Fix the internet? Is that possible?

Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the World Wide Web is talking.
Web creator Tim Berners-Lee launches plan to ‘fix’ the internet

Berners-Lee is due to say in Berlin that the contract will serve as a blueprint for governments, companies and citizens to safeguard the web as a force for good.

Just wanted to ask those people, for whom the intricacies of the web design are not beyond their paygrade to help me defend my negative feelings which make me restless on my bar stool.

I remember Richard Stallman saying he refuses to have a mobile phone these days, I think because facebooking over the phone is just not the icing on the internet-cake? Why?

[video:https://youtu.be/9kv4uXUFJ3w]

And I get frustrated because, when I want to donate some peanuts to my favorite presidential candidates, they always want to force me to give them my mobile phone number. Why? ActBlue gives me an allergic itching pain around my behind's hole and I start to get restless on my bar stool. Should I pay with a credit card?

Do you have an Amazon credit card yet? I think we should make sure that we cause Besoz' behind-hole some allergic itching pain, don't you think? He starts to donate money the philanthropic way, as them billionaires sometimes feel is necessary to pretend they are humane (I think a divorce of a wife might be a necessary precursor for that kind of humanity)

Seufz. I am a mess. I don't understand that stuff. It's Monday morning and thinking is especially hard on Monday mornings in the greyish Northern parts of Germany in wet Novembee weather.

Nothing for Ungood. Tomorrow is Tuesday. I shall not be here on Monday. Because I talk nothing but 'Quatsch' anyway. Thank God. Wink

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but cringe at any suggestion that we should be spared the possibility of encountering what might be considered “fake news” or socially unacceptable ideation or content.

As it stands, Empire already suppresses any challenges to its unfettered existence through propaganda and its unholy alliance with what used to be a free press. If internet content arrives at our homes pre-filtered, you can be sure it will be cooped to support the established order first and foremost.

Those preferring a more homogenous and agreeable web experience can look to software solutions installed on their personal devices to weed out content they may find objectionable.

The internet is a powerful medium for the free exchange of ideas. A pre-filtered internet would quickly become a world wide digital “New York Times” at the service of establishment interests.

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Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all."
- John Maynard Keynes

lotlizard's picture

@ovals49  
seems totally okay with reviving East German levels of censorship, supposedly in order to stop the spread of “hate” — an emotional, rather than legal or civic, term continuously propagated but intentionally left poorly defined (and sold to centrists and progressives as covering all the usual suspects among the “isms”).

It’s getting to the point that, if you speak out in favor of free speech, you’ll be accused of backing neo-Nazis.

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mimi's picture

@lotlizard @lotlizard
as those emotions can trigger and lead into violence or sadistic low-flying, under the cover torture, I am not so sure about the limits of free speech. It is understandable that people try to contain the emotion triggering mechanism. I don"t think it is possible, but nevertheless an acceptable intent, considering the outcomes those emotions can lead to.

How do you want to define an emotion? The emotions are all personal, individually different and caused by different experiences of each individual person.

Isn't arguing for free speech the same right for all the people including those, who as a freely speaking person accuses another person of supporting Neo-Nazism?

Can one have maximum freedom of speech rights and then complaining about what has been said as unacceptably causing emotional pain?

Any person has different lines of acceptance and different capabilities to endure pain. Is that a bad thing to consider as a basic fact and accept efforts to contain the freedom of speech to a civil level?

C99p has one, i.e. "don"t be a dick" (which makes me think what kind of legal expert came up with that 'wishy-washy-wiggle law') Do you think it is an acceptable 'guideline', which you can abuse til you hit JtC's level of patience with bullshit? Or if you want to speak of Germany, our old existing law of to not be allowed using Nazi-symbols or to deny the holocaust of the Nazi era, is restricting our freedom of speech rights in Germany overall?

Will Germany's new law kill free speech online?

So, explain to me, why I always felt much safer to speak up my mind in Germany than I was in the US? It should be the other way around, considering our freedom of speech restricting laws in Germany.

