I’ve assumed for years now that they had at least some access to it but him getting arrested (batshit insane btw) might show they didn’t or didn’t get what they wanted anyway.

I just figured all those “we got inside info on this right wing plan of attack from a telegram leak” news stories were “the FBI gave us this and told us to say it wasn’t from us.” Apple/Google engage in similar obfuscation of what access the feds have. With Google, well, just assume “all.” With Apple it’s probably also “all” but they insist that isn’t the case. It seeks almost certain though they do quietly cooperate with feds to help unlock devices and then feds just cite some technology without mentioning Apple’s probable role in creating it.

Shit sucks, the NSA (among many) should’ve never been allowed to exist. It’s all getting worse too. 20 years ago an arrest like this (transport back the general idea “some guy makes a program people used for naughty naughty”) would be a headline for maybe a month at least. It would be discussed for sure and hogs and dipshit ghouls would defend it and nothing done about it. Now it’s just “oh? Russia? Huh. Oh. Ok. Yes, m’lord…”

Seems like shit!

I like what the ublock origin creators/devs have to say about ads/adblocking

It is important to note that using a blocker is NOT theft. Do not fall for this creepy idea. The ultimate logical consequence of blocking = theft is the criminalization of the inalienable right to privacy.

Ads, “unintrusive” or not, are just the visible portion of the privacy-invading means entering your browser when you visit most sites. uBO’s primary goal is to help users neutralize these privacy-invading methodsin a way that welcomes those users who do not wish to use more technical means.

From their Github

Doing monthly (or more frequent) inventory of the store will “check” the cashiers, as every store has to do. When employees go through and get a total accounting of items actually on hand vs what the system says. Well, it tells the entire story not just on cashiers. How well the stockers kept track of damaged/expired items, theft, cashier mess ups, etc.

I worked grocery, all departments, including receiving when I was younger and had to do inventory all the time. Of course it relies on the employee not being lazy (👀) and actually, you know, doing inventory. Usually the managers waddled their asses over if they wanted “real” inventory done because tbh I spent about an hour actually counting shit and then went and took a nap in the bathroom (had a bench for changing clothes) and just marked everything as matching. Something something pay minimum wage, get minimum work.

Them stopping customers has to be for lowering shrink from theft, but that shit is already negligible anyway. Smart management knows that it’s already baked into the profit margin for the store and harassing people, treating everyone as a thief, will just drive away regular customers. If I get continually hassled somewhere and my time wasted there’s no way I’m gonna keep going there. Even if they manage to catch a bunch of people stealing stuff it just kind of… doesn’t matter.

This is another one of those cases of individuals not understanding statistics and profit margins, etc. You see chuds crying all the time about “but you can’t just steal the chicken! Price go up!” and they seriously can’t comprehend that, as someone who worked in the store(s), they throw away more food (from damage or spoilage) constantly than hungry people could ever realistically try to steal. Like, yeah, there’s a threshold and if literally every shopper is stealing then sure the system breaks. But most people don’t. The people who do, overwhelmingly, are doing so because they have little other choice. It’s just incredibly stupid that managers and especially random employees or (the worst) random customers try to give a shit about theft like this. I’ve had more than a few times where I was working on something and some old guy comes up like “hey. I think that guy over there put something in his pocket.” And I’m just like “ok.” And go back to whatever. I mean wtf do they expect? Should I immediately man the store’s .50 cal turret and blow away the college kid or poor single mom who stuffed a steak in their jacket pocket? I’ve seen entire cases of chicken and other meats being crushed in the waste compactor week after week. That steak doesn’t matter.

Hilarious it only took 5 days for public sentiment to turn against these morons.

I wonder if they’ll ever quietly come and federate again (unlikely)

“Hate speech”

Israel is an illegal, illegitimate, settler-colonial project built upon genocide of indigenous Palestinians, the continued oppression of Palestinians, land theft, and really too much else to put into words.

