I ventured over to the website "disboard" to try to find more online friends that are at least slightly left of "hunting the poors for sport"
I came across "Leftist Alternative" and I'm 99% convinced this was a fed honeypot
https://disboard.org/server/1085633149540777994
I answered all of their "prerequisite/verification" questions. Mostly my answers were of the variety of "Amerikkka imperializes the planet for the 1%" and "it's not the left vs right, it's the 99% vs the 1%"
They gave me a LOT of push-back for not acknowledging the "genocide" in China. But it really went downhill when I said that the imperialism of Ukraine by both USA and the Russian was/is a fairly nuanced topic.
Obama Admits US Role in Ukraine Overthrow
Pro-US, Nazi-glorifying government
Ultranationalism, anti-semitism, neo-nazi pogroms, and attacks on LGBT groups.
Ultimately I ended with, "Every war is a banker's war" and included I was against any/all imperialist movements (including Afghanistan, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Haiti, Congo, Liberia, and Sudan), but I could definitely see why NATO advancing, despite saying they wouldn't move a single inch towards Moscow, would incite a push from Russia to get their old trade buddy back (not to mention Blackrock/JPM front-running grain futures before the invasion and then vying to steal the mineral rights away from Ukraine in exchange to build it back up)
This really set the feds off..
"OH YOU HATE JEWS DO YA?" - 'Leftist' Alternative
"Wait... huh?" - Me
"A 'Bankers' War Huh??? We could just tell you were an anti-Semite"
"Are you insinuating.. that all Bankers are... jewish?" - Me
It immediately devolved into ad-hominems from the "lefties" so I left that right-wing hell-hole :(
Is Every "Leftist" Discord a Fed Honeypot?
Or are the lib 
really just that deeply ingrained at this point?
Edit: Missed an end "
OP: Discovers liberalism in the Anglosphere
* iS tHiS a hOnEypoT*
Don't look outside, all the people you see walking to work are actually FBl actors to specifically trick you
Feds infiltrated indian communist student clubs. If they weren't controlling "left" spaces, they would be fucking up big time.
I highly doubt these people are feds as in employed by the US state department for the purpose of spreading pro-US narratives into "leftist" spaces. They don't need that because, frankly, Americans are so indoctrinated that they (CIA, etc.) don't need to actively do stuff like that anymore.
That doesn't mean they never do it, btw. They absolutely do infiltrate groups and we know this because of the insider operations we've seen executed against the far right wingers that are stupid enough to openly start talking about doing OKC Federal building stuff again. There's probably some example from the left recently but I can't recall any. Probably a ton of informants planted amongst the few leftist anarchist groups that operate and do stuff like sabotage right winger's rallies (like slashing their tires and spray painting their cars and stuff- it's actually pretty comical stuff). Although that's not a threat in the same way domestic terror from McVeigh types would be, FBI and such have an interest in equating them to claim "fairness" later on, even though in the US the only real violence ever comes from the right wing. I assume the few socialist/communist/ML/etc. book reading clubs are probably surveilled lightly, but, everyone knows those are packed with fucking nerds.
So, I think they're definitely doing some stuff, but it's mostly situated around catching the randos who say out of pocket, legally actionable things. Guys trying to set up militias and shit and getting way too descriptive in their purpose. Right wingers can be very descriptive. Left wingers can't be.
Anyway, I think most of the fed-appearing places are just dumbass, libbed-up Americans for the most part. EU/UK, etc. are gonna hold similar opinions. NATO-aligned opinions, basically.
These people aren't socialists in any real sense. They do not oppose US imperialism and hegemony. They support it if anything or rather often engage in "well, maybe US/NATO does some bad stuff, but will it be better if China replaced the US?!" (Yes, yes it would. Or at least oppose US dominance forcing the US state to temper its worst inclinations).
They close their eyes and ears, and it's easy to avoid as an American, to the suffering and horror that US imperialism has brought to the world. If they do by accident see something like the genocide in Gaza well "1) that's Israel, not US and 2) has nothing to do with capitalism, imperialism, or specifically US imperialism." It's just impossible for them to plug the pieces of the puzzle because they don't want to.