Well, I guess I have my problems, don't I?

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lotlizard's picture

@mimi  
No career or business to ruin, very little property to vandalize, if something I say runs afoul of the speech police, be they of the woke Left, redpilled Right, or smug schoolmarm Center.

In Dresden I dropped in on a Pegida rally a few weeks ago and the speeches etc. struck me as all quite civil, unexceptional, and boring. All the noise, screaming, cursing, and aggressive threat displays were coming from behind the police barrier, where the “united against hate” counter-protesters were gathered. Go figure.

Edited to add:
Burglars have just stolen the literal crown jewels of Saxony, breaking into the Grünes Gewölbe. The 25+ stolen treasures were part of a World Cultural Heritage collection and insofar as any numerical value can be assigned to one-of-a-kind historical objects, represent an irreplaceable loss of over 1 billion euros.

Merkel’s CDU is so worried about appearing not to be doing enough to combat “isms” — meanwhile, a case can be made that basic safety and security against crime has been allowed to go to the dogs.

https://www.nzz.ch/international/tristesse-im-polizeirevier-innere-siche...

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mimi's picture

@lotlizard
paid my taxes due to the Americans and felt protected to voice any critical thoughts at my work place. I personally never was rich, but managed to pay my bills independent from any other person. Talking among Americans made me feel more uncomfortable. They were so darn polite, so I felt I can"t be impolite, but felt my true thoughts and feelings would be impolite to their sensitivities.

Over the years I became more used to the Americans' politeness. The daughter of my sister, which some would have called a girl/woman/student of 'color' and who lived and studied in the US, went through the same emotions. We ended up appreciating American politeness over German directness/rudeness, when we both returned to Germany after having lived more than 20 years in the US. My son (more so a person of 'color' than my sisters daughter) still is afraid of German racial rudeness, he experienced only as a child at age 6 to 12 and very rarely so.

There you go. Where do I go from here? You can't change change from happening. Smile

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lotlizard's picture

@mimi  
as soon as I stepped out of the bourgeois bubble of “folks with college degrees welcome our newest fellow Americans from the 50th State.”

Going to Chinatown and feeling a sense of comfortable familiarity flooding back. But then remembering I don’t speak Chinese and, except for enjoying eating the food I had as a kid, clearly don’t belong there either.

Not really at home anywhere? Maybe the Good Life of multicultural world citizenship only works for a certain kind of Davos-class rich heir and/or Deep-State-boosted exceptional achiever.

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mimi's picture

@lotlizard
you can't dance at two weddings with one behind. So, not having a feeling of a home place is pretty much the same feeling as feeling somewhat familiar and homey at any place in the world. Some people think traveling a lot helps a lot to understand other cultures. To a degree, but not really, I think. I think it is the people that surround you and may become your friends and your family members make you feel as if you have a home, it's not the place or country.

If you are rich and belong to the intellectual and educated elite (at least in the US, not so much in Germany, as being educated and intellectual is less related to your wealth in Germany than it in the US), makes it very easy to be 'nice' to people of color. From nigger to negroe to blacks to people of color and may be back to the people of shithole countries is a journey that brings you nowhere. Emotions are stuck and don't move much.

I remember that in the late sixties I had a lot of difficulties to explain why the word 'Neger' is an expression not appreciated by Africans. Then it became 'Schwarzer' or 'Farbiger'. Cooincidentally I have had contact to a lot of different 'Farbige' (=colored people) and it was clear that the shade of the color of a colored person is very related to different kind of emoitional reactions among the population, who belong historically and culturally to a defined geographical region.

Well whatever, it's just that these are things won't change through legislation, they may just contained to not cause too much violent divisions and civil uproar.

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Lookout's picture

For example -
I make my check to Tulsi 2020
Tulsi's address is...

Tulsi 2020
PO Box 75255
Kapolei HI 96707

I don't trust Act Blue.

I also don't have a mobile phone. I'm a dinosaur with a land line and an answering machine. Nor do I space book or tweet.

