_sexywheat

Audio engineer, music maker, public transit enthusiast, socialist ☭

[_sexywheat @_sexywheat]

If you record your audio at anything less than 48.000 kHz / 24 bit then you are counter-revolutionary.

[The Resonance @Partisan_12]

🇯🇵🇵🇸 Japanese solo protester Yusuke Furusawa has now been Peacefully protesting against Gaza Genocide for over 996 days.

[_sexywheat @_sexywheat]

@theserfstv Brown quite clearly demonstrating that he is incapable of listening. Just waiting for his turn to talk.

[yung🛠walken @as_a_worker]

Quite a coincidence that every country in the western world is simultaneously proposing similar censorship agendas over the internet at exactly the same time

[Jason Toney @jasontoney_]

If you're worried about scandalous foreign interference, wait until you read @CJPME's report, "Israeli Foreign Influence, Interference, and Transnational Repression in Canada." It goes far beyond an ambassador meeting with a museum.

[Back On This App and It’s Still Hell @wickdchiq]

This plus the privacy bill plus the age verification bill is a triumvirate of this government’s intention to set up a surveillance state where you will be monitored thereby putting many people in the crosshairs of state control

[thinkingcap @chrisheatherly]

I’m actually a child online safety expert and was one of the pioneers in this space with Club Penguin and so I feel uniquely positioned to critique this.

The groomer problem is real but it’s also vastly overstated. The far larger issue we saw at Penguin was suicidality or reports of sexual abuse in the home.

There is no solution for lazy/bad parenting. You can implement all the ID laws you want but if parents are going to just hand kids their phones unlocked, those kids will have access to all the same things the parents have unfettered.

What I found is that these draconian safety laws actually make it harder to be an honest operator of kids apps because on one hand it’s so much legal risk and so much user friction that it simply becomes uninvestible as a business.

Parents will just lie to let their kids use the unfettered internet. For example, I have a friend who works in mobile gaming who has two kids, one above and one below the age limit but separated by just 2 yrs, and the two wanted to play and chat together on Roblox - which is reasonable. To do this, he just verified that his younger kid is old enough for the chat feature when he’s not.

This happens all the time and will happen with these laws to. How far do we want to go with this? Scan the face of the user in real-time to make sure it’s not a kid using the device? We could do that but it feels like a massive unwanted intrusion of privacy.

That’s how you know this law isn’t about kids. COPPA and GDPR-K and so forth already make it illegal to allow chat and other grooming vectors to kids.

What’s really being done here is trying to eliminate online anonymity. And this is a far bigger issue that goes to core speech rights because if you cannot criticize the govt anonymously and if wrong speech is a crime then it becomes easy to identify all the detractors of the govt in power, and ban, fine or jail them for speech crimes.

Starmer has already been doing this and he wants to do it at a much bigger scale. Starmer won’t even acknowledge the problem of actual grooming gangs in Britain’s neighborhoods but he’s worried about online grooming?

No he’s not, and this hypocrisy gives away the game. What he wants is to kill online anonymity so he can enforce censorship of his unpopular policies. No politician should have this power.

[profdeibert @RonDeibert]

Hey ‼️ digital rights advocates worldwide

The Carney 🇨🇦 govt is pushing thru parliament a flurry of bills that are among the worst I and my colleagues have ever seen. They will create security risks, erode civil liberties, enhance mass surveillance, and undermine oversight.

[Christo Aivalis 🌹🍊 @christoaivalis]

Carney is legitimately a terrible person

He wants to make it easier for Canadian companies to kill the working class across the world

[_sexywheat @_sexywheat]

@christoaivalis More blood for the God of Death

https://t.co/PS0MzhSvM1

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

When they say "democracy" they mean a specific thing.

They mean: elections in which the outcome does not threaten the existing distribution of property and the existing terms on which foreign capital accesses domestic resources.

That kind of "democracy" is promoted. Defended. Supported with funding and observation missions and strongly worded statements when it is threatened.

A democracy that produces an Allende is not that kind of democracy.

An election that produces a Mosaddegh is not that kind of election.

A movement that produces a Lumumba is not that kind of movement.

The word "democracy" is doing the same work as the word "communist" in reverse.

