Rendered at 20:14:03 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
unfocso 5 days ago [-]
Really sad, and also a testament of the fact that as much as we think we try to be indipendent, eventually once somebody starts putting enough pressure on the people around you (and you turn from "a neutral customer" to "a liability") the path to isolation is very short.
stymaar 5 days ago [-]
This. When the US government decides to label you “terrorist organization”, it means that you are now targeted by the most potent state actor on earth, which will go as far as blowing up weddings in your neighborhood to stop you.
So unless you're willing to become a literal terrorist organization and die with a bunch of your friends in an uphill battle (not technically unwinnable, but at least lopsided and the casualties will be tremendous), the only option is to cave.
dvt 5 days ago [-]
> So unless you're willing to become a literal terrorist organization and die with a bunch of your friends in an uphill battle (not technically unwinnable, but at least lopsided and the casualties will be tremendous), the only option is to cave.
Honestly, the internet has made folks so lazy. It's very ironic that the most "revolutionary" act taken recently (January 6) was actually done by the far-right. Yeah: if you believe in something, you need to actually get out of the basement, grab a gun, and storm the Capitol. And if you take it all the way, a lot of people are going to die. That's how revolution works. Unless we're all LARPing?
But Americans/Westerners (left, right, center) are way too comfortable for a revolution, so for people that are, or have been, actual dissidents (think Arab Spring, or IRA, or ETA, or whatever), this is all just a big meme.
chanakya 5 days ago [-]
If everyone is so comfortable, what do we need a revolution for? Wasn't that the goal of civilization? If someone doesn't like civilization, why try to bring it down? There's plenty of places on earth you can go to live without it.
ranger_danger 5 days ago [-]
Most people are comfortable, but not everyone. At least, comfortable in the sense that they are not willing to die for their country/people at the moment, and aren't personally affected by most of the bad things their government does. In the US at least, things like high food/gas prices or unemployment/healthcare issues are just one of many other issues, and aren't causing most people so much pain that they are willing to pick up a weapon and give up their lives. Or even peacefully protest.
People that had enough money that they weren't paying attention to the price of groceries before Trump, probably still don't care all that much now. I might eat out less, but that's not worth abandoning my family or dying over to me.
The kind of problems you're describing certainly don't sound like things you should "pick up a weapon and give up your life" for, so this doesn't seem to add an argument in favour of "revolution".
ranger_danger 4 days ago [-]
Right, and unless enough people are personally affected, I don't see there being one.
I think this was an inevitable outcome of western culture's individualism being inherently selfish.
pjerem 5 days ago [-]
It sounds like you don’t know what it means to have your ancestors fighting to death for freedom and rights, being enslaved in work camps…
The fight is to never get to this situation again and to keep the rights people died for you to have.
You act like things are binary “comfort” vs “horrible life”. It’s not like Fascism grows slowly and then suddenly you are locked.
chanakya 4 days ago [-]
I agree we should all be fighting to keep what we have, which is pretty good. But that sounds like the opposite of a revolution to me.
stymaar 5 days ago [-]
> Honestly, the internet has made folks so lazy.
Or maybe people realize that revolutions, and the civil war that almost always ensue, are a very high price to pay, for a very uncertain reward.
Talking about the Arab spring, look what it lead to:
- Egypt and Tunisia are again being lead by a dictator, it's just a younger one.
- Libya is destroyed, lacks leadership and conflict could resume any day should Haftar decide he doesn't like the result of the upcoming (but long postponed) elections.
- Syria has suffered the worst civil war of the decade and the situation is still very brittle. It looks like Jolani could bring redemption to Syria, but with the Israeli playing around with fire it could also collapse any day. And that's assuming Jolani doesn't turn into a dictator himself: we're not talking about someone with a good track record of honoring his promises (which is a good thing when the promise is made to ISIS or Al Qaeda, but still).
Barrin92 5 days ago [-]
Jan 6, didn't work, not entirely sure why you bring this up as a blueprint for anyone. It was an actual LARP and as Bruno Macaes wrote resembled a bunch of people making it to the end of a videogame, then running around confused in costumes and going for a drink.
What did work for them was pouring money into the election system and party apparatus, media, the courts and then taking control over politics
jfengel 5 days ago [-]
What worked was getting people stirred up to the point that some would turn to violence. Even now a majority of their party believe they were justified.
That helped them take control of politics. And so that tactic will surely turn people to violence again. The violence itself may not be effective but the level of outrage is.
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
Jan 6 didn't work, but it could have worked. Many similar events have worked before. Jan 6 was the only time people tried, that was the point.
Muromec 5 days ago [-]
I would argue Jan 6 was as larpin as it gets, but I also know how being teargassed feels
xienze 5 days ago [-]
> Jan 6, didn't work, not entirely sure why you bring this up as a blueprint for anyone.
Might want to let the Democrats know that. According to them the government was >this< close to being overthrown. Which is funny, because if anyone truly believes that, we don't stand a chance against pretty much any country on earth.
nmeagent 4 days ago [-]
Then you weren't paying attention. Watch the videos of the mob inside the building. If they hadn't been led away from the senate chambers by capitol police [1], we'd be having a very different conversation right now. Did you think the American History X extras leading the pack were just there to see the sights? Come on, man.
What conversation do you think we would be having? Would we be debating the laws that January 6 attendees are passing in the chambers? What alternate outcome do you think was likely, or even possible?
nmeagent 4 days ago [-]
Perform your own trivial extrapolation and cut out the sealioning nonsense.
runtime_terror 5 days ago [-]
I don't know a single prominent Democrat who thought they had a chance of succeeding, just that they even tried was enough for them to be unpatriotic cultists
ModernMech 4 days ago [-]
Ya'll don't realize what the actual plan was. It wasn't to use the mob to overthrow the government, it was to use the mob to delay the certification of the vote. Which they did, but it wasn't for long enough. They were going to overthrow the Constitution by just deciding for themselves they won despite the votes. And they're in power again, so they're very likely going to do exactly that next time.
The whole plan after the judicial effort failed (using the courts to overturn the vote outcome) and the individual shakedowns failed (calling up governors and demanding they change the vote outcome) was to pressure senators to throw out the state certificates, kick them back to the states, and have the states decide that Trump won instead. They had a whole slate of fraudulent shadow certificates with Trump as the winner ready for Senators to certify. That 10000% would have worked because there are more red states than blue, so they would have just picked Trump over Biden.
But Pence refused to go along with the plan. So the mob was the last ditch effort to convince the senators. Its purpose was not to kill the senators but to delay the vote to give more time to affect the influence campaign. So that plan was also very very close to working because they did delay the vote. It only didn't work because Mitch McConnell refused to end the session and kept everyone around to complete the certification of the vote on January 7. But the fact that it happened on January 7 means that the plan very nearly worked.
You need to look at J6 as a buffer overflow attack. There are no instructions for what to do if the J6 vote is disrupted by a mob, the hope was that but putting the country in that illegal state would allow for arbitrary instructions to be executed.
ModernMech 4 days ago [-]
The only people capable of overthrowing the government like that are white conservatives. Anyone else would have been gunned down on the approach.
micromacrofoot 5 days ago [-]
bro if 2k people broke into work looking for you, it would probably be something you think about a whole lot
TMWNN 5 days ago [-]
> ~~2k~~ 250 unarmed people ~~broke into work~~ mysteriously allowed in are looking for you, while dozens of trained armed police officers surround you, it would probably be something you think about a whole lot
The one person who died violently was one of the rioters, an unarmed woman who was shot by Capitol Police. Four other rioters died of natural causes around the time of the riot.
fatbird 5 days ago [-]
An unarmed woman climbing through a smashed window with a capital police officer on the other side, sidearm drawn, warning her not to advance, in the middle of a crowd storming the capitol building while a gallows stood outside,
waiting for the crowd to bring out a member of congress or the Vice President.
> * U.S. representative Markwayne Mullin [currently head of DHS], a witness to Babbitt's attempted breach, said that Byrd "didn't have a choice" but to shoot, and that his action "saved people's lives".* [0]
The shooting was deemed “lawful and within department policy”.
>The shooting was deemed “lawful and within department policy”.
I do not disagree with this at all. I only mentioned her death as contrast to the usual rhetoric of how the mob at the Capitol "killed" Officer Sicknick and others (who are always mysteriously unnamed).
kwarcode 5 days ago [-]
> Four other rioters died of natural causes around the time of the riot.
At that rate, how many can even be left by now?
ethbr1 5 days ago [-]
It's hard to reconcile a conspiracy theory that protestors were allowed to storm the Capitol with the fact that Ashli Babbitt was shot on video for refusing calls to stop breaching a barricade.
Police and security trying to manage a dynamic situation with minimum loss of life by not immediately gunning down quasi-violent crowd is a more reasonable conclusion.
Regardless, 100% of which is Trump's fault for incitement.
micromacrofoot 4 days ago [-]
alright but the point still stands? people were yelling out names carrying zipties... they broke windows hit police officers and a woman was killed while crawling through a broken window?
if that happened to me at work it would be something I talked about all the time, there are a thousand ways it could have gotten even worse
ModernMech 4 days ago [-]
Jan 6 was an attempt to convince the American public that the 2020 election was stolen, and to keep Trump in power. Today, more people believe the 2020 election was stolen than on January 7th, Trump is in power despite causing an insurrection, and all the J6 insurrectionists have been pardoned. They’re even setting up to pay them “restitution” out of your pocket.
You can be the judge as to whether it succeeded or victory was deferred, but violence definitely won in the end.
vintermann 5 days ago [-]
It depends on what you count as "revolutionary". There have been at least two high-profile politically motivated murders in the US after that.
indymike 5 days ago [-]
> the only option is to cave
Or sue, or organize and protest, or win the next election. Not every government problem warrants revolution, and not needing to revolt is not a failing of the people.
> Americans/Westerners (left, right, center) are way too comfortable for a revolution
A better read is that the situation for most Americans and "Westerners" whatever that means, is that things are good enough that the people do not see value in revolution, or they are able to adjust the government's course enough through elections, redress, courts and other political feedback mechanisms.
kryogen1c 5 days ago [-]
> you need to actually get out of the basement, grab a gun, and storm the Capitol.
This is not what happened on J6, and is specifically why it was not an insurrection.
jasonlotito 5 days ago [-]
They were terrorists. Every single participant in J6 was a terrorist and deserves the full fury of the United States of America to treat them as such. They were also attempting to assassinate the VP. 1500+ terrorist and failed assassination attempts.
It's a shame we went so light on them. Care bear punishment. Sweetheart deals, and then pardoned by a man that literally, factually, supports terrorism against the USA and supporting the attempted assassination of his VP.
Geronimo.
5 days ago [-]
idiotsecant 5 days ago [-]
"I broke everything like a child and now everything is worse" is not a revolution. It's being a useful idiot
Waterluvian 5 days ago [-]
Weddings if you’re lucky. They’ll also murder 150+ girls at school.
vrganj 5 days ago [-]
Whats the dictionary definition of terror again?
> violence or the threat of violence used as a weapon of intimidation or coercion
> especially: violent or destructive acts (such as bombing) committed by groups in order to intimidate a population or government into granting their demands
Now, which actor in this story does this sound like? The webhoster exercising their speech rights or the apparatus bombing schools and weddings in order to get their way?
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
I believe the pragmatic definition is "disagreement with the government".
Muromec 5 days ago [-]
Lasting and violent disagreement with the government, usually on ideological grounds, without being a recognised agent of (another?) government.
Remove any qualifier and you end up in some other category.
vrganj 4 days ago [-]
How is hosting a website and an email violent?
selfhoster1312 4 days ago [-]
Not arguing in favor of banning A/I, but the US administration claims A/I email services were used to coordinate sabotage actions. I mean, that's as stupid as saying telephone networks or paper sheets were used to coordinate sabotage actions.
Furthermore, the noblogs.org platform (previously hosted by A/I) is used to host a lot of politically-motivated content, including news and statements by various resistance groups across the world, which of course is considered terrorist by the USA, but legally should fall under freedom of the press.
mitxela 4 days ago [-]
So Google will be shut down tomorrow, right?
stanleykm 5 days ago [-]
It sounds like that until you realize that the baseline behavior is for countries that are not in NATO to be subservient to NATO. So, as you can see, it is the governments and populations that are coercing and intimidating themselves and NATO is helpfully returning them to normalcy.
Ruphin 5 days ago [-]
The situation in Iran has nothing to do with NATO really. It is a US initiative, and NATO was not involved in any way in decision making or policy.
jpoesen 5 days ago [-]
Oh sweet summer child, you would be absolutely correct were it not for your unfortunate confounding of NATO with the USA.
runarberg 5 days ago [-]
I am biased here, as somebody who grew up next to an American military base in Iceland and had a pro-communist upbringing and learned to hate NATO (as well as the American imperialist agenda as a whole) from an early age.
I don‘t see a difference. I was told this when I was a child, and as I’ve grown up and seen more of the world (including by immigrating to the USA) I am more convinced then ever. In my eyes, there is no meaningful difference between USA and NATO.
Waterluvian 5 days ago [-]
There clearly is. Because NATO isn’t getting involved in America’s idiotic war of aggression and Trump is very upset about this. They’ve spent years being very upset about every other NATO nation’s spending, too.
So even if you don’t believe it, the U.S. clearly cares about NATO member behaviour and therefore recognizes a distinction.
5 days ago [-]
aa-jv 5 days ago [-]
>There clearly is. Because NATO isn’t getting involved in America’s idiotic war of aggression
Smoke screen.
The USA launches its attacks from the territories of NATO members.
NATO has been involved in every war crime the USA has committed this century.
disgruntledphd2 4 days ago [-]
> NATO has been involved in every war crime the USA has committed this century.
NATO countries, yes (mostly the Brits and Polish). NATO as an organization, only for Serbia and Afghanistan.
aa-jv 4 days ago [-]
Brits, Polish, Germans, Italians, French, Turkish. NATO bases are used without discretion to launch atrocities.
disgruntledphd2 4 days ago [-]
Not always, specifically not for the most recent war (gulf war 3).
aa-jv 4 days ago [-]
This is false. NATO bases have been used every single day to attack Iran.
NATO Chief, Rutte: "Europe is a platform of power projection for the United States."
Of course, the local political cover story in Italy is that these bases are 'only used for logistics, never direct attacks', but that's just a cover story to deflect any retribution Italy may receive from Iran and its allies, for Italy's participation in the US' heinous acts, and to keep the internal messaging politically correct within Italys' current circus ...
This is just posturing to avoid retribution. Everyone in Europe knows that NATO bases have been used almost every day since April 2003 by the US to commit its crimes.
Lets also admit that NATO-aligned bases in Poland and Germany are also essential to the US' crimes.
See also, Camp Darby near Pisa, actively supporting NATO and U.S. European and African Command operations.
selfhoster1312 5 days ago [-]
They have been involved in pretty much all previous USA "idiotic wars of aggression", so while it may become useful in the future to make a distinction, it's also fair to appreciate that this distinction doesn't make a lot sense to a whole bunch of people.
Waterluvian 5 days ago [-]
The one time NATO was called on to defend a member was the U.S. asking for help after 9/11. And nobody but the UK followed them into Iraq, shortly after the Afghanistan war began. So there’s certainly strong history of NATO not just doing whatever the U.S. is up to.
I recall this time as a very strong refusal of the above miscategorization of NATO. Bush and his cronies had a whole “you’re with us or against us” tantrum when NATO didn’t follow. I think Americans even did some proto-Trump trolling with “freedom fries” and other nonsense.
runarberg 5 days ago [-]
This is simply false history. Every NATO member went to Afghanistan with the USA. Even Iceland despite not having a traditional army participated in the invasion.
As for Iraq: UK, Poland, Spain, Portugal, and Denmark provided soldiers to partake in the illegal invasion. Even Iceland participated in the propaganda war by putting them self on the farcical “Coalition the willing” along plenty of other NATO countries.
It is very hard to see NATO as anything other then an extension of USA‘s imperial ambitions. It is as if in the year 1986 you would look at the Warsaw pact and claim this is a pact of independent nations and has nothing to do with the interest of the Soviet Union.
fer 5 days ago [-]
Afghanistan: Every NATO member went because of article 5. The Taliban explicitly refused to comply when requested to hand over Bin Laden. This is as clear cut casus belli as it gets. And then Australia, South Korea, Malaysia, Azerbaijan and even Mongolia participated. How are those NATO? How is Mongolia even aligned with the US or under their influence in any way?
Iraq: Japan, Australia, Nicaragua, Philippines, Ukraine, Georgia... And I'm leaving like a dozen non-NATO countries, aligned AND unaligned with the US, that took part in the invasion or post-invasion missions. I don't agree with it, and while there were numerous lies to sell the invasion, equally numerous countries were unhappy about UNSCR 1441 being treated like toilet paper by the UN itself. Moreover, actual major NATO countries like Germany or France were diametrically opposed to the invasion and told the US to take a hike.
When you hold a hammer everything looks like a nail.
runarberg 4 days ago [-]
You are basically saying that supporting American imperialism is not exclusive to NATO. And I don‘t dispute that.
I also think that history has been far too kind to France’s supposed opposition to the illegal invasion. France stood firmly inside a military alliance who’s members broke international law and disregarded human rights. If France and Germany were serious about their supposed opposition to that war they would have at least threatened to withdraw. But such actions were never even considered. France and Germany were perfectly happy to allow American Imperialist agenda to materialize, even though most other NATO countries took a more active role in the crimes.
fer 3 days ago [-]
> You are basically saying that supporting American imperialism is not exclusive to NATO. And I don‘t dispute that.
No, I'm saying that states are relatively free to agree or disagree with the US, at least until president 47. France faced no consequences, and countries like Nicaragua are on the opposite end of the geopolitcal spectrum with no particular interest in a war on the other side of the world.
Because whether Iraq or Afghanistan bear the historical hallmarks of imperialism is up to debate, especially with Afghanistan with clear casus belli, stated war objectives, and no intention to annex or directly control/govern the territory. The actual number of countries supporting either is a good metric on that; I think Afghanistan war had a much wider support for a reason. Putting both conflicts together is simplistic, if not disingenuous.
>France stood firmly inside a military alliance who’s members broke international law and disregarded human rights.
The USSR stood inside an economic and arguably military alliance with literal Hitler until 41. The USSR fed the Wehrmacht, fueled their tanks, and provided metals for their war machine. Mentioning this since you already mentioned you're on the left side of the spectrum. Can we call the USSR as subservient to Third Reich imperialism?
Breaking an alliance simply because an ally does something you don't agree with, while morally commendable, it is also simplistic. France didn't pull out, like nobody pulled out when France was committing atrocities in Algeria, or when Turkey invaded Cyprus; no Warsaw Pact countries left during Hungary 56, Albania did leave because of Prague 68 but only because of it being the last straw on their already strained relations, like CSTO countries aren't pulling out because of Russian imperialism in Ukraine, Georgia or Moldova. Armenia is trying to pull out only because the CSTO wasn't there when it was needed, that is, when the treaty doesn't address its very own points.
Alliances are born out of self-interest, not out of moral purity or consistency.
runarberg 2 days ago [-]
> Can we call the USSR as subservient to Third Reich imperialism?
Yes we can, we should, and we do. People on the left (aside from actual Stalinist) do admit that this alliance was bad, kind of like how liberals admit how the British government was wrong to pursue the strategy of appeasement.
What makes this different though is that both Stalin and the British government (under new leadership albeit) reversed course and fought and defeated fascism. We have not seen France nor Germany do this. To the contrary.
> Alliances are born out of self-interest.
This is the world we live in, but we don‘t have to accept it, and we can and should pressure our leaders into making the moral choice. Perhaps a better world is possible, and perhaps blaming our leaders for moral failures is our way to a better world.
Waterluvian 5 days ago [-]
I think your personal beliefs fit reality if you ignore the parts of reality that strongly refute it. That kind of mentality is getting popular these days. I'll leave you to it.
runarberg 5 days ago [-]
Which parts of my “personal believes” are wrong? And maybe this mentality is getting more popular because it is true. People are tired of being fed propaganda for Western imperialism and capitalism more broadly.
My last attempt to convince you: Ask your self, why did Iceland not vote in favor of a ban on nuclear weapons at the UN general assembly 2016? Why has Iceland still not signed and ratified the treaty? Why has no NATO member done so? Why are Austria and Ireland one of very few European nations to do so?
Aside from France and the UK, it is hard to find an answer here which does not include American imperialist agenda.
vintermann 5 days ago [-]
I think it's true that NATO is for most practical purposes an instrument of the US. But it's also true that there's a distinction between NATO and the US, and some other NATO members do have influence on NATO policy - most notably Turkey, which really complicated things for the US in relation to the Syrian civil war and the Azerbaijan - Armenia conflict.
aa-jv 5 days ago [-]
Matters not one bit to the families being genocided.
vintermann 5 days ago [-]
I didn't say it did. Might still matter for people trying to tame or fight these beasts from less miserable places.
Sharlin 5 days ago [-]
And making nude statues wear clothes. Because freedom or something, I guess.
5 days ago [-]
JumpCrisscross 5 days ago [-]
> When the US government decides to label you “terrorist organization”
We really need laws removing the power from the President to unilaterally declare organizations terrorists. At least not long term without their ability to fight the designation in court.
(Same for tariffs. There is no case where one needs emergency power to tariff or sanction anything. If you need to conduct urgent police action, court-ordered asset freezes are plenty.)
aa-jv 5 days ago [-]
What you really need to do, Americans, is start prosecuting your own war criminals.
Only then will you have the moral altitude you profess to have with the rest of the world, and not until then.
"Terrorist" is just this centurys' n-word - a phrase which racists cannot overtly use any more so they invented a new term to supplant it.
JumpCrisscross 4 days ago [-]
> prosecuting your own war criminals
American here. This is a non-starter. Nobody does it. And war is a domain where leading on moral authority requires firepower to back it.
We don’t agree on what does and doesn’t constitute a war crime, the term seems to cover almost all war as well as actions taken by every global and regional power in almost every military action they’ve each taken.
We need reform. But pretending we can legally ban war is silly.
aa-jv 3 days ago [-]
Nobody is asking you to legally ban war. Just start complying with your obligations under international law to prosecute your own local war criminals.
The USA is the worlds #1 funder of terrorism and its #1 fighter of illegal, criminal wars. Until the American people start demanding justice for the crimes for which their state is responsible, we are all going down the drain with the USA and its war criminals.
JumpCrisscross 3 days ago [-]
> obligations under international law
You can’t do this when nobody else does, and particularly not when pretty much every act of war in the world is alleged to be a war crime by activists. In practice, all war appears to be illegal under international law. That makes the law untenable, which may be part of why it’s being ignored.
> Until the American people start demanding justice for the crimes for which their state is responsible
I agree that we need a framework limiting the U.S. military under U.S. law. But someone needs to propose something realistic.
aa-jv 3 days ago [-]
>You can’t do this when nobody else does,
If you're going to dance around pretending to be the only world power, you have to set the example you want to see of the other 'lesser nations' which are subject to your war criminals' purposes.
>every act of war in the world is alleged to be a war crime by activists.
So what you're really saying is that warriors should always be senior to activists.
This problem runs deep.
>I agree that we need a framework limiting the U.S. military under U.S. law.
No, I'm saying that the U.S. needs to stop being a criminal nation beholden only unto itself.
vachina 5 days ago [-]
We actually need to decouple ourselves such that such threats can be ignored.
JumpCrisscross 5 days ago [-]
> We actually need to decouple ourselves
We’re in a globalized world with aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons. The fallacy of thinking a major economy (or significant nation) can decouple from any expansionist regime is a lesson I thought we learned from the first half of the last century.
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
US weapons are near useless due to prolonged institutional corruption, just like Russian ones. This was learned from Iran.
ben_w 3 days ago [-]
Different kinds of failure.
The Russian weapons (at various points) were missing critical components, maintenance, fuel, etc.
The US weapons appear to have functioned as specified, but the commander-in-chief appears to know marginally less about the Iranian strategic situation than I personally do. And this is not a boast, I have zero military training and only follow the occasional commentator like Anders Puck Nielsen and read the odd Wikipedia page when something surprising comes up in the news or a comment, and pay enough attention to the news and comments to be capable of surprise, it's just that I asked someone around 20 years ago if the War On Terror would go to Iran given all the obvious threads leading there, and they told me it would go down basically as we saw it going down this year: very expensive, no real progress, strategic failure no matter what military victories happen.
JumpCrisscross 5 days ago [-]
> US weapons are near useless due to prolonged institutional corruption, just like Russian ones
At invading or achieving any geopolitical objective, yes (though I wouldn’t compare the American military-industrial base to Russia’s). At causing at least as much chaos as sanctions, no.
shevy-java 5 days ago [-]
> you are now targeted by the most potent state actor on earth
Well, it is a mafia. See the international court investigating war crimes is
also targeted by the orange clown-brigade mafia.
> the only option is to cave
Objectively speaking you are correct, but I don't think this has to be the
case. For instance, why is that orange mafia so powerful? That is the thing
that has to be fixed on every level, not just by taking back what their
billionaires stole from us.
1matin 5 days ago [-]
As a person living in the place you're mentioning, I have to confidently state that you've been brainwashed
georgemcbay 5 days ago [-]
> which will go as far as blowing up weddings in your neighborhood to stop you.
And in case the wedding reference wasn't explicit enough, this isn't just Trump, it was also Obama.
It pains me to summon the specter of "both sides" because the Republicans are so much worse. But the majority of national level Democrats aren't inherently good. They are just less bad (and on some issues they can be close to equally as bad).
wseqyrku 5 days ago [-]
I see you get your news from the internet.
lrvick 5 days ago [-]
> not technically unwinnable
Most should take those odds over giving up another inch of freedom.
golem14 5 days ago [-]
People with minor kids and/or dependent spouses/family often disagree.
selfhoster1312 4 days ago [-]
I don't have a scientific study at hand, but historically many revolutionaries and resistance fighters were family men and women with children who precisely cared for their children's future.
golem14 4 days ago [-]
Historically, those family fighters had really trouble keeping their families alive and very little to lose.
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ghandiluvsu 5 days ago [-]
[flagged]
JuniperMesos 5 days ago [-]
Yeah, what A/I is experiencing is nothing different than what they themselves would seek to do to anyone they consider to be a Nazi.
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mitxela 5 days ago [-]
And when you are the victim of a serial killer, it's no different than what you would seek to do to serial killers. Is that a good or bad thing?
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arcticfox 5 days ago [-]
Could someone point me to some background on this whole incident or write a quick one? I don't know who they are or what's going on but it seems important.
coldpie 5 days ago [-]
The US Republican party has been inventing an increasingly elaborate alternate reality fiction in order to convince their voters to keep voting for policy positions that obviously work against those voters' own interests. One component of this alternate reality is a fictional terrorist organization called "antifa." They claim that anyone who does not align with their policies is a member of this organization. This allows them to use the anti-terrorism laws passed in the wake of 9/11 and similar incidents against their political opponents. The US government claims someone who used the A/I service was a member of this fictional organization, and used those anti-terrorism laws to declare that A/I is supporting terrorism and so threatened sanctions against the banks A/I was using. No access to banking means A/I is shutting down.
5 days ago [-]
mc32 5 days ago [-]
[flagged]
sdenton4 5 days ago [-]
... But also, there's no organization called antifa, and no antifa members. It's an accusation levied against people the right wing wants to call terrorists.
stale2002 5 days ago [-]
> But also, there's no organization called antifa, and no antifa members
Left wing extremist groups absolutely exist. The fact that they don't go around wearing matching uniforms with the letters ANTIFA on them doesn't change that.
Your demand for an exact membership list is simply not how extremist organizations work. Terroristic groups have always been fairly amorphous.
