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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • We can use Trump’s memorandum from December as a guide:

    The memorandum identifies “anti-Christian,” “anti-capitalism” or “anti-American” views as potential indicators that a group or person will commit domestic terrorism.

    The memorandum claims that political violence originates with “anti-fascist” groups that hold the following views: “support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

    Source: Labeling dissent as terrorism: New US domestic terrorism priorities raise constitutional alarms

    So anyone who isn’t a Christian, capitalist, fascist, racist, homophobe, transphobe, and misogynist will be classified as a potential terrorist and subject to anti-terrorist actions.


  • The one-sided narrative is what we were all fed for three quarters of a century. Now they’re just furious that the other side of the story is becoming more widely known. If Israel hadn’t so obviously decided on a policy of genocide towards Palestinians, it might have stood a better chance of continuing to control the narrative. But we’ve seen Israel committing the most appalling torture and mass slaughter every day for years and celebrating it, despite it also killing as many journalists as it can to prevent the truth being told. Our understanding of the story is rebalancing, and Israel’s propagandists hate that.




































  • Consciousness is something completely different. It’s what makes you fully feel the present moment. It’s the fact of feeling alive. So it has nothing to do with the ability to crunch numbers or stitch words together into a logical sequence.

    And there’s one fact you can’t get around. Consciousness, in every case observed since we started studying it, only ever appears on biological substrate. Never on non-living matter. Never on stone, never on metal and never on silicon. So it’s a fact that looks an awful lot like a law of nature.

    This bit strikes me as odd. It suggests we’ve done experiments to check whether consciousness ever occurs in non-biological systems, and concluded that wherever we find consciousness it’s in a loving organism. But has anyone done such an experiment? Could they? Do we understand well enough what consciousness is, what it is for it to be present in an entity, and how to test for that empirically, that we can simply do experiments to test when it occurs and draw conclusions about laws of nature involving it?

    You can’t do an experiment until you can say, to a good enough approximation, what you’re looking for and how you’ll tell whether it occurs or not. I doubt we even have a clear enough notion of consciousness to agree on what we’re talking about, let alone how to test whether it’s present, to do empirical experiments and draw lawlike conclusions. And it’s not that we just need to get a bit clearer about the kind of entity consciousness is: it’s not even clear that it is an entity in the empirical world.


  • Right now if you use encryption the authorities have no proof you’re doing something illegal, because you might not be. But if they make (secure) encryption itself illegal, then anyone they aren’t sure about suddenly becomes a criminal they’re sure about. Then it’s just a matter of selectively prosecuting those whom they most dislike. So it doesn’t matter to them that much whether lots of people find a technical workaround. If they can’t read your messages that’s all they need to be able to silence you if you’re inconvenient.