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Democracy doesn’t guarantee you’ll have good options, just that you have options. The time to express the greatest degree of preference is primaries. It’s how the system works. You can be mad about that, but that’s how it works. And it’s fair, and it’s democratic, and anybody can participate in it. And every four years, like clockwork, people come out of the woodwork to complain about how their vote doesn’t matter and the two-party system is corrupt and yada yada who never even took the time to vote in the primary or downballot elections. It’s equivalent to people who complain that the president isn’t getting x done while not voting in mid-terms to secure a congress who can make sure those things actually can get done. Primaries and downballot elections are how to build a candidate’s resume and experience to run in a presidential election. Luckily for primary voters, the party doesn’t listen to these people, they respect the ballots cast by their primary voters. I don’t think they should have run Hillary, but she got the most primary votes so that’s who they ran. There is nobody to blame there but her primary voters.

The levers of power are available to people, we just have to consistently use them.

50% of people who watched the debate didn’t participate in the primaries. Most people don’t vote, and of those who do vote, most don’t participate in primaries. Nobody of consequence ran. Literally anybody could have run. They didn’t. It’s not the fault of “DNC leadership” that nobody stepped up to the plate to run.

FWIW some people did run, Biden wasn’t literally the only candidate. I had more than one candidate on my primary ballot and I voted for Biden because he had the best chance of winning the general. In fact, Biden lost the primary in American Samoa. If you swap Biden for somebody else, you’ve invalidated my primary vote. That’s just as much a threat to democracy as anything else.

If he’s such an existential threat (and he is), why the fuck are they not forcing the geriatric incompetent running on their ticket to drop out?

Because their rank-and-file voters who voted in the primary voted for him. This primary and last primary. And if you want people to leave your party in a big exodus, invalidating their primary vote is how you do that. They learned that in Bernie’s race. I voted for Biden, he wasn’t the only person to run in the primary, I’ll be damned if the “party elite” select some other candidate anyways, why even vote in the primaries at that point? May as well register for the R primary since they at least had more candidates and (so far) appear to respect their primary process so my vote would actually mean something.

One thing you’ll notice is that the venn diagram for people who complain about only having “two choices” and the people who don’t participate in primaries is nearly a perfect circle. You get an overwhelming amount of choices if you vote in every primary and every election.If you only vote once every 2 or 4 years and skip the primaries, yeah, you get two choices.

Good to see Julian free, he paid a high price for giving people access to relevant, important information about the corruption of their governments.

Because section 702 evidence isn’t showing up in court in other cases. That’s why they have an opportunity to challenge it here. They aren’t defending the nazi, they are defending all of us from being taken to court with evidence obtained without a warrant.

Separate apps more focused on privacy will always be better than RCS/SMS/whatever the mainstream option is.

It’s a shame the US govt has to try to do unconstitutional things. And that we have to keep fighting them back to preserve our basic liberties and freedoms. It’s a blessing the ACLU does it for us.

Probably because you don’t vote in the primaries. That’s where people with more fringe ideas are located. Vote them up if they share your fringe idea. You can complain about the “system” all you want, the people who run the system were put there through primaries and generals. Learn how to use the tools available to you.

Sorry you’re getting downvoted to hell. You’re right. Sometimes people want everything to be a conspiracy or something aside from the simpler truth which is that voters just wanted somebody different.

Cenorship-resistant protocols like ActivityPub (Lemmy, Mastodon), Nostr, Tor, I2P, and freenet solve this.

That’s an awfully… interesting way of saying he lost his primary, which as an incumbent is not a particularly easy to do. Blame foreign money all you want, your voters voted for who they wanted. Primary voters are the most politically aware kind of voters, most people don’t vote, even fewer take the time to vote in primaries. Apparently those voters wanted somebody new.

The solution is apps and protocols that put the privacy in the hands of the user, not the hands of another entity which must be “regulated” by legislative bodies that have been subject to regulatory capture. Decentralize and distribute power. Use P2P/decentralized platforms like lemmy, mastodon, nostr, freenet, etc.

