Any two party system turns into King Log and King Heron.

I posted more lenthy comments on the other communities. Here I’ll say this:

When it comes to backdoors to security, there are no good guys. Zero.

The eventual outcome of this sort of thing is more widespread use of steganographic data storage schemes. We already have plenty, such as ones that make your data look like unused LTS blocks of garbage and code blocks with multiple hidden partitions, so that you can open one block showing pedestrian data and the court unable to prove there are other hidden blocks.

These are technologies that already exist for those people who are really interested preserving their renegade data.

But if I own a business and I don’t want my rivals reading my accounting, and open crypto is illegal, I may go stegan whether or not I have secret slush funds.

It sounds like you haven’t observed the conversation.

And it’s not the tech companes so much as the Linux community who have pushed for e2e.

Considering how many abuses (pretty clear violations of the fourth amendment to the Constitution of the United States) have been carved out by SCOTUS during mob investigations and the International War on Terror, no, the people of the US want secure communication. The law enforcement state wants back doors and keep telling tech folk to nerd harder to make back doors not already known to industrial spies, enthusiast hackers and foreign agents.

You’re asking for three perpendicular lines on a plane. You’re asking for a mathematical impossibility.

And remember industrial spies includes the subsets of industries local and foreign, and political spies behind specific ideologies who do not like you and are against specifically your own personhood.

Look at who owns the copyrights. It’s not Mark Knopfler, it’s Sony.

Copyright is entirely IP and does not serve its original function (according to the Constitution of the United States), To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts rather inhibits innovation by unlicensed actors.

Fuck copyright. Fuck patents. Fuck IP.

Useful addendum on Wikipedia: List of political self-immolations

Governments have long wanted backdoors on secure private communication, and so long as we have an ownership class, they always will.

And backdoors will always be more useful to hackers, industrial spies and terrorists than they are these departments of state looking to ensure national security (or watch for proletariat unrest. We’re already pissed.)

And the private sector will always route around these backdoors, possibly by modding the client or offering new services that are still secure.

States should get used to disappointment. Investigation bureaus should prepare for going dark. Once upon a time they had to rely on detective work rather than asking Google whose phones were near the incident or what web-surfers were asking questions about the circumstances pre-hoc.

Every once in a while the sparkling spirit of r/actuallesbians webs its way to me and tickles my nose.

Come back they coo.

Reddit is toxic! Come to Lemmy! I beg.

And then the signal is once again cut short.

The comic appears to be asking why the Rebel Alliance is fighting an autocratic regime with words rather than guns, and the answer is, it’s a different segment in the timeline.

A better satire would be when Hydra ( ALL HAIL HYDRA ) took over SHIELD. That is essentially what happened. Only Hydra agents are instilled with a cartoony compulsion to out themselves, while the MAGAs often don’t realize they are part of the movement, identifying with esoteric subfactions of the movement which feel different but are still loyal and still would kill liberals and immigrants if they had half the chance.

And part of the failing of SHIELD (and the Avengers) is they protect an untennable status quo that allows for people by the billions to do without resources. In the MCU, only the people who can actually afford Disneyland vacations matter. The homeless, destitute and displaced refugees do not.

I’m not an academically trained scholar regarding left-wing theory, but I’d assume that communists and social democrats are still part of the same group, with one naming themselves after a shorter-term goal-state, and the other naming themselves after a longer-term goal-state.

When we talk about state models such as republic, democracy, autocracy, we’re either describing a current status, or a model we might want to follow or avoid. When we talk about ideologies (conservatism, liberalism, communism, feminism, etc.) they assert specific values and presumptions that might or might not be true or workable. For instance, in the communist ideal, every participant has exactly the same amount of political and material power; influence is perfectly distributed. But we have no idea how a state like that would look, or work, or if we could ever get there.

Every model and every ideology has problems and concessions we don’t understand and have to correct for. The one-person = one-vote thing seems intuitive for democracy, but has terrible side effects, and we’re still sorting out alternative election models that might work better.

All this is to say it’s a really bad idea to treat any one of them as a racehorse or football team or a banner under which to rally and consolidate political power. None of the models or ideals we have are perfect or absolute, and we have to be prepared to adjust them on the fly, especially as we contend with corruption and bad actors who exploit vulnerabilities.

