Context This is my response to a discussion about Firefox collaborating with Ecosia, and the discussion that followed quickly went awry. Not only we need it seems to vote for Democrats[^1] no matter what their policies or our opinions are, but we also must support Firefox whatever its moves or shifts in values are, because of its nominal support for privacy in the W3C. But the political take this commenter took brings as back to the election debate we keep having on Lemmy. Like only recently I debated someone claiming that literally we should throw trans people under the bus because of utilitarianism (if Trump wins they say, global warming will kill way more people, and we are sacrificing those people for the "ideological purism" of protecting trans people).

So we see centrists are willing to sacrifice human life and demolish pillars of democracy to defend their centrist dogma, even reaching for far-fetched causality chains to make reality fit their trolley-problem meme obsession.

In defense of extremism

I don't want this post to just reiterate my response to the Firefox centrist. In fact, I was planning to write "in defense of extremism" with this main argument:

If Auschwitz II - Birkenau is peak capitalism, then anarchist extremist is virtuous. In terms of militarism, political intolerance, racial hatred, and labor exploitation, let alone the murder and stealing efficiency for which it most notorious.

An anarchist is by definition opposed to militarism, political intolerance, racial hatred, and labor exploitation. So anarchism is the logical opposition to all of these together, and there is no room for compromise with any of those:

• No middle ground for militarism
• No middle ground for racial hatred
• No middle ground for political intolerance including religion, sex and gender.
• No room for labor exploitation, in most historical cases supported by the above systems of oppression.

For these reasons I was planning to debunk centrism, since there is no middle ground between freedom and Birkenau, as there is no middle ground between sense and nonsense (eg like antivaxxers and medicine, there is simply no middle ground). Therefore, centrism is also morally wrong.

Responding to centrists

But the arguments I was playing around with in my head for the defense of extremism kept popping up in random discussions I had around Lemmy. Some of them were too good to waste on some rando centrist drawing parallels between Democrats and Firefox 😂. I kept the part that most easily generalizes to the defense of extremism, and best underscores the hypocrisy, intolerance, and immoral compromise of centrists, who are themselves biased ideologues with their own set of material interests.

Here goes:

I am a pragmatist, you are an idealist.

1. This is not what these words mean.
2. You don't get to define what other people determine themselves as.
3. I am ideologue with certain material interests, and you are an ideologue with a different set of interest, who is willing to solve equations with human lives.
4. A centrist although presenting as non-ideologue, is willing to protect his moderation bias even with the lives of other people he thinks as ideological purists.
5. By continuously compromising with the worst amongst the humanity for precious election points he makes society worse for all of us.
6. The real meaning of centrism is that you are flexible with your red lines against fascism and corporatism, and weigh human lives according to their ideological distance from oneself.

history shows that “radical solutions” are almost always a mirage

We have LibreWolf, Mullvad, TorBrowser, which are all Firefox forks of course. If we are talking about possible extinction of the gecko engine perhaps we could have this discussion anew, but because these other projects exist, not because we have to support any ill advised move Firefox makes that time and again alienates this community.

To further this argument, there is, well, open source in general, which many people frame by the same "moderate-biased" arguments you propose. Nonetheless it exists and thrives, and it is well shown that the GPL licenses are better for developers. All this happens because of what you dismiss as "idealists", since the era of Creative Commons, Independent Media Center, and the Internet Archive, up to the Tor Project, Tails, SciHub and all other good things the internet has to offer comes from ideologues. Even Lemmy that you are currently using.

The centrist as intolerant, purist and conservative

So whatever is outside the centrist's tunnel vision is just non-existent. That makes the centrist an extremist naive empiricist, lacking non only object constancy but also the intellectual sophistication to stipulate configurations of the world outside his immediate and temporary surroundings.

The blithe centrist happily leeches off to preach ad nauseam that middle ground with spooks, fascists and advertisers is a universal truth we must blindly succumb to. Then it is shown that the centrist is not just naive or misguided but actively hostile and dishonest (see first section of this comment for evidence of logical inconsistency and dishonesty[^2]) with people of different opinions, so they prove themselves not to be centrist at all, but diet fascists.

To sum up, in this post I have shown that:

• Centrists can be tactically motivated and intellectually dishonest.
• Centrist are in fact intolerant of views different than theirs.
• Centrists are immoral and undemocratic, in their pursuit of middle ground with perpetrators of exploitation and discrimination.
• Centrists are in fact extremist in their naive empiricism, tunnel vision, and glorification of the status quo that was given to them, which is by definition conservative.

Combining common terms from the above propositions: Centrists are tactically motivated, intellectually dishonest, intolerant to difference of opinion, indifferent to the rights of others, immoral and undemocratic apologists of exploitation and discrimination, extremist in their empiricism and conservatism.

Centrist? Better call them sentries of the status quo. Disclaimer: I hate centrists with a burning passion.

