to squeeze out any secrets. They stabbed him fourteen times. They stabbed him simply to torture him, to fill him with anguish, to make him suffer, to sow terror in the hearts of all mothers. We found out that what robbed people of their parental rights was exploitative - capitalism, which dragged peasant girls away from the countryside to put them to work as servants, to force them into a life of prostitution. We found out that it was capitalism that condemned the daughters of workers and the daughters of peasants to that fate. And it turns out to be precisely socialism that wipes out illiteracy, that educates a million Cubans, that makes plans to rehabilitate prostitutes, to teach typing and shorthand to domestics, to wipe out unemployment, to bring teachers to the remotest corner of the country, to fight and die defending the country from the claws of imperialism, to bring hospitals, to bring roads, to organize social activities, to organize children's activities, to organize youth activities, to develop culture and to struggle for the happiness of the people. That is what we have given our people.
Socialism behaves very generously toward its enemies -- too generously. The social system which captured over a thousand mercenary traitors -- paid by and serving the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon, and who came here escorted by foreign ships -- the system that captured 500 counter-revolutionaries -- among whom were many murderers who had already committed blatant crimes against the peasants -- without even applying the maximum penalty on them, the social system that sees with anguish its calm and generous attitude repaid by the cowardly and vile murder of a 16-year-old youth -- that is socialism.
In other words, with all its power, socialism does not abuse it. It is calm. It is conscientious. It struggles to overcome all its defects. It struggles to overcome-extremism, sectarianism, abuses, injustices, simply because it is socialism, simply because it is what Marx and Engels conceived of, what Lenin and all the revolutionaries fought for -- a better life for man, a happier life for the people, a freer life for the people, that replaces the regime of class oppression, the regime of an exploiting class over the workers, with a workers' democracy. In Marxist terms, this is known as the "dictatorship of the proletariat". (applause).
Liberal ‘leaders’ abandonment. There needs to be an understanding that leadership is no longer following the will of the people in the United States. On either the left or the right. This fact is more of a cause of why things are so crazy than anything the people are doing or wanting
The liberal establishment always abandons effective fellow liberals. Sanders, Mamdani, Thunberg…they’re actually trying to do something. That makes the established neolibs look ineffective and upsets their donors. So they turn their backs on the rabble rousers.
The current anger with Sanders appears to be, from an outsiders pov, that he didn't criticize Israel by calling it a genocide soon enough.
That appears to be it.
I mean. To dismiss everything because one mistake, even if that mistake is massive, and then correcting that mistake, if belatedly, to me, says something very positive about that politician.
I'd prefer it was immediate, and it's gross that it took him so long, but all the other stuff isn't cancelled out by that. He's still a net positive. And he DID criticize earlier than any other us politician I can think of, and sure it Could have been even earlier and harsher, but like. Fuck. If you hate politicians for being open to changing mind based on new evidence, or reforming beliefs you don't like, or admitting mistakes, you are AGAINST them being rational and it plays right into the hands of neoliberal propagandists.
There's more, he criticized protests against ICE in LA turning into riots, and had some nice things to say about Kirk after he was killed.
That said I think it's really unproductive for people to turn on him after he was a big spark in a movement and is still outspoken. He has irritated me a few times lately but he's still one of the most influential leaders.
I mean. To dismiss everything because one mistake, even if that mistake is massive, and then correcting that mistake, if belatedly, to me, says something very positive about that politician.
even if it's clear that he's been doubling down on that mistake when presented with the evidence and then only switched it's become clear that the tide has begun turn?
that's what i'm getting at, he's lying (either to himself and/or to the rest of us) and will go with whatever will cause the least friction; aka a follower, not a leader.
They specifically mentioned the liberal establishment. You're talking about criticism from people that probably abhor the liberal establishment even more than they do progressive liberals like Bernie.
Also I think this kind of criticism is important and I don't know why it bothers people so much. It's okay to be critical of things you ultimately support, either for ideological or simply for tactical reasons. It's called critical support, and I think people should do it more often. Even if the criticism isn't ultimately supportive, that doesn't mean all of a person's hate is directed in that single place. There may be more than just the surface level WHAT, like the WHY of it all and what that implies, that you are missing (or dismissing).
You have to stand for something or you'll fall for anything, and refusal to engage in critical analysis - pretending any politician can do no wrong (or the contrary case; can do no right), getting defensive, and outright rejecting any investigation to prove or disprove your conclusion - does not fall into the category of 'standing for something' to me but rather overzealous team sports.
We have to practice more critical thinking, despite how badly our political class does not want us doing that. Whether it helps any specific politician win an election or not (which you can still do even with criticisms). Especially considering that it's this kind of criticism that has made it untenable for a growing number of politicians to deny the genocide in Palestine; it's pretty clear that the only needle that uncritical support will move is that of the progressives, towards the liberal end of the spectrum. After all, it's our criticism of the current system and its complicity in human suffering that makes us progressive in the first place.
