Really sad, and also a testament of the fact that as much as we think we try to be indipendent, eventually once somebody starts putting enough pressure on the people around you (and you turn from "a neutral customer" to "a liability") the path to isolation is very short.
And yes, they could relocate to TOR, I2P, use P2P websites, torrents, and only accept cryptos for donations. But eventually you'll need to put down a credit card on file to buy a domain, and that domain needs to be owned by somebody.
Njalla is not ICANN accredited, so they cannot register domains. They buy them and then lease them out to you.
The issue is, now they are the legal owners and liable for the content of the website, and they also support PayPal, which will absolutely drop them the moment they get sanctioned.
>But eventually you'll need to put down a credit card on file to buy a domain, and that domain needs to be owned by somebody.
You don't need to pay to host onion websites (.onion domains are free and have no central registry). Though that of course really limits the possible outreach, because most people are not used to browsing onionsites.
Could someone point me to some background on this whole incident or write a quick one? I don't know who they are or what's going on but it seems important.
"After 2005 we have been constantly pestered by prosecutors and security forces (and even by the Vatican! [4]) asking us to hand over users’ data and identities and we are proud to say we were always able to answer: we are sorry, but we do not have them."
This is tech guys supporting with infra real freedom of speech! even more important nowadays!
jumping to the violent antifa narrative means ignoring a lot of important things.
The US government is labeling anyone who says they're "anti fascist" as terrorists, and shut down a major Italian private email provider using that rationale.
The US Republican party has been inventing an increasingly elaborate alternate reality fiction in order to convince their voters to keep voting for policy positions that obviously work against those voters' own interests. One component of this alternate reality is a fictional terrorist organization called "antifa." They claim that anyone who does not align with their policies is a member of this organization. This allows them to use the anti-terrorism laws passed in the wake of 9/11 and similar incidents against their political opponents. The US government claims someone who used the A/I service was a member of this fictional organization, and used those anti-terrorism laws to declare that A/I is supporting terrorism and so threatened sanctions against the banks A/I was using. No access to banking means A/I is shutting down.
You're just not confronting reality, man. The President of the United States personally called for Gavin Newsom to be arrested in June 2025. In September of that year, in response to Newsom's post calling Gestapo chief Stephen Miller a fascist, Miller went on TV to complain that nobody is allowed to call him a fascist and Newsom was encouraging violence by doing so.
that's what a call a straw-man. NSPM-7 exists and is providing funding and direction for LEOs to target ideologically leftist organizations as tame as BLM or 50501 [0]
this, in combination with the rise of Flock, Clearview, Axon, and other mass-surveillance programs is leading us down an incredibly dark and Orwellian state - something that feels almost ludicrous given how anti-Big-Brother your average person is
They say "every accusation is a confession" yet I'm still continually surprised by accusations that I never thought would turn out to be confessions, turning out to be confessions. Like the Chinese surveillance state.
It seems to be a type of psychological projection - someone harbors an ideal like a surveillance state and assumes everyone else is harboring the same ideal so they accuse them.
I hope the Uyghur genocide accusation doesn't turn out to be a confession.
>voting for policy positions that obviously work against those voters' own interests
Delusions of grandeur / superiority complex much? Have you considered a posibility, that these voters just dont agree with your idea of what their best interests are?
>fictional terrorist organization called "antifa."
An organization so fictional, that just a few months back multiple members were convicted in a terrorist attack
For a group who's so bloody-minded about "words have meanings" about certain things, this whole "movement and affiliation and organization are all obviously exactly the same thing" claim is blatantly ridiculous.
When Republicans in the US communicate and sometimes coordinate with totalitarian international leaders, does it mean we get to label the whole thing as a single "international totalitarian organization"?
“Organization” is a stretch. Criminals? Sure. Violent thugs? Maybe.
The “terrorist” word, however, has been stretched and distorted for political ends. It seems like any crime motivated by political or religious ideology is now “terrorism”, and thus subject to much harsher punishment than those same crimes would normally receive.
By this definition, the Jan 6 rioters were terrorists - yet they received pardons.
The UK's position on Palestine Action is the poster child for this. Completely harmless old people holding placards have been prosecuted under terrorism legislation passed after 9/11. "Terrorist" has become a label applied to anyone opposing any government policy.
We need to roll back all those counter-terrorist laws in every Anglosphere country.
> Antifa defenders just hide behind the fact that the movement is decentralized and leaderless by design
Calling a movement an organization is a fiction, unless you live in an alternate reality. Should i consider you part of an organization because you tweeted a certain hashtag once? Are you the member of a band because you whistled a song on the subway? Are you in the military because you watched a Rambo movie when you were a teen?
“Autistici/Inventati (A/I) is an Italian hacktivist group that provides Internet communication services for left-wing activists. It was founded in 2001 by members of the anti-globalisation movement…”
This. When the US government decides to label you “terrorist organization”, it means that you are now targeted by the most potent state actor on earth, which will go as far as blowing up weddings in your neighborhood to stop you.
So unless you're willing to become a literal terrorist organization and die with a bunch of your friends in an uphill battle (not technically unwinnable, but at least lopsided and the casualties will be tremendous), the only option is to cave.
> violence or the threat of violence used as a weapon of intimidation or coercion
> especially: violent or destructive acts (such as bombing) committed by groups in order to intimidate a population or government into granting their demands
Now, which actor in this story does this sound like? The webhoster exercising their speech rights or the apparatus bombing schools and weddings in order to get their way?
It sounds like that until you realize that the baseline behavior is for countries that are not in NATO to be subservient to NATO. So, as you can see, it is the governments and populations that are coercing and intimidating themselves and NATO is helpfully returning them to normalcy.
I am biased here, as somebody who grew up next to an American military base in Iceland and had a pro-communist upbringing and learned to hate NATO (as well as the American imperialist agenda as a whole) from an early age.
I don‘t see a difference. I was told this when I was a child, and as I’ve grown up and seen more of the world (including by immigrating to the USA) I am more convinced then ever. In my eyes, there is no meaningful difference between USA and NATO.
There clearly is. Because NATO isn’t getting involved in America’s idiotic war of aggression and Trump is very upset about this. They’ve spent years being very upset about every other NATO nation’s spending, too.
So even if you don’t believe it, the U.S. clearly cares about NATO member behaviour and therefore recognizes a distinction.
They have been involved in pretty much all previous USA "idiotic wars of aggression", so while it may become useful in the future to make a distinction, it's also fair to appreciate that this distinction doesn't make a lot sense to a whole bunch of people.
The one time NATO was called on to defend a member was the U.S. asking for help after 9/11. And nobody but the UK followed them into Iraq, shortly after the Afghanistan war began. So there’s certainly strong history of NATO not just doing whatever the U.S. is up to.
I recall this time as a very strong refusal of the above miscategorization of NATO. Bush and his cronies had a whole “you’re with us or against us” tantrum when NATO didn’t follow. I think Americans even did some proto-Trump trolling with “freedom fries” and other nonsense.
This is simply false history. Every NATO member went to Afghanistan with the USA. Even Iceland despite not having a traditional army participated in the invasion.
As for Iraq: UK, Poland, Spain, Portugal, and Denmark provided soldiers to partake in the illegal invasion. Even Iceland participated in the propaganda war by putting them self on the farcical “Coalition the willing” along plenty of other NATO countries.
It is very hard to see NATO as anything other then an extension of USA‘s imperial ambitions. It is as if in the year 1986 you would look at the Warsaw pact and claim this is a pact of independent nations and has nothing to do with the interest of the Soviet Union.
I think your personal beliefs fit reality if you ignore the parts of reality that strongly refute it. That kind of mentality is getting popular these days. I'll leave you to it.
Which parts of my “personal believes” are wrong? And maybe this mentality is getting more popular because it is true. People are tired of being fed propaganda for Western imperialism and capitalism more broadly.
My last attempt to convince you: Ask your self, why did Iceland not vote in favor of a ban on nuclear weapons at the UN general assembly 2016? Why has Iceland still not signed and ratified the treaty? Why has no NATO member done so? Why are Austria and Ireland one of very few European nations to do so?
Aside from France and the UK, it is hard to find an answer here which does not include American imperialist agenda.
I think it's true that NATO is for most practical purposes an instrument of the US. But it's also true that there's a distinction between NATO and the US, and some other NATO members do have influence on NATO policy - most notably Turkey, which really complicated things for the US in relation to the Syrian civil war and the Azerbaijan - Armenia conflict.
Afghanistan: Every NATO member went because of article 5. The Taliban explicitly refused to comply when requested to hand over Bin Laden. This is as clear cut casus belli as it gets. And then Australia, South Korea, Malaysia, Azerbaijan and even Mongolia participated. How are those NATO? How is Mongolia even aligned with the US or under their influence in any way?
Iraq: Japan, Australia, Nicaragua, Philippines, Ukraine, Georgia... And I'm leaving like a dozen non-NATO countries, aligned AND unaligned with the US, that took part in the invasion or post-invasion missions. I don't agree with it, and while there were numerous lies to sell the invasion, equally numerous countries were unhappy about UNSCR 1441 being treated like toilet paper by the UN itself. Moreover, actual major NATO countries like Germany or France were diametrically opposed to the invasion and told the US to take a hike.
When you hold a hammer everything looks like a nail.
Not arguing in favor of banning A/I, but the US administration claims A/I email services were used to coordinate sabotage actions. I mean, that's as stupid as saying telephone networks or paper sheets were used to coordinate sabotage actions.
Furthermore, the noblogs.org platform (previously hosted by A/I) is used to host a lot of politically-motivated content, including news and statements by various resistance groups across the world, which of course is considered terrorist by the USA, but legally should fall under freedom of the press.
> So unless you're willing to become a literal terrorist organization and die with a bunch of your friends in an uphill battle (not technically unwinnable, but at least lopsided and the casualties will be tremendous), the only option is to cave.
Honestly, the internet has made folks so lazy. It's very ironic that the most "revolutionary" act taken recently (January 6) was actually done by the far-right. Yeah: if you believe in something, you need to actually get out of the basement, grab a gun, and storm the Capitol. And if you take it all the way, a lot of people are going to die. That's how revolution works. Unless we're all LARPing?
