That’s because the US rebuilt Germany, as a barrier to the USSR.

if just a handful of idealists

If they are so few why does their vote matter that much? Futile attempt to undermine those who disagree with oneself on the basis of statistical sums.

suck it up

This arguments goes both ways. You say I suck it up, I say you suck it up, I don’t put my friends’ life/well-being on the line, for the sake of some half-baked moderation bias one considers self-evident truth.

the third-party purist who made their heart sing.

This is not what happened. All analyses point to that Harris failed to mobilize progressive voters. But this is not a discussion we are having right now, I have made my point very clear in this post including the contributions of others underneath.

So this is a dishonest ad hominem argument, that contradicts itself. I expect it to be thought of as refuted, and one should not resurrect it as per the anti-sealioning policy.

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 purism.
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”, from the era of Creative Commons, Independent Media Center, and the Internet Archive, 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.

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 your logical inconsistency and dishonesty) 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 conservativism.

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

Someone should tell Mozilla about the AI-sized environmental concern in their browser?

It’s called offset /s

With no intention of stirring the pot, this sounds just like the pre-election arguments in favor of Democrats.

The last voice that cares even slightly about our privacy will be gone.

The emphasis here should be on “even slightly” rather than the dramatic effect of “the last voice”.

I mean, if this slice approaches zero, then why it is better to stay with Firefox rather than moving on to more radical solutions?

I don’t actually believe there’s a way for the Left to pitch trans issues

Then fuck the Left, I guess?

doesn’t alienate our progressive base

Then fuck “our” “progressive” base?

If the “Left” had spent a fraction of the resources to match the vile torrent of anti-trans propaganda, the situation would be different, with regard to both of your points about pitching trans issues to the progressive base.

Like, John Oliver and Jon Stewart showed exactly how a mainstream progressive media can combat anti-trans demagoguery by Republicans, not to mention Scientific American, the American Psychological Association, and other bodies. You probably weren’t listening because if you don’t think this is a way to “pitch” then you might have been listening to other sources that make the matter unpalatable, like “biological males in female sports” and what have you.

So I take it as a given that you were listening to the wrong sources about it, and you are at least partially anti-trans yourself. On the other hand, you might not be listening to all the analyses after the fact that point to other issues as to why Democrats lost the election. See for example this thread, this comic strip, and this thread also.

In a nutshell, Harris did already try to appeal to the transphobes and she failed. So this should be end of discussion. I am not discussing compromise of the human rights of any group in order to appease to either moderate or extreme bigots.

I already said no. We have a totally different mind model here. You think that there is a static majority with crystalized opinions, a conservative inertia that we have to adapt to. I believe that the revolutionary powers compete with fascist propaganda to win over the majority, who is bound to different material interests.

When this deceptively mild approach of appeasing the majority used, it legitimizes that the fascists are somehow in the right to a degree.

That is what I cannot stand about centrists. I am an anarchist, there is no middle ground between me and, well, a number of things that are utterly unacceptable. There is no middle ground to nazism, and corporatism, for example. By upholding these standards, I am dragging society towards absolute equality.

With your appeasement approach, you legitimize fascists, which is called the ratchet effect. Without revolutionary powers dragging people leftwards, centrist appeasement pushes the mainstream rightward.

Having said that, the proposed example is completely out of historical context, and is wrong on so many levels. I can’t go into all the details right now, but the very idea of “throwing homosexuals in the mix” is preposterous given the historical context.

Let me direct you to the fact that the British Empire paid reparations to slave owners, but even to this day if you try to mention Reparations to the Caribbean and African nations you will be met with vile harassment from hordes of nazi trolls. So I cannot educate you in Marxist political economy right now, but you comparing abolitionism to gay rights is comparing apples and oranges, and the equivalence is unwarranted.

Only under the concurrent prism of anti-wokeism these are deemed comparable, from the viewpoint of being “not cisgender heteronormative germanic/anglo/saxon Christian male”. So you would not be bringing this even remotely up if you were not ever so slightly affected by anti-woke propaganda yourself.

this keeps playing out across the world

Sorry, I won’t cater to the anti-woke majority. They are shaped by decades of well-funded fascist propaganda and complicit media and social media outlets.

This is how “woke” was even introduced in our vocabulary in the first place.