He didn't "change his mind based on new evidence", public opinion just shifted to the point where he couldn't get away with not calling it a genocide. The whole time he has always taken the most Israel friendly position he can get away with without losing credibility. Hell, in the very first line of his statement calling it a genocide he still insisted on repeating Isreali lies about October 7th.
Imagine not being able to imagine any political spectrum beyond one that has Neo-liberalism at one end and moderate Soc-dems at the other. Communists? Anarchists? Fascists? Never heard of them.
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
It's sort of like Malala, and how she remained committed to socialism and Islam. I think ten years ago for a while the western boosters who brought her to international attention thought she'd flip and be a useful stooge. When she turned out to not be, we heard less and less of her.
Same deal with Greta Thunberg, who is something more dangerous than someone who can be bought: she's someone who is principled for climate justice and human rights.
She definitely had peaked before then, and already had started to lose some media favor due to her criticism of capitalism w.r.t. climate change. So yeah, it's not all due to Gaza, but Gaza was still an infection point.
The left is pretty much splintered into different types of ideologies, levels of hostility towards conservatism, and having wildly different objectives to accomplish, so they could not agree with each other and thus rarely ever win over the right.
The right-wingers? They have unanimous hatred towards the left and seemingly united until once they defeat the left, they'll fight and kill each other as to who gets the biggest slice of the pie.
I'm saying this because much of the left are split over this personality.
This is how I feel about Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and his stupidly named political party that will go nowhere.
Obstensively he is fairly radically left wing, he's just not radically in favour of actually doing anything. Basically he sits on the sidelines and mutters about genocide being bad (hot take I know) but otherwise just sits there. The only reason he's considered a threat is because his party might actually take votes away from labour but if he won an election nothing would change.
Short of an actual uprising against the corporate elite nothing is going to improve. You can certainly not rely on politicians to be your saviours. That's true globally not just in the US in the UK.
Although I am not exactly right-winger. I do not believe there is a God, for example.
Long ago - at least that is how it seems now - "right-wingers" were laughably and infuriatingly wrong. They tried pushing evolution in schools. They were against gay rights. And so on.
Now I find that it's the "left-wingers" who are laughably and infuriatingly wrong. They have even managed to malleate how science is defined socially. And science is not the only example - they've lost their minds in crime, immigration, sexuality, racism - everything - and they changed (or tried to change) all definitions. I will not go into any examples because it always starts a debate. But I will say this. If we think math is a "white supremacist construct", then there is something that has gone very, very wrong.
I used to be a scientist and I'm a science teacher now, and science is 100% a social construct. I could go through examples of how our modern interpretation of science is based on western philosophy that is a few thousand years younger than science itself as a practice, and how this limits the scope of modern science in a materially significant way. I could go into other examples too. But you really should just go watch Dr.Fatima's two videos "Gravity is a Social Construct, and That's Okay", and "Astronomy has a Colonialism Problem" on YouTube, because she does the most phenomenal exploration of the topic, and I could only (poorly) approximate the quality of her work here.
Look, liberals being evil is news. The good Greta brings to the world is news. Liberals abandoning people is not. Everybody abandons people that no longer reflect their political goals. Like, John Fetterman. Dude ran as a progressive economic populist and the American left loved him. Then he outed himself as some republican-lite zionist and now his entire former base hates him. And for good reason mind you; fuck that guy. But there is no unique sin in abandoning political leaders. Greta is simply more morally consistent and righteous than liberals.
The attachment to Israel in opposition to humanitarian ethics is only going distance people from the god they constantly claim to follow. This is in the Book
My test batch setup is nearly complete (please also appreciate the "beautiful" tiles) and I tested it with a wet hop beer. As you can see, those were clearly at the upper end of their ripeness scale, but it was the only time I could manage to pick some at all due family & kids. In they went in for a ~20 minutes 80 ˚C hop stand, during which my kitchen smelled a troubling lot of garlic and onions. By removing the bag with the hops, I stirred up the already settled trub, so I had to pour all hop debris & hot break into the minikeg along with the wort. Let's see what that does to the beer. I've overshot my OG quite a bit with the setup in the pictures, with a lot higher efficiency than predicted, only by stirring every now and then, so we're looking at an OG of 1.051 instead of 1.046.
Yesterday, after a week of fermentation under rising pressure, it was time for a gravity sample. It's fully attenuated already, and except a hint of some sharpness, I'm happy to report that we're apparently free of off-flavours. 😀 It came down do 1.008 (vs 1.010 predicted) , which leaves me with a 5.6 % ABV beer instead of 4.2 % with a lot less residual sweetness (US-05, you monster). Next time, I'll certainly mash hotter, and check the temperature with an external thermometer as well. I also wonder what a Kveik yeast would do to the result.
Here is the base recipe I intend to use for ongoing experiments with malts, yeasts & hops.
Totally forgot got mention it: These are actually wild hops! Foraged next to a rural road with not zero, but little traffic.
