Snowden doesn’t even think the NSA is evil:

The lesson of 2013 is not that the NSA is evil. It’s that the path is dangerous. The network path is something that we need to help users get across safely. Our job as technologists, our job as engineers, our job as anybody who cares about the internet in any way, who has any kind of personal or commercial involvement is literally to armor the user, to protect the user and to make it that they can get from one end of the path to the other safely without interference,” he told an auditorium filled with the world’s foremost computer and network engineers at a 2015 meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force in Prague.

He reaffirmed his view a year later at Fusion’s 2016 Real Future Fair in Oakland, California. “If you want to build a better future, you’re going to have to do it yourself. Politics will take us only so far and if history is any guide, they are the least reliable means of achieving the effective change.… They’re not gonna jump up and protect your rights,” he said. “Technology works differently than law. Technology knows no jurisdiction.”

Snowden is a brave guy in some ways, but even in spite of his leaks, he’s remained a naive US-supremacist libertarian, who evangangelizes tech over political action, defends the OTF, silicon valley, and US-DoD funded crypto tools and privacy apps.

The lesson of 2013 is not that the NSA is evil. It’s that the path is dangerous. The network path is something that we need to help users get across safely. Our job as technologists, our job as engineers, our job as anybody who cares about the internet in any way, who has any kind of personal or commercial involvement is literally to armor the user, to protect the user and to make it that they can get from one end of the path to the other safely without interference,” he told an auditorium filled with the world’s foremost computer and network engineers at a 2015 meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force in Prague. He reaffirmed his view a year later at Fusion’s 2016 Real Future Fair in Oakland, California. “If you want to build a better future, you’re going to have to do it yourself. Politics will take us only so far and if history is any guide, they are the least reliable means of achieving the effective change.… They’re not gonna jump up and protect your rights,” he said. “Technology works differently than law. Technology knows no jurisdiction.”

I do this too, keepassdx form filling works really well on android.

Same. It’s so hard to get ppl to switche

Matrix is also missing.

1. With a long enough passphrase, your keepass db is uncrackable by any current tech.
2. If you have 50 accounts using the same password, if any one of those websites get hacked, they now have access to every other account.

I’m obsessed with these lol.

Another great one:

capitalism is only another name of feudalism,

There are fundamental differences between different production systems that we Marxists think are important enough to warrant distinction, even if they’re both instances of class societies.

I have a feeling you’d digest something better in video:

Paul Cockshott - Feudal economics

Watch that and them get back to me.

more carefully and generously than in the meme

So we’re not doing that up to your standards?

Also just thought of this pertinent quote by William Casey, the CIA director during the 1980s:

We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.

Swiss Policy Research Institute - The propaganda multiplier

I don’t see anyone here discouraging communication, and we’ve provided links that should help ppl get past the misdefinitions.

Control of language and ideas is a critical part of cultural hegemony:

In Marxist philosophy, cultural hegemony is the domination of a culturally diverse society by the ruling class, who manipulate the culture of that society (the beliefs, explanations, perceptions, values, and mores) so that their imposed, ruling-class world view becomes the accepted cultural norm; the universally valid dominant ideology, which justifies the social, political, and economic status quo as natural and inevitable, perpetual and beneficial for everyone, rather than as artificial social constructs that benefit only the ruling class.

If you live in the USA, you’ve probably already seen this a dozen times in your lifetime: Anti-unionism becomes “Right to work”, colonized peoples become “terrorists”, social support becomes “Welfare mothers”, immigrants become “illegal aliens”, petit bourgeiosie and the working class gets confused into “middle class”.

You can call these campaigns to miseducate conspiracies if you like, but they enter the public lexicon via mass inundation from capitalist media and educational institutions.

Do you believe that the average person saying “capitalism is human nature” uses your definition of capitalism? Or that they are just vaguely reference something that they don’t really want to argue?

If they’re mis-using terms why should they not be corrected? Capitalism isn’t “trade” by any acceptable definition. Ppl should be educated and enlightened, not dumbed down to.

Absolutely, and thanks for your work in this thread. o7

Indigenous societies have largely industrialized in nearly all the world. Take nearly any country (except the USA, Canada, and Australia, western colonial projects), and you’ll find ethnic peoples from those areas with an industrial mode of production.

From what I can tell, they’re doing the anarchist nostalgic idealization / fetishization of the past. Usually goes along with idealizing poverty, defeat, and religious “self-sacrifice”, on the terms that this is more “pure” and moral than the modern day with its modern production methods, science, technology, and gasp ability to feed millions of people with labor-saving technology.

When indigenous peoples do start taking up the mantle and uplifting themselves out of poverty by industrializing (Vietnam, China, DPRK, etc), then these same anarchists denounce them for the “betrayal”.

For most of human history (tribal / pre-agricultural societies), markets were rare and mostly unecessary. Small groups of people survived by foraging / hunting for food and sharing it among themselves. Usually elders, or some type of communal decision-making process was how food was distributed. Sharing, not trade, was the distribution system.

You can have some trade in tribal / feudal societies, but it isn’t the most common way that goods are distributed.

Feudalism also employed some industrial machinery (water wheels for milling grain is one example). But the primary energy source was still muscle power, the primary product was agricultural produce, and the workers were peasants tied to the land, not mobile wage workers producing consumer goods.

Marxists consider these important distinctions that define entire historical periods, even if they’re still both examples of class society.

Imperialism can occur in any class society. In its most general definition, it means the theft of land, labor, and resources of a weaker country to feed a stronger one. So we do call it “Roman imperialism”:

The surplus here is an agricultural one.

Imperialism takes a different shape under capitalism, where instead of a landed aristocracy / slave-owning class doing the colonizing, its finance capitalists in the imperial core exporting production to low-wage / underdeveloped countries to produce commodities cheaply.

Also, the surplus in nearly all the periods of ancient Rome, was still largely an agrarian surplus, extracted either from slaves, or from feudal workers / colonates in the territories outside the city.

The city / empire survived not by its own products and a commodity-producing economy, but by feeding an agrarian surplus off its many colonies.