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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • A while ago I read the book Swarmwise by Rick Falkvinge about the process of starting a political movement in Sweden, and some aspects of how their democracy works seemed comparatively impressive to me, and better capable of genuine representation because the barriers to getting started are not so insurmountable. Still, I’m not convinced overall of the narrative of changes to the structure of government being generally positive. You used a technology metaphor, but it’s been a clear trend for tech platforms to actually become worse over time in terms of user agency, privacy and exploitation, something that to me seems mirrored in government. A lot of what people see as solutions to problems take the form of an increase in centralized control and a weakening of barriers to that control, and I see those barriers as the ideological core of how the US was originally designed to work. A specific law might be shown to have positive results in itself, but be achieved by an unsafe concentrating of power. In particular, I think the way the executive branch has been expanding over the last century is very concerning especially with stuff like the Patriot Act and everything associated with it.

    Basically, especially right now it’s clear that a lot of the people in power are malevolently insane, incompetent and demented, and it’s really important that we maintain and improve protections to keep them from doing too much damage, so I am skeptical about ideas for major reform especially when the idea is to take the shortest path to policy goals.












  • “We immediately began to sink, they saw that… They heard us all screaming, and yet they still left us,” he told the BBC.

    "The first child who died was my cousin’s son… After that it was one by one. Another child, another child, then my cousin himself disappeared. By the morning seven or eight children had died.

    It replied that its staff worked “tirelessly with the utmost professionalism, a strong sense of responsibility and respect for human life and fundamental rights”, adding that they were “in full compliance with the country’s international obligations”





  • Really interesting article. The general idea seems to be that people having their access to banking shut down has been a real problem for a long time, and is most commonly imposed on marginalized groups, but people don’t realize it’s going on, and the people on the right making noise about this issue ignore where the bulk of the problem is.

    This is sometimes how I feel when I appear on the ‘anti-mainstream’ ‘free thought’ media outlets. They want to hear about the financial censorship of the Freedom Convoy, but they don’t want to hear about restrictions on Aboriginal payments. This hints to a skew in their freedom of thought, and it’s certainly not open-minded. When they approach me, they’re trying to recruit that mercenary side of me who is nominally prepared to defend their narrow free thinking, but this poses an ethical dilemma, because their selective curation of what examples of payments censorship they’re prepared to ask about or listen to amounts to a silent form of censorship in itself. Selectively hearing, and amplifying, one set of injured voices - the Truckers - can be very similar to blocking another set out.

    Firstly, yes, it’s very important to fight the general principle of payments censorship (and, by extension, to protect the cash system that provides a buffer agai nst it). Secondly, I must inform them that the actual chances of payments censorship being used against them is smaller than the chances of it being used against refugees, migrants, the homeless, or sex workers, who face recent real-world cases of financial censorship.