he’s a method actor

My favorite trope is how libs will inevitably start screeching about Russia when faced with the fact that their ideology is midwifing fascism.

You are the master of fractal wrongness.

It’s pretty simple really. Liberals midwife a fascist system by justifying capitalist property relations while distracting people from class intersectionality with identity politics.

good point

The issues people bring up with Signal are very easy for anybody with a minimally functioning brain to understand, and none of these experts are able to provide a credible answer to them.

The key issues people point out over and over is that Signal is a central server hosted in the US that harvests people’s phone numbers on sign up. The users are trusting server operators with their privacy at that point because there is no way to verify how this data is used. Since the server associates real identity with the account, it is in position to map out networks of people communicating. And if this data is shared with intelligence agencies, which they wouldn’t be allowed to disclose, then those can trivially correlate the personally identifiable information with all the other data they have access to.

If there’s a person of interest, and you map out whom that person wants to have private conversations with, that’s very useful data. Once you know that, then you can start tracking all the activities of their associates, and map out a whole network of people. Say, people organizing unions, or coordinating labor strikes, and so on.

This is an obvious problem with Signal, one that doesn’t take any significant expertise to understand, and one that has never been fully addressed. People talk about things like sealed sender, but that doesn’t address the problem I just outlined.

The core issue is that you have to trust the physical infrastructure rather than just the cryptography. The protocol design for sealed sender assumes the server behaves exactly as the published open source code dictates. A malicious operator can simply run modified server software that entirely ignores those privacy protections. Even if the cryptographic payload lacks a sender ID, the server still receives the raw network request and all the metadata attached to it. Your client has to talk to the server and identify itself before any messages are even sent.

When your device connects to send that sealed message, it inevitably reveals your IP address and connection timing to the server. The server also knows your IP address from when you initially registered your phone number or when you requested those temporary rate limiting tokens. By logging the raw incoming requests at the network level, a malicious server can easily correlate the IP address sending the sealed message with the IP address tied to the phone number.

Since the server must know the destination to route the message, it just links your incoming IP address to the recipient ID. Over time this builds a complete social graph of who is talking to whom. The cryptographic token merely proves you are allowed to send a message without explicitly stating who you are inside the payload. It does absolutely nothing to hide the metadata of the network connection itself from the machine receiving the data.

This once again makes it very suspicious that Signal insists on running a single centralized server.

It is absolutely irrelevant who makes the criticism, what needs to be addressed is the criticism itself. If somebody gives you advice to simply trust people blindly then you should be very suspicious of their motivations.

I don’t know if you were aware, but you can just not write imbecilic comments on social media.

meanwhile in the real world

• https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/09/15/china-social-credit-system-authoritarian/
• https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/11/16/chinas-orwellian-social-credit-score-isnt-real/

Liberalism is objectively a right wing ideology. Liberalism consists of two main parts. First is political liberalism which focuses on wholesome ideas such as individual freedoms and democracy. Second is economic liberalism which centers around free markets, private property, and wealth accumulation. These two aspects form a contradiction. Political liberalism purports to support everyone’s freedom, while economic liberalism enshrines private property rights as sacred in laws and constitutions, effectively removing them from political debate.

As a result, liberalism justifies the use of state violence to safeguard property rights, over supporting ordinary people, which directly contradicts its promises of fairness and equality. Private property is seen as a key part of individual freedom under liberalism, and this provides the foundational justification for the rich to keep their wealth while ignoring the needs of everyone else. Thus, the talk of freedom and democracy ends up being nothing more than a fig leaf to provide cover for justifying capitalist relations.

Most of the food comes from things that die at upper levels and fall down to the bottom, like say a whale carcass. And as the article notes, since the temperature at these depths is really low their bodies act as a larder where food is preserved for a long time.

China, Cuba, Vietnam, and DPRK have all fixed the issue and have the working class in charge.

It’s not just the US though. None of these people have been punished in any western country, none of them are in jail. The whole Epstein fiasco proves beyond all doubt that Marxists were right all along. We live in a class society, and the laws of this society are created by the ruling capitalist class which subjugates and exploits the working majority. Any democracy that exists is reserved for the ruling elites.

You do realize Reuters has a strong western bias as well?

they’re the stenographers for the rich

That’s not what I’m saying at all. The first step to my perspective is to consider the framing they’re using and to think why they want to push a particular narrative. Nowhere did I say anything about assuming they’re being truthful. Although, in most cases western media uses more sophisticated techniques for distorting information than outright lying. It will be omission of facts, framing, and so on. This is an excellent book dissecting how US propaganda actually works. https://november8ph.ca/psychological-warfare-in-the-strategy-of-imperialism-v-l-artemov/

And you should also widen your media diet to include non western sources. These will have different biases and framings which you can contrast with what western media reports.

If we discarded every source that had a liberal or capitalist slant, we would effectively have to stop reading 99% of Western media, and we’d be blinding ourselves to the narrative of the ruling class. We are adults with functioning brains and the capacity for critical analysis. We should be able to read a piece of liberal slop, identify the ideological framing, strip it away, and analyze the material conditions they are reporting on or trying to obscure.

You need to read the Wall Street Journal because it is the mouthpiece of the ruling class that tells you exactly what capital is thinking, what they are afraid of, and how they are strategizing to protect their interests. You cannot effectively dismantle an argument if you refuse to understand its internal structure and logic.

Running away from information because it doesn’t align with their worldview is what liberals do when they retreat into their MSNBC bubbles. We should be secure enough in our own position to read sources we abhor, understand them, and approach their claims from a position of knowledge. Ruthless criticism of all that exists includes reading sources like the wsj.

Ah yes, me a famously rich person.

That’s not hyperbole by the way, the military in the south is literally under US command. In September 1945, the US Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK) took over the southern half of the peninsula. It ruled for three full years, outlawed local people’s committees, and kept using the old Japanese colonial bureaucracy. That is a textbook military occupation. When the Korean War broke out in 1950, the US provided 90 percent of all combat forces and placed the South Korean military under the operational control of an American general. There weren’t even any elections under the occupation until the late 80s. It was a literal dictatorship.

That control has never truly gone away. Today, South Korea is under de facto US military occupation. The US runs Camp Humphreys, the largest overseas US base on the planet, with its own postal service and currency. More importantly, the US controlled Combined Forces Command holds wartime operational control over the entire South Korean military. If fighting resumes, Seoul’s army does not answer to Seoul, but to a four star American general. And a US dominated UN Command still publicly dictates what South Korea’s parliament can legislate near the DMZ.

Under the current Combined Forces Command structure, if war breaks out tomorrow, every South Korean soldier would automatically answer to an American commander without Seoul’s consent. It is a 70‑year‑old military subordination that the US has repeatedly delayed transferring. As of May 2026, the US insists on “conditions‑based” transfer and opposes a “politically convenient” timeline. South Korea’s president himself is pushing back against this delay. A foreign general holding final command over a sovereign nation’s military in wartime is, by any definition, continuing military occupation.

so edgy