“Wing” is not the term to use. Liberals sat on the left side of parliament, literally the left wing of a hall, so it’s accurate and quite literal to call them “left wing”. What isn’t accurate is calling them leftist, as in socialist, and I think that’s the term everyone is actually talking about? Everyone is talking past each other here cause of the wing thing.

Vivaldi is Chromium, which I avoid because I consider it an advertising corporation’s attempt to erode open web standards.

Still better than the Chrome-alikes, but all the same I’ve switched to Librewolf. Problem is, foss mozilla teams like Librewolf are small and underfunded, and their ability to continue sanitizing and debloating the app forever is not garaunteed. A new vanguard FOSS browser project is needed, ideally one that continues the Netscape lineage of open and non-coercive web standards with a more durable and democratic organizational structure.

LLMs are fly honey for stupid people.

OP if you’re gonna post a paywalled article, can you at least copy the full text of it into the thread? Most of us cannot read more than two paragraphs of this piece, ensuring that most participants here are talking around the headline only.

I’ve lived here my whole 40 years and can verify that while a significant chunk of our voting class (Because it very much is a class thing) are sheltered enough from consequence that they are either still satisfied with status quo or their disaffection leads them only to encourage debasement, the class living a tenuous and effectively disenfranchised existence is much larger. Did you know that despite our last presidential election having the largest turnout in US history, less than half of citizens and barely more than half of eligible voted participated? Whether disenfranchisement or apathy, neither of those reasons generate from nothing.

But my point above was not that it’s incorrect to point the blame squarely at US voted for their government’s decline (Even though I would probably argue, in a separate debate, that it is), my point is that it’s entirely the wrong tree to be barking up when trying to figure out how to put America back on “The right track”. Thinking that we can just yell at Americans until they vote progressive is to deeply misunderstand the nature of power. Asking why Americans are so disaffected, apathetic, or disenfranchised that they don’t participate in politics is perhaps a good first question, instead.

I don’t think you’re really addressing what I wrote. I’m not saying it’s untrue in a strict sense. I’m saying it’s a disingenuous point. A misleading framing. An uncritical, not entirely applicable, and wholly unhelpful approach to our political issues.

Kinda? Most Americans are extremely low-information on politics, and never proactively educated as to how to find that information or sometimes even why it matters. We are the most propagandized population on Earth, our country has little to no standards for factual information in media and several of our major outlets are just pure corporate spin, while all of our major newspapers are owned by oligarchs. Demographic fact is gerrymandered out of our districts, our default voting method creates perverse incentives to elect popularity over platform and locks third parties out of viability. Individual jurisdictions decide how voting is accomplished and more often than not use this power to make it difficult to do so instead of easier. There is almost no enforcement of laws requiring leave from work to vote. There is next to no oversight of our physical voting machines and little trust in tabulation, while parties can and often do purge voter roles between elections without informing those who they nullified. Ultimately most people didn’t vote for this because quite frankly most people don’t or can’t vote for one of the reasons above, something that I missed, or a tragic apathy created by said trainwreck of conditions.

Saying “The people voted for this” sounds logical but the reality on the ground makes the statement wholly disingenuous. At the very least it’s not a statement that can be built off of for a more productive outcome, in fact it functions as a thought-terminating cliche and provides cover for a class of power who continuously work to keep this set of circumstances cemented in place.

Why? Little corporations must comply with KYC law, too. They’re all required to gather personal data.

Movim looks very promising and I haven’t heard of it before, thanks for highlighting it. My group has been working to stand up a few Prosody (XMPP) servers but as far as client side the best we could identify was Gajim. This looks better.

Decentralize and federate or die.

I can hold out on not buying a new car a hell of a lot longer than the American economy can survive under a tariff regime.

The reason we can get away with non-military violence is because we have ultimate recourse to military violence. Think, how did we destabilize that home region before selling them weapons? How did we deprive an entire region of food to the point that they have to buy it from us? This all ties back to our reliance on overwhelming force.

IMO you’re right about most of that but you do realize that most of them distill down to “violence with extra steps”.

Not really, domestic consumerism is significant but it isn’t anywhere near enough to bring US currency to world reserve status. American treasury bonds are the safe and steady investment of choice for institutions and sovereigns all over the world, and they’re safe and steady because the US military will force it’s way through any obstacle to US hegemony. That’s the real dollar engine and it really does come back to violence (Like everything in capitalism).

And my monthly power bill has tripled to subsidize them. I’m paying for several new PCs for someone whether I like it or not.

And after 26+ years of friendship, my buddy chose this month to be the month where he finally hunkered down and built his first PC. Of all the times to build a budget parts list for a friend…

Nick Merrill! This guy is awesome! I met him a few times back around 2014 when I sold him a bunch of old Dell server racks, presumably for use by his organization Calyx. This was a few years after his case against the FBI ended and he was able to talk freely about it. I’d been following the case previously so it was like meeting a personal hero, even though we were just manually humping Dell pizza boxes into his van. Legit guy, really cares.

You need to read the article. It explicitly and IMO satisfactorily answers your excellent questions.

It’s an atrocious system, innocent people get killed every year over it.