Notices by Fabio Manganiello (blacklight@social.platypush.tech), page 2

@danjac in some countries pooling the resources to fight back the right-wing propaganda machine would suffice. But the US has a bigger problem: it's structurally more exposed than other democracies to these machineries because of long-term vulnerabilities that it has never addressed.

It's always been an imperfect democracy where rural and right-wing communities are strongly over-represented because of the Electoral College and decades of gerrymandering (the proof is that not a single GOP president has ever won the popular vote since 2004). And it has never solved some issues (like gun controls, institutional racism and a coherent system of national IDs for its citizens) that are like gasoline for the fire of right-wing populism.

It's just much easier for this kind of propaganda to ignite in the US, because a small propaganda effort is usually accompanied by a big multiplier. And there's no easy way of fixing it other than dismantling the structural issues that just make the country more exposed to this kind of aberrations.

And I don't think there will ever be a strong motivation for Americans to fix it unless their allies really start raising their voices, and make it clear that it's uncomfortable for us to sleep in bed with a country that outlaws abortions, bans books, doesn't fix its problems with gun violence, doesn't fix its legacy of institutional racism, doesn't recognize the authority of the international criminal court, and doesn't fix a system that structurally favors one party over the other.

@ThatWouldBeTelling @AidanTTIerian@poa.st I honestly don't think that the GOP can be reformed in this state. I wish it could.

It's way easier to capitalize on a system that favours the rural, evangelical and uneducated America, because those folks are already over-represented by the current political system, and they've already been radicalized by two decades of Murdoch, Trump and Carlson.

Heck, you don't even have to come up with a political agenda, nor put your face on any risky reforms. You just have to throw insults at your political opponents, speak up whatever comes to your mind, and you're guaranteed to get most of the American rightwing votes, because they'll believe that you're one of them no matter how wealthy you are: how cool is that? Why would any party squander this opportunity?

Any shift towards more moderate views will be seen as treason from their hardcore neo-fascist base. They will just spin off their official American Fascist Party, pulling off the remaining few strings and constraints, and they'll put the "moderate GOP" into a position of political irrelevance - too bigot and outdated for the urban/secular/educated population, too moderate for the rural/religious/uneducated electoral base.

The GOP is very aware of it, and that's why it can't get out of its Trumpist Stockholm syndrome disease.

@cowanon thanks for reminding me of why the US has no right of judging other countries for being ruled by religious fundamentalists.

@cowanon no, I don't block anyone as long as they act in a civilized way. I try to steer away from the "omg-you-blocked-me" drama.

On the contrary, I want people to read your comments. Because they prove my point more than a thousand words.

@cowanon I guess by "politics" you mean "why the US is allowed to have a political system that would be considered undemocratic in other countries".

And by "history of gun controls" I guess you mean "why the US is never willing to give up on seeing guns as a basic necessity, even when basically all the other countries in the world disagree on the topic".

And we could go on and also include institutional racism, banning books and abortions, death penalty etc.

Whenever somebody asks "why the hell is the US so weird and outdated", the answer is always "history, our Constitutional fathers, blabla".

My point was that we, as Western partners, should stop hiding our heads in the sand, and be more vocal about our discomfort of being allied with such a country.

That's because the US will never fix its contradictions unless one applies enough pressure from the outside. That's because the US sees too many of those contradictions and illiberal doctrines as structural parts of its "history", and those who defend them have been structurally given more voice than anybody else.

So yeah, you pretty much proved my point, word by word. Thanks for it.

@cowanon other point proven.

No matter how many rational arguments one can bring, you folks will always respond with a meme that puts Hilary Clinton and Hitler in the same image.

Memes work well in lifting simpler minds from the burden of having to come with a coherent thought of their own (or, God forbid, having to read and interpret more than ten words in a row).

No matter how skilled somebody is at chess, if they play against a pigeon then the pigeon will always end up shitting on the board - and tell their friends that they've won the match.

@matty of course, you'd like the GOP to be disbanded because some of the people in it still share something that looks like democratic ideas.

You'd just like to go into full nativist mode, allow all those who look like you to buy all the guns that they want so they can go out and shoot anyone who doesn't look like you, abolish universal suffrage, abolish any resemblance of welfare, put universities under State control, and finally try this little #fascist experiment that the US has been so eager to try for a while.

And that's exactly why people like you are a threat to society and should be fought at all costs.

@doctorsex I'll tell you what, I didn't have a big problem when the American right was represented by folks like Reagan, Nixon, or even that imbecile that was G.W.Bush.

