These mid-half money breaks are truly terrible. But they are so very American.

Send an email to their webmaster if you haven’t already. The more of us, the better.

Not in context. Take a single look at that Clive Palmer guy.

given that we could be producing it at home at-cost in quantities large enough to saturate the population for next to nothing

I say this out of complete ignorance: what’s stopping people? Regulation laws? Cost of initial equipment?

It wildly depends on the articles/topic, but yes, it’s generally not trustworthy. Especially anything politics or corporate, but sometimes articles on objective topics can have issues.

Adblockers have been mentioned a hundred times, as they should.

Annual reminder to donate to Invidious too. YouTube has done some serious work to try and block most of the instances.

Somewhat relevant are the Subvertisers for London (as well as similar groups all over the world):

Another word for “marketing” or “advertisement” is Manipulation.

Don’t worry they’ve solved that, it’s called 🩷 𝐼𝓃𝒻𝓁𝓊𝑒𝓃𝒸𝒾𝓃𝑔 😎. That’s much less ominous! They just influence!

I’ve willingly learned Calc (LibreOffice’s open-source spreadsheet tool) because I’ve made spreadsheets for my own needs. But to “become employable”? No way.

Our cogs do not feel amplified.

private as possible

What are you trying to hide, and who are you hiding it from?

I dislike that some privacy forums, like reddit and therefore here by proxy, have a cultural habit of talking about privacy or security as an abstract value in itself. But when we start getting into more detailed questions, it’s all vague and vibes until we make it clear who we’re trying to hide from and what we’re hiding.

For example, most of the time I’m not hiding from my own government. Sure, I incidentally do make it a bit harder for them to track me, but I’m more focused on hiding from Meta/Alphabet/Amazon/etc. (plus from a small group of deranged online stalkers obsessed with some of my friends) so there are plenty of online services and stores I can buy from without taking inconvenient measures. It’s fine for me if some services can guess my name and know where I live and one of my phone numbers. It’s not fine if they learn some other details.

It’s important to get out of the habit of saying “more private”, “less private”, “most secure”, and talk about what you’re specifically concerned with and how tactics and tools specifically address that. What information will Google gain from knowing your investments? Is that a threat to you? Are there acceptable ways to mitigate that threat?

Using google to create an account would mean giving them my real data

I’ve been surprised how easy it was for me to make a fake Google account with no links to my real identity. I only use it for age-restricted YouTube videos, I wouldn’t trust it with money like investments, because the way I set it up is inherently suspicious and I wouldn’t be able to verify identity if challenged.

Redlib is an alternate frontend to reddit.com.

I can’t find “Ramble” so I’m guessing they might mean Raddle, which is a reddit-like website of its own, similar to Lemmy (without federation)

Obligatory viewing for the people talking about left-center-right.

But yeah, look, the title uses US mass media terminology, which is thoroughly ridiculous to any political scientist or historian (‘liberal’ instead of progressive, ‘libertarian’ instead of liberal, ‘socialist’ instead of social capitalist, oh my!). And it’s melodramatic. But there’s little point in circlejerking over it and demanding a US general-audience news outlet actually use the language we expect, it’s a written piece with a target audience and it’s not you.

The Mamdami supporters need to understand what tools their enemies have at their disposal, and learn about what challenges democratic socialists like Salvador Allende and the working people faced from capitalist reactionaries (before Allende was shot). Voting in a candidate is the easy part, the citizens of NY must continue to involve themselves in how their society is run and do their part in defending social and economic reform from its reactionary opposition.

Project 2025 already shutdown huge chunks of the government, I’m surprised this is concerning them.

That’s not dehumanization.

Nazis are humans. They still need to be removed from society, even if that means killing them like we had to back in the '40s.

I agree that the rhetorical technique is smart and one we should learn about.

Although I think there’s a false equivalence there within the mainstream US context, because red scare propaganda wholeheartedly declares Venezuela and Cuba to be undemocratic dictatorships, while Bolsonaro and Melei bare resemblance to Trump themselves by being (seen as) the rightward tip of mainstream electoralism, a little extreme but still still capitalist #democracies.

Sanders has infamously praised Castro and Cuba a few times, I wasn’t really paying attention so I don’t know how well this was received by the Democrat audience. I remember it was a headline controversy back in 2020, but it certainly didn’t ruin Sanders.

As for attacking their enemies… one would have to be very careful attacking America to an audience of mainstream Americans. It’s possible to (in bad faith) frame it as criticizing specific governments (Bush, Trump) instead of imperialism, or even possibly framing it as a problem with capitalism, but given their target audience that’s a tough leap to make in one go - remember that these leaders are seen by most as “authoritarian dictators” and it’s not easy to unravel that much propaganda in a couple of speeches. I don’t know how effective it would be to attack those leaders’ domestic enemies or historical predecessors (see yellow Parenti snippet on Cuba).

You’re right, dodging the question would have been much smarter. I haven’t seen the context but I doubt there’s any need for the mayor of New York to declare a position on these two leaders, and Mamdami has already famously dodged the Zionist Regime visit question in the primaries debate.

I am a communist. The liberal electoral system is systemically rigged towards the bourgeoisie and it would be ridiculous to approach it in good faith.

If your middle of the road beliefs were correct, he wouldn’t have won the primary.

What do you mean? Mamdami’s primary platform didn’t depart from capitalism as far as I saw. Furthermore, the primary has a different voting audience and calls for different tactics (even if using the same strategy) to improve chances of winning that popularity contest.

Even if Mamdami didn’t believe that, it would still be the smart thing to say. Elections are a popularity competition, there’s no prize for saying the truth; just ask a climate scientist. The point is to change things.

It’s important to get out of the liberalist mindset of thinking electoralism (here and now) should be about honestly stating every policy and correct position. We don’t live in a marketplace of ideas where simply being correct is worth anything. If the bulk of the population isn’t on board with socialism, then an election seat is either useful for milquetoast mild reform or for propaganda platforming (e.g. Sanders making “socialism” a more approachable idea despite Sanders clearly contradicting socialism in many other statements).