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

mimi's picture

@Lookout
trusting ActBlue. Thx. lookout for strengthening my confidence in my own feelings.

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Anja Geitz's picture

While we have always lived in a world where disagreement with others can indeed become contentious, I have to wonder how many of us really care to live in a world where "people who know better" get to choose which subjects we may be allowed to debate publicly?

If we deny free speech for one group for a "good" reason, the precedent will be set for denying free speech to any other group for any reason.

It's called a slippery slope for a reason.

Either we support free speech for everyone, or we open up a Pandora's box of selective McCarthyism that will be sanctioned by law.

Nothing could go wrong with that scenario, eh?

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There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

lotlizard's picture

@Anja Geitz  
There is an enormous establishment effort to convince people that free speech cannot be allowed and that it’s necessary and proper to use state and corporate power to prevent unwanted diversity of opinion about history, culture, race, and religion.

Somebody might say something positive about Hitler or something negative about migrants, Muslims, or even, heaven forbid, Jews.

An ancient folk song goes, “Die Gedanken sind frei” (“Thoughts are free”), but our professional-managerial overlords in Germany and Western countries in general see that as a challenge to be overcome rather than an ideal to be cultivated and upheld.

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Anja Geitz's picture

@lotlizard

I am very disheartened to hear that it is come to this. To engage in discussions, openly, should work as the disinfectant to "unwanted" speech. Suppressing speech only opens the door for arbitrary lines to be drawn about what is considered "unwanted" and what is not.

Why hand the establishment a larger cudgel with which to beat us when it comes influencing the public narrative by recommending censorship?

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There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

lotlizard's picture

@Anja Geitz  
— that is, the right-wing populist party’s — complaints about dissent being silenced by the German establishment and media.

Now I admit they were right and I was wrong.

A few days ago, something ironic happened: the German edition of Extinction Rebellion founder Roger Hallam’s book was to have gone on sale tomorrow, November 26. But it was suddenly cancelled and withdrawn by the publisher because in an interview Hallam condemned the Holocaust using language that wasn’t strong enough for the speech police. Critics accused him of “relativizing” the Holocaust (by which they apparently mean he tried to consider it in proportion to other historical atrocities), a taboo violation to be treated as just as evil as flatly and completely denying the Holocaust.

https://www.dw.com/en/climate-activists-holocaust-remarks-spark-outrage-...

What makes this ironic is, the AfD leans more towards the climate skeptic side. So you have the strange spectacle of climate skeptics defending Hallam’s right to free speech, and supporters of all the other parties, who gang up on the AfD at every opportunity and claim to believe in the urgency of the climate crisis, falling in line and agreeing in chorus that Extinction Rebellion founder Hallam deserves to be silenced.

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mimi's picture

@Anja Geitz @Anja Geitz

Suppressing speech only opens the door for arbitrary lines to be drawn about what is considered "unwanted" and what is not.

There is no legal suppression of speech and there is a right to say that you consider something as unwanted. As I could talk about millions of unwanted issues, there is no way to legalize any of them as 'not wanted' and therefore 'verboten.

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mimi's picture

@lotlizard
who do you see saying they are not, in Germany right now? May be I missed something in the news?

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lotlizard's picture

@mimi  
In other words, they already feel intimidated.

Friends have told me of experiences where, after voicing their political opinions on Facebook, a few days later they were called in at their place of work and told by their boss not to do that.

You can imagine how that goes over with people who grew up under the old East German system, where you could come in to school and find your favorite schoolteacher gone, replaced because of something they said.

https://taz.de/Shell-Jugendstudie-2019/!5633951/

Mehr als zwei Drittel der Befragten waren der Meinung, man dürfe nichts Negatives über Ausländer sagen, ohne als Rassist zu gelten. Und mehr als die Hälfte der Studienteilnehmer stimmten zu, dass „die Regierung der Bevölkerung die Wahrheit verschweigt“.

 
Report in English from Der Spiegel that in part cites the same study as above, while overall trying to give the situation a more upbeat, establishment spin:
https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/germany-struggles-to-define...

