On no level do most accusations of “sealioning” seem to hold up to scrutiny, in my opinion.

Agreed. While I haven’t seen many accusations of it, all the ones I’ve seen have been false. And like you said, Lemmy has sufficient moderation that I’ve never seen it happen here.

As for the title question:

Do we need more users ?

We don’t need more users. It might be nice, there are benefits, but we don’t need it. I agree with you on not caring much about growth-as-a-target, “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell”. I was here years before the first big reddit exodus with the third-party API changes and I was having a good time back then too.

Since the micronation is unrecognized, within the territorial claim of the UK and easily within reach of their law enforcement, I wonder what the Principality of Sealand would have to do before the UK attempt to enforce their laws on them. Would the huge pressure of recording and film industries have enough power to compel them? Sealand have gotten into serious armed shenanigans before, which if one chooses not to interpret their governance as valid, would effectively be ransom.

Their wiki page mentions HavenCo, a data haven which apparently was operational for a few years.

Good example, with the caveat that one would still be subject to the intellectual property rights of Russians, and I’d assume of their allies. (I know I used Hollywood in my example, that’s on me)

Thanks for adding the source.

I’m not a soulist like the user you replied to, but for another perspective, mine is that rights are imaginary constructs which mean nothing if unenforceable.

People have some rights to not be murdered; that’s not an opinion if we have a compatible definition of ‘rights’, it’s written in law, it’s ingrained into mainstream liberalist social norms and ethics. So the right exists as a social idea which sometimes manifests in real consequences. However:

• I can get murdered by the government or law enforcement who proclaim to enforce my right to not be murdered! It’s a conditional right, not the idealistic universal right it’s often made out to be.
• And there are some people who I wouldn’t really care if they were murdered. I don’t weep for Wnssolᴉuᴉ’s lynching. I don’t mind that Ken McElroy’s murderers weren’t charged. Sometimes we just don’t have the luxury or power to go through the ideal routes of justice. And to be clear I also don’t advocate for murder for a big long list of reasons, many of them are obvious. For example, I think the assassination of Brian Thompson was morally just and cathartic, it stopped an antisocial social murderer who would not have been held accountable by law, and the fear it created may feasibly have saved some lives of UHC customers in the short term, but ultimately I do not advocate for such adventurism as it’s proven historically to do little to create long-term systemic improvements, and can easily go wrong and cause more damage than benefit, as we saw with the “golden age of Propaganda of the Deed”.

The sealion in the comic overheard someone being racist against them, and stepped in to say, “Hey, why are you being racist?” And for some reason is wrong because… they’re persistent? Or because they’re annoying? How is that not literally just every “anti-woke” argument?

I think the point is that the sea lion is feigning civility while harassing someone over a casual opinion.

My response would be that if we extend the metaphor, like you did, and substitute the absurd ‘sea lions’ for a race, then harassing the racist doesn’t bother me. Bigots don’t deserve peace. It’s absolutely harassment to stalk and interrogate someone who doesn’t want to talk, I just wouldn’t care that they’re being harassed for airing such bigotry.

(On the other hand, if we assume the original opinion is not a metaphor and replace it with a similarly absurd statement, like enjoying pineapple on pizza, then the sea lion would be acting unreasonably. If someone followed you around online and kept bringing up how you prefer pizza to be prepared, demanding a calm discussion and insisting on peer-reviewed proof that pizza tastes better a certain way, while you ask them to stop, that harassment would obviously be uncalled for. For what it’s worth, the author made a comment that it wasn’t meant to be “analogous to a prejudice based on race, species, or other immutable characteristics.” - but I say it’s a though-provoking interpretation to explore regardless)

Yep. “Hmm, ‘unknown?’, let’s assume they’re all Linux!”.

Linux is doing well, no need to lie about it!

I’ve come across some people who have no idea what “sealioning” even means. There used to be a hb user “Ulysses” or something, like three years ago, who accused me of doing it after I replied to their reply to my reply, and that’s the only conversation we’d ever had. I pulled up the definition of sealioning and the comic which the word originated from, and they just say “no that’s not true, stop sealioning”.

I feel like some people just think sealioning means “this person keeps replying to my posts”, as if conversations on a public forum are somehow uncalled for, or unusual.

private as possible

What are you trying to hide, and who are you hiding it from?

I dislike that some privacy forums, like reddit and therefore here by proxy, have a cultural habit of talking about privacy or security as an abstract value in itself. But when we start getting into more detailed questions, it’s all vague and vibes until we make it clear who we’re trying to hide from and what we’re hiding.

For example, most of the time I’m not hiding from my own government. Sure, I incidentally do make it a bit harder for them to track me, but I’m more focused on hiding from Meta/Alphabet/Amazon/etc. (plus from a small group of deranged online stalkers obsessed with some of my friends) so there are plenty of online services and stores I can buy from without taking inconvenient measures. It’s fine for me if some services can guess my name and know where I live and one of my phone numbers. It’s not fine if they learn some other details.

It’s important to get out of the habit of saying “more private”, “less private”, “most secure”, and talk about what you’re specifically concerned with and how tactics and tools specifically address that. What information will Google gain from knowing your investments? Is that a threat to you? Are there acceptable ways to mitigate that threat?

