if just a handful of idealists

If they are so few why does their vote matter that much? Futile attempt to undermine those who disagree with oneself on the basis of statistical sums.

suck it up

This arguments goes both ways. You say I suck it up, I say you suck it up, I don’t put my friends’ life/well-being on the line, for the sake of some half-baked moderation bias one considers self-evident truth.

the third-party purist who made their heart sing.

This is not what happened. All analyses point to that Harris failed to mobilize progressive voters. But this is not a discussion we are having right now, I have made my point very clear in this post including the contributions of others underneath.

So this is a dishonest ad hominem argument, that contradicts itself. I expect it to be thought of as refuted, and one should not resurrect it as per the anti-sealioning policy.

I am a pragmatist, you are an idealist.

1. This is not what these words mean.
2. You don’t get to define what other people determine themselves as.
3. I am ideologue with certain material interests, and you are an ideologue with a different set of interest, who is willing to solve equations with human lives.
4. A centrist although presenting as non-ideologue, is willing to protect his moderation bias even with the lives of other people he thinks as ideological purism.
5. By continuously compromising with the worst amongst the humanity for precious election points he makes society worse for all of us.
6. The real meaning of centrism is that you are flexible with your red lines against fascism and corporatism, and weigh human lives according to their ideological distance from oneself.

history shows that “radical solutions” are almost always a mirage

We have LibreWolf, Mullvad, TorBrowser, which are all Firefox forks of course. If we are talking about possible extinction of the gecko engine perhaps we could have this discussion anew, but because these other projects exist, not because we have to support any ill advised move Firefox makes that time and again alienates this community.

To further this argument, there is, well, open source in general, which many people frame by the same “moderate-biased” arguments you propose. Nonetheless it exists and thrives, and it is well shown that the GPL licenses are better for developers. All this happens because of what you dismiss as “idealists”, from the era of Creative Commons, Independent Media Center, and the Internet Archive, to the Tor Project, Tails, SciHub and all other good things the internet has to offer comes from ideologues. Even Lemmy that you are currently using.

So whatever is outside the centrist’s tunnel vision is just non-existent. That makes the centrist an extremist naive empiricist, lacking non only object constancy but also the intellectual sophistication to stipulate configurations of the world outside his immediate and temporary surroundings.

The blithe centrist happily leeches off to preach ad nauseam that middle ground with spooks, fascists and advertisers is a universal truth we must blindly succumb to. Then it is shown that the centrist is not just naive or misguided but actively hostile and dishonest (see first section of this comment for evidence of your logical inconsistency and dishonesty) with people of different opinions, so they prove themselves not to be centrist at all, but diet fascists.

To sum up, in this post I have shown that:

• Centrists can be tactically motivated and intellectually dishonest.
• Centrist are in fact intolerant of views different than theirs.
• Centrists are immoral and undemocratic, in their pursuit of middle ground with perpetrators of exploitation and discrimination.
• Centrists are in fact extremist in their naive empiricism, tunnel vision, and glorification of the status quo that was given to them, which is by definition conservative.

Combining common terms from the above propositions: Centrists are tactically motivated, intellectually dishonest, intolerant to difference of opinion, indifferent to the rights of others, immoral and undemocratic apologists of exploitation and discrimination, extremist in their empiricism and conservativism.

Centrist? Better call them sentries of the status quo. Disclaimer: I hate centrists with a burning passion.

What I said was not to mean that “not having a penis” is a prerequisite to enter a toilet. This is so complex to put in simple terms, because what TERFs say is an inconsistent cocktail of hateful ideas, that contradict themselves. But no one is examining genitals to enter any toilet. They just appeal to plain old cisgenderism, “people who look like men must have dicks and people who look like women mustn’t, because these are the two natural categories and I want to be able to put anyone neatly into them, except some freaky accidents of birth”. Their actual problem is that legitimization of transgender individuals threatens the very core of this cisgenderist ideal, which only lead to the corollary that trans people are not natural and should not exist. I intended to write sth else entirely but this is the cornerstone of the whole discussion, that cisgenderism is the substrate and breeding ground of transphobia and perhaps we should start discussing in these terms instead.

Someone should tell Mozilla about the AI-sized environmental concern in their browser?

It’s called offset /s

With no intention of stirring the pot, this sounds just like the pre-election arguments in favor of Democrats.

The last voice that cares even slightly about our privacy will be gone.

The emphasis here should be on “even slightly” rather than the dramatic effect of “the last voice”.

I mean, if this slice approaches zero, then why it is better to stay with Firefox rather than moving on to more radical solutions?

Right? This is what is also complete hypocrisy on Republicans part. On one hand, they (erroneously) equate trans with surgeries when they want to condemn youth healthcare. But somehow all adult trans people are no-surgery self-identifying “men in dresses”.

This is good precedent for when Elon will try to “flip” European politics as well. To bad that the European Commission might be the one responsible to enforce it.