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
Am I a member of a terrorist organisation? How do I check?
stale2002 5 days ago [-]
Are you going around planning terrorist attacks, vigilante violence, sabotaging critical infrastructure in groups or consistently materially supporting those who do? If so then yes.
If you aren't doing anything even close to this then no you wouldn't be.
sdenton4 5 days ago [-]
You're missing the distinction between individual action (however abhorrent) and an actual terrorist organization. Organizations fund, cultivate, and organize attacks, as opposed to lone wolf terrorists, and therefore are much greater threats.
Timothy Mcveigh (and Terry Nichols) weren't members of a terrorist organization, but they were terrorists. Meanwhile, the ku klux klan has actual initiations, membership, and organizational structure. As do Isis and al qaida.
stale2002 5 days ago [-]
> You're missing the distinction between individual action
No I'm not. I specially said "in groups".
ModernMech 4 days ago [-]
Yes you are you left out the rest of the sentence:
> … and an actual terrorist organization.
A group is not “an actual terrorist organization”. You’re trying to say all groups committing a crime against the government are actual terrorists organizations, and they all belong to the same organization, Antifa. That’s not the case. If that’s the case then MAGA is also a terrorist organization — at least they have a clear leader.
stale2002 4 days ago [-]
> You’re trying to say all groups committing a crime against the government are actual terrorists organizations
No, I only said that the ones that are committing terrorist attacks, or similarly serious vigilante violence or sabotaging critical infrastructure in groups are.
Mere "crimes" aren't the same as targeting a powerplant for example.
ModernMech 4 days ago [-]
> the ones that are committing terrorist attacks
They said Good and Pretti were domestic terrorists, they were summarily executed, so not really the line you think you're drawing. NSPM-7 makes "politically motivated trespass and civil disobedience" a terrorist act. So it's not like all you have to do to avoid being labelled a terrorist is to just not blow up a power plant. Helping someone ICE knocked down during a protest is enough.
stale2002 3 days ago [-]
> so not really the line you think you're drawing.
It actually is a pretty good line. I am sure there are some edge cases, but the vast majority of designated terrorist organizations did more than enough to deserve being put on that list.
Yes, I am sure there is "Insert random one off exceptions here" or grey areas, but they would almost certainly win their court cases through the legal system, most of the time the world is pretty good at figuring out who the terrorists are.
Additionally, no, neither Good and Pretti were ever charged with terrorism. You can have your opinions on unfortunate incidents of use of force or officer training failures or about any overly zealous bad apples in our law enforcement personel, but when it comes to official designations the law is actually pretty reasonable here.
Sharlin 5 days ago [-]
And how large a percentage of those who identify with the umbrella term "antifa" do you think are actually members of violent terrorist cells?
stale2002 5 days ago [-]
Like the anarchist groups that dress in all black and attack people/infra/stores in the middle of the night during riot?
Its hard to say, because political violence is a spectrum and the border is very blurry between being an organized violent rioter and someone engaging in terroristic activities. Both are bad in their own way.
But fundamentally there doesn't seem to be a huge categorical/technical difference between violent rioting and "terroristic" activism other than that terroristic attacks are simply the more serious/worse version of political violence.
EX: Once it gets to the point of targeting actual critical infrastructure, we can call that terrorism, and just getting into a fist fight at a roudy protests wouldn't be (even though both are technically political violence).
That being said, serious riots can cause a lot of damage and even kill people, but the blame is more collectively spread out towards a large group of people, as opposed to a few small groups causing the large amount of damage.
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
Are you antifa?
stale2002 5 days ago [-]
I don't go around dressed in black with anarchist symbols and wearing a mask, attacking people or destroying stores at riots in the middle of the night, no.
I generally stay away from that type of stuff and instead support non-violent, political change that happens within the system and I think those destructive groups are engaging in ineffective and bad tactics.
mitxela 4 days ago [-]
Are you antifa?
stale2002 3 days ago [-]
As I said before, the answer is no I don't go around dress in black or wearing anarchist symbols and getting violent at riots.
I do not do that so that would make me not fall under any type of anarchist label like that one.
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
> or consistently materially supporting those who do
Yeah, I pay taxes.
selfhoster1312 4 days ago [-]
That's not true. Black Panther was a group. CNT was a group. Even on the other side of the spectrum, KKK and Boogaloo Boys are groups. They all have a name, membership, and identification.
There's no "antifa" organization because antifascism is a concept with different branches of thoughts and practices. Calling antifa an organization is akin to calling "science" an organization. Sure a dictator can arrest millions of people of the "science" terror organization and jail them for their dangerous subversion, but that doesn't make the "science" organization any more real.
mc32 5 days ago [-]
[flagged]
mschuster91 5 days ago [-]
> If so, why carry those flags and bandanas on their faces?
The flag just symbols that this person is against Nazis. Nothing more, nothing less.
It can be held by anyone. Here in Germany, we have (amongst others, just a list of what I have seen) religious Christians (often of Lutheran Protestantism), Marxists, Leninists, Stalinists, other denominations of Communists, Anarchists, Greens, Social Democrats, Antiimperialists, Zionists and sometimes even the occasional Conservatives showing up under the Antifa banner.
vrganj 5 days ago [-]
Because opposing fascism gets fascists to target you and people are concerned for their safety.
5 days ago [-]
throwaway-11-1 5 days ago [-]
People sharing similar values does not make them an organization. “Why do they wear masks?” because they don’t want nazis to interfere with their jobs, friends and families? You’re asking questions there are very obvious answers to. Seems like a disingenuous comment or you’re unable to do the most basic research
customguy 5 days ago [-]
> Why do so called anti fascists act fascistically
Because anyone call themselves anti-fascist, doesn't make them so. While most people who are, well, not fascists probably don't wear or care about the label. You basically confirmed the point of the comment you replied to.
> I’m sure there are supremacists “organizations” that are also hard to pin down.
You mean the ones that aren't organizations? Let's say all the people who are racist in the world, are they an organization? Even all the people who really hate the same "race", if that's all they do, does that make them an org? Is everyone making inane arguments be part of a global group of people working in concert trying to diminish the cognitive capacity and level of discourse in society?
iwontberude 5 days ago [-]
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ipython 5 days ago [-]
Let me fix that for you.
Lots of maga are idealists (even if their ideas are not based in the real world), a number of them are LARPers and a small number are hard core intent on eliminating “the enemy”. To think that no maga member is violent and entertains violent options, is denying reality. Also it’s disingenuous to think they are all out of their minds looking to overthrow the government. Many just have ideals that don’t align with the mainstream.
That doesn’t work. maga aren’t idealists, they are deeply cynical, atavistic reactionaries.
stale2002 5 days ago [-]
Its not controversial to say that right wing extremists exist, some of which even commit violence, so your analogy isn't the brilliant whataboutism gotcha that you intended it to be.
So yes, just like some very far right people exist, that can justifiably be called terrorists, so to do some very far left individuals.
jasonlotito 5 days ago [-]
> just like some very far right people exist
The difference being they have support from the president. Whereas on the left, it's just some random "person" on Twitter.
Republicans and MAGA literally supports terrorists. This isn't a debate. It's fact.
stale2002 5 days ago [-]
No, its not random people on twitter. If you read the statements that were put it, it involved actual terroristic actions of a variety of groups to sabotage critical infrastructure.
jasonlotito 3 days ago [-]
Name the people in the US government on the left doing this? Go ahead.
You can't. You can't even name the people that I weren't even referencing. It's random people.
But I can point to the literal President of the USA.
stale2002 3 days ago [-]
Yeah so I said this: "it involved actual terroristic actions of a variety of groups to sabotage critical infrastructure."
I would say that people who are sabotaging powerplants count as being called far left terrorists. And that is both dangerous and bad. It is not just a random person making tweets. Instead its people sabotaging powerplants.
It is silly to dismiss that all as just being on twitter. When power plants are sabotaged that can kill people.
joemazerino 5 days ago [-]
Let's not forget far left communists disrupted power in Germany last year, directly leading to deaths.
Name the people in the US government on the doing this? Go ahead. I'll wait.
Oh wait...
Go ahead and show me the the people in the German government on the left doing this?
tempaccountabcd 5 days ago [-]
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mc32 5 days ago [-]
[flagged]
phoghed 5 days ago [-]
> That violent criminals were pardoned doesn’t change the fact
It pretty explicitly changes that fact. Inb4 ehrm actually, we all know bro.
inferniac 5 days ago [-]
>voting for policy positions that obviously work against those voters' own interests
Delusions of grandeur / superiority complex much? Have you considered a posibility, that these voters just dont agree with your idea of what their best interests are?
>fictional terrorist organization called "antifa."
An organization so fictional, that just a few months back multiple members were convicted in a terrorist attack
Antifa defenders just hide behind the fact that the movement is decentralized and leaderless by design, but that doesn't make it fictional.
They are obviously a terrorist organization and it is good to go after their financing and communication channels.
Reason077 5 days ago [-]
> ” They are obviously a terrorist organization”
“Organization” is a stretch. Criminals? Sure. Violent thugs? Maybe.
The “terrorist” word, however, has been stretched and distorted for political ends. It seems like any crime motivated by political or religious ideology is now “terrorism”, and thus subject to much harsher punishment than those same crimes would normally receive.
By this definition, the Jan 6 rioters were terrorists - yet they received pardons.
marcus_holmes 5 days ago [-]
The UK's position on Palestine Action is the poster child for this. Completely harmless old people holding placards have been prosecuted under terrorism legislation passed after 9/11. "Terrorist" has become a label applied to anyone opposing any government policy.
We need to roll back all those counter-terrorist laws in every Anglosphere country.
fireflash38 4 days ago [-]
It's astoundingly trivial to abuse.
If people could imagine it being used against them, maybe they might understand. Like labeling the Republican party a terrorist organization because they sponsored Jan 6 insurrectionists.
aa-jv 5 days ago [-]
"Terrorist" is just this century's n-word. Racists in Congress couldn't use the n-word so openly any more, so they invented a new word - same effect.
selfhoster1312 4 days ago [-]
> Antifa defenders just hide behind the fact that the movement is decentralized and leaderless by design
Calling a movement an organization is a fiction, unless you live in an alternate reality. Should i consider you part of an organization because you tweeted a certain hashtag once? Are you the member of a band because you whistled a song on the subway? Are you in the military because you watched a Rambo movie when you were a teen?
Dylan16807 5 days ago [-]
Any was there any proof of them being members of anything beyond that group of about ten people? That article sure doesn't claim it.
If a movement has no leaders at all then it's not an organization.
majormajor 5 days ago [-]
For a group who's so bloody-minded about "words have meanings" about certain things, this whole "movement and affiliation and organization are all obviously exactly the same thing" claim is blatantly ridiculous.
When Republicans in the US communicate and sometimes coordinate with totalitarian international leaders, does it mean we get to label the whole thing as a single "international totalitarian organization"?
coldpie 4 days ago [-]
> Have you considered a posibility, that these voters just dont agree with your idea of what their best interests are?
I mean, there's not really room for debate on it. Voting to take your money away from you and give it to people who already have more money than they could spend in a lifetime is obviously against your interests. But that's what Republican policy does. That's why they have to make increasingly outlandish fictions and fund whole media empires to sell those fictions: to convince people to keep voting against themselves. Between either a billionaire, or the guy down the street making burritos for $8 an hour, it's obvious which one took all of your money. It's the guy with the money. The increasingly elaborate alternate reality exists to hide this from their voters, so they can keep raiding us.
strictnein 5 days ago [-]
> "They claim that anyone who does not align with their policies is a member of this organization"
No one is claiming that Amy Klobuchar or Gavin Newsom is a member of antifa.
SpicyLemonZest 5 days ago [-]
You're just not confronting reality, man. The President of the United States personally called for Gavin Newsom to be arrested in June 2025. In September of that year, in response to Newsom's post calling Gestapo chief Stephen Miller a fascist, Miller went on TV to complain that nobody is allowed to call him a fascist and Newsom was encouraging violence by doing so.
paimapi 5 days ago [-]
that's what a call a straw-man. NSPM-7 exists and is providing funding and direction for LEOs to target ideologically leftist organizations as tame as BLM or 50501 [0]
this, in combination with the rise of Flock, Clearview, Axon, and other mass-surveillance programs is leading us down an incredibly dark and Orwellian state - something that feels almost ludicrous given how anti-Big-Brother your average person is
It’s mesmerizing to see how easy it has been to transform the USA into what was decried China to become about 5 years ago.
You see some form of resistance (the guy that was caught with a truck full of cut Flock cameras) but it seems the population is resigned.
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
They say "every accusation is a confession" yet I'm still continually surprised by accusations that I never thought would turn out to be confessions, turning out to be confessions. Like the Chinese surveillance state.
It seems to be a type of psychological projection - someone harbors an ideal like a surveillance state and assumes everyone else is harboring the same ideal so they accuse them.
I hope the Uyghur genocide accusation doesn't turn out to be a confession.
Sharlin 5 days ago [-]
Well, the Chinese surveillance state in the US took off 25 years ago, give or take a few days.
paimapi 4 days ago [-]
it's been around for quite a lot longer than that. 1984 was written in 1949 and wasn't strictly inspired by only fascist regimes - there were and still are a lot of similarities (eg ethnosupremaccy, nativism, etc) that have deep roots elsewhere
>With the end of World War II, Project SHAMROCK was established in 1945. The organization was created to accumulate telegraphic data entering and exiting from the United States.[4][22] Major communication companies such as Western Union, RCA Global and ITT World Communications actively aided the project, allowing American intelligence officials to gain access to international message traffic.[23] Under the project, and many subsequent programs, no precedent had been established for judicial authorization, and no warrants were issued for surveillance activities. The project was terminated in 1975.[4]
strictnein 3 days ago [-]
What? That's not a "straw-man" in the slightest.
I was responding to the comment that said "Everyone who disagrees with the GOP is labeled antifa" with two of the many prominent Democrat politicians who haven't been. Should I have listed 50 of them or 100?
"After 2005 we have been constantly pestered by prosecutors and security forces (and even by the Vatican! [4]) asking us to hand over users’ data and identities and we are proud to say we were always able to answer: we are sorry, but we do not have them."
This is tech guys supporting with infra real freedom of speech! even more important nowadays!
jumping to the violent antifa narrative means ignoring a lot of important things.
sltkr 5 days ago [-]
[flagged]
aetch 5 days ago [-]
Not wanting to provide free services to someone isn’t the same as not supporting free speech
sltkr 5 days ago [-]
[flagged]
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
Right. If I support free libraries, but I deny a library card to an ax-wielding serial killer, I don't really support free libraries.
sltkr 5 days ago [-]
Why don't you answer the actual question, instead of coming up with far-fetched analogies?
The US government is labeling anyone who says they're "anti fascist" as terrorists, and shut down a major Italian private email provider using that rationale.
“Autistici/Inventati (A/I) is an Italian hacktivist group that provides Internet communication services for left-wing activists. It was founded in 2001 by members of the anti-globalisation movement…”
oriettaxx 4 days ago [-]
this one is a good one, in English, that I see is kept updated
I read it as a very long path, but they've finally got to the end. They say this project is 25 years old and carried by the same people. Now they're tired. They've done enough. Someone else has to carry the torch. That's how I read it
unfocso 5 days ago [-]
And yes, they could relocate to TOR, I2P, use P2P websites, torrents, and only accept cryptos for donations. But eventually you'll need to put down a credit card on file to buy a domain, and that domain needs to be owned by somebody.
msm_ 5 days ago [-]
>But eventually you'll need to put down a credit card on file to buy a domain, and that domain needs to be owned by somebody.
You don't need to pay to host onion websites (.onion domains are free and have no central registry). Though that of course really limits the possible outreach, because most people are not used to browsing onionsites.
TowerTall 5 days ago [-]
njal.la (no affiliate) exists for that purpose. It is a privacy focused domain service that is run by the people behind the pirate bay.
You’re still subject to ICANN, an American org. There is no escaping the US government if you’re using the public web for your infra
unfocso 5 days ago [-]
Njalla is not ICANN accredited, so they cannot register domains. They buy them and then lease them out to you.
The issue is, now they are the legal owners and liable for the content of the website, and they also support PayPal, which will absolutely drop them the moment they get sanctioned.
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
You don't have to discover the perfect solution in advance. You can just try something and see how long it works for, then try a different thing.
9763268964 5 days ago [-]
[flagged]
InsideOutSanta 5 days ago [-]
I hereby designate the US government an international terrorist organization.
mcv 5 days ago [-]
Yeah, but do you control international banking the way they do? That's ultimately how they're able to do this.
Frieren 5 days ago [-]
> Yeah, but do you control international banking the way they do?
This is why Europe needs to detach itself from the American banking system.
It used to be very practical to use it. Countries renounced to some sovereignty in exchange for ease of doing business. The USA had an advantage but it didn't abuse it too much.
The current situation is that the USA is asking to forfeit sovereignty and to control business in an ideological basis. There is a strong incentive to leave that system as the alternative is become a colony of the USA. And the push for colonization is not subtle as the president takes over other countries resources like Venezuela's oil or tries to take control of the straight of Hormuz (None part of the USA at this moment)
graemep 5 days ago [-]
At the moment Europe is getting more reliant on the US. There are new non-Us payment systems but the end user devices are Apple or Google controlled. Governments and banks are very eager to get rid of cash, to introduce digital ID etc. That all relies on American platforms.
Frieren 5 days ago [-]
> That all relies on American platforms.
Totally true. The EU needs its own platforms, I hope that better regulated than their USA counterparts. Linux started in Europe, it should have been promoted more for internal usage. But privatization of state-owned companies made it ideologically impossible to push for it. Public good was seen as "bad" and "against business", I hope that the obvious failure of that policy makes it now a possibility to use Linux.
mcv 5 days ago [-]
We used to. Contactless payments from my phone didn't require Google Wallet a few years ago, but now they do. My bank passes suddenly say VISA and have credit card numbers on them which they didn't have a few years ago. European banks are going in the completely wrong direction and need to reverse.
graemep 5 days ago [-]
They will only do so if forced to by regulators, and so far regulators have shown no interest in doing it.
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
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mitxela 5 days ago [-]
Your bank pass may support multiple systems. I think a lot of European cards (not all) are EC-Karten as well as one of the major credit card brands, and when you use it in an ATM, it uses neither system but directly contacts your bank.
einpoklum 5 days ago [-]
> This is why Europe needs to detach itself from the American banking system.
So far, what it's detached itself from its sources of fossil fuels. With a little help from its great American friends.
pessimizer 5 days ago [-]
I love how Europeans get pumped up on anti-American rhetoric when they are far more submissive to the US than even a Ukraine or a South Korea is. I'm starting to think the rhetoric (always about what they're about to do, something about Trump, something about Musk) is being pumped to them by US admin think tanks.
The US is going to be at peace with Russia, and still pumping anti-Russian rhetoric into Europe to keep them buying US LNG. The big difference will be that they'll start mixing more Trump-Russia rhetoric in - but the result is that they'll be more dependent on the US. The anti-China rhetoric is working great, too.
The best thing for a Europe that wants to separate from the US is to completely isolate themselves from any possible energy or trade replacement for the US./s
That being said, in Europe it's a small elite class (that is still fairly firmly in control of everything) that pushes this (on direct orders and direct payments from US masters.) The rising degree of control of speech and association they have to exert, and the direct election interference they've had to engage in is very disturbing to a plurality of the European population. And that normally politically disengaged plurality is becoming politically active as their living standards drop.
InsideOutSanta 4 days ago [-]
I think what you're missing is that for many Western European countries, like Germany, suddenly gaining a direct border with Russia is a genuine concern. It's not just rhetoric; it's the real world.
It's easy for Americans, who are essentially uninvadable, to discount this as just people saying stuff, but in Europe, we actually have to live with Russia's direct military threat.
einpoklum 4 days ago [-]
> gaining a direct border with Russia
If you mean EU borders - it's had direct border with Russia since 1995.
If you mean in the sense of placing NATO troups on border with Russia, that is indeed recent, and definitely a concern, but - those west-European countries have gone along with expanding NATO eastwards.
If you mean the supposed fear of Russia conquering Poland - then that is not really serious.
> we actually have to live with Russia's direct military threat.
So far in this war, it is German and other European & NATO member state weapons being intentionally fired into Russia, not the other way around.
Of course, if you look further back, Russia has invaded westwards multiple times over the centuries, and European powers have indaded Russia multiple times: Sweden, France, Germany. But mutual perception as threats is something almost any pair of European states can be said to have in their past. And the distances are even closer than Russia and Germany.
Lumich 4 days ago [-]
It would be great to have a direct border with Russia, and finally get rid of US troops in Europe. Would solve lots of issues and drastically increase prosperity and well-being. There's never been a Russian threat in the first place. The sustained militarization of post-WW2 Europe, i.e. NATO, the arms race and the Cold War and its world-wide proxy wars, is the result of Britain and the US pursueing their strategy of tension. At every single step it was the US who escalated, divided and militarized Europe. This is a patently obvious fact of history. And it includes the current war using the Ukraine as ram against Russia.
mcv 4 days ago [-]
> There's never been a Russian threat in the first place.
Have you really had your head in the sand, or are you just desperately trying to sell a transparent lie here? The Putin is not exactly careful about his threats.
AlexeyBelov 3 days ago [-]
You're replying to a 25-day-old account that posts pro-Russian comments. Don't feed the trolls please.
mcv 5 days ago [-]
> The US is going to be at peace with Russia, and still pumping anti-Russian rhetoric into Europe to keep them buying US LNG.
The US isn't really a source of anti-Russia rhetoric. In fact, the US may be the biggest source of pro-Russia rhetoric, with Trump constantly sucking up to Putin and repeating Kremlin talking points.
UltraSane 5 days ago [-]
"anti-Russian rhetoric" Phrasing like this is hilarious when Russia is actually invading Ukraine and randomly bombing civilians in order to permanently steal its land. In this context the objective facts are "anti-Russian"
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
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toomuchtodo 5 days ago [-]
Which is why efforts by China to stand up independent cross border payment rails are important. You have to cut the US out of any ability to control activities outside of their boundaries.
and Europe. Europe should also decouple itself from the U.S. as much as it is possible, and not repeat the mistake of overreliance with China. not because China is somehow worse, but because you always should be able to say "no", no matter how good your partners are
RonanSoleste 5 days ago [-]
Europe is decoupling itself all ready also. Using SEPA-Inst and wero.
swiftcoder 5 days ago [-]
Unfortunately decoupling payments within the EU is insufficient if the US can just threaten to sanction your bank, and in doing so force the bank to drop you as a customer. Even in the presence of an internal European payments network, those banks still need to transact with the US and other US-sphere countries...
mahkeiro 5 days ago [-]
No but then you can have local bank that will not have US interactions but can still serve you. Since the French judge of the IPC was sanctioned, it’s clear that the EU must completely decouple from the US.
Gigachad 5 days ago [-]
The more times the US uses this as a weapon, the less power it holds and the more effort other countries go through to decouple.
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
The payment system has to be decoupled first, and then banks can have nothing to fear from US sanctions.
swiftcoder 5 days ago [-]
> The payment system has to be decoupled first, and then banks can have nothing to fear from US sanctions.
I'm not sure the payment system is most banks primary concern. Being able to buy/sell US securities turns out to be a fairly fundamental part of the modern economy
mitxela 4 days ago [-]
Any EU back that's holding US securities deserves to fail. And then have its leader get jailed.
toomuchtodo 5 days ago [-]
For now, but not forever. Skate to where the puck is going to be. Decoupling continues, with the target being independence. Quote this comment five years from now.
riffraff 5 days ago [-]
Not forever but long enough: there's no foreseeable future where the USA becomes an economy small enough to not be worth trading in.
For most banks the ability to sell financial instruments which end up interacting with the US financial institutions is fundamental.
So the rest of the world has the option of relying on China instead? How is that better?
FabCH 5 days ago [-]
TBH China is not currently bombing a foreign country for no reason and it is not threatening to invade its allies.
It’s not a particularly high bar, but of the big powers, only China currently meets it.
And I know you will say „but payment networks are not a warfare question, they are an economic question“ but that kind of breaks down when they are used to sanction ICC judges presiding over war crime cases.
graemep 5 days ago [-]
China has invaded and conquered other countries before, has occupied territories and clearly plans to invade at least one neighbour id it gets the chance. Its hugely oppressive internally and is wiping out minority cultures by any means required.
qwertytyyuu 5 days ago [-]
But for now at least, it’s doing less of that than the US
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
Why did I say it and get deadened and then 2 hours later you said it and weren't.
FabCH 5 days ago [-]
100%. I absolutely would prefer my own country to be a global superpower, but it isn’t.
However, currently, only US and Russia have publicly threatened my country, and both are currently engaged in a trade war with us.
China on the other hand is selling us cheap batteries and solar panels.
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
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jdkee 5 days ago [-]
Free Tibet.
mandolingual 5 days ago [-]
A small third party at the junction of two giants is infinitely more powerful than a small third party obliged to be the client of one.
graemep 5 days ago [-]
Sometimes, yes. In the case of bankings systems combined with payment systems you could end up reliant on both. If the US sanctions you only people using a Chinese OS to make payments through a Chinese payment system will be unaffected and vice-versa. Either will be able to take your economy down.
selfhoster1312 4 days ago [-]
The BRICS organization is precisely setup to not rely on the single actor, China included. They all have strong disagreements, but they all agree having a single global bully (USA) is bad for all involved parties.
It can be better, if the alternative mechanism is designed with safeguards against hijacking by a single state. Naturally, the threat of sanctions can always bully banks or states into acting one way or another, but at least it would not be through the cutting off of money transfers between willing parties.
Of course, that's an _if_, not something to just take for granted.
5 days ago [-]
nazgul17 5 days ago [-]
Competition is better for everyone
JeffRosenberg 5 days ago [-]
What I find wild is that this control over international banking, and the sanctions it enables, is a key benefit of the US-led world order that Trump is trying to dismantle. I’m quite sure he doesn’t understand this, but a key consequence of his efforts to stop the US from getting “ripped off” is that we will soon no longer have the ability to impose these sorts of sanctions as the global economy re-routes around American control.
crawfordcomeaux 5 days ago [-]
Just because millions of us haven't marched on the banks globally in a coordinated effort to control the banking system doesn't mean we can't.
Just have not yet done it.
NBJack 5 days ago [-]
They already know what they are. There are good reasons the term "terrorist" has yet to be formally agreed upon among members of the United Nations.
mag7269 5 days ago [-]
If that's what you characterize the US government as, I can only imagine what you characterize some of the other governments around the world. Particularly, from the millions of us who migrated to the US legally and willfully and who are very VERY grateful to this country for providing the opportunities people like myself could only dream-of in our former countries.
port11 4 days ago [-]
Many (most?) governments around the world strike no terror on other countries. They don’t go around invading other countries, nor sanctioning them on the basis of belief, nor using their soft/hard power to exert pressure at a global scale.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m grateful for many things the USA has done, and for the inventiveness and generosity of its people; but let’s not pretend like their government(s) have been the kindest or most terror-free in the past decades.
The USA can be both a good and bad thing. And terrorism, by definition, is a bit of what they do abroad.
cfloyd 4 days ago [-]
A lot of that has to do with the fact that they simply do not need to. Many of these countries rely on allies such as the United States to maintain that aggressive posture for them and offer them the opportunity to remain militarily neutral.
port11 3 days ago [-]
Maybe? I wonder how well their allies would do if the USA was less… belligerent.
hiddencost 5 days ago [-]
As Stephen Miller loves to remind us, we had the first net emigration in decades this year. They're rounding up legal immigrants and putting them in concentration camps where they're dying because they're being denied medical care.
InsideOutSanta 5 days ago [-]
How many of these millions only had to migrate to the US because the US destroyed their countries with war, economic sanctions, covert CIA operations, or other attacks?
mag7269 5 days ago [-]
I don’t know, how many? You are the one throwing blanket statements.