Accepting that your home country, or union of countries (EU, because it's just the little doggie of the US in the end), is responsible for all the suffering in the world, and that you play a role in that suffering even as a first world worker who owns zero capital... it's depressing. The instinct is to lash out, deny, call people names, justify things, call people wreckers, whatever else, anything else except accepting what is plainly true and in front of you and that you have a responsibility beyond just feeling bad about it. If you understand that horrors are being done that benefit you... well, you gotta do something if you desire to be moral, as I think almost humans do. No one wants to be the "bad guy," so if you followed a path to arriving at the first world exploiting the third world you either have to live with that knowledge like a curse or you can say "nah, I reject that because it makes me feel some way and it means actual substantial, scary changes would have to occur. I don't know the outcome of that alternative future! I like this one where USA is number 1. I just want healthcare, free college, rights for gay people, etc., all the good liberal things. And I'm willing to never think about the rest of the world to obtain those things."
And that's why they're liberals. Maybe they prefer socdems, I don't really care. The point is they don't fully engage with the Marxist and Leninist ideas around labor and capital and imperialism. I guess they call this "purity testing." If condemning the imperialism of the US while also not buying into falsehoods about other nations sold to you by the US imperialists is "purity" then yes, that is the test, and you gotta pass it otherwise you're not doing the full and accurate analysis. For some reason this annoys people. Like they wanna call themselves socialists and yet not believe in socialist principles. Why not just call yourself what you are, a liberal? Because "liberals are bad"? It's just a circle of shit there. Yeah, liberals suck, so when people to your left say you're being a shit-sucking liberal, maybe think about shit more. (Ranting now)
Americans are so indoctrinated that they (CIA, etc.) don't need to actively do stuff like that anymore.
Goddamn, I get harassed at the office in Langley for my job being "useless" and I get harassed by the leftists I'm monitoring for my job being "useless"
fuuuckkkkkkk... I need a union
please stay in your cubicle. an HR team has been dispatched to your location to... help you.
Thank you for assuming the party escort submission position.
In the 90s the Feds invested a massive amount of effort hunting down and dismantling the radical environmentalists. The radical environmentalists never killed anyone and the worst property damage they can be accused of is torching a few suv dealerships. But the feds went after them just as relentlessly as they did right wing bombers for a simple reason; they were right.
If people had realized the radical environmentalists were correct and that capitalism was killing the planet, and that immediate and drastic action was needed, it would be far more dangerous to the regime than a hundre Oklahoma Federal Building bombings. So the radical environmentalists had to go. And then a few years later 9/11 happened and DC had unlimited authority to crush dissent anywhere in the world.
They still do that today with XR being defanged quick AF very, very early on since there was some strong anti-capitalist sentiment in the movement. What struck me as ill-thought was how even back in 2017 they or at least some of early leadership was on discord.
the label "leftist" can encompass everything from eurosocialists to syndicalists to maoists. if a community can't get more specific than that, it's reasonable to assume that their only position is broad opposition to conservatives.
ignore the tagline of this site, this is explicitly an anarcho-leninist instance
They're likely not feds. Morpheus said it better than I could;
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YgJ5ZEn67tk
They're so hopelessly dependent on the system they will fight to defend it.
same!
though actually subQ or IM matrix injections are more effective than pillsBack on topic: I imagine actual fed honeypots would be on matrix.
Discord has people, matrix has like 12 guys. Discord is a better Honeypot
The Wachowski sisters are the only filmmakers who successfully made a combination of both Hollywood slop and high brow, meaningful storytelling. The matrix movies continue being correct about everything
i thought at the end of the second movie, and i was convinced of this, that in the third movie they would discover that they never really escaped the matrix. that neo could do what he did because they were still in the matrix and it was all some sort of ruse to be able to let the rebeliious minds rebel without actually causing any trouble and that neo would realize this and actually break free and liberate them.
but then he was just cyber jesus in the third movie and i was super disappointed
That's more or less the plot of the third movie though, isn't it? Escaping the matrix was a ruse. They're still in the Matrix in the sense that the system allows for rebels to periodically revolt and attempt liberation. The fact that the rebels escaped in the first place was all by design to mitigate a programming bug where some people always feel doubt about their reality. Probably that's supposed to mirror how capitalist liberal democracy absorbs and redirects its own critics. You're allowed to say and do whatever you want as long as it doesn't threaten the designed structure.