And yes, it's a sous vide stick. The one by Inkbird, which I got relatively cheaply. It sits in a hop tube so no grains can get into it. After use, I instantly rinse it, then put it in a jar with clean water and let it sit there until I'm cleaning up everything. Then, I rinse it again. As it doesn't have to be sterile, I'm fine with this regime for the time being.
LOS GATOS, CA—With an update the company hailed as a bold feature that would excite existing users and increase membership, streaming giant Netflix announced Tuesday that all of its subscribers would now be required to recruit five new customers.
Thank you for marking as satire. At first glance, I was fully ready to accept this as a genuine part of the actual fuckery that takes place in Netflix-land.
Parce qu'il n'y a rien de plus fun que du jargon juridique, on vous propose une formation juridique avancée ? Ca sera le 16 octobre dans le 19ème arrondissement de Paris, de 19h à 20h30
Mais pourquoi "avancée" ? Parce qu'il s'agit d'une formation pour celleux qui souhaitent approfondir les sujets liés aux procédures judiciaires, nous n'allons pas réaborder pendant la formation les points déjà traités en formation DCNV (Garde à vue, contrôle d'identité...)
Former German chancellor Angela Merkel has blamed Poland and the Baltic States for turning down a proposal for the European Union to negotiate directly with…
The CBS News owner Paramount will acquire the Free Press, a media startup founded by Bari Weiss, and has appointed her editor-in-chief of the storied US news network. The publication is known for criticizing both the left and right and has been a home for staunch support of Israel.
Weiss, 41, has no experience working in broadcast television, though she has carved out a reputation as a heterodox opinion writer and burgeoning media operator.
The purchase comes in light of major changes to 97-year-old CBS News after a merger between Paramount Global, the channel’s parent company, and Skydance Media, a media company founded by David Ellison, the son of billionaire Larry Ellison, this summer. Paramount is also behind the Paramount Pictures movie studios and US cable channels including MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon.
The CBS News owner Paramount will acquire the Free Press, a media startup founded by Bari Weiss, and has appointed her editor-in-chief of the storied US news network. The publication is known for criticizing both the left and right and has been a home for staunch support of Israel.
Weiss, 41, has no experience working in broadcast television, though she has carved out a reputation as a heterodox opinion writer and burgeoning media operator.
The purchase comes in light of major changes to 97-year-old CBS News after a merger between Paramount Global, the channel’s parent company, and Skydance Media, a media company founded by David Ellison, the son of billionaire Larry Ellison, this summer. Paramount is also behind the Paramount Pictures movie studios and US cable channels including MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon.
Verizon Communications Inc. today announced that its Board of Directors has appointed Independent Lead Director and former Chief Executive Officer of PayPal Holdings Inc. Dan Schulman as CEO.
That would be a good reason for the secretary of war to… well… go to war. They’re already clearly bloodthirsty since they proudly display bombing Venezuelas boats like it’s no big deal.
Because Maduro loves to use the US as a universal boogeyman, to justify his continued political existence. The threat of impending invasion is good PR for him.
Maduro and his government have a long history of blaming the U.S. for problems stemming from government mismanagement and incompetence. It's the only way he's managed to hold onto power as long as he has. If it weren't for all the conspiracy theories surrounding the US's involvement in literally EVERYTHING, then who else would the people have to blame? For example:
Early "Sabotage" Claims (2013)
Accusation: Soon after taking office, Maduro claimed the White House was plotting a "collapse" of his government through sabotage of food, electricity, and fuel supplies in October 2013.
Reality: As with later incidents, critics viewed this as a tactic to deflect blame from the government's own failing policies and to boost approval ratings with anti-U.S. rhetoric. A political scientist noted at the time that few Venezuelans actually believed the alleged coup attempts.
2019 Nationwide Blackout
Accusation: In March 2019, a massive power outage crippled Venezuela for days. Maduro and his government immediately claimed the U.S. and the Venezuelan opposition orchestrated a "criminal attack" and "cyber warfare" against the national electrical system. Communications Minister Jorge Rodriguez accused U.S. Senator Marco Rubio by name of being involved.
Reality: Experts and opposition leaders pointed to years of government mismanagement, corruption, and a severe lack of maintenance and investment in the country's power grid as the true cause. A former president of the national electricity corporation stated that the 2019 outage was a result of incompetence and poor maintenance, not sabotage.
Economic Collapse and Hyperinflation
Accusation: As Venezuela's economy collapsed and hyperinflation skyrocketed, Maduro's administration repeatedly blamed U.S. sanctions and what it calls "economic terrorism" for the country's economic woes.
Reality: Economists and international organizations primarily attribute the economic crisis to the Maduro government's policies, including price controls, currency mismanagement, and corruption. U.S. sanctions were largely targeted at specific individuals and sectors, rather than the general economy, and many of the economic issues predated the most severe sanctions.
