Pili

1. Not a reason to fuck up Ukraine for the 100 years
2. Not a reason to fuck up Ukraine for the 100 years

I wouldn’t say you own games on Steam. You can’t install them without Steam, and usually you can’t even launch them without being connected to Steam. And you if lose your account, they are lost forever.

GOG on the other hand, you can absolutely download offline installers for you entire game collection and keep them somewhere safe in a hard drive from which you could still install them 10 years after GOG is dead. (and hopefully the games still work on newer hardware)

Oh yes, voter manipulation is very concerning. Even the simple fact that foreign powers can legally finance a candidate for another country’s presidential election is absolutely crazy to me.

But I think there is something even worse than that:

• When participation is so low that barely 50% of electors cast a vote, with one category of people (the elderly) being massively over-represented.

• When there is no possible recourse if the majority of electors isn’t satisfied with their options, and blank ballots aren’t even accounted for.

• When the main platforms where campaigning happens are all owned by and handful of billionaires, who can choose to present in a good light the candidates that will be the most favorable to them, and do the opposite for others.

• When political campaigns are funded privately (and as I said, sometimes even by authoritarian foreign powers), those who favor billionaires being again at a massive advantage.

The game is so strongly rigged, I’m surprised that the general population still widely considers us democracies. Starting by reforming our electoral systems would do a lot of good and would be a lot simpler than trying to stop social media bots in my opinion, even though we should also tackle that issue.

Yeah, it’s happening all over western liberal democracies. Inflation is going crazy and wealth inequalities are growing at an alarming rate. Because of that, people in power are afraid of a popular uprising, and they would rather see fascists rise to power and protect capitalism, than an economical shift to the left and lose some of their wealth.

It happened many times before. The more commonly known examples being:

• Prominent industrialists and agricultural landowners providing financial support to Mussolini’s party because they feared the rise of socialism, and saw in him a means to counter it.
• German industrialists who were fearful of the rise of the Communist Party and provided financial support to the Nazi party.
• Spanish landowners and businessmen who were alarmed by the social and economic reforms of the Second Spanish Republic and supported Franco’s rise to power.

History tends to repeat itself.

I’m wondering the same. Hopefully privacy oriented projects such as GrapheneOS can counter whatever technology they will try to implement.

The last election was a shitshow.

As usual, the younger generation didn’t bother voting, and the older one voted en masse for conservative candidates because they are those our media push for, while at the same time slandering progressive ones.

In the election runoff, we had the choice between an openly fascist candidate from a party literally founded by former Nazis, and a “light fascist” one that people were seeing as the lesser evil. Though it’s pretty obvious now that his fascism isn’t so light (he openly admires Petain, a french leader who collaborated with Nazi Germany), and I hope people will remember that for the next election and understand that voting for a democratic candidate in the first turn if very important.