Oh no, I did a hate speech!

Fucking losers and baby-brain morons over there who should’ve stayed on their hugbox website. Nothing I said there is glorifying the murder of literally anyone, but if you want to know why anyone got murdered, it’s very simple: lock people in a giant prison, starve them, bomb them, shoot them, deprive them of every necessity of life, and treat them as less than animals… and eventually they will say “fuck it. I’m going to die here anyway. I will make my oppressors feel a sliver of the pain I’ve felt.” And there you have it. Pretending or lying or focusing on recent small-in-comparison deaths of Israelis is just further attempts to dehumanize and justify genocide of Palestinians.

Mourning is absolutely fine. But when your “mourning” becomes “these animals did this!” That’s no longer ok or fine. You don’t get to blame the oppressed for fighting for freedom or for fighting to just make the oppressors feel bad. I know people get assmad over this fact, but the fact is, every person living in “Israel” is oppressing the people in Gaza (specifically, and elsewhere too). That makes them not “civilians” anymore than Germans feeding the Nazi forces were civilians. You can argue laws and morality all day long, but when it comes down to it, they all participated in it to some degree even by remaining in Israel when other options were available. Too many people want to play the “but my grandparents came here” card, which I understand to a degree. They didn’t ask to be born there, etc. But it is their responsibility to end the ongoing genocide, and if they don’t act to end it, these recent actions by Hamas showed the consequences of inaction. And if they genocide more, there’s only going to be more Israeli deaths. If the people truly value life on both sides or even just their own lives/families, then end the fucking apartheid state, reform Palestine and dissolve Israel. Admit that what was done there was an atrocity and reparations are due. None of this is saying “kill the Israeli Jews!” as those morons on reddit and world would claim. My solution, the one Palestinians and Arabs and many others worldwide want, is the one that leads to actual equitable peace, no more wars. Standing against ending apartheid, saying “they have a right to be mad” about Israelis, etc. is all in the opposite direction. No, I’m sorry, they do NOT have a right to be mad on a state level. Individually? Ok. Who cares. This isn’t about individuals being pissed off their baby died. This is about preventing anymore babies from dying and if you’re a sick piece of shit that thinks 1000 Israelis dying justifies bombing Gaza into nothing. Well, I can’t say, or shouldn’t say what should happen to people who say that.

I don’t like using the term clickbait if it’s not egregiously done, but, whatever you wanna call it, this article title definitely did that a bit of over selling in the title.

Spoiler: another article pointing out some legitimate and some “meh” concerns over AI and what it means for the future. I don’t personally think this is much to be overly worried about, but, hey, who knows.

One interesting thing in the middle mentions the EU apparently working on laws to limit AI “globally.” I think we all understand the EU is certainly powerful, but if you don’t have agreements with the US/Canada and China as well, then it doesn’t really matter what Europe says.

And the interesting part for me isn’t so much them all agreeing on restrictions, but more so why they almost definitely won’t agree. I’m considering what insane shit the EU (and US if it gets to that stage of discussion) is gonna cram in that obviously strays from AI-land over into what specific talking point liberals are raging about at the moment of the discussions. I just can’t see a world where they write any honest agreement that isn’t meant to somehow fuck China harder than everyone else which China will rightfully say they won’t sign and then blaming whatever fallout is to come from AI on China. Obviously I’d hope to be proven wrong, but, I don’t see any other outcomes in the near future where the west is just gonna flail all over the place trying to stop the inevitable continuation of Chinese dominance.

Wow, you have to have it chewed up and spit in your mouth like a baby bird?

I don’t need further analysis or thinking. Whatever the CIA says might as well be appended to the glorious holy Bible and thus passes from CIA directly into my consciousness with zero resistance, zero errors, always present and fully accepted directly above my own consciousness.

I’m fully jacked-in, assimilated, one of them.

The CIA is truth. Their words are my memories.