Neo broke the cycle because of his unaccounted love of Trinity and his desire to keep fighting despite impossible odds, despite him knowing he was a pawn in a programmed cycle. He cares deeply for his friends and Trinity and refused to be complicit in their slaughter, just for the cycle to start again. The fourth movie shows that humanity has in fact formed something more like an uneasy peace or cold war with the machines, instead of the previous cycles, so some kind of progress was made.
no. they did escape the matrix but allowing them to escape the matrix was the plan, that part is true. but in that you arent allowed to say and do what you want in the way you say. instead they more or less quarantine them and cull them whereas in capitalism they tend to just incorporate the "rebels". if it was like you say then the whole time they would have been tshirts with neo on them in the actual matrix or some shit, right. in the fourth one this is exactly what happens. in a sense, neo liberalizes the rebels and they become a proper part of the system and no longer rebel against it.
and neo is magic, which sucked
Uhhh obviously the "system" he's talking about is not hating women and the red pill is a metaphor for pickup artistry. It's like you don't understand that movie at all 🙄
spoiler
/j
red pill guys being like "Before you can truly hate women you must take the estrogen".
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Imperialist ideology is so ingrained in western thought that it even permeates allegedly leftist spaces. It's a stronger mental vampire than mere capitalism on its own. You can easily get a westerners to hate their boss or landlord, but you'll have a much harder time disentangling their feelings regarding foreign countries. Try getting a westerner to say anything normal about China.
Lenin knew this, calling them things like social chauvinists. Self-decribed socialists who would suspend their criticism of their own countries during WW1 because their draw to national identity was stronger. So maybe they're feds, maybe not. It doesn't matter because imperialism is a bug in every westerner's mind. It's the core feature of a liberal that has to be stripped before they can actually begin to be a leftist.
I've seen some people claim that the western tendency to praise failed socialist revolutions over successful ones is residual Christian admiration of martyrdom, which I kinda doubt. Westerners will boldly claim to be a "Luxemburgist" (whatever the fuck that is) while claiming the DPRK is a despotic rogue state that's doing capitalism but even worse somehow. I think it's simpler than just some cultural feature. Westerners at their guts know where their bread is buttered, they know their status in the world is reliant on the domination of foreign countries, and the most anti-imperialist movements will attract the most scorn. That's it. Socialist movements that are allied with the west, neutral, or otherwise never fought the west are to be admired. Socialist movements actively resisting imperialism are to be regarded as the most vile perversions on earth.
I think you're mis-using the term honeypot. A fed honey pot would be some incoherent form of Maoism and Anarchism and would be actively trying to get you to commit violence. That would be a "fed"/FBI honeypot.
"Federal" moderation of a discord server would be an intelligence agency psy-op. The plan would be to establish a limit on what is acceptable leftism in America by holding all the mod spots on the largest forums. If you believe they do it on subreddits then it makes sense to believe they do it on discord servers.
Now all that said I want to loop back to: "establish a limit on what is acceptable leftism". This is something any leftist will do of their own accord. Its the bane of leftism.
A fed honey pot would be some incoherent form of Maoism and Anarchism and would be actively trying to get you to commit violence.
You obviously haven't seen many discord "marxist" servers. This fits like 90% of them to a T.
No I haven't but that doesn't sound like the one OP is describing. It be really weird if a fbi were trying to convince you to do adventurism on one hand, while insisting you follow the state department line on the other. The CIA Psy-Op server could easily have the same politics.
Sorry for the confusion, I was making joke that most discord leftists have completely incoherent politics that might as well be honeypots, not that I think that they are actually all FBI honeypots. I would imagine that the feds would rather just keep tabs on people on public discord servers rather than encourage adventurism. They might isolate "dangerous" individuals and invite them to more private servers to do that, but I doubt that is all that common.
Uh i thought it was a joke link and i went to the real fbi,gov. am i gonna get honeypotted?
fbi dot gov is more like a poster that the government put up than it is some massive apparatus with a tracking backend. The FBI doesn’t need to inject malware into their site to track you just like Google doesn’t need to use dark patterns to get your personal information. Americans are the most surveilled people on the planet (or they’re a close second to China, I can’t remember). Walking down main street is less private than visiting fbi dot gov if you have a decent VPN.
I wouldn't say "every" leftist discord server is a fed honeypot, but discord itself is a very compromised platform and I resent ever being asked to communicate through it for any reason.
