Marcela (she/her)

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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2025

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  • The notion of a marketplace of ideas selecting the best ideas and rejecting the worse ones is interesting. It suggests that marketplaces always select for quality, especially the more unregulated they are, which is not something I’ve noticed to be true about how any actual marketplaces operate.

    The idea that Nazi “ideas” need to be defeated in open debate, which will cause them to lose power, is also interesting. It presupposes that debates are always won by the most correct idea, which I’ve noticed is often the opposite of how debate works.

    It also suggest that the Nazis’ plan is to participate in bloodless debate over their ideas, and accept the outcome if their ideas are rejected, which is not a plan I think Nazis have ever pursued, or the sort of arena in which they have ever admitted—much less accepted—defeat.

    It also suggests that what Nazis have are “ideas,” when we know that what they actually have are intentions, and those intentions always create real-life violence toward marginalized communities along racial, ethnic, religious, and other lines of bigotry—and they do so the more effectively Nazis are able to gather and organize and promote their “ideas” into the mainstream.

    Source: https://www.the-reframe.com/questions-for-substack/

    Also, I find the very definition of your “zero point” as a self-contained bad faith argument. It is quite close to notions of “snowflakes needing safe spaces” or sth, but real life anti-nazi tactics are, and should be, more militant. To this bad-faith zero point my position is either a -10, or on another axis entirely lmao.


  • to let a generic phrase be forever attached to a political movement in any setting is a bit much

    ahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah

    BTW this is a prolonged ‘Aha moment’, not a typesetting symbolism of laughter.





  • If your threat model involves all these, then you can only be one person, and he has already been arrested due to stylistics. /joking

    BTW your advice to use AI against writing style fingerprinting is not what I have heard, and some people don’t want to use AI, especially OpenAI. You should at least make your remedy about local models, but those are not as good as the commercial ones.

    The correct response here is: style guides.

    Style guides are specifically designed to make multiple staff writers to all sound the same. There are tools like back-and-forth translation and reading level analyzers that you can use offline to minimize peculiarities in your writing.

    But is is all very cumbersome and error prone, and for low threat scenarios just mimicking another person at a lower reading level than yourself is the most accessible method.


  • Think of it a bit like being in a dark room. You can sorta see other people (or their silhouettes), but if someone turns on a torch, then you can definetly see the torch.

    IIRC recent studies show that this method can identify individuals with higher specificity than you describe here. The OP didn’t specify threat models, but provided general privacy advice. Moving around town with a jammer is a physical parallel of fingerprinting an anonymous browser (It’s this mysterious user again).

    But if your threat model requires you are not placed in a specific place at a specific time, then just having the jammer on in this place will not identify you on its own. Then it also depends on how many people are also using jammers. If only spies used Tor, it would be very easy to smoke them out, but the rest of Tor users serve as decoy for the spies.

    So the dark room analogy is not a good fit here, and it is potentially dangerous for people under certain threat models. Just setting the record gay, with all due respect.





  • “Leftist” in 2000s Italy meant either a) communist or socialist party outside the established Communist parties, also mostly excluded from parliamentary politics…or b) lifestyle progressive in the extended network of ‘a’, also understood as “lite center-left”. There is no way to quantify the “amount of Left” since these two meanings of the word are in opposite directions.

    Understanding this in terms of US politics is a lost cause. This is the only correct response so far:

    As for the US, it actually uses the term “liberal” correctly, the US just has thoroughly shut out the left to the point that liberal is the farthest “left” mainstream discourse is traditionally allowed to go.

    Different culture, different meaning. But if I had to, I would say that “b” above is the one introduced by the American far-right into the political discourse.


  • Kimmel is back on air, and the American liberal establishment has heaved a collective sigh of relief. Not because liberals and their Democratic Party have learned from the incident and used it as an opportunity to galvanise meaningful opposition to Trump’s authoritarian surge, but precisely the opposite – because it allows them to go back to their blissful slumber, ignore reality, cling to cognitive dissonance, denial, ahistorical wishful thinking, and the complicity that is integral to white privilege within a white supremacist order.

    In fact, liberals do not even substantially disagree with the core of Trump’s policies. After all, both right-wing and liberal elites are loyal servants of empire, the latter just give it a veneer of humanitarianism.

    Both support policies that sustain the oppression of poor and marginalised people: the corporatisation of healthcare and education, labour exploitation, mass incarceration, militarised policing, censorship, corruption through corporate donations, and extractivism and militarism abroad. The liberals have put their spin on all these with talk about human rights, rule of law, and diversity.

    Other than the semantics of “liberal” (substitute for Centrist or Democrat to taste), this is very well conceived. These are the same people who tone police and chastise the victims of being too angry, and will through as under the bus to appeal to “the middle of the tent”.

    This piece is really a breath of fresh air. If Democrats were so precious about other topics as they are about their late night comedians, we would have not descended that far into fascism. And this is why they are actually complicit.