American Nations is probably the worst pop-history books I've had the displeasure of reading. Its chock full of backwards rationalizations, just-so narratives, and glaring misconstructions and omissions.

Any assessment of modern society based on this author is immediately suspect and we should honestly stop letting him write for any serious publication.

Realistically any Libertarian dedicated enough to show up to a party conference is probably a member of the 1% of the US population that votes for them in general elections.

Casablanca. Its a classic.

What's far more likely than 3d printed prosthetics becoming fashonable is people just rolling over and accepting the distopian surveilance state.

I can't even get most of my family to use Signal to prevent Facebook from reading their private messages, what could happen to convince them to go full cyberpunk?

Another reason to use a VPN is that ISPs have every motive to sell your browsing data and they do. Unlike many other groups tracking you, your ISP inherently has your meatspace name, address, and payment information making their data easily collatable and very valuable.

If you use the default DNS on their provided router they can even tell if someone purchased an XBox, Playstation, or any other smart device just from update and telemetry lookups.

As the article says, by using a VPN youre using someone else's ISP making that info worthless.

If your threat model includes preventing ad networks from gathering data, a VPN absolutely is a tool to prevent that. Do you have to pay for a service? Probably not if you're technical enough; a VM in a data center is probably sufficient.

Snyder needs someone to tell him a movie should have both character development and a cohesive plot in at most 2 hrs.

I'm done with him deferring blame for not being able to put together a clean narrative.

They're campists; they can't understand any level of moral complexity.

Anyone who opposes the US is inherently good, because surely the west is the only one that can be imperialistic.

This is the best part of our culture and I won't hear otherwise.

Mozilla is a non profit. The most "capitalist" they get is the Mozilla Corp a company owned by the foundation which is basically just for tax purposes. Having a big player in the fediverse helps.

My day is made immeasurably better by Jim Jordan's failure. This entertainment is surely the best thing he's ever done for the country.

I think a lot of these points have been made better elsewhere.

The extended discussion of hypothetical US interference just because of a tenuous chain of connection to the CIA is just typical US-badism. The US frequently funds tools which they think further geopolitical goals and this doesn't inherently mean its untrustworthy, just that their methodology of control is more resilient to uncensored speech; the best example of this is TOR, decentralized, anonymous, and created by Naval Research and DARPA. The author can't concede this point as it'd bring up they're unsubtly simping for a different colonial power, one who does require such censorship.

Signal's centralized nature has always been a major criticism (and it's reasonable), however as a trade off it's easy to on-board the tech illiterate. It's nontrivial to set up a Matrix server and I've seen the difficulty of migrating activist groups there. It's good as a long term goal, but one also has to recognize that a person struggling with housing has different concerns and will prefer to use whatever their friends and family do.