I’m from Latin America and it’s 100% the fault of some of our own corrupt governments and us people living in those places.
Emphasis on “some,” because countries like Chile, Costa Rica, Uruguay and lately Argentina and El Salvador are showing that less government intervention in economic matters and a zero-bullshit policy on crime is how you turn things around to something that reminisces a somewhat livable country.
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
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hugodan 5 days ago [-]
A/I shuts down
drivingmenuts 5 days ago [-]
Some of y'all are from countries that are in great turmoil.
Which is partly or mostly our fault.
Maybe we could concentrate on doing less of that.
what_hn 5 days ago [-]
It really is not the fault of the US that Mexico has drug gangs that kill people at random. It's not the fault that Pakistan and India are nearly at war forever. It's not the US fault that many countries support and require female genital mutilation. The US is not as evil as you think.
InsideOutSanta 5 days ago [-]
> It really is not the fault of the US that Mexico has drug gangs that kill people at random
This is a direct result of the "war on drugs" perpetrated by the US.
The other two are genuinely not the fault of the US, but bringing up two examples where the US wasn't the source of the problem doesn't exactly contradict the original claim.
throwitaway222 5 days ago [-]
The war on drugs definitely didn't cause the drug trade or the murders. If anything it's the fault of leftist US government stance on drugs that weaken border security and allow drugs to get in (and therefore fund more drugs to be produced). And besides all that, the drug trade has been going on for far longer than you know. And including the murders.
> Which is partly or mostly our fault.
It does contradict the original claim because it's 3 examples of things we didn't cause - and he said "mostly our fault". If it takes 3 seconds to think of things we didn't cause, then the world's craziness is not mostly the fault of America. Mostly the US has a hand in stopping communist governments where the citizens are kept as slaves.
beedeebeedee 5 days ago [-]
> The war on drugs definitely didn't cause the drug trade or the murders.
Have to stop you right there. The “war on drugs” absolutely has created the conditions for the drug trade and the murders. If you criminalize a large part of the economy, then only criminals will profit from it. If we had sane drug policy, there would not be the profit that attracts these criminals. Additionally, the US intelligence services (and other nations) have a long documented role in cultivating the drug trade for diverse reasons: for profit and paying for operations, for control of regions, and to provide a reservoir of violence to disguise or facilitate their work.
throwitaway222 3 days ago [-]
So don't do anything to stop anything. Got it.
beedeebeedee 3 days ago [-]
The only way to stop it is to regulate it. We’re almost there. Read the history about the war on drugs. David Musto has a great book about it, The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control. It was never designed to stop it. Its goal from the beginning has been to criminalize “undesirables”
what_hn 2 days ago [-]
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mitxela 5 days ago [-]
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InsideOutSanta 5 days ago [-]
> The war on drugs definitely didn't cause the drug trade or the murders
You should be a lot less confident in your opinions. The war on drugs required violent interventions against drug production in Mexico, which directly created militarized, violent drug cartels.
Example: pressured by the US, Felipe Calderón launched Operation Michoacán in 2006 with U.S. backing and funding. He deployed tens of thousands of federal forces. Mexico has recorded more than 463,000 homicides since that declaration of war on the cartels, a huge increase.
Just look at the data.
> and he said "mostly our fault". If it takes 3 seconds to think of things we didn't cause
He said "mostly" because he knows there are counterexamples, so providing counterexamples doesn't contradict his point.
> Mostly the US has a hand in stopping communist governments where the citizens are kept as slaves.
This is such a genuinely undiscriminating statement that I can't help but categorize it as dumb. I don't usually say this, but you need to stop listening to propaganda and pick up a few actual history books. Until you do, any discussion is pointless, because you're so stuck in your ideology that facts can't penetrate the bubble.
That's really all I have for you. It's up to you to fix yourself.
throwitaway222 3 days ago [-]
Has it occurred to you that there are history books that both back what I am saying and what you're saying? Which ones are handed out in a leftist college?
nullsanity 5 days ago [-]
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customguy 5 days ago [-]
If you don't see an issue with the White House constantly posting straight up Nazi memes then that's on you. There's also plenty immigrants in Europe who vote for fascists, so? Turns out you can't just leave your "former" country behind like an old coat, it's still your upbringing and horizon. You are grateful "to the country", but what does that mean while also shrugging off what the people in "the country" are saying? What is left of "the country"? A bunch of papers, rights and money, opportunities for you; let the goons roam and fill their warehouses, keep children, even infants in despicable conditions, because you (think you) have nothing to fear?
mag7269 5 days ago [-]
Yet billions of people would still want to come here.
How do you like them apples?
customguy 5 days ago [-]
So you neither acknowledge nor disagree with any of that. As if it's nothing. I would if you don't care when it falls to fascism, it's not your home. You gave up your "former" country and you're not being a fellow country person in your new one, either, kinda like you don't really show up to this conversation, but worse. Since what you say has no substance it's as if you didn't say it in the first place. It just took up space and time, for nothing. Does that answer your question?
aliasxneo 5 days ago [-]
[flagged]
sph 5 days ago [-]
> HN is extremely left-leaning
What kind of mickey mouse political left are you using for reference here? The Dems?
HN is extremely american-leaning, whose centre is firmly to the right compared to the rest of the world.
dgellow 5 days ago [-]
> whose centre is firmly to the right compared to the rest of the world.
Not really, no. Most of the world is under authoritarian regimes that would be seen as more right leaning. Most democracies are also right leaning. What characterizes the US is being extremely capitalistic and pro-corporations
aliasxneo 5 days ago [-]
> HN is extremely american-leaning
I would agree that's true for Y Combinator, but my experience in the HN _community_ for almost a decade now has suggested that the heavy anti-American sentiment started right around the start of the current administration.
InsideOutSanta 5 days ago [-]
> anti-American sentiment
It's always a bit upsetting to me when people conflate criticism of aspects of a country (like its government) with being against that country. I would rather say that it shows that people are pro that country and want it to do better.
aliasxneo 5 days ago [-]
Fair enough. I do have a specific sentiment in mind, though, and it's not the constructive kind, which I very rarely see anymore. I would classify "anti-American sentiment" as sentiment which is against the Western culture that has predominated since the founding of the country.
But it's a slippery slope. If someone love America and wants a revolution to turn it into something historically unrecognizable, does that still make them pro-America? I would say no.
5 days ago [-]
Petersipoi 5 days ago [-]
America has the most progressive tax system in the world. There is no other country where the ultra rich pay such percentage of the tax burden. Fuck off with this "Left in the US is center in Europe" bullshit. The EU wishes they were as left as us in a lot of areas.
edit: Because this is HN and a lot of you are learning this for the first time:
US: $60k salary leads to $50k take home pay, then a less than 10% sales tax
Denmark: $60k salary leads to $38k take home pay, then a 25% sales tax
All that money you're losing in Denmark is paying for you shittier healthcare.
Welcome to a small taste of being outside your echo chamber.
commoner 5 days ago [-]
> America has the most progressive tax system in the world. There is no other country where the ultra rich pay such percentage of the tax burden.
Nope, not even close. Sort this list by "Highest" and keep in mind that NYC is only one city in the US:
If only you were the UN and could do something about it.
Oh wait!
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
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rdtsc 5 days ago [-]
> The anarchist cells responsible for sabotaging rail systems across France, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands in 2026, relied on A/I Collective tools and services to claim responsibility for the attacks
Hmm. So they are going by “A/I vets its users” and users sabotaged rail systems so therefore A/I is materially assisting terrorists? I wonder how this vetting works? Do users have to submit government issued documents, write essays? Do they make users sign non-violence agreement ToS. I mean heck, Facebook and Twitter has material supporting various things like that and US government is designated them as terrorists.
joquarky 5 days ago [-]
I wonder why gun manufacturers aren't responsible for the behavior of their users, but this org is.
arcfour 5 days ago [-]
Because you don't apply to a gun company to buy a gun. (You actually apply to the government...chew on that one for a while.)
bakies 5 days ago [-]
Didn't need to chew, I already know the government doesn't do enough to curb gun violence.
ThunderSizzle 5 days ago [-]
Well, in my state, you don't "apply" for a gun like you apply for a license. It is just document that you purchased it after the seller runs a background check.
The government isn't attesting to your capabilities - that is still on you as a citizen.
hokumguru 5 days ago [-]
> you don't "apply" for a gun like you apply for a license.
>... background check
Who requires these background checks? Because the seller wouldn't do them unless obligated. Obviously the check and paperwork around it constitutes at least a de facto application to the government for permission to purchase the firearm.
Sharlin 5 days ago [-]
But that's an outlier. In normal countries you apply for a license, THEN after you get it, you're allowed to purchase a firearm.
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
IIRC from the last A/I thread, there's actually a special law that basically says gun manufacturers are not liable for what people do with the guns, and says it specifically about guns, not any other industry.
SV_BubbleTime 5 days ago [-]
No other industry needed that law. The PLCAA was put in place in 2005 because anti-gun specifically devised a plan to sue gun makers in lieu of any success in changing gun laws.
It is absolute nonsense to ignore why the law exists while you complain about it existing.
fireflash38 4 days ago [-]
Why is it necessary to legislate it if it's nonsense? If there is no culpability, why would there be any threat?
SV_BubbleTime 4 days ago [-]
It was necessary because a group of billionaires (Joyce Foundation) decided they were going to do a run around congress and engage in lawfare for their goals.
It’s nonsense to pretend it came out of no where for no reason.
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
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forestingfisher 5 days ago [-]
By this logic services like Telegram or Signal would be designated "terrorist organizations". But the current admin is purely vibes-based, so we'll never know for sure
baobabKoodaa 4 days ago [-]
Telegram is openly supportive of cyber crime. I don't think it should be labelled as terrorist organization, but it's not far from that.
Some of the claims are interesting - "Decision making in the group takes places collectively instead of through majority voting." - isn't explained by the sourced article.
Kuyawa 4 days ago [-]
In anarchism, democracy and voting are considered flawed
An ignorant/manipulated majority can not decide over my natural rights. 51% of men can not vote in favor of raping 49% of women, that's why 49% of women should be armed and capable of mutually assured destruction as a deterrent (pick gender, race, religion, whatever, applies to all minorities). That's just philosophy, in real life the powerful fucks the weak, and that's how it works. 'Disarm the people' is the first step in the road to slavery. Of course an armed disfunctional society like the US is also not the best solution to the problems the state creates. So we keep thinking and philosophizing, until that day comes...
Btw, I am a philosophical anarchist, I don't throw molotovs or wear masks but I do hate the state with a passion, and I like to think about how a free world should work, and currently the US is the antithesis of that
Normal_gaussian 8 hours ago [-]
While this is often the case, it is not clear how this group specifically functioned. Theory vs practice is always very interesting in these cases.
nullbio 5 days ago [-]
This is how you get mindless group-think. Anyone who tries to object to a bad idea is turned into an outcast and seen as a boat rocker, so members are trained to toe the line at all costs. Very unhealthy.
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
Possible. But the fact they have been running anarchist IT services for 25 years says otherwise.
hackable_sand 5 days ago [-]
It sound like you had one bad social experience and are projecting that onto them.
parineum 5 days ago [-]
That seems like two words for the same thing to me but making the distinction seems like a signalling mechanism to me.
jgtrosh 5 days ago [-]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_decision-making alternative political movements care a lot about how decisions are taken. For instance, authors like David Graeber consider that majority voting only makes sense in the context if backed by violence.
parineum 5 days ago [-]
So what percent of people are required for "consensus" because it seems like 50%+1 to 100%. There seems to also be an implication that democracy is 50+1 when it isn't. It can require any percentage to reach a decision.
Those two words refer to the same "type" of system where the members make a decision by ascent or descent. Both systems require an agreed upon barrier of acceptance.
They are the same. The US congress reaches decision by consensus.
selfhoster1312 4 days ago [-]
Consensus is strictly 100% agreement (or at least 0% disagreement). Granted, it's not always possible. But in some setups and given some objectives, it's sometimes possible to have a collective that finds compromises that satisfy everyone (consensus).
parineum 4 days ago [-]
> Consensus is not synonymous with unanimity – though that may be a rule agreed to in a specific decision-making process.[1]
IETF for instance, makes the distinction because they do not use a fixed vote threshold, but use a judgement of someone with good judgement, taking all facts into account such as the strength of disagreement.
And of course if that person turns out to have bad judgement they won't listen to him next time.
It is certainly possible for this to become unstable and split into two or more groups. This may work for the IETF which frequently creates and destroys working groups.
sdcfgy 5 days ago [-]
This reminds me how fragile the internet is and how we need other channels of communication.
CircuitSeuss 5 days ago [-]
Not all problems are best served with technical solutions. This is a political problem.
sdcfgy 5 days ago [-]
I’m not suggesting technical solutions to be clear.
forestingfisher 5 days ago [-]
Real life is a channel of communication.
dudefeliciano 4 days ago [-]
the internet is real life
sdcfgy 5 days ago [-]
Exactly my point.
Ciph 5 days ago [-]
Maybe LoRa? Doesn't get more sovereign than that. As long you have people to connect with, that is.
Gigachad 5 days ago [-]
There's already TOR, the problem you run in to is you need connectivity and visibility with the rest of the world on the clearnet. lora is even worse here.
20after4 5 days ago [-]
LoRa is very short range and extremely bandwidth limited.
ivoras 4 days ago [-]
...and trivially jammable
agnishom 5 days ago [-]
Is it related to reticulum?
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
Reticulum can use it as one of several transport layers. LoRa is just layer 1 only
Dansvidania 5 days ago [-]
I have no way to verify whether the collective really helped the violent acts that are cited in the designation[1] but, as an Italian, given the dialectic and rhetoric in their statements and in their websites, it would not surprise me if this once they - the US government - were not wrong. "A broken clock marks the right time twice a day" and all that.
I have experienced this kind of language personally back when the collective started (they have root in the no-global movement, a protest group that contributed to the violence at the Genova G8).
At the time I was a young activist on their side, but the 'we are not violent' wink-wink nudge-nudge attitude was not main stream but very much all over the place and became hard to ignore.
> as an Italian, given the dialectic and rhetoric in their statements
As if that holds any value, especially considering the rest of your comment, which completely ignores the rhetoric of that "designation".
That designation is toilet paper - the wording "violent Antifa cells" in the second sentence should be the wake up signal.
> they have root in the no-global movement, a protest group
There was/is no protest group called the no-global movement - you are using language the same way Trump & co. use the word antifa. And using language like Trump & co. is not a good look.
> that contributed to the violence at the Genova G8.
That was the black-bloc, maybe a few hundred or thousand actors within a protest of up to 300k people. I am leaving out the many controversies regarding the infiltrators in the black bloc and the manufactured "evidence" like planted molotov cocktails in the Diaz school.
And we all know who else contributed to the violence, but you conveniently left that out. Carlo Giuliani was killed by police. Same police that raided a school and charged peaceful protesters.
Dansvidania 4 days ago [-]
> As if that holds any value, especially considering the rest of your comment, which completely ignores the rhetoric of that "designation".
I am not saying that you have to hold my experience to any value, but I am stating that was my experience. Anyone is free to interpret as they prefer, but I would question your argument as to why. It sounds a lot like "whataboutism". The fact that the designation is bad does not change my experience with the rhetoric of the collective.
If you'd rather know why I do not express much judgement on the designation: I did not pass any judgement of the dialectic in the designation because I don't claim to have the same experience with such - or any - dialect in English.
I also state that 'a broken clock ...' underlining - I thought - the fact that I don't think the US government does normally much good.
> "violent Antifa cells" in the second sentence should be the wake up signal.
It's not as obvious to me as it is to you why "violent antifa cells" is a wake up signal. Would you mind explaining further?
> There was/is no protest group called the no-global movement.. you are using language the same way Trump & co
Admittedly, these are memories from quite a while ago, I don't exclude some of them might be wrong, but as much as it's not a movement with a cohesive leadership and structured belief, for what it's worth, wikipedia seems to agree with me on the existence of a "No global movment" and its connection with the Genova G8 issues [1]. I would invite you to avoid name calling, such as comparing me to Trump :D
I had no connection with black bloc, and while I agree with you that it was a small minority in the protest having violent intentions, I disagree that only black bloc was to blame for those violent intentions.
I also don't absolve the police, what happened was horrifying, but this again does not take away from the fact that the rhetoric used in the communication by the collective reminds me of the 'not so not violent' groups that at the very least orbited the violence, and, in my personal opinion, very much winked at and approved of it.
I don't see you make an argument contrary to what I am saying other than discrediting my own experience based on the fact that - in your opinion - I don't criticize both sides equally?
First of all I apologize if my previous comment was overly aggressive. Perhaps I got heated because I think this is an an issue that shows were we are going as a society, and it's nowhere good.
> question your argument as to why.
I am also Italian, and I don't feel that "the dialectic and rhetoric" of their statements in any way gives and credibility to the US designation of a "violent antifa cells" equating them to terrorists on the level of Al-Qaeda, ISIS and so on. So there's that, being Italian is not some skill or ability that allows you or me to better understand their statements, especially since they are also translated to English...
> the same experience with such - or any - dialect in English.
That sounds like a cop-out to me, you obviously can express yourself in English quite well, and even if that were not the case phrases like "violent antifa cells", "far-left terrorist networks, built to enable them to organize, recruit, communicate, disseminate propaganda, share target information and tactics, and carry out violent attacks" should clearly show that is nothing more than the lowest form of fearmongering, propaganda and silencing of dissent by an authoritarian government.
Furthermore, especially as Italians, we should support these projects and not give in to notions that "maybe the broken fascist clock is right once in a while".
> wikipedia seems to agree with me on the existence of a "No global movment"
The first sentence: indica organizzazioni non governative, associazioni e singoli individui relativamente ETEROGENEI.
As you put it previously, "a protest group", does not at all convey the notion that these are many people with differing views, and as such there may well be also a violent minority like in any group. No, your comment paints them all with the same brush.
> such as comparing me to Trump :D
I did not compare you as a person to Trump, but the way you are misusing words.
> does not take away from the fact that the rhetoric used in the communication by the collective reminds me of the 'not so not violent' groups that at the very least orbited the violence, and, in my personal opinion, very much winked at and approved of it.
This would be the point were you cite some sources or quotes that give you that impression, rather than relying on your "Italianness" to support your argument.
> in your opinion - I don't criticize both sides equally?
As Italians we should criticize only one side and that is the fascists.
Dansvidania 4 days ago [-]
I appreciate the apology, but this is much of the same.
> being Italian is not some skill
Some of the A/I statements being in Italian, and some of the seditious rhetoric being known to me because I have experienced the Italian far left, I think it is a relevant 'competency' in this thread.
> That sounds like a cop-out to me..
It's a good thing I have no obligation of par-conditio :D
Anyway, whether the US document is good or not was not my point, and I never hinted at the fact that it might be good. I repeat that I don't think it is. You are rather just using that to ignore the point I was attempting to make, which is that the language used by the collective is reminding me of language that winks at violence.
> As Italians we should criticize only one side and that is the fascists.
I reject the requirement you try to impose on me of criticizing only the fascists, as if far left - which this collective definitely was - is tolerable or ok or positive. I do not agree. I prefer to keep my own independence of thought, and would rather point out your statement being ironically oppressive.
postit 5 days ago [-]
I'm wondering how long until they target CCC :/
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
That'll be fun. But the CCC doesn't engage in resistance any more. They mostly just hold the conferences where people tinker with stuff in ways that don't matter .
selfhoster1312 4 days ago [-]
Well A/I doesn't engage in resistance either. All they did was provide email services and host blogs for people. By this standard, Wikipedia or CCC could indeed be next.
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
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molsongolden 4 days ago [-]
For people wondering what types of organizations A/I was providing services to, you can explore the blogs that A/I hosted by using DataRepublican's database that was scraped from the NoBlogs platform.
Never heard of A/I and I have no idea what they are about, but rather than a government communication this statement reads like an angry rant with lots of unhelpful name-calling.
I would expect a government to be professional and just stick to the (proven) facts and avoiding labels; that would also be more convincing. Oh well.
dpkirchner 5 days ago [-]
This is the new Republican mainstream, the same mainstream that brings us AI generated videos of the Obamas as apes. They have no shame and are likely irredeemable (certainly their behavior is inexcusable).
And ultimately these statements aren't for the normal citizens. They're for the truly strange, the racists, and the trolls.
quickthrowman 4 days ago [-]
The entire current US Administration has adopted the grievance rhetoric of its chief executive because the alternative is expulsion.
dash2 5 days ago [-]
Really?
> The anarchist cells responsible for sabotaging rail systems across France, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands in 2026, relied on A/I Collective tools and services to claim responsibility for the attacks, publish official communiqués, and disseminate manuals for constructing improvised incendiary devices to target railways and other critical infrastructure.
> The anarchist cell responsible for sabotaging the Transalpine Pipeline (TAL) in March 2026, which temporarily halted crude oil flows to Austria, Germany, and the Czech Republic, relied on A/I Collective tools and services to claim responsibility for the attack and publish official communiqués, as well as to disseminate a manifesto calling for additional attacks on critical infrastructure and referring adherents to another A/I Collective platform, which provides detailed sabotage manuals as well as maps of vulnerable critical infrastructure across North America.
> The far-left extremist network responsible for multiple arson attacks and acts of sabotage against Germany’s rail and energy infrastructure between 2011 and 2026, including a January 2026 attack on Berlin’s power grid that cut power to 45,000 households and resulted in a fatality, relied on A/I Collective tools and services to claim responsibility for attacks, publish official communiques, and disseminate a manifesto calling for additional attacks on energy infrastructure worldwide.
Seems quite specific to me.
glub 5 days ago [-]
They also probably used Signal for comms, and it's safe to assume some of them used protonmail.
And maybe they used a Google camera for taking photos of their acts.
By the same logic, what prevents US from labelling Signal, Proton, and Google as ones supporting terrorist organizations?
riffraff 5 days ago [-]
Well, the far left extremists also used ISPs, mobile phones, energy infrastructure to do this.
Are those terrorist organizations too?
Moreover, ask yourself: why hasn't Germany accused A/I of being co-responsible of the attacks?
9763268964 5 days ago [-]
[flagged]
MentalM 5 days ago [-]
[flagged]
selfhoster1312 4 days ago [-]
Is the car manufacturer responsible for their use of a car? The power tools manufacturer? The paper sheet manufacturer? The restaurant that fed them?
Technical intermediaries could be held responsible specifically for hosting the manifestos (under freedom of the press laws), but that requires an actual due process. Meanwhile, 100% of the authors and websites who inspired or relayed Anders Brejvik and other neo-fascist terrorists are still online and are not facing any kind of repression.
yunnpp 5 days ago [-]
Check whitehouse.gov next. You'll think it's been defaced by a script kiddie.
threethirtytwo 5 days ago [-]
Wait this is not true. I’m truly neutral here.
The site lists actual terror attacks where the tools were used. That’s pretty damning if accurate. Anyone care to comment on that? I’m not well informed but the statement does not look like just straight up name calling.
lokar 5 days ago [-]
Has any terrorist group ever used Gmail to communicate?
SV_BubbleTime 5 days ago [-]
Is Gmail used for anything else? Lots, right?
Now, what about A/I group? Ah… well, there is your answer.
selfhoster1312 4 days ago [-]
> Now, what about A/I group?
Yes, in my local food distribution networks here in France, quite a few people had autistici emails registered on our mailing list.
Don't talk about something you don't know like you do and you're smarter than anyone.
SV_BubbleTime 1 days ago [-]
lol, it’s sort of pathetic to cover for a terrorist group with ”but they run a mailing list”. No one is buying that.
I’m sure their helpful functions will be picked up by another group that wants to do good work without USAID money.
tim333 5 days ago [-]
Remember this is the Trump administration. I think your expectations might be a bit high.
UltraSane 5 days ago [-]
"statement reads like an angry rant with lots of unhelpful name-calling."
This is the standard of communication for the Trump administration.
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
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alexwebb2 5 days ago [-]
I’m not familiar with A/I, but this sounds pretty damning – the ideological vetting of users in particular seems to discount any sort of neutral utility defense.
notesinthefield 5 days ago [-]
The use of the word “ideological” in text with a US Gov-anything byline is tantamount to a fart. Its whining “I dont like this thing but I cant cry like a child about it.”
lokar 5 days ago [-]
Stop trusting the US government.
WindyTree 5 days ago [-]
It really doesn’t, unless they are screening for terrorism. For instance, a company that provides some free tech for low income Catholics, which ends up used in some crime, maybe bombed family planning clinic, can be charged for the terrorism they didn’t do. In fact, this can be leveraged by anti-Catholic terrorists to take out the Catholic tech service.
5 days ago [-]
dragonwriter 5 days ago [-]
Sure, sounding damning is kind of the point of this kind of statement. But its also cheap and easy since there is no requirement that any of the claims are justified by any facts.
a2ff6eeb0 5 days ago [-]
Hacker news engages in ideological vetting against users. For example, try posting content encouraging violence.
sublinear 5 days ago [-]
HN only (lazily) filters content. It doesn't engage in ideological vetting, and doesn't need to either.
A good amount of the commenters on this story probably would encourage violence, or at least agree with the sentiment on a different platform, yet here they are. I'm not even sure if they're real people or bots.
We are having a discussion right now that would not be allowed if there was vetting.
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
HN's filtering is anything but lazy. Do you have showdead enabled in the settings? If not, enable it and refresh this comments page.
A bunch of my comments were mysteriously deadened and I have no idea why - they aren't flagged. This was among them. Maybe it was a retaliation for talking about HN's filtering?
supriyo-biswas 4 days ago [-]
When a post receive a number of flags and downvotes higher than some configured threshold, they're marked as "[dead]".
mitxela 4 days ago [-]
[flagged] [dead]. Just [dead] by itself means an auto filter.
a2ff6eeb0 5 days ago [-]
What exactly do you think vetting means? Why do you think it's only allowed to happen up front?
5 days ago [-]
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
[dead]
kennywinker 5 days ago [-]
Ideologically vetting can mean a lot of things. Like, a sign on the door that says "NO TERFS" is a form of ideological vetting.
By this logic any right wing message board would be designated terrorists the moment one person who has posted there commits a violent act.
From my reading of their policy they do not claim to be neutral:
> To be hosted on our servers you have to share our principles of anti-fascism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, anti-transphobia, and anti-militarism
I'm not familiar with A/I, but I'm familiar with americans, and they look completely ridiculous talking smack about others doing allegedly "bad things". And they have no defense about supporting war criminals or genocidaires.
20after4 5 days ago [-]
The current administration defines disliking fascism as a very bad thing.
stevenwoo 5 days ago [-]
The latest US Space Force dress uniforms look like Temu Schutzstaffel costumes.
mapontosevenths 5 days ago [-]
Define genocide so we can all be sure we're talking about the same thing.
megous 5 days ago [-]
Intentionally creating circumstances that can lead to a destruction of a group as a whole or in part.
Circumstances were created. The destruction of a group also happened in a significant part, and it's only not more horrendous than it already is just because of massive international support to Palestinians, on whose destruction americans participated in very significant part. Almost all of it was done by american supplied bombs, inluding the mass killings of entire families that are still being brought out of rubble to this day, burried by 100s suffocated or burned alive at the time, with their children, women and men, in covardly night attacks from high above.
Or surprise daylight rushhour mass bombings during ceasefires that killed hundreds of children alone in one go in a day.
This is what I get in mind when I hear "americans" now. This is what americans enabled on purpose. Blergh. Unprovoked aggressions against other countries, like Iran in the last instance that led to permanently increased fuel prices and making everyone poorer around the world, also adds to feeling of disgust when hearing "americans" these days. Americans will learn in time that some things are hard to repair. And their apparent ignorance of what they do in the world and how they are perceived due to that will hit a wall soon enough.
mapontosevenths 5 days ago [-]
It sounds like you have very strong feelings about this. The kind that may not be ideal for a polite conversation.