Oil Industry Decline
Accusation: In 2025, amidst a U.S. military presence in the Caribbean, Maduro accused the U.S. of a thinly veiled attempt to seize Venezuela's natural resources under the guise of an anti-drug operation. This fits a long-running pattern of blaming U.S. actions for the decline of Venezuela's oil industry.
Reality: While U.S. sanctions have impacted the oil industry, analysts note the decline began much earlier due to years of mismanagement, corruption, and lack of investment by the state-owned oil company, PDVSA. Production had already fallen dramatically before sanctions were in place.
2024 Presidential Election Unrest
Accusation: Following the widely disputed 2024 presidential election, Maduro blamed the subsequent protests and unrest on a "far-right conspiracy" spearheaded by the U.S. and his political rivals. He accused the opposition of faking election results.
Reality: The U.S., Canada, and the European Union all condemned the election as neither free nor fair. The Venezuelan opposition presented overwhelming evidence suggesting their candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, won by a wide margin, contradicting the government's official results.
Claim: absolutely true shit said by somebody I don't want to think is right
Reality: the most genocidal, warmongering, racist country ever told me "nah bro it wasn't like that" and I identify with them so much that I just took their word for it
You clearly haven't spoken to very many Venezuelans, have you? I have lots of extended family there, and I can assure you, they don't support Maduro. The only people that still do, are either being bribed or extorted.
There aren't very many "true Chavistas" left. And the ones that are still there, also don't unanimously support Maduro. Chavez was inspirational. Maduro is just incompetent.
My bad I didn't know you knew a statistically significant portion of venezuelans of a random array of educational, economic, and cultural backgrounds. This is for real the first time some gringo tells me they know a Russian/Venezuelan/Cuban/Chinese/whatever somebody (making them basically an authority on the subject).
I guess the sanctions that were designed precisely for the purpose of causing unrest have nothing to do with the people desperate or angry enough to go to those Nazi-ass countries being very dissatisfied with the situation at home. What a fucking revelation, I'm telling you.
Dude. Venezuelans know enough about their own country's political climate to know when things are not as they seem. This is especially true when 2/3rds of the country voted against him in the last election. It's pretty hard to gaslight that many people, all at once. If it was "close", people wouldn't all be looking around at each other saying, "What the fuck just happened?"
And if you want to talk about how bad the sanctions are, maybe explain why everything Maduro does in response to those sanctions, actually makes things worse for regular Venezuelans? Every policy he puts in place, makes it even harder for people to buy things, or to save money, or even just to find work.
You tell me. What do you know about what people are going through there? I don't know anyone who thinks what Maduro has done, has made anything better for them. He's had over ten years to make some kind of progress...but all he's done is abandon all the policies that actually helped people, and implement new ones punishing people just for trying to get by on their own.
You saved that drivel on your phone as if it were useful for anything other than smoking gun proof you're a dope?
First off the entire premise of your argument is fucking stupid. He's a bad leader? Oh well! Not your fucking problem! He's the democratically elected leader of that country so fuck off.
But even allowing your hitleresque premise that you should be allowed to murder tens or hundreds of thousands of people because they voted wrong, your arguments are as stupid as a New York Times article and for the exact same reasons. Just taking a sample from the middle:
Reality: Economists and international organizations primarily attribute the economic crisis to the Maduro government’s policies, including price controls, currency mismanagement, and corruption. U.S. sanctions were largely targeted at specific individuals and sectors, rather than the general economy, and many of the economic issues predated the most severe sanctions.
"The people applying the sanctions to their country, who are actively engaged in a propaganda campaign to de-legitimize it, and who are repeatedly murdering their civilians with military attacks on random fucking boats sailing around it, said the sanctions aren't what made the country bad, it was already bad!"
Fucking baby brain.
If you actually believe the line that sanctions don't hurt the general economy you're a fucking moron and I can't be effusive enough on that point. You're extremely fucking stupid to think that. It's literally the entire fucking point of them. The politicians putting them in place say so explicitly in all situations except in this specific context when they're defending themselves against critics. The entire point of sanctions is to make the population blame and overthrow the government.
Reality: The U.S., Canada, and the European Union all condemned the election as neither free nor fair. The Venezuelan opposition presented overwhelming evidence suggesting their candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, won by a wide margin, contradicting the government’s official results.
"Trump said the election was stolen that's why I'm building a gallows for Mike Pence"
Lol! 1st of all...he lost the last election by 2/3 of the vote. Venezuela has one of the most transparent elections systems in the world. It was designed to provide verifiable proof of outcome, in order to guarantee the results were legitimate.
All the government had to do, in order to validate their claim on power, was to publish the results. That way, they can then be independently verified, and everyone would know who really won.
Except, they didn't do that. It's been almost two years, and they still haven't released those results. Why?
If you are such a galaxy-brained genius, and Maduro is such an unimpeachable Paragon of truth and honesty...explain that. They have the results...they just aren't letting anyone else see them? "Trust me, bro" is not how that system was intended to work.
