Tag Archives: quotes

15748

it keeps getting worse… i stopped reading the news, because all the news does, these days, is make me dispair for humanity, and feel like ALL the changes i have fought for, and ALL the actions that i have taken part in throughout my life have been for nothing. at this point, in my opinion, the direction this country is going, at this point, is backwards, and that at an ALARMING rate. i get the very distinct feeling that we are facing another situation like martin niemöller wrote his confession about, in 1946:

Als die Nazis die Kommunisten holten,
     habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Kommunist.

Als sie die Gewerkschafter holten, habe ich geschwiegen;
     ich war ja kein Gewerkschafter.

Als sie die Sozialdemokraten einsperrten, habe ich geschwiegen;
     ich war ja kein Sozialdemokrat.

Als sie die Juden einsperrten, habe ich geschwiegen;
     ich war ja kein Jude.

Als sie mich holten, gab es keinen mehr, der protestieren konnte.

except that instead of people who call themselves “nazis”, we have people who act JUST LIKE nazis, who call themselves republicans, and instead of communists, trade unionists, social democrats, and jews, we have LGBTQ+ people, autistic people, students, scientists and social workers, and immigrants.

and they’re going after so much stuff at once, with such vigor and determination, that, after #drumpf and his crew are out of office, it will take LITERALLY DECADES before we’re back to where we were in the late ’60s and early ’70s…

and I DON’T HAVE DECADES! i’ve got two, maybe three decades AT MOST, and who knows if we’re even going to be STARTED fixing things by then.

i REALLY DO NOT want to live in a world that is worse off than it was when i entered it. 😠

When they took the fourth amendment,
     I was quiet because I didn’t deal drugs.

When they took the sixth amendment,
     I was quiet because I was innocent.

When they took the second amendment,
     I was quiet because I didn’t own a gun.

Now they’ve taken the first amendment,
     and I can say nothing about it.

… 8/

I remember one time I was with a friend of mine who lives in New York also, and we went to go pick up his cousin — she’s lived on a farm in New Hampshire her whole life. Her family is this weird family that kept their kids on a farm — anyway, her parents finally died, so she got to leave, and so she came down to visit her cousin, my friend in the city, and so we picked her up at port authority bus station.

She had never been to any city before. And we’re picking her up at the Port Authority, that smelly hole of a place. We pick her up there and she’s just freaking out at New York. She’s never seen anything like it. And we pass this homeless guy and she sees him — I mean, we all passed him, but she saw him. She’s the only one who actually saw him. We didn’t — me and her cousin were like, “So? He’s supposed to be there. So what? There’s a perfectly good reason why that’s not me and it’s him. The right people always win, I’m sure of it.”

But, so there he is, and this dude was particularly homeless. He was one of those high-octane homeless, smelly, just piss smell, the unbelievable piss smell, just — he was piss. He didn’t just smell like piss, he was — when you piss, he comes out. And he had dreadlocks. Not cool-guy, medical-marijuana dreadlocks, just “human-neglect clumps” of hair. A clump of hair for every year that no one knew his name or cared.

His cousin immediately just gets “Oh, my God! Sir, are you okay? What happened?”

What happened? America happened.

What do you mean, “What happened?”

So she’s down there

“Sir, can we call someone?”

And me and my friend, we’re from New York, this is the crazy part, we immediately go to her. We start correcting her behavior like she’s doing something wrong.

“Why, is he okay?”

“No, no, he needs you desperately, that’s not the point. We just don’t do that here. You silly country girl.”
     — Louis CK

Where do you live? What religion? What race? What nationality?

Today these questions are considered logical. By 2001, it will occur that these questions are absurd, meaningless, illogical — anti-evolutionary. Elimination of each false premise brings about more and more wealth, and more and more time to do the important things. We must fly by the generalised principles governing the universe, and not by the ground rules, or the grind-him-down rules, of yesterday’s superstitions.

     — R. Buckminster Fuller, “I Seem To Be A Verb” – 1970

welp… we missed that one… 😐

regarding the shutdown of internet in egypt

In the spirit going back to Magna Carta, we require a principle that: No person or organization shall be deprived of their ability to connect to others at will without due process of law, with the presumption of innocence until found guilty. Neither governments nor corporations should be allowed to use disconnection from the Internet as a way of arbitrarily furthering their own aims.
     — Tim Berners-Lee

Egypt: Tor Use Skyrocketing as Users Route-Around Internet Blocks

they’ve got to realise that as soon as they shut down regular internet access, that would immediately drive initiative to gain alternative access…

i already use Tor and a couple of other anonymizing software packages, but i’m seriously thinking about things like freenet or openmesh

Communicate if Your Government Shuts Off Your Internet
3 Projects to Create a Government-less Internet
Get Internet Access When Your Government Shuts It Down