But Americans/Westerners (left, right, center) are way too comfortable for a revolution, so for people that are, or have been, actual dissidents (think Arab Spring, or IRA, or ETA, or whatever), this is all just a big meme.
Jan 6, didn't work, not entirely sure why you bring this up as a blueprint for anyone. It was an actual LARP and as Bruno Macaes wrote resembled a bunch of people making it to the end of a videogame, then running around confused in costumes and going for a drink.
What did work for them was pouring money into the election system and party apparatus, media, the courts and then taking control over politics
What worked was getting people stirred up to the point that some would turn to violence. Even now a majority of their party believe they were justified.
That helped them take control of politics. And so that tactic will surely turn people to violence again. The violence itself may not be effective but the level of outrage is.
> Jan 6, didn't work, not entirely sure why you bring this up as a blueprint for anyone.
Might want to let the Democrats know that. According to them the government was >this< close to being overthrown. Which is funny, because if anyone truly believes that, we don't stand a chance against pretty much any country on earth.
> ~~2k~~ 250 unarmed people ~~broke into work~~ mysteriously allowed in are looking for you, while dozens of trained armed police officers surround you, it would probably be something you think about a whole lot
The one person who died violently was one of the rioters, an unarmed woman who was shot by Capitol Police. Four other rioters died of natural causes around the time of the riot.
An unarmed woman climbing through a smashed window with a capital police officer on the other side, sidearm drawn, warning her not to advance, in the middle of a crowd storming the capitol building while a gallows stood outside,
waiting for the crowd to bring out a member of congress or the Vice President.
> * U.S. representative Markwayne Mullin [currently head of DHS], a witness to Babbitt's attempted breach, said that Byrd "didn't have a choice" but to shoot, and that his action "saved people's lives".* [0]
The shooting was deemed “lawful and within department policy”.
>The shooting was deemed “lawful and within department policy”.
I do not disagree with this at all. I only mentioned her death as contrast to the usual rhetoric of how the mob at the Capitol "killed" Officer Sicknick and others (who are always mysteriously unnamed).
It's hard to reconcile a conspiracy theory that protestors were allowed to storm the Capitol with the fact that Ashli Babbitt was shot on video for refusing calls to stop breaching a barricade.
Police and security trying to manage a dynamic situation with minimum loss of life by not immediately gunning down quasi-violent crowd is a more reasonable conclusion.
Regardless, 100% of which is Trump's fault for incitement.
I don't know a single prominent Democrat who thought they had a chance of succeeding, just that they even tried was enough for them to be unpatriotic cultists
Jan 6 was an attempt to convince the American public that the 2020 election was stolen, and to keep Trump in power. Today, more people believe the 2020 election was stolen than on January 7th, Trump is in power despite causing an insurrection, and all the J6 insurrectionists were pardoned.
You can be the judge as to whether it failed or victory was deferred, but they definitely won.
If everyone is so comfortable, what do we need a revolution for? Wasn't that the goal of civilization? If someone doesn't like civilization, why try to bring it down? There's plenty of places on earth you can go to live without it.
Most people are comfortable, but not everyone. At least, comfortable in the sense that they are not willing to die for their country/people at the moment, and aren't personally affected by most of the bad things their government does. In the US at least, things like high food/gas prices or unemployment/healthcare issues are just one of many other issues, and aren't causing most people so much pain that they are willing to pick up a weapon and give up their lives. Or even peacefully protest.
People that had enough money that they weren't paying attention to the price of groceries before Trump, probably still don't care all that much now. I might eat out less, but that's not worth abandoning my family or dying over to me.
Or sue, or organize and protest, or win the next election. Not every government problem warrants revolution, and not needing to revolt is not a failing of the people.
> Americans/Westerners (left, right, center) are way too comfortable for a revolution
A better read is that the situation for most Americans and "Westerners" whatever that means, is that things are good enough that the people do not see value in revolution, or they are able to adjust the government's course enough through elections, redress, courts and other political feedback mechanisms.
Or maybe people realize that revolutions, and the civil war that almost always ensue, are a very high price to pay, for a very uncertain reward.
Talking about the Arab spring, look what it lead to:
- Egypt and Tunisia are again being lead by a dictator, it's just a younger one.
- Libya is destroyed, lacks leadership and conflict could resume any day should Haftar decide he doesn't like the result of the upcoming (but long postponed) elections.
- Syria has suffered the worst civil war of the decade and the situation is still very brittle. It looks like Jolani could bring redemption to Syria, but with the Israeli playing around with fire it could also collapse any day. And that's assuming Jolani doesn't turn into a dictator himself: we're not talking about someone with a good track record of honoring his promises (which is a good thing when the promise is made to ISIS or Al Qaeda, but still).
> you are now targeted by the most potent state actor on earth
Well, it is a mafia. See the international court investigating war crimes is
also targeted by the orange clown-brigade mafia.
> the only option is to cave
Objectively speaking you are correct, but I don't think this has to be the
case. For instance, why is that orange mafia so powerful? That is the thing
that has to be fixed on every level, not just by taking back what their
billionaires stole from us.
> which will go as far as blowing up weddings in your neighborhood to stop you.
And in case the wedding reference wasn't explicit enough, this isn't just Trump, it was also Obama.
It pains me to summon the specter of "both sides" because the Republicans are so much worse. But the majority of national level Democrats aren't inherently good. They are just less bad (and on some issues they can be close to equally as bad).
I don't have a scientific study at hand, but historically many revolutionaries and resistance fighters were family men and women with children who precisely cared for their children's future.
> When the US government decides to label you “terrorist organization”
We really need laws removing the power from the President to unilaterally declare organizations terrorists. At least not long term without their ability to fight the designation in court.
(Same for tariffs. There is no case where one needs emergency power to tariff or sanction anything. If you need to conduct urgent police action, court-ordered asset freezes are plenty.)
We’re in a globalized world with aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons. The fallacy of thinking a major economy (or significant nation) can decouple from any expansionist regime is a lesson I thought we learned from the first half of the last century.
> US weapons are near useless due to prolonged institutional corruption, just like Russian ones
At invading or achieving any geopolitical objective, yes (though I wouldn’t compare the American military-industrial base to Russia’s). At causing at least as much chaos as sanctions, no.
I read it as a very long path, but they've finally got to the end. They say this project is 25 years old and carried by the same people. Now they're tired. They've done enough. Someone else has to carry the torch. That's how I read it
If that's what you characterize the US government as, I can only imagine what you characterize some of the other governments around the world. Particularly, from the millions of us who migrated to the US legally and willfully and who are very VERY grateful to this country for providing the opportunities people like myself could only dream-of in our former countries.
It really is not the fault of the US that Mexico has drug gangs that kill people at random. It's not the fault that Pakistan and India are nearly at war forever. It's not the US fault that many countries support and require female genital mutilation. The US is not as evil as you think.
> It really is not the fault of the US that Mexico has drug gangs that kill people at random
This is a direct result of the "war on drugs" perpetrated by the US.
The other two are genuinely not the fault of the US, but bringing up two examples where the US wasn't the source of the problem doesn't exactly contradict the original claim.
The war on drugs definitely didn't cause the drug trade or the murders. If anything it's the fault of leftist US government stance on drugs that weaken border security and allow drugs to get in (and therefore fund more drugs to be produced). And besides all that, the drug trade has been going on for far longer than you know. And including the murders.
> Which is partly or mostly our fault.
It does contradict the original claim because it's 3 examples of things we didn't cause - and he said "mostly our fault". If it takes 3 seconds to think of things we didn't cause, then the world's craziness is not mostly the fault of America. Mostly the US has a hand in stopping communist governments where the citizens are kept as slaves.
> The war on drugs definitely didn't cause the drug trade or the murders
You should be a lot less confident in your opinions. The war on drugs required violent interventions against drug production in Mexico, which directly created militarized, violent drug cartels.
Example: pressured by the US, Felipe Calderón launched Operation Michoacán in 2006 with U.S. backing and funding. He deployed tens of thousands of federal forces. Mexico has recorded more than 463,000 homicides since that declaration of war on the cartels, a huge increase.
Just look at the data.
> and he said "mostly our fault". If it takes 3 seconds to think of things we didn't cause
He said "mostly" because he knows there are counterexamples, so providing counterexamples doesn't contradict his point.
> Mostly the US has a hand in stopping communist governments where the citizens are kept as slaves.
This is such a genuinely undiscriminating statement that I can't help but categorize it as dumb. I don't usually say this, but you need to stop listening to propaganda and pick up a few actual history books. Until you do, any discussion is pointless, because you're so stuck in your ideology that facts can't penetrate the bubble.
That's really all I have for you. It's up to you to fix yourself.
> The war on drugs definitely didn't cause the drug trade or the murders.
Have to stop you right there. The “war on drugs” absolutely has created the conditions for the drug trade and the murders. If you criminalize a large part of the economy, then only criminals will profit from it. If we had sane drug policy, there would not be the profit that attracts these criminals. Additionally, the US intelligence services (and other nations) have a long documented role in cultivating the drug trade for diverse reasons: for profit and paying for operations, for control of regions, and to provide a reservoir of violence to disguise or facilitate their work.
As Stephen Miller loves to remind us, we had the first net emigration in decades this year. They're rounding up legal immigrants and putting them in concentration camps where they're dying because they're being denied medical care.
If you don't see an issue with the White House constantly posting straight up Nazi memes then that's on you. There's also plenty immigrants in Europe who vote for fascists, so? Turns out you can't just leave your "former" country behind like an old coat, it's still your upbringing and horizon. You are grateful "to the country", but what does that mean while also shrugging off what the people in "the country" are saying? What is left of "the country"? A bunch of papers, rights and money, opportunities for you; let the goons roam and fill their warehouses, keep children, even infants in despicable conditions, because you (think you) have nothing to fear?
So you neither acknowledge nor disagree with any of that. As if it's nothing. I would if you don't care when it falls to fascism, it's not your home. You gave up your "former" country and you're not being a fellow country person in your new one, either, kinda like you don't really show up to this conversation, but worse. Since what you say has no substance it's as if you didn't say it in the first place. It just took up space and time, for nothing. Does that answer your question?
How many of these millions only had to migrate to the US because the US destroyed their countries with war, economic sanctions, covert CIA operations, or other attacks?
I don’t know, how many? You are the one throwing blanket statements.