True freedom is never worrying that you’ve been lied to because you already know the truth.

I am free.

I think he’s just incredibly stupid. When trying to figure out someone’s actions just consider what motivates them. Elon desperately wants people to adore him. He probably really thought he could buy a giant media-adjacent outlet and turn it into a machine to churn out pro-him propaganda. Obviously he misunderstood many variables though, the first of which being that unlike a newspaper or TV network, the owner of Twitter doesn’t create or really control the content created and put out. I mean, he can and does censor certain stuff now, and Twitter always has but in the past it did lean more towards banning Nazi shit which was better. But in general, people are gonna do what they and no matter how much he boosts his dedicated blue psychos it can’t overcome the that right wing shit just isn’t popular outside of a small subset of the people. You can’t make an entire website dedicated to advocating for the deaths of transkids and expect it to be popular. He bought into the BS hype around the right wing in general. They mistake rigging “democratic elections” (gerrymandering, voter suppression, etc.) as proof of their popularity. No, it just proves they can rig shit and people are ignorant and/or apathetic. Polling proves repeatedly that even burger munching Americans are pro-socialist type programs when not poisoned with the word itself (poisoned due to a life of indoctrination to get a knee jerk NO if they hear it).

I think this is correct.

Also, it’s incredibly ironic because him and all those weirdos like him. The altright, or whatever the fuck they are, “freedom of speech brother!” “Socialism is slavery!” “Crypto will free us!” “Covid was a Chinese hoax!” types of dipshits. They’re like the far right version of what they imagine “woke” liberals to be. I’m not drawing equivalency in the ideologies (obviously), just pointing out that they are, literally, the overly performative, loud, obnoxious virtue signaling people they imagine “woke liberals” to be and mock constantly. Almost like… they’re projecting. Hmm.

And there’s another saying amongst the right wingers… “go woke, go broke.” Welp. It turns out they were their own snake eating their own ass on that one. They smoked too of their own stash. Drank their own Koolaid. Shot themselves in the fucking head.

I was using Heimdall and it was having some weird corruption(?) issues. Switched to homarr when I saw it the other day and it’s great. It has small icons (for phones) medium (for like tablets) and large (for desktops/laptops) all can be changed independently so you can optimize for mobile and desktop usage. Très bien

I think it’s just the ease of GUI for people. This isn’t to shit on anyone, btw. A lot of people don’t like dealing with the keys and IPs involved, few as there may be, with setting up wireguard.

If someone else has a compelling difference or reason to use tailscale then I’d be happy to hear it. I tried it once and it worked fine enough. But wireguard works just as fine and takes the same time to setup if you already know what to do. Like wireguard seriously takes 2 minutes.

You seem to think minds are being changed in twitter comment sections or even on here. I think we should all know by now that’s not the case.

Besides that, anecdotally of course but whatever, before I started taking Marxism seriously and reading more I got yelled at by I can’t even estimate how many people who were a mixture of MLs, anarkiddies, whatever else. Some clown being mean to me, justified or not, had exactly zero impact on my willingness to learn more when the time came. If I’m being honest, my upbringing in the heart of capitalism had already put blinders on to Marxist ideas. They were simply wrong and anyone who believed in them was crazy/evil/stupid, take your pick. It’s not like some guy calling me a lib could lower the bar of consideration below zero, if that makes sense.

Anyway, the only way people are reliably going to come to embrace Marxist critiques of capitalism is if they find it when in a state of mind where they’re already receptive to it. If their material conditions are shit or becoming shit they’re going to be desperately seeking out the reason… I mean I wish I could say we all could help guide these desperate people to the light, but I just do not think that’s true. Sure, post an explanation when something happens that kind of boggles liberals’ brains. Maybe even post when the hogs are especially riled up over something. But overall it’s not going to penetrate deep enough.

