Anti dogmatic thinking

Brining #indymediaback

The fallow flower beds/farm that is #indymedia needs to be bought back to life slowly with as little change to the structure as possible. In our current social tech state just about ANY change will start ripping and when this starts it escalates quickly to do real damage. The original 2000-2008’ish structures cover 90% of issues in a good way, lets live with that for a while.

They are a host of outstanding big issues in the remaining 10% that are undefined – lets concentrate our energies on these missing bits and roll out solutions respecting “diversity of tactics”. The ansears to the missing 10% generally cannot be found pre-defined, we should be very weary of people coming in with fixed agenders. Diversity and good process in hand with on the ground #4opens working overtime as a part of the real network is the ONLY valued test.

Slow/diversity/nurture vs fast/dogmatic/tearing. To highlight now before we roll out bigger, there will be lots of the second and little of the first much of the time. It is just how it is…

* #4opens is not dogma, it’s simply the last 30 years of open source development codified as social structure.

* PGA is not dogma, it’s the embodied wishes/dreams and planning of thousands of peoples over meany country’s and years of time.

* Indymedia is not dogma, it’s the expirence of meany radical media groups coming together to build an open network to fight neo-liberalism (#deathcult) on the ground, in the streets, in the fields and online.

The difference between indymedia and the hundreds of failed “radical” media projects over the last 20 years is that indymedia flourished for a good time before it succumbed to the “forgetting” of the #PGA and #4opens foundation it was built on and was thus helpless against the internal forces that ripped it apart. Leaving  no malubilerty to shift to the heavy blows from the forces attacking from the outside.

We core crew need to learn how to become benign older folks who answer every “better” solution put forward by the thrusting young with “how does that work with the #4opens” then fallow up with “lets look to see if that furthers the PGA hallmarks” to all their enthusiastic “youth” energy for “change”. Keep it genital and most importantly keep the focus…

At meany stages there will be howling mobs soured by hatred and through wing shit to create a stinking mess… our job is to keep focus and calm… a hard thing to do in a messy/disaster world #Brexit and #climatechoas pushes, but it’s the simple job we are taking on.

Q. are the unpleasant side effects from the vaccine true?

A. There maybe adverse reactions. They are likely to be a few people having anaphylactic shock, it happens with many vaccines, but the number is very low. Some may feel a bit ill for a few days as that seems to happen with some vaccines too. There is a risk of other problems, those seem to be neurological such as being prone to fainting or chronic fatigue for long periods after vaccination, those are not large numbers but possible.
Best to keep an eye out for reports of adverse reactions in reputable sources and have a vaccination a month or so after it has been released in the UK providing the risks seem ok.

The best place to keep an eye out for them are the Cochrane database, which does metta-analysis of drug trials, it has a corona section, and the RxISC website, where people put up their own reports of drug adverse reactions.

For an account of how to assess vaccine risks this book gives you details of how it can be done, it debunks anti-vax scares but is critical of some vaccines on an evidence based statistical models.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0848FPKNP

Link to the Cochrane database Covid 19 section https://www.cochrane.org/news/cochrane-clinical-answers-related-covid-19

This is the RxISC website, put vaccine in it and could find no side effects listed which indicates that they do not give large numbers of adverse reactions which is in link with what the Doctors tell us https://rxisk.org/

This is important too though: “Prof Allyson Pollock (director of the Newcastle University Centre for Excellence in Regulatory Science) has tweeted, “In the Interests of transparency all clinical study reports should be published and in the public domain now.” Pfizer UK Country Manager Ben Osborn told Reuters, “We have provided complete data packages, the unblinded data, to both regulators. I think what you’re seeing is just the difference in the underlying process and timelines, as opposed to any difference in data submission.” So why hasn’t the UK government published this? It’s vital people have confidence in the vaccine and the approval process. Transparency would help with this – people couldn’t claim the wool was being pulled over the public’s eyes.”
https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-britain-eu/update-1-eu-warns-of-risks-of-covid-19-vaccine-race-after-uk-approval-of-pfizer-shot-idUSL1N2II0N3

Regulatory capture is a real thing

Outline from John Hoggett

Take a moment to think about basics

Take a moment to think about basics: activism/campaigning is about building resistance to the mainstream to change its flow in progressive directions. Were #mainstreaming is about shifting activism to reduce these resistances to the mainstream flow. Thus, it’s good to understand that #mainstreming is a #NGO agender to build the jobs of the people involved and is in turn funded to this end. Good not to get the shit mixed up.

Lifestyle is a way of forming a tribe inside this mainstream flow. The problem for activism is that this old school tribalism is obviously a BLOCK on social change as looking and talking right are MORE important than being right. Being right would be “resistance” and lifestyle is about going with the counter flow.

On the other hand the are advantages to “modern” tribal and lifestyle activism – it functions as social glue to hold campaigns together and provides a “uniform” flag to rally round. You notice I do not use words like anarchist, socialist, liberalism here as these have a different role in social change thinking – they are the ideas – the clothing is what I am taking about #fashernista is the hashtag.

#Revolution is about blowing up the flow of the mainstream so it floods into a different path with much “calcollateral” damage in the process as we live inside a highly urban complex society. Both paths can be useful, both have costs.

Good not to mix this shit up

Let’s build something to compost this mess #OMN

 

Where is evil in our world

For the last 40 years we have had neo-liberalism pushed into every part of our living human and natural world. This was designed to disintegrate the social democratic 20th century consensus and replace it with a 19th century market fundamentalism. This has successfully and obviously pushed selfish over selfless. Over the last 20 years this fundamentalism push social democratic norms out of the internet and web and replace these values with powerful tools for social control based on market logic of “want to be” powerful individuals and capital agender.