I suspect everyone on the left ultimately seeks a society in which everyone is materially provided for, in which liberties are as extensive as possible while providing for protections and considering human biases towards certain abberant behavior (e.g. drunk driving) in which there are as few social strata as possible and power is as well distributed as possible. The models that accommodate all these, even to partial degrees, are still very fuzzy. (Western civilization has been working on them for only three hundred years or so.)

So we’re at least in the same book, if not on the same page.

The Egg has to go through a LOT of cyanobacteria. Of course it could just be that patient.

It was the petit bourgeoisie that started the French Revolution after the Estates General of 1789 and the commoners followed them. I was basing the Rebel Alliance after them, hinted at since among the promoted soldiers in Rebel Alliance command were not-just-a-few nobles.

ETA: Of course the people should, if they can on their own, seize the means of production and overthrow the ownership class. WE HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT OUR CHAINS! 💣

I think a given Christian, confronted with the directive with killing an innocent person directly (say by shooting them in the face with a pistol) would find it difficult, even if their minister told them God commanded them to do so.

Our ethics are mostly based on feelings and empathy, though we have a lot that are based on principle. The MAGA folk and the White Christian Nationalist movement try to favor loyalty (to Trump, to the church, to the movement) above all else.

A couple of points:

1) The Alliance formed after a good chunk of the Galactic Empire was feeling the pressure of being imperial rather than republic. Granted, the republic was corrupt like Chicago during Prohibition, but while it existed many of the public departments were still actively serving their role (more or less).

2) The Alliance was not formed from the proletariat, but the noble houses and companies pushed out (who fell out of favor) when the empire rose. Their plan was to restore the republic system that recognized their wealth and political power. And there might have been a period like this comic when Imperial interests were willfully lying to opposition parties and interests to prolong the time before they got serious and formed a military.

3) It was atrocities like Alderaan that really fueled recruitment into the Alliance. Every young person who had family lost in the Alderaan event at least considered joining up, and if they were sympathetic to the Alliance (or had no loyalty to the Empire) were inclined to do so even if their prior ambitions were apolitical, e.g. art or medicine or civil engineering or whatever. ALSO Alderaan was only the most recent atrocity committed by the Empire in the name of enforcing its political power. And (as per long-studied Counter Insurgency) every act of brutality by tyranny draws more of the population into the resistance. The Alliance was just the most popular and best supported movement.

4) NOTE: This is speculation based on circumstances, much like the Endor Holocaust (The EH is implied by the ROTJ events but was later rectconned out via additional canon): The final point of the Death Star is not merely to be a planet-destroying superweapon but a mining tool to crack open (lifeless or evacuated) planets to get to interior precious minerals. While its success as such a tool might be uncertain, had it not been destroyed, the hope by its crew, engineers and support staff was that the superlaser would not often be used as a military device (optimally never again!) but could still be used in the process of gathering necessary resources.

Recently Google decided to enforce its storage limits, which is how I discovered most of my Google cloud storage was backed up photos I never once asked Google to back up. It was… tedious getting them deleted, and I had to desync my phone lest it also delete my device’s gallery as well.

It all seemed to be a ploy to force me to buy more cloud storage space. Thank you, no.

The Democratic Party needs to go hard into socialized services or just pack up. Right now it looks complicit in the GOP coup d’etat.

The same, incidentally is true for the Labor party in UK, and for the other neoliberal parties all throughout Europe. Serve the people for realsies this time, or pack up as the Neville Chamberlain party.

Our asses touched the same seat. We are brothers in revolution against the autocracy! ☭💣

Gave it a touch up.

Sadly, during DADT, the rate of discharges due to outing was higher than before DADT.

In the US military, DEI is not merely about readiness, but about recruitment and retention as well. Seriously, we counter-recruiters already have enough material to illustrate how joining up is a Really Bad Idea.™

On board with the mushroom kingdom

I’m making an executive decision and declaring this to be the slang for the position of seeking to end the current healthcare system for public healthcare. And to save Mangione from state justice law.

They did before in 1789, hence the immediate outcome of the Estates General of 1789.

And hence the response of the French public immediately following.