I disagreed with them on almost everything, but at least we all agreed on the rules of the game - on confrontation of ideas where the best argument eventually wins, on the scientific method, on the democratic framework, and on not throwing offenses at the ideological opponent without trying at least to dismantle their arguments.

Whatever happened to that party after Trump was elected is just like seeing Idiocracy unfold in front of my eyes.

Condemning a party that has become the negation of everything that made our species successful and our civilization possible and wishing for it to be erased from history is a civic duty.

@doctorsex Popper's idea of showing no tolerance towards the intolerant, because that's the only way of preserving a tolerant society, is the cornerstone of my political thought.

And I'm already used to the fascist counterargument - "but who said that we're the intolerant? if you're intolerant towards us doesn't it make you the one that a tolerant society ought to fight?"

And, again, that's a flawed argument if you look at it from the perspective of "who was intolerant first?"

Who tried to make their religion the cornerstone of the political doctrine of the country?

Who tried to prevent women from having abortions, gay people from marrying, kids from reading, racial minorities from voting, and black people from just not being beaten up to death?

When you ask these simple questions, it becomes quite clear who wears the hat of the intolerant.

After expelling two Democratic representatives for taking part in protests against gun violence after yet another avoidable mass murder, we can confidently infer that the US is a failed democracy that has no moral stance to tell others how to behave.

It's struggling with basic things such as gun controls, death penalty, abortion rights, welfare state, institutional racism, censorship, voting rights and citizen identification mechanisms that most of the other democracies have already figured out loooong ago.

There's of course only one way out of this - that is, completely disband and outlaw the GOP as it is today for being a threat to democracy and social order, throw out of the window all the district borders drawn by GOP representatives to advantage their party, and abolish that abhorrence called electoral college that gives 5x/6x more voting power to rural over urban Americans. Showing zero tolerance towards the intolerant and the illiberal is a civic duty for any democracy that wants to protect its health.

Of course, that will never happen unless the GOP goes full-in on a Nazi coup - like it tried on January 6th, and even that failed to move the needle that much last time: a clear message to the new breed of Nazi-Americans that they can get away with literally anything.

It's a duty of Western democracies to isolate the US and decouple from them until they get their shit together.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/apr/06/tennessee-gun-control-protest-house-expel-democrats

@RahowasaurusRex1979 @caekislove@gleasonator.com @c@shitpost.cloud @ImperialAgent@mugicha.club I have already blocked or banned most of your friends because they have exceeded any threshold of tolerance and decency when it comes to talking by memes and abusing the nigger/faggot/jew words.

I feel pity and rage reading your messages.

One brings arguments about the undemocratic roots of the Electoral College and gerrymandering, the absurdity of buying guns at the mall, the banality of evil that comes out of banning books and abortions.

And what arguments do you guys bring to the table?

"Boo. Faggot. Nigger. Jew. Pedophile. We have the guns. The length or our guns compensates the shortness of our penis, and it's cool. Here's your meme".

I'm disgusted by people like you. A system that allowed human beings to turn into such imbeciles, incapable of any civil confrontation, is a failed system.

I'd like to think that Trump did this to you, but I don't blame him. The seeds of this arrogant de-evolutionary process where already long in the making. Trump just gave you a vocabulary, and he just made it cool to be an imbecile who is incapable of any critical thought.

@alcinnz @janriemer I see people mentioning Haskell or LISP dialects quite often here.

I consider myself a big fan of functional paradigms, but I've never managed to digest the LISP/Haskell/Erlang way - where *everything* is a function.

Sure, it forces developers to think of a problem in terms of immutable data and chains of functions that transform it, and code written like this is usually less prone to errors. But to me it's always been a too big cognitive leap to make. Sounds like I may still give another try though!

For me this is the last nail in the coffin for #Go.

I've never bought much into the language. I've been impressed by its constructs to natively manage and synchronize asynchronous operations, but its rigidity when it comes to programming paradigms (no proper object-oriented and functional constructs in the 21st century, seriously?) means that I see it as a language that seriously limits expressivity, and doomed to generate a lot of boilerplate. It's a language very good at solving the types of problem that are usually solved at Google (build and scale large services that process a lot of stuff in a way that the code looks the same for all the employees), and little more than that.

After #Rust really took off, I didn't see a single reason why someone would pick Go.

And now here we go with the last straw: Google has proposed to embed telemetry collection *into the language toolchain itself*. And, according to Google, it should be enabled by default (opt-out rather than opt-in), because, of course, if they make it an opt-in then not many people will explicitly enable a toggle that shares their source code and their usage of the compiler with one of today's biggest stalkers.

Not only, but Google went a bit further: "I believe that open-source software projects need to explore new telemetry designs that help developers get the information they need to work efficiently and effectively, without collecting invasive traces of detailed user activity".