The Shell Study, a recently published report on the beliefs and mindsets of more than 2,500 young people between the ages of 12 and 25, produced similar findings. Two-thirds of respondents said they believed that you can’t say anything bad about foreigners in Germany without being immediately called a racist. More than half said they believed, “the government is hiding the truth from the people.” And at least one-third still fears that society is being “infiltrated by Islam.”

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mimi's picture

@lotlizard @lotlizard
those, who target those, who chose not to say something negative about or target a group of people like 'foreigners', 'refugees', 'immigrants' or 'people of color'?

I assume that the oppression of freedoms of speech and other freedoms in the former East Germany was based on ideology and not raciially or ethnically based. I remember quite vividly discussions with Africans in formerly West Berlin, who have lived before in East Germany and Russia, saying that our (westerner capitalist democrats') belief that discrimination in socialist or communist regimes is less strong than in capitalist countires is wrong. They just laughted about such a naiveté. That lead me to believe that ideological oppression of free speech is something different than race- or ethnic-based oppression of freedom of speech. Can you follow me?

I remember a long time ago, in the late sixties, someone said that the East German population never had to confront their own Nazi past of their parent generation of fathers and mothers, because they were such good 'socialists' and beyond approach for any sort of racial animosity feelings towards Nazis. They were the better Germans, because their regime defended 'social equality' as their first goal. Well ...

Right now I feel that I am as much a target of 'discrimination' and feel intimidated, because I criticize people of being Neo-Nazis or racists, and all this is done under the cover-up of 'defending total freedom of speech' rights.

No words about Assange in main stream media? It's everywhere, not only in the German main stream media. They are all avoiding the issue and are cowards. As are people avoiding this discussion here right now. Isn't there as much the problem of enabling divisions among you and me, by being overly concerned that I try to censor your thoughts just by speaking up against them?

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lotlizard's picture

@mimi  
on your side, though. The AfD has a ragtag bunch of misfits.

Two-thirds of the AfD’s voters, most of whom are too busy making ends meet to follow politics closely, only vote for them out of disappointment with the other parties. Support for genuinely neo-Nazi groups like Der dritte Weg is vanishingly small.

Hating on the AfD is a feel-good activity where the whole mainstream spectrum — “everything from A to B” as Randy Newman sang — can and does come together and bathe in the sensation of being united.

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mimi's picture

@lotlizard

Two-thirds of the AfD’s voters, most of whom are too busy making ends meet to follow politics closely, only vote for them out of disappointment with the other parties. Support for genuinely neo-Nazi groups like Der dritte Weg is vanishingly small.

The AfD has a ragtag bunch of misfits.

Hitler himself was a member of the ragtag bunch of misfits and liked to bathe himself in the ragtags bunch of misfits emotional responses. He was quite successful in taking those 'baths' and became more than lily white clean by doing so...

Hating on the AfD is a feel-good activity where the whole mainstream spectrum — “everything from A to B” as Randy Newman sang — can and does come together and bathe in the sensation of being united.

Well, I can't stand racially-challenged misfits and like the sensation of bathing myself to clean myself off from the AFD's demagoguery. Feeling united? With whom, I ask? I feel quite lonely.

I find it quite ironic that I have defend myself for disliking right-wing racists on a what I consider a left-leaning blog. Hell, I was never an especially enlightened light-bulb. Send complaints to the Almighty, he is to blame for my genes.

Seufz.

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lotlizard's picture

@mimi  
Disliking racists and neo-Nazis is anyone’s perfect right and probably healthy. That’s not what I’m pushing back against.

(1) I’m against elite media continually stretching (“nudging”) public perception of who and what is racist or neo-Nazi to cover ever more mental and spiritual territory, from deeds, to words and symbols, to beliefs and ideas, to entire inherited traditions and schools of thought.
(2) I’m especially against criminalizing, deplatforming, and “cancelling” people one happens to dislike, making it impossible for them to speak. Or meet. Or transact business. Or go about everyday activities undisturbed.