13415 5 days ago [-]
It's defined in the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Long title but the document is like two pages, easy reading for even the intellectually laziest persons.
mapontosevenths 5 days ago [-]
That definition is less than ideal from several perspectives. It serves neither side.
The worst reason to hate it is that it relies on proving intent (dolus specialis), which essentially makes it unenforceable unless the perpetrator is a group of simpletons.
It really hit me when I realized that there are only two ways to prove intent: The criminal admits it, or the prosecution proves that there are literally zero other possible explanations that could possibly fit the actions.
So - Back to the point. Did the USA assist people guilty of genocide by your own chosen definition? Not if there could be literally any other intention.
Keep in mind that Hamas's own convention (1988) clearly declares that they partly exist as a group for the purpose of wiping Israel out, and they did actually perpetrate October 7th. It would be very difficult for even the best lawyer in the world to argue that self-defense couldn't be at least one possible intention, and given that the nation of Israel probably has one or two decent lawyers, they'd likely be able to come up with a few other possible intentions as well, but they only need one to completely avoid prosecution.
A second reason to hate it is that it doesn't carve out exceptions for mutual combat situations, even the ones that that have been dragging on for thousands of years. When two religious groups or ethnicities from neighboring regions fight each other in open combat few reasonable people would refer to that as a genocide, but it might be considered genocide against both sides if we interpret the UN Convention as it was actually ratified.
> even the intellectually laziest persons
Yo mama.
To be more serious, this wasn't necessary and was rude. What was your goal? To convince me? To convince others? Neither are best accomplished with this sort of behavior.
claykkari 4 days ago [-]
> It really hit me when I realized that there are only two ways to prove intent: The criminal admits it, or the prosecution proves that there are literally zero other possible explanations that could possibly fit the actions.
I doubt we'll have absolute certainty about genocide until Nuremberg-style trials take place. The problem is such trials won't happen unless the international community intervenes, and they don't seem willing to intervene without 100% certainty. Chicken-egg problem.
13415 4 days ago [-]
> To be more serious, this wasn't necessary and was rude. What was your goal? To convince me?
My goal wasn't to convince you. My goal was to answer your question even though you were, in my opinion, intellectually lazy when you asked it. Now you pretend you've done your homework and suddenly are an expert on definitions of genocide, of course. That's great! At least you've read the convention now.
Seriously, though, it seems striking to me that you asked in bad faith, and I'm not interested in discussing this matter any further. Ask non-rhetorical questions only if you don't believe to know the answer yet!
5 days ago [-]
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
[dead]
mdp2021 5 days ago [-]
What if "ideological vetting of users" means "discarding those who you believe would use the services for purposes you loathe".
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
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catlover76 5 days ago [-]
[dead]
madsmith 5 days ago [-]
Unfortunately I can no longer take any official communication from my government at face value. They have lost my trust that they are operating as directed by the letter of the law without fear nor favor.
bambax 5 days ago [-]
"violent" is used many times in this announcement, but it would seem that one of the most violent entity in the world right now are the US? Also, it's so weird that "antifa" (antifascists) has become a bad thing. If antifa is bad then it must mean "fa" is good? So we should bring back the Nazis?
The "Western hemisphere" (which, of course, is neither) tolerates the US and the way it enforces its decisions outside its own borders, because it used to provide some assurance of stability and protection. But as the US rescinds that policy, weakens Nato, declares a tariffs war to every country on earth, etc., there will be less and less justification as well as, probably (hopefully) less and less public acceptance for any of this posturing.
the_wolo 5 days ago [-]
> one of the most violent entity in the world right now are the US?
I too find it really weird. My grandpa was a member of a violent antifascist organization (US Army, 1940s). The US government even awarded him multiple medals for his antifa activities.
20after4 5 days ago [-]
The Fa has taken over the US government.
sph 5 days ago [-]
Like trying to scrutinize the motives of a complete lunatic.
Grombobulous 5 days ago [-]
Here’s the thing though: if even some of the examples given in the state department page are true (some of them are rather silly), that A/I knowingly provided services to groups that verifiably did some rather violent things they are accused of, I’m not sure how they expected to hide behind their mission.
My impression is that they didn’t say “hey we don’t have customer information but we don’t service violent groups and we will responsibly investigate and discontinue service to offenders.”
Their vibe was much more defiant, like, “we designed this to be anonymous and specifically intend/expect for it to be used in any way regardless of legality and are okay with it.”
Is it right for the US to be the global arbiter of this issue and domains in general? Of course not.
pepperoni_pizza 5 days ago [-]
> “we designed this to be anonymous and specifically intend/expect for it to be used in any way regardless of legality and are okay with it.”
That is also what Signal does. Or absolutely any end-to-end encrypted communication service at all - these are explicitly designed not to retain details of communication.
Do you want to declare them terrorists too?
Grombobulous 5 days ago [-]
What Signal does is different than what A/I was in a number of ways.
sph 5 days ago [-]
Which terrorists and criminals are texting right now on Signal? You (and hopefully Signal) have no idea whatsover, that's the point of privacy.
Now, if you are against private conversations, please state so clearly so we know which side of the fence you lean towards.
boesboes 5 days ago [-]
I disagree in more ways, so that invalidates your comment xoxox
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
They're saying the difference is that Signal doesn't say it. If you ask Signal about their support of terrorist groups, they'll say Signal doesn't allow terrorism on its platform (even though it obviously does since it has no way to know). Those are the Right Words. If you ask A/I, they said they didn't care if someone was a terrorist. Those are the Wrong Words. There's a social game being played at the highest levels that A/I have forfeited.
pepperoni_pizza 5 days ago [-]
You won't elaborate though, just make vague accusations.
ricardobeat 5 days ago [-]
I think the difference they alluded to is that they manually vetoed new users, presumably based on their self-declared goals and ideology, whereas Signal etc are neutral platforms.
pepperoni_pizza 5 days ago [-]
The A/I vetting was in the form of a form asking why do you want A/I email or blog. You could write anything in it.
Meanwhile, Signal requires a phone number, so it knows much more about your identity than A/I did.
SpicyLemonZest 5 days ago [-]
How do you know what the A/I vetting consisted of or what standards they held? They don't seem to have published any detailed description of the process, and by their own account they destroyed all records of the vetting after approval.
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
Maybe they clicked on the signup form while it was still live. You know, to gather actual information instead of speculating.
Several fediverse instances have the same thing. It's just a freeform textbox saying why do you want an account.
SpicyLemonZest 4 days ago [-]
Again, I'm working off of the only actual information I'm aware of, A/I's self-description of how the process works. If someone has more information they should provide it rather than relying on maybes! The existence of an intake form, to be clear, doesn't really suggest that form is the extent of the process or that any reasonable answers are accepted.
Grombobulous 5 days ago [-]
Yeah I didn’t elaborate since this was explained elsewhere in the thread.
Jeff_Brown 5 days ago [-]
Please elaborate!
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
[dead]
fl0id 5 days ago [-]
in interviews, they said if you give them examples of "xyz" is prohibited by applicable law, they would remove it. They would not help you spy on them probably, by backdooring their infra or sth.
ceejayoz 5 days ago [-]
> A/I knowingly provided services to groups that verifiably did some rather violent things they are accused of
If that's disqualifying, a lot of US government contractors are in trouble.
beej71 5 days ago [-]
Or J6.
5 days ago [-]
Grombobulous 5 days ago [-]
[flagged]
ceejayoz 5 days ago [-]
> There are very logical reasons why the state wielding force and violence is preferable to the alternatives…
Seems like there are some pretty clear historical exceptions to this rule.
Grombobulous 5 days ago [-]
[flagged]
ceejayoz 5 days ago [-]
> we’ve already established an okay-ish democratic system
We have pardoned Jan 6ers convicted of "wielding force and violence" for political goals in goverment positions now.
And everyone involved in hiring and pardoning them should go to prison. I can't speak for everyone, but many of us really do have a principled opposition to political violence.
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
[dead]
stanleykm 5 days ago [-]
well depends on if you are in the group the state is wielding that power for or not..
5 days ago [-]
5 days ago [-]
fastball 5 days ago [-]
> A/I’s cadre of radical hackers and tech developers provide a full spectrum of services
Pun intended?
hirako2000 5 days ago [-]
> ERR_UNEXPECTED_PROXY_AUTH
vrganj 5 days ago [-]
Basically, far right extremists targeting antifascists through mechanisms of political repression while having the gall to call themselves pro free speech.
mrtesthah 5 days ago [-]
Why is this downvoted? The regime has openly declared that anti-fascist beliefs are now cause for surveillance, censorship, and persecution.
Again, whatever laws you have in the US is irrelevant in Italy, where they have their own free speech and the US is the foreign country.
Free speech has been around as a concept for two millenia, starting with Athenian democracy. Your relatively recent constitution didn't invent it and harping on your particular implementation is off-topic.
politician 5 days ago [-]
[flagged]
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
The story is not about the US determination. The US makes many insane determinations every day. The story is about an Italian entity with zero ties to the US, with several Italian court rulings in its favor, being forced to comply anyway. Not just comply but shut down.
If they're really good they're about to start an identical but legally distinct organisation, but I think they're retiring.
vrganj 5 days ago [-]
Who's talking about your right to free speech? The point is that the US is infringing on these Italians' right to free speech, which they have independent of your national mythology, because y'know, it's not exactly a novel concept around here.
Americans can be so self-absorbed sometimes, they apparently think they're the only ones with rights or that their constitution matters anywhere outside their borders. Whatever rules you have for whoever, they don't apply in Italy.
The point is that this move was an unacceptable violation of our rights here and our sovereignty, as defined by us. We don't like brash foreigners coming in and abusing systems we set up in the spirit of cooperation to extort us, no matter the stories they tell themselves.
This is precisely why Europe is working on initiatives to decouple from the American payment system as we speak.
As a result of this extraterritorial aggression I expect further deterioration of global US standing and with it, further weakening of its power. In a way, I even agree with your last sentence, but do be aware that precisely this is currently being worked on and you probably won't enjoy its results.
politician 3 days ago [-]
Stop using our DNS? I don't understand how you can call us "self-absorbed" when Europe so heavily relies on us for its existence.
FWIW, I'm in favor of withdrawing the nuclear umbrella from Europe.
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
[dead]
politician 5 days ago [-]
[flagged]
vrganj 5 days ago [-]
Who cares about some American Bill in Italy? Y'all really think your country is the only one with freedom of speech?
queenkjuul 5 days ago [-]
Most Americans truly do believe that
5 days ago [-]
computomatic 5 days ago [-]
Most of this has me rolling my eyes (“cadre of radical hackers”? really?), but this part is interesting:
> The A/I Collective… manually vets all potential users for ideological affinity before granting them access to its infrastructure.
What is the truth behind that? Such behaviour would undermine A/I’s claim they are akin to Gmail if they explicitly are not a neutral ISP. After that, it becomes a question of degrees: what were their specific criteria for access to the platform?
Asking out of genuine curiosity. I wasn’t familiar with this group before today.
Grombobulous 5 days ago [-]
This is exactly the problem they ran into.
A lot of the state department’s claims of “violent groups” are BS but it also seems like a non-zero number of them are pretty violent organizations.
There’s a big difference between “we have designed our devices to be zero-knowledge but we act swiftly against violent/illegal activity if it’s discovered” versus “we actively endorse the views of our user base.”
fl0id 5 days ago [-]
for them it basically just means to not platform nazis etc. but then once you have an account, there is no control or anything.
fastball 5 days ago [-]
That's exactly the point though: if you are choosing to platform some and not others, and some (many? most?) of the groups you are choosing to platform are violent groups, you very quickly run out of plausible deniability.
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
[dead]
hirako2000 5 days ago [-]
So the oppression does work. It won't stop.
dudefeliciano 4 days ago [-]
"In this political climate, continuing to offer our services endangers our users and anyone who is part of our communities"
This is true in Italy, the United States, Russia, China, and with yesterday's victory of AfD in Sachsen-Anhalt I see the trajectory of it becoming true in Germany too very soon.
And a lot of the comments in this so-called community of so-called hackers are very disheartening, have any of you even read the Hackers Manifesto? Are you just going to shut your eyes in front of the evidence, as long as your pockets and bellies are full?
typhonic 5 days ago [-]
> History shows that people always choose convenience over autonomy.
The mere fact that revolution exists disproves this statement.
raydev 5 days ago [-]
It only proves just how hard people’s lives were in order for them to prefer actual revolution over the status quo.
riffraff 5 days ago [-]
Well, you can interpret revolution as happening only when convenience breaks down too much.
lrvick 5 days ago [-]
We must all fight for independent hosting or we will lose the right.
Punish those trying to stop it by coming back stronger. Spin up in a few new countries if you have to.
Friends and I have been giving out free shell accounts, service hosting, and mentorship for anon randos for over 25 years. Apparently this makes us cyber-terrorists. Neat!
We have had our infrastructure taken from us many times, and quickly come back online, often in a new country, every time.
Looking forward to 25 more years of people trying to kill us. Every attempt makes us stronger and smarter.
Should have focused on Monero donations from the get-go. Banks are a plague. Like what is a group like this using banks for or at least diversifying??
It's like choosing not to use E2EE.
It's not even left political groups that get debanked or screwed—it's everyone often.
Even GrapheneOS, but intelligently, they use crypto heavily:
>Unfortunately, PayPal permanently locked our GrapheneOS Foundation account today. No reason has been provided for the account being locked. All we've done is accept donations. We added our bank account information yesterday in order to begin withdrawing money and it was locked.
The problem with repression is not financial. Since A/I's goal was never to make profit, Bitcoin can't do anything to help them.
olalonde 5 days ago [-]
Not surprising. Far-leftists tend to be ideologically opposed to Bitcoin. They say so themselves: "Bitcoin are an investment fund pump & dump done to dupe the ultra-libertarian anarco-capitalists."
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
[dead]
AndrewKemendo 5 days ago [-]
Love these people and what a powerful message
If anyone from A/I is reading this know you always have a place to stay/eat if you need it
righthand 5 days ago [-]
> We are stopping, but the Resistance and ideas do not stop. Stay human.
How will that be if the resistance is not visible to the public. What are all the people using their services supposed to do? I’m guessing there are plans to reform in a few years. Why is the Italian government not protecting them?
K0balt 5 days ago [-]
Resistance and revolution happened before the internet. People have become lazy and complacent, and want their resistance served up over the wire. Thats not how real resistance happens, but it does make people feel like they are doing something, sucking up their energy while the biggest impact is TikTok memes, the modern version of the sternly worded letter.
This is exactly where the power structures want the struggle to be , online, with no real consequences that matter.
The best thing that could happen to the internet and society would be that it would be absolutely illegal to post anything inciting resistance or change of any kind on the internet.
Then, the resistance would go back to being real people in real rooms, secrets and whispers and actual plots to effect change in society for a more equitable and prosperous human future.
Because that’s how real change takes place. The powerful don’t try to make change by posting on instagram. (Advertisement and PR of course, but it’s not the organizational nexus) they gather in conference rooms, talk in person, and have social gatherings where they decide your future.
When they do use the internet to coordinate, it’s not in public forums, it’s encrypted communications, targeted and limited in scope.
The internet is useful, of course, and encrypted communication in private groups, even darkweb resources. But thinking you can use the official structure of the internet (public domain infrastructure, dns, walled gardens) as a primary means of subverting the dominant paradigm is foolish at best, suicidally counterproductive on the normative.
The internet was once subversive in and of itself. It no longer is. Now you’re just wearing signs at the mall.
The revolution thrives underground, not out in the open.
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
A caveat: people would have to be talking to each other to talk about resistance to each other. They don't.
Underground resistance forms out of existing "underground" social networks - social clubs, friends, people who know each other through any means. There's no longer any underground socialising at scale. We use the internet for it, where talk of resistance is strictly banned.
Even when you talk offline it's monitored. If you talk in the vicinity of an LG TV, it's converting your speech to text and uploading it to their servers, ostensibly for AI training.
K0balt 5 days ago [-]
Exactly. Why is it people don’t talk to each other? Why do they choose to have all of their discussions on the world’s largest and most powerful surveillance instrument?
It’s actually not that hard to go to places where phones, cameras, and internet access is banned or heavily discouraged, and guess what? It’s just people talking to each other, like we did up until the mid 90s. Just providing a technology free context is enough to get people to talk to each other.
I am a huge technology freak, but I can’t reasonably deny what I see, and that is that communications technology, in its present form, has been a terrible disaster for human communication because it made it effortless.
As it turns out, making it effortless also made people not value it at an interpersonal level, and to lessen the value of all of the cultural machinery that hinges on communication ( and the effort of it) as a central pivot.
Every step that makes communication more instantaneous and effortless undermines the value of character, honesty, and accountability.
Follow this and you can see how this has brought us to where we are today, step by step, starting with the telegraph.
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
Nudge theory. It's only got to be 1% more convenient than the alternative (and it's more than that), and you don't notice what you are giving up until it's too late.
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
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unfocso 5 days ago [-]
>Why is the Italian government not protecting them?
The Italian police wiretapped them for one year without them knowing.
mdp2021 5 days ago [-]
> wiretapped them for one year
Can you share the source? I don't have it.
Note: one big issue in the whole event is that this prosecution is happening without a transparent judgement.
ithkuil 5 days ago [-]
You can read about the Italian police obtained the encryption keys through the Aruba colocation provider in the Wikipedia page:
Did they prosecute? Or did they investigate and find nothing wrong ?
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
[dead]
oblongsquare69 5 days ago [-]
I take it as, talk to people in real life and don’t rely on systems that can be shut down.
Normal_gaussian 5 days ago [-]
It should be noted that this is a very sensible thing to say even if you are not stopping; the only case where you cannot say this is if you are carrying on with the same branding, which is typically necessary if you are carrying forwards funds (which have been seized) or brand recognition (which may not be important for a group who focuses on interpersonal relationships).
lambda 5 days ago [-]
The Italian government is also a far-right government like the US, so is aligned in wanting to suppress left-wing views.
mdp2021 5 days ago [-]
Bring evidence that the actions of the two are really comparable. Surprise us (it will take some effort).
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
[dead]
akhasg 5 days ago [-]
You go offline. Paper flyers and meetings are much more effective anyway.
It is also not like Palestinian activism is blocked on X, despite people here saying that only Nazis are on X and everything is censored:
Can just rename themselves into I/A. “A/I? That’s shut down. We are not affiliated with them…”
mcv 5 days ago [-]
Possibly. The content can be saved and posted on a variety of other platforms.
While this is very heavy handed censorship, there are plenty of ways around it.
monkaiju 5 days ago [-]
Hopefully riseup can pick up some of the slack here, but more decentralized services are needed.
rireads 5 days ago [-]
Are there interesting approaches to the problem? Tor comes to mind but that's not really accessible for readers
Kuyawa 5 days ago [-]
I hereby designate the US dollar the currency of an international terrorist organization
matt123456789 5 days ago [-]
What did they do??
dd8601fn 5 days ago [-]
Sounds like providing encrypted communications?
I think we can all see the potential problems with this, even if a specific group is awful.
“The specific claim: a far-left media group that describes itself as a “tool” for militants to share information “to be acted upon” used A/I’s services to publish communiqués and calls to action for U.S.-designated terrorist groups, including FAI/FRI, the IRGC, Hamas, Hizballah, ELN, NPA, PFLP, and PIJ. That same media group was cited in a federal complaint against a domestic terrorist sentenced to 19 years for attacking a federal building and a police car with IEDs.”
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
That's what the USA alleges. There is no evidence of any of this is true, and the USA is known to be a habitual liar and a terrorist state itself.
SkyeCA 5 days ago [-]
[flagged]
msm_ 5 days ago [-]
IRGC, Hamas, Hizballah and maybe others are far right organizations, so I don't think this is purely left/right.
And what about signal? I am pretty sure many violent/terrorist groups use it too.
I don't have an opinion about this group, because I didn't even know it existed. But, like often with things related to the free speech, I think this topic is more complex than you make it out to be.
graemep 5 days ago [-]
Their supporters in the west form alliances with the left.
I do not think you can meaningfully fit them in a left vs right classification. There are many groups in the world that take bits from left and right. There are ethno-nationalist communists, for examlle.
bakies 5 days ago [-]
Can you describe those alliances?
stale2002 5 days ago [-]
Yeah, the basic alliance is that anyone who wants to harm the USA nominally is ok with working together regardless of contradicting underlying ideology.
That why you'll see russia, iranian, marxist, and anarchist supporters/ideologies all using the same talking points.
bakies 5 days ago [-]
You didn't describe any relationships. I don't think leftists are intending harm on the USA
stale2002 4 days ago [-]
Far leftists are quite open about how they think the USA is the evil empire and that Russian, China, Iran, ect are the "multipolar" world that they support.
You must be thinking of progressives who merely want free healthcare. Sure, an average bernie fan who wants some more government programs doesn't want the USA to fail. Instead, I am talking about the campists, the far lefties, or the "tankies" that they are sometimes called.
bakies 4 days ago [-]
I don't think cooling off the empirical war machine is "harming the USA"
stale2002 3 days ago [-]
Supporting actual attacks on shipping lanes, or supporting the russian war, or attacks done by designated terrorist organizations is what I am referring to that some of the hard leftists support.
Yes, those things harm the USA, to explicitly be doing things like supporting the russian war on our allies.
bakies 2 days ago [-]
> Their supporters in the west form alliances with the left.
so you don't agree with this? you're saying the far-right and far-left terrorist orgs will support each other?
stale2002 2 days ago [-]
> you're saying the far-right and far-left terrorist orgs will support each other?
I am saying that far left people put out support for what are arguably far right, religious extremist groups yes.
The labels of left and right get blurred, also. The people are who are right and support russia's invasion of ukraine, for example, often use very similar rhetoric to what supposedly far left people also use.
Its very similar talking points. Very similar arguments. The only main difference is that the far right will say they think jews control the world, whereas the far left will make the same exact argument about "zionists" instead.
But often time the exact argument, word for work will be the same, with only a single word replaced. Even stuff like "ZOG", which used to be vocabulary only used by neonazis is now being used by all sorts of people.
2 days ago [-]
politician 5 days ago [-]
No one believes pro-Hamas activists in the US are voting for Trump.
kennywinker 5 days ago [-]
"pro-hamas activists" is approximately nobody.
fastball 5 days ago [-]
Very clearly untrue. Just search for "people waving hamas paraglider flags" on Google and you will find plenty of sources[1], like this.
Basically every movement/organization on earth has activists who support their activities, why would Hamas be any different? There are people everywhere who don't mind violence/killing and there are people everywhere who are anti-semitic. You think the intersection of those two cohorts is empty?
People who are anti-semitic and violent call themselves Proud Boys and Restore Britain.
It's true that a lot of radical leftists do "critical support" for Hamas, just like they used to with the IRA or ETA. But that's the same thing as the US government supporting Islamists against the Soviet Union and Reagan funding right wing militias in Nicaragua.
It's defending a resistance movement on some parts of their agenda even if you disagree with the rest, because you think they're fighting for a good cause against a common enemy.
Some Hamas leaders, individuals within the party, want to massacre Jewish villages to drive all Jews out of Palestine. Almost no one in the student protests was defending that. But when it's the other way around all the Western leaders rush to defend the Israeli government saying it's just two insane ministers in a big cabinet and the rest will talk them into submission. That's clearly not true when you see a lot of their ideas getting implemented.
If the conflict was just Israel against Hamas it would be one of the situations where everybody involved sucks and there's no clear answer to anything so you should stay neutral. But the Israeli government is treating it as a war against Palestine where they allow their soldiers to rape and kill civilians, you can hear generals publicly setting kill targets and "security" policies that were already close to Apartheid level are getting stricter every week. They see every Arab as a legitimate target.
That tips the balance to the point where you can argue that supporting any resistance, even violent nationalist Hamas, is the only right move.
fastball 5 days ago [-]
I appreciate your wanting to introduce nuance into the discussion, but nuance isn't really needed here. Two commenters replied to GP saying "Pro-hamas activists don't exist", which is untrue. That was my claim, and that was basically all GP said as well (with the additional assertion that such people are not voting for Trump). Why they are supporting Hamas is beside the point.
This conversation is basically the "it's not happening" > "it might be happening" > "it's happening and it's good actually" meme, though admittedly not by one person.
politician 5 days ago [-]
My point was simply that foreign "far right" organizations are not the same as the "right" organizations belonging to the left vs right paradigm in the United States. Hamas is not equivalent to the Republican Party.
Fastball here is the only one that wasn't triggered by this observation.
pepperoni_pizza 5 days ago [-]
> No one believes pro-Hamas activists in the US are voting for Trump.
Because "pro-Hamas activists" don't exist.
healsdata 5 days ago [-]
Substack knowingly and openly platforms neo-nazis, allowing them to profit from their rhetoric while taking a piece of the action. Even if the authors avoid specific calls to violence to skirt the ToS, it still gives them fertile ground for recruitment and funding of their activities.
By your definition, then, Substack should be labelled as a terrorist organization and shutdown, yes?
dpkirchner 5 days ago [-]
Worse, Substack promotes nazi content via push notifications to people that haven't subscribed to those nazi accounts.
foxglacier 5 days ago [-]
Writing about your Neo-Nazi beliefs, or even being a Neo-Nazi doesn't make you a terrorist, and I'm sure none of those you're talking about are. So no, by his definition, Substack shouldn't be labelled as a terrorist organization and shutdown.
5 days ago [-]
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dd8601fn 5 days ago [-]
I don’t disagree. I just don’t know if they actually were courting bad guys or bad guys used an encrypted services provider. Both? Neither?
And I don’t see anyone hand wringing about that list of bad guys. Calling some of them “left” is pretty ridiculous in the first place.
That part sounds a little like telling on oneself.
5 days ago [-]
SpicyLemonZest 5 days ago [-]
Their public position, before the sanctions at least (https://archive.is/5TWWu), was that their services were manually vetted and provided "exclusively to individuals or groups we feel we have an affinity with".
soulofmischief 5 days ago [-]
By that logic, you should stop paying taxes if you don't want to support terrorism.
bakies 5 days ago [-]
I would be in favor of my state government withholding federal taxes, yeah
soulofmischief 5 days ago [-]
It might come to that soon for a couple states, but it's going to be a rough time.
aetch 5 days ago [-]
The traitors in power in the U.S. use signal and no one cheers for signal to be shut down
micromacrofoot 5 days ago [-]
so let's shut down the US government?
NostraDavid 5 days ago [-]
> Hizballah
Is that Hezbollah's little brother?
strictnein 5 days ago [-]
Hizballah and Hezbollah are different spellings of the same thing, with Hizballah probably being more accurate and the one regularly used by the US government.
13415 5 days ago [-]
Oh...the US government. That clarifies a lot...
strictnein 4 days ago [-]
It clarifies what, exactly? That there are a myriad of spellings for a group whose name is originally in Arabic and couldn't care at all about how we spell it? I was just correcting the person who thought it was inaccurate to use the spelling "Hizballah".
A worldview of "America dumb" is a boring way to go through life, especially with topics about which you clearly have a very limited understanding.
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
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xyst 5 days ago [-]
The "terrorist" definition is just anybody that doesn’t agree with this administration at this point.
They will fabricate anything to justify their thinly veiled intentions.
driverdan 5 days ago [-]
This isn't new, it changed after 9/11. The US government expanded the definition of terrorism to pretty much mean anything they want.
9763268964 5 days ago [-]
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tolerance 5 days ago [-]
If I was someone who funded/relied on A/I's services I would have been trying to figure out what would it had taken for the US State Department to produce evidence for their allegations and would have lobbied for some sort of determination of whether the scope of A/I's involvement with said parties and their actions violated their own policies/terms of service.
