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#Freedom of Thought
timeonthepond · 2 months
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I remember when George Orwell's 1984 was just a book.
I was in High School in 1984. I recommend Everyone read it!
Here we are in, 2024, and it is a reality.
This is an atrocity on the freedom everybody is entitled as a human. Freedom of free thinking and freedom of free speech.
This is happening just to our north, Canada 🇨🇦. Still considered a" free" country. ( read what's happening in GB and Ireland).
Pay attention everyone! It could be coming ! Phone carriers are now censoring us! Soon who else?
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New unclassified documents show Spain's espionage against Catalan independentists and how Spain's government, police and media worked together to publish fake information to attack Catalan independentists for years
For the last two months, there situation with the political espionage against Catalans, false accusations of all kinds of things against pro-independence politicians and activists, as well as right-wing demonstrations with Spanish supremacist hate speech, Spanish right-wing (though not only) politicians saying once again that Catalans are terrorist to gain votes, etc. have been escalating once again.
I had not made any post about all of that because I am simply too tired of the same thing happening over and over again and the same discussions happening all the time. This blog would be boringly repetitive if I commented on all the cases of diffamations, fear-mongering about inexistent supposed Catalan terrorists, the negotiations for a fake amnesty written so that they can keep as many people in jail as possible, and every new attack against Catalan people's right to use the Catalan language in the Catalan-speaking territories. It's the same old same old that doesn't stop happening in Spain. But I will give an update about what has been proven lately (and which had been known for a long time, but now can't be denied).
It has been known for a long time that the Spanish military intelligence service (CNI), with permission from the Spanish Supreme Court, has been using the Israeli espionage programme Pegasus to illegally spy on dozens of Catalan pro-independence journalists, activists, lawyers, politicians, and their relatives and friends for years. This goes against the human rights of the people who had their personal communications spied on and also against all the independence movement, because nobody is safe and everyone is susceptible of being spied on only for their political ideas.
Now, some of the official documents of the CNI have been declassified, so we know for sure that this espionage was happening, but other documents have not yet been declassified. Catalan politicians are asking the CNI to release the rest of these documents. The answer has been that they will not declassify them because it would "generate a risk and a grave threat for the life and integrity of the sources and collaborators of the CNI". Taking into account how in the last few years there has been many cases of infiltrated Spanish police in the Catalan social movements, including police who were infiltrated and entering long-term romantic relationships with Catalan activists (mostly Catalan women but some men too) and having sexual relations with others while lying to them about their identity, this statement can be understood to accept that there are many more people infiltrated in the movement.
But what have we seen in the documents that were released? That, as expected, the Spanish Government and Police between 2012 and 2016 used fake proof as excuses to spy on Catalans and tarnish their reputation on the press. As it has been released, the Spanish police compiled fake events with made-up proofs about Catalan independentist politicians, then they sent these fake news to the Minister of Interior of the Spanish Government, Jorge Fernández Díaz, who sent them to the Spanish media to be published as manufactured scandals on the front pages. This way, the Spanish media has spent years publishing fake information with the purpose of attacking the reputation and spreading fake ideas about Catalan independentists, including accusing many innocents of corruption, tax evasion, and personal family problems. All of these false accusations were widely talked about in Spanish media and became huge scandals, but when they were proven to be fake, the same media that published it would not include the news that these people had been declared innocents. Other ministers of the Spanish government like María Dolores de Cospedal and the president of Spain Mariano Rajoy were aware of it, and other ministries contributed to sending cherry-picked or false information to the Ministry of Interior for this scheme. All of this, of course, was paid for with public money coming from our taxes.
Nobody is surprised. This is just another day in Spain. The current Spanish Government has continued the espionage with Pegasus.
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palatinewolfsblog · 10 months
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On Censorship (for all those who resist) ...
"Libraries should be open for all. Except the Censor." John F. Kennedy.
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theoreticallysensible · 8 months
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The Power and Purpose of Strikes
Simone Weil, the philosopher/anarchist/mystic, describing an ideal political future for France after WW2, lamented that trade unions have become primarily concerned with wages. This might seem strange to us now, when even this activity is so contested by conservatives, but Weil saw it as playing too much into the capitalist spirit.
She saw this as just one of trade unions’, and the worst of the lot, because it encourages workers to think about personal monetary gain rather than justice, solidarity, and even their own needs beyond the material. It also risks the union becoming institutionalised through frequent direct interactions with established economic forces. Again, this will sound weird today, given how unions fighting for wages represent one of the few remaining avenues for working class justice, and yeah Weil was a Catholic with strong convictions about the importance of moralism, but I think fundamentally she had higher hopes than we can easily imagine today.