No. Open-source doesn't need telemetry. Telemetry introduces brittle dependencies on external systems with no functional net gain, and that's at odds with the whole idea of building and running things on your own.

Open-source software has already a very well-established way of collecting feedback: open an issue on the project, and if you want to change something submit a PR. You don't need remote probes whose purpose is to funnel data back home. Even when done with the best intentions, that breaches the trust between the developer and the user - because data gets scooped out, and the systems that store and use that data aren't open. But, of course, if you've only used hammers in your life then the whole world will look like nails.

This could even backfire for Google. There are many applications out there where secrecy (and minimizing the amount of data that leaks outside of the network) is a strong requirement. These applications may start considering alternatives to a language that enables telemetry data back to an external private company by default.

If you build open-source projects in Go, it's time to drop it and start considering alternatives. The market for modern compiled language is much more competitive now than it was a decade ago. Many of us knew already that we couldn't trust a programming language developed by the largest surveillance company on the planet.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/10/googles_go_programming_language_telemetry_debate/

Goodbye for good I guess, #DuckDuckGo? DDG depicts itself as a search engine that really cares about your privacy. As long as you only access their results through their website. If, like me, you use SearX/SearXNG to forward the requests, then DDG will promptly block you https://github.com/searxng/searxng/issues/1854

Outside of Europe, #Google's monopoly gets slammed by India too. The ruling says that:

- Google must allow alternative app stores (like F-Droid or ApkPure) on the Play Store. This is really the step zero for fair competition: give everybody the same visibility, and let users pick what they like.

- Google should not force Android providers to install its own apps in order to be a certified Android provider. Step one for fair competition: competition only works if none of the involved party starts from a position of advantage.

- Google should make the Play Store available also on Android forks. Step two for fair competition: if the competitors' stores are available on your store, then your store should also be available on the competitors' forks, and users eventually will pick what they like the most. All the distribution asymmetries should be removed.

This is a good and balanced ruling that aims to create a level playing field by removing all the bumps that, as of now, strongly consolidate Google's position of dominance.

And it's going to hit Google quite badly too: India is the largest global market for Android (arguably on par with China), and Google may be on its way to lose its unfair advantage there.

https://9to5google.com/2023/01/20/google-play-stroe-third-party-india/

"No evidence suggests that Google coerced Apple, Mozilla, or any other browser developer into adopting a design that includes a single default search engine"

Do you really have to coerce Mozilla when the money you pay them to keep your search engine as the default is basically their main revenue stream?

Do you really have to coerce Apple when in 2021 alone you paid them $15B to be the default search engine on Safari?

Can other search engines afford to pay so much money to these companies to be the default?

When the sums you pay to get a privileged treatment are out of reach for all of your competitors, you are doing coercion.

"Requiring Google not to compete vigorously would turn competition law on its head"

What are you competing vigorously for when you already own >90% of the market? Total annihilation of the few remaining competitors?

"Forcing browser developers to ask users if they want to use an alternative search engine will make the browsing experience worse. If people want to try other search engines, they're free to do so"

First, who established that any user experience alternative to yours is worse? Your marketing department?

Second, who said that proactively asking people what product they want to use (and asking only once) makes the overall user experience worse?

Third, how are non-tech people supposed to know that search engines alternative to yours even exist, if every time they open a browser on any device they only see your search bar? Let alone knowing how to change the default engine in their browser, let alone installing extra software on Android just to have the default search bar replaced?

Google's arguments against users choice are exactly the same as Microsoft's a decade ago, when they were eventually forced to ask Windows users which browser they wanted to use.

Microsoft executives back then were all like "it'll make the user experience worse / it'll confuse users / people will keep using IE anyway / blabla"

Surprise, the browser choice dialog turned out to be a big nail in the coffin of Internet Explorer.

It turned out that most people didn't even know about the existence of browsers like Firefox and Chrome unless somebody asked them if they wanted to use them. It turned out that many people actually liked them better than IE and they never came back.

And that's what fair competition is all about: giving everyone the same visibility, and letting users pick what fits them best.

Google is using the same argument as Microsoft ten years ago because it's afraid of competition. Because it's going to fight hard to maintain its monopoly. Because monopolies can be sustained only when you don't give users a choice (see Facebook and user tracking consent), or when you hide the choice away from users.

Even if it comes to the cost of contradicting their own position a decade ago - when they argued against Microsoft and its "monopolistic practices" because the browser choice dialog would have benefited Google's (still infant) Chrome browser.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/11/23550023/google-search-antitrust-doj-state-lawsuit-unsealed