Using google to create an account would mean giving them my real data

I’ve been surprised how easy it was for me to make a fake Google account with no links to my real identity. I only use it for age-restricted YouTube videos, I wouldn’t trust it with money like investments, because the way I set it up is inherently suspicious and I wouldn’t be able to verify identity if challenged.

Without the ears and with broad paws, it nicely doubles as a sea lion.

One quickly learns that drawings don’t have to be detailed or experienced to be appreciated. Sure, it absolutely helps, learn what techniques make art more beautiful so you can punch above your weight, but I’ve received compliments from quick minimal doodles just by having fun with it.

In the past 5 years I’ve only ever had minor issues*, like a power button light not being on. But as a developer, I’m aware my hardware choices are more likely to be popular with other developers who would have already noticed and fixed issues.

* excluding on niche distros, like Puppy ones.

What are some things you preferred in KDE over Cinnamon? I haven’t explored KDE much.

That’s not whataboutism at all, that’s extrapolating the logic of a claim to another case in order to test it.

Your Lemmy account is part of a disinformation network. It’s very obvious from your account history that you are not part of a community, but a think tank asset.

Not sure if you’ve already checked, but here’s how your post looks to us on Lemmy:

https://lemmy.world/post/40939309

That’s true.

On one hand, there are often ways to change the settings to make things more like how they were on Windows,

On the other hand, sometimes there’s a good reason for it to be different, so I always try to check why it’s different before changing it. An example is some window managers putting the taskbar panel at the top of the screen or on the side instead of the bottom (top panel is more convenient with a mouse, side panel takes up less space on a wide/landscape screen).

Always good to try out a few distros before settling in for the long run. As much as I love Mint, there are always cases where one distro has issues with your hardware where another doesn’t.

Copy paste did take a while to get used to.

Which part, the highlight-middle click part or something else?

Also the default screenshot tool doesn’t automatically put the snip on the clipboard.

In Mint? You’ve made me realize that would be convenient for me so I looked into it, I believe copying straight to clipboard is a default keyboard shortcut option I didn’t know about.

You can’t just say “The USSR was bad because of communism, end of story”, for example. It was never communist, and I would argue it eas never trying to get there.

On one hand, I know you’re right that socialist rhetoric is abused. It’s vitally important to be alert to it, and fascists have a proven history of trying to exploit socialist sentiment, given their rise in response to a string of 1920s socialist uprisings in Europe.

On the other, I can’t look at the decades-worth of writings and actions of the RSDLP and Bolsheviks and conclude they weren’t honestly trying to build a vanguard party with the aim of building a communist society. I’m open to critique of whether or not Leninist theory has been shown to be right or wrong, but I struggle to see how Lenin could have been pretending to be a communist full-time for 20 years at extended self-sacrifice. An opportunist wouldn’t have chosen a path with such little opportunity. The Bolsheviks were evidently a vanguardist party trying to eventually achieve communism - a ‘communist party’.

You’re using all these fraught terms like “socialism” and “liberalism” incorrectly

I’m using them in a way consistent with political dictionaries.

Fascism is, openly, anti-liberal. This is not a contested fact, they say it openly. It’s one of the few consistent parts of fascism, along with being anti-socialist (‘socialist’, in this context, meaning in support of social ownership of the means of production - a very standard and common definition in English dictionaries and encyclopedias alike).

You accuse me of using those terms incorrectly, so what would you consider a correct usage?

The Nazis rose out of National Bolshevism, after all.

No, they didn’t.

A cursory look at the Nazi Party’s history clearly shows their utter disdain and scapegoating of Bolshevism as a grave evil. The Nazi Party founder (Anton Drexler) was an anti-Marxist. Drexler emphasised the only thing ‘socialist’ about the party was social welfare for those deemed Aryan. The Nazi Party considered nazbols to be a strand of Bolshevism and therefore part of a Jewish conspiracy.

No, fascism and communism aren’t “opposites”

I don’t believe politics is simple enough to allow opposites, but if there were such a thing, those two ideologies would be pretty close. Fascists are ideologically anti-communist and communists are always among the first they mass murder. Communists (along with anarchists) are consistently the foundation of anti-fascist action.

while communism is a highly ideological philosophy that’s never existed

“Yes, and,”

This is where terminology plays tricks:

• A communist society is the ultimate goal of the ideology called ‘communism’.
• You’re absolutely correct that no country has a communist society; in fact, it’s a contradiction, since a communist society is stateless by definition.
• The countries that are labelled ‘communist’ (by themselves and others) are states with a communist government in power. This strategy of vanguardism is strongly debated among communists: many would agree with you that it’s a contradiction, while others consider it a necessary transitional phase in order to defend from capitalist counter-attack. If we assume that the vanguard government is not corrupt (and we shouldn’t assume that without evidence!), then it’s a government that aims to create the material conditions that would cause itself to wither away, piece by piece. Obviously none has succeeded in that goal, but it’s not wrong to call those governments ‘communist’, in the same way a person who supports socialism is called a ‘socialist’ - it’s about a school of thought, about ideology, rather than describing the current situation they govern over. And to characterize authoritarian communists as fascist is ignorant about how fascist systems develop - fascism works to kill socialism and liberalism with the backing of the owning-class. No matter how many similar characteristics one may try and find on the surface, the two concepts are foundationally incompatible and opposed, and will act very differently. It’s fine to hate them both, but they are not related.