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.

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 did in college despite always voting Democrat) 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, cause spoiler effects, and then fuck off back into the wilderness.

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.

Read the linked article, look at 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.

Yes, and they do.

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.

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 entirely.

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

I remember the summer of 2016, when I was playing Pokemon Go in the parks and people I had never talked to and that lived nearby were playing it next to me. We were all celebrating when we caught a pokemon when we were after, and comparing which ones we’d caught with each other.

At the time I thought…who would buy Trump’s conman routine? Who actually thinks that the country is in a terrible enough place that we need to elect this person who seems to actively hate the country and seemed to want to set the entire thing on fire?

I left my Californian home and went back to my original state to visit my family. We went to several different areas of the state in fall of 2016 because my wife was from a rural area and I originally grew up in a slightly more suburban area. I saw the signs in the yards, I saw the discontent, and I saw how people did not seem to be reacting the same way to his craziness. I saw how casually they would put on his rants in the background while talking about other issues. I saw how some of them were amused by his antics. It had been a couple of years since I had last been back and it once again struck me how much worse the area appeared to be from the last time I was there. I was in a rural area when the “Access Hollywood” tape dropped. People seemed to visibly shrink at even the mention of the news. I thought he was done for, and that this was a bridge too far for his supporters to cross. That people would vote third party, or not vote at all. I did not get the sense that my thoughts were shared by those around me.

When I came back to California, people were talking about the debates. It was sunny and nice out, and people would talk about the projects they had going on in their houses, or they’d talk about work related affairs. People were sometimes amused by Trump’s antics, but everyone uniformly thought it was impossible for him to win the election. Having seen what I had seen in the weeks prior, I was no longer one of these people. “They’ll never let him win”, one of my co-workers said. I was stunned…who are “they”? Does the rest of the country actually believe this?

It turns out quite a few of them did. Many people thought there was just simply no way that Trump would win, because either the system was already rigged against him and would not allow him to win, or because the country was just not in dire enough straits to elect such a madman (as I once thought).

Hindsight is 20/20 but when I thought it was bizarre that he was even a viable candidate at one point in 2016, and I saw the decaying state where I grew up, I thought “if he wins the election, then we are in a much worse state as a country than I thought”. And we undoubtedly are.

Of course he won, but the reason that I have this somewhat rambling response to this question is that the answer to “why is he still in the race?” ultimately comes down to the overall state of this country.

He is in this race because this is where we are as a country: barely able to imagine a possible future that is brighter than the current one, because we are still caught up in degenerative non-sense that keeps us thinking that our broken down towns, and our poor social bonds are caused by some horde of “others” instead of their true causes: our ever-widening wealth inequality, our ever-decaying moral responsibilities to each other, and our national instinct to absolve ourselves of our responsibilities by claiming that not only is it correct to be forever self-serving, but that even the idea of altruism is a lie.

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.

Once (I liked it so much I saw it twice…my apologies to Ted Lasso)

I don’t know if that fits the definition, but it’s an album being written within a movie which sounds like “media within media” to me.

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!

I’d love nothing more than for Elon to be irrelevant, but unfortunately I live in a world where their money causes them to have large amounts of influence.