EDIT: It's literally Microsoft Teams for streamers and gamers. Just a huge piece of corporate bloatware with way too many features nobody uses and probable NSA backdoors and constant forced updates.
Discord is a proprietary social networking site geared toward grooming children into making their social life dependent on their app. Discord has zero encryption, meaning that all your messages are WORLD-readable by anyone who gets access to the Discord servers, this includes your direct messages.
There's is no need to make it a fed honeypot, it's already is designed to compromise anyone who uses it. Like, everyone gets press reels of Elon Musk and Tim Cook but have you actually seen or heard from a Discord exec?
Most people use it because of the network effect (Discord is only compatible with Discord, forcing users to be trapped within its sphere) and that it is free of charge (which, of course, attracts a lot of children who are then easily indoctrinated into reactionary Discord chatrooms). There's no "enshittification" (which is an incredibly
term that deeply unserious people use), Discord has been designed from the start to be like this.I'm interested in your opinion about the term enshittification. It's a Doctrowism and even though it's a little imprecise, frequently misused/understood, a little childish, and it isn't my first choice, it's the term that took off. Do you know a better phrase? Not trying to put you on the spot. You always have good takes.
It's a good term if you want to vent out your anger, but many who use the term don't apply to already existing theory and instead use the term to smear the corporation or software which wronged them. It gives off the impression that there are "responsible" companies who distribute nonfree software and those who abuse their customers. Of course, as Marxists, we understand that software itself is capital and in a capitalist system, the owners of software will be the ruling class and their class interests will prevail. Software is an incredible tool for creating surplus value for capitalists as unlike material goods like steel or fruit, software can be morphed and changed to increasingly extract more and more profit with anti-features and malware to yield immediate results.
It's to say that I'm wary of populist terms like "enshittification" that can obfuscate the long standing feud for free software. All proprietary software is harmful and it's better to point out the anti-features of these programs rather than appeal to people's intense emotions which, in my two years fighting this fight, are incredibly fleeting. Free software vs. proprietary software is always a valuable distinction to make since it orients the conversations to people's rights rather than the grievances of customers. Hell the term "enshittifcation" has the danger of invoking a reactionary nostalgia for a gilded age that never existed.
It's been a while since I skimmed through that Doctorow essay, but I have always thought the term, at least as originally intended, implied that enshittification was an inevitability, a direction that any and every proprietary social media platform under capitalism will tend towards over time. If so, it seems it is still mostly in line with what you're saying, and should help make clear that the nostalgia people have for the "good old times" on a profit-driven platform is false, since the kind of degradation that "enshitification" refers to is inherently built in from the start.
- https://doctorow.medium.com/my-mcluhan-lecture-on-enshittification-ea343342b9bc
Doctorow's ideas has a lot of radlib stuff in it.
It’s a three stage process: First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
No, the platform was never good to their users because the platform was proprietary. He keeps praising the civilized "European/Western data privacy laws" but doesn't actually confront the origin of the problem which, in its essence is nonfree software and capitalism.
That TikTok is brainwashing millennials into quoting Osama Bin Laden?
Yuck.
But the capitalism of 20 years ago made space for a wild and wooly internet, a space where people with disfavored views could find each other, offer mutual aid, and organize.
The capitalism of today has produced a global, digital ghost mall, filled with botshit, crapgadgets from companies with consonant-heavy brand-names, and cryptocurrency scams.
No, the capitalism of 20 years ago is the introduction of NDAs and nonfree licenses, of large corporate interests accumulating capital and training university researchers to become worker drones, essentially robbing the academic field to be put into factories. It was always bad, especially for minorities to be on the internet where there was little to no representation as technology used to be only an upper class hobby. The beginning of the end was 20 years ago when MIT researchers saw more value in proprietary software and control rather than keeping the software free. The material analysis stretches as far as Doctorow can retrace the steps of corporate giants and not those resisting the takeover since the 80s.
Wild and wooly internet is just a libertarian nostalgic fantasy. Bullshit takeovers were happening then and are happening now.
Martin Luther King said ‘It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.’
Yuck, why are you quoting MLK here in a talk about your social media treats going bad, real radlib energy.
He mentions nothing concrete you can go and support, just explains the problem in a milquetoast fashion. No mention of the GNU Project, Fediverse, Open Source Initiative, Right to Repair, Freedesktop, Linux etc. It's the same level of analysis as succdems going over why capitalism is broken but saying nothing of the solution except "we got to do better y'all".