I’m from Latin America and it’s 100% the fault of some of our own corrupt governments and us people living in those places.
Emphasis on “some,” because countries like Chile, Costa Rica, Uruguay and lately Argentina and El Salvador are showing that less government intervention in economic matters and a zero-bullshit policy on crime is how you turn things around to something that reminisces a somewhat livable country.
Many (most?) governments around the world strike no terror on other countries. They don’t go around invading other countries, nor sanctioning them on the basis of belief, nor using their soft/hard power to exert pressure at a global scale.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m grateful for many things the USA has done, and for the inventiveness and generosity of its people; but let’s not pretend like their government(s) have been the kindest or most terror-free in the past decades.
The USA can be both a good and bad thing. And terrorism, by definition, is a bit of what they do abroad.
Which is why efforts by China to stand up independent cross border payment rails are important. You have to cut the US out of any ability to control activities outside of their boundaries.
and Europe. Europe should also decouple itself from the U.S. as much as it is possible, and not repeat the mistake of overreliance with China. not because China is somehow worse, but because you always should be able to say "no", no matter how good your partners are
Unfortunately decoupling payments within the EU is insufficient if the US can just threaten to sanction your bank, and in doing so force the bank to drop you as a customer. Even in the presence of an internal European payments network, those banks still need to transact with the US and other US-sphere countries...
For now, but not forever. Skate to where the puck is going to be. Decoupling continues, with the target being independence. Quote this comment five years from now.
No but then you can have local bank that will not have US interactions but can still serve you. Since the French judge of the IPC was sanctioned, it’s clear that the EU must completely decouple from the US.
> The payment system has to be decoupled first, and then banks can have nothing to fear from US sanctions.
I'm not sure the payment system is most banks primary concern. Being able to buy/sell US securities turns out to be a fairly fundamental part of the modern economy
Sometimes, yes. In the case of bankings systems combined with payment systems you could end up reliant on both. If the US sanctions you only people using a Chinese OS to make payments through a Chinese payment system will be unaffected and vice-versa. Either will be able to take your economy down.
TBH China is not currently bombing a foreign country for no reason and it is not threatening to invade its allies.
It’s not a particularly high bar, but of the big powers, only China currently meets it.
And I know you will say „but payment networks are not a warfare question, they are an economic question“ but that kind of breaks down when they are used to sanction ICC judges presiding over war crime cases.
China has invaded and conquered other countries before, has occupied territories and clearly plans to invade at least one neighbour id it gets the chance. Its hugely oppressive internally and is wiping out minority cultures by any means required.
It can be better, if the alternative mechanism is designed with safeguards against hijacking by a single state. Naturally, the threat of sanctions can always bully banks or states into acting one way or another, but at least it would not be through the cutting off of money transfers between willing parties.
Of course, that's an _if_, not something to just take for granted.
The BRICS organization is precisely setup to not rely on the single actor, China included. They all have strong disagreements, but they all agree having a single global bully (USA) is bad for all involved parties.
What I find wild is that this control over international banking, and the sanctions it enables, is a key benefit of the US-led world order that Trump is trying to dismantle. I’m quite sure he doesn’t understand this, but a key consequence of his efforts to stop the US from getting “ripped off” is that we will soon no longer have the ability to impose these sorts of sanctions as the global economy re-routes around American control.
> Yeah, but do you control international banking the way they do?
This is why Europe needs to detach itself from the American banking system.
It used to be very practical to use it. Countries renounced to some sovereignty in exchange for ease of doing business. The USA had an advantage but it didn't abuse it too much.
The current situation is that the USA is asking to forfeit sovereignty and to control business in an ideological basis. There is a strong incentive to leave that system as the alternative is become a colony of the USA. And the push for colonization is not subtle as the president takes over other countries resources like Venezuela's oil or tries to take control of the straight of Hormuz (None part of the USA at this moment)
At the moment Europe is getting more reliant on the US. There are new non-Us payment systems but the end user devices are Apple or Google controlled. Governments and banks are very eager to get rid of cash, to introduce digital ID etc. That all relies on American platforms.
Totally true. The EU needs its own platforms, I hope that better regulated than their USA counterparts. Linux started in Europe, it should have been promoted more for internal usage. But privatization of state-owned companies made it ideologically impossible to push for it. Public good was seen as "bad" and "against business", I hope that the obvious failure of that policy makes it now a possibility to use Linux.
We used to. Contactless payments from my phone didn't require Google Wallet a few years ago, but now they do. My bank passes suddenly say VISA and have credit card numbers on them which they didn't have a few years ago. European banks are going in the completely wrong direction and need to reverse.
Your bank pass may support multiple systems. I think a lot of European cards (not all) are EC-Karten as well as one of the major credit card brands, and when you use it in an ATM, it uses neither system but directly contacts your bank.
I love how Europeans get pumped up on anti-American rhetoric when they are far more submissive to the US than even a Ukraine or a South Korea is. I'm starting to think the rhetoric (always about what they're about to do, something about Trump, something about Musk) is being pumped to them by US admin think tanks.
The US is going to be at peace with Russia, and still pumping anti-Russian rhetoric into Europe to keep them buying US LNG. The big difference will be that they'll start mixing more Trump-Russia rhetoric in - but the result is that they'll be more dependent on the US. The anti-China rhetoric is working great, too.
The best thing for a Europe that wants to separate from the US is to completely isolate themselves from any possible energy or trade replacement for the US./s
That being said, in Europe it's a small elite class (that is still fairly firmly in control of everything) that pushes this (on direct orders and direct payments from US masters.) The rising degree of control of speech and association they have to exert, and the direct election interference they've had to engage in is very disturbing to a plurality of the European population. And that normally politically disengaged plurality is becoming politically active as their living standards drop.
"anti-Russian rhetoric" Phrasing like this is hilarious when Russia is actually invading Ukraine and randomly bombing civilians in order to permanently steal its land. In this context the objective facts are "anti-Russian"
> The US is going to be at peace with Russia, and still pumping anti-Russian rhetoric into Europe to keep them buying US LNG.
The US isn't really a source of anti-Russia rhetoric. In fact, the US may be the biggest source of pro-Russia rhetoric, with Trump constantly sucking up to Putin and repeating Kremlin talking points.
I think what you're missing is that for many Western European countries, like Germany, suddenly gaining a direct border with Russia is a genuine concern. It's not just rhetoric; it's the real world.
It's easy for Americans, who are essentially uninvadable, to discount this as just people saying stuff, but in Europe, we actually have to live with Russia's direct military threat.
> The anarchist cells responsible for sabotaging rail systems across France, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands in 2026, relied on A/I Collective tools and services to claim responsibility for the attacks
Hmm. So they are going by “A/I vets its users” and users sabotaged rail systems so therefore A/I is materially assisting terrorists? I wonder how this vetting works? Do users have to submit government issued documents, write essays? Do they make users sign non-violence agreement ToS. I mean heck, Facebook and Twitter has material supporting various things like that and US government is designated them as terrorists.
Well, in my state, you don't "apply" for a gun like you apply for a license. It is just document that you purchased it after the seller runs a background check.
The government isn't attesting to your capabilities - that is still on you as a citizen.
> you don't "apply" for a gun like you apply for a license.
>... background check
Who requires these background checks? Because the seller wouldn't do them unless obligated. Obviously the check and paperwork around it constitutes at least a de facto application to the government for permission to purchase the firearm.
IIRC from the last A/I thread, there's actually a special law that basically says gun manufacturers are not liable for what people do with the guns, and says it specifically about guns, not any other industry.
No other industry needed that law. The PLCAA was put in place in 2005 because anti-gun specifically devised a plan to sue gun makers in lieu of any success in changing gun laws.
It is absolute nonsense to ignore why the law exists while you complain about it existing.
By this logic services like Telegram or Signal would be designated "terrorist organizations". But the current admin is purely vibes-based, so we'll never know for sure
I have no way to verify whether the collective really helped the violent acts that are cited in the designation[1] but, as an Italian, given the dialectic and rhetoric in their statements and in their websites, it would not surprise me if this once they - the US government - were not wrong. "A broken clock marks the right time twice a day" and all that.
I have experienced this kind of language personally back when the collective started (they have root in the no-global movement, a protest group that contributed to the violence at the Genova G8).
At the time I was a young activist on their side, but the 'we are not violent' wink-wink nudge-nudge attitude was not main stream but very much all over the place and became hard to ignore.
Some of the claims are interesting - "Decision making in the group takes places collectively instead of through majority voting." - isn't explained by the sourced article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_decision-making alternative political movements care a lot about how decisions are taken. For instance, authors like David Graeber consider that majority voting only makes sense in the context if backed by violence.
So what percent of people are required for "consensus" because it seems like 50%+1 to 100%. There seems to also be an implication that democracy is 50+1 when it isn't. It can require any percentage to reach a decision.
Those two words refer to the same "type" of system where the members make a decision by ascent or descent. Both systems require an agreed upon barrier of acceptance.
They are the same. The US congress reaches decision by consensus.
Consensus is strictly 100% agreement (or at least 0% disagreement). Granted, it's not always possible. But in some setups and given some objectives, it's sometimes possible to have a collective that finds compromises that satisfy everyone (consensus).
IETF for instance, makes the distinction because they do not use a fixed vote threshold, but use a judgement of someone with good judgement, taking all facts into account such as the strength of disagreement.
And of course if that person turns out to have bad judgement they won't listen to him next time.
It is certainly possible for this to become unstable and split into two or more groups. This may work for the IETF which frequently creates and destroys working groups.
This is how you get mindless group-think. Anyone who tries to object to a bad idea is turned into an outcast and seen as a boat rocker, so members are trained to toe the line at all costs. Very unhealthy.
There's already TOR, the problem you run in to is you need connectivity and visibility with the rest of the world on the clearnet. lora is even worse here.
That'll be fun. But the CCC doesn't engage in resistance any more. They mostly just hold the conferences where people tinker with stuff in ways that don't matter .
Well A/I doesn't engage in resistance either. All they did was provide email services and host blogs for people. By this standard, Wikipedia or CCC could indeed be next.
Here’s the thing though: if even some of the examples given in the state department page are true (some of them are rather silly), that A/I knowingly provided services to groups that verifiably did some rather violent things they are accused of, I’m not sure how they expected to hide behind their mission.
