Mullvad is good, but it’s not enough to make piracy safe.

An adblocker like ublock is essential, not just for blocking ads but for blocking malware.

Streaming piracy is about as safe as sketchy websites always are, which is pretty okay these days.

If you download anything, check the file type before opening and whether the type is safe. For example, .exe is extremely unsafe, .pdf is somewhat unsafe, and .mp3 is safe. Generally audio and video file formats are pretty safe because they’re very locked down in what they can do, while interactive formats are dangerous. Someone might call audio by a misleading name to troll, but it shouldn’t put your device at risk.

If you download .exe s, do not run them unless you are very confident the source is trustworthy. This means a trusted account posting on a trusted website claiming that a trusted person made the exe. I haven’t caught this guide in a lie yet, but when it comes to exes double- and triple-check everything.

The more tech savvy solution would be to run .exes (or all pirated files if you’re being paranoid) in a virtual machine so even if the virtual machine is pwned the rest of your computer wouldn’t be.

To be fair, a movement is not its name. National socialists aren’t socialists. Antifa in practice is far-left, as any sane person should be.

The truth has the advantage of objective evidence and the disadvantage of needing to be more complicated to incorporate objective evidence.

When it comes to news from out of town, there is no objective evidence, only appeal to authority. The few people willing to personally travel somewhere to testify that it is real can be written off as paid actors (or as AI-generated if you aren’t seeing their testimony live).

So in almost all scenarios with this technology, the truth would have the disadvantage but not the advantage. An arms race between pro-truth and anti-truth AI would be the anti-truth AI winning because it can tell the more convenient lie.

My hopeful take is that it will make proper citation an essential life skill, with everyone who believes stories without citation getting scammed until they know better and everyone who doesn’t cite sources being disbelieved. And that, as such, people will organically build up transparent citation networks that they rely on for information, meaning they can more effectively filter out advertisement, propaganda, memes, and lies.

So you don’t tell them to calm down, you just stay away. Hm.

It’s not even a conspiracy, it’s just corporations and politicians behaving according to individual incentives and communicating about it publicly with a basic level of indirectness to avoid outrage.

I was going to complain that clearly “spreadsheet” derives from paper-based tabular data editors. But apparently that term was only used consistently after 1906, while digital spreadsheets that aided calculation were conceived of in 1961. Meaning that it has meant a digital calculation aid for longer (65 years) than it only meant a tabular data editor (55 years).

Broadly speaking, the US is okay with invading Iran because Iran isn’t a US tributary and the Iranian state is unwilling to become a tributary because theocracy is incompatible with US tributary status (A king might swear fealty to an emperor, but god’s emissary can hardly submit to a heathen).

The primary objective of the US administration is to win the midterm elections. War has historically boosted Republican support under low-informations voters and centrists, and going by the standing ovation in Congress, Democrats are happy to go along with the narrative that this is a just war because they too support enforcing tributary status.

That takes care of the motive. The means is the US military-industrial complex. The opportunity comes in the form of the US breaking a nuclear non-proliferation treaty with Iran and then being outraged that Iran isn’t complying.

They could count on Iran not complying because Israel keeps attacking Iran (and its other neighbors), ensuring Iran will defend itself in a way that can be treated as offensive. Israel keeps attacking its neighbors because that is what the US pays them for and because their history of doing that means that if the US cut funding for unrendered services, many Israelis would have to flee to escape facing justice for their participation in genocide.

So that’s means, motive, and opportunity for the US attacking Iran. Now how will it go?

Firstly, the motive being elections means the US will keep the war going until at least after the midterms. Economic consequences of this can be spun as justifying Republican autarky. The biggest consequence would be oil shortages in most of the world. Countries with large domestic production and/or strategic reserves, including the US, Canada, China, Russia, and Venezuela, would be less affected or have their position strengthened (with Venezuela going along with the US because they now know what happens if they don’t).

In Iran, the US will keep bombing targets until it is satisfied ground resistance is sufficiently mollified, then move troops in to occupy. Given Iran’s geography and the theocratic nature of the current regime, it will likely be a phase of shattering state power followed by a phase of occupation and guerilla warfare.

The US will attempt to create safe zones from which the tributary government and military loyal to the US operate and grow in power, likely centered around urban areas, key infrastructure, and strategic resources. Given there is more support for regime change in Iran than in Afghanistan, the tributary government might attract enough loyal troops to slowly take over the fight against the loyalist guerillas and not collapse immediately when US support drops.

This invasion has bipartisan support so even the Trump administration being replaced would not stop it. I don’t know how long the Iranian state can resist, but as long as it does the blockade on the Strait of Hormuz will remain in place, and even after that guerillas will make that route unsafe. After that, getting the tributary government shipshape could take years or decades, on the long end probably getting cut off like Afghanistan.

Iran or its supporters may attempt asymmetric warfare. If the US government wants to, it could replicate 9/11 and its massive boost for Republican popularity by having a similar lack of curiosity about suspected upcoming attacks. There have been articles about a possible Iranian drone attack from a ship off the coast of California which could fail to be stopped. Similar attacks may occur on the rest of NATO, and slowly ebb as Iranian loyalist power diminishes.

