Sell it to who, Ben? Fucking Aquaman?

Good choice, no point throwing it away if it was too late for you to realize, but it’s more powerful as a platform to disavow Musk and Tesla.

The US is collapsing and all I got was this lousy car

For what it’s worth. I suspect fed-run relays have sped up the Tor network substantially. I’m really mostly using it to avoid commercial tracking and passive dragnet so it doesn’t really bother me…

Nazism refers to a school of political beliefs. It’s not some vague unknowable thing, a Nazi is perfectly capable of advocating for Nazism using speech and symbolism. So don’t pretend they have no clue what a Nazi advocates.

No, killing a Nazi does not make someone “the Nazi”. It would be nice if you didn’t trivialize atrocities like the Holocaust.

People who self-identify as Nazis, as well as those knowingly in neo-Nazi organizations, are therefore perfectly valid targets of assassination. Historically, Nazi killers are seen as national heroes, so don’t give me that ‘winning people over to your side of history’ junk.

When it is strategically effective to shoot a Nazi, and it often is, then I advocate you do so without hesitation. Where it is not strategically effective, I advocate the myriad of nonviolent techniques put in use by antifascists. These are preferred, not because of some silly claims that Nazis should not be harmed, but because they’re safer and more sustainable than individual actions.

Listen closely to what a Nazi wants, yes even the ‘cosplay Nazis’, and think about whether their life is more important than stopping their goal of mass extermination.

Firefox is the best browser

It’s only real competitors, in my eyes, are Firefox forks.

You wouldn’t, because you are (presumably) knowledgeable about the current AI trend and somewhat aware of political biases of the creators of these products.

Well, more because I’m knowledgeable enough about machine learning to know it’s only as good as its dataset, and knowledgeable enough about mass media and the internet to know how atrocious ‘common sense’ often is. But yes, you’re right about me speaking from a level of familiarity which I shouldn’t consider typical.

People have been strangely trusting of chat bots since ELIZA in the 1960s. My country is lucky enough to teach a small amount of bias and media literacy skills through education and some of the state broadcaster’s programs (it’s not how it sounds, I swear!), and when I look over to places like large chunks of the US, I’m reminded that basic media literacy isn’t even very common, let alone universal.

Well, it would require more than just legislation change. Truth be told, in the US, a working democracy requires some form of revolution since the people holding all the power benefit from the broken system. But on the other hand, organizations and communities (including territories of hundreds of thousands) practicing direct democracy on a smaller scale have seen success with these strategies.

Try buying Monero, it is very hard to buy.

• Acquire BTC (there are even ATMs for this in many countries)
• Trade for XMR using one of the many non-KYC services like WizardSwap or exch

I haven’t looked into whether that’s illegal in some jurisdictions but it’s really really easy, once you know that’s an option.

Or you could even just trade directly with anyone who owns XMR. Obviously easier for some people than others but it’s a real option.

Both of these methods don’t even require personal details like ID/name/phone number.

How do you solve the problem that half the country can’t even be bothered to participate once every four years?

I assume you’re talking about the US electoral system?? That’s very different.

but how would we get people to engage with such a system?

By empowering them.

Consider how the current electoral system disempowers people:

1. Some people literally cannot vote or risk jeopardizing their job taking the day off, others face voter suppression tactics

2. The FPTP system (esp. spoiler effect) and the present political circumstances mean that there are really only two viable options for political parties for most people, so many feel that neither option represents them, let alone their individual positions on policy

3. Politics is widely considered to be corrupt and break electoral promises regularly. There is little faith in either party to represent voters

But, in a system where you are able to represent yourself at will, engagement is actually rewarding and meaningful. It won’t magically make everyone care, but direct democracy alongside voter rights reform would likely make more people think it’s worth polling.

No it doesn’t. It requires imperialism. The genocides are simply efficient for the imperial machine creating settlements, but it’s not a requirement. They’re evidently avoidable and capitalists just repeatedly decide not to avoid it because they consider it cheaper to commit genocide rather than integrate more passively.

For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t ask any chatbot about politics at all.

For what it’s worth, I don’t understand why anyone needs any linkedin.

I instance-hopped a couple of times because I joined smaller instances (the recommendation everyone gives you) that then disappeared / were abandoned by the admin.

