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#freedom

3 posts3 participants0 posts today

You can't make this up - #history #facts #fascism #americafirst. Dr Seuss #Theodor SeussGeisel was the chief editorial #cartoonist for #liberal New York newspaper, PM, during #WWII. Drawn over 80 years ago - yet this is #america now #trump #maga #project2025 #history repeats itself when no lessons are learned. #democracy at #risk as #nazism #musk #trump #gop those who mine the past to fuel the war on #constitution #freedom #justice #civilliberties

Replied in thread

“Musk lashed out at…senator Mark Kelly on social media yesterday, after Kelly posted pictures of his recent trip to Ukraine, …concluding “it’s important we stand with Ukraine.” Musk responded: “You are a traitor.” Kelly…responded: “Traitor? Elon, if you don’t understand that defending freedom is a basic tenet of what makes America great and keeps us safe, maybe you should leave it to those of us who do.”
—Heather Cox Richardson, March 11, 2025
#musk #kelly #usa #ukraine #freedom

Free America from these broligarchs.

Free America from these billionaires who bought themselves politicians and policy.

Free America from wages we can't live on and food that we cannot buy.

Free America from healthcare that makes us get sick worrying about the bill.

Free America from guns that we don't need in our kids' schools and taking over our lives.

Free America from meddling in our personal decisions, who we love, how we live, what we look like, who we hang out with, what nail polish we wear.

I am excited to announce the
📊 Household Defense Chart Competition.

Create a U.S. Department of Defense-style chart for an everyday household activity. The strategic focus of this competition: Breakfast 🥞

Would you like to know more? Details are here: hpincket.com/competition-house

You can submit your entry by replying to this post, right here on the Fediverse.

Boosts appreciated.

"In withholding or distorting knowledge or imparting falsehood, a liar deprives others of the information they need to participate in public and political life, to avoid dangers, to understand the world around them, to act on principle, to know themselves and others and the situation, to make good choices, and ultimately to be free" (Rebecca Solnit, in Orwell's Roses, p. 221).

@bookstodon #SundaySentence #truth #lies #democracy #politics #freedom #bookstodon

Anna's Archive is an #opensource search engine for shadow libraries, launched in November 2022 by an anonymous team known as Anna and the Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi) team. It provides free access to a vast collection of #books , academic papers, and other written materials by aggregating records from major shadow libraries like Z-Library, Sci-Hub, and Library Genesis.

annas-archive.org/

annas-archive.orgAnna’s ArchiveThe world’s largest open-source open-data library. Mirrors Sci-Hub, Library Genesis, Z-Library, and more.
Replied in thread

@randahl

There's no saving face for America.

All the world knows The Criminal is on the side of global corruption and against #Freedom for the citizens of democracies around the world.

The American Century has come to a crashing end and with it the relative stability of the rules based international order.

People around the world will get to intimately understand the depradations of the late 19th and the 1st half of the 20th century.

Apparently BlueSky is censoring the AI video of the felon catering to the unelected co-president's toes because it was non-consensual explicit material. I wrote some thoughts about this complex matter on someone else's thread, but I'm re-posting them as a top-level post to not distract from other conversation where I originally posted...

- - - - - -

There is a lot of other stuff happening our budding dictatorship that is non-consensual. Will the fact of it be tolerated and the speaking of it be an offense?

If this were a matter between private citizens, I would absolutely applaud an action such as this. But rights of people are sometimes in tension. Privacy sometimes comes into conflict with free speech. There is no way to always preserve one person's rights without risking not preserving someone else's. That's just a fact. A balance must be struck on a case-by-case basis, uncomfortable as that is.

The cryingly sad irony is that this specific act is intended to draw attention to and protest the fact that soon no one will care about our rights at all. If the conversion to a totalitarian state (which so far mirrors what happened in Nazi Germany and other places) follows the obvious plan, law will soon be used in a meaningless way as a club to beat up people who are just politically unpopular, regardless of whether there's any offense at all.

The problem is that what's happening as we become a totalitarian dictatorship is shocking. People are seeking to use nonviolent means to wake the public up to the shocking nature of what's going on. In context, that video is mild. I wish as much public discussion came from attempts to cut medicaid, from firing people who maintain our nuclear, aviation or public health operations, or from inciting mob violence.

An unelected billionaire, someone where it's not clear he even works for the government, or whether the government works for him, has access to all of our private data and is acting swiftly in a way that is plainly not consistent with the Constitution, hoping to have severe damage fast enough to disable the various systems that might put him in check in our system of checks and balances.