My impression is that they didn’t say “hey we don’t have customer information but we don’t service violent groups and we will responsibly investigate and discontinue service to offenders.”
Their vibe was much more defiant, like, “we designed this to be anonymous and specifically intend/expect for it to be used in any way regardless of legality and are okay with it.”
Is it right for the US to be the global arbiter of this issue and domains in general? Of course not.
> “we designed this to be anonymous and specifically intend/expect for it to be used in any way regardless of legality and are okay with it.”
That is also what Signal does. Or absolutely any end-to-end encrypted communication service at all - these are explicitly designed not to retain details of communication.
I think the difference they alluded to is that they manually vetoed new users, presumably based on their self-declared goals and ideology, whereas Signal etc are neutral platforms.
How do you know what the A/I vetting consisted of or what standards they held? They don't seem to have published any detailed description of the process, and by their own account they destroyed all records of the vetting after approval.
They're saying the difference is that Signal doesn't say it. If you ask Signal about their support of terrorist groups, they'll say Signal doesn't allow terrorism on its platform (even though it obviously does since it has no way to know). Those are the Right Words. If you ask A/I, they said they didn't care if someone was a terrorist. Those are the Wrong Words. There's a social game being played at the highest levels that A/I have forfeited.
in interviews, they said if you give them examples of "xyz" is prohibited by applicable law, they would remove it. They would not help you spy on them probably, by backdooring their infra or sth.
Most of this has me rolling my eyes (“cadre of radical hackers”? really?), but this part is interesting:
> The A/I Collective… manually vets all potential users for ideological affinity before granting them access to its infrastructure.
What is the truth behind that? Such behaviour would undermine A/I’s claim they are akin to Gmail if they explicitly are not a neutral ISP. After that, it becomes a question of degrees: what were their specific criteria for access to the platform?
Asking out of genuine curiosity. I wasn’t familiar with this group before today.
A lot of the state department’s claims of “violent groups” are BS but it also seems like a non-zero number of them are pretty violent organizations.
There’s a big difference between “we have designed our devices to be zero-knowledge but we act swiftly against violent/illegal activity if it’s discovered” versus “we actively endorse the views of our user base.”
That's exactly the point though: if you are choosing to platform some and not others, and some (many? most?) of the groups you are choosing to platform are violent groups, you very quickly run out of plausible deniability.
Basically, far right extremists targeting antifascists through mechanisms of political repression while having the gall to call themselves pro free speech.
I’m not familiar with A/I, but this sounds pretty damning – the ideological vetting of users in particular seems to discount any sort of neutral utility defense.
The use of the word “ideological” in text with a US Gov-anything byline is tantamount to a fart. Its whining “I dont like this thing but I cant cry like a child about it.”
Sure, sounding damning is kind of the point of this kind of statement. But its also cheap and easy since there is no requirement that any of the claims are justified by any facts.
I'm not familiar with A/I, but I'm familiar with americans, and they look completely ridiculous talking smack about others doing allegedly "bad things". And they have no defense about supporting war criminals or genocidaires.
It's defined in the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Long title but the document is like two pages, easy reading for even the intellectually laziest persons.
That definition is less than ideal from several perspectives. It serves neither side.
The worst reason to hate it is that it relies on proving intent (dolus specialis), which essentially makes it unenforceable unless the perpetrator is a group of simpletons.
It really hit me when I realized that there are only two ways to prove intent: The criminal admits it, or the prosecution proves that there are literally zero other possible explanations that could possibly fit the actions.
So - Back to the point. Did the USA assist people guilty of genocide by your own chosen definition? Not if there could be literally any other intention.
Keep in mind that Hamas's own convention (1988) clearly declares that they partly exist as a group for the purpose of wiping Israel out, and they did actually perpetrate October 7th. It would be very difficult for even the best lawyer in the world to argue that self-defense couldn't be at least one possible intention, and given that the nation of Israel probably has one or two decent lawyers, they'd likely be able to come up with a few other possible intentions as well, but they only need one to completely avoid prosecution.
A second reason to hate it is that it doesn't carve out exceptions for mutual combat situations, even the ones that that have been dragging on for thousands of years. When two religious groups or ethnicities from neighboring regions fight each other in open combat few reasonable people would refer to that as a genocide, but it might be considered genocide against both sides if we interpret the UN Convention as it was actually ratified.
> even the intellectually laziest persons
Yo mama.
To be more serious, this wasn't necessary and was rude. What was your goal? To convince me? To convince others? Neither are best accomplished with this sort of behavior.
> It really hit me when I realized that there are only two ways to prove intent: The criminal admits it, or the prosecution proves that there are literally zero other possible explanations that could possibly fit the actions.
I doubt we'll have absolute certainty about genocide until Nuremberg-style trials take place. The problem is such trials won't happen unless the international community intervenes, and they don't seem willing to intervene without 100% certainty. Chicken-egg problem.
Intentionally creating circumstances that can lead to a destruction of a group as a whole or in part.
Circumstances were created. The destruction of a group also happened in a significant part, and it's only not more horrendous than it already is just because of massive international support to Palestinians, on whose destruction americans participated in very significant part. Almost all of it was done by american supplied bombs, inluding the mass killings of entire families that are still being brought out of rubble to this day, burried by 100s suffocated or burned alive at the time, with their children, women and men, in covardly night attacks from high above.
Or surprise daylight rushhour mass bombings during ceasefires that killed hundreds of children alone in one go in a day.
This is what I get in mind when I hear "americans" now. This is what americans enabled on purpose. Blergh. Unprovoked aggressions against other countries, like Iran in the last instance that led to permanently increased fuel prices and making everyone poorer around the world, also adds to feeling of disgust when hearing "americans" these days. Americans will learn in time that some things are hard to repair. And their apparent ignorance of what they do in the world and how they are perceived due to that will hit a wall soon enough.
HN only (lazily) filters content. It doesn't engage in ideological vetting, and doesn't need to either.
A good amount of the commenters on this story probably would encourage violence, or at least agree with the sentiment on a different platform, yet here they are. I'm not even sure if they're real people or bots.
We are having a discussion right now that would not be allowed if there was vetting.
HN's filtering is anything but lazy. Do you have showdead enabled in the settings? If not, enable it and refresh this comments page.
A bunch of my comments were mysteriously deadened and I have no idea why - they aren't flagged. This was among them. Maybe it was a retaliation for talking about HN's filtering?
It really doesn’t, unless they are screening for terrorism. For instance, a company that provides some free tech for low income Catholics, which ends up used in some crime, maybe bombed family planning clinic, can be charged for the terrorism they didn’t do. In fact, this can be leveraged by anti-Catholic terrorists to take out the Catholic tech service.
From my reading of their policy they do not claim to be neutral:
> To be hosted on our servers you have to share our principles of anti-fascism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, anti-transphobia, and anti-militarism
"violent" is used many times in this announcement, but it would seem that one of the most violent entity in the world right now are the US? Also, it's so weird that "antifa" (antifascists) has become a bad thing. If antifa is bad then it must mean "fa" is good? So we should bring back the Nazis?
The "Western hemisphere" (which, of course, is neither) tolerates the US and the way it enforces its decisions outside its own borders, because it used to provide some assurance of stability and protection. But as the US rescinds that policy, weakens Nato, declares a tariffs war to every country on earth, etc., there will be less and less justification as well as, probably (hopefully) less and less public acceptance for any of this posturing.
I too find it really weird. My grandpa was a member of a violent antifascist organization (US Army, 1940s). The US government even awarded him multiple medals for his antifa activities.
Never heard of A/I and I have no idea what they are about, but rather than a government communication this statement reads like an angry rant with lots of unhelpful name-calling.
I would expect a government to be professional and just stick to the (proven) facts and avoiding labels; that would also be more convincing. Oh well.
This is the new Republican mainstream, the same mainstream that brings us AI generated videos of the Obamas as apes. They have no shame and are likely irredeemable (certainly their behavior is inexcusable).
And ultimately these statements aren't for the normal citizens. They're for the truly strange, the racists, and the trolls.
The site lists actual terror attacks where the tools were used. That’s pretty damning if accurate. Anyone care to comment on that? I’m not well informed but the statement does not look like just straight up name calling.
> The anarchist cells responsible for sabotaging rail systems across France, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands in 2026, relied on A/I Collective tools and services to claim responsibility for the attacks, publish official communiqués, and disseminate manuals for constructing improvised incendiary devices to target railways and other critical infrastructure.
> The anarchist cell responsible for sabotaging the Transalpine Pipeline (TAL) in March 2026, which temporarily halted crude oil flows to Austria, Germany, and the Czech Republic, relied on A/I Collective tools and services to claim responsibility for the attack and publish official communiqués, as well as to disseminate a manifesto calling for additional attacks on critical infrastructure and referring adherents to another A/I Collective platform, which provides detailed sabotage manuals as well as maps of vulnerable critical infrastructure across North America.
> The far-left extremist network responsible for multiple arson attacks and acts of sabotage against Germany’s rail and energy infrastructure between 2011 and 2026, including a January 2026 attack on Berlin’s power grid that cut power to 45,000 households and resulted in a fatality, relied on A/I Collective tools and services to claim responsibility for attacks, publish official communiques, and disseminate a manifesto calling for additional attacks on energy infrastructure worldwide.
Is the car manufacturer responsible for their use of a car? The power tools manufacturer? The paper sheet manufacturer? The restaurant that fed them?
Technical intermediaries could be held responsible specifically for hosting the manifestos (under freedom of the press laws), but that requires an actual due process. Meanwhile, 100% of the authors and websites who inspired or relayed Anders Brejvik and other neo-fascist terrorists are still online and are not facing any kind of repression.
Unfortunately I can no longer take any official communication from my government at face value. They have lost my trust that they are operating as directed by the letter of the law without fear nor favor.
We must all fight for independent hosting or we will lose the right.
Punish those trying to stop it by coming back stronger. Spin up in a few new countries if you have to.
Friends and I have been giving out free shell accounts, service hosting, and mentorship for anon randos for over 25 years. Apparently this makes us cyber-terrorists. Neat!
We have had our infrastructure taken from us many times, and quickly come back online, often in a new country, every time.
Looking forward to 25 more years of people trying to kill us. Every attempt makes us stronger and smarter.