Why so meny manure piles online?

In web application development there are 3 groups you can empower and it’s important to understand which group you are empowering.

1) the users
2) the producers
3) the geeks who develop/admin

Most #geekproblem coding is about the 3ed grouping taking all the power to decide. We, tiny, “elite” know what is good for you “passive” masses. This is why most #openweb codebases are unusable, because obviously they simply do not know, good UX in social tech is hard.

Most #dotcons empower capital who pay the geeks to “serve” the producers to enslave the users. In this they are an interesting evil hybrid.

I can’t actually think of an example where the users are actually empowered off the top of my head – ideas please?

Good #openweb projects try to empower the producers/user they are not meany of these. Can anyone think of examples, we need a list.

Obviously we can’t keep repeating the first two shit outcomes as they are already piles of stinking manure everywhere from the last 20 years of this tech mess. You have/need a shovel #OMN

If you are interested in online security have a read

This is a truth that our #encryptionists need to be held to account on. The issue is not their code, though we should trust nothing that is not open source and p2p, which rules out almost all of their favourite projects for the last 10 years. And the stuff that in theory could be secure is not because it runs on insecure operating systems, insecure firmware and completely insecure networking equipment.

It’s a closed fantasy that has been a block on working open structures for way to long. Much more than 99.99% of our information infrastructure is “insecure” and let’s be generous .01% that just might be secure is impossible for any normal person to use.

We can’t keep repeating closed, we really need to rebalance with open.

Update:
And if anyone thinks encrypted clientservers can be secure. Look at the police spy cases. They drove our vans and were at the heart of our activist meetings… you really do not think they were not running our activist internet infrastructure? The friendly shadowy internet geek who volunteers.. You never quite know who he is but the servers stay online and it’s all “encrypted” so must be safe, just trust “us” who ever “us” is.

Conclusion:
Open is a large part of the fix for this and whispering in the forest. Never trust digital devices if you are doing anything illegal. Use them to built trust networks if you would like to do something effective. Then go off-line and whisper in the forest, its fun.

Update:
To try and be a part of the .01% you have to use single use “burner” equipment from a not obvious public resource. Use a “burner” SIM card or public Wi-Fi. This is harder to do as almost all public spaces have CCTV. Then only Tor not logging into anything you normally log into. When the equipment is used dispose of right away. Preferably by destroying it with prejudice so no data can remain.

Every time you access a resource you have to go through this process a fresh. As each piece of technology has numerous digital “fingerprints” as you do personally, due to how you move mice/gestures on touch screens etc.

Does this sound anything like what your friendly #encryptionists actually dose you would be right 99% of their behaver is actually security theatre, the rest is lifestyle.

We can’t keep believing in the security fairy tail. Its socially unhealthy and obviously silly.

Outreaching the openweb

With the current #openweb reboot going on there’s a lot of default thinking that is bad, and we do need to learn to judge between the good and bad paths if it’s to live up to its potential. Let’s start to give examples:

* Promoting silos vs promoting networks – as our current thinking is based on closed/silo thinking then when we promote #openweb projects we continue to use this thinking and promote silo/closed thinking rather than harder to understand open/network thinking.

– Protocols rather than platforms, balance talk about fedivers/activertypub and mastodon or branded projects. Our brand thinking is a failure of networking and contains strong unseen #deathcult thinking.

– Always outreach a wide selection of instances rather than a single one, the strength is in the network and not in the silo. Networks scale downwards, more/balanced, with stability is better than one “solution”. Be weary of sites that push themselves as the “place”.
– Networks are based on trust, in this look for groups/families of projects to support. Lose is always good, do not support “we are THE solution” closed siloed thinking. Write articles about a spread of views is better outreach as this is actually the project.
– be weary of projects that promise digital security/privacy first – these projects are always lying and thus dangerous and unhealthy for trust based networks. This is a hard-to-understand open/closed issue, we all need to have real conversations about this.
More to come…

People send me links – one look is all it takes

My initial thought on most academia is wank, most is poisoned by the last 40 years of the #deathcult It’s better to go back to radical basics and reboot something from outside the poisoned mainstream, we are doing this with #indymedia reboot.
Most “activism” from this source is little more than a funding drain 99.999% of progressive funding goes straight down the #fashionista drain in academia and #NGO land.

Think the soil is a little dry past time for some compost, get your spades out.

Thinking on the modern UX for the #indymedia reboot. Tabs are a line at the top of the page – metaphor is not buttons. You are switching sheets of paper. The page is the paper. The top banner is the desk under the paper. It’s an interesting challenge to think through metaphors.
Using buttons you are outside the desk/paper metaphor so it’s a whole different thing, to mix them is not KISS and confusing. You are into early computer metaphors with the buttons – think mainframes. We are a “newspaper” so the tabs and table and paper sheets make a feeling for the project. Always echo back if you can for a project that is based on a solid past.
For new stuff “invention” is good and there will be lots of space and growth for this when the #OMN is up and running…
One thing the fediverse taught us is that copying existing successfully projects is a root out of the #geekproblem that #fashernistas embrace. So this up to a point is the right thing to do for social change. We for the first time put a spin on it by rebooting a radical grassroots social tech project. But behind this is something much more radical. The #OMN lets see if we can plant and nurture a seed. Think the soil is a little dry pastime for some compost, get your spades out.