The felon that our Constitution says should not have been allowed to even run for President is turning a blind eye to what this unelected billionaire is doing. A man who speaks of grabbing women by whatever he likes, and how if you're rich or powerful, they just let you. This is the person whose rights are being protected? We have rights so that the weak are protected from the powerful. Is that what this particular act of censorship has achieved?

Too many people are not seeing and taking seriously that very real issue. That anyone thinks this censorship act will do anything to create justice or preserve freedom is evidence.

I'm sure whoever did the censorship will later say they were "just following orders". But it's important for each of us to understand that the US as we've known it may soon not exist, in part because the people attacking us are not following rules, and the people defending us are thinking somehow if they just do their job in the ordinary way, the system will protect us.

Media operations are taking sides, and an uncomfortable number of them seem to be hoping that if they just "obey in advance" (to use Timothy Snyder's term -- read On Tyranny if you do not know this term), they'll be spared the wrath of the incoming dictator. They seriously need to re-read Niemöller's poem, "First they came".

I wrote this five years ago:

“Democracy or capitalism? Pick one.

If, like me, you grew up in the 80s, you probably unthinkingly accepted the neoliberal maxim that democracy and capitalism go hand-in-hand. This is one of the greatest lies ever told. Democracy and capitalism are polar opposites.

You cannot have a functional democracy and billionaires and trillion-dollar corporate interests and Silicon Valley’s Big Tech misinformation and exploitation machinery. What we’re seeing is the clash of capitalism and democracy and capitalism is winning.

Are we past a tipping point? I don’t know. Perhaps. But we can’t think like that.

Personally, I’m going to keep working to effect change where I feel I can be effective: in creating alternative technological infrastructure to support individual freedoms and democracy.

We’ve already laid the infrastructure of techno-fascism. We’ve already created (and are creating) the panopticons. All the fascists need to do is move in and take the controls. And they will do so democratically, before destroying democracy, just as Hitler did.

And if you think the 1930s and 40s were something, remember that the most advanced tools to amplify the destructive ideologies of the time were less powerful than the computers you have in your pockets today. Today we have machine learning and are on the brink of unlocking quantum computing.

We must ensure the 2030s are not like the 1930s. Because our advanced centralised systems of data capture, classification, and prediction plus a hundred years of exponential increase in processing power (note: I do not use the word “progress”) mean the 2030s will be exponentially worse.

Whoever you are, wherever you are, we have a common enemy: the nationalist international. The problems of our time transcend national borders. The solutions must also. The systems we build must be both local and global at once. The network we must build is one of solidarity.

We created the present. We will create the future. Let’s work together to ensure that that future is the one we want to live in ourselves.”

– In 2020 and beyond, the battle to save personhood and democracy requires a radical overhaul of mainstream technology

ar.al/2020/01/01/in-2020-and-b

And that’s why I’m working on building the Small Web.

ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-s

With ZERO funding from the EU and multiple rejections from NLNet/ngi (because they still don’t get it).

ar.al/2022/10/20/nlnet-grant-a

(That’s from 2022. We were also rejected in 2024 for my work on Kitten, Domain, and Place as outlined in my talk, linked below, but I was too tired to write about it again.)

ar.al/2024/06/24/small-web-com

So for fuck’s sake, if you agree with my vision for a technological (and thus societal) future different from the hellscape we currently inhabit, and want to help us explore one possible path towards it, please fund our damn work. (Because, clearly, the EU is adamant about not doing so.)

small-tech.org/fund-us/

Other ways to help:

- If you know of folks that are ethically compatible who offer no strings funding, please try to secure some for us (my time is 100% spent on coding at the moment).

- If you know of conferences that pay their speakers, ask them to have me speak on the Small Web. It can be as technical or non-technical as you like and I won’t do it for free but I’m happy to accept, within reason, what they can afford (in addition to travel and accommodation being covered) and any fees received go to Small Technology Foundation, our not-for-profit.

- Help share this far and wide.

Once Domain is released and we have the first Small Web host running on small-web.org – hopefully the first of many that will be run by other folks in the future – and we start taking commercial sign-ups for Small Web places, we should eventually have the money problem solved (because apparently that’s a problem you have to solve to gain the privilege of working for the common good in our world because our system is unabashedly shortsighted).

So, yeah, anyway, g’morning! How’s your day going so far? :)

(You made it this far? You deserve a hug. And don’t worry, I’m just venting. Things will get better. It’s just frustrating swimming upstream all the time.)

💕

Aral Balkan · In 2020 and beyond, the battle to save personhood and democracy requires a radical overhaul of mainstream technologyWe stand at the precipice of reverting from being people to being property again, hacked via a digital and networked backdoor, the existence of which we continue to deny at our peril.