https://lemmy.ml/post/27285771/17347137

https://lemmy.ml/post/27285771/17347137

https://lemmy.ml/post/27285771/17347137

People playing fast and loose with the terms “discrimination” and “racism” really grind my gears. We are talking about centuries of fucking crimes against humanity, and some sad little fuckers have the nerve to conflate reparations with the very crimes that were committed.

OK now that arstechnica has written about it, shills might stop nagging in the comments about my titling. LMAO

I don’t think we understand very well the threat model here. Are we talking about having a Mozilla account or the web engine itself. If you have an account they will probably start doing mining shit with it. What about activists researching certain topics then? The content browsed can be visible to Mozilla if they use their account for syncing bookmarks. That should be a dealbreaker right there. No different than Meta user-profiling the fuck out of your engagement behaviors. Now if this is NOT the case and you haven’t a Mozilla account, I assume that the version of the web engine available back at the time of the fork is exactly the same. So far so good.

The problem is that browsers are hard, and there is a ton of web protocols to be implemented, various fixes for security, support extensions and other QOL features. WORD ON THE STREET is that tasks like these cannot be undertaken as solo/hobby projects, that funding and an organization structure is essential. The teams behind LibreWolf, Waterfox, etc have a track record of already lagging behind Firefox’s version updates. Same goes with user-profile and configuration sets like Arkenfox (if I am not wrong). You may tweak the conf all you want, but if privacy and anonymity is compromised at the web engine level, these forks will be left with little to do about it. Then the only option will be to keep using an old version of the web engine (sacrificing security and quality of life extensions), or ditching the gecko web engine altogether.

That is why people are looking for genuine alternatives to the web engine.

This is trolling. It is beyond self-evident that the Open Source fediverse has thoroughly criticized the latest Mozilla move. I myself point out device fingerprinting and third party vendors. You respond to neither approach. You want me to do homework and quantify the sentiment on the trending Mozillla hashtag? Sealioning. Diigressing the topic of conversation? Report and block you sad impotent spook troll.

Your mastodon feed might be different that mine, lmao

https://mastodon.social/tags/mozilla

User name checks out

You know there is a specific type of person who holds 95% percent Nazi views, but is pointing fingers in all directions when an actual Nazi is called out as a Nazi. It is the same type of person that says he hates rapists most of all things, but never admits there is enough proof of sexual misconduct about any actual rapist. That person is the next door m’fer that enables fascism and patriarchy throughout history, and he is complicit to both.

Consent of the oppressed

At this point the ones preaching against trans liberation are the same ones that will take away your union protections. This is the long and short of it.

The premise of this meme is overly simplistic. Effectively equating a social media platform with a website hosting specific beliefs.

Here are, from the top of my head, some ways Big Social is different, regardless of country.

• Hosting a platform with millions or billions of users.
• Exploiting algorithms that mine sensitive data to an invasive degree.
• Control the flow of information, to a very granular degree of precision.
• Experimentally collecting behavioral data in response to said control of information.
• Modeling user’s life expectancy, sexual orientation, political beliefs, consumer patterns, terminal illnesses.
• Selling said data and model outputs to private insurance companies as well as police states.
• Addicting users to withdraw from real life, and get hooked to their screen where they can happily serve the company for data mining.

I hardly think that any of the above should be gauged by the standards of individual rights to free speech. Even corporate entities viewed as individuals with a right to free speech.

This is something else entirely, and whoever owns it, out of whichever country must have their ass regulated off.

Even harder than the EU did.

Operations of this type and size should be eventually dismantled. They are inherently antisocial, corporatist, and totalitarian in their conception and daily function.

Sometime ago I started a discussion about the “Role of Attrition” in the effort to dismantle Big Social enterprises Here it is

I think the problem is in the opposite direction. Society is too ideologically homogeneous in being against socialism. The major narratives are controlled by nation-states and corporations, social media are infested with political advertisement and propaganda.

So, as others say, I believe it is sorta uninformed and middle-of-the-road fallacy to find a corner of the internet where you can speak your mind without being harassed by white supremacist trolls, and say we need more diverse views.

