I struggle with this issue myself — the fear of all the “bad people” doing all this unconstitutional shit, that they’ll eventually come for me.
But I want to live my life with calm, purpose and resolve anyway. I don’t want to hide, and I don’t want to have one anonymous online persona where I’m the real me and a fake terrified one IRL that pretends to go along.
Way too many people in this space hoping to wait it out in the underground bunker while the world burns, maybe they can save themselves and their families in the citadel.
When instead the world is your citadel, and you either defend it openly or you lose it entirely.
I read a lot of headlines and stories, and the message is FEAR, FEAR, FEAR, BE AFRAID, LOOK HOW POWERFUL THE ENEMY IS, LOOK AT ALL THE WAYS THEY WILL VIOLATE YOUR RIGHTS, and the message is so often.
"Here are ways to hide and only pretend to comply in real life while secretly defying authority." It’s the Anne Frank model of resistance, hiding in the basement while any compromise of op-sec can do you in and ruin you.
The alternative — the one that wins IMO — is the Rosa Parks model where you just stand up and say no, in plain sight, and they realize you are not going to budge, and the freedom tech gives you the power to resist, and they stand down.
Instead of hiding and worrying, you are relaxed and transparent.
You don’t broadcast your personal affairs to the world, but if someone wanted to find out roughly the net worth of some powerful person today in fiat that’s relatively easy to do, and that’s not a problem.
Disagree.
You *can* use conjoin if you want to, or have some important reason to, but the point of bitcoin IMO isn’t to be secretive about your wealth.
If you live in a nice house or drive a nice car, people will know you are wealthy anyway, and there is nothing wrong with being wealthy. You don’t need to hide it as though it’s something to be ashamed of.
The point of bitcoin isn’t to hide who you are or what you are doing, it’s to be able to be it and do it, whether or not people want to permit it or approve of it.
You want to hide it if the communists can otherwise seize it. But the point of BTC is that it’s not seizable by the communists and therefore defeats communism.
I see a lot of this “freedom tech” being touted as the ability to hide from he authorities, when instead I think the message should be it gives the power to be right in the sights of the authorities but they’re powerless to do anything about it.
The real fuck you isn’t, you don’t know who I am, it’s you know exactly who I am, and you can’t do shit about it. nostr:note1lr7cahh2mdsrpv3n3ftqw7nsuz3ql3r77z0y9k0f7raczky4hk4qy3hhv3
“I sincerely believe that if you think there's a solution, you're part of the problem.”
— George Carlin
(h/t my friend Robi who mentioned this at dinner last night.)
Maybe, but to the extent it is, it’s not following instructions at that point. To the extent it’s following instructions, it’s not complex.
AI will never master complex systems because AI can only do what it’s told, and the output of complex systems isn’t predictable from the inputs.
The AI is a dumb robot, and the complex system is a living thing.
Granted, we can’t master complex systems, either, but we have the advantage of being complex systems which allows us to get into the flow of them in a way a robot never can.
I live in Europe, and I was at first dreading the eID and CBDC they’re trotting out, but I think it will probably fail.
I could be wrong, but the current situation can’t hold. They can’t rack up this kind of debt relative to their productive capacity and not have the system collapse, so of course they’re going to try to seize control while they still have some power left. This isn’t some master plan, it’s overreach out of desperation. No one wants or needs this except them.
You should be happy when your opponent out of desperation makes a rash move he would not otherwise make. It means you are about to win if you don’t blow it and panic.
the eID is bullish for NOSTR, the CBDC is bullish for bitcoin.
And if I’m wrong, I’ll deal with that then. But for now I think this is basically a Hail Mary.
I tried to understand ethereum a few years ago. Read some posts on it, gave up.
Daughter was sick for a week, might have been covid, who knows, we didn’t test. Coughed in my face a bunch, and yesterday I felt a scratchy throat and tired.
So I gargled Lugols iodine, then did a bump of it in each nostril. (Iodine, not an actual bump).
By the end of the day, I felt normal, woke up today feeling normal.
Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but definitely felt like I was getting sick, and now (knock on wood) I feel fine.
The cameras on the cell malfunctioned and the guards on watch left their posts too.
Respectfully, the “conspiracy theory” trope is the low-effort path here.
Building something better is obviously good, but doing so is not mutually exclusive to entertaining hypotheses about the world as it exists to understand what’s happening and what’s at stake.
Starting drafting a post entitled Bitcoin Is Agency.
My thoughts aren’t organized enough yet, but had the idea that hope and fear are just positive and negative poles of passivity. You hope x and fear y. Same as fear not-x and hope not-y.
But agency is the opposite of both — you are taking part, assuming responsibility for your fate.
“Bitcoin is hope” per nostr:npub15dqlghlewk84wz3pkqqvzl2w2w36f97g89ljds8x6c094nlu02vqjllm5m isn’t quite right, unless you bought some and are waiting for the number to go up before trading it for something.
It’s agency.
Instead of waiting to withdraw your IOU from the bank with its permission, you actually possess the money yourself. You have traded the passive IOU for the active bearer instrument.
You can achieve final settlement without permission.
It’s easy to feel powerless in a world with printable money, astroturfed politics, insecure elections and endless propaganda. It’s easy to hope for world events to work out in your favor, for the right leaders to be elected, for the right policies to be enacted. Or to fear the opposite.
