QuietCupcake [any, they/them]

I tried it with Tor browser on a standard OS, hoping I’d get a similar result to what you got using Tor on Whonix, etc. It fed me a line about how my information was still shared but because javascript is turned off, it can’t tell me what that information is. More like it won’t tell me, because amiunique.org and other sites like this do so just fine. I know I can turn js on and reload, but part of the point would be to see the difference in info shared with it on vs off but this place can’t test that.

Did you win? Sounds like you probably did if he got so about it. On the other hand, just because one of them throws a hissy fit at the drop of a hat or gets physically threatening doesn’t mean they failed to get their way.

I knew and had to spend a lot of time with a former small business owner who lost her ~100 employee business and ended up living the worst nightmare of any capitalist: being a wage worker. Having to exist on the other side of the class divide and get exploited rather than do the exploitation went a long way in humbling her I think, though it happened a decade before I met her. But she still remained one of the most petulant people, totally unable to admit to having any fault or being wrong in any way and was always just so childish for the most asinine reasons. (Though to be fair I’ve also known life long proles with similar issues).

Small business owners really do put the “petty” in the term petty bourgeoisie.

lemmy.world has the bread-and-circuses that you’re looking for.

Yes. Along with all the rabid pro-western propaganda, chauvanism, unexamined privilege, and the insufferable confidence in mistaking naivete and ignorance for common knowledge. You know, all the stuff that should make you feel right at home if all you’re looking for is a reddit 2.0. Then again, there are a number of instances to choose from if that’s what you’re looking for, but .world remains the classic example.

Fennec is pretty good too.

Oh noes! You wouldn’t want to have your misconceptions challenged, you had better run along now.

oh, good call. I didn’t know about that, thanks.

I don’t directly use youtube anymore to watch youtube videos, ever. It’s all through the frontends. No ads period, runs smoother, and none of google’s bullshit.
https://yewtu.be/
https://inv.nadeko.net/
https://invidious.nerdvpn.de/

I actually have a redirect extension set up on my browser so that any youtube link just automatically redirects to one of those. But if you don’t want to do that, and just want to use one when you’re having trouble with some particular video, just look at the url and copy-paste the watch?v=******** part of it onto the end of one of those^.

I see someone already listed a bunch of hexbear comms, maybe as a half joke, but seriously some of them are the most active and fun if you’re a lefty. But a couple non-hexbear comms worth suggesting are

!piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
&
!privacy@lemmy.ml

Perhaps also !memes@lemmy.ml if you want not just leftist memes but also the drama of indignant, sometimes enraged libs (even an occassional frothing chud) coming into the comments and usually proving the accuracy of the meme they’re upset about. It’s one of the best comms for that reason.

If you want great news analysis I would also suggest not just a news comm, but more specifically the newsmega thread at hexbear. It will change url every week since its a single post thread, not a comm. But it stands on its own so well I think its worth mentioning along with entire comms or instances. Hexbear has a certain reputation, some of it deserved (much of it not), but the bulletins and international news thread (aka newsmega) is, regardless of what you may think of the rest of the instance, one of the best places on the internet to get serious leftist/anti-imperialist analysis of current news and events as far as short form “reddit-like” (I hate to phrase it that way but you know what I mean) commentary and discussion.

For anyone reading this who might be scratching their head as to what “tankie” means, you can find descrriptions of its history a number of places, but for all intents and purposes here on the fediverse, it simply refers to the people who have the most education in history and socioeconomics. Since reality is in direct contradiction with most of the prevailing narratives pushed by the powerful beneficiaries of the dominant systems (the most obvious of these systems being capitalism), there will always be a contingent of true believers in the dominant narrative who are shocked to find that there are others who openly reject those narratives. The former will clutch their pearls, aghast that the propaganda they’ve believed all their lives is being questioned by these… these… muckrakers! And so a pejorative is used (hence the word “tankies”) to otherize and sequester the individuals best able to challenge those narratives, individuals whose presence tends to trigger the uncomfortable feeling of cognitive dissonance in those who aren’t yet ready or able to put their beliefs to honest questioning.

