marjaerwin

https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/12/02/russia-lgbtq-bars-raid/

10 years ago, the Russian gov't introduced anti-lgb and anti-t censorship, supposedly to protect children.

Now it's mass arrests, mass surveillance, and the very real threat of mass murder.

And Florida and other parts of the United States have similar censorship.

And parts of the United States and temporarily-United Kingdom are attacking trans kids.

What can we do to prevent mass murder?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pF8do4irdEo

https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/12/03/liz-truss-new-law/

https://www.pnj.com/story/news/2023/11/22/floridas-dont-say-gay-law-could-be-coming-to-workplaces-next/71679139007/

https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2023/03/rightwinger-calls-for-eliminating-transgenderism-but-says-he-didnt-mean-killing-people-no-one-is-buying-it/

In practice, it is a form of censorship. Even if harassers like to claim it is free speech. For several reasons, it tends to silence minority views and minority perspectives more than majority views and majority perspectives.

One reason is the Petrie Multiplier-- When you have multiple groups, and harassment of outgroups, those in the smaller groups are likely to face much more harassment than those in larger groups. When you have two groups, a and b, the amount of harassment each member of group b faces is proportional to the square of the ratio of a to b, and similarly, the amount of harassment each member of group a faces is proportional to the square of the ratio of b to a.

Another reason is unequal vulnerability-- for example, it's easier for attack-posts to injure someone with photosensitive epilepsy like Kurt Eichenwald, or with ptsd, or with phobias, than someone without. This has the effect of discouraging discussion of these things. Similarly, it's easier for doxxing to hurt undocumented immigrants, domestic violence survivors, so on.

Another reason is that power structures tolerate "punching down" but not "punching up"-- so harassers tend to target marginalized groups and/or personally vulnerable individuals.

Copymight and patent monopolies make me think of the British salt monopoly in India.

It's not the same, because copymight and patent monopolies are at least supposed to have legitimate purposes, by providing funding for research and creative works, though they remain illegitimate means.

It's again not the same because the salt monopoly prices were hardest for the poorest people in India.

But copymight and patent monopolies are a key part of contemporary capitalism, like the salt monopoly was, afaik, a key part of British rule. And, afaik, Gandhi adopted a two-fold strategy against the salt monopoly. One part was to teach people to manufacture salt locally, bypassing the monopoly. Another part was to break into British salt factories, forcing the army and the police to use violence to protect the factories. After his arrest, this escalated, and foreign reporters saw the brutality of the army and the police against the salt marchers, which helped discredit the British regime. But many salt marchers bore severe injuries.

Of course, Amazon was responding to politicians' threats.

But someone has to stand firm here. Everything is on the line.

A free internet, a rigidly censored one, or a shutdown?

The political establishment is unwilling to tolerate a free internet, and unable to censor it. I suspect they will shut the internet down within the next 10 years.

A society of privacy or one of secrecy?

Privacy and secrecy are not the same thing. Privacy is a matter of individual/cooperative freedom, including freedom from surveillance, and including the freedom to organize for mutual aid. Of course, the state cannot legitimately claim anything, but in particular the state cannot claim the right to violate individual/cooperate freedom or claim those freedoms for itself.

The state has no privacy rights.

The state has secrecy.

That secrecy is the power of the state to conspire against the people, against the people across its borders, and against the people it considers undesirables, "illegals," defectives, "Untermenschen," and other classes it chooses to target. That secrecy is the power of the state to conceal its crimes: war, torture, prison rape, and the rest.

I don't believe that the technologies exist to create an impervious totalitarianism.

But the ruling class seems determined to try to maintain their place by any means possible, while they destroy the world around them. They may bring humanity into darkness. During the Cold War they developed second strike capabilities which had no purpose but to bring humanity into darkness. They may do this more slowly yet less deliberately, exhausting the oil supplies on which mass agriculture depends, shooting refugees at the border as the system collapses, and watching the ecosystem collapse and the people die off...

In hundreds or thousands of years, humanity might begin to rebuild. But the world will have been impoverished.