An amusing tirade but politics and economy tend to go hand in hand, especially when it comes to superpowers. And there are far more brutal examples of it going on as we speak. Blocking access to essential medicine and food comes to mind. Outside the virtue signaling bubble and PR facades the world is a very Machiavellian place.
Feel free to run over people, there's no shortage of them.
Women are dead weight, don't hire them.
Think what's useful, not what's good or bad, true or false.
Always ask yourself what's in it for me.
Space colonization is a wonderful opportunity to create unique civilizations, each pursuing their own destiny. Where does your sadistic desire to control the future of entire mankind come from?
Ability to choose different paths is far more appealing than suffering under some inescapable dystopian global diktat you have in mind. So yes, we should extend tribal thinking to space. Platitudes like "we are single human race" are as meaningful as saying we are all life.
Yep, expect no privacy in any app that requires a phone number. At least in most places. More than 150 governments require a proof of identity to purchase a SIM card.
> even for Twitter's ridiculously ineffective controls on hate speech
Twitter's controls are not that ineffective as much as they're selective. They were banning people for learn to code jab at journalists and doing nothing about blatant hard core misandry and racism directed at white men. If they're trying to radicalize more people, they're doing a great job.
> Nations are abstract. They don't weep. They don't bleed. They don't suffer. Neither do Empires. These are metaphors.
I was not referring to a nation as political abstract but as a group of people sharing common descent/history/culture/language, inhabiting a particular territory. They do suffer, bleed and weep.
> One side effect of this has been an end to millennia of multiculturalism, often bloody.
You seem to be operating on the premise that caliphates were peaceful multicultural, almost utopian, societies. They weren't. All kinds of crimes against the subjugated people were the norm. And it's not just the massacres, slavery, and the usually stuff but also bizarre practices like the blood tax practiced by the Ottoman empire (young Christian boys taken from their families, converted to Islam, trained into Janissaries, and sent back to kill their own people)
As for Syria/Iraq, it wasn't any pretty under Ottoman rule. Perhaps a quote from Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad describing Damascus massacre can help paint the picture.
They say those narrow streets ran blood for several days, and that men, women and children were butchered indiscriminately and left to rot by hundreds all through the Christian quarter; they say, further, that the stench was dreadful. All the Christians who could get away fled from the city, and the Mohammedans would not defile their hands by burying the 'infidel dogs.' The thirst for blood extended to the high lands of Hermon and Anti-Lebanon, and in a short time twenty-five thousand more Christians were massacred and their possessions laid waste. How they hate a Christian in Damascus!
> Nations as a concept didn't exist when those empires were founded
Nations as in "a group of people united by common descent, history, culture, and language, inhabiting a particular state or territory" most certainly did exist.
> Within the boundaries of the empire you had peace and prosperity.
Then you don't know much (or anything) about the life of people conquered by caliphates.
> When emperise gives way to nations, minorities suffer.
The very creation of those empires was a violent subjugation of nations through carnage and pillaging. But who cares about their suffering that lasted for centuries as long as we have muh multi-ethnic caliphate, right?
> flags the user as interesting/has something to hide (i.e. they are probably using Tor Browser, not just Firefox).
Tor nodes are known and it's trivial to detect users using Tor.
> There's also usability to consider - if this results in more people using Tor Browser, or not disabling things to try and work around it, that might be a net gain.
I'm sorry, but that's just ridiculous. Sharp corners on tabs most certainly won't attract more users.
EDIT: Ok I saw the issue with mobile users and some other edge cases. I would still agree with bo1024, it's a weak argument.
An amusing tirade but politics and economy tend to go hand in hand, especially when it comes to superpowers. And there are far more brutal examples of it going on as we speak. Blocking access to essential medicine and food comes to mind. Outside the virtue signaling bubble and PR facades the world is a very Machiavellian place.