Which of course goes to my last point which ties to your first thing. There isn’t just poor discussion from those of us who consider ourselves to be MLs and live in the imperial core… there is NO discussion because there is no real significant amount of us. I don’t think I’d even say 1% of the US have read and understand Capital. Or any other writings for that matter. It’s probably an insanely small amount. Which IS a problem because if you don’t have people who understand the ideology to teach those who won’t go learn on their own (not online, but in settings such as union meetings which is one of the reasons I do advocate for unionization even in the imperial core) then how the hell will you ever have a revolution much less one favorable to principles we’d like to see? You don’t, basically.

On the hand, and this gets a bit doomer/pessimistic so brace yourself, there will no socialist revolution within the imperial core. Not likely in our lifetimes. The way things are, and the way ideologies work, even if material conditions continue to plummet, and who the hell would expect otherwise?, people will become more and more radicalized… towards fascism. I wish it weren’t true, but the US state has all but assured it will happen either on purpose or by completely moronic and evil policies. Thry wiped out any even slightly leftist movements in the country repeatedly and barely or never touched the right wing. Add to that that fascism has no like real driving ideology or core principles. It can be molded to fit the individual racism and hatred of any given person or group. Socialism, done correctly, does require a base level of acceptance of certain principles. A politically uneducated mass of people with falling material conditions… what else is there to expect?

I know this probably comes off as inconsistent or schizophrenic. It does in my mind too. We’re simultaneously faced with the reality that we probably can’t really affect anything, but we must do something. So what do you do? Post nice essays on Twitter? I dunno, maybe. I’d say just about the only really consequential thing to be done is what I said earlier. Try to form or join a union for a profession you work in and find those workers who seem to share your mindset and see where they are in their political educational journey. Maybe you journey together further, I dunno. You could probably do this in other ways too just in the real life local community. The key though to this entire thing is the people you seek to educate in order to “convert” them have to trust you and not just like some sociopath shit where you manipulate them into it. But real, actual trust that you build through genuinely discussing things, helping people, whatever. Sounds like a lot of work. I know. It is. Way more than posting nicely online, for sure. But if you want to be doing something, short of going off and John Browning some shit or offing yourself (can’t recommend either of these), I don’t really know what else there is to be done. We’re just in a weird wait and see period of history right now it appears. The decline of the US and the western EU could take another century, who knows. I dunno. I’d just spend less time worrying about random libbed up, probably a Nazi dude on reddit being butthurt and more time worrying about focusing your power and energy where it can affect change and accepting that your power to do anything is damn near zero. Some people call that being a doomer. I’d call it being realistic.

Of course this is only one man’s opinion…

When I hear red fascist I just think either it’s someone generally on the left, probably an ML, who pissed off an anarchist (man they love screaming tankie and red fash) or they mean to just describe a fascist. Insert whichever flavor you want.

Someone understanding or being conscious of exploitation under capitalism doesn’t mean shit, really. Bezos, I’m absolutely sure, knows he exploits his workers. But he still does it. American libertarians, who are all right wingers without a single exception that I’ve ever seen, also understand to a degree exploitation, coercion, etc. But they still actively advocate for a system that despite what they say would lead to an even MORE exploitative world (basically legalizing slavery because people would “choose” it. Ironically all of them would also be dead or enslaved immediately).

Anyway, that was just an aside. It sounds like the person you spoke to is probably, to be as nice as a I can, someone who hasn’t thought things out fully. They hold onto some reactionary tendencies as many people do and haven’t resolved them yet. Religion is perfectly fine. I know a lot of atheists (which I consider myself although I do not use the word because it’s been tainted horribly by the debate bros) become essentially anti-thiests. Which, I’d say, is probably reactionary. It might be better than being an over the top gay-hating super theistic person, but it’s not good either. There’s absolutely a middle ground. Religion helps people through too much stuff to even go into. If the reactionary elements are removed, and presumably under a socialistic government people would have less inherent trending towards reactionary ideologies in the first place, then it really doesn’t matter. Divorced of the hatred which people incorrectly inject into religion, it can really be a positive thing for communities and the world. Just don’t force people into it nor force them to give it up.