"Communist" names what must be destroyed.

"Democracy" names what must be protected.

Both words, in operational American foreign policy usage, have the same referent underneath:

The arrangement in which Western capital can access the resources it needs on the terms it requires.

Governments that maintain that arrangement are "democratic."

Governments that threaten it are "communist."

The words are not descriptions.

They are assignments.

[_sexywheat @_sexywheat]

@christoaivalis

[_sexywheat @_sexywheat]

@mattxiv @Radical_Mainiac Anything but the metric system

[Chris Hedges @ChrisLynnHedges]

An audience member at a Q&A recently asked me why I'm so apocalyptic. The genocide in Gaza, beyond being a tragedy, marks an irreversible shift in the global world order. Before the genocide, the imperialist ambitions of the Western oligarchic class were partially constrained by the utopian ideal of the rules-based order. Now that ideal is gone, and unrestrained barbarity will characterize the methodology of the war-making ruling class. In other words — our future is an apocalyptic one.

[_sexywheat @_sexywheat]

@Grochowa2 Check this 2021 article from @BenjaminNorton @TheGrayzoneNews they’ve been cooking this for a while now

https://t.co/9Or9Rwf3N7

[Alex Cosh @AlexCosh_]

NEW: The Liberal government’s new elections bill includes a loophole that will let dark money fund third-party groups during election campaigns, a watchdog warns.

Latest from @emmapaling https://t.co/qnO1YDQSwH

[Ollie Vargas @Ollie_Vargas_]

During Bolivia's general strike against neoliberalism, there are workers' assemblies almost daily in the indigenous city of El Alto that surrounds the capital.

This is where the people vote on strategies and analyse how the strike is going. The new popular democracy takes shape.

[zupa grochowa @Grochowa2]

wow interesting @cafreeland

[The Serfs (youtube.com/theserftimes) @theserfstv]

The forced sterilization of Indigenous women only became a crime last year

[Glenn Diesen @Glenn_Diesen]

There is a strange development in which academics of international politics are expected to publicly condemn adversarial countries before they are allowed to participate in public discourse. The complexity of international politics is reduced to a moral question of good versus evil, and academics must make moral declarations before even discussing facts, history, strategy, and interpretations. Academics should explain why states behave as they do; they are not moral validators.

What value does it bring to an analysis if the analyst "condemns" one side? After Russia invaded Ukraine, the former Norwegian foreign minister actually argued that "this is not the time to understand, but to condemn". This ridiculous position is pushed on academics. However, understanding is not endorsement, explanation is not advocacy, and ignorance is not strength. I argue it is in Russia's security interest to push NATO away from its borders, it is in Iran's interest to control the Strait of Hormuz, and it is in China's interest to create a new international economic architecture. This is not advocacy, nor is it a normative position about how the world should work; rather, it is a recognition of how the world actually works.

An academic should examine interests, capabilities, and strategic calculations that produce such policies—not participate in ritualised declarations of virtue that contribute absolutely nothing. Furthermore, moralism and condemnation often lead to a lack of understanding and increased conflict. When the conclusion is always that the good guys are confronting the bad guys, then the solution is always "peace through strength", "weapons are the path to peace", and defeating the latest reincarnation of Hitler. If you want war, condemn the other side as pure evil. If you want peace, the first step is to understand the other side.

[Noah Khrachvik @khrachvik]

His books were readily available to read in USSR. They were studied as any ideologies would be studied.

There is a great story Michael Parenti used to tell about a trip he took to USSR. He was with a bunch of American academics, who had been talking down on the Soviets and the censorship they guessed they had been under.

When one of them asked a Soviet academic which western theorists he’d read, he rattled off a long list, which both Friedman and Hayek were on. The Soviet then asked the American which Soviet theorists he’d been able to read.

And the American couldn’t list a single one.

That story is a perfect encapsulation of how real, effective censorship works. You’re not outright forbidden to read. You are, instead, gaslit into it with billions of dollars worth of propaganda, information marginalization, distortion, and lies.

This is why you still find people today who believe in cartoons, rather than simply opening their eyes and looking at the real world, who retreat into safe abstractions rather than face the cold, hard reality that we are the most propagandized, socially engineered, and brain washed people in history.