But what a contrast to acting with agency — creating something of value, interacting with the people you choose, and if it comes to it, disobeying the laws you find unjust and in violation of fundamental rights.
You don’t know what will happen, but you have a hand in your own fate.
Agency, not hope.
Interesting idea — seems like it should be easy to select that mode as an option at least, experiment with it.
Hope and fear are two sides of a coin.
The opposite of fear isn’t hope, it’s agency.
With respect to the gigachad nostr:npub15dqlghlewk84wz3pkqqvzl2w2w36f97g89ljds8x6c094nlu02vqjllm5m, Bitcoin isn’t hope, it’s agency.
There are two Orwellianisms that can justify virtually anything in our society: National Security and Public Health.
National Security is the foreign policy version. It’s ISIS and WMDs and why we must arm Ukraine without end. It’s why we can’t know sensitive information about how our government spends (and apparently is unable to account for) trillions of dollars, much of which is off the books and beyond scrutiny. It’s why Edward Snowden lives in exile and Julian Assange is in prison. It is the umbrella under which George Bush and Dick Cheney could spend $6 trillion, kill a million Iraqis, find no weapons of mass destruction and yet avoid accountability entirely. “It’s a matter of national security!”
Public Health is the domestic policy arm. It’s why we had “14 days to flatten the curve” that morphed into an emergency declaration that was not rescinded until more than three years later. It’s why we had lockdowns, mandatory masks and experimental mRNA injections. It’s why you needed to show your papers to enter a restaurant. It’s why the government transferred tens of billions in taxpayer money to Pfizer. If you ask why basic civil liberties were violated without your consent or input, the answer was “It’s a matter of public health!”
Virtually any encroachment on your rights, any expense can be justified by “National Security” or “Public Health.”
The pharmaceutical conglomerates are to public health as the arms manufacturers are to national security — massive for-profit operations fronting as our protectors from disease and foreign adversaries, respectively.
Does anyone not on the payroll really believe we are more safe from destabilizing the Middle East or Central America or waging proxy war with Russia? Is our military industrial complex truly concerned with protecting our borders from plausible foreign invasion, or is it instead creating new enemies by the millions while administering to its own geopolitical aims and enriching its stakeholders?
Is our medical industrial complex substantially different? The cholesterol-heart hypothesis has been destroyed, and yet every doctor tests for cholesterol, and statins (cholesterol-lowering drugs) remain among the most prescribed. The mRNA shot has killed thousands worldwide (this is not in dispute, even by the countries that mandated it!) in order to protect people against one particular kind of cold with an IFR of .15 percent (much lower among healthy people.)
Hospitals unnecessarily killed people by the thousands with ventilators during the height of the panic, and failed to treat bacterial pneumonia with antibiotics, something that was routine during prior flu seasons (apparently viruses weaken the immune system, and it’s the ensuing bacterial infection that’s responsible for much of the mortality.) Hell, the third leading cause of death in America is medical error, and these are only the errors to which they admit!
Does anyone wonder why the childhood vaccination schedule is up to 60 shots? Do you think the same medical system that brought you “if you get vaccinated, you won’t get covid,” has sufficient understanding of the complex system known as human immunity to intervene so aggressively in its development. Is it possible the epidemics of chronic disease, autoimmunity and, yes autism, are related to this heavy-handed (and highly profitable) meddling?
Now this is not to argue nation-states don’t need national defense or citizens within them don’t need medicine. There are such things as foreign invasions, and people really do get sick and need to be treated by competent professionals honoring their professional oaths. But these functions are now almost completely captured, and so long as that’s the case, the military industrial complex is, on balance, putting us at greater risk of attack, while the medical industrial one is making us sicker. And both are doing so while enriching themselves beyond belief and bankrupting both the state and the ordinary person.
More pertinent question is why are legacy media outlets calling attention to this now?
My guess is because they know only the most brainwashed still believe Biden is competent to be president, and it’s too small a group even to cheat-win an election with.
So he needs to be replaced, and they’re sowing the seeds. nostr:note1f365r98mt5lhtf4mw6zg4a0yst4dunwy27urrqt3wfa3hrave0kq9q6wce
From a walk in the Asturias last week: 
Had a sense of optimism while returning from my run this morning. The collapse of the fiat system won’t in and of itself be that bad. Certainly not as bad as in past collapses when people had no viable way to transact as a result.
People will still grow food and truck it into supermarkets. People will still build homes and maintain the electric grid. The paper (or digital) currency doesn’t change the underlying supply and demand for things of value.
The only thing that will change is the ledger. If there were no viable ledger, that would be a big problem, as there would be no incentive for people to work. But luckily there is a useful alternative ledger already up and running, that properly incentivized people will learn to use very quickly.
The real risk right now is the lengths to which those in charge of the fiat ledger will go as it’s collapsing. But even then, they will be incentivized to have *some* caution before it collapses, and once it’s too far gone, they’ll try to do insane things but find they lack the power.
There’s only a tiny window where they might do something truly crazy while they still have the power, and I think we’re in it now. But it’s closing rapidly.
They have already lost, and mercifully they won’t know it until their power is almost gone.