[^1]: I have made my point very clear in this post, including the contributions of others underneath. [^2]: The rest of the comment overlaps with the second part of this post.

she tried to get wrapping paper made, presumably to sell to raise campaign funds.

the wrapping paper and it had a pattern that alternated between a graphic that reads,

“My team just informed me that no company would make this wrapping paper for us because it’s too ‘offensive,'” she wrote.

“A sitting Congresswomen using a disgusting and bigoted slur about Americans who staged a nonviolent protest,” responded Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-FL). “People who use this type of despicable language should not be leading anyone.”

Pretty much what the title says

Tate is currently facing several legal investigations in Romania and the U.K. for rape and child sex trafficking charges. In recent comments, he has said men who enjoy heterosexual sex purely for pleasure (rather than for creating children) are actually gay. He has also said that women belong in the home, are men’s property, and bear responsibility for when they are raped.

Near the end of last month, hackers reportedly said they were able to access The Real World’s data through a site “vulnerability” — they described the site’s cybersecurity as “hilariously insecure.” The hackers then gained access to the site’s 221 public and 395 private chat servers and also “to upload emojis, delete attachments, crash everyone’s clients, and temporarily ban people,” the group said in a statement shared by The Daily Dot.

One chatroom user’s comments complained about the “LGBTQ agenda,” and others complained that the chat servers are “useless” due to “all the spam.”

I have met a couple of them in real life, and a few I have met online. The sample is not significant enough to draw any conclusions about their point of view and background.

I am more than interested in your opinions about the personality and political makeup of people who express this type of pro-C bigotry.

Folks, let me share some random observations with you, because I can't wrap my mind around those.

1. People have Zoom, Teams, Slack, Discord, Messenger, Telegram, and Viber, all happily installed on their phones at the same time. When you then invite them to Matrix they are like "Is this necessary? Why install yet another one of those?"

2. People who use Chrome by default without ad blockers, and you just hint there is a massive intelligence and surveillance operation are quick to respond that "I am getting this services for free, so it is fine to give something back" [^1].

3. People thinking that OSS is not secure enough for their devices. Surprise surprise, it is the exact same people who fall for obvious scams and their devices are ad-ridden, bloated horrors that have not been updated in a million years, but they think that Libre Office will break their computer and lose their emails.

4. People thinking that privacy and anonymity enthusiasts are shady freaks who want to go live in the woods and possibly terrorists. There is a slightly insane take here that we are against technology because we refuse to "just" install an app to make our lives easier[^2].

So they do not complain about being exploited and disrespected, while ripped off and offered crap services, as long it is a capitalist corporation shaking them down with vendor lock-in and network effects. They are grateful even. But just the idea of installing a single free/libre OSS app or extension to protect their privacy is a red flag and pushes their buttons big time, even for just suggesting it.

So, what are your own examples of anti-OSS stupidity, and how do you explain its prevalence in society?

[^1]: It is how quick they are in responding that way, which makes me think that the idea is already crystalized in their minds, by some "anti-OSS" discourse.

[^2]: But just installing a Matrix client is a big deal.

There was that John Stewart interview with Sarah Smarsh. That was a pain to watch, but the gist was that "we didn't pander to the American rural working class identity".

I felt weird about this framing of working class, which seems to mean the low-brow identity. "Oh sorry there, we were mistaken in thinking that NPR is par to Fox News". And now, what exactly Democrats? Are you going to cater to anti-intellectuals to get votes? You know like fascists do? So they will try to take a page out of Trump's book, but they are doomed because they can't do it as well as fascists do. There is a chasm between that (whatever is called...) NPR discourse and the pre-industrial dogmas and prejudice. That's why everybody says that even logical arguments do not work the same way with them, as we have seen time and again. They just were never modern, if you get my meaning.

I also read these politico articles. They go into many areas, but I want to focus on the identity thing, since this is the second hint in my feed about it. On the one hand they say "you know what, how we missed that, rural bigots are also an identity", on the other hand they say "we might have focused too much on identity". So which one it is m'fers?

The idea that the working class rural America is a forgotten identity is really weird to me. I was apalled by the fact (cited in one of the two articles) Harris refers to all the different sets of oppressed people as "the groups". The "groups" are consequential because simply they are not the dominant group. All this is gaslighting because the Democrats now say, yes the cisgender straight Caucasian uneducated transphobic male is also an identity, and we should cater to him too. Which is too similar to MRA incel shit to take seriously.

Then, I don't even see black, brown, woman, trans, gay, intersex, as identities, rather than inherent features of people. The meanings they have are due to societal groupings alone. And you bet they have been political in the past and they are as hell political now. Anti-identitarian leftists, leftists who split "identity" from "class consciousness" by default seem weird to me in that effect, because for example slavery was a mode of exploitative production, ownership and enslavement of women was integral in pre-industrial economic systems. This "laborist" sterilization of the working class definition reduces a snapshot of British 19th century capitalism to the canon of analysis for every historical period and every type of social stratification? How do you even approach other type of societies entirely, like tribal societies? Like marxist anthropologists tried to and ended up with all kinds of upgrades to marxist theory, but some people do not want to hear about it because of purity.