Should have focused on Monero donations from the get-go. Banks are a plague. Like what is a group like this using banks for or at least diversifying??
It's like choosing not to use E2EE.
It's not even left political groups that get debanked or screwed—it's everyone often.
Even GrapheneOS, but intelligently, they use crypto heavily:
>Unfortunately, PayPal permanently locked our GrapheneOS Foundation account today. No reason has been provided for the account being locked. All we've done is accept donations. We added our bank account information yesterday in order to begin withdrawing money and it was locked.
Not surprising. Far-leftists tend to be ideologically opposed to Bitcoin. They say so themselves: "Bitcoin are an investment fund pump & dump done to dupe the ultra-libertarian anarco-capitalists."
Check the <li> near the bottom. Some are named, such as Armed Proletarian Justice, Revolutionary Class Self-Defense, and Jane’s Revenge, but some unnamed ones as well (at least their actions have been described).
Parler was "ripped off the Internet" because it was delisted from app stores and dropped by AWS for violating their ToS due to having (If I remember correctly) approximately zero content moderation, which is not really compatible with the mainstream distribution model they wanted. The owners were not subjected to sanctions by a foreign government.
I think we can all see the potential problems with this, even if a specific group is awful.
“The specific claim: a far-left media group that describes itself as a “tool” for militants to share information “to be acted upon” used A/I’s services to publish communiqués and calls to action for U.S.-designated terrorist groups, including FAI/FRI, the IRGC, Hamas, Hizballah, ELN, NPA, PFLP, and PIJ. That same media group was cited in a federal complaint against a domestic terrorist sentenced to 19 years for attacking a federal building and a police car with IEDs.”
Hizballah and Hezbollah are different spellings of the same thing, with Hizballah probably being more accurate and the one regularly used by the US government.
If I was someone who funded/relied on A/I's services I would have been trying to figure out what would it had taken for the US State Department to produce evidence for their allegations and would have lobbied for some sort of determination of whether the scope of A/I's involvement with said parties and their actions violated their own policies/terms of service.
Otherwise there is a way to look at this as A/I getting away scot-free for failing to administer their policies, failing to hold bad actors accountable and ultimately letting down individuals and organizations who lawfully used their services.
I'm also not surprised that A/I themselves never anticipated something like this happening and did not have some sort of protocol in place to deal with it. They had 25 years to do so.
What is this nonsense even about? Site I’ve never heard of making bombastic claims without any citations. Can someone please provide context and sources? Because this looks like a hoax or something?
Edit: just so we are clear, I’ve no idea what A/I is, the linked page gave no details, nor do the current top comments. The current top comment is rambling about free shell accounts and stuff. The ones I read after that were mourning the loss of this mysterious site/service/something. Does anyone want to clueinthe rest of us?
The U.S. government’s track record is concerning. After their actions against AntifaOst, numerous NGOs, such as 'Die Rote Hilfe,' were stripped of their banking access in Europe.
And break everyone's e-mail address in the process? It is not a trivial step to migrate to a new domain an e-mail account that had been active for decades.
I also oppose fascism, militarism, racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, like what A/I do... And none of that is illegal... At least not in any civilised society. So what did they do to trigger so many? I remember the Norwegian stuff (since I’m Norwegian), and I remember thinking it sounded like bullshit to copy their entire server drive when they wanted access to the blog of two people.
From what I could gather, it seems various governments accused them of deliberately providing infrastructure to groups whose violent activities they supported, such as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), with communications associated with railway sabotage, attacks on energy infrastructure and the “Jane’s Revenge” arson campaign (whatever the hell that is).
Here’s a snippet I found on the net: "Italian police installed a server backdoor in 2004 during an investigation into the anarchist collective Crocenera. It was discovered in 2005. According to contemporary EDRi reporting, the access potentially exposed communications belonging to thousands of unrelated users; EDRi explicitly noted that actual collection of unrelated data had not been proven. EDRi’s contemporary report"
Huge disclaimer on this, since it’s just my musings: This might be one of the situations where both sides are in the wrong. It’s possible that A/I willfully turned a blind eye to actual illegal activity by its users, and refused to cooperate with legal investigations. At the same time, various governments, including mine, overreacted and behaved unethically and maybe even illegally because A/I “didn’t want to play ball.”
Just speculation. But the fact that I can’t easily find concrete examples of what A/I supposedly did wrong makes me inclined to feel sympathy for them. I hate unspecific allegations like “facilitation of problematic and terroristic-adjacent activities.” That’s some 1984-ish bullshit.
I have no clue what I’m talking about here, though. Strange situation and too little information...
How do you think LGBTQI+ rights came exist? It was not a pretty, blood-free, submissive process. And we're still far from LGBTQI+ rights being normalized.
How about workers rights? Slavery? Any progress that you'd think of as civilizing was not achieved without blood.
I don't remember any LGBTQI+ wars here in the Czech Republic, so "blood free" actually seems like a good characterisation. Sometimes the system just works.
See also the Velvet Revolution for a pretty large shift away from totalitarianism without any deaths.
It is strange. I certainly wouldn't think your house, having been isolated from western society over decades by a communist regime and heavily-patrolled borders, would respond to social activism in foreign countries. But maybe there's just some secret house mycelium for sharing progressive ideas that I don't know about.
Theoretical aphorisms can't override the facts of recorded history. If the harsh border control and cultural isolation of the East Bloc ran counter to Marxist principles, then you can complain to the dead leaders of the USSR, but that's about it.
Check the history of the different communist movements. Maybe an entrypoint would be this: today there is the Fourth International. The USSR was born out of the Third International with Lenin, and the Fourth International opposed/opposes the USSR's practices and because of that the USSR hunted them down using their agents whom eventually killed Trotski.
People who want bloodshed tend to say this… It’s melodramatic.
You could say that about anything classified as human progress. How did we improve things so that people could have electricity and safety? At the cost of deaths and suffering by everyone who built the Hoover Dam and similar projects. The same goes for "stop killing patients by going dirty from corpses to the delivery room," even when we knew it was unsafe. There is always death and blood related to any topic. How do you think you got the device you are communicating with? Through the death and suffering of someone in Congo, mining cobalt, and someone working themselves to death in a factory.
I have lived through the normalization of gay rights in Norway, and saying that it was a process marked by blood and suffering is moronic. It was painful, unnecessary, overdue, and many other things. But saying that it was a bloody conflict is just not true, at least not any more than many other progressive movements. So progress doesn't have to be violent.
You could say that this is not the lived experience of many people, and that is true. But that doesn’t automatically mean it has to be so for everybody, and it does not have to be inevitable for any cause. It’s not statistically more violent than many other things.
I’m getting tired of the violent and angry rhetoric people spew without pushback. Stop idealizing and glorifying violence and conflict to solve any problem. It seems more and more to me that this is violent ideation first, with the cause being secondary.
I have not glorified violence nor called to do violence to anyone. You seems to have misunderstood: I wish for violence to stop. It was always the oppressed's blood that was spilled by the establishment through police force every time they protested in the streets, and every time they were uncomfortable. Take the workers day as an example. It's egregious to me to call a protest violence.
The only thing the oppressed can do is to be uncomfortable, organize, and not let the system claim their souls and bodies. The only thing the system does is perpetuate itself, inflicting violence to the oppressed, in an endless spiral towards the bottom.
https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20... This designation offers some specific examples of violence being coordinated using their systems. Some are indeed extreme, if true. That doesn’t invalidate their mission or overall contribution to the world at large; it just was sufficient ammo for extinguishing another threat to power.
This does not show what they (A/I) did. The only concrete examples are of bad behavior by some users. Then there’s a bunch of generic claims against A/I, with NO specifics.
So, yeah, it might be true. But I find no concrete examples of what bad stuff A/I themselves did, just their users. Personally, I would like for there to be at least SOME concrete examples. Like, “This convicted terrorist had a blog on their infrastructure, and A/I refused to hand over data they had, even when presented with a valid court order.” Or something like that. Is it too much to ask that the government provide some concrete evidence, not just abstract vage accusations, when doing something as drastic as designating someone a terrorist organization? It would seem so...
This is a knock on the state.gov item, not your comment. Your comment was good.
The problem is that, as A/I themselves explained (https://www.inventati.org/who/collective), they worked hard to ensure that they do not possess any evidence of or data about who is using their infrastructure.
"We provide our services strictly for non-commercial use, in order to provide support exclusively to individuals or groups we feel we have an affinity with. In order to verify the existence of these pre-conditions, each and every service request is processed manually by one of our volunteers and is in a dialogical form. All requests are anonymized and will be destroyed."
Anonymized how? Before the first contact? After the conversation?
If anyone here wants to set up a similar service: This is patently stupid for an ISP to attempt.
All that demonstrates is that they operated a public email/messaging server. One could have coordinated the exact same things using ProtonMail or Signal.
> I also oppose fascism, militarism, racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, like what A/I do... And none of that is illegal... At least not in any civilised society. So what did they do to trigger so many?
Do you oppose using standardized tests to determine which applicants should get admitted to selective public universities? This is a specific thing that was halted in California because activists argued it was illegally racist (https://publiccounsel.org/our-cases/smith-v-regents-of-unive...). You'll probably find that lots of ways you relate to people around you as gendered beings, men and women, count as either sexism, transphobia, or both, at least according to some activists' definitions. I do not assume that when a political activist group claims to oppose racism, sexism, or other ostensible hostility to a demographic group, that they aren't trying to define this in a way that would result in an immense restriction on your rights, freedoms, or quality of life if enacted.
> We are stopping, but the Resistance and ideas do not stop. Stay human.
How will that be if the resistance is not visible to the public. What are all the people using their services supposed to do? I’m guessing there are plans to reform in a few years. Why is the Italian government not protecting them?
Resistance and revolution happened before the internet. People have become lazy and complacent, and want their resistance served up over the wire. Thats not how real resistance happens, but it does make people feel like they are doing something, sucking up their energy while the biggest impact is TikTok memes, the modern version of the sternly worded letter.
This is exactly where the power structures want the struggle to be , online, with no real consequences that matter.
The best thing that could happen to the internet and society would be that it would be absolutely illegal to post anything inciting resistance or change of any kind on the internet.
Then, the resistance would go back to being real people in real rooms, secrets and whispers and actual plots to effect change in society for a more equitable and prosperous human future.