I would like it if German law, culture, and practice were more in line with the following:

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/688824-goebbels-was-in-favor-of-free-sp...

Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re really in favor of free speech, then you’re in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of free speech.

—— Noam Chomsky

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4585909.Evelyn_Beatrice_Hall

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

—— Evelyn Beatrice Hall; commonly attributed to Voltaire

It is possible to dislike and distrust someone but still stick up for their rights.

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TheOtherMaven's picture

@lotlizard

"I disagree with everything you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

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There is no justice. There can be no peace.

mimi's picture

@lotlizard @lotlizard
years, and of course I stand behind them. But apparently most of you can't imagine that they are abused by some not so honest people to cover up their own true colors. Citing noble words and intentions does not guaranty or make noble deeds.

I will not stick up for the free speech rights of a Goebbels or Hitler to incite racial hatred. Sorry. You can do it, I won't. I do believe in the seriousness of Chomsky (he is serious, I am convinced), but will not stick up for people causing tremendous pain to other people through their deragotary disparaging, deprecating and denigrating and often threatening verbal expressions, cuz 'free speech' rights can all be used as excuse to allow others to oppresse people.

1) I’m against elite media continually stretching (“nudging”) public perception of who and what is racist or neo-Nazi to cover ever more mental and spiritual territory, from deeds, to words and symbols, to beliefs and ideas, to entire inherited traditions and schools of thought.
(2) I’m especially against criminalizing, deplatforming, and “cancelling” people one happens to dislike, making it impossible for them to speak. Or meet. Or transact business. Or go about everyday activities undisturbe

And you see today's German media is doing this continually? I don't.

And who has made it impossible for them (AFD and co.) to speak. They speak, quite loudly, and I wouldn't want my grandchildren asking me one day, grandma, why didn't you speak up against those, who oppressed others for what they said or believed in?

If I would follow this argument to its logical end, I would be against kids of the 'Scholl sibling of the White Rose group' in wwII, who spoke courageously up against the Nazi regime and be a supporter of Goebbels propaganda instead ... why does that rub me in the wrong way?

What happened to the White Rose group and the Scholl siblings?
The group conducted an anonymous leaflet and graffiti campaign that called for active opposition to the Nazi regime. Their activities started in Munich on 27 June 1942, and ended with the arrest of the core group by the Gestapo on 18 February 1943.

Ok, let's end this. I can't express my thinking in a logical way to this audience.It seems to be a tabu to be doubtful or critical of "our heroic noble defenders of total free speech rights". Let's wait and see what those heroes are unintendedly end up enabling. I think people might be in for an unpleasant surprise.

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lotlizard's picture

@mimi  
people’s souls and see that they are Goebbels and Hitler reincarnated and therefore must be pre-emptively denied human rights. You, perhaps, do.

Certainly the political scene is full of Professor Trelawneys whose stock in trade is acting out in that capacity.

I don’t have that gift. The role of spiritual judge and jury, of prophet who knows the future and can hand down sentences condemning people to perdition for crimes yet uncommitted — I try to leave that to, as we say in Twelve-Step programs, my Higher Power. The role is, as you might put it, above my paygrade.

What I do know is that judgments that we pass on others have a way of falling back on ourselves. My political and generational cohort and I were pretty rash in younger years. It should surprise no one that while we sometimes were right in seeing Goebbels and Hitler in others, sometimes, burning with self-righteousness, we turned out to be projecting our own inner dictator and propagandist on others. What one thinks one sees and hates most in others is what one hates about oneself, as they say.

Because of history Germans are ill at ease about being German. This leads to various aberrations, also familiar from Twelve-Step: self-hatred, insecurity, inability to take pride in or stand up for oneself, persistent feelings of guilt which others can easily manipulate and exploit, continual striving to compensate combined with the continual admonition that one is falling short.

I see current culture and media as upholding these unhealthy psychological patterns. I further see right-wing populism as an inevitable response to such patterns and — this is the controversial part — even a good thing to the extent that it recognizes them as unhealthy and wishes to break out of them.