Except, they didn’t do that. It’s been almost two years, and they still haven’t released those results. Why?
Because they don't answer to the people trying to murder them you fucking moron.
Oh and by the way literally the only people saying the election was illegitimate are the people trying to murder them. Not that you've shown yourself capable of critical (OR EVEN INDEPENDENT) thought, but don't you think you should be examining your sources before you say shit? Mmm?
Finally, way to ignore literally everything of substance in my comment and go off on your own shower argument like an NPC by the way. Not touching the central argument that none of your points have any say on whether you should be allowed to murder innocent people. You fucking nazi piece of shit.
Because they don't answer to the people trying to murder them you fucking moron.
Oh and by the way literally the only people saying the election was illegitimate are the people trying to murder them.
Are you saying the Venezuelan population is trying to murder them? The Venezuelan people are the ones who need to see the results of their own elections. Without that, the government has no legitimate claim to power. That's the entire point in setting up a system that can be verified independently. There is no ambiguity here. Either the results say he won...or they don't. So, the only reason they are refusing to show people the results, is because he lost. Period.
You clearly have no idea what you're talking about, so you're backing up your bullshit with insults, thinking that's a valid argument. It isn't.
None of your arguments are valid unless you can address the giant hole in your argument when it comes to those results not being released. That is the only thing that matters. You cannot make the claim that the Maduro government is legitimate anymore, when they have refused to provide the evidence that they won. Everything else you can say to try and defend him, is just hollow and pointless, without that.
Even making the argument that the US is wrong to question the election results falls flat, when the results are so obviously in question. All you're doing is showing me that you are not arguing in good faith. You are defending the indefensible.
Venezuela: Overview of U.S. Sanctions For over 17 years, the United States has imposed sanctions in response to activities of the Venezuelan government and Venezuelan individuals.
Venezuela isn't being hit any harder than any other country the US has beef with. Those other countries aren't all collapsing under the weight of those sanctions. In every other case, they've managed to find a stable equilibrium within their own means. So, why is Venezuela so different? Why isn't Iran experiencing rolling blackouts in a weekly basis? Why is Cuba able to fund cutting edge medical research?
Venezuela has no shortage of natural resources at its disposal, and also no shortage of countries willing to do business with them, despite the sanctions. There is no reason why they should have failed so completely, to maintain even a minimum level of economic stability.
But, they haven't. They're unique in both their economic and infrastructural collapse, as well as their out of control inflation. Almost everything they've done over the last two decades has made their situation worse than it should have been. It's like they took all the available options, and chose the ones that would cause the most damage.
Nope. My wife is Venezuelan, and most of her family were originally Chavez supporters. None of them still support Maduro at this point. He isn't even a Socialist. He's just an opportunistic parasite that's taking advantage of what Chavez tried to build.
At first, they were angry...but that was before Maduro took over. Now they just wish someone would get it over with...just hopefully without a lot of collateral damage. The shittiest part about it all is, most people there now, look at Trump like he's the one that's going to save them.
How fucked up is that? Things there have gotten so bad, that people even think Trump is offering something better.
Maduro using the USA as a bogeyman is a lot different from going to war with the USA.
At this point, the USA is looking for an excuse to go to war and Maduro has backed down from a lot of positions to keep the USA from having any excuses.
Under any other president, I would say, "Why would the US bother?" But, unfortunately with Trump, you never know.
But, by the numbers...why would they bother? Maduro has already agreed to allow US oil companies to take their oil...so, why invade when you are already getting what you want from the current administration?
What the US is doing out in international waters, is performative theater for their base at home. They sit out there and blow up a few smuggling boats, and all the brain dead MAGAts at home, cheer. The US still gets the oil, and also gets to claim they're being "tough on Maduro", without risking a single US soldier.
Maduro on the other hand, is hemorrhaging support at home. People are catching on, to the fact that he is completely corrupt and has no intention of helping them. He's getting richer every day, thanks to US investment, and none of it is "trickling down" to the people. He's had to crack down on dissent after he lost the last election and refused to leave office, and now even his allies are losing faith in his administration.
What he needs is for the boogeyman to do something real. He can't keep relying on flimsy conspiracy theories and conjecture. He needs them to "prove" that they are a real threat, or else no one is going to keep believing his bullshit anymore. And, if a few Venezuelans have to die in the process...well, that's just a sacrifice I'm sure he's willing to make.
The first Trump administration did the same thing to Iran that this administration is trying to do to Venezuela, get the weaker nation to do something that would be construed as a casus belli to justify regime change. Trump wants to be a wartime president without being the aggressor.
Maduro may be bleeding support, but Venezuela can't win a war against the USA and Trump is looking for any excuse to go to war. Having an American ship parked off shore should be enough to pull in some patriotic support. However, any aggression against the USA now could be used as an excuse for regime change.
Except there was no regime change in Iran. They just rattled their swords for the crowd, which is all they're doing now.