Aah yes, the electronic intifada, such an excellent, neutral source for reporting.

Don’t disclose all their big donors

Peter Thiel is also one of the big donors.

Many orgs don’t disclose donors, particularly those working on human rights. Imagine you are a rich person in a dictatorship who wants to improve human rights in your country, do you want your name listed on the donor registry for Amnesty International? Probably not. Amnesty, btw, sponsors the freedom forum as well alongside the city of Oslo. So Either Amnesty is in on this 4D chess you’re seeing where the far right is somehow using human rights as a cover to… give us all more privacy or something, or maybe Amnesty did their due diligence and concluded that this org is worth working with.

The article states that “Who is Halvorssen? He is best known as the founder and CEO of the Human Rights Foundation, where he is listed as the lone staff member.”, yet their site lists over a dozen people. So that’s just a clearly factually inaccurate statement right there, makes me question the validity of the entire thing if they can’t get something that simple correct. https://hrf.org/about/team/

“Halvorssen is the scion of an oligarchic Venezuelan family closely linked to the political opposition that formed against recently deceased former President Hugo Chavez”

Hmm… I wonder if living under an autocrat might have made him care about human rights and free expression.

Believe it or not, people on the “far right” can care about human rights too, and can donate to human rights organizations, and that’s ok. I challenge you to find any major human rights or civil liberties organization that doesn’t have somebody “far right” or whom you otherwise disagree with strongly. Human rights is an issue that cuts across many different political ideologies. And these organizations can build tools and infrastructure to support human rights all around the globe, and do. We shouldn’t be cancelling organizations just because they got money from somebody we disagree with or even detest. What they actually do with that money should be what matters, something your accusations against this org are completely devoid of because they are actually doing good things. What they’re actually doing is advancing the cause of human rights globally.

It’s organized by the human rights foundation, which is an intl non-profit organization headquartered in New York. The freedom forum is not only hosted in but also donated to by the City of Oslo. It’s all about resisting dictators and autocracy. Ask wikipedia if you doubt

In a time of rising political instability and distrust of institutions, institutions will turn more and more to censorship and surveillance. We need decentralized, censorship resistant networks to fight back. #nostr is one such network, so is #tor, #freenet, #i2p, etc. And yes, #lemmy #mastodon and #activitypub too.

I’d love to see more nuclear power generation. Nuclear power is the densest form of power on earth, it’s safer than even renewables and doesn’t have the huge e-waste or energy storage problems that come with it. It’s very, very safe even compared to windmills depending on where you draw the box. I have never met anybody who actually understands nuclear power safety or waste disposal who is against it. At best, they say “renewables are currently cheaper so let’s focus there” but they’re not like “Nuclear is bad”.

In the ground, very deep, forever, for not nearly as much money as you might think. It takes up very, very little space. It’s not green liquid that can spill, it’s pieces of glass.

There are many open source wiki softwares: zim, dokuwiki, etc.

Nostr is an open protocol. Plenty of questionable people have contributed to Linux, I still use the OS. Tor was made by an alleged rapist. I still use Tor. Open protocols are sometimes used or made by nasty people. Lemmy and email are “censorship proof”, they are both good protocols. Lemmy used to be 100% annoying tankies, but as it grew so did the diversity of the userbase. Nostr is going through the same thing.

You choose who you follow, so you choose who ends up in your feed. For the “public square” areas (trending tweets etc), relays set their own moderation policies just like lemmy, that feature is identical. Find a relay that suits your moderation preferences. Most nostr apps can automatically filter out anything related to crypto/nsfw/politics/other less popular topics and prompt you to do so. If something slips through you can easily click ban and move on.

Tips are a cool functionality. On one social network, content creators don’t have an opportunity to get paid for the content they post. On the other they do. Which one do you think will attract the most content creators? My bet is on the second. I like being able to send tips to people who write good posts. But it’s an optional feature, you don’t have to use it.