Nostr Web Client

There is a common phrase: “he/she woke up today and chose violence”.

I like it. It is funny. But it is imperfect.

“Violence” is now a verbal defensive phrase that means too much. To “wake up and choose violence” in the modern parlance of people who know zero struggle means to choose public verbal opposition. Okay, sure. But not really.

I woke up today and chose rhetoric. Not violence.

I spent years doing mixed martial arts competitively. I know violence. I am trained in a dozen ways to choke someone out, and have been choked out in’s dozen ways. I have had a 200 pound male fireman try to beat me unconscious and fail to do so. Even that wasn’t really violence, since it was controlled. Assholes on my trailer park bus stop in my teenage years were violent.

Verbosity isn’t violence. It is rhetoric.

I woke up today and chose rhetoric. I woke up today and chose to defend noncustodial privacy tools with language and resources. Coordinating messages between entities shouldn’t be a crime per se.

Bitcoin is anti-fragile and will continue to be so, thanks to all the people who work hard for it. But it is not without a fight.

Privacy is necessary in a free society in the digital age. A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto made this clear three decades ago and is still true.

@IsabelSydow Queen of Shrimps (but u can call me Dan.) 1y ago

Speaking from experience, I have never chosen violence.

Violent assholes do the choosing when they prey on those of us who they know won't be able to hurt them enough when and if they fight back.

There are violence conducive words, but that's already part of the vocabulary. I believe "threats" defines those.

I feel like we've grown dividing ourselves even more nowadays. In general. Folks are not discussing, disagreeing, debating, attempting to prove points amicably anymore. They are all out war behind the keystrokes, othering each other very quickly by throwing labels and calling names.

This seems to be the tactic of those whose only winning strategy is to label themselves a victim immediately and pointing the finger at the other side, naming them a perpetrator because this "perpetrator" made them uncomfortable when demonstrating or proving the validity of their argument.

To someone like me, who by any set standards shouldn't be alive today, who lived and endured violence of the worse kind; this type of behaviour hurts victims like no other.

It tells you, people like this, either never heard of the story of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf," or did hear it... and they're purposely wearing others down so they can facilitate the wolf's work, helping the wolf by distracting and fomenting apathy in everyone, to keep them from stopping the wolf from slaughtering our lambs.

For the many of us choosing rhetoric, I guess we gotta find ourselves a set of strategies to be able to shield ourselves from being labeled as perpetrators when we're obviously not. We'll have to pick our battles, who we engage with... Learn to foresee (if possible at all) how productive the engagement will be, what is its merit. Because I do believe we can't give rhetoric and discussion up. They're a major part of communication and pillars of the free exchange and expression of ideas.

I sure hope that we don't only get the opportunities to be able to learn, organize and strategize our thoughts and words to improve our winning chances, as we're literally trying to save lives with many of the points we discuss. But I also hope we get to have and keep the platforms that encourage the open and free human behavior of communication and freedom of speech.

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