And for the record, the US has a long history of losing to so-called "weaker countries", when asymmetrical warfare is involved. The only war they actually managed to "finish" recently, was the invasion of Iraq...and that was largely because the Iraqi population wasn't actually trying to fight back. Venezuela would not be the same.
And I'm not trying to say this would be a smart move by Maduro...just desperation. Right now, half the population in Venezuela don't even believe the government when they say there's an American fleet parked offshore. The government has been saying shit like that every other week for the last 12 years, and it always turns out to either be totally overblown, or straight up bullshit. People there just aren't buying into the propaganda like they used to. Which is never a good sign for a dictatorship that relies on fear mongering, in order to maintain loyalty.
Wouldn't be the 1st time a dictator with a weakening grip on power has instigated a war with another county, in order to try and solidify his domestic support. It's actually pretty textbook.
They're gonna do a false flag on Venezuela because they want to destroy a left-wing government. The fact that it will distract from the Epstein files is a positive side effect, but they are enacting an agenda beyond it.
Tu fais tes premiers pas chez Extinction Rebellion ? Cette formation à la DCNV (Désobéissance Civile Non-Violente) est une des formations de base chez XR, elle te permettra de comprendre de façon concrète comment XR met en oeuvre la non-violence dans ses actions, comment se passe une garde à vue, ou encore les techniques de blocage corporel, le déroulement d'une action, les risques juridiques, etc... Cette formation dure une journée, elle aura lieu à Nantes et mêle parties théoriques et parties pratiques (simulation d'action, etc...). Elle te permettra de te sentir plus à l'aise et préparé.e avant de partir en action !
🕐 La formation durera de 9h30 à 17h30 avec une pause déjeuner.
🪙 La formation est donnée à prix libre, pour permettre de couvrir certains frais de la journée et du groupe local d'Extinction Rebellion. Prévoyez du liquide ou utilisez notre cagnotte en ligne : opencollective.com/xrnantes
Le lieu vous sera communiqué par mail (centre de Nantes)
Le nombre de places est limité, vous serez prévenu par mail en cas de changement de programme.
That's a deep and insightful analysis which clearly illustrates why a prospective user might not want to choose SimpleX over other options. Very helpful indeed. Please post more takes like this.
Connecting to somebody new with a new pseudonym is completely possible by just tapping one switch in the share screen.
Plus, you don't need a phone number which does generally require at least some personally identifiable information to obtain
Do be aware though, your database is an incredibly important file. If you lose your database or lose the password to your database, you are completely screwed just as if you lost cryptocurrency. Those accounts are burned forever because you will never have the keys to generate those accounts again.
Someone I volunteer with sent me a Google Doc and I told them I couldn't see it without a Google account and they just couldn't wrap their head around why I did not have and would not be getting one. I gave them several alternatives where they could upload the document to share and they simply refused.
I also volunteered with another program with the local school district/city and they required to use Google Groups for communications. I sent them a list of 8+ alternatives but they just tried to guilt me into using Google instead.
This is exactly why I don't use it. I have a super tiny chance of getting somebody to message me on signal. I have zero chance of getting them to simplex.
I played with it briefly. It looks like a good choice for a situation where security is paramount and the people involved are reasonably motivated. I don't have those needs, and nobody I know has asked to connect with me using it.
Signal, on the other hand is a familiar experience for most people with no new concepts to learn, and popular enough that I think most people will find a number of contacts already using it.
I don't know that it is "tangibly better for privacy". Not saying it isn't, just that I don't know. It's definitely better for anonymity/pseudonymity. The main benefits, in my opinion, are:
No phone number needed for sign-up. Signal wants people to be able to easily find who is available to message on Signal, and they're leveraging the phone numbers in your personal contacts to build a private "social graph". This is actually really nice, but also can be a huge hurdle for a variety of reasons I won't go into, none of which are privacy, as others have repeatedly alleged, because there is nothing connected to your phone number, as Signal has demonstrated in their public subpoena responses.
SimpleX let's you have multiple profiles. For example, a work profile, a personal profile, a public/social profile, and an anonymous/pseudonymous profile. They also support business profiles. This is, in my opinion, a huge problem for Signal. Sometimes Signal is used to do things like organize protests. If that group is public, anyone can join and see exactly who you are, and you're essentially doxing yourself in that group. Really not ideal. In the case of something like Session, I can use Shelter to create a work profile and install a redundant copy of the app for another profile, but due to #1, this is not possible.
I also see orgs like EFF and 404 Media using Signal as a comms method. You can't message them either without doxxing yourself, unless you just erase/pseudonymize your profile, which would then just completely confuse your actual friends and family.
No one can message you that you have not invited to message you. Due to #1 (again) people can and do use Signal to send spam/scam messages. Now they could do so just using SMS, but my personal SMS app has spam filters, Signal does not.
