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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 12th, 2022

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  • Watched it for the lolz. Lots of rhetoric aimed at their bases, with very little in the name of actual policy, outside short slogans that got repeated 3 or 4 times over with next to no detail. Each trying to ‘gotcha’ the other and each tried to miscategorize the other a few times. Each echo chamber will claim their person won, yet as an outsider and non-American with no skin in the game, I would say they both did pretty poorly with both stating a couple of valid comments, but few and far between. A couple of ABC commentators later said the same.

    Looking forward to the headlines cheerleading their pre-selected person on Wednesday. Each camp trying to out meme the other. Lastly, weren’t the microphones at the debate supposed to be muted when the other was talking? 'Cause they weren’t at times. This made the thing funnier. Would have been better with an actual audience. Otherwise, it looked so fake and performative.








  • Agreed. It makes sense that if you live in the West that you are going to get Western propaganda. What was a bit more surprising was the wall-to-wall level of psy-op grade propaganda coming from the Americans and of some of the other countries, like the Germans.

    The reductionist mindset of a multi-layered, regional geopolitical situation was reduced to we, the Americans.NATO = the white-wearing good guys, Russians = bad guys.

    I mean, it is not like this has not been done before and from all sides. Yet the level in which any valid criticism of what is essentially an exercise in NATO expansionism, and the repercussions of that push, which ends with the Ukrainians being used a cannon fodder as a way to weaken the Russian military is a prime example of a Machiavellian strategy, in my opinion.

    Ukraine will be the one to pay the highest price, just like the Cubans have, in the inverse case, since the Cuban missile crisis. I was looking at a demographic chart of Ukraine and their population has taken a huge blow, either due to deaths or people fleeing the country. Now, who do you think is going to the all the contracts to rebuild everything back up, later on?



  • I do not know either. But with the recent Google, Anti-Trust ruling, there is a chance the Courts could force Google to break the deal they have with Mozilla in the future. I assume Google will appeal, but if that goes, so does 80-85% of Mozilla’s income. Selling Mullvad’s VPN is not going to cut it, so maybe they think they can cash in with “AI” somehow. Since you are right, maybe the best VPN’s aren’t dirt cheap but they are certainly not expensive in most Western countries. Besides, most users do not use VPNs. As of 2023, only about 31-33% of all internet users do.


  • Fair. should have been more clear. I use Betterfox with my own tweaks, essentially a mix of AK and BF. Since BF is just based off AK. The AK maintainer has stated in the past that he just steals it off him. However and as you said, when jumping to site to site, AK is more likely to break things, which requires a bit more troubleshooting. Which I do not need for work since I know most of the sites I will be on. So outright privacy is not the primary goal there.
    I used BF and tweaked upwards, rather than to undo AK settings. It’s just less of a hassle.

    If I want AK, I use LIbrewolf since it already uses a lot of Arkenfox, along with my own tweaks for personal use, where I take privacy more seriously. Each browser has different uses.



  • Use more than one.

    On PC, my daily driver is Firefox Developer, patched with my CSS along with Betterfox for enhanced privacy over ArkenFox. I am an Admin and run a number of sites, so this helps.

    Librewolf as general backup. Mullvad as second backup but I find that I am not the best use case for it, on top that I use different VPN services. It is for non-tech users, is not bad, just not the best tool for me but it is what I will tell people to use when using my PC since the other two have very UI minimal, heavy keyboard-centric setups. Tor for when I need more privacy/testing. Keep a copy of ungoogled Chromiu, mostly vanilla, only uBlock, again for testing and the off-chance fuzzy site but barely ever use it. They all, aside UG, sync bookmarks via Nextcloud instance so I do not need to sign into FF sync.

    On Android, Mull, or CookieWeb Preview because the excellent extension management due to their pop-up window. Great for things like uBlock on medium mode, otherwise medium mode on mobile is a pajn to use, on Mull I keep it on Easy mode. Nevertheless, uBlock is a must in today’s internet. Tor for when travelling abroad and do not need to sign-on to anything. Keeping extensions to a minimum. Each browser connects to different DNS services to minimise overlap, along rotating VPN servers from non-5 eyes countries as the minimum. Sounds like a lot but once you set it up, it is mostly set-and-forget.


  • Although true. The root is that no super power likes another super power or its proxies on their borders. Russia does not and stated as such for decades. Hell, China literally helps fund the NK government and puts up with it, so it does not have SK, and its American bases on its south border. The USA put an embargo on Cuba for over 60 years because they put Russian weapons 90kms from Florida and Cuba would not capitulate. So much for the Cubans and the USA’s hypocrisy to memory hole this fact.

    Yet somehow many Americans are so blind to not understand that Russia does not want Ukraine as an USA puppet next to them, which they would be. They see it as a clear and present danger --whether others see it or care, does not matter-- just like how the USA saw Cuba. I think we can all agree that Putin is a despot but to not see and understand of just how obvious Super power Geopolitics works or only see the one side of the issue because it is convinient is quite the statement on USA propaganda and the ongoing push for expanding of the Monroe Doctrine as status quo. Operation Condor comes to mind.

    Super powers actually care little about smaller countries if they so not fit or push their specific geopolitical interests. No exceptions. Despite the real loses of human life, to the American government the Russia/Ukraine conflict is a but proxy war meant to weaken Russia for its own geopolitical goals. Some politicians stated as such already, despite the previous humanitarian PR. Calling any of this so-called Russia propanda as a way of side stepping by some, does not make it any less correct. Sadly.


  • The most annoying thing is that the peace accords back then where known to be derailed by the USA and UK, like it was 100% not a secret, absolutely public knowledge if you actually cared about the actual geopolitical region and were paying attention to what was going on outside general news media. Academics were saying the same as well.

    The Western media utterly, and seemingly in conjunction decided to under report this to well, mostly to Americans. So your average Americans were kept in the dark of how instrumental they were in escalating this war. And painted anyone who stated actual reality as merely Putin puppets. The manipulation was strong since it seems to have worked wonders.

    I fail to see how the USA and by extension the UK are any different when playing the disinformation and misinformation game. Everyone blames everyone else and claims they do not do any of it.

    Nuland is just a war criminal but one that has the approval of the American military and political complex. I trust people have listensed to the leaked phone call from years ago where she cherry picks Ukrainian politicians to exalt into office? Go democracy.