This is a whole lot of conspiracy bs with no sources provided.
It’s not a conspiracy, it’s out in the open. I don’t know what claims you would want sources for. Feel free to ask.
But it includes the usual keywords “the system”, “design”, and “ruling class” so you can get your upvotes from like-minded fellows in your bubble.
You might notice that this is a public community on a non-socialist instance. So, the opposite of what you are saying. Personally, I expected a mix of responses.
Have you considered that politics and economics is a little bit more complicated and a lot of gears make the machine?
Complexity vs. simplicity means nothing in this topic. What matters is identifying dominant powers and the mechanisms by which they function. Many of those mechanisms are somewhat complex, though not that complex that anyone can’t read about them and understand them if they actually want to.
Have you read any socialist theory?
But “the elite pulling the strings” is much easier to understand and you conveniently get an enemy.
Class conflict is actually something that emerges from base social interactions that constitute the primary economic system: how and why we work. The dominant class does have more realized power, by definition, but it is still subordinate to the mechanisms of the economic system itself.
For example, you cannot simply choose to be a nice business owner that pays everyone as much as they deserve. You will, eventually, get outcompeted by the business owners that will keep pay lower and profits higher. While small businesses are still commonly owned by petty tyrants, their loss to big box stores is an example of how a larger mass of profits can be leveraged to destroy the competition (initial low prices), then using monopoly status to earn even more profit by cutting wages and increasing prices.
The political class is just the functionaries of the state that serves the dominant class’s interests. You can call them elite because they personally get a bigger piece of the pie and have power on paper, but they are several rings lower on the hierarchy.
Learning media criticism, history, political economy, and how past groups have organized takes a decent amount of time. Namely, socialist theory. So does unlearning the ideological falsehoods that cloud our ability to think and investigate. And so does recognizing what builds power, what actions are effective, what cooption looks like and how to counter it, etc. So I don’t recommend just doing one thing, but instead working from where you are to be closer to a stronger consciousness. I suppose the closest thing to a single recommendation I can give is humility and curiosity around all of the aforementioned topics and to give people grace IRL when you begin working with an organization.
If you are interested in reading recommendations and info about your thoughts on politics I’d be happy to think of something you might appreciate. Or if you feel like you’re ready for action and are in the US I can recommend some orgs that are reasonably good to “start” with (many stay in them and that is also fine!).
Congress is an organ of the ruling class and always has been. When they (rarely) do something seemingly against ruling class interests, it is still a strategem to best keep the capitalism boat afloat (it tries to sink every 5-10 years).
Sure, Congress is corrupt, but it always has been. The system is working more or less as designed. And if you want to oppose this design, the system is also designed to fight you to the death. And funneling all of your capacity into sheepdog voting is how your masters tell you you should oppose them. So if you want to oppose this system, you must become informed as to how it functions and join up with like-minded individuals to develop actually effective means of resistance.
Privacy is a shield. It is useful to protect against a threat. It doesn’t have to perfectly protect against the threat. But the important thing is to have a threat model and construct your privacy concerns around it.
Ask yourself what you believe will be a threat to you and then criticize those beliefs. Use this self-critical process to decide on your first idea of a threat model.
The only surefire form of privacy is to not store information digitally in the first place, ideally not at all.
But sometimes we do have information that needs storing. And in that case privacy requires that you control the data at rest and encrypt the data at transit. All free cloud services can snoop your data if they really want to. If you value privacy, minimize your use of them.
You should assume that every social network is ride with spying, both for corporate and governmental purposes. For example, the main reason TikTok is currently getting threatened with a banning is because they have a less fed-friendly algorithm, so large masses of people are actually seeing the horrors in Gaza. If you watch the nightly news, you won’t see that content. If you go to YouTube, you won’t see that content. You also will barely see it on Reddit (which literally hired someone that worked at the CIA to be their community manager person lol). Do your best to dissociate your online activity from your personal identity. Use a good VPN that you pay for with cash or a proxy system like a voucher that can’t be traced back to you. Use burner email accounts. Etc etc.
I think you are confused. The dismissive behavior was not to just give advice and I pointed out what it actually was. And it is not dismissive to meet people where they are at. I think you’re now reaching for some fairly basic defensive behaviors (straw men and even the “I’m rubber your glue” kind of retorts) so I’m going to disengage.
Please do try to interact with others with more empathy.
It is very difficult to run an email provider and not get banned by the others. Google, Microsoft, and Apple control the US market, for example. If they decide your domain is spam, you suddenly can’t email anyone with a Gmail or Hotmail or Apple account. Avoiding getting banned means you have to regulate your own outgoing emails very carefully, rate-limit them just right, and yet also build up a reputation of trustworthiness by sending a lot of emails that don’t get marked as spam.
The only privacy-secure way to do your email would be DIY but this risks getting banned like… all the time.
Personally, I recommend having your own domain and setting up MX records to a reliable email provider that is not one of the big ones and ideally offers some kind of theoretical inbox protection (please note that they could always still read everything if they just copied all incoming messages to another database as well).
Email is itself not very secure. You can use GPG to make it better but most people won’t know how to receive your messages or send secure ones. For security, I recommend using a dedicated e2e chat service or in-person communication.
Oh that’s totally valid. Sometimes we just need to talk and receive the validation we deserve. I’m sorry we don’t have a society where you have people you can talk to like this instead.
I haven’t personally used any of the offline open source models but if I were you that’s where I’d start looking. If they can be run inside a virtual machine, you can even use a firewall to ensure it never leaks info.
Any online service into which you enter information has the capability to save that information for its own purposes. This includes all the people entering personal or identifying or really any information into “AI” products.
Given that it’s not even particularly useful, I recommend just not using “AI” if you’re not sure how to protect yourself.
Almost nothing. There was no public reaction countering Snowden’s targeting with US state violence, violence that forced him to flee, let alone any forced reduction in domestic spying or secret police activity. Both have probably increased. Nevertheless, self-serving narratives of being “the city on a hill”, a bastion of freedom and democracy, stay intact. It confirmed the biases of people who already knew this was likely happening, and those same people continue to be marginalized by an easily-propagandized public.
Traditionally, people like myself get killed due to bad opsec.