@rasterman @diresock @ChristiJunior @matrix @popko @redneonglow @sjw > "You don't use basic bitch software? What's your problem?"
A thousand Ed Snowdens would not change these people's absolute batshit nonsense conceptions of the difference between rational behavior and
behavior.
2013 drove that home for me. All the wiretapping and NSA shit and Google creepiness, that all required a bit of exposition for people to even understand, but "Accept the new facts and stop using GMail" always lost to "Decide this is actually fine and keep using GMail". But then the Snowden leak happened and I thought, "Finally, everyone has heard this one. This is national news, every channel, every blog, every publication. Now they'll understand the problem." Instead, the insanely depressing response was "Make the government promise to not do that!" and nothing changed and all of these people still used GMail and Facebook and still accused me of
every time I said "I don't use Google" or they use my wifi and they wonder why they can't connect to Facebook.
So every time, I explain it like I did before Snowden, and if they look like they're actually listening I'll say a few words about consumer-grade infosec and the main difference is I don't make a surprised face when they go "Yeah, but you can't just stop using Google, it's a literal impossibility to stop using their services." as if Google were operating their pacemaker or something and using a different search engine would literally cause their death.
Privacy and freedom are abstract concepts with a complicated value proposition, whereas switching services has a known cost, and if the benefits require some cogitation but the cost is already known, their brain will kill the proposal in subcommittee. If you ask people about trade deficits and Chinese sweatshops and what-have-ye, most people have an opinion that precludes buying an iPhone every time a new model is released, but they all know what Foxconn is and they all get new iPhones, because an iPhone is a real, concrete object that they can see and touch, while a bunch of factory workers committing suicide is much less concrete. Unless it's one of their pet issues, they will completely ignore it.
> I should've started talking about monarchy and the Jews.
I get it as a bozo filter, but this does make things more difficult for me.