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Joined 1 month ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2025

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  • Yeah. As far as I know, there are some theoretical state-actor attacks, but nothing that anyone’s ever been able to make work in practice. Compromising something else is just always easier.

    It was literally designed by professional spies to be resistant against state intelligence agencies. It was originally made by US intelligence for secret communication with their assets, and only released to the public when they realized they needed a bunch of additional traffic on the network that the US intelligence traffic can blend in with. At least as of the Snowden leaks (which showed NSA compromise of huge amounts of the internet including most HTTPS traffic), they hadn’t figured out a way to undo it for their own spying purposes, either.




  • Were you under the impression I thought I was the first person to come up with these ideas or questions? In history? No, the point is that you don’t want to answer them, not that they were somehow untouched by scholarship.

    I’m happy to make the same offer for you, you can try to expose the flaws in my thinking by trying to ask questions I really don’t want to admit the answers to or am just unaware of.

    But like I say, it’s clear that you prefer soapboxing to that sort of interactive discussion (even the Playskool version of it with one word answers). I wonder why…


  • It’s okay if you don’t know! I think you do, though, at least most of these answers you are probably aware of. I’ll make them simpler so there’s no time needed to put together a little essay or anything (which is probably better anyway, since it’ll be less subjective). One or two word answers.

    • What did Stalin have done to most of the KPD members who fled Hitler to the Soviet Union?
    • Which country currently embodies what you’d like to see, as the successful Communist model to emulate?
    • Which direction did people generally flee across the Berlin wall?
    • How would you characterize China’s modern government, in one or two words?

    I know, I know, you don’t want to participate. It’s easier just to talk down to me and soapbox, and from that format you can really easily refuse to analyze things that you don’t want to analyze that undo your mental models if you do analyze them. But there’s no reason you would be unwilling just to admit the answers, since your model is super-correct and I’m the wrong one.

    Up to you


  • I’m not a debate pervert.

    I mean it definitely sounds like you are lol

    The fact that you use Trump and Stalin in the same sentence shows profound ignorance on your part.

    They both aspire to throw their domestic enemies into a network of shadowy prison camps or kill them outright, they both claim the establishment opposition needs to be disposed of, they both claim that censorship is necessary because some ideas are wrong and the leader needs to be in control so he can keep the wrong ideas away. There are some important differences, too, but certainly they belong in the same sentence. Trump’s just a lot less effective, is actually the main difference I see.

    There is no point attempting to have a discussion with people who have strong opinions on subjects they have no understanding of.

    Sounds good! Let me check your qualifications, that’s a really good point, I did have a sense that there was no point to having this conversation with you, and this sort of gets to the heart of why lol.

    • What did Stalin have done to most of the KPD members who fled Hitler to the Soviet Union?
    • Why did the USSR ultimately collapse? What should be done differently to raise up the next massive wonderful communist state? Or nothing, they did everything fine?
    • Which direction did people generally flee across the Berlin wall? Why?
    • How would you characterize China’s modern government, in one or two words? Marxist, communist, gangster-capitalist, what?

  • Okay, this is clearly going to be a waste of time. Tell you what: You’re clearly never going to admit that you’re wrong about this, and obviously I can’t force you. It seems like you’re actually sort of enjoying how easy it is just to keep typing “freedom is an illusion anyway and that’s why I had all the opposition shot and that makes perfect sense” and similar things and no one can stop you.

    Let’s do this: Tell me a format within which we can have this conversation, and get some kind of feedback or judgement about who it is that’s able to prove their case. If you want to propose a framing of some sort, and go within that, I’m happy to talk about it with you. If not, I think it’s just going to be you insisting that Stalin-style/Trump-style governance is justified until I get bored or frustrated and abandon the conversation.


  • The difference is that communists accept the need for censorship and are open about why some ideas need to be suppressed.

    Because some ideas are so destructive to your whole model that they have to be suppressed, because these models in their practical application are often sort of un-defendable, and so the only option is to have secret police running around shooting dissidents.

    It doesn’t mean that liberal democracies don’t fall into the exact same pattern, to some extent large or small. It is in the nature of human power struggle. It’s not innate to any particular political system (or it is innate to all of them because they’re all made of people). The difference is that we don’t celebrate it or make excuses for it. We publish books about what a lie the government is telling, we have a constant struggle between the forces of freedom in the streets and the government trying to stamp it out. Sometimes different factions get the upper hand, or it switches.

