You can’t spy on our citizens, that’s our (and our corporations’) job!

Signed, the US Government

I’d rather they just ban spy apps in general…but that’s a “dream a little dream, it’s never gonna happen” type of thing.

Yes, I understand your point and agree with you for the most part.

I feel like there was a turning point in the Internet though, where the federation of user identities basically ended for most Internet users. I track it to the advent of MySpace and Facebook. People started using their actual identities on these sites (most likely, at first, to attempt to get laid), and our privacy began being flushed down the toilet then. I also think the creation of Google Chrome with Google’s all-consuming want for private data and to tie all of your Internet activity to a real person had a big hand in this as well. The modern Internet is a surveillance Internet.

As the article states, it’s no longer true that “on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”. They hook you to your actual physical identity the instant you do anything on your phone, search using a logged in account, browse one of their sites with your logged in cookie, or generally browse anything after you’ve touched any of the major social media sites because they added trackers to everything.

In some ways, this is beneficial because many cannot handle anonymity, but the bad parts of the Internet have largely drowned out the good. As the Internet has scaled, more and more of the bad side of humanity is reflected digitally. To add to that mix, the major sites in their fun house mirror algorithms supposedly designed to amplify engagement (or “enragement algorithms” as I sometimes say) constantly amplify items posted by the most degenerate among us.

However Lemmy is still way bigger than what a mid 90s experience with the internet would be.

IRC was a ghost town the last time I checked in on it. In the mid-90s there were constantly thousands of people on it.

I hate fucking snap. It might be enough to make me switch distros if Ubuntu keeps up with it (which I am sure they intend to).

The continual “you have new snaps” or whatever it was message every time I’m just trying to have a web browser open made me eventually figure out how to install firefox for real on all of my computers.

EDIT: I think you may have convinced me to try out Debian on my next OS installation.

He was invited to give a speech from the bushes.

Most of us vote for the candidate that best upholds our interests no matter the letter on the lapel.

This also isn’t true. Hypothetically, rational voters would vote their own self-interest or using other rationally explicable criteria, but those are hypothetical voters. Those “thought exercise” voters are just as hypothetical as the “invisible hand” that magically makes markets fair, or the hypothetical economic rational actor in the economy that always has perfect information and behaves rationally to maximize their own self-interest. They’re more fictional than the “spherical cows” involved in introductory physics problems.

A lot (or maybe even most) of the people that vote Republican vote against their own interests. That’s why Cory Doctorow talks about them being “turkeys voting for Christmas”.

Farmers that vote Trump are voting against their own interests. People from small towns with decaying infrastructure and social security recipients that vote Trump are voting for a circus clown that will not do anything to improve their life a single iota.

If you have to type fifteen responses complete with diagrams about your ideology, then everything I’m saying about it not being straightforwardly definable is 100% correct and you’re proving it right now.

Gallup found that voters who identify as libertarians ranged from 17 to 23% of the American electorate.

Exactly, “identify as”…do you really think 17-23% of the American voting populace actually has consistent, definable meanings about what it means to be a libertarian? I’m willing to bet that they do not. Relatedly, I have never seen the Libertarian Party get 17-23% of the vote in my lifetime. So, sure, you have a bunch of people that “identify” as libertarian (as I once sort of did in college despite always voting Democratic) but in reality, they are not part of the organized party at all. The Libertarian Party gets up to the low single digits in national elections which is a pathetic showing and is why they do not even get to debate the candidates of the two main parties.

They show up every couple of election cycles, take their “conscientious objector to the ‘duopoly’” single digit voter percentage, occasionally cause spoiler effects, and then fuck off back into the wilderness. They’re basically the “Green Party” equivalent for right-leaning people, exactly as I was saying above.

American politics is akin to the aisles in the grocery stores here: lots and lots of different labels and colorful packaging, and very little actual choice.

I read the linked article, and noticed that verbiage: “considered by some”. That’s exactly my point. Nobody has the ability to define what exactly libertarianism is in this country because there are so many little feuding factions, and it’s a 1-5% movement in the first place.

It’s essentially a thing you can pretend to be when the Republican candidate is too repulsive to openly support and that’s about it.

Are you going to change the definition of pacifist or are you going to call me a violent non-pacifist.

If you and all of the other pacifist movement people are really violent then I’d say the same thing about your movement, you’re running a naming scam.

In this particular case, it’s difficult to even call libertarianism a set thing, because the “movement” spends much of its time discussing what is and isn’t libertarianism, and I think that has a lot to do with the fact that individual liberty versus collective responsibility is largely a more difficult balance to strike than they’re pretending, and there’s no clear and fast way to cut it for every scenario. Pacifism, on the other hand, is much more straightforward to define.

they’re just using that moniker because it fits whatever they’re really trying to accomplish.

That’s what Libertarianism is. The same naming con also applies to the so-called Green Party. I don’t know why we are so easily fooled by names of things, especially when we live in a country full of scams where people constantly try to fool you like this. You’d think we’d develop a tolerance considering it’s a constant thing, but nope, we’re still just as stupid and naive as we were decades ago. If anything, we’ve gotten more naive.

This is Twitter equivalent to fucking yourself down the bar skank ladder. I knew of Laura Loomer exclusively from Twitter when I was there and she was in a similar but less illustrious category as that guy who got caught pretending to be a black man, that weirdo whose profile pic looks like he bought a shirt too small in order to roid rage out of it, or that former Hercules idiot.

I think the step you’re missing is 4chan

So, we’re not doing Section 230 anymore ?

That’s a part of a US law, and as such doesn’t throw a shrimp on the bar-b in Australia, mate.

👆 Trump in the “spin room” afterwards.

Yeah, I too don’t understand why everyone around him is just OK with the idea of the guy being a completely responsibility-free empty vessel.

It seems that once again they want to absolve this…former president of all responsibilities, but him being responsible for what comes out of his donkey-brained mouth is the lowest possible bar of accountability before the bar clangs to the floor.

Try to enjoy them; if Trump wins, these will be remembered as the good times.

I also sub to a few channels on Odyssee, and a couple on Rumble. If you’re good at searching for stuff, PeerTube can also work, but I personally haven’t found anything I really like there.

Good on you because the goal of getting off of google is definitely good but…these names sound like things that a writer would come up with as fictional social media platforms on a comedy show.

I saw Sarah Good with the Devil! I saw Goody Osburn with the Devil! I saw Bridget Bishop with the Devil! You can’t fact check me! I WATCHED IT ON TV!

she picked some and did that