Also worth pointing out: referendum campaign has less strict spending limits compared to parliamentary elections so this is one more way (on top of utilizing state media and state owned enterprises) that PiS can outspend competition in upcoming elections which are held on the same day.

Don’t get me wrong, I fully understand that a fascist is not the same thing as a communist. But they’re equally despicable.

Fascism is inherently anti-democratic, communism isn’t. I know communism is a shorthand for stalinism, maoism and other totalitarian ideologies that use socialist facade (similar to national socialism) but it’s worth to make an effort not to discredit the whole idea.

People half-joke that coming to Fediverse is easy, all you need to do is select a provider like you do with e-mail.

In case of Lemmy this omits the part where you have to block dozens of communities because they shill for genocidal regimes and you can’t block them and their users wholesale using instances. You also have to be on a lookout for trolls that coordinate on those instances and use alts from other instances. If you aren’t careful enough your experience might be akin to a conspiracy Facebook group but obviously it’s users fault.

Mastodon doesn’t have this issue despite using same Activity Pub framework.

Kbin doesn’t have it.

It’s Lemmy developers and instances that somehow ended up with staggering amount of tankie trolls, to the extent that exceeds even alt-right trolls on Reddit.

Telling people to start their own instances is acknowledging that the issue is so widespread that there are no instances with sane policies.

They’re A-D masquerading because it has some plausible deniability.

My criticism of that idea is also documented there.

But defederating Threads was fine lol.

We need to stop recommending Lemm.ee to newcomers, it’s hostile to normal folks.

It’s the dishonesty that makes me despise those guys the most. How could you dislike them when they’re so civil in their shilling for genocidal regimes, eh?

Modern day tankies are indistinguishable from fascists since they shill for fascist shitholes like Russia and China. I don’t care about intent, everyone can lie about it. You can’t lie about outcomes.

https://szmer.info/post/777626

If you’re at the extreme bottom there’s little chance to move upwards in capitalism but it’s comforting to have some undesirables who have it even worse than you.

Religion is not the goal of conservatives, it’s a tool to preserve hierarchy in the society. Capitalism is another tool that achieves that.

The people that aren’t wealthy but are conservative benefit from hierarchy enforced by religion. It ensures that they’re not on the bottom of society - that place is intended for various minorities.

This client looks interesting but community groups seem to be very WIP at the moment. Posts in those groups are sorted by community (some arbitrary amount is pulled), then requested order (new, hot etc) and it takes ages to load so it’s probably not very threaded. Regardless, this looks promising and I’ll keep my eye on it - thanks!

TikTok is absolutely scummy in how they nag you for access rights to phone features / data but I don’t think there’s a way to do this without adding third “Popular” tab next to Following and For You.

If they had this as a setting then it’d have to stay this way. Industry standard is to withhold such setting and constantly default to algorithmic page in the attempt to trap you there or make you tired of switching feed constantly.

I prefaced this with disclaimer that’s a personal experience. It’s probably hard to measure because people aren’t that eager to self report tax avoidance.

It is government’s interest though. Hence extensive AML regulations for example.

Yeah, their algo is fun most of the time but it’s easy to fall into a bubble and detach from reality. It’s also quite transparent how often you’re subjected to annoying A/B testing. I’m glad this is happening because it gives users ability to see general view and get more control over their experience.

Building complex systems involving humans is hard because humans are flawed. The best thing we’ve come up so far are systems involving extensive checks and balances to prevent thing happening too rapidly and without necessary oversight and even then it’s a tricky part to balance.

For the record, I’m not for entirely cashless society but organisations that are cash heavy have proven to be source of many headaches. There is a balance to be found on thresholds and barring some types of businesses from using cash and where digital money transfer is required. Banks and other money transfer entities will have to deal with scenarios where malicious parties will try to obfuscate their intent outside of those thresholds.

This is all technically true but cash is not the answer.

Right now there are so many easily accessible ways for governments to spy on people (cell phone geolocation, call metadata monitoring) that I’m not sure that for the purposes you think of you aren’t screwed already anyway. From this perspective fight for cash use becomes a bit theoretical.

The only people that I know of personally that are strongly for cash are either people that frequently skirt around taxes (“minor” stuff like car repair shops) and unfortunately conspiracy nuts. Genuine privacy oriented people exist but realistically the majority will be there for selfish reasons.

The societal cost of tax evasion, money laundering and financing organisations that legally require transparency (political orgs, NGOs etc) are massive and immediate.

What we really need is strong oversight of institutions, government transparency, rule of law and healthy democracy. Those are the things you want to enshrine in your constitution.

It’s not an Islamic State takeover but it’s hard to imagine they won’t be taking advantage of chaos and Niger losing French & US military aid.

I’m amazed at the lengths tankies will go to argue for overthrowing democratically governments and supplanting one colonial power for another one that comes packaged with Wagner and Boko Haram.

It’s easy - tax evasion, money laundering, secret financing of things you wouldn’t want others to know. All perfectly fine reasons to fight for.