Sex work stuff, in this person’s case, seems tied to their religious beliefs just based on how you outlined it. I’d say that’s “not good.” I think prostitution is pretty clearly a result of failures in society. Throughout history it’s typically been the last resort of the most desperate people, mostly girls and women. Obviously the way the US and a lot of the world goes about resolving the issue ie punishing the prostitutes is counter productive and cruel. If they really want less of this type of misery they should better the conditions of the populations that the sex workers come from. That’s a solution, however, capitalists and liberal democracies seem to find impossible to enact. It’s easier to condemn the people, throw them in a hole, and move on. It’s generally the only response capitalism really has for anything deemed “immoral” such as drug usage/abuse.

To avoid typing a fucking three part volume here, I’ll just end with the suggestion that under a socialist economic order all needs would provided to all people. Girls wouldn’t be forced to sell themselves into effectively sexual slavery to eat. The men who use these services would be diminished as well as more stable livelihoods, guaranteed basics being met, more leisure time would result in time to interact with humans, form those strong bonds that often result in marriages and such. It starts sounding utopian or whatever, but really, you remove the sword over everyone’s head and the world does become utopian. People will dare to dream of the future as a bright place and suddenly a lot of the issues of society that people moralize about and use religion as an excuse to condemn individuals for start disappearing.

And just a little bit on consent and exploitation: there’s varying degrees to these things. Everyone who works under capitalism ie the laborers not the owners is being exploited and is exploited via coercion. How is there consent when coercion exists? Maybe it’s not an absolute “with coercion there can be no consent” but certainly there’s, at the least, a strong correlation that as coercion increases the actual consent one is capable of giving goes down. So, as a society, if we allow people to be homeless and suffer all the violence that comes with it, there’s always this sword, if you will, at your throat or over your head. You don’t work, you get to be homeless. You’ll starve or die to the elements quickly unless you sell the only thing you have… Your body.

So what’s my point? The electrician is being exploited in the way that a capitalist is stealing his surplus-value he created by wiring homes, repairing, whatever. The sex worker is exploited by having (often the case) ALL of their value stolen by a pimp or whatever and of course exploited in the other definition. And I know we’re all leftists, Marxists and such. We know exploitation is bad. But we’re usually describing having the fruits of your labor stolen from you essentially by force. That’s bad. But it’s incredibly different from having the value created (feels gross but much like slavery there is value in the discussion) by selling your body, allowing another person to use you as an object, either all that value is stolen or most of it anyway. I don’t think I need to keep going.

My overall point there is basically the electrician can consent somewhat and his exploitation is far less than the sex worker who I’d say theoretically might consent, but we have no way of measuring that in society as it exists. I could just as easily say she does not consent in the least. Prostitution is such an exploitative practice that I’d imagine, in a world absent all forces of coercion, almost no one would choose it. Sex work as far as porn making, maybe, in fact probably yes. But selling yourself to strangers, in a world where you can exist with all your needs met without doing so? I don’t see anyone choosing that… I don’t know if I’ve done a good job explaining this or not, but, there it is.

No debate really. Obviously China has the most diverse set of weapons and shit and the infrastructure and funding and such to support it.

I added some paragraph spacing only because you asked nicely

Perhaps the wording could’ve been better, but I wasn’t referring to liberalism as a mental disease. It was meant to be a little callback to the beginning and referencing how mentally exhausting, draining, etc. it is for me to deal with the same baseless arguments over and over from bad faith people with zero knowledge or even beliefs.

If it was possible I’d have a little disclaimer next to my username that says like “I wrote this while shitting or while sitting on a bench wasting time between workout sets. It’s not refined and nearly zero effort went into this post.”

