Those are good reasons and I'm glad you think about and develop these threat models. And sorry you have to deal with them.
Bernie is a Zionist imperialistic chauvinist and has been for decades. He is exactly who anyone on the left should aspire not to be. He exemplifies the sentiment, "social democracy is the left wing of fascism" and this statement is proof perfect.
To be of and for liberation means to be of and for liberation worldwide. Bernie just pushes for social programs for Americans while carrying water for genocide and domibation overseas.
You have asked the most important question in this topic. Privacy and security only have meaning when you develop a threat model or encounter a threat. With digital security it is usually pretty straightforward in that you don't want anyone else controlling your computer or phone and using it for their own ends. And a lapse in digital security can ruin attempts to secure privacy.
Privacy is where threat models should be developed so that you (1) don't waste time worrying about and working around nonexistent threats and (2) can think holistically about a given threat and not believe in a false means of privacy.
For example, if you are of a marginalized community, closeted, and in a very unsafe living situation, your main threat model might be getting doxxed and outed. To prevent this you should ensure that there is zero to no information that would link your real identity to an online identity and you should roll accounts to ensure small slipups can't be correlated. VPNs probably don't help in this threat model but they don't hurt either. A private browser does nothing in this situation. Securing your phone and not leaving it unlocked anywhere is good for this situation (sometimes privacy isn't really about tech but behavior). Using strong passwords that can't be guessed helps with this situation. Making a plan to move to a safe living situation so you can be out will resolve the threat entirely, though it may mean needing to think about new ones.
Notice that the government was not in this threat model and that it was more about violence towards the marginalized. Cis white guy techbros generally have nothing to worry about re: infosec and are just being enthusiasts or LARPers. Nobody is showing up at their house with a gun and the feds are not going to arrest you for having the most "centrist" political takes and actions available. The people that need to project themselves are those facing overt targeted marginslization or who take political action that the government wants to, or would eventually want to, suppress. For example, the US government labelled anti-apartheid groups as terrorist organizations and intimidated or jailed those they could identify. It has a habit of doing this to any advocacy groups that gain steam and actually pose a political threat to their opponents.
Even if you don't have a threat model, though, having good digital hygiene is useful in case one develops in the future. You may currently do political work that seems safe, and it is because it is not perceived as a threat. Let's say you help organize unions. But there have been times where organizing unions would mean you're targeted by the government and hired thugs and those times can easily return. If they have compiled a database of likely union sympathizers, will your name be in there? Maybe that's a risk that you just take. But maybe you should use good privacy practices so that you can go underground when needed.
The latter applies to the threatless cis white techbro "centrists". Such an individually may someday change politically or in their gender identity and having good practices would then pay off.
I'm not nornalisong genocide.
One of the things I said she did was lockstep promote genocide as part of the Biden-Harris regime. You seemed to be saying that it this is normal because VPs should be lockstep. But... it's genocide. Genocide is not something to normalize by saying things like, "well she has to because she is veep [no further explanation given]." Maybe you don't think of yourself as normalizing genocide, but in reality that is the meaning if what you are saying. To downolay the social violence she supported as part of this administration, to say it is her role, it is normal. I listed genocide and anti-immigrant policy.
I also recognize that there are two bad options and she is the least bad option.
Appealing the lesser evil canard when the topic is genocide is also an attempt to normalize genocide. You should fight and oppose genocide not try to justify why you support 99% Hitler over 100% Hitler (in your mind).
Actively seeking to undermine her without an alternative is advocating for more genocide, not less.
No, exactly the opposite. I work to make empathetic people realize that they do not, in fact, have to support genocide, and can build political power against this evil.
We could talk about how your lesser evilism is poor political calculus, but frankly it should be enough for you to simply say, "I will never vote for a genocide candidate". You should be able to say that. Let me know if you do.
As I see nothing indicating any real curiosity about cops as witness testimony nor an acknowledgement of the repeated bad faith behavior, I will not be replying further.
Western "leftists" often fall into a trap. In this trap, they get to announce the necessity of organizing for class consciousness without actually doing any labor work, political education work, or even joining an organization. In this trap, they get to announce solidarity with the global working class and say damning things about the worst imperialist excesses, but also get to retain the chauvinism of their imperialist upbringing, never actually doing anything to challenge their own countries' component of the imperial core while attacking imperialists' designated enemies. As no political project is without faults, but their idea of socialism is free of faults, they are bestowed a license to condemn every movement that wins a revolution and tell them to be more like those that never even get off the ground (the pure, clearly faultless ones).
Interestingly, people can fall into this trap because they refuse to educate themselves at all or because they spend all of their time diving deeply into a canon of purity and fail to have historical context or real-world experience in struggle. There are so many Western "Marxists" that have not read Capital in any form. There are also many Western "Marxists" that exclusively consume cloistered trade unionist or Trotskyist or MLM sources, failing to self-apply the criticism that they gleefully throw at "campists" and "revisionists". Consequently, they follow an idealist path, and this is most evident in their attempts to organize, or lack thereof. Most don't really do anything at all, they just read and pick fights. But when they do attempt organizing work, these are the people who overly congratulate themselves on a job well done for doing, more or less, nothing, or doing something embarrassingly incompetently, or losing, or just plain acting against our shared interests. For example, the "Marxist" paid trade unionist that spends half their time promoting imperialist party candidates and the other half trying to make jobs making bombs for genocide pay better. That person thinks of themselves as a true revolutionary and in the same breaty that they defend a concentration on facilitating class traitorism they will tell you that it is bad to defend the Palestinian resistance.