I think a lot of people sense the truth of what she says today - though unfortunately it’s usually conservatives, who would turn back on it immediately if they recognised what it was they were saying. You see it when they say “Why are train drivers striking? Why are writers striking? Why do they think they deserve more than nurses, or posties, or actors?” And of course, the answer is: “They should strike too!” (As some of them now are 🎉). But it’s true that the narrow focus on wages does foster a sort of competitive individualism which can undermine solidarity with other industries. This means that a more revolutionary conception of unions is needed, which is not what these critics have in mind, but it is what Simone Weil has in mind.
What Weil sees in trade unions is the potential for fostering community, freedom of intellectual and spiritual thought, and a degree of independence from capitalism, all of which amount to a greater degree of what she calls ‘rootedness’ - something involving confidence in truth, having material needs met, security in community, and relative freedom (among other things). She saw them as being able to foster solidarity to meet workers’ need for community, free them from the corrupting influence of monetary concerns, and fight for justice as a group. She also hoped that they could provide a space for freedom of thought, to avoid the fetishisation of community she saw in both the French and Russian revolutions.
Trade unions then should not merely concern themselves with accumulating resources, but also with accumulating time and freedom - with the expansion of what Henri Lefebvre called everyday life, the time in which we are free to do what we want and create new types of experiences. When we have enough of it, we can build our own institutions free from capitalist influence which can form the infrastructure for disruptive situations. This can be mutual aid groups, creative projects, intellectual and spiritual communities, and reimaginings of what it means to work, through permablitzing, learning crafts, and starting co-operatives.
The ideal version of this is the general strike. Walter Benjamin described the general strike as a form of divine violence, violence which acts instantaneously, bloodlessly, without coercion. Rather than sort of blackmailing capitalists, as most strikes do, the general strike is (ideally) a complete disengagement with the entire capitalist system. It asks nothing of it, and simply makes it irrelevant by building entirely new social relations in its place. This is not at all feasible with where we are at the moment, but I like to think that it can be used as an inspiration for incorporating more utopian ideas into our more limited actions, all of which are still so radical in this current climate.
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"The moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, contempt, [your] freedom of thought becomes impossible." -- Salman Rushdie
September 30 is International Blasphemy Day.
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blackswaneuroparedux · 9 months
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People are afraid of attacking any expression of faith because it's seen as an attack on a 'community': 'communities' have to be respected, 'communities' mustn't have their feelings hurt. This is the exact opposite of a multi-cultural society, where everything can be discussed.
- Christopher Hitchens
I wonder how long it would have taken for Hitchens to have been cancelled if talked about so-called ‘marginalised’ communities today? He most likely not have cared a jot and would just keep speaking truth to power.
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infinitysisters · 9 months
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“It’s about internalizing correct thought. Orwell understood very well the relationship between language and thought and how control of the former permits control of the latter: “[If] thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
He devoted much of “1984” to exploring how the exercise of power over what may be said makes it easier to enjoy dominion over what can be thought, over how individuals understand themselves and their place in society. “Don’t you see,” says Syme, a lexicographer at the Ministry of Truth, “that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end, we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible because there will be no words in which to express it.”
The real-world version of that fictional effort to overhaul man’s inner life through controlling the language he is allowed to use in society is expressed more softly, though no less sinisterly. “New language… can become a useful tool for changing how people deal with each other,” say the Symes of today.
Allowing the subjective beliefs of people in the present to override the objective recording of events in the past would be extraordinary – a testament to the extent to which political correctness had overpowered reality entirely.
We now know the price of not speaking back, of letting others instruct us on what we may utter and how we must think. We now know the cost of allowing incursions into our inner lives. Man must be “master of his own thoughts,” said Spinoza. He must never be “compelled to speak only according to the diktats of the supreme power.” That is the first task of the heretic, then: to resist compulsion. To speak as he sees. To never fear to express the truth.”
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Brendan O’Neill 𝘈 𝘏𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘵𝘪𝘤'𝘴 𝘔𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘧𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘰: 𝘌𝘴𝘴𝘢𝘺𝘴 𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘜𝘯𝘴𝘢𝘺𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦
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chrisengel · 7 months
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People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”
Søren Kierkegaard
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gregor-samsung · 1 year
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L'avenir [Things to Come] (Mia Hansen-Løve - 2016)
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lost-carcosa · 24 days
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bouncinghedgehog · 4 months
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dbaydenny · 10 months
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Fact checkers cancel
comments, opinions and views,
rapid censoring
to avoid an indulgent
populace of free-thinkers.
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D W Eldred
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rand0mwisd0m · 3 months
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The only reason why you want to censor other people is that you're lying and want to prevent getting caught
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elizabethanism · 2 years
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"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use."
~ Søren Kierkegaard
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“The greatest trick of authoritarians is to convince their subjects to rejoice in their own subjugation. The rise of the new puritanism has meant that it is not uncommon to see self-proclaimed ‘leftists’ cheering on multi-billion-dollar corporations as they ratchet up their policies on censorship and their determination to control the parameters of acceptable thought and speech.”
-- Andrew Doyle, “The New Puritans”
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palatinewolfsblog · 2 years
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Call of the Wild (for Karen) ...
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