Poor bastard just lost the remaining credits he had :(

He’s a right wing liberal who used to masquerade as “on the left.” I think he’s had to give up that shit in recent years due to other people who are actually versed in left ideologies completely embarrassing his zero historical knowledge. In response to being called out and shamed and embarrassed in basically every discussion he’s just been hanging with straight up Nazis like Fuentes and that Nazi lady whose name I forget and don’t care about. Normally he’d be completely forgotten and irrelevant, and he basically is, but he still holds onto a small couple thousand or so loyal Nazi dipshits who spend all day on reddit and Twitter generally harassing and annoying the shit out of the rest of humanity. Thank God twitch finally booted him off twitch and into the even further irrelevancy of live streaming on YouTube which absolutely no one watches. If he got hit by a bus tomorrow I’d just guffaw and move on. That’s all the thought he’s worth ultimately

I’d say you probably shouldn’t try to counter them. Not often anyway. It’s mentally taxing and ultimately produces basically zero fruit. People grow up their entire lives, their nice comfy lives btw, being told “China bad! US good!” and although you obviously can’t just swap that moronic narrative and make it true… it’s much closer to the truth. They already believe insane bullshit, basically. Can you argue a fairly devout religious person down from their religion of choice? Of course not.

Leaving aside the religious stuff, they have to find a reason to change their minds within themselves. Everyone in “the west” who was born and raised within its culture by the average normie-brained neoliberals that have been dominant for the last 40ish years and ended up on this website is way outside of the norm. People like to say “I watched/read/heard X and it changed me!” No, it didn’t. You changed because things around you didn’t add up. You looked into it. You probably found a bunch of shit that you thought was insane conspiracy (not theories, but actual conspiracies). Maybe some is/was but a lot of the shit if we’re talking about reading into the history of western nations especially the US is true. The worst shit did happen. And it’s hard to come to grips, properly, with the reality that you are not living in the good nation. That China isn’t full of misguided fools, that the USSR often held a much higher moral ground on basically every discussion of everything… that much of what we were told about them is just straight up lies or exaggerated for propagandistic effect.

I think accepting China isn’t the absolute demonic evil of the world is probably damn near the last thing for westerners to break out of. Well, besides the monkey-brain shit which might be impossible to break for many people cough anarchists cough (reactionary tendencies towards individualism comes to mind).

If you throw out facts of how the US is objectively, absolutely no debate, insanely worse for the world including many of its own citizens you’re just gonna get CNN talking points, state dept lies, links to horribly written, poorly sourced bullshit about the billions of Muslims that China apparently liquidated last month. Only slight exaggeration. They don’t want to learn or hear the truth. They literally don’t care. It will take either time and circumstances unique to them to change their minds (after an academic journey of some sort, as all of us had to do) or… force. No one can do the first method and we obviously lack the power to do the second (for now…).

So, sure, post some links, point out the easiest most obvious hypocrisy (like people shitting over “China spying” meanwhile the NSA has exabytes of fucking data on the exact dimensions of your cock and asshole) but I wouldn’t engage too much. I try to limit myself to about once a day, and I don’t read the hog replies because what’s the point of the mental stress this would cause me?*

*I edited the last sentence from ending with “mental disease” to the above ending to clarify I did not mean that the senders of said annoying messages, liberals basically, are suffering from “liberal brain disease” but rather they are giving me brain disease by which I meant stress, annoyance, etc. It was a self-attack of sorts (I can’t handle too much uneducated/bad faith pushback), but I recognize the wording was poor. Hopefully this is better. Also as an excuse: I wrote this, and all of my comments basically, either on the shitter or in this case sitting on my bench press bench procrastinating from lifting.

Mali has reclaimed some .ml domains. It’s not been made completely clear why they did or if it will continue. There was a pinned post like a week ago regarding alternate domain possibilities and raising awareness of the possibility this one gets yoinked. Long story short the admins have one reserved and the current one is already paid for like 2 years into the future, but, we don’t know if Mali might ignore that or not. Guess we’ll see