    The difference, as you brilliantly demonstrated here, is that some of the most thickheaded of communist supporters get themselves turned around sufficiently that they start supporting the government trying to stamp it out. Most sensible people, when the government tells them that some ideas need to be suppressed, and they need to imprison or shoot anyone who’s opposing their power, can figure out that’s a bad thing. You apparently cannot.


  • Dude you’re on the instance where it is forbidden in worldnews to say “Fuck (a particular country which will remain nameless)”.

    Literally the only one. You can say “Fuck the United States” or “Fuck Israel” everywhere on Lemmy, or near enough, which of course is as it should be. But if I start stepping on the wrong massive state actors’ toes from one particular instance…


  • Seriously. The reason CSAM merchants and drug dealers use Tor is because it actually protects their privacy successfully. Whereas, if you’re using a VPN or whatever cobbled-together solution, the feds just have a hearty laugh about it, send a subpoena by email or use some automated system that’s even more streamlined, and then come and find you.

    Tor is not bulletproof; they regularly run operations where they take down some big illegal thing on the dark web. But they have to do an operation for it, and if there were any solution that was any better, that thing would be even more infested with illegal material than “the dark web” is. That’s just how it works. And listening to the newspapers when they tell you that it’s a sign you need to stay away from those actually-effective solutions because “terrorism!” or whatever is a pretty foolish idea.


  • Tor is slow and has a reputation of being used by pedophiles and drug traffickers. I2P is scattered in implementation and cannot handle high load.

    Physical bluetooth mesh networks or other technology is an example. Maybe even a new version of dial-up.

    These are incompatible statements lol

    Tor is fine, I’m looking at this on Tor Browser right now. I would say the jank level is about 20%. Quokk.au, actually, for some weird reason has significant problems with it (significant slowness and sometimes refuses to load a page). I actually have no idea what’s going on with that, but it and I think one other site are the only Fedi sites that have any kind of problem at all. The majority (but not all) news sites and things work fine. Some things do not and I have to bounce over to some normal browser. The jank level is definitely not 0, but it’s bearable.

    I actually do agree about needing to set up a better architecture overall. Tor is an extremely special-purpose architecture for one thing only (near-bulletproof privacy and firewall traversal even against extremely aggressive government attempts to defeat both), which is honestly a pretty fantastic start, but there’s a lot more that goes into “the internet” than just slapping a slightly janky but super-safe VPN over the front of it.

    The main point is: Hey! Don’t badmouth Tor, it’s good (and the jank level of starting from scratch instead will be super high for any forseeable future.)




  • Matt and Trey really don’t give a fuck. They tried to show Muhammed in multiple cartoons, and when the network vociferously shouted them down about it (because it might get them killed or their offices attacked), they snuck him in anyway in multiple places and just didn’t tell anyone. When one of the foundational members of their cast didn’t want them to trash Scientology, they trashed it ten times harder and told him not to let the door hit him on the ass on the way out. They made out with each other for a long time in “Baseketball.”

    However valuable or not you feel like their message / their humor is, they are among the very few voices in mainstream media who are simply unafraid and doing their own thing, completely without reservation.



  • Okay, sure, that part I agree with. She should have voted “yes” on the doomed amendment and maybe gotten into it more afterwards about how even “defensive” funding for Israel is a terrible thing to do at this point. My point was (a) this is being ginned up into the entirety of her Israel position, overriding a ton of pro-Palestinian things she has been consistently doing that are way bigger deals than this, pretty consistently throughout her career, and I think it’s being done on purpose by people who are trying to hurt the left (who will wind up hurting Palestinians a lot more than helping them through the effort) (b) saying that her and Bernie are weak on Palestine in general is a sign that you’re probably listening to some people who are lying to you on purpose. Those two are among the strongest Palestine supporters in congress, probably second only to people like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.

    So yeah if you want to condemn her vote on this, fine. If you want to spin it up into her being pro-genocide or in any way deserving of her office being vandalized or her being singled out as a genocide supporter, you are helping some people who are lying and hurting the Palestinian cause (as well as lot of domestic left issues). That’s my point.