It’s less a dogwhistle and more just explicit symbolism, just substituting the swastika so that it’s not a swastika.

This was interesting. I know two of the small communist sites I use are hosted on these services so it’s good to know how stable the ground is.

I am quickly fragged by space-aged weaponry, provided I don’t explode from the strange atmosphere. Best case scenario isn’t good, food seemingly doesn’t exist.

I’ll call for their manager and attack the manager specifically. Is there a term for that yet?

Security is a cat and mouse game. There’s always a way to steal from anyone, especially a convenience-oriented business.

The best deal is always free. So, I’d rather inconvenience the conglomerate haute-booj than the petit-booj, even if it’s only a few dollars.

Huh, I’ll have to look for a mute button, thanks for the hint. Mine keeps yelling at me to finish unloading then churns out a nonsense marketing phrase. Utterly annoying.

That isn’t a useful definition of racism. It’s sounds alright, although it’s ultimately idealistic, it doesn’t hold up when applying to material circumstances.

As for why people think having different rules for different groups is good, I think one of the simplest ways to sum it up is: Equality of treatment will not give equality of outcome until there is already equality of conditions. Treating all people the same isn’t fair in the real world.

As a thought-experiment to demonstrate: If we have two people, one has $200 savings after rent and the other has $10,000,000, you can’t make them more equal or make the money more distributed by treating them the same: if society wants to reduce poverty (which is obviously a good thing for society, to have less people in poverty), it makes some sense to supply the poorer of the two with money, but it makes no sense to supply the richer: they already have more money than 90% of people! There isn’t a moral or ethical benefit in giving them more money, they don’t need the money as much as others do, it’s not how to achieve fairness or equality.

The generalised point of that being, if a group is disadvantaged and the status quo is keeping them disadvantaged, solving that will require special treatment. Treating Indigenous people the same way as always just keeps the systemic racist status quo, and to solve that, the Government will inevitably have to treat Indigenous people differently. That’s a consequence of trying to create a more equal outcome in an unequal environment.

The same goes for other types of disadvantage, of course. I am obviously not trying to imply that all people who aren’t indigenous have all the advantage they need! Ultimately, everyone who is not a mega-multi-millionaire is disadvantaged, but we can’t fix that all in one change. We have to start somewhere.

No, it is not just racism. There would have been an element of that, but it’s certainly far from the main reason. That idea is contradicted by the facts that a very significant portion of Indigenous people and Indigenous activists voted against it.

Linking to this useful post, explaining why various progressive groups were against it.

You’ve actually explained one of the reasons many Indigenous people rejected this: it is just feedback that could simply be ignored by the Senate. That’s powerless, and we’ve seen from royal commissions into Aboriginal deaths in custody that the feedback does get ignored. Why accept such a bad deal, pretending it’s a victory or progress?

The Black Peoples Union interview with ABC explains why they took the ‘no’ position.

Relevant: the Black Peoples Union position on the referendum (interview on ABC).

An aggregation of written statements collected from socialist, anarchist and radical Indigenous groups, showing the diversity of thought on the matter: http://old.reddit.com/r/AustralianSocialism/comments/161r8r1/megathread_of_leftist_statements_on_the_voice/

(PS: don’t just take all the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ summaries in that list at face value, a couple of them are misinterpretations or oversimplications)

A beautiful slick theme, and Xonotic in the launchpad. This desktop looks like a good time!

I would personally try and make the window panels darker to match all the parts seen in the first image.

Thanks for the detailed reply :)

I agree with all your points, it is misleading and potentially harmful to use a strong term like spyware to refer to all of those things, without further context. I guess I’m still used to a couple of tech circles where people would jokingly throw ‘spyware’ around to describe anything and everything, so I didn’t realize how misleading it really is. Especially when it’s applied to things like automatic updates, which only the most extreme security models consider more of a risk than a security feature.

That website has a very strict, unusual interpretation of ‘spyware’. Even if all the telemetry and unprompted connections made by Mozilla Firefox are in good faith and legitimate features, that website still labels it ‘spyware’, as it is revealing unnecessary information without your consent.

The same website gives Tor Browser a ‘Not Spyware’ rating, as it (necessarily!) removed the default features of Firefox that concerned them.

Side note - I think you may have accidentally marked your account as a ‘bot account’ in the settings.

It’s Chromium-based, so I don’t understand how it could be “configured in the same way”.

That website is […] full of verifiably false information

Could you please provide and example or two? I wish to verify it, since I didn’t notice any last time I checked the site.

they act as if any and all [unprompted] connections a browser makes are automatically bad and “spying”.

They’re very clear that this is their approach (bold text on the home page). Even if you disagree with their definition, that doesn’t make the site bad. And there are many valid situations where a threat model should be this strict, consider anti-government activists in any country.

They even claim that Tor Browser is a “spyware”.

It says “Not Spyware”. https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/tor

Firefox gets a high rating on default configuration.

The next line explains that with custom configuration, it becomes Not Spyware.

Maybe we will make groundbreaking leaps in cosmetic surgery. Or have Jackass-style elderly disguises become popular.

‘Authoritarianism’ is a bullshit vague idealist concept that can’t be linearized into ‘more than’, ‘less than’, ‘most’ or ‘least’, and make any sense.

The USA throw people in prison for decades and enslave them for being a victim of the drug trade. They have one of the largest proportions of imprisoned population in the world.

They also allow socialists to own guns and propagandize, to a larger degree than most countries.

Liberalism is complex, contradictory and idealist, so terms like ‘authoritarianism’ are basically meaningless to apply to the real world.

There’s a big difference between banning addictive industries and oppression. There’s a big difference between ‘a government not letting people do something’ and ‘oppression’. There might be a case that this way of eliminating tobacco usage, by just making an addictive substance illegal, can be cruel if there isn’t adequate social support alongside it, but banning smoking by itself isn’t cruel, malicious or arbitrary.

I think there are some reasonable arguments for not criminalizing tobacco, and that this is a silly ineffective way to approach a chemically-and-socially addictive issue, but it is harmful to health for the user and others, society and therefore economics. And this can’t be rationalized away by ‘it’s someone’s own free will’ when it’s chemically-addictive, socially-ingrained and still being marketed to vulnerable teens. And, keep in mind, the medical costs of this are socialised, so it’s not like the person smoking pays for all the consequences. It’s a systematic, non-trivial problem that significantly affects people who do not choose to partake.

With all that said, fuck the ‘war on drugs’ style of criminalization. It just creates an illegal market and fills prisons, and in some countries with a similar system to the US, creates a legalized form of mass slave labour.