thebardingreen

Neither did he last administration and neither will the next.

That's like saying that neither tepid bath water nor boiling tea water are "cold."

The Syrrannites being called a "violent cult" was propaganda by a corrupt regime trying to rewrite Vulcan history to keep themselves in power. They were deliberately suppressing beliefs and practices related to the Vulcan telepathic nature, because this posed a threat to them.

Vulcans, valuing rationality as they do, reacted differently than humans would to the exposure of the misconceptions and outright lies that had been propagated by Vulcan high command. Most of society reevaluated their beliefs and taboos around telepathy and the more spiritual nature of being Vulcan. By the time of TOS, Vulcan society had mostly reconnected with their more spiritual and pacifistic traditions and abandoned the more modern, arrogant and hypocritical views espoused by the High Command of the Enterprise era.

This tells an interesting story actually, of how humans and Vulcans (and Andorians) benefited on a societal level and became better people together through the cultural interactions and exchanges that took place during that era. Prior to Enterprise, we kind of knew that humans had benefited technologically and culturally through their contact with Vulcans. Enterprise showed us how Vulcans benefited and rediscovered themselves (and went through major and positive cultural revival) as a result of their contact with humans. I think it's kind of a beautiful story.

What the other poster said. Is it possible to skip all those episodes? Probably, if you're okay with getting dropped into an episode like

"Wait, weren't they under attack by a huge battlefleet? What happened? How did they survive?"

"Wait, this character is dead? How did that happen??"

You'll also have to skip the season finale of season 6, the first few episodes of season 7, and most of the last episodes of the series, including the series finale. The story arcs of at least four main characters will be resolved in Prophet / Pah Wraith episodes. The whole Dominion plot line becomes heavily entwined with the Prophets / Pah Wraiths and the major events of the later parts of the series we'll make zero sense without that context.

tl:dr; power through, don't do it, it gets better.

Saying it again here: The only infrastructure we can trust is our own.

Even if there are still a number of services that are strongly above average trustworthy, they are ALL under attack in multiple "free" countries.

It's Trump-proofish

• I approve of Matrix and Nextcloud.
• Proton unfortunately is probably the easiest option for now. We need better self hosted / anonymous email servers, but spammers and scammers have probably ruined that for everybody forever and fuck them all to hell for that. Best option is to just abandon email for anything sensitive.
• All the alternative social media is better, but they can still absolutely feed the lot of it into an LLM and then ask the LLM to print out a list of "likely dissidents." I would be shocked if this isn't coming soon to a United States near you - then again, I'm one to talk posting this on Lemmy, using a username I've used for close to two decades, from an instance that runs on a server I rent from a corporate cloud host.
• OS should be Whonix, Tails or Qubes.
• Browser should be Tor Browser (or at least get a mention). PRACTICALLY, for most people, I would recommend Brave over LibreWolf (for reasons of stability, compatibility, more frequent security patches and the fact that the Mozilla project has been unfortunately going to shit lately). Yes the company sucks, but the browser consistently scores top marks on real world privacy and security tests.
• No mention of FDE or post quantum crypto. Quantum chips are coming effing fast, if they're not already here. I have reason to believe both the US and China can currently make practical use of Shor's algorithm, although only in a targeted and VERY expensive way... but Moore's Law man, plus I can't prove it and I can't say more. Post quantum doesn't seem to be on most people's radar (most troublingly, the Tor project).
• Anything to do with phones is literally fucked, like "This is fine" dog level fucked. If you MUST be mobile (like basically everybody trying to do basically anything), you must accept you're probably NOT really fascist proof, unless you go to some pretty extreme lengths and REALLY know what you're doing.

As far as your average normie (or even above average competence tech saavy user) goes, this is close to as Trump proof as you're likely to get right now without help and support. So great, but it has holes in it a fascist regime could drive a brigade of tanks through, and unless you EITHER have that help and support OR really know what you're doing, you should be thinking about that REALLY hard, every day.

We collectively decided decades ago that centralized services are more convenient and better able to connect us to the people and content we want to be connected to (although we were very deliberately herded in that direction by oligarchs). Now we will pay the price.

tl:dr; The only infrastructure we can trust is our own. Not liking that, and not having the skills or resources to do anything practical about it (tragically, terrifyingly) doesn't make it not true. Plus needing to stay connected to the people and resources we can ONLY access through third party services and infrastructure, continues to make us reliant on those services and infrastructure, unto our own ruin.

You can't take the sky from me.

I'm a people person! I have people skills! What the fuck is wrong with you people?!

I know a guy who worked on Unix in the '80s and he is very clear that Linux / MacOS are just Unix.

I host servers both out of my home, out my wife's office and I also have some cloud servers at Digital Ocean.

If you're worried about data loss (and you should be) you need offsite backups. I have actually lost data to a fire (in 2009) and to a hard disk crash when I didn't learn my lesson the first time (in 2014). Never again.

I have backup servers at both my house and my wife's office. If you don't have a wife with a convenient office for this purpose, you could probably find a self host buddy to host your backup server (and maybe you could host your buddy's back up server, a friend and I used to do this years ago). You could also encrypt everything and then back the encrypted files up to the cloud, secure that the fascists almost certainly can't decrypt them, even if they get their hands on the raw data.

You can automate this. There are tools that can help. I'm kind of a power user and I just use rsync, scp, minio and database replication to automate my various backups, so I'm a bad person to ask about the easier to use tools that can do this. However, either of those communities I posted are full of people with better answers and I know that less DIY back up tools exist.

Whilst I’ll agree with your statement some people prefer a service to use rather than self hosted.

Great! They can prefer that. Lots of people (most people probably) even need services, because they lack the skills and / or equipment.

That doesn't change the simple truth of "the only infrastructure we can trust is our own." My goal with that statement is to educate people as much as possible NOT to trust the third party services they're using, even if those services supposedly care about privacy and security.

I've also seen a huge outpouring in recent weeks of people who are suddenly very eager to learn about and use self hosted infrastructure (or get access to someone else's self hosted infrastructure). For some reason, I wonder what that could be. I've never seen anything like it in my life. I for one intend to encourage the shit out of it.