I think that’s a good point and it’s something I run into often. It seems like everyone expects propaganda to be so obvious and clumsy that, when it happens, they’ll be able identify it immediately. But it turns out that what we’re guarding our minds against is anything contrary to our existing world view, not the things we’ve already uncritically accepted. And what we’ve accepted are largely things we’ve observed through the lens of media.

It’s also hard for people to imagine the massive scope of such a conspiracy and how it could be so well organized. It’s easy to explain how media employment bias works in a hierarchy of personal interest, but that system doesn’t work perfectly and it generates a lot of contradictions which I think westerners have conditioned themselves to simply ignore. Even I want to imagine the propaganda machine to be an elegant and cunning device, but the real workhorse seems to just come down to writing “China/Russia/Iran Bad” headlines enough times. Getting past that bias with americans has been the biggest challenge in my experience. It’s pretty depressing.

We had the power to save the earth, but we were so busy mining shitcoins we sorta forgot to care

Lol, yeah, then def not worth your time unless you’re very attached to it.

Not at all familiar with this phone, but maybe check the ribbon cable connecting the display to the board. Is it possible to reflash the roms?

Because it expands google’s monopoly and mass surveillance network.

I feel ya. I’ve had pretty limited success getting companies to get rid of bad software.

“Can’t you… just… umm… patch it or something???”

So glad windows isn’t my problem. But I’m sorry for your stress and loss of sleep, mate.

I love how these dudes always say “white genocide” instead of “american genocide”. Seems to imply they know

Thanks, I should have been more specific.

You can also layer encryption on top of xmpp like omemo and openpgp

Matrix (as a protocol) appears to be very strong end-to-end encryption and is federated/decentralized. It can do encrypted and unencrypted chats for any number of users, so it can replace discord (which is not at all private or secure) and do private 1:1 communications (which I’d say is the best use case for it). It also does not require a phone number like signal does (which is usually tied to your legal identity and can be used for geolocation).

I wouldn’t trust any electron apps, which is the framework the official Matrix client, Element, is built on. It’s fully open-source so there are other clients out there which may be better. Of course, the biggest weakness is probably going to be the OS/firmware of device you run it on.

Edit: The desktop element clients rely on electron (which is a webapp framework built on google chrome, which is spyware). If you’re on android, the app also renders in chrome (which is spyware), but that matters a bit less because android itself is a massive pile of spyware. iOS is also spyware that openly just copies all your files to a server in the US where they are “scanned for very bad things”, retained indefinitely and may be accessed by your favourite state agencies without warrant.

Signal has always looked like a honeypot operation to me. Keep in mind, too that if you run a CIAware operating system, the key can be remotely pulled off of the filesystem or extracted from memory. It’s not possible to have any secure piece of software on an unsecurable OS.

Well, it’s not your fault Windows is dogshit. I refuse to build, repair, admin or maintain any system running a non-FOSS operating system. 16 years later and it’s still the best professional decision I ever made. Remind your employer this is their fault and the inevitable outcome for using unsecurable spyware on their machines.

Better opportunity to talk about how your machines are held hostage by closed-source fascist CIAware.

Great Firewall win

There is no variation of Windows that isn’t CIAware. Complaining about extra backdoors and bloat in a unsecurable, backdoored, closed source bloatware OS is time better spent learning and using the alternatives.

Good old Operation Rubicon. Soviets saw straight through it… euros not so much.

I think it’s good to remember that “progressivism”, at least as it exists in the US, is not a left-moving political force, but a cutout of liberalism designed to capture anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist (left) political movement, and push them back into liberalism (right). It’s structured to be a specific counter-force to socialism. Progressivism offers superficial appeasement on a variety of humanist-sounding issues which are not in conflict with the interests of capital (until they are). It is one half of the culture-war treadmill that redirects people’s political energy away from addressing their material conditions and onto cheering on rainbow capitalism and voting for liberals. Reaction with cute stickers.

As much as you think you’re trying and failing to move your friend left, they’re also trying and failing to move you right.

Is it working? Yes. Are they going to stop the blockade? No.

I mean, if the IOF don’t like being called savages they should probably stop kneecapping children from sniper towers and giggling about it.

Whelp. This bus is sending some very mixed messages.