Shit like this really worries me. That if they were ultimately against the proverbial wall, about to fall, no way out, no way to win that they might just launch all the nukes and try and burn the world to a cinder rather than let their enemies win. There are many among them who are that deranged. Who would see annihilating humanity as preferable to the loss of their precious “norms” and their hegemony and rule. And who would with their last breath claim that the Russians and Chinese did all this or caused it and that they had no choice and were righteous to do so.
The US is already inching up to the line of attacking Russia in a full on cyber-attack to cripple their economy as that is about the last thing left after this that isn’t kinetic warfare. They’re growing frustrated by losses in Ukraine and are desperate to stop them. They will sooner or later pull that trigger as well. Or goad Russia into reacting.
They are pulling out every single stop to stop Russia, to get a win from the Ukraine situation, to force them out and let the Nazis there win and for their media to cheer. It’s not even about the strategic situation with the Nazis and having NATO there anymore it’s about morale and sending a message to allies that they’re still strong and not to be fucked with. If Russia continues and succeeds in partitioning Ukraine and disarming and destroying most of their weapons and killing many of their Nazis as well as taking many western assets prisoner and trying them and broadcasting that it will be a big blow to the US/NATO hegemony and image. An unacceptable one.
Russia should consider escalating first to warn them off. The west is already self-righteous and would even see nuking Moscow as justified at this point if it meant cutting the head off Russian government, killing Putin and installing their own puppets. Russia has significant cyber capabilities.
Fact is soon enough NATO is going to put together a flotilla to try and get the grain they say Russia is blockading in port but which in fact Ukraine is holding back or preventing from leaving thanks to unmoored dangerous old sea-mines they’ve flooded the black sea with. They’re going to sail in, land a bunch of heavy weapons systems for sinking the Russian fleet and then do that unless Russia reacts and sinks them. They will do this under the auspices of the UN for humanitarian reasons claiming Russia is starving the global south.
This is the violent, angry lashing out of a cornered, diseased, injured but not dead empire.
I mean the real solution is revolution and a proletariat state that funds and supports a good single browser.
I also didn’t mention but one additional issue, the thing that dethroned and fucked Firefox is you need a way to push your browser to the people or you end up like Firefox with under 10% user share (and that’s from a browser that at one time people willingly flocked to and gave majority share from the poorly maintained monopoly of Internet Explorer). Chrome has google mail, google itself, chromebooks, android all pushing people to use it and integrate into their ecosystem. Apple’s Safari is so big because it’s default on Macs and iPhones. Edge has any share at all because it’s default on Windows and has lots of easy ways to manage corporate policies for corporations deploying Windows machines.
I think a FOSS effort could rescue Firefox for a while if it imploded but I just question the long-term viability as I think such a project would be increasingly locked out of web standards and slowly but surely falling behind and rotting from code debt. When you have things like Chromium out there that you can just strip the google stuff out while someone else (Google) maintains the engine itself and all the hard parts most people I think would in the end take that road of least resistance.
It would be an undertaking of the magnitude of Linux itself. Not exactly that but as close to that as anything.
The first problem with web browsers as compared to any other software is they are bound to evolving, constantly changing web standards they don’t entirely control on their own but usually have input in. In addition to that in the age of Chrome they have to deal with constantly changing non-standards implemented by Chrome that are extensions of standards which they can either support or people jump ship because web designers implemented stuff using those non-standards and tell people to use Chrome or get lost. (This is by the way the old Microsoft EEE strategy of Embrace-Extend-Extinguish)
The second problem is web browsers are not -A- attack surface, they are -THE- attack surface. Security fixes for browsers, problems in standards, implementations of the standards, engines, etc far outstrip security problems with OSes. And whereas most OS security issues are “can wait” things because they rely on local access or being on the same network or running specific compromised software or using specially crafted malicious payloads, a bad security bug in a browser can result in zero-click compromise of the whole system without user interaction to say nothing of countless easily enough done social engineering user interaction compromise bugs.