Because that’s how real change takes place. The powerful don’t try to make change by posting on instagram. (Advertisement and PR of course, but it’s not the organizational nexus) they gather in conference rooms, talk in person, and have social gatherings where they decide your future.
When they do use the internet to coordinate, it’s not in public forums, it’s encrypted communications, targeted and limited in scope.
The internet is useful, of course, and encrypted communication in private groups, even darkweb resources. But thinking you can use the official structure of the internet (public domain infrastructure, dns, walled gardens) as a primary means of subverting the dominant paradigm is foolish at best, suicidally counterproductive on the normative.
The internet was once subversive in and of itself. It no longer is. Now you’re just wearing signs at the mall.
The revolution thrives underground, not out in the open.
A caveat: people would have to be talking to each other to talk about resistance to each other. They don't.
Underground resistance forms out of existing "underground" social networks - social clubs, friends, people who know each other through any means. There's no longer any underground socialising at scale. We use the internet for it, where talk of resistance is strictly banned.
Even when you talk offline it's monitored. If you talk in the vicinity of an LG TV, it's converting your speech to text and uploading it to their servers, ostensibly for AI training.
Exactly. Why is it people don’t talk to each other? Why do they choose to have all of their discussions on the world’s largest and most powerful surveillance instrument?
It’s actually not that hard to go to places where phones, cameras, and internet access is banned or heavily discouraged, and guess what? It’s just people talking to each other, like we did up until the mid 90s. Just providing a technology free context is enough to get people to talk to each other.
I am a huge technology freak, but I can’t reasonably deny what I see, and that is that communications technology, in its present form, has been a terrible disaster for human communication because it made it effortless.
As it turns out, making it effortless also made people not value it at an interpersonal level, and to lessen the value of all of the cultural machinery that hinges on communication ( and the effort of it) as a central pivot.
Every step that makes communication more instantaneous and effortless undermines the value of character, honesty, and accountability.
Follow this and you can see how this has brought us to where we are today, step by step, starting with the telegraph.
Nudge theory. It's only got to be 1% more convenient than the alternative (and it's more than that), and you don't notice what you are giving up until it's too late.
It should be noted that this is a very sensible thing to say even if you are not stopping; the only case where you cannot say this is if you are carrying on with the same branding, which is typically necessary if you are carrying forwards funds (which have been seized) or brand recognition (which may not be important for a group who focuses on interpersonal relationships).
I still think a decentralized DNS alternative could scale, if done the right way. I also think that the majority of sites would be more secure if they used a system like ssh to deal with certificates, and government-controlled trust chains should be left for banking and other "official" stuff.
I'm working on something like this with Dap[1] (full disclosure, I used to be heavy into the Handshake[2] ecosystem). Where previous alt-roots failed is having nothing to build on it. Lots of marketing about how "things will be different" this time while providing nothing in the way of getting developers building experiences atop this new naming system.
Claiming your root is more secure isn't enough, what can people DO with it and WHY should they care? I've ranted enough about this to deaf ears over a half decade to no avail. Even if Dap doesn't end up being the first credible alt-root, I do hope something appears and is not immediately linked to (objectively) illegal/evil activity.
Did you really though? I never understood the "free speech absolutists" to care about speech they disagreed with. They made it clear that they only accept "patriotic" speech a long time ago.
That much was obvious for a long time to anyone paying attention. But I honestly believe that their success at newspeak-ing so many concepts was one of the final nails in America's coffin.
I hope I'll live until their fascist phase ends & historians can properly investigate all the immoral and illegal ways they've been influencing the population. My prediction is that they've scaled Cambridge Analytica to a level that'll make you sick.
Good point, we should also allow foreign organizations to contribute to US election campaigns and make Facebook ads because they might also believe in civil liberties as rights and ideals, uh... right?
It's OK to say you wish a politician was dead. It's not OK to pay someone to kill them. It's OK to say that you support some criminal activity (let's say Luigi), but it's not OK to offer direct financial support for their crimes.
> It's OK to say you wish a politician was dead. It's not OK to pay someone to kill them.
Both actions are equivalent, as such words are (social and/or political) capital bounties offered to the masses in return for fulfilling the death of said politician.
Capital always exists, even in the form of words. To deny a variant of capital whilst allowing another variant is inconsistent/doublespeak.
Just because it's not printed onto a piece of denominated paper, doesn't mean that such capital doesn't exist.
> Both actions are equivalent, as such words are (social and/or political) capital bounties offered to the masses in return for fulfilling the death of said politician.
Neither the law nor common interpretation of words agrees with this. There is a significant and crucial difference between words and actions.
Funny, the same US "free speech absolutists" get upset about "censorship" outside the US (mostly in EU countries) all the time, so it would be completely on point.
I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at. You seem to be saying the "free speech absolutists" getting upset about censorship in the EU is a bad thing. While, at the same time, saying them not getting upset about this is a bad thing.
In criticizing their inconsistencies, you are highlighting and simultaneously missing your own inconsistencies.
No E.U. censorship happened here and they're still legally allowed to operate in Italy. In the past they've been attacked by Italy several times and always won. This is a pure US threat against a pure European entity. It's like if France thought it could shut down Samsung - and then Samsung quit operating.
"Free speech absolutists" demonstrably don't even care about free speech for Americans on American soil. "Free speech absolutism" is, in 99.9999% of cases, a euphemism for 1) holding abhorrent views and 2) being a gigantic fucking crybaby when someone criticizes you for them.
I'm a free speech absolutist (albeit one of apparently few people who actually knows what "free speech" is [0]) and I'm absolutely outraged and infuriated by this action and a long history of anti-speech actions by the USG, though this particular Administration is unprecedented in terms of censorship, general evil and authoritarianism in modern history. I also think it's unfortunate how many people in favor of all sorts of censorship now attack stawmen and treat something so vitally important as a joke like you have. The unseriousness you treat something incredibly serious with has become an endemic problem in our society, and directly inspires nihilism/fatalism/tribalism etc, feelings which in turn directly support authoritarianism.
----
0: For example, if HN bans you, shadowbans you, makes your posts dead by default, flags, or downvotes, that's all free speech.
I am not sure I see a fundamental distinction between HN censoring your speech on their platform or the government preventing you from speaking in public. Both are censoring you right? Is the difference the fact that HN is free to regulate its own platform as it wants to?
For a large part I see people using digital platforms as a primary method of expressing their thoughts and opinions. Governments in both the US and the EU have imposed restrictions on what platforms may host. I think we have not reconciled yet how to reinterpret free speech online.
Im no expert on free speech, of free speech absolutism, so please let inform me :)
If I have a public platform and refuse to sponsor/publish/platform your speech, that is my free speech right! You don't have the right to force me to speak your words. Only the government is prohibited (by 1st amendment) from censoring/limiting speech (that does not cause or promote violence or injury to others). There are also some restrictions and protections also offered to the press (eg libel and defamation) and common carriers, along with the abomination of the DMCA.
Personally, I don't consider paid speech to be free speech, and I don't consider corporations to by humans, but the supreme court does.
Remember, facts aren't real, there is no truth, and crime is legal (in the current "Justice" Dept).
Freedom of association and freedom of speech go hand in hand. You can say whatever you like. You should not be arrested for it. People may choose not to associate with you, or not to do business with you, or not to amplify your speech by hosting it for you.
I don't think absolute free speech exists; there are always some limits to speech. Ideally not too many, but there are kinds of speech that I don't think you have any choice but to restrict if you want to have any kind of decent, safe and free society: threats, libel/slander, blackmail, and hate speech. Those are the kind of things that will silence, mislead or manipulate others, and are therefore by themselves a threat to free speech.
But things like criticising governments, questioning political or economic paradigms, or just making fun of powerful people, should always be legal and protected.
I think this depends on how you define 'hate speech'. Is talking about how billionaires are the scum of the earth hate speech?
I get the idea behind banning hate speech, but it gets really tricky when you try to think how to define and enforce it. Everyone agrees you need to be able to criticize groups that you don't like, so what makes it cross the line to hate speech (besides calls to violence, which would fall under the 'threats' category anyway)?
The worry is always that if you carve out an exception to free speech to protect vulnerable groups from harassment, how do you stop a future government from expanding those groups to include their political allies?
I think calls to violence usually only count as threat when they're targeted at a specific person. To me, hate speech is about creating an unsafe, threatening or oppressive situation for a vulnerable demographic group. Like saying a specific ethic group is a threat to society, or general attacks against women in general. Thing that, when repeated enough, will normalise the idea of violence or oppression against that group.
But what about similar speech against powerful groups, like billionaires? Well, they're not vulnerable or marginalised, they already have a disproportionally large voice, so they're not easily silenced. And of course being a billionaire is a choice; they can abdicate from their wealth in a way people can't do from their gender or ethnic group. So it's not the same. That said, calls for violence against them might still count as hate speech or be considered specific enough to count as threats.
There is obviously some fuzziness, but there also is with other limits to free speech, and there are courts to ultimately adjudicate that.
If it was the government telling a platform to block certain speech, that would be a restriction in free speech.
The difference is that the ownership of HN has their OWN freedom to choose who they let post on here, and what they let be posted.
This is known as the 'Freedom of Association': The right to come together with other people to collectively express, promote, or pursue their common interest. This right also includes the right to accept or decline membership in the group for whatever reason they want. HN can choose to only allow whatever they choose on their site.
In the United States, this right is actually established (according to court rulings) by the same First Amendment that establishes the right to free speech.
The right to free speech does not require a private individual or company give you a platform to make your speech.
>I am not sure I see a fundamental distinction between HN censoring your speech on their platform or the government preventing you from speaking in public. Both are censoring you right?