Otherwise there is a way to look at this as A/I getting away scot-free for failing to administer their policies, failing to hold bad actors accountable and ultimately letting down individuals and organizations who lawfully used their services.
I'm also not surprised that A/I themselves never anticipated something like this happening and did not have some sort of protocol in place to deal with it. They had 25 years to do so.
latentframe 5 days ago [-]
Political risk becoming infrastructure risk ; aservice can be viable technically and still disappear when the institutional environment changes
nikunj1809 5 days ago [-]
What does it means?
reilly3000 5 days ago [-]
The US government designated a long-running web/email hosting services collective that served political dissidents as a terrorist organization.
It's interesting how a terrorist organization is now labeling others terrorists. This is how far we've come.
einpoklum 5 days ago [-]
This is unfortunately nothing new. The hegemonic power defines resistance to it as criminal, terrorist, immoral, heathen, satanic, reactionary etc.
5 days ago [-]
eek2121 5 days ago [-]
What is this nonsense even about? Site I’ve never heard of making bombastic claims without any citations. Can someone please provide context and sources? Because this looks like a hoax or something?
Edit: just so we are clear, I’ve no idea what A/I is, the linked page gave no details, nor do the current top comments. The current top comment is rambling about free shell accounts and stuff. The ones I read after that were mourning the loss of this mysterious site/service/something. Does anyone want to clueinthe rest of us?
teekert 5 days ago [-]
I think everybody should read the two Economic Hitmen books by John Perkins.
m4rtink 5 days ago [-]
So I guess they just relaunch under a different name ?
fph 5 days ago [-]
And break everyone's e-mail address in the process? It is not a trivial step to migrate to a new domain an e-mail account that had been active for decades.
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
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exiguus 5 days ago [-]
The U.S. government’s track record is concerning. After their actions against AntifaOst, numerous NGOs, such as 'Die Rote Hilfe,' were stripped of their banking access in Europe.
SV_BubbleTime 5 days ago [-]
I like how certain HN threads really highlight that the venn of users here and Reddit /r/politics share almost entirely the same area.
jtrn 5 days ago [-]
I also oppose fascism, militarism, racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, like what A/I do... And none of that is illegal... At least not in any civilised society. So what did they do to trigger so many? I remember the Norwegian stuff (since I’m Norwegian), and I remember thinking it sounded like bullshit to copy their entire server drive when they wanted access to the blog of two people.
From what I could gather, it seems various governments accused them of deliberately providing infrastructure to groups whose violent activities they supported, such as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), with communications associated with railway sabotage, attacks on energy infrastructure and the “Jane’s Revenge” arson campaign (whatever the hell that is).
Here’s a snippet I found on the net: "Italian police installed a server backdoor in 2004 during an investigation into the anarchist collective Crocenera. It was discovered in 2005. According to contemporary EDRi reporting, the access potentially exposed communications belonging to thousands of unrelated users; EDRi explicitly noted that actual collection of unrelated data had not been proven. EDRi’s contemporary report"
Huge disclaimer on this, since it’s just my musings: This might be one of the situations where both sides are in the wrong. It’s possible that A/I willfully turned a blind eye to actual illegal activity by its users, and refused to cooperate with legal investigations. At the same time, various governments, including mine, overreacted and behaved unethically and maybe even illegally because A/I “didn’t want to play ball.”
Just speculation. But the fact that I can’t easily find concrete examples of what A/I supposedly did wrong makes me inclined to feel sympathy for them. I hate unspecific allegations like “facilitation of problematic and terroristic-adjacent activities.” That’s some 1984-ish bullshit.
I have no clue what I’m talking about here, though. Strange situation and too little information...
reilly3000 5 days ago [-]
https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20... This designation offers some specific examples of violence being coordinated using their systems. Some are indeed extreme, if true. That doesn’t invalidate their mission or overall contribution to the world at large; it just was sufficient ammo for extinguishing another threat to power.
jtrn 5 days ago [-]
This does not show what they (A/I) did. The only concrete examples are of bad behavior by some users. Then there’s a bunch of generic claims against A/I, with NO specifics.
So, yeah, it might be true. But I find no concrete examples of what bad stuff A/I themselves did, just their users. Personally, I would like for there to be at least SOME concrete examples. Like, “This convicted terrorist had a blog on their infrastructure, and A/I refused to hand over data they had, even when presented with a valid court order.” Or something like that. Is it too much to ask that the government provide some concrete evidence, not just abstract vage accusations, when doing something as drastic as designating someone a terrorist organization? It would seem so...
This is a knock on the state.gov item, not your comment. Your comment was good.
SpicyLemonZest 5 days ago [-]
The problem is that, as A/I themselves explained (https://www.inventati.org/who/collective), they worked hard to ensure that they do not possess any evidence of or data about who is using their infrastructure.
"We provide our services strictly for non-commercial use, in order to provide support exclusively to individuals or groups we feel we have an affinity with. In order to verify the existence of these pre-conditions, each and every service request is processed manually by one of our volunteers and is in a dialogical form. All requests are anonymized and will be destroyed."
Anonymized how? Before the first contact? After the conversation?
If anyone here wants to set up a similar service: This is patently stupid for an ISP to attempt.
aetch 5 days ago [-]
Sounds like they vet the users request before giving them access. After that the usage is anonymous. It’s not that deep
All that demonstrates is that they operated a public email/messaging server. One could have coordinated the exact same things using ProtonMail or Signal.
upofadown 5 days ago [-]
I note that that extensive list only contains a single death, due to a power failure. Extreme civil disobedience, but not really terrorism.
philstephenson 5 days ago [-]
> “That doesn’t invalidate their mission or overall contribution to the world at large;”
Give me a break. Ends to not justify all means. This is a completely appropriate response by the state department.
queenkjuul 5 days ago [-]
Why aren't they banning Signal?
nullsanity 5 days ago [-]
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mitxela 5 days ago [-]
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akhasg 5 days ago [-]
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jtrn 5 days ago [-]
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123hz 5 days ago [-]
You go from "I have no clue what I’m talking about here, though. Strange situation and too little information..." to "That’s at best a simplistic framing."?
And allude to specific incidents without links? WTF?
9763268964 5 days ago [-]
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JuniperMesos 5 days ago [-]
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ranyume 5 days ago [-]
> And none of that is illegal... At least not in any civilised society
I mean, the capitalist system is a barbaric system with defenders that do make opposition illegal...
jtrn 5 days ago [-]
Yeah, but there are degrees. I’d rather have a conversation about trans rights here in Oslo than in Afghanistan.
ranyume 5 days ago [-]
How do you think LGBTQI+ rights came exist? It was not a pretty, blood-free, submissive process. And we're still far from LGBTQI+ rights being normalized.
How about workers rights? Slavery? Any progress that you'd think of as civilizing was not achieved without blood.
dvdkon 5 days ago [-]
I don't remember any LGBTQI+ wars here in the Czech Republic, so "blood free" actually seems like a good characterisation. Sometimes the system just works.
See also the Velvet Revolution for a pretty large shift away from totalitarianism without any deaths.
ranyume 5 days ago [-]
I don't remember any LGBTQI+ wars inside my house either, but they're respected here. That's strange isn't it?
dvdkon 5 days ago [-]
It is strange. I certainly wouldn't think your house, having been isolated from western society over decades by a communist regime and heavily-patrolled borders, would respond to social activism in foreign countries. But maybe there's just some secret house mycelium for sharing progressive ideas that I don't know about.
ranyume 5 days ago [-]
It's very clear you do not have a grasp of Marxism or Communism. You'd know that the worker class is only one.
dvdkon 5 days ago [-]
Theoretical aphorisms can't override the facts of recorded history. If the harsh border control and cultural isolation of the East Bloc ran counter to Marxist principles, then you can complain to the dead leaders of the USSR, but that's about it.
ranyume 5 days ago [-]
Check the history of the different communist movements. Maybe an entrypoint would be this: today there is the Fourth International. The USSR was born out of the Third International with Lenin, and the Fourth International opposed/opposes the USSR's practices and because of that the USSR hunted them down using their agents whom eventually killed Trotski.
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
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goosejuice 5 days ago [-]
Indeed. Must also acknowledge that such tactics generate the seeds of opposition. i.e. hate begets hate and violence begets violence.
jtrn 5 days ago [-]
People who want bloodshed tend to say this… It’s melodramatic.
You could say that about anything classified as human progress. How did we improve things so that people could have electricity and safety? At the cost of deaths and suffering by everyone who built the Hoover Dam and similar projects. The same goes for "stop killing patients by going dirty from corpses to the delivery room," even when we knew it was unsafe. There is always death and blood related to any topic. How do you think you got the device you are communicating with? Through the death and suffering of someone in Congo, mining cobalt, and someone working themselves to death in a factory.
I have lived through the normalization of gay rights in Norway, and saying that it was a process marked by blood and suffering is moronic. It was painful, unnecessary, overdue, and many other things. But saying that it was a bloody conflict is just not true, at least not any more than many other progressive movements. So progress doesn't have to be violent.
You could say that this is not the lived experience of many people, and that is true. But that doesn’t automatically mean it has to be so for everybody, and it does not have to be inevitable for any cause. It’s not statistically more violent than many other things.
I’m getting tired of the violent and angry rhetoric people spew without pushback. Stop idealizing and glorifying violence and conflict to solve any problem. It seems more and more to me that this is violent ideation first, with the cause being secondary.
ranyume 5 days ago [-]
I have not glorified violence nor called to do violence to anyone. You seems to have misunderstood: I wish for violence to stop. It was always the oppressed's blood that was spilled by the establishment through police force every time they protested in the streets, and every time they were uncomfortable. Take the workers day as an example. It's egregious to me to call a protest violence.
The only thing the oppressed can do is to be uncomfortable, organize, and not let the system claim their souls and bodies. The only thing the system does is perpetuate itself, inflicting violence to the oppressed, in an endless spiral towards the bottom.
broodbucket 5 days ago [-]
You're right, of course, but you're on a website of a VC firm.
shevy-java 5 days ago [-]
> Every day we stayed online after August 26, 2026, has been a victory, but now we are forced to stop.
Sad to see big bro tech and AI skynet is winning the war.
mannanj 5 days ago [-]
So, in 2021-2022 I publically called the See I Ayyy terrorists and advocated against accounts that algorithmically looked to astroturf or divide people on Instagram.
They showed up as actors in my commune where I lived (it was open-to-join, that was the mistake I made among being naive publically thinking truth prevails). I found after that the many past abuses of our government have not stopped and simply adopted to the modern age. Organizations whose interest it is to protect their shadow interests care not about what’s actually good for Americans, their interests are for maintaining status quo.
Status quo supports what - questioning AI and attempting to reverse the power structures or following along obediantly without question? I always wondered if my commentary led me to be put into a database of some kind. After Formerly holding a clearance, and letting it lapse, I’m recently reapplying and let’s see if “calling a government organization a terrorist org” discounts me from that. After reading the article I wouldn’t be surprised if like school yard bullies a leader in the orgs with power respond to viral accusers by marking them in a database as terrorists. Edit; please don’t accuse me of having mental health issues, I’m fine and I am working with my senators office and a “investigatory” agency to look into the abuses. I don’t yet feel hopeful the 3 petter org will reveal anything tho about my case due to security reasons.
glimshe 4 days ago [-]
When radical right wing groups get whacked, everybody celebrates (as we should). But when radical left wing groups suffer the same fate, we should be crying?
NetOpWibby 5 days ago [-]
A DNS alt-root and something like x402 would fix this
13415 5 days ago [-]
I still think a decentralized DNS alternative could scale, if done the right way. I also think that the majority of sites would be more secure if they used a system like ssh to deal with certificates, and government-controlled trust chains should be left for banking and other "official" stuff.
NetOpWibby 5 days ago [-]
I'm working on something like this with Dap[1] (full disclosure, I used to be heavy into the Handshake[2] ecosystem). Where previous alt-roots failed is having nothing to build on it. Lots of marketing about how "things will be different" this time while providing nothing in the way of getting developers building experiences atop this new naming system.
Claiming your root is more secure isn't enough, what can people DO with it and WHY should they care? I've ranted enough about this to deaf ears over a half decade to no avail. Even if Dap doesn't end up being the first credible alt-root, I do hope something appears and is not immediately linked to (objectively) illegal/evil activity.
[1]: https://dap.sh
[2]: https://handshake.org
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
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MelonArmiger 5 days ago [-]
"Italian neckbeard collective declared terrorist organization by Donald Trump" - what a world we live in.
flohofwoe 5 days ago [-]
Hmm, I would have expected more outrage from the US "free speech absolutists" over this US government decision ;)
eikenberry 5 days ago [-]
This is such a small blip in all the crap this administration is perpetrating that most are probably not aware of it or are drowned out in the rage over inflation, tariffs, wars, immigrants, etc.
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
They shut down basically the entire global left wing blogging space since this group was hosting it.
xoa 5 days ago [-]
I'm a free speech absolutist (albeit one of apparently few people who actually knows what "free speech" is [0]) and I'm absolutely outraged and infuriated by this action and a long history of anti-speech actions by the USG, though this particular Administration is unprecedented in terms of censorship, general evil and authoritarianism in modern history. I also think it's unfortunate how many people in favor of all sorts of censorship now attack stawmen and treat something so vitally important as a joke like you have. The unseriousness you treat something incredibly serious with has become an endemic problem in our society, and directly inspires nihilism/fatalism/tribalism etc, feelings which in turn directly support authoritarianism.
----
0: For example, if HN bans you, shadowbans you, makes your posts dead by default, flags, or downvotes, that's all free speech.
pet_the_bird 5 days ago [-]
I am not sure I see a fundamental distinction between HN censoring your speech on their platform or the government preventing you from speaking in public. Both are censoring you right? Is the difference the fact that HN is free to regulate its own platform as it wants to?
For a large part I see people using digital platforms as a primary method of expressing their thoughts and opinions. Governments in both the US and the EU have imposed restrictions on what platforms may host. I think we have not reconciled yet how to reinterpret free speech online.
Im no expert on free speech, of free speech absolutism, so please let inform me :)
JoshTriplett 5 days ago [-]
HN can't put you in jail.
Freedom of association and freedom of speech go hand in hand. You can say whatever you like. You should not be arrested for it. People may choose not to associate with you, or not to do business with you, or not to amplify your speech by hosting it for you.
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
The USA can't put A/I in jail, since they're Italian and haven't been found guilty of any crimes in Italy .
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
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cortesoft 5 days ago [-]
If it was the government telling a platform to block certain speech, that would be a restriction in free speech.
The difference is that the ownership of HN has their OWN freedom to choose who they let post on here, and what they let be posted.
This is known as the 'Freedom of Association': The right to come together with other people to collectively express, promote, or pursue their common interest. This right also includes the right to accept or decline membership in the group for whatever reason they want. HN can choose to only allow whatever they choose on their site.
In the United States, this right is actually established (according to court rulings) by the same First Amendment that establishes the right to free speech.
The right to free speech does not require a private individual or company give you a platform to make your speech.
kurthr 5 days ago [-]
If I have a public platform and refuse to sponsor/publish/platform your speech, that is my free speech right! You don't have the right to force me to speak your words. Only the government is prohibited (by 1st amendment) from censoring/limiting speech (that does not cause or promote violence or injury to others). There are also some restrictions and protections also offered to the press (eg libel and defamation) and common carriers, along with the abomination of the DMCA.
Personally, I don't consider paid speech to be free speech, and I don't consider corporations to by humans, but the supreme court does.
Remember, facts aren't real, there is no truth, and crime is legal (in the current "Justice" Dept).
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
Is ICANN the government?
mcv 5 days ago [-]
I don't think absolute free speech exists; there are always some limits to speech. Ideally not too many, but there are kinds of speech that I don't think you have any choice but to restrict if you want to have any kind of decent, safe and free society: threats, libel/slander, blackmail, and hate speech. Those are the kind of things that will silence, mislead or manipulate others, and are therefore by themselves a threat to free speech.
But things like criticising governments, questioning political or economic paradigms, or just making fun of powerful people, should always be legal and protected.
cortesoft 5 days ago [-]
I think this depends on how you define 'hate speech'. Is talking about how billionaires are the scum of the earth hate speech?
I get the idea behind banning hate speech, but it gets really tricky when you try to think how to define and enforce it. Everyone agrees you need to be able to criticize groups that you don't like, so what makes it cross the line to hate speech (besides calls to violence, which would fall under the 'threats' category anyway)?
The worry is always that if you carve out an exception to free speech to protect vulnerable groups from harassment, how do you stop a future government from expanding those groups to include their political allies?
mcv 5 days ago [-]
I think calls to violence usually only count as threat when they're targeted at a specific person. To me, hate speech is about creating an unsafe, threatening or oppressive situation for a vulnerable demographic group. Like saying a specific ethic group is a threat to society, or general attacks against women in general. Thing that, when repeated enough, will normalise the idea of violence or oppression against that group.
But what about similar speech against powerful groups, like billionaires? Well, they're not vulnerable or marginalised, they already have a disproportionally large voice, so they're not easily silenced. And of course being a billionaire is a choice; they can abdicate from their wealth in a way people can't do from their gender or ethnic group. So it's not the same. That said, calls for violence against them might still count as hate speech or be considered specific enough to count as threats.
There is obviously some fuzziness, but there also is with other limits to free speech, and there are courts to ultimately adjudicate that.
cortesoft 4 days ago [-]
I agree with you that it isn't the same, and vulnerability matters.
My worry is that I can easily see an administration like the current US one claiming that MAGA Americans are the most vulnerable in the country, and they need to be protected.
mcv 4 days ago [-]
Perhaps, but they don't seem to believe in free speech anyway. They're actively going after media that criticise the government, and are restricting government-funded scientists from using specific words that suggest research that doesn't fit their narrative.
xoa 5 days ago [-]
>I am not sure I see a fundamental distinction between HN censoring your speech on their platform or the government preventing you from speaking in public. Both are censoring you right?
Wrong. HN is not "censoring" you at all, which requires engaging in violence (or threat of violence) against you to inhibit you from speaking in public. HN is literally engaging in Free Speech itself. Take arguably the most fundamental free speech activity in a democracy: advocating to your peers for the candidate you wish to vote for and have elected to represent you. You've researched and listened to Alice, Bob and Carol. You decide the best is Alice, and to show your support you do the quintessential thing and put out a Vote For Alice lawn sign on your lawn. That's obviously free speech right? Now what if instead some volunteer from Alice's election team comes by and asks you if they can put up a sign on your property, and you say yes. That too clearly involves your free speech rights, even if you didn't pay for the sign. Now say Bob & Carol's campaigns turn up, and they ask to put up signs on your lawn too. You don't support them and say no. Have you censored them? Of course not, that's ridiculous. Free speech isn't "everything is equal nothing matters", everyone is trying collectively to iterate towards truth and value by making their cases and listening, without general use of force. To say that "I think this idea/person/item is the best choice" by definition is exclusionary, it's also saying "I think all the other ideas/persons/items are NOT the best choice". It can also simply be "I wish to engage with these subjects, not those". You can make a forum dedicated to airplanes & cats, and ban anyone who starts threads on boats & lizards. You may have nothing whatsoever against boats or lizards, but that's not what you personally want to focus on on your own forum you're paying for.
Hacker News is the private property of its owners. They have their own free speech rights. Exercising those rights is not censorship.
Others in turn are free to use their property and/or their voice on public property to make their cases, and they can try to convince you and vice versa. And there can be social consequences, if someone really dislikes your speech maybe they don't invite you to dinner anymore and urge others to do the same, who might agree (or go the other way, or just ignore it). Humans can get passionate sometimes. But by keeping violence out of the whole thing outside of narrow exceptions that undermine the approach itself, room is preserved for minds to be changed and rifts mended years or even decades later, and for ideas to come back around if someone cares enough.
Government enforcing things though always involves violence, either directly or one or more orders removed. But a general monopoly on the legitimate use of force is a defining feature of government. If government doesn't like Alice, and tells you take down the sign, or else, that's fundamental infringement. They're closing down the whole cycle (if a private person did that it'd also be a bunch of other crimes AND infringement, because private persons are not allowed to use violence against others at all by default outside of narrow exceptions). And if government tells you "oh you can leave up the sign about Alice, but it's not fair you censor Bob & Carol, you must put up signs for them too. Or else." that'd be equally infringing censorship. If everyone has a sign, it's the same message as nobody having one. It's still suppressing "I think Alice is the best choice".
>For a large part I see people using digital platforms as a primary method of expressing their thoughts and opinions.
It is easier and cheaper than any point in human history to put up your own website, including your own forum to try to form a community around. You have no right to an audience though.
>Governments in both the US and the EU have imposed restrictions on what platforms may host.
What? What restriction has government in the US imposed beyond the long standing and unchanged exceptions that prove the rule (which essentially boil down to threats of violence, comms integral to crime, defamation AFTER a court case to prove it, serious violations of personal self with zero public value like CSAM, and purely commercial speech engaging in fraud)?
>I think we have not reconciled yet how to reinterpret free speech online.
There is nothing to reinterpret. We've gotten it fine since the passage of Section 230. The problem are constant efforts to suppress what we've already got, in some cases coupled with completely orthogonal issues like failure to enforce ancient anti-trust legislation.
andai 5 days ago [-]
> The unseriousness you treat something incredibly serious with has become an endemic problem in our society
Testosterone down 50% since 1970.
Childishness up slightly more than that.
mjfs 5 days ago [-]
I'm sure those two stats are definitely related. What a childish thing to say.
>The puer covets independence and freedom, opposes boundaries and limits, and tends to find any restriction intolerable.
Isn't that the opposite of this?
mjfs 5 days ago [-]
The word "testosterone" is not mentioned on this page at all. Nor any other hormones.
andai 5 days ago [-]
Well I was just noting a suspicious correlation. (Also childishness is up a lot more than 50%, in case my tone was unclear :)
But you've given me quite an interesting endocrinology research project here. Last I heard, the root cause of the drop remains unknown. (And it's still dropping.)
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
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RIMR 5 days ago [-]
Did you really though? I never understood the "free speech absolutists" to care about speech they disagreed with. They made it clear that they only accept "patriotic" speech a long time ago.
Timon3 5 days ago [-]
That much was obvious for a long time to anyone paying attention. But I honestly believe that their success at newspeak-ing so many concepts was one of the final nails in America's coffin.
I hope I'll live until their fascist phase ends & historians can properly investigate all the immoral and illegal ways they've been influencing the population. My prediction is that they've scaled Cambridge Analytica to a level that'll make you sick.
vmg12 5 days ago [-]
I hate to see this strawman every single time there is an attack on free speech. You are actually mocking the fight for free speech. You aren't attacking the hypocrites that only use it when convenient.
The only purpose this rhetoric serves is to justify using the power of government to silence opponents the next time your side happens to be in power.
nomel 5 days ago [-]
I think the ability for good concepts to be "tainted" by the opposition is the most dangerous manifestation of tribalism/group think, in modern society.
MelonArmiger 5 days ago [-]
Freeze peach was never a good concept.
The libertarian Internet was a mistake and the world will be a better place when it's gone.
nomel 3 days ago [-]
I don't think I'm on the internet enough to understand what you're trying to say here.
MelonArmiger 2 days ago [-]
You haven't noticed real life?
politician 5 days ago [-]
Did you catch the part where A/I Collective is operated by foreign parties outside the US?
flohofwoe 5 days ago [-]
Funny, the same US "free speech absolutists" get upset about "censorship" outside the US (mostly in EU countries) all the time, so it would be completely on point.
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
No E.U. censorship happened here and they're still legally allowed to operate in Italy. In the past they've been attacked by Italy several times and always won. This is a pure US threat against a pure European entity. It's like if France thought it could shut down Samsung - and then Samsung quit operating.
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
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Petersipoi 5 days ago [-]
I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at. You seem to be saying the "free speech absolutists" getting upset about censorship in the EU is a bad thing. While, at the same time, saying them not getting upset about this is a bad thing.
In criticizing their inconsistencies, you are highlighting and simultaneously missing your own inconsistencies.
rexpop 5 days ago [-]
This is not how accusations of hypocrisy work. I don't have to agree with any particular stance of yours in order to accuse you of hypocrisy.
Arainach 5 days ago [-]
If you believe in civil liberties as rights and ideals, your belief shouldn't stop at borders.
xienze 5 days ago [-]
Good point, we should also allow foreign organizations to contribute to US election campaigns and make Facebook ads because they might also believe in civil liberties as rights and ideals, uh... right?
Arainach 5 days ago [-]
Money isn't speech.
x-complexity 5 days ago [-]
As you said yourself:
> > If you believe in civil liberties as rights and ideals, your belief shouldn't stop at borders.
If you believe in civil liberties as rights and ideals, your belief shouldn't stop at money.
Either the right extends everywhere, including money, or it doesn't.
Arainach 5 days ago [-]
That doesn't follow.
It's OK to say you wish a politician was dead. It's not OK to pay someone to kill them. It's OK to say that you support some criminal activity (let's say Luigi), but it's not OK to offer direct financial support for their crimes.
x-complexity 5 days ago [-]
> It's OK to say you wish a politician was dead. It's not OK to pay someone to kill them.
Both actions are equivalent, as such words are (social and/or political) capital bounties offered to the masses in return for fulfilling the death of said politician.
Capital always exists, even in the form of words. To deny a variant of capital whilst allowing another variant is inconsistent/doublespeak.
Just because it's not printed onto a piece of denominated paper, doesn't mean that such capital doesn't exist.
Arainach 5 days ago [-]
> Both actions are equivalent, as such words are (social and/or political) capital bounties offered to the masses in return for fulfilling the death of said politician.
Neither the law nor common interpretation of words agrees with this. There is a significant and crucial difference between words and actions.
x-complexity 4 days ago [-]
> There is a significant and crucial difference between words and actions.
The difference is artificial, and delusionally blinds itself to the base reality that social/political capital exists.
Again, just because there isn't a cash figure attached to that bounty, doesn't mean that a reward hasn't been attached to it in the form of social/political prestige.
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
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politician 5 days ago [-]
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lokar 5 days ago [-]
The Declaration of Independence, constitution and bill of rights aim to recognize and protect rights everyone is born with.
vrganj 5 days ago [-]
Do you think your country is the only one that thought of free speech? Your particular implementation is irrelevant, I'm not sure what you're trying to achieve by giving us a lecture on how some foreign country justifies their self-perception.
That being said, it is somewhat humorous how you're confirming the stereotypes that apparently even that needs guns and violence over there somehow?
politician 5 days ago [-]
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Arainach 5 days ago [-]
> Hmm, I would have expected more outrage from the US "free speech absolutists" over this US government decision
The crowd that claims to be in favor of free speech should be in favor of free speech for everyone, not just US citizens. This thread isn't about the government - it's about how HN's very vocal "free speech" crowd are actually libertarians who want to say awful things and not get called out rather than people who stand up for the concept of free speech in general.
politician 5 days ago [-]
Why is my position invalid? I'm in favor of the exact type of free speech provided by the Bill of Rights for citizens of the USA, of which I am one, and that I do not care about the fantastical universal "for everyone" form of free speech that is being pushed on HN?
Let your own countries defend their own "free speech" rights. The UN cannot defend it for you, and you cannot defend it for yourself.
vrganj 5 days ago [-]
So basically your position is imperialism mixed with some weird provincial fetishization of some document, not being pro free speech?
And you wonder why people consider that both ugly and simultaneously ridiculous?