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mimi's picture

@lotlizard
I want to say four things:

1. No, I have no magical gift of clear-voyance to see in the future or into he souls of men and don't feel like a spiritual judge of mankind's sins.

2. But yes, I do have guts. And can't ignore what they tell me (behind closed doors - of course - I usually don't talk in public about my guts' feelings.)

3. May be I missed it, because I was not back in Germany for a long enough time to knwo. Who started first to express ethnic- and race-based condescending thoughts loudly and in public, the AFD and their friends or the media? To me it was the AFD. So, there is not much of a magical gift to have, for realizing, who was first.

4. I certainly don't need the bashing of the AfD for having a blissful feeling of being united.

But I need a black-enough coffee now to forget about this conversation and go to sleep.

Good Night. Hoping that you have sweet dreams and that they are not too much on the black dark side.

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mimi's picture

@Anja Geitz
to a group of people, but rather more often to a group of issues. Books of different authors were burned independent of the ethnicity or race of the authors. Internet free speech is restricted dependent on what and how you express your thoughts and not dependent on a group the commentators or authors might belong to, who you mostly can't authenticate anyway in online conversations.

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mimi's picture

@lotlizard

Now I admit they were right and I was wrong

Why? The AFD's dissent was not silenced, but disliked by many and for good reasons. We have the right to criticize the AFD's positions and it is somehow amazing that you consider the critics as 'gang-uppers' on them. Feels more the AFD is ganging up on certain groups of people to me, rather than them discussing de facto political or soical issues.

he (Extinction Rebellion co-founder Roger Hallam) tried to consider it (the holocaust) in proportion to other historical atrocities, a taboo violation to be treated as just as evil as flatly and completely denying the Holocaust.

Because factually speaking there are not many other historical atrocities comparable in proportion to the holocaust. Or name me one that comes close to it. So for Roger Halem to call the holocaust 'just another fuckery' is definitely not a remark we have to respect, as it is vulgar and factually wrong.

I feel a lot of 'Scheinheiligkeit' (sanctimony and Pharisaism) among the 'noble and honorable total free speech defenders'. Apparently they haven't been on the receiving side of racially motivated violence and mind-controlling manipulational torture.

I guess I am an outlier here and continue being skeptical. Better than being an out-(right)-liar, if I may say so.

Sorry to have raised the issue. It irks me now. We are not on a slippery slope in Germany, but there are people who are interested in soaping up the slopes to make us appear to slide down the same hell-holes of the past. Not to see that, is dangerous, imo.

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Anja Geitz's picture

@mimi

Sorry to have raised the issue. It irks me now.

Because we don't agree with you?

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There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

mimi's picture

@Anja Geitz
it's no fun. Try again ...

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lotlizard's picture

@mimi  
and freedom of the press, but their concern is so extremely narrow — focussing only on three journalists targeted by the NPD — that not one thought, word, or deed is given to the immeasurably worse situation of Julian Assange.

My baptism of fire in German politics came in a time long past now, when the Greens and the “alternative” or “undogmatic” Left in Germany would have placed issues like the treatment of Assange and WikiLeaks front and center.

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lotlizard's picture

@mimi  
I do have a problem when the criticism immediately rises to the level of, “So we now have no choice but to ban his book, declare him unwelcome anywhere in Germany, and also get his own movement back in the U.K. to fire him.”

Disagreement doesn’t lead to debate anymore — instead, “triggered” people immediately try to annihilate the person they disagree with socially and financially.

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mimi's picture

@lotlizard

Disagreement doesn’t lead to debate anymore — instead, “triggered” people immediately try to annihilate the person they disagree with socially and financially.

That is true for how Assange and other whistleblowers are treated, but why do you target those, who would agree with you on this, as the oppressors?

Isn't there a constant flip-flop between who you criticize and who you want to support?
What is it that I don't get? Beyond my paygrade apparently.

