Liberalism is capitalist realism, and anti-communist. It's anti-democracy as well, so long as you define democracy as doing what the people want (That's clearly an impossible way to ride a bike!). Capitalism/liberalism calls itself democracy, but is really just profit seeking. Sometimes the highest expected profits come from doing what people want, just as often it comes from creating toll booths between people and readily available resources so you can extract a profit (enclosure).

I know I wouldn't trust my government or politicians to do anything but enrich themselves at my expense, but I don't have to; my rights are guaranteed by our constitution.

@OP RE: Idealism Do you really think a piece of paper protects you or anyone? Sure there's nominally some "belief in the rule of law" but all it takes is some "creative" interpretation of a document which was written by slave owners who left several intentional loopholes to get around that. The only thing materially restraining the state/capitalism from further trampling your so called rights is fear of reprisal by you. The constitution is one concession by the state, a pinky promise to generally not do these particular things insofar as you promise to be a good worker and not stir the pot too much. Did the constitution give women the right to vote? No. Did the constitution end slavery, and give reparations to those slaves? Nope. Will the constitution step in to stop the profiteering and uniquely evil US healthcare system that has killed and disabled members of my own family? Never.
So what does the constitution "do" in reality? Because from my perspective it might as well be joseph smith's golden tablets, which republicans occasionally use to scold democrats for not being American (tm) enough.

Paying thousands of dollars for something that drops most of its value in just a few years can leave the buyer feeling cheated

How is that any different from non-synthetic diamond rings? lol

I hope this sentiment never stops someone from uploading a textbook without OCR. Once it's scanned it can always be OCRed at a later time.

You aren't permitted to not own an android or apple smartphone with an active number and internet access. You aren't visible as an individual to corporations or even many governments without one. I don't see this getting better any time soon either.

No thank you I have an ad blocker. I'll just have the hominem.

You see that's kind of where the problem is. You can say there's a genocide and I can say "where" and that gives me the vibe of a genocide denier. I've looked for evidence, I've asked for evidence, but the best I've ever gotten is a satellite image of some prison in China, some (AI padded) mugshots with no context, and some thorough browbeating by very serious liberals.

Let me put this another way. I'm of Jewish descent. My great aunt was in a camp. I'm not trying to "deny" any genocides, but what should my standard of evidence be? Particularly when there is a clear incentive for western media to create false narratives about their enemies, and have done so before?

If you have something to present that I haven't seen, I and the other "tankies" are wide open to engage with it.

You wouldn't believe some of the shit they're making up about us on the lemmyverse now that we aren't there to contradict it. According to several posts I've seen we're literal nazis who throw up swastikas for fun and hate trans people. There's been a telephone game of uncharitable interpretations and now a good percent of users have only heard about us this way and have lumped us in with 4channers such that they think we're literal nazis.

I've tried to push back against some of it in the most gentle "civil" way and gotten banned for "subverting defederation" I guess I'm not allowed to have two accounts on the lemmyverse 🤷

Even if by some magic they didn't get shot doing their nonviolent march, the Israelis don't fucking care, and you are never never going to make them.

Go talk to them, they literally couldn't care less.

let's try doing good things

Last time we tried to do good things 10 billion died is that what you want?

I can't believe we're having this struggle session now involving 3 year old accounts?

How did they keep quiet this long and what made them lose this ability?

Using chromium, ungoogled chromium, brave (reactionary baggage), vivaldi, opera, etc is not good enough. We must switch to Firefox specifically.

All the Chrome forks I mentioned above use the same chrome rendering engine, called blink. When you use blink you're helping google take over the web. Firefox is already on the shitlist of every major website because they refuse to prevent the user from installing things like adblockers and privacy extensions like Chrome does with manifest v3 and soon with their new Web Environment Integrity system. They cannot wait to throw up a "your browser is no longer supported :(" page for all Firefox users, and when that happens it will be over for our fox friend.