Avatar
plantimals
dd81a8bacbab0b5c3007d1672fb8301383b4e9583d431835985057223eb298a5
ΔC https://drss.io -- bringing back the republic of blogs. and onramp for bringing RSS content, including podcasts, into NOSTR https://npub.dev -- configure your outbox https://npub.blog -- experimenting with reading articles in a client-side only setup

> he does only what is his to do, and considers constantly what the universe has in store for him - doing his best, and trusting that all is for the best. for we carry our fate with us, and it carries us.

gm ☕

speed reading is a shitcoin

that's reasonable. at least get people thinking about what they want in a browser, rather than putting down roots in whatever they landed in by accident.

they certainly could succeed in this project, but it will more likely than not be kyc'd inside and out, with no privacy permitted against the 'zon.

reminds me of the old days of nostr.

"testing..."

"hello from nostril...."

shout out to #[0] , #[1] mentioned alphama at #nostrica

awesome. combat never gets old. it is by far the world's best drinking game. you lose a round, you drink.

Isaiah Berlin's "Two Concepts of Liberty"

https://archive.org/details/Two_Concepts_Of_Liberty_Isaiah_Berlin_1958.pdf/

he distinguishes negative liberty, freedom from, vs positive liberty, freedom to, and discusses their domains.

examples:

negative liberty: right to be free from interference when associating voluntarily with others

positive liberty: right to affordable housing

a very useful framing for many common disputes

#pleblibrary

Replying to Avatar Mike Brock

When people talk about the importance of centralization, I believe that most people take the existence of an open internet for granted. Especially bitcoiners. And especially the kind of bitcoiners who talk openly about welcoming the collapse of American political institutions.

Perhaps the most important thing to consider when you’re engaging of the mental gymnastics of what could happen in a counterfactual scenario where the US government were to collapse — which I see a lot of people around these parts suggest would be some kind of deliverance, and that freedom would blossom from every town, city and hamlet, and the winds of bitcoin-fueled prosperity would sweep through and bring spontaneous order to all.

There’s so many suspect assumptions in the view that the collapse of Western liberal democracy would lead to something better that it would be impossible in enumerate in a single note. But perhaps the most important one to consider is: why are you so sure a tyrannical regime wouldn’t take its place? Also, why are you so sure that you can use your internet-bound money to resist them?

As far as that second question goes, I’d suggest that such a regime seizing control of the internet in the US in a comprehensive way would not be difficult. In fact, there’s only two or three major broadband providers in the US left today. Secondly, about five companies, who run data centers and cloud services control over 80% of the daily traffic in the internet. Thirdly, the global interconnects to and from the United States which run through undersea cables could be *easily* severed if there was political will to do so.

My argument to those who are so confident we could sit back, grab popcorn, and enjoy the unwinding of Western institutions, and hand out copies of the bitcoin whitepaper and wait for emergent prosperity to kick-in, requires taking so much for granted that it makes my head spin.

I put this kind of thinking on the level of say, liberal reformers who made the terrible mistake of lining up behind the Ayatollah in the Iranian revolution as a consensus opposition leader. Or more contemporaneously, the liberal protesters in the Arab Spring who successfully brought down governments, only to find themselves on the wrong side of the power vacuum.

I mean I think it’s kind of nuts that some people think I’m a “contrarian” when I say things like this, but I’ll make the point anyways: I think bitcoin’s success is pretty tied to the continuance of liberal democratic governance for all the above reasons.

this is spot on. we need a mix of foxes and hedgehogs to have a functional society. bitcoin can induce rampant hedgehogism in an unproductive way. it's one slider on the panel of what makes a society functional. I read this into the humility mentioned by @odell

nostr is hardened by this heat. I love that "bitcoin twitter" sounds weird to my ears now. sovereign information distribution will turn out to be crucial.

"The West is preparing to add its fables to those of the East. The valleys of the Ganges, the Nile, and the Rhine having yielded their crop, it remains to be seen what the valleys of the Amazon, the Plate, the Orinoco, the St. Lawrence, and the Mississippi will produce. Perchance, when, in the course of ages, American liberty has become a fiction of the past, — as it is to some extent a fiction of the present, — the poets of the world will be inspired by American mythology."

from "Walking" by Henry David Thoreau

is there at least a coherent position against nostr? we should try to understand it if so. don't have to agree, but good to know why.

I never would have known about it without constant shilling on RHR. thank you for the recommendation.

exactly. did you want to take sovereignty over your information flows, or did you want a different master?

no more rhyming, this time I mean it!