He mentions nothing about software freedom, and that's what I take issue with. There are more people in tech (especially em_poc and queer people) than ever yet still a frightening fraction of them actually know the history of resistance. Enshittification doesn't help build a platform, it just builds resentment, the fact that it blew up in liberal circles is just making it seem like more of a red flag.
GNU Project despite not taking a clear stance against capitalism, is still more helpful since it provides people with an alternative worldview.
I might make a more organized post about this, but that's just my ranty response to the term enshittification being as popular as it is.
a mutual aid group I'm in just switched from signal to discord. Its so disheartening.
If you can, you should bring up possibly switching to Matrix, you can't let Discord get away with it.
I'll bring it up but I don't think I have that kind of pull really, its one of those things where it's a big restructuring effort trying to get more organized which discord is theoretically making easier, and its all completely above-board work, so nobody really has opsec on the brain. I'm guessing they discussed this at a meeting I missed or something, which would have been the time to bring it up. even with literally no organizational features signal is better because I actually check it. I get notifications for it. I'm not installing discord, so idk if I'm gonna be helping that group as much. I guess I'll use it in the browser, maybe, but I'd really rather not
I have a small friend group and we have our own discord server to play games with each other, what alternatives do we have? I wasnt aware of discord being so bad.
I hate to be that guy but you don't have a discord "server" that's your own. What you have is a chatroom (within Discord api it is called a guild) that's hosted on Discords centralized network. Discord has the right to fuck you over at any time for any reason. Nearly all ruling class owned social networks operate like this.
Most people use Discord because they enjoy the free VoIP service that Discord gave out to all users. This actually killed a lot of VoIP companies because why pay for serverspace when you can monkeywrench discord into your needs. Discord was always a predator from the get go and was enabled by people wanting free shit but not thinking about the ramifications. Couple that with longstanding world poverty and advertising to impressionable children and you can see how Discord grew into a gigantic tumor it is today. Discord never took the spotlight like Facebook and X dot com so it creeped into people's routine unabated. It's an antisocial media site that grabbed the most loyal audience who themselves grabbed and lured other people into it.
If you and your friends don't want to self host a VoIP server like Mumble or find Element's embedded Jitsi Meet voice calls too different to use then I'm not going to finger wag you or anyone else for using Discord because you like their proprietary VoIP service. But if you can live without Discord's VoIP you should consider switching to matrix.
We only have Discord for voip, chat room and screen share, we dont know or use any other thing, and I guess my friends dont care that much about changing to something new. Is it that bad? And Im saying this by only using the program to talk to my close friend group of 5, never bothered with anything else so Im sure Im blind to the problems.
You can try out matrix. The element client is a good choice since it mimics a lot of Discord's design. You don't know a lot of these things until you try it out for the first time and you may be pleasantly surprised.
I will try it myself yeah, but convincing my friends is gonna be hard.
They just sound like ordinary libs who have never read theory. 🤷♀️
We give then 
as a treat...as long as you don't use the word removedDiscord itself is trash and full of
safe for all investor bullshit now. A victim of enshittification.No E2E and their privacy policy make me reluctant to call it a case of enshittification. Terrible from the start.
I've been trained to assume anything with "alternative" in the name is trot because of SAlt. Were they trots?
Discord in general sucks. It's basically unusable if you're not glued to the screen 24/7
Yeah, I don't get the appeal. I'd rather be able to make a few posts/comments when I have a few free minutes and go on with my day.
Maybe I'm just old and have responsibilities idk
the problem with "big tent leftism" is that nobody worth interacting with considers themself on the right, so it's easy to find center-right assholes, libs, even racists and other bigots in those spaces, claiming some vague allegiance to left politics.
all "i'm on the left" means anymore, as a baseline, is that they don't knowingly embrace and publicly advocate for all forms of racism.
this is one of the practical limitations of conceptually flattening political positioning into a single axis.
Is that the problem of a single axis? Sounds like you're describing the problem of a binary that would be nicely solved with an axis
A binary left/right would place things in absolute terms, and I’m not sure how that would look exactly. The single political axis allows for left/right to be placed in relative terms, and what happens is anything slightly left of far right becomes leftist in relation, despite not being leftist in the absolute. The single political axis is what I think enables our vibes based politicking, largely.