Not really. As vice president her role is to follow the administration and donbidens plans
As Vice President she can do basically whatever she wants re: taking political positions, breaking ties in the Senate, going on diplomatic missions. The VP slot used to go to the runner-up of the election, they weren't even of the same party.
She actively chose to be a "team" player for xenophobia and genocide. And that, of course, is part of why she was selected as VP in the first place.
but not unquestioningly.
Okay well she did it without public questioning and did actual bad things.
As a candidate, she should have her own vision.
As a candidate she should be a lot of things, beginning with not forwarding genocide and being elected. Harris has received no personal electoral wins since 2016. She could not even win her home state during the 2020 primaries. Her campaign is virtually devoid of major policies.
So far, her campaign, in effect, is about how openly liberals will embrace genocide. The answer is: quite a lot, but perhaps not enough for her to win the election.
Shes more responsible than someone outside the administration but shes not the administration on her own. [...]
Anyone supporting genocide or xenophobic policies is complicit in them. As a person in office, she has the capacity to work against those things. But she is in her position because she would never do so, she is an empty suit.
I would expect her platform to also not undermine her current role, or shed have to leave.
Why? She can't be fired. She could be impeached but that is rare.
If she plans major changes, she should announce them before election but that doesn't mean she needs to announce things that aren't election issues, unless she chooses to
Harris has the entire DNC behind her, was previously a Senator and is now VP. If she prioritized independent policy in any way, even just as a cynical piece of election propaganda, she would have had an agenda ready to go on day 1 of being coronated by the party leadership.
This is perfectly normal whether you agree with her or Biden or neither or both.
Please refrain from normalizing genocide.
To paint it as unusual is performative on your part, not hers.
Liberals are usually not so openly genocidal and previously claimed to be against Trump's harsh immigration policies. These are both salient positions contradicted by the Biden-Harris afmin and Harris is complicit in them. I have made zero claims about whether a VP being a good lapdog is abnormal, but these are serious violences that she has had a material impact on and for which she bears responsibility.
It does appear to be an incoherent act of desperation. The obvious move if you wanted to coopt people that oppose Biden, as in genocide Joe, would have been to make purely performative gestures to triangulate despite her obvious complicity in the administration's policies. Easy wins.
I think their campaign decided to treat this as a typical "court the right, do what we wanted to anyways, and vote shame the left" strategy and have found out that none of those things are working very well, for various reasons. For one, the candidate having no charisma or sellable policies, being a career empty suit. Or the fact that their genocide is not just a "loony left" issue but also an ethnic and familial and basic decency one.
I have actually never met a single person that can name a major Harris 2024 policy promise off the top of their heads, lol. That is how little they think of anyone that is actually concerned about material outcomes. It's like the saw Hillary 2016 and were like, "we can do that but better because we have manic JOY".
The Harris campaign attempts to distance itself from the Biden-Harris administration she has been an uncritical part of for 4 years, activeky working for its imperialist and anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric.
Seems a bit late to attempt that performative pivot. And who is the audience for it?
A nationalist "tough on crime" anti-socialist with a deep appreciation for cops-for-capitalism pining for a return to "glory days" for a subset of residents while scapegoating others via racist and xenophobic policies? While pushing a genocide? Whose supporters can't even name the parts of her platform that appeal to them, instead trying to build a cult of personality and identify through who they reject?
To the extent anyone is fascist any longer she's right up there. But she uses rhetoric that is normalized for liberals and flies under the radar because the oppression she supports is sanitized and "politely" obfuscated.
Remember when the libs here were saying only Russia does this and acting like it was beyond the pale?
I do because it was yesterday.
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TheOubliette
joined 1 year ago
I said neither. I said that the marginalized have relevant threat models and, at least in the state they are currently in, cis white techbros generally do not and treat privacy as a hobby, failing to develop realistic threat models. This doesn't translate into either of those sentiments.
That really depends on the specifics of the technique and if your threat model is the entities that could draw those conclusions, namely a government, they will tend to do that regardless. For those threat models you should really be shedding digital communication entirely and making a plan to leave.
But sure, something like having a ton of boring and diverse traffic in a VPN is useful for making them a privacy tool at all.
Alarms among who and what are the threats? This means nothing without a threat model.
This is simply false. For example, not everyone needs to meet in-person just for that to be an option for staying private. So long as you have a means to avoid leaking certain information to certain people, you can meet the needs of a threat model.
Not what I said.
The only meaningful way to think about it is in terms of threat models. Identities are an aspect of engaging in certain online activities, they only have meaning relative to a threat model. I agree that it is a good idea to keep employers out of your political activity by not tying them together but that is because we live under capitalism where your employer can remove your means to provide for itself whenever it wants. The threat model is ubiquitous, just differing slightly in its form (delays, the need for lawyers, etc). There are of course more threat models re: political activity.
The risk of not considering threat models and instead adopting broad brush practices is that you can fail to adequately weigh threats or get a false sense of security.