A few that I can think of: Rockhill, Smith, Enfu, Boer, Manoel, Foster, Cockshott, Shaikh.

We lost Losurdo pretty recently, and he was IMO one of the best of the last few decades.

You can’t simply say “we must assume” as evidence.

Okay yeah you definitely didn’t read it. Large sections in that doc just before that are on phone number identifiers, NSLs, and 5-eyes countries, the US goverment pushing signal in privacy spaces… literally the reasons why signal isn’t trustworthy. Unless you can tell me what an NSL is, then I’ll assume you didn’t read it.

While there may be other US government requests they are not alllwed to disclose, they were legally required to provide the same information to the courts, and we can see what they provided.

Did you ignore the large section on NSLs? These come with a gag order, meaning its illegal for signal to notify their users about them being spied on.

In fact, they implemented “Sealed sender” in 2018 where they are not able to see who the message is being sent to.

This is a “just trust me” from signal, since neither of us have access to their centralized DB, but you also ignored two paragraphs down, where it showed that with message timestamps and recipient information, this would be trivial to find the real sender of a message, regardless of sealed sender. Again, actually open source software can’t say “just trust me” like signal can, we actually have to show code to prove it, and let people run that code in a private manner.

And sure, while the US government funds Signal, you know who else endorses it? Edward fucking Snowden. If anyone knows about secure messaging, it’s the man that physically removes the microphone and camera from his phones before using them.

Elon musk and jack dorsey also endorse signal. An endorsement means nothing, especially for centralized software based in a 5-eyes country.

Read the linked doc, because it’s clear you didn’t.

Signal is a centralized, US-based service which requires your phone number (thus your real identity, IE name and address), has social networking graphs of everyone you talk to, and must forward that information to the US government when asked, as well as (by law) not tell you that they’ve been asked to do so. During the Obama era, 60 NSLs were issued for this private information every single day.

People overlook its privacy concerns for the same reason they do with apple: it has a shiny interface and is easy to use, and makes people very attached to it. Behind all that, is a surveillance network that its creators have explicitly said they do not want it to be able to run in a decentralized, private manner.

It has a long history of privacy offenses below (such as refusing to publish its server’s source code for years, its reliance on other US tech services (amazon, google), US-government funding, and a US-defense-tank friendly administration) which get ignored or shouted down by many of those above. See the article below.

Why not signal.

Pretty much any alternative is better, as long as its not hosted in a five-eyes country, and especially if it doesn’t require phone numbers or real identities like signal does.

I personally have been using SimpleX for friends and real life contacts, and Matrix for larger more anonymous group chats.

For a good intro to unequal exchange, and imperialism in the modern era, without reading a larger book, here’s a really good article: John Smith - the GDP illusion

Yeah, the ACA was really a program to force people without insurance to pay private insurance companies, and on the other side they could no longer deny people. There was nothing progressive or positive about further entrenching this parasitic industry, and the ACA did nothing to reverse the trend of increasing healthcare costs.

It’s not just having a “command economy”, it’s in whose interest the economy is being commanded for. The PRC went through an intense anti-colonial / communist revolution to disempower the feudalists and reactionaries, and capture the state to bring it under a worker-peasant control.

If western nations want to repeat the success of the PRC, they need to repeat China’s steps from 1949. They would each need to go through violent revolutions to capture the state and overthrow bourgeois democracy. Otherwise, capitalists will still hold power, and their economies will be commanded to suit capitalist interests.

Competent vs incompetent managers of empire.

Any negative speech: especially harsh, slanderous or divisive, that provokes equally charged emotional responses.

One other thing I’d like to add: It’s not just that rage-inducing content is out there, that’s always been there. It’s that it gets rewarded by big tech, by making sure that highly responded content, gets pushed to the top.

Capitalist tech companies have an incentive to platform this content because it increases the on-site time, and their own popularity, to the detriment of their users mental health. It also helps them push pro-capitalist narratives that atomize and isolate people who should be united by a shared humanity and class status.

tbh we’re somewhat guilty of this in lemmy also, with the Active sort allowing new comments to bump posts to the top of feeds.

The only real way to fight it, is to keep an eye out for these toxic / combative threads and posters, and remove them if necessary. Since we don’t capitalist incentives to keep people on site or serve ads, it serves no benefit to keep rage-bait posters around.

It took me like a full minute too.

I realize its the aesthetic of that time, but so many of these are not too far away from a star trek command deck.