Right wingers have (had) Parlel, Gap, TruthSocial, now they have X, and Facebook, where they were also dominating and harassing in the past. No leftists and/or genderqueer person would survive a day at these platforms.

But Lemmy being primarily/explicitly leftist is the problem, and you suddenly are alarmed for echo chambers. This is not quite fair, now is it.

As for Lemmy per se, I don’t think it is too homogeneous. I debate centrists and liberals every other day. And recent discussions showed that the amount of latent transphobia in the site is shocking, with people knowing next to nothing apart from 4chan/MAGA talking points.

How can this happen after all these years of activism and outreach. It is because of the ecosystem of echo chambers in the broader communications and media landscape. This discourse never reached those people.

Considering it was the position of major medical and professional organizations, it shows that the pathology lies with the existing social media and broader media enterprizes, with a prominently selective messaging.

Do I need to say that this led to widespread science-denialism for which mainstream platforms are clearly to blame?

If your inquiry is honest, then the only explanation is that the propaganda apparatus works so well, that the (relative) absence of the dominating narratives makes you anxious that you entered an echo chamber, when in fact you probably have been in an echo chamber so far.

Oh, I got one of my own: The notion that Linux is for enthusiasts that spend most of the time tweaking their computer, and therefore Linux can’t be used by an end user who just want to get things done.

Close to this is the classic adage: “Linux is only free if you don’t value your time” which is an extension that assumes that extensive tweaking is necessary to get to work, not an option available to the power user.

(But they still complain when Microsoft fucks over their workflow on every update. It is a double standard because Microsoft is “a brand”, so yes, I will say it is a Linux-specific bias.)

disdain for C programmers, from LISP programmers, in the Unix Hater’s Handbook (1994)

I’m definitely looking that up.

Feel free to tell us about your project then.

I adore that your sources were: Yourself

It is a whole thread, not just my analysis. I also put thought into it, so I won’t recite every point I carefully phrase there to a rando centrist, so live with it.

a comic strip and a paraphrasing of a (solid) late night comedian

Directly responding to your very argument though, are you going to engage with these responses or what?

I did watch Stewart’s take

Stewart took on an Alabama MAGA moron legislator on trans youth heatlhcare bans. We are probably not talking about the same segment. The part you are talking about is probably the one I am criticizing in the thread you refused to read because it was written by me, so why should we bother with your tired argument? This borders on sea-lioning since a couple iterations ago, and I think if this is the case it is actionable.

Which is as dumb as people on the Right saying that “trump said he respects and loves women so I don’t get how the libs think he’s anti woman.”

But you talked about pitching to the progressive base, not the opposite side. MAGA fanatics are cult-minded morons that dismiss everything that diverts from their narrative. There is no comparison to centrist and center-left democrats base, who operate under totally different rules than a fucking Nazi cult.

Your example about the Ad is addressed to a cult.

You said:

no way to rebut it without alienating our progressive wing, so we just take the L on this

Just searching around Lemmy you can find fine rebuttals to this bullshit. You make it sound like it is unthinkable to rebut these hateful tropes. This is more or less what Matt Walsh and Ben Shapiro tout: That their common sense is unrebuttable. It is not.

to ZERO pushback from Harris

She could have rebutted, and take them on. Same goes for Rachel Levin. They chickened out of it. Furthermore, the mainstream progressive media not only omitted to address misconceptions and dangerous cliches, but they chimed in with thinly veiled TERFism, and this is because the interests behind the Democrats are in part transphobic as well.

This also responds to these words of yours:

To say that trans issues weren’t a thing this election because your side didn’t talk about then is absurd.

I keep saying they abstained from matching the excessive anti-trans propaganda. What is your point?

I said that Oliver and Stewart, the Scientific American, the APA, and several other bodies have addressed trans issues to the progressive base, and no-one in the left thought they were unpalatable until now. The progressive media would have protected against this, that is more than a decade in the happening, but they did not.

