‘ukraine’ stopped being a sovereign, democratic state when the euromaidan coup of 2014 (orchestrated by nuland and others in the obama admin) overthrew yanukovich.

The coup itself was exceptionally violent, including burning many people alive in a trade union hall, as well killing many civilians in the donbass region by indiscriminate mortar fire (by the ‘ukrainians’).

The regime itself is openly fascist, and has formally integrated military units which openly wear nazi-era symbols and which glorify the infamous nazi steppan bandera.

Modern ukraine is now a proxy state, which the west uses as a money laundering operation to wash american tax dollars through ukraine and ultimately to europe, and as a weapons blackmarket for terrorists around the world. The banderite regime is also trafficking human organs at an industrial scale, and it is widely assumed that sex trafficking from that region has also increased. (ukraine was one of the most corrupt countries in the world even before the coup stole the sovereignty away from ukrainian people.)

Now that ukraine is badly losing on the battlefield, and that this useless war has dragged on for years longer than it should, to still be supporting ‘ukraine’ in 2026 means one of two things. Either:

1: You are historically / politically or media illiterate. This means you believe every news story from cnn, fox news, or from other cia cutouts. You can’t understand why the US would have anything to do with coups because that doesn’t gel with your disney-level understanding of reality. No critical thinking, no context, no details. Just ukraine good. zelensky good. putin bad.

or

2: You are an ideological fascist. In the ww2 sense. You support the legacy of bandera, you believe their concentration camps and holocausting of jews, gays, romani etc didnt go far enough, that their project went unfinished, and you hope that with western backing zelensky and his coterie of banderites will this time complete the fuhrers final solution and make ukraine an ethnically pure fascist state.

I’ll be generous and say as a third option you might be a ukrainian national and just be playing along with the cancerous banderite junta (which has banned all non-state-sanctioned religions, cancelled all elections, outlawed opposition political parties, and even banned the speaking of the russian language amongst ethnic russians) out of pure fear. This one i can at least understand, especially if you lacked the foresight or the means to flee your country when it was lost to the west in 2014.

propaganda

tl:dr when they say ‘I have nothing to hide’ you respond with 'you aren’t even really you without privacy so you can’t really say what ‘you’ have to hide. Then when they give you a confused stare you walk them through the previous logical steps. I’m not sure it’s incredibly persuasive IRL especially to the kind of person who would argue against their own fundamental human rightd in this way (i’ve had similar chats with my own father fwiw) but it’s a good starting point.

Following up with concrete examples of harm (which don’t rely on a logical chain of propositions) is a good follow up.

being monitored (even if you are not aware of it) changes your behaviour via the ‘big brother’ effect.

Your behaviour is most of what makes you an individual, and is the means through which people express their autonomy and social existence.

putting these things together gives you the result that you cannot fully be ‘yourself’ while you are being watched. At best you are performing what you’d like ‘yourself’ to be for an expected audience.

Self actualisation, or the process of developing and becoming ‘yourself’ is therefore disrupted meaning that you can never be or know yourself while you lack real privacy.

Another (more dramatic) way to say it would be you cannot be fully human without also enjoying a default privacy

the search providers (especially that famously ‘not evil’ one) had a huge hand in centralising and then gatekeeping access to ‘the web’. They have such a disproportionately powerful effect on how users discover content, and huge power to drive self-fulfilling ‘network effects’ where people go where people already are, which has become so normalised that most people couldn’t imagine ‘the web’ without them.

i’m not suggesting it was ever realistic or possible, but what we needed was for that one search provider and indexer of content to be broken up, partially nationalised, and partially integrated into the network specification itself. Only they are powerful enough to become a model for how to functionally disentangle their operations into public and private parts.

the only alternative is to break the centralisation of the web as china is doing and other BRICS nations intend to do, by creating ‘national internets’ which in some ways federate together and in other ways do not. I don’t like this model of development for the future of the internet but the security considerations of the present require this kind of approach.

This was my first thought too but unfortunately the app doesn’t play nice with grapheneOS

It was an almost perfect medium for sharing cooking videos and recipes, can anyone suggest a replacement?

Don’t worry I’ve already uninstalled it (months ago when Ellison bought a majority stake) but I haven’t found a replacement short-form video platform for recipes yet

did you read the link i provided? in case the implication wasn’t clear i’ll say it explicitly. Viruses which are virtually nonexistent (not circulating in the population) can be induced in a population by vaccination itself (in rare cases when using an attenuated virus).

This means there is a risk, especially for viruses like polio which basically don’t exist anymore, that a vaccination program will generate polio cases which then spread and create a new outbreak of polio.

Those recent outbreaks of polio were thought to be from an unnecessarily aggressive vaccination program, at least that’s the reporting i encountered.

I haven’t done a risk calculation, i don’t claim to be an epidemiologist or to know at what point this exotic risk outweighs the benefit of herd immunity. I suspect that calculation depends on things like exposure points in the population, general immunity, and the %of people already vaccinated historically.

It’s definitely a real effect (i linked directly to the american CDC) and it should be included in any discussion concerning virtually dead viruses. It hasn’t been made up by ‘antivaccers’ and for me personally i don’t even bring this up in those kind of spaces because i don’t trust them to parse this level of nuance and contradiction to be brutally honest.

The risk profile probably varies virus to virus also.

other than vaccine induced polio how would a modern day person in the USA even get exposed to polio?

this is hilarious

‘he was downvoted for speaking the truth’

you should check out the 2009 ghostbusters game, many consider it to be the true ‘ghostbusters 3’