• 8 Posts
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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: April 1st, 2022

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  • I’ve come across some people who have no idea what “sealioning” even means. There used to be a hb user “Ulysses” or something, like three years ago, who accused me of doing it after I replied to their reply to my reply, and that’s the only conversation we’d ever had. I pulled up the definition of sealioning and the comic which the word originated from, and they just say “no that’s not true, stop sealioning”.

    I feel like some people just think sealioning means “this person keeps replying to my posts”, as if conversations on a public forum are somehow uncalled for, or unusual.


  • If you don’t and just enjoy the thought of killing people you disagree with then you should be out celebrating alongside MAGA over the murder of Renee Good.

    This is a bizarre comparison.

    UnitedHealth, and therefore its leadership, are collectively responsible for the systemic social murder of many thousands. They (like the rest of the industry) are so ingrained into bipartisan government though lobbying and other forms of soft power that we have consistently seen no legal justice, and have no reason to expect it.

    Renee Good, on the other hand, was not responsible for mass death and not an ongoing threat to millions of innocent citizens.







  • 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.


  • He also can’t just tear down a third of the White House on a whim, but here we are.

    Tearing down the White House doesn’t hurt capital. When we say that Trump can’t just do anything they want, we’re not talking about legality. You’re right, it’s very clear that Trump’s regime disregards legal issues. They have strong institutional power over the writing, judgement and enforcement of law.

    We’re talking about pleasing those who give Trump power - the upper echelon of the rich, the owning class. Trump’s regime needs mass media for messaging (think of social media and news owners like Zuck, Musk, Bezos, Murdoch, … ), it needs technology (add Thiel, Ellison, … ), and obviously it needs money.

    If Trump and friends turn those supporters against him, that’s a very real issue that would lose them material power. They’re pressured into compromising or conforming to the wants of those supporters, so that they continue giving power to the regime. This is what people mean by a “dictatorship of capital” - those with huge amounts of capital dictate the country.