If you want to create a public invitation, you can do so, and share it wherever you want. I share mine on my personal Linkstack site. If, in some hypothetical future, spammers/scammers start scraping the web for invitations, and that invitation gets collected and sold/shared, I can simply rotate it out with a new invitation, but, importantly, without losing any of the connections to people I've already messaged. You can do similar with Signal usernames, but only for the 1 profile, and you cannot stop people from messaging with your #. You can also set it in a group to disallow private messages to other members, which is a huge problem in places like Discord and Matrix.
This doesn't really matter so much today, as certainly the # of users are so small as to be a waste of time for any spammers, but it matters so much on a fundamental level, in a hypothetical future where it becomes widely adopted.
You can also create 1-time invitations so that you can be 100% sure that the person messaging you is the person you invited, as opposed to Signal's "safety number" approach.
They don't use Google/Apple notifications. This is both a pro and con. Ideally they would just support UnifiedPush but instead they run their own notification server. This hits your battery life, as well as causes problems with notifications. I often open the app and just watch it update messages for several seconds and then get a wave of notifications, but I also don't utilize the "always on" notification service. The fact that Signal just uses Google/Apple is appalling but you can get around it using the FOSS Molly app. To reiterate, there is no way to receive notifications in the Signal mobile app without going through Google/Apple's servers. It really chaps my ass to see supposed "private" apps that make no option available to circumvent the servers of tech oligopolies. I understand very few people would utilize this but I still think it's extremely important, and the fact that Molly devs actually provide this shows that it's entirely feasible. Google FCM notifications is the only remaining reason I absolutely need Google Play Services installed on my device, and it frustrates me to no end.
And it has been audited by an independent auditor. And it doesn't have user ID's. And you can have multiple accounts with no effort. And you can selfhost your own servers. And it's actively developed. And it's available on all major platforms. And the list of pros goes on.
I have to contend that the founders views don't align with my own (or with most people on lemmy). But that aside (freedom of speech), I wouldn't dismiss them simply because "VC bad". If you want a different perspective, read this.
I use it, although not with people who are new to encrypted messaging or who I really need to keep contact with.
SimpleX has great features for the separation of pseudonyms, which is part of why I think it's the best concept for an encrypted messaging app so far. But it's not only for-profit, but funded by venture capital. I don't think it's going to last for the long term, and if it does, it'll probably experience a similar enshitification that other services have. Supposedly they're going to profit by allowing businesses to pay for their service, but I doubt that they'll actually make much money from that.
Conceptually, it's a messaging app done right. Not haunted by legacy identifiers like phone numbers, can be run in a decentralized manner, and a more secure invite system.
In practice, it tends to burn through battery, and it's already hard enough getting people to use Signal. People also seem to have a hard time grasping the concepts of invites, or anything that's not a phone number for that matter.
I've stopped using it due to the battery issue and I don't want to fragment my communication strategy further. It ought to have a privacy advantage by virtue of not needing a phone number, but at the end of the day, my messages are also getting swept up on the other end by non-privacy-respecting phones.
fking gross. Why do these guys gargle Musk so much? Like dude, he's not your friend. He doesn't care about you. He doesn't know you exist. You are not his boyfriend.
I have it and used it in the past. It's better in privacy than Signal since it's decentralized and doesn't use any identifiers. Signal forces you to use the worst identifier ever: your phone number. It should be optional (as Threema) for easy contact discovery, not mandatory. Back to SimpleX, I stopped using it because every time you have to connect the computer to phone if you want to use it from computer (it's for maximum security, but inconvenient for me). But it's a great app.
We had a small group (under 50 people) that used it daily for several months as our primary means of communication after moving from Matrix. I think the privacy/anonymity features are sound, and the creator/lead dev seemed to be making the removal and prevention of CSAM on the platform a priority which is great.
We always had problems though. Users on iOS and Windows had regular problems with the chat losing track of where it was, images not loading, images getting stuck as your "last read" position, etc. Users on all platforms including Linux and Android would randomly lose the ability to see messages from others in rooms, fail to receive notifications, or upload images that only they could see. There's also a fair bit of feature disparity across platforms. While we were using it iOS lacked the ability to mark all messages in a room as read, meaning some people were stuck scrolling slowly through hundreds of messages a day or living with unread message counts in the thousands.
We ended up moving to XMPP. Maybe in the future when the platform is more evenly developed we'll give it another shot, but for now XMPP is working better for everyone across multiple platforms.
Gajim on PC (Linux) and Monocles on mobile (Android) are my favorites. Gajim is available on every desktop platform you mentioned. Monocles is a fork of conversations.im.
I don't actually have a recommendation for iOS as I don't use it. I know at least one person in our usual group does though, so I'm assuming there's a client on that side that doesn't suck?
I'm trying to move a friend groupchat away from discord and there are users on all those platforms.
Are you hosting your own server? How's it working with multi devices one one account (phone and desktop usually)? I've experimented with prosody a bit and it seemed like only one machine was able to receive message at one time, so the phone and computer quickly got out of sync.
Sorry for asking too many questions, it's hard to find these things easily.
