"The corporations own the government" made sense for a while, but Trump has done enough to hurt said corporations lately that I'm actually starting to question that idea (it's definitely true for the majority of Democrats though). The only real reason I can think of where it would make sense to do stuff like this is to cause a crisis making it easier to abuse power later on.

By your logic developers in the US shouldn't be allowed to contribute to free software either, after all the US is committing genocides and threatening to invade other countries

If you're a nerd, also check out Typst and LaTeX. Being able to format your documents with pure code is awesome, and you can also define functions for different things, import libraries to generate graphs, and write comments that don't show up in the document.

There's also Kiwi Farms targeted harassment involved as well

reddit actually defended the piracy subreddit? lmao

If by "diverse" you mean "has western conservatives", then considering how the entire concept of the fediverse is progressive, you're not going to find many of them here. On Reddit, there's r/AskPolitics which overall leans liberal and is US centric but is more open to discussion than other subreddits. There's some other debate subreddits as well which you might be interested in. They're helpful for developing political views, but after that hearing the same BS from people who have fundamentally different values gets tiring and people leave so that's why there aren't many of those spaces.

If you're open to other viewpoints that are opposed to both Republican and Democrat, leftist instances like lemmy.ml, Hexbear, Lemmygrad, and dbzer0 have that, and they can have very different stances on other issues as well (i.e. Lemmygrad vs dbzer0). They can still be echo-chambery (which is hard to avoid) but they also tend to have more users that are interested in intellectual debate.

As far as what instance actually has the most diverse points of view, I'd say lemm.ee which federates with basically everybody and I've seen users there from all over the political spectrum. However, there's isn't much in terms of political discussion there compared to other instances.

On default settings, Firefox's news feed is suspiciously similar to the stuff I browse, so I don't trust it at all for privacy without Arkenfox. I like how LibreWolf strips all of that out by default but still lets me loosen the settings so I can install add-ons and keep data I want stored, which I'm not sure that Mullvad browser does. If it's getting behind on updates though, that would be disappointing, although right now the LW Flatpak is on a newer version of FF than Fedora FF. Mullvad browser is better for anonymity though.

Privacy Guides still recommends fucking Brave browser? Brave analyzes your data on your device for ads, which is better than sending it off to Google, but actual privacy browsers don't analyze your data at all, and their CEO is a piece of shit.

I'm trying to understand how this system works and came across this article from Al Jazeera which, if I'm reading it correctly, is saying that the US did determine gross human rights violations but the Biden administration is refusing to apply the Leahy Law. Doesn't this mean that Biden does have the authority to stop sending military aid but isn't, or am I misunderstanding something? Also, aside from Leahy Law why can't he veto the military aid?

It's sad that communities I used to think of as progressive safe havens quickly started justifying this shit as soon as Democrats hopped on the anti-immigrant bandwagon.

Meanwhile my university has a large CS program yet uses Windows for everything, even the fucking Unix class requires Windows/macOS exclusive software. I have no idea how we are ranked top 100 for CS.

I'm in that age bracket and male and among the people I know reading literature is basically nonexistent. I constantly see people browse Instagram when randomly bored so a bunch of organizations use Instagram as their primary means of communication then I end up browsing Instagram to get updates from those organizations and get addicted to it like everyone else. Video games are social and also addicting so people prefer those over literature as well. Aside from that people have very limited time and want to spend the few moments of free time they have doing things that are more social, more engaging (which black marks on a white paper doesn't do a great job at, I can barely pay attention to them for like 2 minutes), or more relevant to their hobbies or future. With music on the other hand I've seen differently, a lot of people use Spotify frequently and I've met quite a few people who have strong interests in certain bands or genres. Also while the internet has caused all sorts of problems regarding addiction and misinformation and people not being as social, I think it has also caused people to be more connected and empathetic on a large scale since they see the struggles of people outside of their physical social bubble.