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lotlizard's picture

@mimi  

are we already on that level?

Triggering each other / trying to silence each other? No, no, of course not, who said that? I never said that. My animus is directed 100% at the powers and players in society at large, not at you personally in this little microcosm.

Edited to add:
Flip-flopping? Hm. I do see myself as trying to find and follow and serve the truth, wherever it leads. That pretty much precludes taking any public figure or group’s side 100% consistently these days, since rare indeed is the political player who doesn’t use lies when they feel the situation warrants (because “it’s for a good cause overall,” “the end justifies the means,” etc.).

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mimi's picture

@lotlizard
the German political landscape as a whole.

Sorry that crossed over to you in a way it was not meant by me.

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lotlizard's picture

@mimi  
and immediately pull their books off the market instead. And then libraries follow suit by not stocking the book or dropping it from their collection. Basically it’s like bookburning! Fahrenheit 404 instead of 451.

At least, that’s what I think.

It was that crossing of the line that makes me think the AfD has a point — it wasn’t anything you said.

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mimi's picture

@lotlizard
fact that a library can decide freely which books they carry and which ones they won't. Was the library 'ordered' by some governmental buerocrats to drop and not carry that specific book?
That would be definitely a case to draw the line. I agree.

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lotlizard's picture

@mimi  
The publisher withdrew it. So it’ll never even make it onto library shelves in the first place. It’ll be as if it never existed.

Fahrenheit 404.

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mimi's picture

@lotlizard
of this article, interview, incidence?
Extinction Rebellion Co-Founder Roger Hallam 'We Are Engaged in the Murder of the World's Children

I have to read that and make up my mind of that specifically. So, let me just say something this way:

"I don't disagree with everything you say, and the little bit I did disagree with, I will have to think over. I will defend to the death (well 'apparent death' to make it less pathetic Wink ) your right to ignore what I believed and said.

I was not well informed enough about Roger Hallam's book or words and deeds. That you stuck with me and tried to 'make me think more' I value highly. Thanks lotlizard, I appreciate all your links and comments, especially those, which teach me something.

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lotlizard's picture

@mimi

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thanatokephaloides's picture

When these folks talk about "fixing" the internet, I think of "fixing" puppies or kittens, i.e., neutering.

Something I don't want done to the internet. Or me, for that matter.

Bad

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"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar

"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides

lotlizard's picture

@thanatokephaloides  
Neuter the Internet by building into the “software stack” a layer of gatekeepers, both algorithmic and human, that monitor every utterance and effusion for wrongthink.

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mimi's picture

@thanatokephaloides
considering their goals and intentions with the resulting effects of their creation, as more or less dishonest in their desire to fix something they realize has gone astray? When Tim Berner-Lees himself wants to fix something of his own creative work, I listen. I assume he has thought a lot more intensely about it than a normal non-tech IT person, who can't understand what an algorithm is.

Are you afraid to imagine that 'total defense of all freedoms of speech rights' could lead to the opposite of what you hoped to defend?

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mimi's picture

@mimi
I mean the surveillance of every of our utterances. We just didn't realize and understand it on time, including the construction workers of the internet super highway themselves. Super. Isn't it?

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lotlizard's picture

@mimi  
a string of creepy incidents (while I was living in the U.S.) where the simplest explanation was that my mail — nowadays it’s perhaps necessary to clarify: actual postal snail mail with stamps and envelopes and stuff — was being watched and intercepted.

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mimi's picture

@lotlizard
I mean the opening letters by USPS etc., when I heard about it as well.

I started to wonder about US surveillance, when I realized, visiting African countries, that nobody of the Africans trusted any American, who worked at the US embassies there. Of course anti-Americanism and anti-colonialism leads to bias of the Africans itself, but - having a bad memory - I wonder why I never stopped wondering about the clear mistrust, which was not talked about it in the open and in presense of 'whites'. Enough people overlooked me or thought I could be neglected in their concerns against white people, when Africans talked among each other. So, there you go and I don't know where to go from here.

Peace.

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