I already had this problem on PeerTube years earlier, so I played it safe with a bigger instance, at least for a main account (I also had one on gtio.io which was gone before the reddit API exodus). This is absolutely a real issue with people recommending small instances, but at the same time, it’s necessary to avoid recommending just one which gets overwhelmed and disables new accounts.

I joined lemmy through a link my relative sent me and somehow I did not get to select an instance, it seemingly auto-assigned me to lemmy.cafe.

Like spujb said, my guess is the link was directly to lemmy.cafe.

If you want to quickly browse around different instances, there’s https://join-lemmy.org/, which some people have said they avoided because they don’t want people joining the politically-stricter instances as a first impression. So I’d recommend settling in for a week on .cafe to get an idea of how this works, before considering if you’re having no problems with .cafe or if you’d like to explore other options. For example, if they have blocked any communities on other instances which you’re interested in (I don’t know if this is the case).

To be fair, you can’t say they’re wrong.

Most of them are. Some of them are even plain old factually wrong, not just condescending or exaggerating.

It’s important to understand that many of these instances were raised by people who didn’t like reddit’s widespread US-defaultism (including people claiming reddit is left-of-center because it swings Democrat) and its tolerance of bigots and trolls. Now if someone wants to set up their own instances to clone reddit and keep all the bad parts, sure, all we can really do is ignore them or get ignored by them. But when those people complain that this is “a bunch of 14 year olds” with “vote bots” or a “political echo chamber”, that’s just plain old ignorant, or shocked that they’re suddenly in a place with a different culture and struggling to believe it’s mostly just normal nerdy people like reddit is.

These points both make sense given ideal conditions. People and businesses should have liberty over themselves, with the government serving as a neutral foundation representing the interest of voters.

Unfortunately, these ideal conditions don’t exist. The government isn’t neutral, but that’s not because of themselves or a democratic decision, but because businesses have more power to influence politics than you and me. Look at the major shareholders of mass media and social media, look at fundraisers for political parties, look at the laws made to bias the system. The government is evidently not a neutral foundation or a representative of the common people, but a dictatorship of the owning class (I’m using the term dictatorship not to imply one person ruling, but rather, that business owners as a class dictate the actions of politicians and therefore the government). And while it’s easy to consider this a crony capitalism or corporatocracy, it’s ultimately just capitalism itself taking its logical course, as business owners generally have a common class interest and the government cannot work without the complicity of business owners. We see this consistently in capitalist states, all the way back to the first ones. It’s not a fluke, it’s the power of capital.

We also see the trend of monopolization emerge - more money makes more money, more resources makes more resources, so small businesses are generally muscled out or incorporated into larger companies unless the government can force them to stop. So while you technically don’t have to interact with a specific business at all, there are many industries where you are effectively forced to interact with a small collection of the most powerful businesses or even a duopoly, even more so if you don’t have enough money to be picky.

So, while I agree, the government is supposed to be representing voters’ best interests, and business should not have power comparable to governance, they don’t represent us and businesses do govern, and history shows this won’t be changed through the electoral system they control. It has only changed when the worker class, as opposed to the businesses, has become the class directing the government.

Why is a private entity significantly different from a government entity? If a coalition of private entities (say, facebook, twitter, youtube, … ) controls most of the commons, they have the power to dictate everything beyond the fringes. We can already see this kind of collusion in mass media to the extent that it’s labeled a propaganda model. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model

I just don’t think the private/gov dichotomy is enough to decide when censorship and moderation is valid.

which does a lot of censoring, even though the creators are sort of, somehow, outwardly against censoring?

Another perspective on the Lemmy situation is that, for example, I can sincerely say I believe free speech has merits while creating a book club where political discussion isn’t allowed. Some would call that censorship, but restricting a certain community doesn’t mean I approve of unconditional societal censorship. “Censorship”, like many abstract concepts in the liberalist worldview, doesn’t make sense to think of as a universal value, but rather in contexts, like you pointed out with hate speech removal being in line with the beliefs of most people on the main Lemmy instances.

There are some concepts, for example, that I think are fine to discuss in an academic situation but should be censored in public spaces, especially when it comes to explicitly genocidal ideologies like Nazism, or bigoted hate speech.

How was it default? I’ve been here for years and in all that time, it was never default. It was one of the most popular, and the most widely shared, but that’s not the same at all.

The linked post given on the second point is a bit flimsy. It’s basically saying that if you use evidence published by a person with shitty views, you must have them too. To me, that’s absurd as claiming that referencing FBI statistics makes someone a federal agent.