Frontline Internet
The war for your mind is ongoing and has always been.
This blog captures the events as they unfold according to their own logic. Years down the road, when the strangulation of freedom is so acute, even the most zombified of today will feel it's pinch. 'How did it all come to this?' they will proclaim. Asleep at the helm?
You only need to peer over the bow to see disaster looming.
The icebergs are floating past.
How to recognize them? How to know which direction we should be travelling?
Use the time honoured fundamental Rights clearly articulated in many of the worlds constitutions as your compass - not exact, not perfect in every little detail, but they send you in broadly the right direction.
Free speech
Due process
Free movement
and so on ... fundamental guiding principles, not sound-bites and political footballs. Not abstract, difficult to grasp concepts, but practical everyday eventualities that we either re-enforce or neglect.
the most important first:
Is it free speech for you or for Google?
If you answer that question, even in your own mind, you are exercising free speech (which is the dissemination of ideas). If you don't exercise you get weak. If you don't care you get sick.
[10 Jun 2016]
Free speech is a fundamental prerequisite for freedom. It is so fundamental that it should be preserved even where it is purportedly directly linked to harmful acts. It is the acts that are harmful and that may justifiably be punished. The words are an extension of thoughts and can only be harmful where the recipient (the actor) carries out the acts suggested by the words without question. The responsibility rests on each actor to use his own conscience and reasoning before acting on the words of others.
The Internet is a powerful tool. It is a technology and therefore cannot, itself, be either 'good' or 'evil'. For the reasons stated above freedom haters will want to restrict its use, freedom lovers will resist every attempt to do so.
The freedom haters don't want to arouse suspicion. So they will do what they have always done. Slowly close the net around the unsuspecting.
Here are some references to that process in action:
Governments tightening the net
The TPP trade agreement uses commercial issues like copyright and Intellectual Property as an excuse to attack free speech online.
[21/8/2017]
I hate to say "I told you so" but ...
Was it really "confirmation bias" that enabled me to see this coming? Am I "cherry picking" data? Or is it simply the application of the logic of what the "war on terror" and all the other freedom hating vehicles (anti-racism, anti-fascism, anti-feminism, anti-Semitism etc.) manifests itself as.
There is a world of difference between disliking someone else's perspective and locking them up for it. Asking the state to do your dirty work is cowardly and irresponsible. The state will be happy to oblige. Who doesn't like more power? It will keep accumulating it until one day something YOU think will be deemed "unacceptable". Where will you turn then?
This is happening NOW.
What happens next is up to you....
[30/8/17]
How your fundamental rights are perniciously removed. The journalist from the Council on Foreign Relations tells regulators and politicians to 'take note'. No doubt they will, as they always have. The professor quoted at the end gives himself plausible deniability by proposing that "the CDA be re-crafted to "shield providers from liability for third-party user online conduct only to the extent such providers operate as true passive conduits"." Slippery, basically dishonest. Giving a nod to the political juggernaut that wants free speech removed from the Internet and then providing a personal cop out that enables him to claim he never opposed "true passive conduits".
Notice how much effort is being made to shift responsibility for removing fundamental rights onto commercial parties so that the politicians and regulators can avoid responsibility for what they're really up to. This is the dishonesty and irresponsibility that has brought us to where we are today in terms of freedom. It is a pattern that has been repeated many times in the past.
[11 Oct 2017]
Your free speech and by implication ability to judge alternate, controversial views is very rapidly being extinguished. Crack open a history book to discover what happens when free speech is snuffed out ... ask yourself where do you draw the line?
[7 Nov 2017]
Slowly, surely finding ways to justify gagging free speech (which is not about 'truth' or 'falsehood', it's about freedom - not sure? ask Tony Blair)
[5 Jan 2018]
Trump's regular use of the phrase 'fake news' has set-up the meme for others to slam dunk. Now France pays the price for giving this concept credibility.
[11 Jan 2018]
[23 Jan 2018]
[26 Jan 2018]
Georges Soros says we should regulate - so it must be the way to go!
Why the law won't protect free speech ... in fact it will be used to attack it
[28 Feb 2018]
[14 Mar 2018]
[22 Mar 2018]
[17 Apr 2018]
Pretend there's a 'war' in cyberspace so you can justify interfering with the free flow of information on the Internet in the interests of 'National Security', of course. They always need to create some kind of pretext for attacking free speech because there's simply no justification for it. It's an essential part of any manipulator's tool-kit.
[23 April 2018]
[8 Jun 2018]
More conflation of online/offline "violence" in an yet another attempt to stifle free speech. What you read on a computer is not 'violence' any more than reading a book is 'violence'. TM wants to legislate so that she can use the armed thuggery of the State to force her narratives down people's throats and hide behind the old 'I'm doing it for you because I care about your Rights' routine, that, unfortunately, the 'democratic' system fools people into believing gives her the ability to do.
[9 August 2018]
Alex Jones gets taken down - NYT tries to frame it as 'far-right'