I love the oval or hexagonal-shaped front, and the bright, clearly comprehensible indicators :

I got banned from Hexbear for posting a video of BE calling out ChapoTrapHouse because they supported Platner. Being against Graham Platner a few months ago was akin to being an “anti-left utra”.

That doesn’t sound right. I don’t know the circumstances of your ban, but I don’t see anyone supporting imperialists like platner on hexbear, I would think it’d be bannable offense supporting him. Most marxist spaces don’t like BE because he’s an ultraleft who demonizes most socialist projects, and is also extremely twitter-poisoned and has cringy takes on other topics.

It’s quite literally because of BE that the entire US left had to steer clear of endorsing a genocidal Nazi US marines doing tours at Abu Graib.

You’re vastly overestimating the importance of some youtuber.

And it’s up to others to help Cuba. But sadly Cuba has been let down and international solidarity isn’t what it used to be.

We shouldn’t get too caught up in putting all hope in external saviors, it’s not the way any communist project has operated, including Cuba itself. They did the work to liberate themselves and free their country from US domination. They’ve already been through this before during the special period after the fall of the USSR, and will continue to modernize and do what’s necessary to be self-sufficient.

It’s an ultraleft tendency to demonize other socialist countries for “not doing enough” to help, usually demanding military intervention and getting sucked into quagmires and afghanistan-like traps. It’s not anyone’s place to demand intervention or what form it takes. The PRC is choosing to do economic, and not military intervention, to help Cuba. That’s their decision and its not for ultras to criticize.

Percentage / proportion over time is more pertinent for the term “transitioning” than absolute levels.

Yes they are. The proportion of clean to unclean energy is vastly increasing : https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/china/ . There is a green energy revolution for the past few decades.

Also compared to the world average, the PRC is at 42% clean to the world average of 43%, while the US is at 9%. See the article I posted below.

2001 - 2025:

From what I could find, the US has a miniscule amount of green energy, and its not increasing in proportion to fossil fuels like natural gas: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=62444

According to EIA data, the US is currently only ~9% clean energy sources, and 91% fossil fuels.

This is way behind the world average for clean energy, which is 43%, and the PRC’s which is 42% despite producing most of the consumer goods for the whole world.

Being anti-Israel and not apologizing for murderous imperialists like Platner is an extremely low bar (one that much of the compatible left in imperialist countries don’t clear, but still). I don’t recommend getting your politics from youtubers or streamers, but from actual Marxists / MLs. There are plenty out there doing great work, writing and organizing, who don’t spend all their time getting in pointless fights on twitter, and denouncing every socialist project.

BE is a twitter-poisoned ultraleft who denounces every socialist country : China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc. He has no materialist understanding of socialism and isn’t to be trusted on any topic just because he correctly opposes Israel.

From here:

Gawronski: But China, even if it’s remained socialist politically, is trying to move away from socialism economically. On the other hand, Cuba still seems to be solidly socialist. Isn’t it difficult to be the only socialist country when everything around you is changing?

Castro: I think China is a socialist country, and Vietnam is a socialist country as well. And they insist that they’ve introduced all the necessary reforms, precisely to stimulate development and to continue advancing towards the objectives of socialism. There are no chemically pure regimes or systems.

In Cuba, for example, we have many forms of private property. We have tens of thousands of landowners who own, in some cases, up to 45 hectares; in Europe they would be considered latifundistas. Practically all Cubans own their own homes and, what’s more, we are more than open to foreign investment. But none of this detracts from Cuba’s socialist character.

What’s certain is that we will never make the mistake of destroying the country to make something new. We will not make the mistake of plunging our country into chaos, into anarchy, to solve the problems we have, because that would be the only way to never solve them.

Optics

We shouldn’t concede defeats to the anti-communist witch hunters in any field, especially language. To do otherwise would be implicitly accepting their worldview as the correct one. Instead we should dismantle the weak supports for their anti-communism / anti-marxism in the first place, which isn’t difficult for any person whose attention can be drawn to the mass suffering capitalism causes.

The US is going all in on the doomed oil and coal economy, and going to continue to use the pursuit of oil as a cause for war, until its too weak to do so. Meanwhile the PRC and countries allied to it are transitioning to the green energy future: solar, wind, nuclear fission and fusion.

The long-term trend will be that the countries that are able to harness more energy, will outpace those that don’t. So soon it’ll be the US and Europe playing catchup to Asia, Africa, and Latin America.