In addition to just patching exploits and bugs you also have to invest in keeping up to date in security architecture, that is creating, testing, implementing the newest mechanisms to make sure your browser is reasonably safe compared to the one run by the trillion dollar monopoly. You also have to do the same in terms of tweaking things to keep things running quickly as your competitor is constantly optimizing to make things load more smoothly, videos to work better, web-video-conferencing to work better, etc. So you can’t just sit on an engine and just bug-fix or you won’t have a satisfactory user experience compared to competitors and things may even end up broken.
For both these reasons you can’t just develop at your own pace like you can with most FOSS. Not saying it can’t be done but it’s hardly as simple as pointing at GIMP or Blender and saying they’re FOSS and work well when they don’t have to deal with tons of fast evolving standards, changes in their environments and being internet-exposed to attackers. Web standards are ratified, you have to get them into your browser and working in a certain time-frame and that takes a lot of work and coordination. An exploit is discovered? You have to patch it within a certain time-frame. Chrome introduces something and it’s causing a bad experience for users of your browser? You have to figure it out and change things before too many of them jump ship because your browser is now seen as “slow” through no fault of your own but through malicious intent of the monopoly.
Web 3.0 is a brave new place. You can’t even read half the major websites these days (to say nothing of interacting, logging in, using forms, etc) without enabling javascript not just for the main webpage but for a CDN, another site or so which may be analytics, advertising, etc.
The fact is the modern web is being made hostile to users. Hostile to user choice. It is intentionally being designed around this and you can’t beat corporations into making healthy choices to support your FOSS browser and an open web.
All rely on Mozilla. If it goes down none of these projects, not even all of them together have the resources to maintain an active browser, to keep it up to date with web standards, to keep it patched with security fixes. Hell, Mozilla has hundreds of employees, whole teams, millions of dollars and they still are late porting basic web features like AV1 hardware support because they’re so bogged down.
A modern web browser including a modern web browser engine independent from Google, hate it or love it is an intensive project that cannot be maintained out of your garage. It requires hundreds of people, many working full time, many working late hours on emergency notice to patch security issues that crop up and are being actively exploited.
The fact is if Mozilla just collapses so will these projects. They won’t be able to maintain web standards but long before websites stop working you’ll start risking getting hit with exploits that were made known months or weeks ago but were unable to be patched in anything like a timely manner.
Also Waterfox was sold to an advertising company. No reason to suspect they won’t be sketchy long-term. And if Mozilla went down they’d be the first IMO to either call it quits or stuff the browser full of spyware while still not fronting the millions needed to hire people to keep the browser competitive.
Mozilla at many times almost seems like they’re actively self-sabotaging and I have a conspiracy theory in my head Google is somehow directing this self-sabotage through some means to achieve supremacy and dominance. Mozilla sucks but there is no one, no one to replace them. Even a corporation Microsoft’s size with that kind of money threw in the towel and joined in using Chrome’s engine rather than continue to develop their own.
Look. The sex is bad in my initial post was said jokingly. It was a meme if you will. A call-back to the volcel police meme, the Maoist position paper on consent under capitalism, AKA “All Sex is Rape” paper. I didn’t mean it literally. But I am for shutting down people getting horny online in left-spaces.
No I don’t know or care about your propaganda. You kind of tipped your hand there with that anti-communist nonsense. (And no, don’t send me any RFA links about it)
No one but you is talking about puritanism. I started this thread by talking about people having a right to sexual (self) release FFS.
As to the nonsense about Christianity I was brought up an Evangelical Christian and I was expected to save myself for a nice Christian man and to submit to him in all things and not to have sexual desires outside of that idea. I know what sexual repression is and what unhealthy religious effects on sex and women are from a very intimate perspective that I wouldn’t wish on anyone.
