Why are Americans so focused on left vs right? Both parties are fascists they’re just trying to take away different rights for the time being.
The Left think they’re morally superior… Prepare to be downvoted to oblivion kek
Meanwhile, me a Libertarian Socialist laughs at both sides for being totalitarian in their own way.
One of them lies about it while virtue signalling empty promises and the other says “what are you gonna do about it, huh? Yeah, that’s what I thought”
Well the left wants to treat people as people and the right want to treat immigrants, trans and women as garbage. Pretty sure that makes us a bit more moral.
Oh really. Why has Biden sent funds and bombs to Israel? Treating people real well there with genocide. Fucking joke.
2A right to privacy right to freedom of association
Keep in mind when I say left I mean the Democrats
I know you mean democrats, but that would be incorrect about the second amendment and freedom of association.
Where’d you read that?
Yeah the good guys are the centrists who want to continue the status quo: grind the poor people, make them pay fortunes for basic needs while making the rich richer.
Oh right you are talking about the Dem vs Rep and not left vs right. I totally misunderstood you.
I’m so fed up with enlightened centrists that I judged you wrongly. My bad.
Bear in mind that the US’ main parties do not define the extent of Left and Right.
I thought the left was the ones who cared, and the right was all like “If you dont have anything to hide you shouldnt be worried” bootlickers.
If you didn’t realize the importance of privacy after the patriot act and seeing the continuation of right wing authoritarianism, it’s definitely time to get on board asap. Get yourself and your community on signal instead of texts and tuta or proton instead of regular email, use a vpn (mullvad or proton are solid), and depending on what kinds of actions you may or may not be interested in, learn how to use tails os and tor (try to find a copy of the darknetmarket bible for a good intro)
Edit: simplex is a good alternative to signal too, and if you have a google pixel, grapheneos is solid. Next time you’re getting a new phone, get a used pixel and install it. On your computer, there’s a lot of telemetry and sketchy stuff windows does, either research and disable that or switch to linux if you can
patriot act and seeing the continuation of right wing authoritarianism
The Patriot Act was an overwhelmingly bipartisan bill.
Please don’t use Signal, the US government has all the keys. Self host XMPP, Matrix and SimpleX servers and make sure encryption is properly configured. If you’re not generating your encryption keys, why should you use them?
Source? And fyi, if you use Signal you are generating your own encryption keys. Your private keys are generated on your phone and stay on it. So what gives you the idea that
the US government has all the keys
?? Sounds a lot like a conspiracy theory
I don’t think Signal is unsafe, but agree that it is a weird middle ground. Depends on threat model, of course, but overall I would prefer something selfhostable - for the sake of independence, easier anonymity and censorship resistance. Plus, Signal by default doesn’t allow desktop registration (and desktops are much easier to make private than phones), so you’d need either a VM or a command-line application for it, which is a big pet peeve of mine.
Agreed. That’s a really bold claim to make without citing (credible) sources
I don’t want Authoritarianism period I don’t care if it is left or right. Specific political beliefs are a distraction
Fair, but at least in the US right wing auth is a much more direct and realistic threat to people and their privacy, although left auth is bad too
@iiGxC@slrpnk.net don’t forget the CL:OUD Act either - that has serious privacy implications for countries outside the USA
the left is/will suffer more of the consequences
In an ideal (post-scarcity communist) society, we should be able to be completely libertine without judgement from society or from government systems (so long as we’re not causing harm). But as with the rest of this ideal we don’t know if we can actually get there.
I have an ancient (2016) paper about potential joys of full disclosure (on Wordpress, if you’re interested) that portends the enshittification of Google. But it points out Google’s original business model, which was to have an enormous body of data that no human being got to look at directly (except their proper owners), and in the meantime the computers would report on observable trends and correlations.
In the end, it got messed up by the usual suspects: Advertising interests pressured Google to reveal more and more. Technicians abused their positions of power to stalk. The police state forced Google to fulfill reverse warrants and list all people near the scene of a crime, making them all suspects. Or to completely reveal all the data of a given suspect, which poisoned the whole idea of your own safe private place to track contacts, dates, travel, etc.
As it is, we need privacy specifically because of all those interests that would want to link our data to us. All the reasons for commercial or state interests to have our data are causes for them to not have our data.
I’m pretty sure Communism is definitely not an option. I don’t want to starve or die today.
A big part of communism is about who owns the means of production. One way to alter this aspect of society is through cooperative economics. A state-less form of socialism (edit: democratically controlled) that’s already proven effective in small pockets of our own country (assuming US here) and around the world. One common example is Mondragon in Spain, a cooperative business and the seventh largest company in the country, that has proven its even possible for the cooperative model to reach levels of scale capable of competing in a private capitalist world.
Cooperatives are cool, but unfortunately Markets lead to class contradictions even with cooperatives in place, which is why the goal still needs to be full Socialism.
Always cracks me up to see people who champion open source alternatives hate on communism.
They are not related
You can tell yourself that but communism is very different from libre software
There’s an argument to make that digital data is by default a post-scarcity sort of thing and that in a post-scarcity environment communism is the only reasonable system. But we don’t operate in a post scarcity environment for physical goods and services, and there’s really not anything we can point to historically that suggests a communist takeover doesn’t do terrible things to availability, quality and variety of food available.
Its funny that people dying of starvation, in the USSR, is seen as a crime of communism but the exact same people will refuse to accept, by their own “logic”, that would make the rest of ALL the starvation in the world a crime of capitalism.
How do you even start to deconstruct that kind of indoctrination?
Communism is a far-off ideal, and we don’t yet fully know how it would work, or how we’d get there, but people starving or dying would be a sign that it wasn’t working.
You might be thinking of USSR, which sought to create a communist state, but was subject to internal corruption and outside threats (not to mention, Wilson sought a pact with the European states – some of which were still monarchist – to sanction trade with USSR, so it was at a considerable disadvantage from the get go.
But while USSR was going through its growing pains, the rest of us were going through the great depression, and those of us living in cardboard boxes and stacks of paint cans were wondering if Lenin had a point, the industrialists boozing and gambling with Hoover were admiring the Austrian fellow. Eventually those industrialists decided they need to create a propaganda package and teach it in our schools.
Huh. I can’t post images anymore. I wonder if it’s a browser problem or a Lemmy problem.
Communism is a far-off ideal, and we don’t yet fully know how it would work, or how we’d get there, but people starving or dying would be a sign that it wasn’t working.
I don’t see how Communism can be built without actively building it through Socialism, so that bit’s pretty much solved, and the rest can be figured out by Socialist societies.