The economic consequences of an oil shortage would naturally hit vulnerable targets hardest. Food delivery vehicles might not be able to afford a trip into remote rural areas during a famine, while Europe can rely on electrified modes of transport for day-to-day stuff and reserve oil for essential services.

Countries with more oil, such as Russia and the US, may take advantage of this situation. Ukraine is not looking so good.

At any time, the US could move on to the next crisis and either stretch itself thin or leave the Iranian tributary state without support in what would then be a civil war. Israel will continue its aggression until its funding gets cut and it collapses.

So it goes.

The rich value power more than wealth. An economic crisis would empower them, unless a revolution takes them out.

The US and Israel invade three countries and it’s “China, Russia Tensions”?

It was very well implemented. The people that invented, designed, and minted them made billions of dollars from a bunch of gullible idiots using very little work, and they got away with it too.

Though android is likely going to crack down on them before the end of the year, so new users should switch to a degoogled or open source phone OS.

Or download the videos using ytdlp, and use a cable to transfer them to your phone like it’s 2012.

The article says Uber lets women avoid male drivers, which implies that at the very least the Uber account is registered as female, which means female drivers could choose to only accept jobs offered through this system.

That raises the question how Uber is deciding that drivers and clients are women. Could a prospective rapist make a “female” burner account to ambush women? Are trans women who are unrecognized by the state excluded even if they’re at far higher risk than cis women?

Of course the real solution is public transit. Uber is dangerous because it means leaving two strangers together for every single journey. For the vast majority of people taking public transit, there will be many strangers in the same cabin who can all help keep each other in line.

Great, so how is that going to help Mrs. Jones who can’t afford sufficient notary proof of her marriage to explain why she isn’t called Miss Smith, resulting in the polling place refusing to give her a ballot?

Voting is an administrative procedure, so rigging an election can be done purely procedurally. Once the election is rigged, no amount of weapons used defensively will unrig it. Maybe they will send ICE to pick people out of the line in Latino neighborhoods, but they don’t need to in order to win. And even if they send ICE, it wouldn’t help if the people with guns stand around gormlessly as they drag people into vans, or as they themselves get arrested.

I suppose them doing more than that wouldn’t be the worst inciting incident for a civil war, but again: it’s perfectly possible for the election to get rigged without violence.

Since many people won’t read the article: it shows that there is no significant difference between the growth of the far left and the growth of the far right among young voters.

Young people are radicalizing, but the average remains to the left of older people’s average. There are many young people are moving right, but there as many young people moving right too.

This fits with the article’s data of young people radicalizing towards the left and the right in equal measure.

A question that doesn’t distinguish between the centre-right and the far left will show “radicalization without the average changing” as “the far right growing”.

I’m sure corporate and state media are choosing to report on growing support for the far right but not on growing support for the far left for perfectly normal reasons.

Trump is trying to steal the elections. As laid out in Project 2025. As he tried in the 2020 putsch. If seeing that makes you a leftie, then every centrist is blind.

every centrist is blind.

If advertisers loved a good news channel, all corporate news would be good news channels. But scared and tired people make far less informed decisions, making advertising far more effective.

The countless horror movies you can watch online are far more upsetting than a streamer saying “fuck”. Censorship isn’t about avoiding people getting upset but about having infrastructure for silencing speech that they and their corporate partners don’t like.

Imagine if cops couldn’t give out fines, then they would miss out on being able to choose to let white people off with a warning while fining black people for the smallest infractions. This means cops would be less effective at maintaining white supremacy. And so cops have to be tough on crime despite all evidence showing that it makes crime worse. Because cops exist to maintain and expand white supremacy, and more specifically the supremacy of rich white Christian men.

Likewise, an advertiser who has a well-established policy of punishing “advertiser-unfriendly” phrases like swear words can then use that policy to suppress certain voices while letting other voices gain fame by boldly defying the rules with only a slap on the wrist. This infrastructure has allowed them to very quickly start censoring Palestine, Minnesota, and discussion of productive forms of activism and resistance in general. Whether this is a service they sell to rich white men or if it’s them choosing to do this because of their rich white owners, the buck stops with them.

Look, you can keep pointing out obvious loopholes and people can keep answer with increasingly obscure examples of laws or of people getting convicted trying just that until the cows come home, but that’s missing the bigger picture.

The rich don’t want people to get rich easily. For legal loopholes to go unpatched, they have to be complicated enough that politicians can plausibly deny blame and they have to require enough wealth to begin with that rich people see it as a tool rather than as a threat. Or they have to be something that has genuinely escaped notice so far despite millions of people searching for it. A lay person free-associating from nothing is very unlikely to come across something that hasn’t been tried yet.

“[tinny distorted noise]”

AFAIK that’s an unsubstantiated claim by one person unrelated to the victim or anyone, and it doesn’t make sense logistically. You’re not going to let a 12-13 year old walk around pregnant for 9 months just so you can throw their child in a lake. You just have it aborted.

The child rapes and abuses he is confirmed to have done are bad enough. No point in muddying the waters by instead focusing on more spectacular unsubstantiated claims. Unless you care more about spectacle than bringing child rapists to justice.