whydudothatdrcrane

This is a cool way to protect a belief, narrowing the scope so that the refuting data do not apply anymore. Perhaps I can write a fucking essay about it, but do you have data to support this narrowing move? There is like a ton of data that the West has been invasively spying of possible threats to the status quo (from Cointelpro to undercover UK cops like recently), not just people "acting on it". Furthermore, actions can fall under protected free speech as well, like putting up a poster, demonstrating, and protesting. So your proposal is inherently undemocratic if you roll back freedom to only protect oral expression, quite similar to a "Don't ask don't tell" attitude towards gay people. What you just said is simply counter-factual. Blanket surveillance is a staple of Western societies in the 21st century, and it blows my mind that there are still people oblivious to what is more or less spelled out clearly in the Patriot Act and all laws modeled after it across the globe.

Criticizes gatekeeping of science by showcasing it shares the premise of the very laws that were used in 1934 to bar Jewish people from citizenship in Germany. The table used for the adaptation is from Wikipedia, a summary and breakdown of an actual 1930's poster explaining the new rules to Germans.

AI slop and my ML instance-ship? Ok dude, whatever...

First things first, the 66% is not reliable when you clearly see that the data is segregated along party lines. Nevertheless, there is a rise in favor of restrictions among Democrats and Democrat-leaning respondents. I have explained in the above and I will reiterate here that this can be explained in the network structure and dynamics of MAGA propaganda.

Since you make clear that you do NOT argue for a concession but in pursuit of a convincing argument, I respond below. But you make clear that you are not support watering down trans rights, so that none of the devastating arguments I presented is relevant to your position. Let's examine that then.

The "convincing argument" you are talking about is a lost cause, because you forget that the right does not listen to reason. If you follow the link I have linked at the word "sports" you will see that there are several arguments about it. It doesn't matter at all. There are great arguments out there, for the whole range of transphobic fascist propaganda. The problem is that it does not reach critical mass. In comparison, transphobic propaganda is obscenely funded and organized, as the rest of the links suggest. Specifically those links:

Right wing domination of the online media ecosystem

Racist propaganda

Nazi propaganda

Wartime propaganda tactics

Who the fuck funds so many anti-trans hate groups?

Democrat's media outlets spewing transphobic prejudice

Democrat media outlets 2

Gender critical "leftist" intellectuals

See if you cared about putting forward a convincing argument, you would take links such as this, and this includes my own posts, and would push them to a wider and wider network of ambassadors and online/offline propagandists, to reach as many people as possible. Agitating in left-wing forums, bordering on concern-trolling, crying there is no convincing argument for trans women in women's sports, does not cut it. It is defeatist and achieves exactly one thing: to out you as a person who is not individually persuaded by a single argument in favor of trans people. I will not make assumptions about your precious individuality as to why is that. For the majority of people it is just SELF-CENSORED cis-genderism.

The plethora of right wing propaganda agents and the substantial amount of center-left cisgenderist apologists gives a sufficient explanation as to why public discourse has regressed more and more to more primitive and dehumanizing stereotypes and truism, no matter how many great arguments trans advocates have put out there.

Additionally:

Because mainstream platforms amplified hate speech, failed to moderate harassment, shadow banned, echo-chambered, and eventually pushed out advocates and turned into nazi bars.
Because the ever-growing right wing propaganda network became more and more interconnected and overlapping, that successive cycles of outrage and backlash allowed them to prevail in mass culture, by pushing more and more reactionary points.
Because this all went down without a shred of a response from Democrats.

Even the data you present reveal the most important thing about them: their TIME RANGE. There is no other explanation than the insane reach of transphobic fascist propaganda. I don't have the tools as an individual to break down how the content has regressed from "legitimate concerns" to raw, primal, animus against trans people. But this is what was done:

They went from "We are NOT saying trans people ARE perverts and predators, BUT that real predators MIGHT exploit self-identification to wear dresses and attack women in segregated spaces", all the way to "trans people are groomers, rapists and pedophiles" in a span of a few short years.

The arguments were right there, like Zinnia Jones had debunked the bathroom thing as soon as 2015. Same goes for detransition rates and effectiveness of transition. The issue here is not the message but the network of information flow that is entirely controlled by the platforms and the racist and nazi funds that are backing them and manipulating them.

Relevant research also shows (in the propaganda firehose article I have linked in the text) that responding to organized propaganda is futile. The response to this is to GROW SUPPORT for trans people, which is consistent with years and years of insight that transphobes DON'T listen to reason. The rare EXCEPTION is this dude. What changed his mind? Listening. That is what changed his mind.