In short, if you have no problem with seeing and reading perspectives that might make you question your own perspective, then you should have no problem with the “tankies.” And as for those who would actively defederate from those vile tankie instances so as to avoid having to confront even the possibility that their own beliefs are riddled throughout with deep misconceptions, well that should tell you something about the priorities of those tankie-fearing communities.

If there were two parties, one to double the slaves, and another to keep the number of slaves the same, I would vote for the second party.

Then you’re a fucking slavery-defending piece of shit who John Brown would have rightfully shot. You don’t have to support slavery at all, you know. You could even say “Slavery is wrong, full stop.” And then go on to do whatever is in your power to tear down any group that advocates for that grotesque abuse and denial of even the most basic human decency. But instead you insist on carrying bucket after bucket after bucket of water for the fucking slavers who are blatantly grifting you with their detestable bullshit of “at least I’m not that bad” as they point at another fucking slaver.

You people are so brainwashed into this absurd binary thinking it is genuinely shocking to me the atrocious shit that squirts out of your mouths that you think is fucking reasonable!

It’s not good that cloudfare (or any single entity) “owns” half the internet.

100% this^. Even if they aren’t actively doing anything terrible that we know of, it still totally undermines people’s privacy, even those of us who try to be careful about that sort of thing. Cloudflare is fingerprinting you when you visit sites that use their services for security, and like google, their sheer ubiquity across the web means they can effectively watch and track you wherever you go.

More and more I’ve been running into the full-page error “please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed” while just browsing around the web. A site is completely locked to any user who runs into this error; it’s not just a popup notification, its a blank page with nothing but the error message and the only way to “fix” it is to whitelist their fingerprinting scripts. I use extensions like uBlock Origin of course, but for more fine-tuned script blocking, also uMatrix, so it’s usually because of one of those that I get the cloudflare error. I could of course whitelist it, but I never do, I just decide that page is not worth my time. But it’s getting harder to stick with that principle as I run into it more all the time, even for sites that it never used to be an issue. It’s also part of why it keeps getting more difficult to browse the web with TOR browser.

Fuck cloudflare. They’ve wormed their way into most of the web now but they’ve managed to do it in a quiet way that usually goes unnoticed if you’re not a privacy nerd. Everyone knows google and amazon are evil and do all that they can to track anything and everything people do, but cloudflare is becoming just as insidious.

Lol, I have been reading theory for almost 2 decades now, kid. I even taught at a community college for a while.

Listen, this is clearly a case of “every accusation a confession” - that is to say, you are well aware of your own naivete and so you project it onto others as a defense mechanism. Fortunately, there is a cure for that sort of ignorance, and in large part it does indeed involve reading theory and exposing yourself to perspectives that may seem frightening due to your having been awash in a sea of propaganda all your life. Come join our Das Kapital reading group on hexbear (hosted by the awesome @Cowbee@hexbear.net) and maybe learn a little something about the real world you’re so painfully unaware of.

I want Russia to win (and it will) and I want China to win (and it will). My use of an LLM isn’t going to make one lick of difference one way or the other, but if it did, I would help it in any and every conceivable way.

You are a fucking nerd for thinking you have more “privacy” to lose to China than to the profiteering, rent-seeking silicon valley bastards who are already and right now exploiting the fuck outta you.

his nonchalant attitude that Palestine and Ukraine need to just surrender because being in the news cycle is inconvenient to him.

Motivations aside, if he really does want Ukraine to “just surrender” (which remains to be seen beyond rhetoric) then it’s one of the only good positions he has. Ukraine 100% needs to surrender. Absolutely nothing good comes from it continuing to fight. It only means more death and emisseration of working people and more profits for the military industrial complex. It’s honestly rather repulsive when people lump Palestine and Ukraine together like that as if they’re even remotely the same thing. One is fighting a deeply asymmetric struggle of survival against their own genocide by a settler colonial ethnostate that seeks to eradicate them from the earth, the other is a nazi coup government fighting a proxy war for imperialists that uses their own working class as cannon fodder in a conflict that could have been resolved years ago with no loss of life.