The lottery. Falconry. Schools.

No one is attempting to prove bleeding P->Q here.

If P -> Q and P, then Q

Sure, and when ~P^Q, then P->Q is still not false, and you can further use it in a proof, in the context of other given statements.

This was never presented as a method to show that P->Q, which arguably can only be shown with data.

With all due respect, get your head out of your arse and read this from what I posted:

While modus ponens is one of the most commonly used argument forms in logic it must not be mistaken for a logical law; rather, it is one of the accepted mechanisms for the construction of deductive proofs that includes the “rule of definition” and the “rule of substitution”.

Emphasis is mine. I cannot scream hard enough to get this simple message across to your flipping head. You are reading it wrong, and if you had done one class of prepositional calculus you would have known, therefore you haven’t.

As for your foundationalist pursuits, most of science advances without getting back to the foundations, just as calculus was in practical use long before it was formally proven. So you see a person (OP) struggling with basic conception and composition of his argument, let alone the formal expression, and you raise the bar to the level of logical foundations of mathematics? If not dishonest, this is utterly unproductive.

Modus Ponens Justification by Truth Table Wikipedia

Modus Ponens Justification by Truth Table Wikipedia

Modus Ponens Justification by Truth Table Wikipedia

Modus Ponens Justification by Truth Table Wikipedia

Modus Ponens Justification by Truth Table Wikipedia

Quine is the most sane person among your lot. And righteously followed by Thomas Kuhn.

Given A and given B, with literally nothing else, prove A -> B.

That was never the task at hand. You are projecting your belief system so hard you cannot even parse the arguments at a functional level. Yet, after an hour or so, suddenly 4 more vote me down, and only in this particular thread. (Since the rest of the comments in the whole post are unaffected, even mine? What the fuck did you go to your philosophy of science SimpleX chat and called for back up?

Pathetic.

For the last time The truth table does not mean that A->B is “proven”. Obviously you have never done propositional calculus on pen and paper, because this misconception is literally worse than OP’s ravings.

You postmodernist you

I stand by the comment. Bringing up Gödel in polite conversation should go straight to the site-wide banable offenses.

Good luck!

This attempt to patronize is futile. You proved you were in bad faith, and I wish not to continue this discussion.

We want to prove A -> B ergo given A and B, A -> B.

Still failing to see that we aren’t proving A -> B, but getting its truth value within a proof.

OP brought propositional logic to a relativistic conversation. My goal was show why that’s a bad idea.

I think your goal was the equivalent of what any postmodernist does in deconstructing any given field:

• “Nothing is real”
• “you can’t prove the first axioms within the system”
• “it is all in the historical context”
• “No truth statements are possible”

By the same coin, all the other logical fallacies go out of the window, together with boolean logic and what have you. Even the valid ones.

It’s now an axiom that A and not B cannot be

How so?

Remember, we started with the assumption we could prove A -> B by negation, not that A -> B was guaranteed.

It is rather that the fact that people who do have something to hide will probably use encryption cannot be refuted by an instance of someone using encryption without having something to hide.

We waved our hands and said there’s no way for that to happen.

This is textbook modus ponens, sorry if you find that disturbing.

you are assuming some sort of framework that allows you to build these truth tables from real life

This is unproductive and eventually relativistic. I can’t fathom how you dare bring advanced topics of math/logic fundamentals in a discussion like this. We are talking the kind of stuff that takes 200 pages to prove 1 + 1 = 2, and why it is not correct, or absolute. What is the purpose of that level of meta in a discussion about flipping privacy?

Pregnancy, abortion seeking, sexual orientation of clergy, being trans, all have become matter of life and death level reasons for caring about privacy.

Ah, another one: insurance company might profile you as XYZ subcategory and discriminate against you.

“Yes but you know what data brokers are hiding from you?” I haven’t tried this one, but I will.

In modus ponens you have four cases:

Here, A is “Having sth to hide”, and B “Caring about encryption”. Obviously case b says that although people having something to hide seek out encrypted methods of communication, it is logically accepted that there might be other reasons, even unknown. A more silly example is this: the grass is wet does not necessarily means it has rained. There might be other reasons. But this does not mean that rain does not make the grass wet.

To sum up, the OP could have just said that. It does not change anything anyway. You can’t beat a propaganda apparatus with this “fallacy talk”.

It is widespread propaganda to make everyone who uses private and encrypted tooling as potential criminals. Encrypted chat is not sth clean cut kids do. Simple as that. It is a pushed narrative by those who don’t want encryption.

Everytime a superficial opinion is so strong that is robust to constant debunking and perpetually reprises, it is typically a propaganda apparatus at play.

Having said that, your attempt to appeal to logic is utterly futile, and also in this particular instance, done badly. Mostly because of the imbalanced and non-sequitur rendering the text unintelligible.