If you care about trans issues, you should see to the available information to reach as many people as possible, both in quantity as well as information flow patterns in the network.

I would add, a proactive strategy for dismantling platforms and suppressing hate-speech are also part of the solution.

Since you insist that you never said that the left must concede on trans sports and condone segregation on the basis of gender identity, I will take it that my previous argumentation does not apply to your take, and you subscribe that eroding the rights of any protected group is out of the question, as far as your suggested strategy is concerned.

As per your own statements, you only think that there is not a convincing argument for trans women participation in sports, I have linked to a number of scientific arguments, and I added the moral in-feasibility of segregation on top of that. Is there anything else?

Trigger Warning: Get a pack of Kleenex and load your favorite Daily Wire playlists to have handy, because this is not going to be a light read for a self-proclaimed intelligent centrist.

The left is getting killed on the trans sports issue

Do you have any data backing this? And what analysis goes with the data?

Don't let me be misunderstood: Rights are not defined by majorities, otherwise you could have a white majority voting on the humanity of black people, and wolves voting on the right of sheep not to be eaten.

On the other hand, the public's views are heavily conditioned by misanthropic, anti-democratic propaganda, that shifts the window of acceptable discourse, and excludes people from a set of fundamental freedoms that cisgender people take for granted. As a consequence, the ubiquitous genocidal discourse against trans lives, if left unchecked leads (and this is by now not a prediction but a historical fact) to erosion of rights of women, blacks, indigenous, disabled, and every other citizen. Because these freedoms are not "special" to trans people, but are mere extension of legal scholarship and the rule of law. The ongoing American fascism is not an overreach of "legitimate concerns" but it is profoundly, structurally embedded in challenging the legitimacy of trans people. This is why TERFism was initially deemed "unworthy of respect" by British courts: because it goes against TONS of legal precedent.

Long story short, in the times of "Der Stürmer" you could have said that the majority of German did not think Jews should be married to Germans. So what? So much for the argument that we should sacrifice human rights of ANY group because they are unpopular.

ALL protections exist so that UNPOPULAR groups enjoy the rights that the majorities take for granted. Outside that logic there is only fascism.

It is much like segregation (which, surprise, is coming back again) and apartheid: The Feelings of uneasy white people sharing bathrooms and sports with black people, are of no importance whatsoever, because, simply, segregation is dehumanizing and unjust.

By extension, what you suggest is morally corrupt and inhumane, and it is deeply fascist in its very conception.

Now, we are arriving at the data. Bear with me.

You people hand-wave a fucking lot when you suggest that trans rights are so unpopular that they have lost you elections, when there have been multiple arguments that Democrats barely touched on the topic, apart from being loosely against killing trans people in pogroms and LUKEWARM at that. So your argument amounts to little more than "Fascist discourse is more trendy so let's do that instead", which is not JUST the Ratchet effect: it is "being complicit to actual genocide".

So you HAND-WAVE about an IMAGINARY regular person (who is that fucking nazi?) to whom we must bow under all circumstances? Fuck that populist tactics, and fucking educate people.

But does this IMAGINARY nazi-enabling regular Joe even exist?

And what studies you cite for him not being able to revise being a shit person

Views differ even more widely along party lines. For example, eight-in-ten Democrats say they favor laws or policies that would protect trans individuals from discrimination, compared with 48% of Republicans. Conversely, by margins of about 40 percentage points or more, Republicans are more likely than Democrats to express support for laws or policies that would do each of the following: require trans athletes to compete on teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth (85% of Republicans vs. 37% of Democrats favor); make it illegal for health care professionals to provide someone younger than 18 with medical care for a gender transition (72% vs. 26%); make it illegal for public school districts to teach about gender identity in elementary schools (69% vs. 18%); require transgender individuals to use public bathrooms that match the sex they were assigned at birth (67% vs. 20%); and investigate parents for child abuse if they help someone younger than 18 get medical care for a gender transition (59% vs. 17%).

Which is from Pew which others like you like to point to as a general "trans rights unpopular with our voter base", but if you actually read you will see that you can even find a small percentage of Republicans that are not vehemently against trans rights. And let's not forget that the percentage of Democrats against trans rights would be very much different if Democrat's media outlets weren't fucking complicit in amplifying genocidal "gender critical" misanthropy, and there weren't a score of fucking "leftist" intellectuals adopting their talk points, when there was ZERO voice given to the marginalized trans scholarship. So, this consent you talk to is manufactured by complicit Democrats to start with.

