Of course, but it’s there now and they’re happy to abuse it. Call them hypocrites all you want, they couldn’t care less.

This is correct, and also, Nazis don’t care about good faith argumentation. They’re explicitly anti-liberal (as in, liberty, freedom) and will only pretend to have these values to try and point out an apparent contradiction (“You believe in rights to speech and democracy, so why are you censoring us?”)

In this video of former white supremacists talking about how they left the ideology, one brings up that on their Nazi website, it was normal and common to argue for points they knew were garbage, like the Great Replacement theory. It’s about power and results, not liberalist idealism.

Violent methods usually aren’t the preferred way of dealing with Nazis (because it’s harder to get a mass movement to join in and support it, and because it’s riskier, legally, which makes it harder to sustain), but it works. It broke up the BUF in Britain, it’s kept the local turds scared to show their faces or reveal their true thoughts (don’t worry, they still usually get revealed by researchers anyway). Violence works. They know it and we know it. But when they’re the government, their violence is now legal.

I was clarifying and adding more details, and also restating to make it clear I wasn’t disagreeing at all or trivializing it.

Maybe. It could also be just a general aversion of politics in the workplace, it’s usually not a good place to start (non-work related) political fights.

Correct me if I’m wrong: IIRC the feds sent back mock pictures to ‘confirm’ the victims were killed, so I don’t know if anyone was assassinated in reality but, as you said, Ulbricht payed to have them murdered.

I have talked to people. That’s how I’ve found fellow socialists at work, alongside some others who are increasingly (and surprisingly) critical of capitalism and systematic issues affecting them.

Obviously culture changes from place to place, I don’t know your circumstances, but I expected my workplace to be especially conservative.

Someone in that thread you linked to posted this short video, I think it’s worth a watch: There are more communists than you think!

Dr. Strangelove is a surprising adept analogue - immigrant from a white supremacist regime who can’t leave it behind, weird and socially awkward, [supposed] tech expert. Maybe I’m stretching it a bit.

‘Accident’ isn’t the word I’d use to describe a famous, clear, unique and repeated gesture. It’s not something one does unknowingly. I’d lean more towards ‘association’, ‘intuition’, perhaps ‘familiarity’, if it weren’t premeditated. It’s no secret that Musk is frequently interacting with and boosting neo-nazis on their social media platform, the most doubt I could possibly give them is they wanted to do a powerful victory gesture, picked the first one that came to mind and they were too damn ignorant to realize even US conservatives don’t like Nazi symbols.

You know it’s gotten pretty bad when even the anarchist flag usernames are meming about how ridiculous the anti tankie attitude is.

I mean…if the movie is good you should support it

What is ‘it’? The movie is a published work, it can’t be financially supported. Who is being supported with the money you pay?

Vote with your wallet.

Unfortunately, consumer boycott (and conversely, support) usually isn’t an effective strategy at this scale you’re talking about. Unless you and all your friends are voting with a few thousand dollars, it’s hardly going to make a dent in the numbers.

Giving money to your enemy is idiotic tho. There is a class war out there and normies are too busy funding their oppressors

Absolutely. At the end of the day, most of the moral ideals being thrown around are, at the end of the day, nice ideas.

Giant corporations exist to get more money and, history shows, media companies will happily brainwash us and buy oppressive politicians just to push their profits up. Furthermore, they serve as a megaphone for the ideas of the owner class, who are historically the core force behind fascism when society is in crisis.

Giving them your resources is fucking suicidal.

It is always morally acceptable?

Morality is, literally, subjective. There is no universal answer to that question.

I personally consider anything being sold by a distributor to be fair game, no questions asked. If I pay for mainstream music, films or games, most of the time, zero of that money goes to the workers who created those artworks. It just makes rich owners richer, because they legally own rights. I would go as far as to say it’s morally wrong to pay for those things, it’s not neutral, it’s supporting a cycle of abuse at your own expense. So that’s my perspective on your ‘giant corporations’ question.

Digital copying isn’t stealing, unfortunately, because those giant companies deserve to have their hoard of capital expropriated.

[src]

Yep. Socialist orgs are generally public-facing and have no interest in secrecy, we’re not hiding from people. We don’t vet people before letting them see meetings like the neo-nazis and many politicians do, we’re basically the same inside as we are outside. And it pays off: there’s no fake persona to uphold, no paranoia about federal infiltration. Just walk in and have a look around, we’re here to build a mass movement, not some arrogant secret conspiracy cell.

Trump promoting the best commie coffee

There’s only one better coffee promotion I’ve seen.

Soon we’ll be routing our internet connections like flight paths to get around sanctions.

If the CIA agents in Havana don’t get Cuban healthcare benefits, they should just quit.

Yes it’s somewhat sanitised, all social media is sanitised.

And it’s all sanitized for good reason - the closest places to unsanitized, such as freespeechextremist, are literally just spambots, molesters, troll neo-nazis and people mechanically incapable of holding a conversation without bursting into nonsense screeds in all caps. Effectively, just the people no-one else wants to talk to.

As for the RedNote sanitizing, some of the ones I’ve seen newcomers getting tripped up on are rules which would make our local social media better. They seem aimed at countering grifters/influencers, sexualization for popularity (not being a prude, rather, there are plenty of other places for that content) and similar negative trends associated with TikTok.

I’ll look around to see if I can find those show segments online, but as for ‘are they panicking?’, mass media has a vested interest in influencing public opinion (that’s effectively the only reason a private business bothers with news) and therefore control over public opinion. If the people who own the show and the channel give orders, the writers and actors probably won’t risk getting fired. (oh, and obligatory quick clip to demonstrate what ownership looks like, for those who haven’t seen it: “This Is Extremely Dangerous to Our Democracy”)

So, with that in mind, recall the reactions of almost all mass media to the UnitedHealthcare assassination: consistent critique and denouncement. Surely this wasn’t how all the news anchors felt, given how positive general opinion was! The people with ownership and executive power over these media channels obviously don’t want the idea of citizens shooting the dangerously rich and powerful to get popular, so we saw their ideas echoed in all the news.

Compare that to here: media channels outside of China don’t really want that counter-narrative to gain traction. It goes against their inherent interest of influencing public opinion, it’s a competitor which all the biggest media companies can agree to call bad news. So I have no doubt this unexpected and surprising turn would make them panic.

edit: the clips I found from Colbert and The Daily Show were a surprisingly mixed bag. For example, this Daily Show clip comes off more as a satirical jab at the US than any panic.

Personally, I suspect the bigger problem for their platform will be handling the contrasting values of Western social media norms against their own.

Even sinophobic reactionaries have been pointing out for years that “[Douyin] Chinese TikTok is Wholesome, American TikTok is Corrupting our Youths!” with product influencers/grifters, rampant sexualization up to and including pornography, etc., albeit the reactionaries are interpreting the difference from a conspiratorial moral-panic viewpoint claiming it’s weaponization by The Chinese Government to corrode Western society, rather than the difference being that the US TikTok is social media with liberalist freedoms combined with the capitalist pursuit of profit above society, and is in line with the content on Xitter, reddit and other familiar social media.

The point being, that people rise to the top of TikTok through sexual suggestion, flashing symbols of wealth and other normalized habits which I’ve heard are banned on Lil’RedBook (which sounds like a great decision!).