Wrong. HN is not "censoring" you at all, which requires engaging in violence (or threat of violence) against you to inhibit you from speaking in public. HN is literally engaging in Free Speech itself. Take arguably the most fundamental free speech activity in a democracy: advocating to your peers for the candidate you wish to vote for and have elected to represent you. You've researched and listened to Alice, Bob and Carol. You decide the best is Alice, and to show your support you do the quintessential thing and put out a Vote For Alice lawn sign on your lawn. That's obviously free speech right? Now what if instead some volunteer from Alice's election team comes by and asks you if they can put up a sign on your property, and you say yes. That too clearly involves your free speech rights, even if you didn't pay for the sign. Now say Bob & Carol's campaigns turn up, and they ask to put up signs on your lawn too. You don't support them and say no. Have you censored them? Of course not, that's ridiculous. Free speech isn't "everything is equal nothing matters", everyone is trying collectively to iterate towards truth and value by making their cases and listening, without general use of force. To say that "I think this idea/person/item is the best choice" by definition is exclusionary, it's also saying "I think all the other ideas/persons/items are NOT the best choice". It can also simply be "I wish to engage with these subjects, not those". You can make a forum dedicated to airplanes & cats, and ban anyone who starts threads on boats & lizards. You may have nothing whatsoever against boats or lizards, but that's not what you personally want to focus on on your own forum you're paying for.
Hacker News is the private property of its owners. They have their own free speech rights. Exercising those rights is not censorship.
Others in turn are free to use their property and/or their voice on public property to make their cases, and they can try to convince you and vice versa. And there can be social consequences, if someone really dislikes your speech maybe they don't invite you to dinner anymore and urge others to do the same, who might agree (or go the other way, or just ignore it). Humans can get passionate sometimes. But by keeping violence out of the whole thing outside of narrow exceptions that undermine the approach itself, room is preserved for minds to be changed and rifts mended years or even decades later, and for ideas to come back around if someone cares enough.
Government enforcing things though always involves violence, either directly or one or more orders removed. But a general monopoly on the legitimate use of force is a defining feature of government. If government doesn't like Alice, and tells you take down the sign, or else, that's fundamental infringement. They're closing down the whole cycle (if a private person did that it'd also be a bunch of other crimes AND infringement, because private persons are not allowed to use violence against others at all by default outside of narrow exceptions). And if government tells you "oh you can leave up the sign about Alice, but it's not fair you censor Bob & Carol, you must put up signs for them too. Or else." that'd be equally infringing censorship. If everyone has a sign, it's the same message as nobody having one. It's still suppressing "I think Alice is the best choice".
>For a large part I see people using digital platforms as a primary method of expressing their thoughts and opinions.
It is easier and cheaper than any point in human history to put up your own website, including your own forum to try to form a community around. You have no right to an audience though.
>Governments in both the US and the EU have imposed restrictions on what platforms may host.
What? What restriction has government in the US imposed beyond the long standing and unchanged exceptions that prove the rule (which essentially boil down to threats of violence, comms integral to crime, defamation AFTER a court case to prove it, serious violations of personal self with zero public value like CSAM, and purely commercial speech engaging in fraud)?
>I think we have not reconciled yet how to reinterpret free speech online.
There is nothing to reinterpret. We've gotten it fine since the passage of Section 230. The problem are constant efforts to suppress what we've already got, in some cases coupled with completely orthogonal issues like failure to enforce ancient anti-trust legislation.
Well I was just noting a suspicious correlation. (Also childishness is up a lot more than 50%, in case my tone was unclear :)
But you've given me quite an interesting endocrinology research project here. Last I heard, the root cause of the drop remains unknown. (And it's still dropping.)
This is such a small blip in all the crap this administration is perpetrating that most are probably not aware of it or are drowned out in the rage over inflation, tariffs, wars, immigrants, etc.
I hate to see this strawman every single time there is an attack on free speech. You are actually mocking the fight for free speech. You aren't attacking the hypocrites that only use it when convenient.
The only purpose this rhetoric serves is to justify using the power of government to silence opponents the next time your side happens to be in power.
I think the ability for good concepts to be "tainted" by the opposition is the most dangerous manifestation of tribalism/group think, in modern society.
Apparently they provide the digital infrastructure for violent Antifa cells and because of a 9/11 related executive order, the A/I is able to be branded a sponsor of terrorism.
I guess this makes it a crime to give them money or provide aid to them (if you are a US citizen).
EDIT: who is downvoting and why? The 2nd sentence in the PR says "Autistici/Inventati (A/I Collective) is an Italy-based extremist group that builds and operates the digital infrastructure for violent Antifa cells and other far-left militants across the world" Are you mad that I quote the article or mad that you disagree with Trump? In either case, why are you downvoting me exactly? I am genuinely curious.
I think people are downvoting you for several reasons:
- Taking administration propaganda pieces at face value (such as the batshit insane page you linked to)
- Referring to "violent antifa cells". That's the spin Trump has been trying to put on the groups of people who have been resisting fascism. (Do you know what "antifa" stands for?)
Thanks for explaining, I will work on my approach, I didn't think I said anything that presented I agree with or believed the PR, only that it was context for why the A/I situation.
> In a world where allegations are disconnected from reality, we can only expect repression to be increasingly disproportionate.
At the very beginning of his first mandate, when he lied about something as trivial as the size of the crowd during his inauguration, and kept to his lies despite absolute evidence to the contrary, never showing any hesitation, second thoughts, or remorse, Trump showed everyone the way ahead.
Do not look at facts. Decide what you want to be true, and act like it is true. Do this every day of every year. In the beginning, people will object; do not get into a debate with them, rather continue making up lies, bigger ones.
I remember seeing videos of a tsunami for the first time. I imagined a huge wave that destroyed everything. It was nothing like that. It started slowly. The water level rose, a few waves went over a wall and onto streets, But the water kept coming, and coming, destroying everything that stood in its path, and in a matter of minutes it was the ocean where before there was a city.
So, in 2021-2022 I publically called the See I Ayyy terrorists and advocated against accounts that algorithmically looked to astroturf or divide people on Instagram.
They showed up as actors in my commune where I lived (it was open-to-join, that was the mistake I made among being naive publically thinking truth prevails). I found after that the many past abuses of our government have not stopped and simply adopted to the modern age. Organizations whose interest it is to protect their shadow interests care not about what’s actually good for Americans, their interests are for maintaining status quo.
Status quo supports what - questioning AI and attempting to reverse the power structures or following along obediantly without question? I always wondered if my commentary led me to be put into a database of some kind. After Formerly holding a clearance, and letting it lapse, I’m recently reapplying and let’s see if “calling a government organization a terrorist org” discounts me from that. After reading the article I wouldn’t be surprised if like school yard bullies a leader in the orgs with power respond to viral accusers by marking them in a database as terrorists. Edit; please don’t accuse me of having mental health issues, I’m fine and I am working with my senators office and a “investigatory” agency to look into the abuses. I don’t yet feel hopeful the 3 petter org will reveal anything tho about my case due to security reasons.
Really sad, and also a testament of the fact that as much as we think we try to be indipendent, eventually once somebody starts putting enough pressure on the people around you (and you turn from "a neutral customer" to "a liability") the path to isolation is very short.
And yes, they could relocate to TOR, I2P, use P2P websites, torrents, and only accept cryptos for donations. But eventually you'll need to put down a credit card on file to buy a domain, and that domain needs to be owned by somebody.
njal.la (no affiliate) exists for that purpose. It is a privacy focused domain service that is run by the people behind the pirate bay.
[1] https://njal.la/domains/
You’re still subject to ICANN, an American org. There is no escaping the US government if you’re using the public web for your infra
Njalla is not ICANN accredited, so they cannot register domains. They buy them and then lease them out to you.
The issue is, now they are the legal owners and liable for the content of the website, and they also support PayPal, which will absolutely drop them the moment they get sanctioned.
You don't have to discover the perfect solution in advance. You can just try something and see how long it works for, then try a different thing.
>But eventually you'll need to put down a credit card on file to buy a domain, and that domain needs to be owned by somebody.
You don't need to pay to host onion websites (.onion domains are free and have no central registry). Though that of course really limits the possible outreach, because most people are not used to browsing onionsites.
Could someone point me to some background on this whole incident or write a quick one? I don't know who they are or what's going on but it seems important.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autistici/Inventati#United_Sta...
also for context this is a shorter version and represents well the situation https://www.inventati.org/who/collective
"After 2005 we have been constantly pestered by prosecutors and security forces (and even by the Vatican! [4]) asking us to hand over users’ data and identities and we are proud to say we were always able to answer: we are sorry, but we do not have them."
This is tech guys supporting with infra real freedom of speech! even more important nowadays! jumping to the violent antifa narrative means ignoring a lot of important things.
The US government is labeling anyone who says they're "anti fascist" as terrorists, and shut down a major Italian private email provider using that rationale.
The US Republican party has been inventing an increasingly elaborate alternate reality fiction in order to convince their voters to keep voting for policy positions that obviously work against those voters' own interests. One component of this alternate reality is a fictional terrorist organization called "antifa." They claim that anyone who does not align with their policies is a member of this organization. This allows them to use the anti-terrorism laws passed in the wake of 9/11 and similar incidents against their political opponents. The US government claims someone who used the A/I service was a member of this fictional organization, and used those anti-terrorism laws to declare that A/I is supporting terrorism and so threatened sanctions against the banks A/I was using. No access to banking means A/I is shutting down.
> "They claim that anyone who does not align with their policies is a member of this organization"
No one is claiming that Amy Klobuchar or Gavin Newsom is a member of antifa.
You're just not confronting reality, man. The President of the United States personally called for Gavin Newsom to be arrested in June 2025. In September of that year, in response to Newsom's post calling Gestapo chief Stephen Miller a fascist, Miller went on TV to complain that nobody is allowed to call him a fascist and Newsom was encouraging violence by doing so.
Yet
that's what a call a straw-man. NSPM-7 exists and is providing funding and direction for LEOs to target ideologically leftist organizations as tame as BLM or 50501 [0]
this, in combination with the rise of Flock, Clearview, Axon, and other mass-surveillance programs is leading us down an incredibly dark and Orwellian state - something that feels almost ludicrous given how anti-Big-Brother your average person is
[0] https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/how-nspm-7-seeks...
It’s mesmerizing to see how easy it has been to transform the USA into what was decried China to become about 5 years ago.
You see some form of resistance (the guy that was caught with a truck full of cut Flock cameras) but it seems the population is resigned.
They say "every accusation is a confession" yet I'm still continually surprised by accusations that I never thought would turn out to be confessions, turning out to be confessions. Like the Chinese surveillance state.
It seems to be a type of psychological projection - someone harbors an ideal like a surveillance state and assumes everyone else is harboring the same ideal so they accuse them.
I hope the Uyghur genocide accusation doesn't turn out to be a confession.