As communists we do not see women as “dirty chewed gum” because they had sex before marriage nor do we call them such. As communists we do not criminalize abortion. As communists we do not object to sex toys or birth control, we pay for the latter. As communists we do not perpetuate or entertain the disgusting male ownership culture of girls’ and women’s bodies by their fathers, husbands, or the church.
Even the most uncharitable interpretation of my words could not reasonably say it was on the level of advocating for the same thing as disgusting Christian purity culture. Seems a little unreasonable as a perspective there because even if I were advocating for a communism with sexual repression on the level you think I am (I’m not, you seem awful offended on the behalf of sex pests) it wouldn’t be anywhere near the awfulness of purity culture just purely on the basis that communism results in liberation of women from patriarchal structures while Christian purity culture is sexual slavery by another name.
I can see where your outrage comes from to be honest. When I first escaped religion I was super liberal in terms of sexuality. I was pro-porn, I was just against anything and everything that looked like a constraint on sexuality because it looked more like that religious prison I’d just escaped. The passionate heat of the hate I felt as an anti-theist for religion has cooled though. I am still an atheist, still a religious critic. I am still of the opinion religion will be overcome. However I have perspective. Liberalism itself is a rot and a disease and we must free ourselves of it. This doesn’t mean state control over all sexual activities. I refer you to the GDR (East Germany) and their take on things as what we might look towards for guidance.
The problem is having this super open and accepting attitude towards sex just invites in all kinds of sex pests. People who legitimately have our politics as well as predators who don’t (and to be clear there can be predators who can share our politics as well but be predators).
The fact is we’re here to get things done not be a dating group or a place where people (often women) have to worry about being hit on and feeling objectified and unsafe and too many – let’s face it, it’s almost always men – join up for and expect “revolutionary pussy” in exchange for being good dedicated boys who do all the right things. I mean FFS you have Obama talking about trying to get in the pants of this Marxist chick he knew by going to something with her in his autobiography. So this is not exactly some imagined issue. It is a big issue that has existed for decades in the broad ‘left’ from student groups to environmental activism to yes Marxist groups and communist parties.
On an organizational level it is correct for parties and other Marxist organizations to take a stance against bringing or allowing horniness in the ranks (no comrade, having an orgy is not going to stick it to the bourgeoisie, no comrade, having underwear cuddle sessions won’t allow us to enlighten ourselves any better, and no comrade it’s not a revolutionary act to fuck). This doesn’t mean enforced chastity or vows or anything of the sort just that being horny around comrades is bad actually and you shouldn’t do it.
There is a little meme there as a Maoist organization once published a position paper basically arguing all sex is rape because under capitalism there cannot be freedom from various coercions which means an inability to truly consent. While I do think they had a point there (not to the point that we should all refrain from sex under capitalism but the harms capitalism does towards our ability to attain true consent and equality required for real sexual liberation). This paper as I understand it was used to shut down anyone even remotely looking like a sex pest in the ranks of some Maoist orgs.
I know right? I didn’t want to say it because you know sex bad obviously but damn it there’s something to be said to having a human right to use a vibrator in privacy to de-stress and yes get off and more privacy than just pulling a blanket over yourself and shamelessly going at it while the people all around it just awkwardly look away or worse are total creeps about it.
I disagree about the nuke thing. Nukes are too traceable, it’s too brinksmanship-like with Russia and risks nuclear retaliation even if on a limited scale. Far more likely is they false flag with biological or chemical weapons. Those are almost impossible to trace and just as outrageous. Just whip up some novichuk or similar, drop it on one of those areas, scream bloody murder that the Russians did it and there you go, got your NATO involvement under another name.
They’ve been hinting at it for some time now. The previous misinformation about the Russians imminently going to use such things. The new conditions for intervention. It doesn’t even have to be a political decision the Pentagon or Executive makes. The CIA sees this and they’ll just go for it on their own because they were told in other words the price of involvement is that.
Too bad. Let’s hope most of them die or are captured before that point.