These efforts were never matched in breadth and throughput by those on the anti-anti-woke side. Saying that Democrats should cater more to the anti-woke lynching mob does not cut it. It is the quintessence of the ratchet effect. It only leads to greater success rate of said propaganda efforts.

So to translate your argument, the fascist propaganda apparatus indeed has shaped an anti-woke majority, but leftists should not yield to them under no conditions: it will only normalize bigotry. Plus they already did lower the tones on trans issues. It did not win them the elections. Biden did take on the bigots with pro-trans policies and he had won, on the other hand.

So what leg does your argument even stand on except sharing some of the bigotry? We should push the narrative more and more towards equality, not conceding that absolute equality is utopian. The more you annoy the bigots the better.

The Democrats never addressed the propaganda apparatus that brought us to this. And now we should focus more on organizing rather than retrospectively catering to transphobes and racists to win elections. That is why I think your argument is despicable and comes from a position of privilege. If it was your rights/survival on the line and not someone else’s you wouldn’t be suggesting political trade-offs.

Right enough, you are doing this right now: Because your life is at threat now, you say “shiiit we should have sacrificed the trans pawn to win the political chess after all”. Guess what, this is the dog-eat-dog mentality that fascism instills in people, having its way already.

The answer is solidarity and organizing, not trade-offs.

Wow, this should be downvoted more.

conceded on say trans issues or whatever

What if we conceded on your rights or whatever?

Plus the idea that trans rights lost Democrats the election is ridiculous. There were zero trans speakers in the DNC, and Harris did cater to transphobes by saying she will go with state laws.

So the question remains, who else are you willing to throw under the bus because you think that their rights are too edgy?

Go-slowism leads to do-nothingism - Malcolm X

Utilitarian is not what you think it is. Your comment just shows a complete lack of empathy for people living in the same social space as you.

I think people who think that the rights of any group’s rights is “too much” to appease and appeal to a society of oppressors are complicit to the oppression.

This is not a matter of opinion, rather than centralized control of information.

Musk can shadow ban you, for example, nobody granted him that power except he was able to by it.

This type of social media are a power structure that is despotic in nature, and it is deeply problematic for democracies.

It is not like a nation state banning a religious minority or an anarchist site. That would be censoring of opinions.

In the case of Xitter, it is Musk and a team of political advertising engineers doing the censorship. So they are worse than Nazi apologists for example. The latter we only anticipate they will impose censorhip (let alone murder) once they are in power.

Xitter has that power already at orders of magnitude above what traditional media outlets have. He controls the flow of information. (And he made it a fucking nazi bar right enough).

But I will grant you that we should not expect nation states to ban Xitter. We should aim for its destruction.

Yes, you missed how social media algorithms work, having captivated the attention of whole nations, and carefully control every bit of information that pass in front of your eyes, then some billionaire buying said mechanism and taking part in the government he helped elected, then threatening the nations that have banned him that they will lose the next elections. Did I miss anything?

Real democracies need to shield themselves from this kind of corporate interference, yet most people don’t even understand how it works, or why Cambridge Analytica was a big hit, or where are these experts now and how they are making a living.

As for your original question: Musk helps oppressive states enforce censorship on his platform .

His passion for free speech is only for white supremacists and conspiracy theorists now running rampant on his platform (there is a John Oliver segment about it).

He opposed an anti-hate-speech law in Ireland, although the law makes clear that it is still allowed to express unfavorable opinions and offend others, but forbids incitement to violence.

This shows he is not interested in defending “unfavorable reasoning” against the “woke” inquisitors, rather than advancing hate-speech and white supremacist causes in particular. This is not only a hypothesis, but a reported outcome of his actions with X/Twitter, which is now a nazi bar.

Don’t forget Russel’s tolerance paradox: If you tolerate nazis in order to defend freedom (of speech, political association, and the like), they will overtake the state apparatus and verbot freedoms for everyone, not only speech, but freedom of life as well.

He is doing exactly that, not only permitting, but promoting white supremacy, and at the same time treating the term “cisgender” for example as a slur.

This shows he is not all in for defending free-speech for all sides, but he is out to “destroy to woke mind virus” because it “stole his son from him”.

Musk is a nazi apologist, a big cry baby, and a media gatekeeper who enforces censorship both as a platform owner and as a service to totalitarian states.

He is a national security risk, according to Wired.