This leads to paradox, when on one hand you say "wage labor is like modern slavery" but then you ditch all analyses that explore the long aftermath of actual slavery in society, or the deep roots that oppresion of women has in society including labor relations. As if the fact that modern American society has nerfed the feminist, civil rights, and gay liberation movements by providing an inclusivity capitalist narrative, is itself the true essence and historical origin of these groups historical movements and demands. Some go as far as rejecting the concept of human rights on supposedly marxist and/or antiimperialist premises.

This way you just erase decades of movements, activist, and scholarship, because race and gender has been branded to you as a neoliberal smokescreen, but I can't take serious an analysis like that.

To get back to the original topic, Democrats are doomed if they want to start catering to the low-brow rural population. Especially coining this demographic as yet another identity is preposterous and ridiculous. This is rock bottom for representative democracy of the late stage "politician marketing" flavor. And from a strategic perspective, the fascists have long beaten them to catering to this demographic, and such obvious, after the fact, flattery will only worsen the results, even if they decide to be machiavelian about it.

So much for the Democrats, RIP, start organizing at the local level, and don't forget that working class means strictly you are exploited for surplus value, and you can't understand this without intersectionality. Rather than "identity politics", race and gender are historical components of worker exploitation, and sticking to a naive definition of the working class does little more than undoing the collective history of these movements.

Last but not least, it seems that blaming a specific identity is trending, and that would be trans people. We get several Democrat lawmakers speaking out the same ignorant shit as conservative conspiracy nutjobs. I won't go in depth here, but this is just scapegoating. Not to mention, all those who complain about identity politics they either think trans acceptance is "too much", or upon inquiry they also oppose gay marriage and are just centrist bigots. This new wave of Democrat anti-trans scapegoating only helps normalize Republican misinformation and bring it to the mainstream.

The two lines of news show that Democrats want to cater to the the straight white man and throw other groups under the bus, because this is just political marketing. They need the people to get the votes and serve their own fucking lobbies. Have no doubt about it. If they lose elections over Black Lives Matter and trans rights, they will move the goal posts more and more to the right, until they are indistinguishable from fascists. I was not with the camp against Harris vote on the election, but gauging Democrats behavior after their loss, I eventually think that people were right to shit on them, even at the cost of a fascist dictatorship in the US.

I am interested in a community of people of faith who are at the same time on the political left, particularly anarchism, and lgbtq+ inclusion, particularly transgender. I am kinda sick and tired of atheists harassing everyone religious. I don't care much about the philosophy surrounding it, it is just that their collective behavior is arguably harassment, not a bit different to typical transphobic harassment about delusions etc. I believe that freedom of religious belief is a very basic right for people of all convictions. At the moment there is a huge divide: religious lgbtq+ people who are also anarchist (and might have been ostracized by their religious community on top of everything else) have no place to go without facing atheist harassment, and this is how there is no place to discuss faith together with politics and identity. So, here goes, I want to start this discussion with people who would like to see sth like this happening.

Recently some group published an interactive, javascript based, website, to graphically explore data broker companies. This is just one group doing similar research work in different fields. I applaud the cause, but I take issue with the format.

An organization, that is, or group that frequently needs to provide structured data. In turn, developers might want said data, in order to deliver apps.

Interactive websites seem flaky to me, since no one guarantees they will still be there two years from now. I think it is only natural that groups doing important work would do a great service to communities if they served a RESTful or GraphQL API, depending on the complexity of the data.

But even in this case, when the group stops serving the API let alone be coerced to stop, or access to the API is blocked, this great service will be discontinued. Obviously the raw data must be shared for this to work.

Lately I was thinking about these edge cases. Journalists or activists doing this type of work may lack the sophistication to structure the data in useful ways. They probably do the journalist work and then have some developer they either hire, or is part of the group, make the important backend decisions, including structuring the raw data.

Regarding the retention of the data in case the group disbands or goes away, there are some existing solutions like torrenting or IPFSing the datasets. Both methods can help the data be online forever, but what about content integrity and versions? They would still need a static webpage or something to provide the hashes, and IPFS is by its design not very well suited for versioning.

There are no clean cut guidelines on how to go about this, or at least, what is a handful of good ways to go about this, so that a current or future group can rely on to deliver this type of work.

Another idea that popped into my head is that the ecosystems of repositories and package managers are very mature in all major distributions. Structured data could be uploaded to distro repositories (including FDroid and the like), just like any other software with underlying data structures. Hashing and versioning would be then natively taken care of by existing package managers. But the question still remains, what data structure is the best for this kind of relational data, and what kind of API should best be exposed to the user.

So, if you feel like it, I would like to hear your thoughts on:

1. Skills and preparations required by investigative teams to publish structured data to the world.
2. Assessment of the torrenting and IPFS solutions to ensure recovery of the data in perpetuity.
3. Assessment of the RESTful or GraphQL format to disseminate investigative data.
4. Assessment of using established package managers and repositories to disseminate investigative data.
5. Ideas on what should be eventually exposed to the user, who can be assumed to be a developer as well.
6. Further comments.

I would be glad to get some feedback on these thoughts.

Archived