From April:
Substack was important during the pandemic because Twitter, Facebook et al. went all-in on censorship, while Substack remained tolerant of dissident speech. But, being centrally controlled, Substack is a half-measure. Yes, you can take the emails with you, but it’s still a social media company trying to keep you ensconced in its ecosystem to the point where you’re loath to leave. Moreover, most readers follow multiple Substacks replete with their payment information, so it’s not a trivial ask to get them to sign up and put credit card info into yet another platform.
The full measure is nostr, which is a protocol rather than a platform. I wrote about it on my site today:
4/27/23: Made a long Twitter thread on Twitter about the problems with Twitter. Ironic I'm linking back to it here, but I don't have anything against Twitter per see, except that it's a dystopian social credit-score hellscape run by the Antichrist himself. Seriously, though I still like Twitter (and Musk himself because he wouldn't be the Antichrist if you didn't like him!), but it's unwise to build your house on a weak foundation. That Twitter can ding me because other people (with whom I don't even interact) decide they don't like my posts, or because someone, who serially spread misinformation for years, unilaterally decided what I posted was "misinformation" makes it unstable. You can be arbitrarily rugged at any time and for no good reason.
To that end, I'm posting more here and also on nostr, which is a protocol, not a platform. The difference is no one controls it the way no one controls SMTP - - there is no one who can buy email itself and prevent you from sending any. Someone can own Gmail or Protonmail, but not email, and similarly someone can own Twitter or Facebook but not nostr. That means no social credit score, no censorship and a marketplace of ideas.
The problem for me is no one follows me there, so I'm posting into the void, but if I had even 50 followers, it would be worth it, and that's my aim for now. It's also IMO the future, and it's a good idea to get in early. I wish I had gotten into Twitter early, and I wish I hadn't waited until 2015 to start a podcast, but it's still early for nostr.
So long as you agree not to force inject or lock down your fellow citizen because someone in a lab coat told you to, happy to move on!
How do you know it’s an emergency? My experience with covid was I knew no one who died from it, and for me it was just a cold. And everything the government said was a lie, and everything they did made it worse.
The lesson for me is to ignore them sooner than I did. (I bought in for 8 months.)
BTW — they are still lying!
Meant to quote not re-post. Seems like similar things happening in every field — automating without understanding the base layers, then only interacting at the surface level.
It’s how you got 100 million midwits telling you to “Trust The Science” without knowing shit about how the scientific method works.
https://damus.io/note1fpn0qatk3usdtz45zzsrz9x9clmxs4za82ykzzh3mchjc59503xq5pqqxz
If you are willing to follow instructions of scientists, then the government will just order scientists to tell what they want you to do.
And they did even though it was a lie.
And you think I would go into quarantine just because someone in a lab coat said so? Why should I listen to you? What is I disagree and think it’s all bullshit just as it was with covid?
I’ve made many mistakes. One time while on LSD, my friends and I decided to watch Caligula. Huge mistake, traumatized all of us.
Imagine one year later if there were a violent crime problem, and the State determined (quite reasonably) that the perpetrators were mostly men. Let’s further imagine the State showed lowering testosterone in men reduced their tendency toward violence (I don’t know if this is really true, but stick with me.) The State might make a law requiring all men to inject a medicine that reduced testosterone for the good of society. If you refused, people could say: “Are you really choosing “muh freedom” over ending domestic violence, murder and rape?” It would be the same principle and, having already conceded your rights, you would be powerless to resist. So long as those in power deemed something in the public interest, the individual would have no defense.
Ah, okay, I see.
The example you give, though, is where the court system has to intervene to mandate the treatment, not to make an exception to it. That’s an edge case, and I suppose if someone were not of sound mind (also a tricky subject), you could get a court order to treat them.
But the default should not be mandates unless you get someone to let you off the hook.
I assumed everyone on this platform would basically be hard-core anti-mandated medicine, but I was mistaken. If there’s one mission I have after the last three years it’s not to orange pill people or purple pill them, but to persuade people that the knowledge required to mandate medical treatment on your fellow citizen is (a) not something we possess; and (b) not something we can ever possess because you’d need to know the medium and long-term, second and third and nth-order results of a complex system are simply impossible to game out.
Morever, the idea that you can violate someone’s rights “for the greater good” is the justification of every tyrant in history. The reason we have inalienable rights is ultitarian do-gooders will supply all manner of reasons why you need to do x, y and z.
Life is complex, and you cannot know the mind of God (or the Tao) or whatever you like to call it.
The only ethical road is humility and restraint.
I don’t see that as a coherent worldview. If you can be force-injected on the say-so of government officials, you not only don’t have property rights, you don’t have rights to your own bloodstream.
To the extent government can’t be trusted with the currency, why on earth would you trust them with the contents of your bloodstream and that of your kids?
This is not to say if you *do* trust them in a particular instance you shouldn’t be free to jab yourself, but that’s very different than forcing your fellow citizen to take medicine he doesn’t want.
Oh, great, I have some bitcoin, so the state can’t debase my savings arbitrarily. Oh wait, Fauci and Pfizer said there’s a pandemic! Guess we need to send soldiers to the houses of the non-compliant! At least they won’t be able to seize their bitcoin!
if the government owns your bloodstream but for a court granting you an exemption, you are enslaved. Mandated medicine is totally off limits in a free society.
you will never know for sure if a major disease “threatens” the human race, so you will be forcing medicine into people based on someone else’s commands. You will cede the right to other people’s bloodstreams simply because someone told you so.
I thought transaction fees were proposed as a solution mostly for when the halvings run out in 2140.
Forced medicine of any kind is evil. Even worse with a experimentual EUA one. Basic human rights were knowingly violated and in the end, this will kill more Israeli’s than foreign adversaries.
All true, but an elephant in the room is what the Israeli government did to its citizens via mRNA mandate too. Hard for me to believe they care very much about ordinary Israelis, either.
I’m not the nitty-gritty valuation model guy. I’m more the first-principles, larger idea, framing-the-discourse guy.
Axioms > Network Effects.
The axioms determine the power of the function. The network effects are merely the current output.
x ^ 2 is more powerful than 2x, but when x is 1, 2x wins out. At x = 2, the output is the same. But over time, x ^ 2 will win out.
Right now, it’s as though the dollar is at 100, but the function is 2x. BTC would only have to get to 15 to beat it.
I would say it’s the same reason the US within a century and a half became the most powerful country in the world even though Europe had much bigger network effects initially — the axioms (the Constitution) and the natural resources were better.
Skate to where the puck is going, not to where it’s been.
Sometimes I think I’m the oldest person on NOSTR (52).
I don’t mind, but going to guess the average age is about 30.