In addition to what everyone else has said to point out how absurd it is to put Trump in the top 5 worst presidents, there’s also the fact that almost every significant Trump policy was continued or worsened by Biden. Even the ones that democrats pretended to care about when it suited their agenda like kids in cages, building the wall, and increasing fossil fuel extraction. So if you want to talk about all the ways Trump is an evil piece of shit (which he most certainly is) to put him in the top 5 worst, then you had better make sure Biden is even higher on that list.

Imperialism much?

Wut? Oh, you think that’s imperialism? Stating the fact that Taiwan is part of China and that Hong Kong is also just a region (SAR if you even know what that is) of China? All this shows is you have no fucking clue what imperialism even is. You literally don’t know what that word means. Not by ML standards clearly, but not even by general layman standards. And it shows you know absolutely nothing about the history of this situation, which is typical of the sinophobic liberal. Taiwan is ran by a fascist nationalist government that tried to wipe out the workers movements and that still claims to be the “rightful” rulers not only of all of China but also other sovereign nations like Mongolia. And you’re saying that China allowing them to continue to operate while slowly working towards future reunification is “imperialism.” That’s just sick. Take a look at what the US via the IMF and World Bank does to impoverished global south nations (that are impoverished solely because the US impoverished them for the purpose of subjugation and unequal exchange) to begin to understand what imperialism looks like. Then come back and tell me China’s lenient position on Taiwan is “imperialism.”

The US being bad doesn’t make China good.

Never said it did. BUT part of why China is good is because it is overtaking the US which is unambiguously bad. This is one of the many things China is doing (in this case passively, but it does a hell of a lot of active good too) that is beneficial to humanity.

There is no nation in this world worth simping for.

I don’t know what you think “simping” for a country even means, given it’s a slang term involving romantic attraction, but if by “simping” for a nation, you mean “expressing vocal approval and ideologically supporting it,” then yes, there are nations absolutely worth “simping” for. Cuba immediately comes to mind as the obvious one. But China also deserves the vocal approval and support of leftists since it is in fact a socialist state and is in fact doing much good in the world, both for the masses of people living within it as well as for most of the rest of the world through BRI and the fact that it is undermining the actual imperialist’s ability to beat the global south into submission. Russia deserves critical support for the latter bit as well, seeing as it is doing more than any other state to actively fight imperialism and the monopolarity of US hegemony.

If China is so great then why does it feel the need to dictate over Hong Kong and Taiwan?

It doesn’t. Taiwan and Hong Kong ARE China. If anything the high level of autonomy that China allows reactionary regional governments to have is what should be criticized.

Does China have gay marriage? Trans rights perhaps?

China allows for civil unions for LGBTQ. https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1162943.shtml It made civil unions legal across the nation before USA made gay marriage legal in every state. Like all places in the world (some more than others) China has a long way to go on LGBTQ rights. But that’s just it, China is improving along those lines, while the US is rapidly regressing. China is improving with trans rights and has been punishing companies that violate them. So yes, we should absolutely support China in continuing to move in the correct direction.

It’s a nation state (a far too big one at that), which are by definition tools of oppression.

Lol, by whose definition? A state is only as good or bad as the ruling class that wields it. A bourgeois (capitalist) state will always be oppressive. As a socialist state (and China is a socialist state), the CPC uses its power to suppress the constant attempts of the bourgeois to oppress the working class.

tankies claim to be communists but spend all day parroting their favorite Russian or Chinese state propaganda

Tell us how these “tankies” are “parroting” propaganda and we’ll tell you exactly how your geopolitical opinions align with the US State Dept.

When did I say I agree with US propaganda?

For starters, right here where you showed your whole ass and said: “If China is a socialist state worth supporting then I’m a donkey with a laser dick”

You do seem to be quite a donkey but clearly it’s just overconfident false advertisement about the laser.

I honestly would have thought it was a bit making fun of dipshit libs if they hadn’t gone mask off in other comments and proving once again the validity of the “scratched liberal” saying.