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
So you only care about things that benefit you?
kennywinker 5 days ago [-]
So free speech absolutists don't care about free speech, just free speech for americans on american soil? Not very absolutist then...
estearum 5 days ago [-]
"Free speech absolutists" demonstrably don't even care about free speech for Americans on American soil. "Free speech absolutism" is, in 99.9999% of cases, a euphemism for 1) holding abhorrent views and 2) being a gigantic fucking crybaby when someone criticizes you for them.
overfeed 5 days ago [-]
The US free speech advocates had plenty to day about Julian Assange, an Australian stuck in the Ecuadorean embassy all the way across the Atlantic.
NicoJuicy 5 days ago [-]
Another reason why EU should be independant of US. Cloudflare never had this kinda of bs...
2 different rules it seems.
hermannj314 5 days ago [-]
I am first hearing about this group today, but here is some context:
Apparently they provide the digital infrastructure for violent Antifa cells and because of a 9/11 related executive order, the A/I is able to be branded a sponsor of terrorism.
I guess this makes it a crime to give them money or provide aid to them (if you are a US citizen).
EDIT: who is downvoting and why? The 2nd sentence in the PR says "Autistici/Inventati (A/I Collective) is an Italy-based extremist group that builds and operates the digital infrastructure for violent Antifa cells and other far-left militants across the world" Are you mad that I quote the article or mad that you disagree with Trump? In either case, why are you downvoting me exactly? I am genuinely curious.
behole 5 days ago [-]
More boogie man bullshit from our fascist admin.
guywithahat 4 days ago [-]
> from our fascist admin
In what way is Trump socialist? Even if you think he's trying to reduce the US to one race (presumably one of the European nationalities? Which is insane to think on its own), he's actively opposed to socialism and generally opposed to government control of industries. People using the term fascism have no idea what it actually means.
behole 3 days ago [-]
Says you. This is so much word-salad I got diarrhea. To be a fascist you don't need to exist in opposition to a socialism. The two ideologies exist independently of each other. This take is just ignorant. Show me anywhere, where any scholar, on either side of, inside or outside of our current iteration of the Overton window, bundles socialism and fascism as codependent. Not a single mention of "socialism" in the 14 points of fascism.
Why don't you enlighten us then if you have some bEtTeR definition of fascism?
guywithahat 3 days ago [-]
Fascists are, by definition, socialist. You cannot be a free market fascist, because then the party wouldn't have power and the people wouldn't have a shared direction to move. Calling any modern figure on the right a fascist is a deep misunderstanding of the word and its history.
I'm not sure what the 14 points of fascism are but it appears to be a modern work that came out in the 90's. I would encourage you to read books from the time period; the Nazis were very clear the purpose of the national socialist party was to create a socialist economy, and they believed a "shared blood" (as they called it, meaning genetically similar population) was needed for a successful socialist economy (otherwise people would disagree on culture and politics too much to have shared ownership over industry and society). This was the core motivation behind their party and why they made the decisions they did. I'm unaware of serious historians who don't, at least partially, think this way.
Also I'm sorry but this whole thread is a bit off-topic and I'm not going to keep responding. I would encourage you to continue to research the topic though
"It is characterized by a hatred for liberalism, socialism, democracy, internationalism and the parliamentary system;" / "It opposes communism, socialism, pluralism, individual rights and equality, and democratic government" / "Fascist nationalism is reactionary in that it entails implacable hostility to socialism and feminism" / "Fascism, at any rate the German version, is a form of capitalism that borrows from Socialism just such features as will make it efficient for war purposes... It is a planned system geared to a definite purpose, world-conquest, and not allowing any private interest, either of capitalist or worker, to stand in its way."
Even Mussolini named fascism as something standing against socialism.
So, what definition are you thinking of?
> I'm unaware of serious historians who don't, at least partially, think this way.
So simply cite the serious historians who think that?
3 days ago [-]
phyzome 5 days ago [-]
I think people are downvoting you for several reasons:
- Taking administration propaganda pieces at face value (such as the batshit insane page you linked to)
- Referring to "violent antifa cells". That's the spin Trump has been trying to put on the groups of people who have been resisting fascism. (Do you know what "antifa" stands for?)
hermannj314 5 days ago [-]
Thanks for explaining, I will work on my approach, I didn't think I said anything that presented I agree with or believed the PR, only that it was context for why the A/I situation.
Of course. But that's not what we have in the present moment, excepting a few instances here and there.
LeoPanthera 5 days ago [-]
[flagged]
r3trohack3r 5 days ago [-]
From the state department link above:
> Oregon-based Rose City Antifa has relied on A/I Collective tools and services to organize and incite violent and criminal acts domestically, including an attack on Customs and Border Patrol helicopters that led to a federal indictment. Rose City Antifa also used A/I Collective tools and services to disseminate doxing lists and release illegally obtained personal information of Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement, along with calls for targeted attacks on ICE agents in the streets and “in their homes.”
Planktonne 5 days ago [-]
That's a bunch of unproven allegations from an administration with a history of lies; have you got anything more concrete?
GaryBluto 5 days ago [-]
So violent cells that refer to themselves as "anti-fascist" don't exist?
5 days ago [-]
apricot 5 days ago [-]
> In a world where allegations are disconnected from reality, we can only expect repression to be increasingly disproportionate.
At the very beginning of his first mandate, when he lied about something as trivial as the size of the crowd during his inauguration, and kept to his lies despite absolute evidence to the contrary, never showing any hesitation, second thoughts, or remorse, Trump showed everyone the way ahead.
Do not look at facts. Decide what you want to be true, and act like it is true. Do this every day of every year. In the beginning, people will object; do not get into a debate with them, rather continue making up lies, bigger ones.
I remember seeing videos of a tsunami for the first time. I imagined a huge wave that destroyed everything. It was nothing like that. It started slowly. The water level rose, a few waves went over a wall and onto streets, But the water kept coming, and coming, destroying everything that stood in its path, and in a matter of minutes it was the ocean where before there was a city.
queenkjuul 5 days ago [-]
I fucking hate the US so much
vallerie 5 days ago [-]
Yet another example of the troubling amount of power the United States holds over the internet and global finance.
I really worry about the future of free and open expression over the next few years.
sfx77 5 days ago [-]
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abosalehworld 5 days ago [-]
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sph 5 days ago [-]
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darig 5 days ago [-]
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behole 5 days ago [-]
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iammyselfhere 5 days ago [-]
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13415 5 days ago [-]
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swiftcoder 5 days ago [-]
I mean, this sort of pales in comparison to sanctioning the International Criminal Court, no? They got away with that...
13415 5 days ago [-]
Good point, it's not a particularly new behavior. It's just depressing what kind of utterly horrible shitshow the US has become. I was pretty open to and almost planning to move to the US 25 years ago and now I'm so happy I didn't.
GaryBluto 5 days ago [-]
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layer8 5 days ago [-]
I’d like to have more information about what “offered” means here. I’m sure that regular email and hosting providers have been used by terrorists without being designated a terrorist organization themselves.
I'm sure they're aware who they are hosting, at least blog wise. We're not talking about a massive company with no ideological affiliation, they vet who they provide access to before they do so, so in many ways it is more of a partnership than simply providing services. Not that necessarily I think it was worth labelling the organization themselves terrorists, but it still isn't something that should be whitewashed.
swiftcoder 5 days ago [-]
> Eleven days?
How long do you think you could resist a tier-1 nation state coming after you on terrorism charges?
aetch 5 days ago [-]
I’d like to see you resist a government ordered shutdown of your accounts for more than a few hours
xgulfie 5 days ago [-]
I can't imagine continuing to run something designated by the US as a terrorist organization for for even ONE day
mindslight 5 days ago [-]
Actual terrorists have a right to speak too, you know. Intrinsic to the whole idea of rights is that even people we don't like (or are even mortally opposed to!) still have them. The problem with "firebombs on anti-abortion pregnancy crisis centers" is obviously the firebombs.
swiftcoder 4 days ago [-]
> The problem with "firebombs on anti-abortion pregnancy crisis centers" is obviously the firebombs
I don't know, if we didn't have "anti-abortion pregnancy crisis centers", the firebombs would be kind of irrelevant
GaryBluto 2 days ago [-]
I'm sure Islamic terrorists feel the same about gay people and throwing them off buildings. If they didn't exist, nobody would "need" to be thrown to their deaths, right?
phoronixrly 5 days ago [-]
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monkaiju 5 days ago [-]
Bold of you to assume we have any say...
beej71 5 days ago [-]
Yet we did, indirectly.
monkaiju 5 days ago [-]
Indirectly is doing a lot of work there. The US is an extremely disenfranchised place, and the choices are both pro-capital and will never actually represent the people in any meaningful sense. This liberal individualism framing only serves to bolster nationalism and divide groups when what we really need to be doing is recognizing our shared goals, with "we" being the international "we", and figure out who our enemies really are.
elmer2 5 days ago [-]
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benregenspan 5 days ago [-]
Parler was "ripped off the Internet" because it was delisted from app stores and dropped by AWS for violating their ToS due to having (If I remember correctly) approximately zero content moderation, which is not really compatible with the mainstream distribution model they wanted. The owners were not subjected to sanctions by a foreign government.
lukan 5 days ago [-]
"They promoted and hosted violent/terrorist activity."
Check the <li> near the bottom. Some are named, such as Armed Proletarian Justice, Revolutionary Class Self-Defense, and Jane’s Revenge, but some unnamed ones as well (at least their actions have been described).
well_ackshually 5 days ago [-]
Because as we all know, the US government (and especially this one) would never lie.
How are the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq doing?
mitxela 5 days ago [-]
I heard MS13, and Tren de Aragua.
guywithahat 4 days ago [-]
Gotta love how you provide a clear, cogent answer to his question, and so people downvote you.
A/I wasn't like protonmail; they specifically provided IT support to terrorist groups, who would often be violent and would sometimes kill people. I mean to thoroughly vet your users and then make the services anonymous is a wild thing to do, all while encouraging violent users to use your site.
hirako2000 5 days ago [-]
They are neutral. So violent terrorist activity is cracked down via their provider. So called secondary sanctions.
5 days ago [-]
beej71 5 days ago [-]
Unless the US government ripped parler off the Internet, this is not a sensible comparison.
wraptile 5 days ago [-]
> They promoted and hosted violent/terrorist activity.
like?
foul 5 days ago [-]
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par 5 days ago [-]
"created: 62 days ago" -- beyond that, what else makes you think it's a bot?
Shuang1 5 days ago [-]
Everyone who disagrees with me is a bot.
foul 5 days ago [-]
I'm a gentleman and beyond that it's merely more likely (we are on HN and it's a newish user) that it is a bot, compared to their being a "meta shill" or a "monomaniac". You can skim their comments history for more information.
So unless you're willing to become a literal terrorist organization and die with a bunch of your friends in an uphill battle (not technically unwinnable, but at least lopsided and the casualties will be tremendous), the only option is to cave.
Honestly, the internet has made folks so lazy. It's very ironic that the most "revolutionary" act taken recently (January 6) was actually done by the far-right. Yeah: if you believe in something, you need to actually get out of the basement, grab a gun, and storm the Capitol. And if you take it all the way, a lot of people are going to die. That's how revolution works. Unless we're all LARPing?
But Americans/Westerners (left, right, center) are way too comfortable for a revolution, so for people that are, or have been, actual dissidents (think Arab Spring, or IRA, or ETA, or whatever), this is all just a big meme.
People that had enough money that they weren't paying attention to the price of groceries before Trump, probably still don't care all that much now. I might eat out less, but that's not worth abandoning my family or dying over to me.
It takes 3.5% of the population to effect change: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3.5%25_rule
I think this was an inevitable outcome of western culture's individualism being inherently selfish.
The fight is to never get to this situation again and to keep the rights people died for you to have.
You act like things are binary “comfort” vs “horrible life”. It’s not like Fascism grows slowly and then suddenly you are locked.
Or maybe people realize that revolutions, and the civil war that almost always ensue, are a very high price to pay, for a very uncertain reward.
Talking about the Arab spring, look what it lead to:
- Egypt and Tunisia are again being lead by a dictator, it's just a younger one.
- Libya is destroyed, lacks leadership and conflict could resume any day should Haftar decide he doesn't like the result of the upcoming (but long postponed) elections.
- Syria has suffered the worst civil war of the decade and the situation is still very brittle. It looks like Jolani could bring redemption to Syria, but with the Israeli playing around with fire it could also collapse any day. And that's assuming Jolani doesn't turn into a dictator himself: we're not talking about someone with a good track record of honoring his promises (which is a good thing when the promise is made to ISIS or Al Qaeda, but still).
What did work for them was pouring money into the election system and party apparatus, media, the courts and then taking control over politics
That helped them take control of politics. And so that tactic will surely turn people to violence again. The violence itself may not be effective but the level of outrage is.
Might want to let the Democrats know that. According to them the government was >this< close to being overthrown. Which is funny, because if anyone truly believes that, we don't stand a chance against pretty much any country on earth.
[1] https://lawandcrime.com/2020-election/absolute-hero-capitol-...
The whole plan after the judicial effort failed (using the courts to overturn the vote outcome) and the individual shakedowns failed (calling up governors and demanding they change the vote outcome) was to pressure senators to throw out the state certificates, kick them back to the states, and have the states decide that Trump won instead. They had a whole slate of fraudulent shadow certificates with Trump as the winner ready for Senators to certify. That 10000% would have worked because there are more red states than blue, so they would have just picked Trump over Biden.
But Pence refused to go along with the plan. So the mob was the last ditch effort to convince the senators. Its purpose was not to kill the senators but to delay the vote to give more time to affect the influence campaign. So that plan was also very very close to working because they did delay the vote. It only didn't work because Mitch McConnell refused to end the session and kept everyone around to complete the certification of the vote on January 7. But the fact that it happened on January 7 means that the plan very nearly worked.
You need to look at J6 as a buffer overflow attack. There are no instructions for what to do if the J6 vote is disrupted by a mob, the hope was that but putting the country in that illegal state would allow for arbitrary instructions to be executed.
FTFY
The one person who died violently was one of the rioters, an unarmed woman who was shot by Capitol Police. Four other rioters died of natural causes around the time of the riot.
> * U.S. representative Markwayne Mullin [currently head of DHS], a witness to Babbitt's attempted breach, said that Byrd "didn't have a choice" but to shoot, and that his action "saved people's lives".* [0]
The shooting was deemed “lawful and within department policy”.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Ashli_Babbitt
I do not disagree with this at all. I only mentioned her death as contrast to the usual rhetoric of how the mob at the Capitol "killed" Officer Sicknick and others (who are always mysteriously unnamed).
At that rate, how many can even be left by now?
Police and security trying to manage a dynamic situation with minimum loss of life by not immediately gunning down quasi-violent crowd is a more reasonable conclusion.
Regardless, 100% of which is Trump's fault for incitement.
if that happened to me at work it would be something I talked about all the time, there are a thousand ways it could have gotten even worse
You can be the judge as to whether it succeeded or victory was deferred, but violence definitely won in the end.
Or sue, or organize and protest, or win the next election. Not every government problem warrants revolution, and not needing to revolt is not a failing of the people.
> Americans/Westerners (left, right, center) are way too comfortable for a revolution
A better read is that the situation for most Americans and "Westerners" whatever that means, is that things are good enough that the people do not see value in revolution, or they are able to adjust the government's course enough through elections, redress, courts and other political feedback mechanisms.
This is not what happened on J6, and is specifically why it was not an insurrection.
It's a shame we went so light on them. Care bear punishment. Sweetheart deals, and then pardoned by a man that literally, factually, supports terrorism against the USA and supporting the attempted assassination of his VP.
Geronimo.
> violence or the threat of violence used as a weapon of intimidation or coercion
> especially: violent or destructive acts (such as bombing) committed by groups in order to intimidate a population or government into granting their demands
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/terror
Now, which actor in this story does this sound like? The webhoster exercising their speech rights or the apparatus bombing schools and weddings in order to get their way?
Remove any qualifier and you end up in some other category.
Furthermore, the noblogs.org platform (previously hosted by A/I) is used to host a lot of politically-motivated content, including news and statements by various resistance groups across the world, which of course is considered terrorist by the USA, but legally should fall under freedom of the press.
I don‘t see a difference. I was told this when I was a child, and as I’ve grown up and seen more of the world (including by immigrating to the USA) I am more convinced then ever. In my eyes, there is no meaningful difference between USA and NATO.
So even if you don’t believe it, the U.S. clearly cares about NATO member behaviour and therefore recognizes a distinction.
Smoke screen.
The USA launches its attacks from the territories of NATO members.
NATO has been involved in every war crime the USA has committed this century.
NATO countries, yes (mostly the Brits and Polish). NATO as an organization, only for Serbia and Afghanistan.
https://www.politico.eu/article/nato-mark-rutte-italy-us-bas...
NATO Chief, Rutte: "Europe is a platform of power projection for the United States."
Of course, the local political cover story in Italy is that these bases are 'only used for logistics, never direct attacks', but that's just a cover story to deflect any retribution Italy may receive from Iran and its allies, for Italy's participation in the US' heinous acts, and to keep the internal messaging politically correct within Italys' current circus ...
https://en.lasicilia.it/news/italy-world/3052391/the-us-iran...
This is just posturing to avoid retribution. Everyone in Europe knows that NATO bases have been used almost every day since April 2003 by the US to commit its crimes.
Lets also admit that NATO-aligned bases in Poland and Germany are also essential to the US' crimes.
See also, Camp Darby near Pisa, actively supporting NATO and U.S. European and African Command operations.
I recall this time as a very strong refusal of the above miscategorization of NATO. Bush and his cronies had a whole “you’re with us or against us” tantrum when NATO didn’t follow. I think Americans even did some proto-Trump trolling with “freedom fries” and other nonsense.
As for Iraq: UK, Poland, Spain, Portugal, and Denmark provided soldiers to partake in the illegal invasion. Even Iceland participated in the propaganda war by putting them self on the farcical “Coalition the willing” along plenty of other NATO countries.
It is very hard to see NATO as anything other then an extension of USA‘s imperial ambitions. It is as if in the year 1986 you would look at the Warsaw pact and claim this is a pact of independent nations and has nothing to do with the interest of the Soviet Union.
Iraq: Japan, Australia, Nicaragua, Philippines, Ukraine, Georgia... And I'm leaving like a dozen non-NATO countries, aligned AND unaligned with the US, that took part in the invasion or post-invasion missions. I don't agree with it, and while there were numerous lies to sell the invasion, equally numerous countries were unhappy about UNSCR 1441 being treated like toilet paper by the UN itself. Moreover, actual major NATO countries like Germany or France were diametrically opposed to the invasion and told the US to take a hike.
When you hold a hammer everything looks like a nail.
I also think that history has been far too kind to France’s supposed opposition to the illegal invasion. France stood firmly inside a military alliance who’s members broke international law and disregarded human rights. If France and Germany were serious about their supposed opposition to that war they would have at least threatened to withdraw. But such actions were never even considered. France and Germany were perfectly happy to allow American Imperialist agenda to materialize, even though most other NATO countries took a more active role in the crimes.
No, I'm saying that states are relatively free to agree or disagree with the US, at least until president 47. France faced no consequences, and countries like Nicaragua are on the opposite end of the geopolitcal spectrum with no particular interest in a war on the other side of the world.
Because whether Iraq or Afghanistan bear the historical hallmarks of imperialism is up to debate, especially with Afghanistan with clear casus belli, stated war objectives, and no intention to annex or directly control/govern the territory. The actual number of countries supporting either is a good metric on that; I think Afghanistan war had a much wider support for a reason. Putting both conflicts together is simplistic, if not disingenuous.
>France stood firmly inside a military alliance who’s members broke international law and disregarded human rights.
The USSR stood inside an economic and arguably military alliance with literal Hitler until 41. The USSR fed the Wehrmacht, fueled their tanks, and provided metals for their war machine. Mentioning this since you already mentioned you're on the left side of the spectrum. Can we call the USSR as subservient to Third Reich imperialism?
Breaking an alliance simply because an ally does something you don't agree with, while morally commendable, it is also simplistic. France didn't pull out, like nobody pulled out when France was committing atrocities in Algeria, or when Turkey invaded Cyprus; no Warsaw Pact countries left during Hungary 56, Albania did leave because of Prague 68 but only because of it being the last straw on their already strained relations, like CSTO countries aren't pulling out because of Russian imperialism in Ukraine, Georgia or Moldova. Armenia is trying to pull out only because the CSTO wasn't there when it was needed, that is, when the treaty doesn't address its very own points.
Alliances are born out of self-interest, not out of moral purity or consistency.
Yes we can, we should, and we do. People on the left (aside from actual Stalinist) do admit that this alliance was bad, kind of like how liberals admit how the British government was wrong to pursue the strategy of appeasement.
What makes this different though is that both Stalin and the British government (under new leadership albeit) reversed course and fought and defeated fascism. We have not seen France nor Germany do this. To the contrary.
> Alliances are born out of self-interest.
This is the world we live in, but we don‘t have to accept it, and we can and should pressure our leaders into making the moral choice. Perhaps a better world is possible, and perhaps blaming our leaders for moral failures is our way to a better world.
My last attempt to convince you: Ask your self, why did Iceland not vote in favor of a ban on nuclear weapons at the UN general assembly 2016? Why has Iceland still not signed and ratified the treaty? Why has no NATO member done so? Why are Austria and Ireland one of very few European nations to do so?
Aside from France and the UK, it is hard to find an answer here which does not include American imperialist agenda.
We really need laws removing the power from the President to unilaterally declare organizations terrorists. At least not long term without their ability to fight the designation in court.
(Same for tariffs. There is no case where one needs emergency power to tariff or sanction anything. If you need to conduct urgent police action, court-ordered asset freezes are plenty.)
Only then will you have the moral altitude you profess to have with the rest of the world, and not until then.
"Terrorist" is just this centurys' n-word - a phrase which racists cannot overtly use any more so they invented a new term to supplant it.
American here. This is a non-starter. Nobody does it. And war is a domain where leading on moral authority requires firepower to back it.
We don’t agree on what does and doesn’t constitute a war crime, the term seems to cover almost all war as well as actions taken by every global and regional power in almost every military action they’ve each taken.
We need reform. But pretending we can legally ban war is silly.
The USA is the worlds #1 funder of terrorism and its #1 fighter of illegal, criminal wars. Until the American people start demanding justice for the crimes for which their state is responsible, we are all going down the drain with the USA and its war criminals.
You can’t do this when nobody else does, and particularly not when pretty much every act of war in the world is alleged to be a war crime by activists. In practice, all war appears to be illegal under international law. That makes the law untenable, which may be part of why it’s being ignored.
> Until the American people start demanding justice for the crimes for which their state is responsible
I agree that we need a framework limiting the U.S. military under U.S. law. But someone needs to propose something realistic.
If you're going to dance around pretending to be the only world power, you have to set the example you want to see of the other 'lesser nations' which are subject to your war criminals' purposes.
>every act of war in the world is alleged to be a war crime by activists.
So what you're really saying is that warriors should always be senior to activists.
This problem runs deep.
>I agree that we need a framework limiting the U.S. military under U.S. law.
No, I'm saying that the U.S. needs to stop being a criminal nation beholden only unto itself.
We’re in a globalized world with aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons. The fallacy of thinking a major economy (or significant nation) can decouple from any expansionist regime is a lesson I thought we learned from the first half of the last century.
The Russian weapons (at various points) were missing critical components, maintenance, fuel, etc.
The US weapons appear to have functioned as specified, but the commander-in-chief appears to know marginally less about the Iranian strategic situation than I personally do. And this is not a boast, I have zero military training and only follow the occasional commentator like Anders Puck Nielsen and read the odd Wikipedia page when something surprising comes up in the news or a comment, and pay enough attention to the news and comments to be capable of surprise, it's just that I asked someone around 20 years ago if the War On Terror would go to Iran given all the obvious threads leading there, and they told me it would go down basically as we saw it going down this year: very expensive, no real progress, strategic failure no matter what military victories happen.
At invading or achieving any geopolitical objective, yes (though I wouldn’t compare the American military-industrial base to Russia’s). At causing at least as much chaos as sanctions, no.
Well, it is a mafia. See the international court investigating war crimes is also targeted by the orange clown-brigade mafia.
> the only option is to cave
Objectively speaking you are correct, but I don't think this has to be the case. For instance, why is that orange mafia so powerful? That is the thing that has to be fixed on every level, not just by taking back what their billionaires stole from us.
And in case the wedding reference wasn't explicit enough, this isn't just Trump, it was also Obama.
It pains me to summon the specter of "both sides" because the Republicans are so much worse. But the majority of national level Democrats aren't inherently good. They are just less bad (and on some issues they can be close to equally as bad).
Most should take those odds over giving up another inch of freedom.
Left wing extremist groups absolutely exist. The fact that they don't go around wearing matching uniforms with the letters ANTIFA on them doesn't change that.
Your demand for an exact membership list is simply not how extremist organizations work. Terroristic groups have always been fairly amorphous.
If you aren't doing anything even close to this then no you wouldn't be.
Timothy Mcveigh (and Terry Nichols) weren't members of a terrorist organization, but they were terrorists. Meanwhile, the ku klux klan has actual initiations, membership, and organizational structure. As do Isis and al qaida.
No I'm not. I specially said "in groups".
> … and an actual terrorist organization.
A group is not “an actual terrorist organization”. You’re trying to say all groups committing a crime against the government are actual terrorists organizations, and they all belong to the same organization, Antifa. That’s not the case. If that’s the case then MAGA is also a terrorist organization — at least they have a clear leader.
No, I only said that the ones that are committing terrorist attacks, or similarly serious vigilante violence or sabotaging critical infrastructure in groups are.
Mere "crimes" aren't the same as targeting a powerplant for example.
They said Good and Pretti were domestic terrorists, they were summarily executed, so not really the line you think you're drawing. NSPM-7 makes "politically motivated trespass and civil disobedience" a terrorist act. So it's not like all you have to do to avoid being labelled a terrorist is to just not blow up a power plant. Helping someone ICE knocked down during a protest is enough.
It actually is a pretty good line. I am sure there are some edge cases, but the vast majority of designated terrorist organizations did more than enough to deserve being put on that list.
Yes, I am sure there is "Insert random one off exceptions here" or grey areas, but they would almost certainly win their court cases through the legal system, most of the time the world is pretty good at figuring out who the terrorists are.
Additionally, no, neither Good and Pretti were ever charged with terrorism. You can have your opinions on unfortunate incidents of use of force or officer training failures or about any overly zealous bad apples in our law enforcement personel, but when it comes to official designations the law is actually pretty reasonable here.
Its hard to say, because political violence is a spectrum and the border is very blurry between being an organized violent rioter and someone engaging in terroristic activities. Both are bad in their own way.
But fundamentally there doesn't seem to be a huge categorical/technical difference between violent rioting and "terroristic" activism other than that terroristic attacks are simply the more serious/worse version of political violence.
EX: Once it gets to the point of targeting actual critical infrastructure, we can call that terrorism, and just getting into a fist fight at a roudy protests wouldn't be (even though both are technically political violence).
That being said, serious riots can cause a lot of damage and even kill people, but the blame is more collectively spread out towards a large group of people, as opposed to a few small groups causing the large amount of damage.
I generally stay away from that type of stuff and instead support non-violent, political change that happens within the system and I think those destructive groups are engaging in ineffective and bad tactics.
I do not do that so that would make me not fall under any type of anarchist label like that one.
Yeah, I pay taxes.
There's no "antifa" organization because antifascism is a concept with different branches of thoughts and practices. Calling antifa an organization is akin to calling "science" an organization. Sure a dictator can arrest millions of people of the "science" terror organization and jail them for their dangerous subversion, but that doesn't make the "science" organization any more real.
The flag just symbols that this person is against Nazis. Nothing more, nothing less.