You would not make this argument unless you wanted to appeal to the Republican voter base, but doing so only shows that it is voter trends that guide your politics and not principles, and in fact, you are willing to enable crimes against humanity to appeal to a fascist voter base. This is unscrupulous and misanthropic.

Instead of succumbing to extremely well-funded racist and nazi propaganda, a principled political advocate with such means and resources as the Democrats could help alleviate what is a systematic attack to decent society and inclusive democracy. Therefore, your advocacy ultimately paints the Democrats as a manufactured opposition, and essentially a fascist party, once it does not stand for human rights, as it never were.

Centrists should be actively considered agitator agents for fascism at this point. Like, have you clowns even considered that your voter base might want you to grow a fucking spine and stand up for human rights, with trans rights front and center? Because I only see your democratic voter base being alienated by your flirt with fascism.

People playing fast and loose with the terms "discrimination" and "racism" really grind my gears. We are talking about centuries of fucking crimes against humanity, and some sad little fuckers have the nerve to conflate reparations with the very crimes that were committed.

I do think it is mildly infuriating.

We aren’t special.

You should dial this statement way up. The population of Lemmy is definitely not a representative demographic. Nor is Reddit's.

There is a conceptual distinction: Encryption in transit vs. encryption at rest. You may send the packets encrypted to the server, but if they are not encrypted on the server's file system, anyone can read them.

The real question is, why do you think governments make such a big fuss about citizens having access to military grade encryption?

There have been audits of e2ee implementations, and the algorithms used also have some objective properties. I don't think that I have ever heard in cryptography discussions that backdoors are so widespread that the discussion is moot. I have only heard, time and time again, the opposite.

Even Apple, in this very occasion, opted to ditch the service rather than backdoor it, and in fact takes the UK to court over this. I think that the opinion that this is all for show is a tad wild, and not very well supported in this occasion.

Like every cryptology book starts with the adage "There is cryptography that prevents your little sister from reading your mail, and cryptography that prevents the government from reading your mail, and we will talk about the latter."

https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2025/02/23/three-questions-about-apple-encryption-and-the-u-k/

On the other hand, not all implementations are created equal. Telegram was recently under fire, and there is a lot of variance in e2ee implementations in XMPP clients, IIRC.

OK now that arstechnica has written about it, shills might stop nagging in the comments about my titling. LMAO

The basic way to do this is you respond to these three questions: What am I trying to protect? From whom? What are they able to do to get there?

No shit. They are not the same thing, they are heavily overlapping adjacent sets of people. You draw the line at alt-right, you are left with less than 20% of Republican voters, but a 100% of MAGA hat-bearers. This distinction is more theoretical than practical.

It is one of these cases where that "OR" approaches a singular circle.

Note just to be sure, Mull is a different thing than Mullvad. What you wrote makes sense for Mullvad, but I am not so sure if this is the case with Mull, the mobile app.

I don't think we understand very well the threat model here. Are we talking about having a Mozilla account or the web engine itself. If you have an account they will probably start doing mining shit with it. What about activists researching certain topics then? The content browsed can be visible to Mozilla if they use their account for syncing bookmarks. That should be a dealbreaker right there. No different than Meta user-profiling the fuck out of your engagement behaviors. Now if this is NOT the case and you haven't a Mozilla account, I assume that the version of the web engine available back at the time of the fork is exactly the same. So far so good.

The problem is that browsers are hard, and there is a ton of web protocols to be implemented, various fixes for security, support extensions and other QOL features. WORD ON THE STREET is that tasks like these cannot be undertaken as solo/hobby projects, that funding and an organization structure is essential. The teams behind LibreWolf, Waterfox, etc have a track record of already lagging behind Firefox's version updates. Same goes with user-profile and configuration sets like Arkenfox (if I am not wrong). You may tweak the conf all you want, but if privacy and anonymity is compromised at the web engine level, these forks will be left with little to do about it. Then the only option will be to keep using an old version of the web engine (sacrificing security and quality of life extensions), or ditching the gecko web engine altogether.

That is why people are looking for genuine alternatives to the web engine.

I thought Mullvad was the best in anti-fingerprinting. Anyone can check their own configuration with EFF's "cover your tracks" site.

Perhaps this explains why all these spook impostors are so vehemently against advanced privacy and anonymity. They are signaling they are the good ones!