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Cake day: May 18th, 2025

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  • I acknowledge it was used within rightwing spaces, even that they had influence over its evolution. But your model implies “pilling” was ever wholly appropriated by rightwing culture, which would require it to have died out in other contexts. And I’m arguing it never did, that it maintained regular usage outside of that context and thus can’t be assumed to be a rightwing signifier.

    Even during the blip in time where specifically redpill was associated with manosphere pickup culture, bluepill’s meaning evolved as the counter to it (for those that were exposed to the trend; both terms’ general meanings never entirely vanished), and shortly after there was the ironic/postironic re-appropration of the new form of red pill. So even then one couldn’t assume a person’s ideology solely from usage of x-pill terminology.

    But regardless of whether right-wing culture actually successfully appropriated the terminology a decade ago, it since has maintained widespread usage and evolved on its own in quasi-mainstream online spaces. So to claim the OP is mistakenly signaling some sort of incel ideology is questionable at best.

    “Woke” is somewhat similar in that its common definition was renegotiated by rightwing appropriation. But in this case the word largely lost any original meaning as it became a floating signifier for rightwing rage. And even in this case, it’d need to be usage of the term as a pejorative to be considered rightwing signaling, usage of the term itself isn’t necessarily so, per se (e.g. people reclaiming the word as pro-woke or using it ironically like dark-woke).


  • This article is pretty shoddy. It acknowledges that “red/blue pill” comes from the Matrix but then acts like incels were the only ones using it and pushing its evolution as a suffix. When in reality it developed across the whole internet, not just within incel communities. Oldass encyclopedia being out of touch.

    “Blackpilled” specifically basically just means pessimistic, doomer, etc. I see it used in this context on a regular basis with no association to incel, rightwing, or misogynist ideologies.

    It certainly has its own unique meaning within those communities, but it’s very clear that’s not how OP was using it. To argue they were misusing the term you’d have to prove that most people here associate “x-pill” terminology with incels, rather than directly with The Matrix and/or how the terminology is commonly used on social media by regular people.





  • Western propaganda has been claiming the “situation” constitutes a genocide, with no real evidence to back it up.

    One of the US’s strategies to destabilize other countries is to back separatists and terrorists. It combines that with information warfare and usually economic warfare in hopes that the instability will open the door for a coup, where a compradore would be put in charge and then facilitate the extraction of resources from the country. This pattern has been replicated dozens of times in the last few decades.

    China has been hit by multiple terrorist attacks as a result of this tactic, so it instituted deradicalization practices and jobs training for at-risk populations.

    The Western propaganda industry used images from South America and claimed they were forced labor in China (with Spanish signs visible in the background). They used early image generation to fill out a registry of “missing” people, except a lot of the images still had artifacts from generation (if you remember thispersondoesnotexist, they were almost identical to that) until they got deleted. They relied almost exclusively, for a time, on citations from Adrien Zens, a man who cannot speak or read Mandarin and claims he is chosen by God to bring about the downfall of China.

    China invited the UN to investigate. Dozens of countries investigated and found no evidence of genocide.

    We’ve seen the kind of evidence that modern genocide produces due to Israel’s actual genocide of Palestinians.

    So some westerners have walked back their invention from “genocide” to “situation”, while others continue to parrot the original disproven claims.

    So it’s not about trying to compare moral judgements, it’s a skepticism of any claims coming from a proven, proudly genocidal empire about its targets.












  • It’s been a few years since I was invested in this topic, but I think the “meta” for reconciling the tension between blocking tracking and unique fingerprinting was to, in some cases, spoof information rather than outright block it.

    Tor browser does that by default, though a few years ago when I tried to use it as a daily driver it was too tedious thanks to cloudflare.

    Most of my research regarding browsers was focused on computers. Now that Firefox mobile can run extensions some of this might be mitigated that way.

    Blocking JavaScript unfortunately makes you super unique but the tradeoff is probably worth it imo. I don’t want every random site I visit to immediately run a bunch of code, especially third party nonsense. Even if it makes my traffic stand out.

    For most threat models I suspect unrestricted JavaScript is more dangerous than the potential for fingerprint-based tracking. Or at least JavaScript is very likely to leak multiple unique data points, whereas a “blocks JavaScript flag” is just a single unique identifier.

    Sandboxing and siloing can also mitigate some of the risk, and is relatively painless once implemented.

    All of it comes down to threat model and motivation. You can probably get like 70% better privacy/security for 20% of the work, which is a good standard for a typical usecase/person. Install ublock, disable some of the higher risk and less useful tracking (websites don’t need my fucking battery and gyroscope).

    Diminishing returns start to hit hard, in part due to the passive fingerprinting / active tracking tension, due to cloudflare, due to everyone around you that doesn’t give a shit. Anything on the other end of the risk spectrum should just be done without a smartphone in the vicinity, if possible.


  • I mean I’ve used a solar panel to block a window before.

    But it’s more practical to get cheap blinds and throw a regular solar panel on a roof. There’s significantly more roof square footage than window square footage, and it’s gonna get like ten times as much sun as vertical windows.

    Normal panels are like $0.50/watt and will last forever. Folders are closer to $1/watt, less effective, and break down after a couple years. If you want like a set of thin solar strips in a blind form factor, that adds a lot of electrical complexity, so I imagine it increases the cost and lowers the lifespan further.

    Depending on the type of panel, if any of it is blocked the whole panel will have severely reduced efficiency. Idk all the details regarding that. But if that’s the case each window might have to be custom sized/wired.