It can be held by anyone. Here in Germany, we have (amongst others, just a list of what I have seen) religious Christians (often of Lutheran Protestantism), Marxists, Leninists, Stalinists, other denominations of Communists, Anarchists, Greens, Social Democrats, Antiimperialists, Zionists and sometimes even the occasional Conservatives showing up under the Antifa banner.
Because anyone call themselves anti-fascist, doesn't make them so. While most people who are, well, not fascists probably don't wear or care about the label. You basically confirmed the point of the comment you replied to.
> I’m sure there are supremacists “organizations” that are also hard to pin down.
You mean the ones that aren't organizations? Let's say all the people who are racist in the world, are they an organization? Even all the people who really hate the same "race", if that's all they do, does that make them an org? Is everyone making inane arguments be part of a global group of people working in concert trying to diminish the cognitive capacity and level of discourse in society?
Lots of maga are idealists (even if their ideas are not based in the real world), a number of them are LARPers and a small number are hard core intent on eliminating “the enemy”. To think that no maga member is violent and entertains violent options, is denying reality. Also it’s disingenuous to think they are all out of their minds looking to overthrow the government. Many just have ideals that don’t align with the mainstream.
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1153982516232...
https://www.gettyimages.com/videos/jan-6
So yes, just like some very far right people exist, that can justifiably be called terrorists, so to do some very far left individuals.
The difference being they have support from the president. Whereas on the left, it's just some random "person" on Twitter.
Republicans and MAGA literally supports terrorists. This isn't a debate. It's fact.
You can't. You can't even name the people that I weren't even referencing. It's random people.
But I can point to the literal President of the USA.
I would say that people who are sabotaging powerplants count as being called far left terrorists. And that is both dangerous and bad. It is not just a random person making tweets. Instead its people sabotaging powerplants.
It is silly to dismiss that all as just being on twitter. When power plants are sabotaged that can kill people.
https://www.dw.com/en/berlin-blackout-how-dangerous-are-left...
Oh wait...
Go ahead and show me the the people in the German government on the left doing this?
It pretty explicitly changes that fact. Inb4 ehrm actually, we all know bro.
Delusions of grandeur / superiority complex much? Have you considered a posibility, that these voters just dont agree with your idea of what their best interests are?
>fictional terrorist organization called "antifa."
An organization so fictional, that just a few months back multiple members were convicted in a terrorist attack
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyedgnyn4mo
Antifa defenders just hide behind the fact that the movement is decentralized and leaderless by design, but that doesn't make it fictional.
They are obviously a terrorist organization and it is good to go after their financing and communication channels.
“Organization” is a stretch. Criminals? Sure. Violent thugs? Maybe.
The “terrorist” word, however, has been stretched and distorted for political ends. It seems like any crime motivated by political or religious ideology is now “terrorism”, and thus subject to much harsher punishment than those same crimes would normally receive.
By this definition, the Jan 6 rioters were terrorists - yet they received pardons.
We need to roll back all those counter-terrorist laws in every Anglosphere country.
If people could imagine it being used against them, maybe they might understand. Like labeling the Republican party a terrorist organization because they sponsored Jan 6 insurrectionists.
Calling a movement an organization is a fiction, unless you live in an alternate reality. Should i consider you part of an organization because you tweeted a certain hashtag once? Are you the member of a band because you whistled a song on the subway? Are you in the military because you watched a Rambo movie when you were a teen?
If a movement has no leaders at all then it's not an organization.
When Republicans in the US communicate and sometimes coordinate with totalitarian international leaders, does it mean we get to label the whole thing as a single "international totalitarian organization"?
I mean, there's not really room for debate on it. Voting to take your money away from you and give it to people who already have more money than they could spend in a lifetime is obviously against your interests. But that's what Republican policy does. That's why they have to make increasingly outlandish fictions and fund whole media empires to sell those fictions: to convince people to keep voting against themselves. Between either a billionaire, or the guy down the street making burritos for $8 an hour, it's obvious which one took all of your money. It's the guy with the money. The increasingly elaborate alternate reality exists to hide this from their voters, so they can keep raiding us.
No one is claiming that Amy Klobuchar or Gavin Newsom is a member of antifa.
this, in combination with the rise of Flock, Clearview, Axon, and other mass-surveillance programs is leading us down an incredibly dark and Orwellian state - something that feels almost ludicrous given how anti-Big-Brother your average person is
[0] https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/how-nspm-7-seeks...
You see some form of resistance (the guy that was caught with a truck full of cut Flock cameras) but it seems the population is resigned.
It seems to be a type of psychological projection - someone harbors an ideal like a surveillance state and assumes everyone else is harboring the same ideal so they accuse them.
I hope the Uyghur genocide accusation doesn't turn out to be a confession.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_Unite...
>With the end of World War II, Project SHAMROCK was established in 1945. The organization was created to accumulate telegraphic data entering and exiting from the United States.[4][22] Major communication companies such as Western Union, RCA Global and ITT World Communications actively aided the project, allowing American intelligence officials to gain access to international message traffic.[23] Under the project, and many subsequent programs, no precedent had been established for judicial authorization, and no warrants were issued for surveillance activities. The project was terminated in 1975.[4]
I was responding to the comment that said "Everyone who disagrees with the GOP is labeled antifa" with two of the many prominent Democrat politicians who haven't been. Should I have listed 50 of them or 100?
"After 2005 we have been constantly pestered by prosecutors and security forces (and even by the Vatican! [4]) asking us to hand over users’ data and identities and we are proud to say we were always able to answer: we are sorry, but we do not have them."
This is tech guys supporting with infra real freedom of speech! even more important nowadays! jumping to the violent antifa narrative means ignoring a lot of important things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autistici/Inventati
“Autistici/Inventati (A/I) is an Italian hacktivist group that provides Internet communication services for left-wing activists. It was founded in 2001 by members of the anti-globalisation movement…”
https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2026/08/28/18888285.php
You don't need to pay to host onion websites (.onion domains are free and have no central registry). Though that of course really limits the possible outreach, because most people are not used to browsing onionsites.
[1] https://njal.la/domains/
The issue is, now they are the legal owners and liable for the content of the website, and they also support PayPal, which will absolutely drop them the moment they get sanctioned.
This is why Europe needs to detach itself from the American banking system.
It used to be very practical to use it. Countries renounced to some sovereignty in exchange for ease of doing business. The USA had an advantage but it didn't abuse it too much.
The current situation is that the USA is asking to forfeit sovereignty and to control business in an ideological basis. There is a strong incentive to leave that system as the alternative is become a colony of the USA. And the push for colonization is not subtle as the president takes over other countries resources like Venezuela's oil or tries to take control of the straight of Hormuz (None part of the USA at this moment)
Totally true. The EU needs its own platforms, I hope that better regulated than their USA counterparts. Linux started in Europe, it should have been promoted more for internal usage. But privatization of state-owned companies made it ideologically impossible to push for it. Public good was seen as "bad" and "against business", I hope that the obvious failure of that policy makes it now a possibility to use Linux.
So far, what it's detached itself from its sources of fossil fuels. With a little help from its great American friends.
The US is going to be at peace with Russia, and still pumping anti-Russian rhetoric into Europe to keep them buying US LNG. The big difference will be that they'll start mixing more Trump-Russia rhetoric in - but the result is that they'll be more dependent on the US. The anti-China rhetoric is working great, too.
The best thing for a Europe that wants to separate from the US is to completely isolate themselves from any possible energy or trade replacement for the US./s
That being said, in Europe it's a small elite class (that is still fairly firmly in control of everything) that pushes this (on direct orders and direct payments from US masters.) The rising degree of control of speech and association they have to exert, and the direct election interference they've had to engage in is very disturbing to a plurality of the European population. And that normally politically disengaged plurality is becoming politically active as their living standards drop.
It's easy for Americans, who are essentially uninvadable, to discount this as just people saying stuff, but in Europe, we actually have to live with Russia's direct military threat.
If you mean EU borders - it's had direct border with Russia since 1995.
If you mean in the sense of placing NATO troups on border with Russia, that is indeed recent, and definitely a concern, but - those west-European countries have gone along with expanding NATO eastwards.
If you mean the supposed fear of Russia conquering Poland - then that is not really serious.
> we actually have to live with Russia's direct military threat.
So far in this war, it is German and other European & NATO member state weapons being intentionally fired into Russia, not the other way around.
Of course, if you look further back, Russia has invaded westwards multiple times over the centuries, and European powers have indaded Russia multiple times: Sweden, France, Germany. But mutual perception as threats is something almost any pair of European states can be said to have in their past. And the distances are even closer than Russia and Germany.
Have you really had your head in the sand, or are you just desperately trying to sell a transparent lie here? The Putin is not exactly careful about his threats.
The US isn't really a source of anti-Russia rhetoric. In fact, the US may be the biggest source of pro-Russia rhetoric, with Trump constantly sucking up to Putin and repeating Kremlin talking points.
China, Egypt to do away with the use of the US dollar - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49555056 - September 2026
China nears launch of mBridge as alternative to Swift - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48636931 - June 2026
I'm not sure the payment system is most banks primary concern. Being able to buy/sell US securities turns out to be a fairly fundamental part of the modern economy
For most banks the ability to sell financial instruments which end up interacting with the US financial institutions is fundamental.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49225112
It’s not a particularly high bar, but of the big powers, only China currently meets it.
And I know you will say „but payment networks are not a warfare question, they are an economic question“ but that kind of breaks down when they are used to sanction ICC judges presiding over war crime cases.
However, currently, only US and Russia have publicly threatened my country, and both are currently engaged in a trade war with us.
China on the other hand is selling us cheap batteries and solar panels.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRICS
Of course, that's an _if_, not something to just take for granted.
Just have not yet done it.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m grateful for many things the USA has done, and for the inventiveness and generosity of its people; but let’s not pretend like their government(s) have been the kindest or most terror-free in the past decades.
The USA can be both a good and bad thing. And terrorism, by definition, is a bit of what they do abroad.
I’m from Latin America and it’s 100% the fault of some of our own corrupt governments and us people living in those places.
Emphasis on “some,” because countries like Chile, Costa Rica, Uruguay and lately Argentina and El Salvador are showing that less government intervention in economic matters and a zero-bullshit policy on crime is how you turn things around to something that reminisces a somewhat livable country.
Which is partly or mostly our fault.
Maybe we could concentrate on doing less of that.
This is a direct result of the "war on drugs" perpetrated by the US.
The other two are genuinely not the fault of the US, but bringing up two examples where the US wasn't the source of the problem doesn't exactly contradict the original claim.
> Which is partly or mostly our fault.
It does contradict the original claim because it's 3 examples of things we didn't cause - and he said "mostly our fault". If it takes 3 seconds to think of things we didn't cause, then the world's craziness is not mostly the fault of America. Mostly the US has a hand in stopping communist governments where the citizens are kept as slaves.
Have to stop you right there. The “war on drugs” absolutely has created the conditions for the drug trade and the murders. If you criminalize a large part of the economy, then only criminals will profit from it. If we had sane drug policy, there would not be the profit that attracts these criminals. Additionally, the US intelligence services (and other nations) have a long documented role in cultivating the drug trade for diverse reasons: for profit and paying for operations, for control of regions, and to provide a reservoir of violence to disguise or facilitate their work.
You should be a lot less confident in your opinions. The war on drugs required violent interventions against drug production in Mexico, which directly created militarized, violent drug cartels.
Example: pressured by the US, Felipe Calderón launched Operation Michoacán in 2006 with U.S. backing and funding. He deployed tens of thousands of federal forces. Mexico has recorded more than 463,000 homicides since that declaration of war on the cartels, a huge increase.
Just look at the data.
> and he said "mostly our fault". If it takes 3 seconds to think of things we didn't cause
He said "mostly" because he knows there are counterexamples, so providing counterexamples doesn't contradict his point.
> Mostly the US has a hand in stopping communist governments where the citizens are kept as slaves.
This is such a genuinely undiscriminating statement that I can't help but categorize it as dumb. I don't usually say this, but you need to stop listening to propaganda and pick up a few actual history books. Until you do, any discussion is pointless, because you're so stuck in your ideology that facts can't penetrate the bubble.
That's really all I have for you. It's up to you to fix yourself.
How do you like them apples?
What kind of mickey mouse political left are you using for reference here? The Dems?
HN is extremely american-leaning, whose centre is firmly to the right compared to the rest of the world.
Not really, no. Most of the world is under authoritarian regimes that would be seen as more right leaning. Most democracies are also right leaning. What characterizes the US is being extremely capitalistic and pro-corporations
I would agree that's true for Y Combinator, but my experience in the HN _community_ for almost a decade now has suggested that the heavy anti-American sentiment started right around the start of the current administration.
It's always a bit upsetting to me when people conflate criticism of aspects of a country (like its government) with being against that country. I would rather say that it shows that people are pro that country and want it to do better.
But it's a slippery slope. If someone love America and wants a revolution to turn it into something historically unrecognizable, does that still make them pro-America? I would say no.
edit: Because this is HN and a lot of you are learning this for the first time:
US: $60k salary leads to $50k take home pay, then a less than 10% sales tax
Denmark: $60k salary leads to $38k take home pay, then a 25% sales tax
All that money you're losing in Denmark is paying for you shittier healthcare.
Welcome to a small taste of being outside your echo chamber.
Nope, not even close. Sort this list by "Highest" and keep in mind that NYC is only one city in the US:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_rates
Oh wait!
Hmm. So they are going by “A/I vets its users” and users sabotaged rail systems so therefore A/I is materially assisting terrorists? I wonder how this vetting works? Do users have to submit government issued documents, write essays? Do they make users sign non-violence agreement ToS. I mean heck, Facebook and Twitter has material supporting various things like that and US government is designated them as terrorists.
The government isn't attesting to your capabilities - that is still on you as a citizen.
>... background check
Who requires these background checks? Because the seller wouldn't do them unless obligated. Obviously the check and paperwork around it constitutes at least a de facto application to the government for permission to purchase the firearm.
It is absolute nonsense to ignore why the law exists while you complain about it existing.
It’s nonsense to pretend it came out of no where for no reason.
Some of the claims are interesting - "Decision making in the group takes places collectively instead of through majority voting." - isn't explained by the sourced article.
An ignorant/manipulated majority can not decide over my natural rights. 51% of men can not vote in favor of raping 49% of women, that's why 49% of women should be armed and capable of mutually assured destruction as a deterrent (pick gender, race, religion, whatever, applies to all minorities). That's just philosophy, in real life the powerful fucks the weak, and that's how it works. 'Disarm the people' is the first step in the road to slavery. Of course an armed disfunctional society like the US is also not the best solution to the problems the state creates. So we keep thinking and philosophizing, until that day comes...
Btw, I am a philosophical anarchist, I don't throw molotovs or wear masks but I do hate the state with a passion, and I like to think about how a free world should work, and currently the US is the antithesis of that
Those two words refer to the same "type" of system where the members make a decision by ascent or descent. Both systems require an agreed upon barrier of acceptance.
They are the same. The US congress reaches decision by consensus.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_decision-making
And of course if that person turns out to have bad judgement they won't listen to him next time.
It is certainly possible for this to become unstable and split into two or more groups. This may work for the IETF which frequently creates and destroys working groups.
I have experienced this kind of language personally back when the collective started (they have root in the no-global movement, a protest group that contributed to the violence at the Genova G8).
At the time I was a young activist on their side, but the 'we are not violent' wink-wink nudge-nudge attitude was not main stream but very much all over the place and became hard to ignore.
[1]https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...
edit: forgot the link to the designation
As if that holds any value, especially considering the rest of your comment, which completely ignores the rhetoric of that "designation".
That designation is toilet paper - the wording "violent Antifa cells" in the second sentence should be the wake up signal.
> they have root in the no-global movement, a protest group
There was/is no protest group called the no-global movement - you are using language the same way Trump & co. use the word antifa. And using language like Trump & co. is not a good look.
> that contributed to the violence at the Genova G8.
That was the black-bloc, maybe a few hundred or thousand actors within a protest of up to 300k people. I am leaving out the many controversies regarding the infiltrators in the black bloc and the manufactured "evidence" like planted molotov cocktails in the Diaz school.
And we all know who else contributed to the violence, but you conveniently left that out. Carlo Giuliani was killed by police. Same police that raided a school and charged peaceful protesters.
I am not saying that you have to hold my experience to any value, but I am stating that was my experience. Anyone is free to interpret as they prefer, but I would question your argument as to why. It sounds a lot like "whataboutism". The fact that the designation is bad does not change my experience with the rhetoric of the collective.
If you'd rather know why I do not express much judgement on the designation: I did not pass any judgement of the dialectic in the designation because I don't claim to have the same experience with such - or any - dialect in English.
I also state that 'a broken clock ...' underlining - I thought - the fact that I don't think the US government does normally much good.
> "violent Antifa cells" in the second sentence should be the wake up signal.
It's not as obvious to me as it is to you why "violent antifa cells" is a wake up signal. Would you mind explaining further?
> There was/is no protest group called the no-global movement.. you are using language the same way Trump & co
Admittedly, these are memories from quite a while ago, I don't exclude some of them might be wrong, but as much as it's not a movement with a cohesive leadership and structured belief, for what it's worth, wikipedia seems to agree with me on the existence of a "No global movment" and its connection with the Genova G8 issues [1]. I would invite you to avoid name calling, such as comparing me to Trump :D
I had no connection with black bloc, and while I agree with you that it was a small minority in the protest having violent intentions, I disagree that only black bloc was to blame for those violent intentions.
I also don't absolve the police, what happened was horrifying, but this again does not take away from the fact that the rhetoric used in the communication by the collective reminds me of the 'not so not violent' groups that at the very least orbited the violence, and, in my personal opinion, very much winked at and approved of it.
I don't see you make an argument contrary to what I am saying other than discrediting my own experience based on the fact that - in your opinion - I don't criticize both sides equally?
[1]https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movimento_no-global
> question your argument as to why.
I am also Italian, and I don't feel that "the dialectic and rhetoric" of their statements in any way gives and credibility to the US designation of a "violent antifa cells" equating them to terrorists on the level of Al-Qaeda, ISIS and so on. So there's that, being Italian is not some skill or ability that allows you or me to better understand their statements, especially since they are also translated to English...
> the same experience with such - or any - dialect in English.
That sounds like a cop-out to me, you obviously can express yourself in English quite well, and even if that were not the case phrases like "violent antifa cells", "far-left terrorist networks, built to enable them to organize, recruit, communicate, disseminate propaganda, share target information and tactics, and carry out violent attacks" should clearly show that is nothing more than the lowest form of fearmongering, propaganda and silencing of dissent by an authoritarian government.
Furthermore, especially as Italians, we should support these projects and not give in to notions that "maybe the broken fascist clock is right once in a while".
> wikipedia seems to agree with me on the existence of a "No global movment"
The first sentence: indica organizzazioni non governative, associazioni e singoli individui relativamente ETEROGENEI.
As you put it previously, "a protest group", does not at all convey the notion that these are many people with differing views, and as such there may well be also a violent minority like in any group. No, your comment paints them all with the same brush.
> such as comparing me to Trump :D
I did not compare you as a person to Trump, but the way you are misusing words.
> does not take away from the fact that the rhetoric used in the communication by the collective reminds me of the 'not so not violent' groups that at the very least orbited the violence, and, in my personal opinion, very much winked at and approved of it.
This would be the point were you cite some sources or quotes that give you that impression, rather than relying on your "Italianness" to support your argument.
> in your opinion - I don't criticize both sides equally?
As Italians we should criticize only one side and that is the fascists.
> being Italian is not some skill
Some of the A/I statements being in Italian, and some of the seditious rhetoric being known to me because I have experienced the Italian far left, I think it is a relevant 'competency' in this thread.
> That sounds like a cop-out to me..
It's a good thing I have no obligation of par-conditio :D
Anyway, whether the US document is good or not was not my point, and I never hinted at the fact that it might be good. I repeat that I don't think it is. You are rather just using that to ignore the point I was attempting to make, which is that the language used by the collective is reminding me of language that winks at violence.
> As Italians we should criticize only one side and that is the fascists.
I reject the requirement you try to impose on me of criticizing only the fascists, as if far left - which this collective definitely was - is tolerable or ok or positive. I do not agree. I prefer to keep my own independence of thought, and would rather point out your statement being ironically oppressive.
https://datarepublican.com/noblogs/
There's a "Dashboard" view in the top right that is easier to skim.
I would expect a government to be professional and just stick to the (proven) facts and avoiding labels; that would also be more convincing. Oh well.
And ultimately these statements aren't for the normal citizens. They're for the truly strange, the racists, and the trolls.
> The anarchist cells responsible for sabotaging rail systems across France, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands in 2026, relied on A/I Collective tools and services to claim responsibility for the attacks, publish official communiqués, and disseminate manuals for constructing improvised incendiary devices to target railways and other critical infrastructure.
> The anarchist cell responsible for sabotaging the Transalpine Pipeline (TAL) in March 2026, which temporarily halted crude oil flows to Austria, Germany, and the Czech Republic, relied on A/I Collective tools and services to claim responsibility for the attack and publish official communiqués, as well as to disseminate a manifesto calling for additional attacks on critical infrastructure and referring adherents to another A/I Collective platform, which provides detailed sabotage manuals as well as maps of vulnerable critical infrastructure across North America.
> The far-left extremist network responsible for multiple arson attacks and acts of sabotage against Germany’s rail and energy infrastructure between 2011 and 2026, including a January 2026 attack on Berlin’s power grid that cut power to 45,000 households and resulted in a fatality, relied on A/I Collective tools and services to claim responsibility for attacks, publish official communiques, and disseminate a manifesto calling for additional attacks on energy infrastructure worldwide.
Seems quite specific to me.
And maybe they used a Google camera for taking photos of their acts.
By the same logic, what prevents US from labelling Signal, Proton, and Google as ones supporting terrorist organizations?
Are those terrorist organizations too?
Moreover, ask yourself: why hasn't Germany accused A/I of being co-responsible of the attacks?
Technical intermediaries could be held responsible specifically for hosting the manifestos (under freedom of the press laws), but that requires an actual due process. Meanwhile, 100% of the authors and websites who inspired or relayed Anders Brejvik and other neo-fascist terrorists are still online and are not facing any kind of repression.
The site lists actual terror attacks where the tools were used. That’s pretty damning if accurate. Anyone care to comment on that? I’m not well informed but the statement does not look like just straight up name calling.
Now, what about A/I group? Ah… well, there is your answer.
Yes, in my local food distribution networks here in France, quite a few people had autistici emails registered on our mailing list.
Don't talk about something you don't know like you do and you're smarter than anyone.
I’m sure their helpful functions will be picked up by another group that wants to do good work without USAID money.
This is the standard of communication for the Trump administration.
A good amount of the commenters on this story probably would encourage violence, or at least agree with the sentiment on a different platform, yet here they are. I'm not even sure if they're real people or bots.
We are having a discussion right now that would not be allowed if there was vetting.
A bunch of my comments were mysteriously deadened and I have no idea why - they aren't flagged. This was among them. Maybe it was a retaliation for talking about HN's filtering?
By this logic any right wing message board would be designated terrorists the moment one person who has posted there commits a violent act.
This is meant to chill domestic left-wing activism. Just like the person who got 30 years for delivering some zines (https://freedom.press/issues/texas-man-sentenced-to-30-years... https://portside.org/2026-06-25/injustice-how-leftist-zines-...)
> To be hosted on our servers you have to share our principles of anti-fascism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, anti-transphobia, and anti-militarism
It is the first line of https://www.inventati.org/who/policy
Circumstances were created. The destruction of a group also happened in a significant part, and it's only not more horrendous than it already is just because of massive international support to Palestinians, on whose destruction americans participated in very significant part. Almost all of it was done by american supplied bombs, inluding the mass killings of entire families that are still being brought out of rubble to this day, burried by 100s suffocated or burned alive at the time, with their children, women and men, in covardly night attacks from high above.
Like this thing: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/9/5/gaza-teams-recover-r...
Or surprise daylight rushhour mass bombings during ceasefires that killed hundreds of children alone in one go in a day.
This is what I get in mind when I hear "americans" now. This is what americans enabled on purpose. Blergh. Unprovoked aggressions against other countries, like Iran in the last instance that led to permanently increased fuel prices and making everyone poorer around the world, also adds to feeling of disgust when hearing "americans" these days. Americans will learn in time that some things are hard to repair. And their apparent ignorance of what they do in the world and how they are perceived due to that will hit a wall soon enough.
The worst reason to hate it is that it relies on proving intent (dolus specialis), which essentially makes it unenforceable unless the perpetrator is a group of simpletons.
It really hit me when I realized that there are only two ways to prove intent: The criminal admits it, or the prosecution proves that there are literally zero other possible explanations that could possibly fit the actions.
So - Back to the point. Did the USA assist people guilty of genocide by your own chosen definition? Not if there could be literally any other intention.
Keep in mind that Hamas's own convention (1988) clearly declares that they partly exist as a group for the purpose of wiping Israel out, and they did actually perpetrate October 7th. It would be very difficult for even the best lawyer in the world to argue that self-defense couldn't be at least one possible intention, and given that the nation of Israel probably has one or two decent lawyers, they'd likely be able to come up with a few other possible intentions as well, but they only need one to completely avoid prosecution.
A second reason to hate it is that it doesn't carve out exceptions for mutual combat situations, even the ones that that have been dragging on for thousands of years. When two religious groups or ethnicities from neighboring regions fight each other in open combat few reasonable people would refer to that as a genocide, but it might be considered genocide against both sides if we interpret the UN Convention as it was actually ratified.
> even the intellectually laziest persons
Yo mama.
To be more serious, this wasn't necessary and was rude. What was your goal? To convince me? To convince others? Neither are best accomplished with this sort of behavior.
I doubt we'll have absolute certainty about genocide until Nuremberg-style trials take place. The problem is such trials won't happen unless the international community intervenes, and they don't seem willing to intervene without 100% certainty. Chicken-egg problem.
My goal wasn't to convince you. My goal was to answer your question even though you were, in my opinion, intellectually lazy when you asked it. Now you pretend you've done your homework and suddenly are an expert on definitions of genocide, of course. That's great! At least you've read the convention now.
Seriously, though, it seems striking to me that you asked in bad faith, and I'm not interested in discussing this matter any further. Ask non-rhetorical questions only if you don't believe to know the answer yet!
The "Western hemisphere" (which, of course, is neither) tolerates the US and the way it enforces its decisions outside its own borders, because it used to provide some assurance of stability and protection. But as the US rescinds that policy, weakens Nato, declares a tariffs war to every country on earth, etc., there will be less and less justification as well as, probably (hopefully) less and less public acceptance for any of this posturing.
always has been
e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SG0Ql0VfcRg
My impression is that they didn’t say “hey we don’t have customer information but we don’t service violent groups and we will responsibly investigate and discontinue service to offenders.”
Their vibe was much more defiant, like, “we designed this to be anonymous and specifically intend/expect for it to be used in any way regardless of legality and are okay with it.”
Is it right for the US to be the global arbiter of this issue and domains in general? Of course not.
That is also what Signal does. Or absolutely any end-to-end encrypted communication service at all - these are explicitly designed not to retain details of communication.
Do you want to declare them terrorists too?
Now, if you are against private conversations, please state so clearly so we know which side of the fence you lean towards.
Meanwhile, Signal requires a phone number, so it knows much more about your identity than A/I did.
Several fediverse instances have the same thing. It's just a freeform textbox saying why do you want an account.
If that's disqualifying, a lot of US government contractors are in trouble.
Seems like there are some pretty clear historical exceptions to this rule.
We have pardoned Jan 6ers convicted of "wielding force and violence" for political goals in goverment positions now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Hall_Putsch is uncomfortably close to the situation.
Pun intended?
https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/trumps-nspm-7-labels-commo...
Free speech has been around as a concept for two millenia, starting with Athenian democracy. Your relatively recent constitution didn't invent it and harping on your particular implementation is off-topic.