We have a private Prosody server on a VPS. The device issue may have been a setting you needed to change on your clients. By default there's a built in delay when sending notifications to multiple devices, so whatever is seen as your active device will get the updates in real time and the others won't. I have all mine set to no delay and all the messages sync instantly on PC and phone, assuming the phone isn't doing any type of power or data saving that messes things up.
Neat idea, but in practice, it's only practical for a single small-ish group of motivated, technical users who wish to communicate internally to the group. When you luck out with such a situation, there are many options out there to choose from, including running a private chat server somewhere running something like XMPP, possibly over tor. It's well-trodden ground.
Signal has a completely different use case than the above. You can get a lot of regular people to switch from SMS or imessage to a Signal chat without too much cajoling, and sometimes just discover that contacts are already on it so you can start with that.
Why? This way it doesn't give you false expectations of privacy.
Of course it doesn't prevent the other side from running a modded client that doesn't delete, but at least it's obvious that disappearing messages are something that requires both sides to be on board
I was just telling people to read terms of service and people disliked my post. If they read it they would realize information like that but they are SIMPs so they just refuse to and say "oh iTz tOo hArdD to ReAd it"
The Signal crowd gets butthurt pretty quick lol. Have been downvoted before for prefering SimpleX over signal and trying to explain that its better in terms of privacy. They really are simps ahhahaha
I use it, and its pretty decent. Looks good and works.
Pros: -No user ID needed. -Can self host the server that passes on your messages. -Has the option to use Flux. -Works out of the box.
Cons: -Battery drain is a thing. Either toggle the periodic check, or turn it off and open it yourself to check messages. -Using one account accross multiple devices can be a pain. Since u can't keep using your phone account at the same time as it is connected to your pc. Can be circumvented by having mutiple accounts in the same group chat; but yea it's a pain the ass.
Neutral: -Convincing people to use it hahahh. But this is a universal probem vs mainstream messenger apps.
Final verdict: 4/5. Very good if privacy and anonymity is your number 1 priority. It's less of hassle to set up than some other options, and relatively easy to get people into it. Sent invite, they download the app, make profile and are good to go.
Batterydrain and same use account across multiple devices could and should be better for mainstream adoption. On the other hand if u toggle the periodic checks then I find the drain tolerable. And how many of us are in places that don't have a wallsocket available to charge your phone 😛
Countries are falling short on reducing emissions, but British data scientist Hannah Ritchie looks at the numbers and sees the world making real gains on climate change. In an interview, she talks about the unheralded progress she sees in the global shift to clean energy.
France’s political crisis has deepened after the new prime minister dramatically resigned within hours of appointing a government.
Sébastien Lecornu was the third French prime minister in a year, as the country continued to lurch from one political crisis to another. He quit hours before his first cabinet meeting on Monday afternoon. Macron accepted Lecornu’s resignation on Monday morning.
Lecornu then made what he called a “spontaneous” speech on the steps of the prime minister’s residence in Paris. He appeared to place the blame on opposition political parties in France, who he said had not wanted to compromise.
On an unrelated topic I found a comment in a YouTube video about Sonichu Medaillion being cursed. It peaked my interest. Truly cursed. Then I found a shop selling these and scrolled down, and it recommended me more curse.
I don't know what else to say, other than the recommendation was right.
Department of Homeland Security agents were seen abandoning one attempt to arrest a man in Chicago over the weekend after being outnumbered by protesters.
a federal judge has temporarily blocked the Trump administration from deploying any national guard units to Oregon a few hours after the California governor, Gavin Newsom, announced he would sue the president over the planned deployment of his state’s troops.
Both states sought the temporary restraining order after the president sent guard members from California to Oregon earlier in the day. On Saturday, the same judge temporarily blocked the administration from deploying Oregon’s national guard troops to Portland.
The ruling by US District Judge Karin Immergut said there was no evidence that recent protests necessitated the presence of national guard troops, no matter where they came from.
Good! I'm MUCH happier paying WHATEVER PRICE OIL EXECUTIVES WANT ME TO PAY for Energy then being able to LITERALLY make my Own Energy in my backyard for FREE after installation!
This is so incredibly short-sighted. Support for solar energy really should be a Republican priority too - it's business, it's industry, it's making money. China, India, the entire continent of Africa, are all going solar. The United States could be a world leader in this trillion-dollar industry - hell, there's a national security argument that we need American scientists and workers to support the American solar industry.
Never mind the climate issue for now. Walking away from solar leaves billions on the table that other countries are going to snap up. Republicans love subsidizing industry. This is a braindead bipartisan opportunity.
But little Donnie hates solar energy personally, threw a tantrum about it, and no one in the 80-year-old boy king's court dares to disagree with him.
I think there's also a double whammy of solar/wind being a 'liberal' energy, so any damage done to it will get browny points with the idiots who see it as successfully 'owning the libs', alongside the oil/gas industry bribing them to stifle it as well.
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