Given that it’s an issue that some 70% of America disagrees with us on

Shit man, this is such a complex study that I can easily point out that 60% of Democrats think that trans representation has not even gone far enough.

Above all, I don’t think that trans issues are edgy and unpopular at all. Until a couple years ago it was a strictly medical thing, with a very niche activism surrounding it, mostly on legal representation and medical gatekeeping issues.

It was the fascists who spent millions to demagogue on that point for many years, and I think people should be educated on trans issues as they should a decade ago.

At this point people who take anti-trans propaganda seriously are lost causes to me, and this includes people who fall for an ad like the one you posted. There is no point to cater to them from a pro-trans perspective, it is like trying to appeal to a 1936 German crowd applauding Hitler about the human rights of Jews at this point.

The view you defend here is essentially a compromise to concurrent Nazi discourse, which as I said is unacceptable, and I don’t care about Democrats ratings. I rather see that the extreme left everywhere dials up the pro-trans issues and organize defense and survival programs.

such an easy bone to throw moderates with almost no real world costs (apologies to the handful of high level trans athletes

Again I have cited arguments against the supposedly self-evident low hanging fruit you evangelize here.

I think that I have responded to all your concerns here or elsewhere in my Lemmy posts and comments, and I won’t respond further. You probably come from a naive self-designated center-left perspective, but the discourse of this post borders too closely to sealioning and concern trolling, that I will not waste more of my time on.

I don’t actually believe there’s a way for the Left to pitch trans issues

Then fuck the Left, I guess?

doesn’t alienate our progressive base

Then fuck “our” “progressive” base?

If the “Left” had spent a fraction of the resources to match the vile torrent of anti-trans propaganda, the situation would be different, with regard to both of your points about pitching trans issues to the progressive base.

Like, John Oliver and Jon Stewart showed exactly how a mainstream progressive media can combat anti-trans demagoguery by Republicans, not to mention Scientific American, the American Psychological Association, and other bodies. You probably weren’t listening because if you don’t think this is a way to “pitch” then you might have been listening to other sources that make the matter unpalatable, like “biological males in female sports” and what have you.

So I take it as a given that you were listening to the wrong sources about it, and you are at least partially anti-trans yourself. On the other hand, you might not be listening to all the analyses after the fact that point to other issues as to why Democrats lost the election. See for example this thread, this comic strip, and this thread also.

In a nutshell, Harris did already try to appeal to the transphobes and she failed. So this should be end of discussion. I am not discussing compromise of the human rights of any group in order to appease to either moderate or extreme bigots.

I already said no. We have a totally different mind model here. You think that there is a static majority with crystalized opinions, a conservative inertia that we have to adapt to. I believe that the revolutionary powers compete with fascist propaganda to win over the majority, who is bound to different material interests.

When this deceptively mild approach of appeasing the majority used, it legitimizes that the fascists are somehow in the right to a degree.

That is what I cannot stand about centrists. I am an anarchist, there is no middle ground between me and, well, a number of things that are utterly unacceptable. There is no middle ground to nazism, and corporatism, for example. By upholding these standards, I am dragging society towards absolute equality.

With your appeasement approach, you legitimize fascists, which is called the ratchet effect. Without revolutionary powers dragging people leftwards, centrist appeasement pushes the mainstream rightward.

Having said that, the proposed example is completely out of historical context, and is wrong on so many levels. I can’t go into all the details right now, but the very idea of “throwing homosexuals in the mix” is preposterous given the historical context.

Let me direct you to the fact that the British Empire paid reparations to slave owners, but even to this day if you try to mention Reparations to the Caribbean and African nations you will be met with vile harassment from hordes of nazi trolls. So I cannot educate you in Marxist political economy right now, but you comparing abolitionism to gay rights is comparing apples and oranges, and the equivalence is unwarranted.

Only under the concurrent prism of anti-wokeism these are deemed comparable, from the viewpoint of being “not cisgender heteronormative germanic/anglo/saxon Christian male”. So you would not be bringing this even remotely up if you were not ever so slightly affected by anti-woke propaganda yourself.