If they're really good they're about to start an identical but legally distinct organisation, but I think they're retiring.
Americans can be so self-absorbed sometimes, they apparently think they're the only ones with rights or that their constitution matters anywhere outside their borders. Whatever rules you have for whoever, they don't apply in Italy.
The point is that this move was an unacceptable violation of our rights here and our sovereignty, as defined by us. We don't like brash foreigners coming in and abusing systems we set up in the spirit of cooperation to extort us, no matter the stories they tell themselves.
This is precisely why Europe is working on initiatives to decouple from the American payment system as we speak.
As a result of this extraterritorial aggression I expect further deterioration of global US standing and with it, further weakening of its power. In a way, I even agree with your last sentence, but do be aware that precisely this is currently being worked on and you probably won't enjoy its results.
FWIW, I'm in favor of withdrawing the nuclear umbrella from Europe.
> The A/I Collective… manually vets all potential users for ideological affinity before granting them access to its infrastructure.
What is the truth behind that? Such behaviour would undermine A/I’s claim they are akin to Gmail if they explicitly are not a neutral ISP. After that, it becomes a question of degrees: what were their specific criteria for access to the platform?
Asking out of genuine curiosity. I wasn’t familiar with this group before today.
A lot of the state department’s claims of “violent groups” are BS but it also seems like a non-zero number of them are pretty violent organizations.
There’s a big difference between “we have designed our devices to be zero-knowledge but we act swiftly against violent/illegal activity if it’s discovered” versus “we actively endorse the views of our user base.”
This is true in Italy, the United States, Russia, China, and with yesterday's victory of AfD in Sachsen-Anhalt I see the trajectory of it becoming true in Germany too very soon.
And a lot of the comments in this so-called community of so-called hackers are very disheartening, have any of you even read the Hackers Manifesto? Are you just going to shut your eyes in front of the evidence, as long as your pockets and bellies are full?
The mere fact that revolution exists disproves this statement.
Punish those trying to stop it by coming back stronger. Spin up in a few new countries if you have to.
Friends and I have been giving out free shell accounts, service hosting, and mentorship for anon randos for over 25 years. Apparently this makes us cyber-terrorists. Neat!
We have had our infrastructure taken from us many times, and quickly come back online, often in a new country, every time.
Looking forward to 25 more years of people trying to kill us. Every attempt makes us stronger and smarter.
https://www.inventati.org/donate
Should have focused on Monero donations from the get-go. Banks are a plague. Like what is a group like this using banks for or at least diversifying??
It's like choosing not to use E2EE.
It's not even left political groups that get debanked or screwed—it's everyone often.
Even GrapheneOS, but intelligently, they use crypto heavily:
>Unfortunately, PayPal permanently locked our GrapheneOS Foundation account today. No reason has been provided for the account being locked. All we've done is accept donations. We added our bank account information yesterday in order to begin withdrawing money and it was locked.
https://xprivate.lol/GrapheneOS/status/1684663777273233408
https://xprivate.lol/GrapheneOS/search?f=tweets&q=Pay+monero...
If anyone from A/I is reading this know you always have a place to stay/eat if you need it
How will that be if the resistance is not visible to the public. What are all the people using their services supposed to do? I’m guessing there are plans to reform in a few years. Why is the Italian government not protecting them?
This is exactly where the power structures want the struggle to be , online, with no real consequences that matter.
The best thing that could happen to the internet and society would be that it would be absolutely illegal to post anything inciting resistance or change of any kind on the internet.
Then, the resistance would go back to being real people in real rooms, secrets and whispers and actual plots to effect change in society for a more equitable and prosperous human future.
Because that’s how real change takes place. The powerful don’t try to make change by posting on instagram. (Advertisement and PR of course, but it’s not the organizational nexus) they gather in conference rooms, talk in person, and have social gatherings where they decide your future.
When they do use the internet to coordinate, it’s not in public forums, it’s encrypted communications, targeted and limited in scope.
The internet is useful, of course, and encrypted communication in private groups, even darkweb resources. But thinking you can use the official structure of the internet (public domain infrastructure, dns, walled gardens) as a primary means of subverting the dominant paradigm is foolish at best, suicidally counterproductive on the normative.
The internet was once subversive in and of itself. It no longer is. Now you’re just wearing signs at the mall.
The revolution thrives underground, not out in the open.
Underground resistance forms out of existing "underground" social networks - social clubs, friends, people who know each other through any means. There's no longer any underground socialising at scale. We use the internet for it, where talk of resistance is strictly banned.
Even when you talk offline it's monitored. If you talk in the vicinity of an LG TV, it's converting your speech to text and uploading it to their servers, ostensibly for AI training.
It’s actually not that hard to go to places where phones, cameras, and internet access is banned or heavily discouraged, and guess what? It’s just people talking to each other, like we did up until the mid 90s. Just providing a technology free context is enough to get people to talk to each other.
I am a huge technology freak, but I can’t reasonably deny what I see, and that is that communications technology, in its present form, has been a terrible disaster for human communication because it made it effortless.
As it turns out, making it effortless also made people not value it at an interpersonal level, and to lessen the value of all of the cultural machinery that hinges on communication ( and the effort of it) as a central pivot.
Every step that makes communication more instantaneous and effortless undermines the value of character, honesty, and accountability.
Follow this and you can see how this has brought us to where we are today, step by step, starting with the telegraph.
The Italian police wiretapped them for one year without them knowing.
Can you share the source? I don't have it.
Note: one big issue in the whole event is that this prosecution is happening without a transparent judgement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autistici/Inventati
Italian Postal Police wiretapping (2004–2005)
It is also not like Palestinian activism is blocked on X, despite people here saying that only Nazis are on X and everything is censored:
https://x.com/intifada
While this is very heavy handed censorship, there are plenty of ways around it.
I think we can all see the potential problems with this, even if a specific group is awful.
“The specific claim: a far-left media group that describes itself as a “tool” for militants to share information “to be acted upon” used A/I’s services to publish communiqués and calls to action for U.S.-designated terrorist groups, including FAI/FRI, the IRGC, Hamas, Hizballah, ELN, NPA, PFLP, and PIJ. That same media group was cited in a federal complaint against a domestic terrorist sentenced to 19 years for attacking a federal building and a police car with IEDs.”
And what about signal? I am pretty sure many violent/terrorist groups use it too.
I don't have an opinion about this group, because I didn't even know it existed. But, like often with things related to the free speech, I think this topic is more complex than you make it out to be.
I do not think you can meaningfully fit them in a left vs right classification. There are many groups in the world that take bits from left and right. There are ethno-nationalist communists, for examlle.
That why you'll see russia, iranian, marxist, and anarchist supporters/ideologies all using the same talking points.
You must be thinking of progressives who merely want free healthcare. Sure, an average bernie fan who wants some more government programs doesn't want the USA to fail. Instead, I am talking about the campists, the far lefties, or the "tankies" that they are sometimes called.
Yes, those things harm the USA, to explicitly be doing things like supporting the russian war on our allies.
so you don't agree with this? you're saying the far-right and far-left terrorist orgs will support each other?
I am saying that far left people put out support for what are arguably far right, religious extremist groups yes.
The labels of left and right get blurred, also. The people are who are right and support russia's invasion of ukraine, for example, often use very similar rhetoric to what supposedly far left people also use.
Its very similar talking points. Very similar arguments. The only main difference is that the far right will say they think jews control the world, whereas the far left will make the same exact argument about "zionists" instead.
But often time the exact argument, word for work will be the same, with only a single word replaced. Even stuff like "ZOG", which used to be vocabulary only used by neonazis is now being used by all sorts of people.
Basically every movement/organization on earth has activists who support their activities, why would Hamas be any different? There are people everywhere who don't mind violence/killing and there are people everywhere who are anti-semitic. You think the intersection of those two cohorts is empty?
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-68275185
It's true that a lot of radical leftists do "critical support" for Hamas, just like they used to with the IRA or ETA. But that's the same thing as the US government supporting Islamists against the Soviet Union and Reagan funding right wing militias in Nicaragua.
It's defending a resistance movement on some parts of their agenda even if you disagree with the rest, because you think they're fighting for a good cause against a common enemy.
Some Hamas leaders, individuals within the party, want to massacre Jewish villages to drive all Jews out of Palestine. Almost no one in the student protests was defending that. But when it's the other way around all the Western leaders rush to defend the Israeli government saying it's just two insane ministers in a big cabinet and the rest will talk them into submission. That's clearly not true when you see a lot of their ideas getting implemented.
If the conflict was just Israel against Hamas it would be one of the situations where everybody involved sucks and there's no clear answer to anything so you should stay neutral. But the Israeli government is treating it as a war against Palestine where they allow their soldiers to rape and kill civilians, you can hear generals publicly setting kill targets and "security" policies that were already close to Apartheid level are getting stricter every week. They see every Arab as a legitimate target.
That tips the balance to the point where you can argue that supporting any resistance, even violent nationalist Hamas, is the only right move.
This conversation is basically the "it's not happening" > "it might be happening" > "it's happening and it's good actually" meme, though admittedly not by one person.
Fastball here is the only one that wasn't triggered by this observation.
Because "pro-Hamas activists" don't exist.
By your definition, then, Substack should be labelled as a terrorist organization and shutdown, yes?
And I don’t see anyone hand wringing about that list of bad guys. Calling some of them “left” is pretty ridiculous in the first place.
That part sounds a little like telling on oneself.
Is that Hezbollah's little brother?
Are the Dutch more clarifying for you?
https://pt.icct.nl/article/hizballah-africa
Or how about the Brits?
https://search-uk-sanctions-list.service.gov.uk/designations...
A worldview of "America dumb" is a boring way to go through life, especially with topics about which you clearly have a very limited understanding.
They will fabricate anything to justify their thinly veiled intentions.
Otherwise there is a way to look at this as A/I getting away scot-free for failing to administer their policies, failing to hold bad actors accountable and ultimately letting down individuals and organizations who lawfully used their services.
I'm also not surprised that A/I themselves never anticipated something like this happening and did not have some sort of protocol in place to deal with it. They had 25 years to do so.
https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...
It means the government won.
Edit: just so we are clear, I’ve no idea what A/I is, the linked page gave no details, nor do the current top comments. The current top comment is rambling about free shell accounts and stuff. The ones I read after that were mourning the loss of this mysterious site/service/something. Does anyone want to clueinthe rest of us?
From what I could gather, it seems various governments accused them of deliberately providing infrastructure to groups whose violent activities they supported, such as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), with communications associated with railway sabotage, attacks on energy infrastructure and the “Jane’s Revenge” arson campaign (whatever the hell that is).
Here’s a snippet I found on the net: "Italian police installed a server backdoor in 2004 during an investigation into the anarchist collective Crocenera. It was discovered in 2005. According to contemporary EDRi reporting, the access potentially exposed communications belonging to thousands of unrelated users; EDRi explicitly noted that actual collection of unrelated data had not been proven. EDRi’s contemporary report"
Huge disclaimer on this, since it’s just my musings: This might be one of the situations where both sides are in the wrong. It’s possible that A/I willfully turned a blind eye to actual illegal activity by its users, and refused to cooperate with legal investigations. At the same time, various governments, including mine, overreacted and behaved unethically and maybe even illegally because A/I “didn’t want to play ball.”
Just speculation. But the fact that I can’t easily find concrete examples of what A/I supposedly did wrong makes me inclined to feel sympathy for them. I hate unspecific allegations like “facilitation of problematic and terroristic-adjacent activities.” That’s some 1984-ish bullshit.
I have no clue what I’m talking about here, though. Strange situation and too little information...
So, yeah, it might be true. But I find no concrete examples of what bad stuff A/I themselves did, just their users. Personally, I would like for there to be at least SOME concrete examples. Like, “This convicted terrorist had a blog on their infrastructure, and A/I refused to hand over data they had, even when presented with a valid court order.” Or something like that. Is it too much to ask that the government provide some concrete evidence, not just abstract vage accusations, when doing something as drastic as designating someone a terrorist organization? It would seem so...
This is a knock on the state.gov item, not your comment. Your comment was good.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260826145332/https://www.autis...
"We provide our services strictly for non-commercial use, in order to provide support exclusively to individuals or groups we feel we have an affinity with. In order to verify the existence of these pre-conditions, each and every service request is processed manually by one of our volunteers and is in a dialogical form. All requests are anonymized and will be destroyed."
Anonymized how? Before the first contact? After the conversation?
If anyone here wants to set up a similar service: This is patently stupid for an ISP to attempt.
All that demonstrates is that they operated a public email/messaging server. One could have coordinated the exact same things using ProtonMail or Signal.
Give me a break. Ends to not justify all means. This is a completely appropriate response by the state department.
And allude to specific incidents without links? WTF?
I mean, the capitalist system is a barbaric system with defenders that do make opposition illegal...
How about workers rights? Slavery? Any progress that you'd think of as civilizing was not achieved without blood.
See also the Velvet Revolution for a pretty large shift away from totalitarianism without any deaths.
You could say that about anything classified as human progress. How did we improve things so that people could have electricity and safety? At the cost of deaths and suffering by everyone who built the Hoover Dam and similar projects. The same goes for "stop killing patients by going dirty from corpses to the delivery room," even when we knew it was unsafe. There is always death and blood related to any topic. How do you think you got the device you are communicating with? Through the death and suffering of someone in Congo, mining cobalt, and someone working themselves to death in a factory.
I have lived through the normalization of gay rights in Norway, and saying that it was a process marked by blood and suffering is moronic. It was painful, unnecessary, overdue, and many other things. But saying that it was a bloody conflict is just not true, at least not any more than many other progressive movements. So progress doesn't have to be violent.
You could say that this is not the lived experience of many people, and that is true. But that doesn’t automatically mean it has to be so for everybody, and it does not have to be inevitable for any cause. It’s not statistically more violent than many other things.
I’m getting tired of the violent and angry rhetoric people spew without pushback. Stop idealizing and glorifying violence and conflict to solve any problem. It seems more and more to me that this is violent ideation first, with the cause being secondary.
The only thing the oppressed can do is to be uncomfortable, organize, and not let the system claim their souls and bodies. The only thing the system does is perpetuate itself, inflicting violence to the oppressed, in an endless spiral towards the bottom.
Sad to see big bro tech and AI skynet is winning the war.
They showed up as actors in my commune where I lived (it was open-to-join, that was the mistake I made among being naive publically thinking truth prevails). I found after that the many past abuses of our government have not stopped and simply adopted to the modern age. Organizations whose interest it is to protect their shadow interests care not about what’s actually good for Americans, their interests are for maintaining status quo.
Status quo supports what - questioning AI and attempting to reverse the power structures or following along obediantly without question? I always wondered if my commentary led me to be put into a database of some kind. After Formerly holding a clearance, and letting it lapse, I’m recently reapplying and let’s see if “calling a government organization a terrorist org” discounts me from that. After reading the article I wouldn’t be surprised if like school yard bullies a leader in the orgs with power respond to viral accusers by marking them in a database as terrorists. Edit; please don’t accuse me of having mental health issues, I’m fine and I am working with my senators office and a “investigatory” agency to look into the abuses. I don’t yet feel hopeful the 3 petter org will reveal anything tho about my case due to security reasons.
Claiming your root is more secure isn't enough, what can people DO with it and WHY should they care? I've ranted enough about this to deaf ears over a half decade to no avail. Even if Dap doesn't end up being the first credible alt-root, I do hope something appears and is not immediately linked to (objectively) illegal/evil activity.
----
0: For example, if HN bans you, shadowbans you, makes your posts dead by default, flags, or downvotes, that's all free speech.
For a large part I see people using digital platforms as a primary method of expressing their thoughts and opinions. Governments in both the US and the EU have imposed restrictions on what platforms may host. I think we have not reconciled yet how to reinterpret free speech online.
Im no expert on free speech, of free speech absolutism, so please let inform me :)
Freedom of association and freedom of speech go hand in hand. You can say whatever you like. You should not be arrested for it. People may choose not to associate with you, or not to do business with you, or not to amplify your speech by hosting it for you.
The difference is that the ownership of HN has their OWN freedom to choose who they let post on here, and what they let be posted.
This is known as the 'Freedom of Association': The right to come together with other people to collectively express, promote, or pursue their common interest. This right also includes the right to accept or decline membership in the group for whatever reason they want. HN can choose to only allow whatever they choose on their site.
In the United States, this right is actually established (according to court rulings) by the same First Amendment that establishes the right to free speech.
The right to free speech does not require a private individual or company give you a platform to make your speech.
Personally, I don't consider paid speech to be free speech, and I don't consider corporations to by humans, but the supreme court does.
Remember, facts aren't real, there is no truth, and crime is legal (in the current "Justice" Dept).
But things like criticising governments, questioning political or economic paradigms, or just making fun of powerful people, should always be legal and protected.
I get the idea behind banning hate speech, but it gets really tricky when you try to think how to define and enforce it. Everyone agrees you need to be able to criticize groups that you don't like, so what makes it cross the line to hate speech (besides calls to violence, which would fall under the 'threats' category anyway)?
The worry is always that if you carve out an exception to free speech to protect vulnerable groups from harassment, how do you stop a future government from expanding those groups to include their political allies?
But what about similar speech against powerful groups, like billionaires? Well, they're not vulnerable or marginalised, they already have a disproportionally large voice, so they're not easily silenced. And of course being a billionaire is a choice; they can abdicate from their wealth in a way people can't do from their gender or ethnic group. So it's not the same. That said, calls for violence against them might still count as hate speech or be considered specific enough to count as threats.
There is obviously some fuzziness, but there also is with other limits to free speech, and there are courts to ultimately adjudicate that.
My worry is that I can easily see an administration like the current US one claiming that MAGA Americans are the most vulnerable in the country, and they need to be protected.
Wrong. HN is not "censoring" you at all, which requires engaging in violence (or threat of violence) against you to inhibit you from speaking in public. HN is literally engaging in Free Speech itself. Take arguably the most fundamental free speech activity in a democracy: advocating to your peers for the candidate you wish to vote for and have elected to represent you. You've researched and listened to Alice, Bob and Carol. You decide the best is Alice, and to show your support you do the quintessential thing and put out a Vote For Alice lawn sign on your lawn. That's obviously free speech right? Now what if instead some volunteer from Alice's election team comes by and asks you if they can put up a sign on your property, and you say yes. That too clearly involves your free speech rights, even if you didn't pay for the sign. Now say Bob & Carol's campaigns turn up, and they ask to put up signs on your lawn too. You don't support them and say no. Have you censored them? Of course not, that's ridiculous. Free speech isn't "everything is equal nothing matters", everyone is trying collectively to iterate towards truth and value by making their cases and listening, without general use of force. To say that "I think this idea/person/item is the best choice" by definition is exclusionary, it's also saying "I think all the other ideas/persons/items are NOT the best choice". It can also simply be "I wish to engage with these subjects, not those". You can make a forum dedicated to airplanes & cats, and ban anyone who starts threads on boats & lizards. You may have nothing whatsoever against boats or lizards, but that's not what you personally want to focus on on your own forum you're paying for.
Hacker News is the private property of its owners. They have their own free speech rights. Exercising those rights is not censorship.
Others in turn are free to use their property and/or their voice on public property to make their cases, and they can try to convince you and vice versa. And there can be social consequences, if someone really dislikes your speech maybe they don't invite you to dinner anymore and urge others to do the same, who might agree (or go the other way, or just ignore it). Humans can get passionate sometimes. But by keeping violence out of the whole thing outside of narrow exceptions that undermine the approach itself, room is preserved for minds to be changed and rifts mended years or even decades later, and for ideas to come back around if someone cares enough.
Government enforcing things though always involves violence, either directly or one or more orders removed. But a general monopoly on the legitimate use of force is a defining feature of government. If government doesn't like Alice, and tells you take down the sign, or else, that's fundamental infringement. They're closing down the whole cycle (if a private person did that it'd also be a bunch of other crimes AND infringement, because private persons are not allowed to use violence against others at all by default outside of narrow exceptions). And if government tells you "oh you can leave up the sign about Alice, but it's not fair you censor Bob & Carol, you must put up signs for them too. Or else." that'd be equally infringing censorship. If everyone has a sign, it's the same message as nobody having one. It's still suppressing "I think Alice is the best choice".
>For a large part I see people using digital platforms as a primary method of expressing their thoughts and opinions.
It is easier and cheaper than any point in human history to put up your own website, including your own forum to try to form a community around. You have no right to an audience though.
>Governments in both the US and the EU have imposed restrictions on what platforms may host.
What? What restriction has government in the US imposed beyond the long standing and unchanged exceptions that prove the rule (which essentially boil down to threats of violence, comms integral to crime, defamation AFTER a court case to prove it, serious violations of personal self with zero public value like CSAM, and purely commercial speech engaging in fraud)?
>I think we have not reconciled yet how to reinterpret free speech online.
There is nothing to reinterpret. We've gotten it fine since the passage of Section 230. The problem are constant efforts to suppress what we've already got, in some cases coupled with completely orthogonal issues like failure to enforce ancient anti-trust legislation.
Testosterone down 50% since 1970.
Childishness up slightly more than that.
Isn't that the opposite of this?
But you've given me quite an interesting endocrinology research project here. Last I heard, the root cause of the drop remains unknown. (And it's still dropping.)
I hope I'll live until their fascist phase ends & historians can properly investigate all the immoral and illegal ways they've been influencing the population. My prediction is that they've scaled Cambridge Analytica to a level that'll make you sick.
The only purpose this rhetoric serves is to justify using the power of government to silence opponents the next time your side happens to be in power.
The libertarian Internet was a mistake and the world will be a better place when it's gone.
In criticizing their inconsistencies, you are highlighting and simultaneously missing your own inconsistencies.
> > If you believe in civil liberties as rights and ideals, your belief shouldn't stop at borders.
If you believe in civil liberties as rights and ideals, your belief shouldn't stop at money.
Either the right extends everywhere, including money, or it doesn't.
It's OK to say you wish a politician was dead. It's not OK to pay someone to kill them. It's OK to say that you support some criminal activity (let's say Luigi), but it's not OK to offer direct financial support for their crimes.
Both actions are equivalent, as such words are (social and/or political) capital bounties offered to the masses in return for fulfilling the death of said politician.
Capital always exists, even in the form of words. To deny a variant of capital whilst allowing another variant is inconsistent/doublespeak.
Just because it's not printed onto a piece of denominated paper, doesn't mean that such capital doesn't exist.
Neither the law nor common interpretation of words agrees with this. There is a significant and crucial difference between words and actions.
The difference is artificial, and delusionally blinds itself to the base reality that social/political capital exists.
Again, just because there isn't a cash figure attached to that bounty, doesn't mean that a reward hasn't been attached to it in the form of social/political prestige.
That being said, it is somewhat humorous how you're confirming the stereotypes that apparently even that needs guns and violence over there somehow?
The crowd that claims to be in favor of free speech should be in favor of free speech for everyone, not just US citizens. This thread isn't about the government - it's about how HN's very vocal "free speech" crowd are actually libertarians who want to say awful things and not get called out rather than people who stand up for the concept of free speech in general.
Let your own countries defend their own "free speech" rights. The UN cannot defend it for you, and you cannot defend it for yourself.
And you wonder why people consider that both ugly and simultaneously ridiculous?
2 different rules it seems.
https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...
Apparently they provide the digital infrastructure for violent Antifa cells and because of a 9/11 related executive order, the A/I is able to be branded a sponsor of terrorism.
I guess this makes it a crime to give them money or provide aid to them (if you are a US citizen).
EDIT: who is downvoting and why? The 2nd sentence in the PR says "Autistici/Inventati (A/I Collective) is an Italy-based extremist group that builds and operates the digital infrastructure for violent Antifa cells and other far-left militants across the world" Are you mad that I quote the article or mad that you disagree with Trump? In either case, why are you downvoting me exactly? I am genuinely curious.
In what way is Trump socialist? Even if you think he's trying to reduce the US to one race (presumably one of the European nationalities? Which is insane to think on its own), he's actively opposed to socialism and generally opposed to government control of industries. People using the term fascism have no idea what it actually means.
Why don't you enlighten us then if you have some bEtTeR definition of fascism?
I'm not sure what the 14 points of fascism are but it appears to be a modern work that came out in the 90's. I would encourage you to read books from the time period; the Nazis were very clear the purpose of the national socialist party was to create a socialist economy, and they believed a "shared blood" (as they called it, meaning genetically similar population) was needed for a successful socialist economy (otherwise people would disagree on culture and politics too much to have shared ownership over industry and society). This was the core motivation behind their party and why they made the decisions they did. I'm unaware of serious historians who don't, at least partially, think this way.
Also I'm sorry but this whole thread is a bit off-topic and I'm not going to keep responding. I would encourage you to continue to research the topic though
By what definition?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism
"It is characterized by a hatred for liberalism, socialism, democracy, internationalism and the parliamentary system;" / "It opposes communism, socialism, pluralism, individual rights and equality, and democratic government" / "Fascist nationalism is reactionary in that it entails implacable hostility to socialism and feminism" / "Fascism, at any rate the German version, is a form of capitalism that borrows from Socialism just such features as will make it efficient for war purposes... It is a planned system geared to a definite purpose, world-conquest, and not allowing any private interest, either of capitalist or worker, to stand in its way."
Even Mussolini named fascism as something standing against socialism.
So, what definition are you thinking of?
> I'm unaware of serious historians who don't, at least partially, think this way.
So simply cite the serious historians who think that?
- Taking administration propaganda pieces at face value (such as the batshit insane page you linked to)
- Referring to "violent antifa cells". That's the spin Trump has been trying to put on the groups of people who have been resisting fascism. (Do you know what "antifa" stands for?)
Yes I am well aware of what antifa means.
> Oregon-based Rose City Antifa has relied on A/I Collective tools and services to organize and incite violent and criminal acts domestically, including an attack on Customs and Border Patrol helicopters that led to a federal indictment. Rose City Antifa also used A/I Collective tools and services to disseminate doxing lists and release illegally obtained personal information of Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement, along with calls for targeted attacks on ICE agents in the streets and “in their homes.”
At the very beginning of his first mandate, when he lied about something as trivial as the size of the crowd during his inauguration, and kept to his lies despite absolute evidence to the contrary, never showing any hesitation, second thoughts, or remorse, Trump showed everyone the way ahead.
Do not look at facts. Decide what you want to be true, and act like it is true. Do this every day of every year. In the beginning, people will object; do not get into a debate with them, rather continue making up lies, bigger ones.
I remember seeing videos of a tsunami for the first time. I imagined a huge wave that destroyed everything. It was nothing like that. It started slowly. The water level rose, a few waves went over a wall and onto streets, But the water kept coming, and coming, destroying everything that stood in its path, and in a matter of minutes it was the ocean where before there was a city.
I really worry about the future of free and open expression over the next few years.
I'm sure they're aware who they are hosting, at least blog wise. We're not talking about a massive company with no ideological affiliation, they vet who they provide access to before they do so, so in many ways it is more of a partnership than simply providing services. Not that necessarily I think it was worth labelling the organization themselves terrorists, but it still isn't something that should be whitewashed.
How long do you think you could resist a tier-1 nation state coming after you on terrorism charges?
I don't know, if we didn't have "anti-abortion pregnancy crisis centers", the firebombs would be kind of irrelevant
What kind exactly?
Check the <li> near the bottom. Some are named, such as Armed Proletarian Justice, Revolutionary Class Self-Defense, and Jane’s Revenge, but some unnamed ones as well (at least their actions have been described).
How are the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq doing?
A/I wasn't like protonmail; they specifically provided IT support to terrorist groups, who would often be violent and would sometimes kill people. I mean to thoroughly vet your users and then make the services anonymous is a wild thing to do, all while encouraging violent users to use your site.
like?