I’m curious – I’ve looked at this a little in the past, but paused once the payment requirement showed up. Doesn’t feel like it really matters at all about using a VPN or otherwise to try and hide my identity, if there’s a charge on a credit card that proves I use a torrenting service… ? How are people sorting that out, or are we all just pretending you can’t get tracked through a payment?

Lots of people seem to think it’s either or, and it really shouldn’t be, in my view. (I’ll note I’m canadian, since it seems to matter to some these days).

The argument that foreigners shouldn’t be allowed to protest is to me somewhat valid, but with a bunch of reservations. Peaceful protests, publishing op eds, (obviously) University papers, online posts, and other ‘regular’ forms of expression I’m totally in agreement that they should be allowed to express themselves/participate.

But we’ve also seen cases in Canada where our immigration levels got so high, that we literally had CCP organized protests in favour of a detained Chinese CCP Billionaire, as well as the tearing down of “peaceful protests”/awareness things in regards to HongKong and the crack down the CCP did there. We’ve seen large, organized groups of Indian students – their messages of “go get free food” being amplified by foreign controlled social media – draining our food banks dry, the loss of that social support helping to fuel class conflicts and increased animosity towards Indian people as a demographic. We’ve seen ‘protests’ leveraged by foreign powers to sow discontent and animosity intentionally, and/or to control the narrative around news stories.

And that’s really no surprise: one of the stated methodologies of authoritarian regimes, for attacking democracies, is to basically sow civil unrest through the amplification of contested issues/topics. They’ll amplify/fund controversial right-wing and left-wing viewpoints in order to cause internal conflict. They’ll hype up race conflicts. Like how the majority of people are totally fine saying both “Hamas is bad” and “Israel’s genocidal actions in gaza are bad”, but somehow it’s always framed as just a 2 sided thing where you’re on one side or the other, is great for authoritarians: why fight a democracy, when you can make it fight itself. If we’re accepting Students/people from authoritarian regimes, we have to be realistic in acknowledging many of these people will share the regimes beliefs, and will be actively working against our governments / peoples. They aren’t the stereotypical refugee seeking a better/freer life, but rather people with malicious intentions and a desire to disrupt.

So I’m fine with such people having visas and non-permanent citizenship revoked if the person’s involved in criminal activity (violent protests), and/or if they’re a primary organizer/instigator/funder of such things, or (as was the case with some ‘student’ groups in Canada) they’re actively coordinating their protests with foreign embassies/agents. I’d also be in favour of increased scrutiny of people from such regions when it comes to long term stays / partial immigration (where they don’t renounce their former non-democratic country). Lots of countries also expect singular citizenship, I see no particular issue with western democracies at least requiring that their citizens not support/be registered citizens of authoritarian dictatorships. If you want to live in an egalitarian/democratic country, you shouldn’t be supportive of authoritarian autocracies/dictatorships.

And again, similar to the note about ‘one side or the other’, in terms of free speech, most folks generally recognise that there are some reasonable restrictions / repercussions involved with it. Hate speech, explicitly calling for the killing of some group of people or what have you, clearly not a ‘right’ for most sane people – at least, not one that wouldn’t come with consequences. In the same way that the left is fine boycotting Musk for his Nazi salutes (he’s free to express himself as a Nazi, and other people are free to take issue with that / not support him because of it), foreigners explicitly challenging the existing norms of society should be prepared for potential consequences if they do so in a manner deemed inappropriate.

Yeah, it’s not too surprising that it’ll have slightly different contexts in different regions.

For starters, the question wasn’t, as far as I know, asking how the ideology / stance fairs in terms of implementation / reality. Like you can give a description of what a communist believes, without having to try and explain Communist Russia / China.

In terms of medicare/dental care, yes, there are soc lib fisc con people that do believe that. Likely not people in the USA, where everything skews right wing – their soc lib is more like “I have a black friend! I’m not racist!”. In more sane countries, there are a good number of people who fall into that ideological mindset, who do support public utilities/health initiatives – it’s pretty common here in Canada, based on people I’ve spoken with.

Like a soc lib fisc con person I know, has previously suggested that we ought to change how roads / cars are handled – arguing that cities shouldn’t have anywhere near as many cars, and that common “paved” roads should be essentially relegated to highways/freeways due to the cost and ecological impact. In their take, city budgets are often bloated by road repair costs due to the over-engineering of what’s required for regular residential activity. Using other road materials would dramatically increase sustainability – and even if it results in more ‘maintenance’ cost/road tolls for car users who still insist on using cars, that’s up to the consumer. I don’t know if they were talking nonsense, but that’s the sort of thing I sometimes hear people in the soc lib fisc con camp say.

So many people with such brutal takes on it – helps to quantify who the audience is on lemmy I guess.

Socially liberal fiscally conservative, to me at least, means that the person is in favour of equality in the sense of equality of treatment from the government, but is not in favour of additional big spending projects to try and have equality of opportunity. They’re pro-choice, but likely against the government funnelling money into providing abortions for women (so abortions available, but not gov subsidized). They’re pro-trans rights in terms of being fine with whoever doing whatever they want with their body/partners of choice, but against government paying for trans-specific gender affirming procedures and parades to highlight those groups. They’re in favour of things like universal medicare/dental care, because those programs are shown to be a net benefit fiscally and socially.

In general, they support socially progressive ideas, so long as they’re fiscally costed out and beneficial to the public purse. They’re against increased government spending / reach, preferring ‘small government’, with the social components placed more on individuals to fund directly.

pot -> kettle