Well, the Chinese surveillance state in the US took off 25 years ago, give or take a few days.
>voting for policy positions that obviously work against those voters' own interests
Delusions of grandeur / superiority complex much? Have you considered a posibility, that these voters just dont agree with your idea of what their best interests are?
>fictional terrorist organization called "antifa."
An organization so fictional, that just a few months back multiple members were convicted in a terrorist attack
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyedgnyn4mo
Antifa defenders just hide behind the fact that the movement is decentralized and leaderless by design, but that doesn't make it fictional.
They are obviously a terrorist organization and it is good to go after their financing and communication channels.
Any was there any proof of them being members of anything beyond that group of about ten people? That article sure doesn't claim it.
If a movement has no leaders at all then it's not an organization.
For a group who's so bloody-minded about "words have meanings" about certain things, this whole "movement and affiliation and organization are all obviously exactly the same thing" claim is blatantly ridiculous.
When Republicans in the US communicate and sometimes coordinate with totalitarian international leaders, does it mean we get to label the whole thing as a single "international totalitarian organization"?
> ” They are obviously a terrorist organization”
“Organization” is a stretch. Criminals? Sure. Violent thugs? Maybe.
The “terrorist” word, however, has been stretched and distorted for political ends. It seems like any crime motivated by political or religious ideology is now “terrorism”, and thus subject to much harsher punishment than those same crimes would normally receive.
By this definition, the Jan 6 rioters were terrorists - yet they received pardons.
The UK's position on Palestine Action is the poster child for this. Completely harmless old people holding placards have been prosecuted under terrorism legislation passed after 9/11. "Terrorist" has become a label applied to anyone opposing any government policy.
We need to roll back all those counter-terrorist laws in every Anglosphere country.
"Terrorist" is just this century's n-word. Racists in Congress couldn't use the n-word so openly any more, so they invented a new word - same effect.
> Antifa defenders just hide behind the fact that the movement is decentralized and leaderless by design
Calling a movement an organization is a fiction, unless you live in an alternate reality. Should i consider you part of an organization because you tweeted a certain hashtag once? Are you the member of a band because you whistled a song on the subway? Are you in the military because you watched a Rambo movie when you were a teen?
there is a good interview with someone from the collective here: https://sabot.media/post/a-network-called-resistance
Here’s a wiki article that I found helpful:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autistici/Inventati
“Autistici/Inventati (A/I) is an Italian hacktivist group that provides Internet communication services for left-wing activists. It was founded in 2001 by members of the anti-globalisation movement…”
This. When the US government decides to label you “terrorist organization”, it means that you are now targeted by the most potent state actor on earth, which will go as far as blowing up weddings in your neighborhood to stop you.
So unless you're willing to become a literal terrorist organization and die with a bunch of your friends in an uphill battle (not technically unwinnable, but at least lopsided and the casualties will be tremendous), the only option is to cave.
Weddings if you’re lucky. They’ll also murder 150+ girls at school.
Whats the dictionary definition of terror again?
> violence or the threat of violence used as a weapon of intimidation or coercion
> especially: violent or destructive acts (such as bombing) committed by groups in order to intimidate a population or government into granting their demands
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/terror
Now, which actor in this story does this sound like? The webhoster exercising their speech rights or the apparatus bombing schools and weddings in order to get their way?
It sounds like that until you realize that the baseline behavior is for countries that are not in NATO to be subservient to NATO. So, as you can see, it is the governments and populations that are coercing and intimidating themselves and NATO is helpfully returning them to normalcy.
The situation in Iran has nothing to do with NATO really. It is a US initiative, and NATO was not involved in any way in decision making or policy.
Oh sweet summer child, you would be absolutely correct were it not for your unfortunate confounding of NATO with the USA.
I am biased here, as somebody who grew up next to an American military base in Iceland and had a pro-communist upbringing and learned to hate NATO (as well as the American imperialist agenda as a whole) from an early age.
I don‘t see a difference. I was told this when I was a child, and as I’ve grown up and seen more of the world (including by immigrating to the USA) I am more convinced then ever. In my eyes, there is no meaningful difference between USA and NATO.
There clearly is. Because NATO isn’t getting involved in America’s idiotic war of aggression and Trump is very upset about this. They’ve spent years being very upset about every other NATO nation’s spending, too.
So even if you don’t believe it, the U.S. clearly cares about NATO member behaviour and therefore recognizes a distinction.
They have been involved in pretty much all previous USA "idiotic wars of aggression", so while it may become useful in the future to make a distinction, it's also fair to appreciate that this distinction doesn't make a lot sense to a whole bunch of people.
The one time NATO was called on to defend a member was the U.S. asking for help after 9/11. And nobody but the UK followed them into Iraq, shortly after the Afghanistan war began. So there’s certainly strong history of NATO not just doing whatever the U.S. is up to.
I recall this time as a very strong refusal of the above miscategorization of NATO. Bush and his cronies had a whole “you’re with us or against us” tantrum when NATO didn’t follow. I think Americans even did some proto-Trump trolling with “freedom fries” and other nonsense.
And making nude statues wear clothes. Because freedom or something, I guess.
This is simply false history. Every NATO member went to Afghanistan with the USA. Even Iceland despite not having a traditional army participated in the invasion.
As for Iraq: UK, Poland, Spain, Portugal, and Denmark provided soldiers to partake in the illegal invasion. Even Iceland participated in the propaganda war by putting them self on the farcical “Coalition the willing” along plenty of other NATO countries.
It is very hard to see NATO as anything other then an extension of USA‘s imperial ambitions. It is as if in the year 1986 you would look at the Warsaw pact and claim this is a pact of independent nations and has nothing to do with the interest of the Soviet Union.
I think your personal beliefs fit reality if you ignore the parts of reality that strongly refute it. That kind of mentality is getting popular these days. I'll leave you to it.
Which parts of my “personal believes” are wrong? And maybe this mentality is getting more popular because it is true. People are tired of being fed propaganda for Western imperialism and capitalism more broadly.
My last attempt to convince you: Ask your self, why did Iceland not vote in favor of a ban on nuclear weapons at the UN general assembly 2016? Why has Iceland still not signed and ratified the treaty? Why has no NATO member done so? Why are Austria and Ireland one of very few European nations to do so?
Aside from France and the UK, it is hard to find an answer here which does not include American imperialist agenda.
I think it's true that NATO is for most practical purposes an instrument of the US. But it's also true that there's a distinction between NATO and the US, and some other NATO members do have influence on NATO policy - most notably Turkey, which really complicated things for the US in relation to the Syrian civil war and the Azerbaijan - Armenia conflict.
Matters not one bit to the families being genocided.
I didn't say it did. Might still matter for people trying to tame or fight these beasts from less miserable places.
Afghanistan: Every NATO member went because of article 5. The Taliban explicitly refused to comply when requested to hand over Bin Laden. This is as clear cut casus belli as it gets. And then Australia, South Korea, Malaysia, Azerbaijan and even Mongolia participated. How are those NATO? How is Mongolia even aligned with the US or under their influence in any way?
Iraq: Japan, Australia, Nicaragua, Philippines, Ukraine, Georgia... And I'm leaving like a dozen non-NATO countries, aligned AND unaligned with the US, that took part in the invasion or post-invasion missions. I don't agree with it, and while there were numerous lies to sell the invasion, equally numerous countries were unhappy about UNSCR 1441 being treated like toilet paper by the UN itself. Moreover, actual major NATO countries like Germany or France were diametrically opposed to the invasion and told the US to take a hike.
When you hold a hammer everything looks like a nail.
>There clearly is. Because NATO isn’t getting involved in America’s idiotic war of aggression
Smoke screen.
The USA launches its attacks from the territories of NATO members.
NATO has been involved in every war crime the USA has committed this century.
> NATO has been involved in every war crime the USA has committed this century.
NATO countries, yes (mostly the Brits and Polish). NATO as an organization, only for Serbia and Afghanistan.
Brits, Polish, Germans, Italians, French, Turkish. NATO bases are used without discretion to launch atrocities.
Not always, specifically not for the most recent war (gulf war 3).
I believe the pragmatic definition is "disagreement with the government".
Lasting and violent disagreement with the government, usually on ideological grounds, without being a recognised agent of (another?) government.
Remove any qualifier and you end up in some other category.
How is hosting a website and an email violent?
Not arguing in favor of banning A/I, but the US administration claims A/I email services were used to coordinate sabotage actions. I mean, that's as stupid as saying telephone networks or paper sheets were used to coordinate sabotage actions.
Furthermore, the noblogs.org platform (previously hosted by A/I) is used to host a lot of politically-motivated content, including news and statements by various resistance groups across the world, which of course is considered terrorist by the USA, but legally should fall under freedom of the press.
> So unless you're willing to become a literal terrorist organization and die with a bunch of your friends in an uphill battle (not technically unwinnable, but at least lopsided and the casualties will be tremendous), the only option is to cave.
Honestly, the internet has made folks so lazy. It's very ironic that the most "revolutionary" act taken recently (January 6) was actually done by the far-right. Yeah: if you believe in something, you need to actually get out of the basement, grab a gun, and storm the Capitol. And if you take it all the way, a lot of people are going to die. That's how revolution works. Unless we're all LARPing?
But Americans/Westerners (left, right, center) are way too comfortable for a revolution, so for people that are, or have been, actual dissidents (think Arab Spring, or IRA, or ETA, or whatever), this is all just a big meme.
Jan 6, didn't work, not entirely sure why you bring this up as a blueprint for anyone. It was an actual LARP and as Bruno Macaes wrote resembled a bunch of people making it to the end of a videogame, then running around confused in costumes and going for a drink.
What did work for them was pouring money into the election system and party apparatus, media, the courts and then taking control over politics
What worked was getting people stirred up to the point that some would turn to violence. Even now a majority of their party believe they were justified.
That helped them take control of politics. And so that tactic will surely turn people to violence again. The violence itself may not be effective but the level of outrage is.
> Jan 6, didn't work, not entirely sure why you bring this up as a blueprint for anyone.
Might want to let the Democrats know that. According to them the government was >this< close to being overthrown. Which is funny, because if anyone truly believes that, we don't stand a chance against pretty much any country on earth.
bro if 2k people broke into work looking for you, it would probably be something you think about a whole lot
> ~~2k~~ 250 unarmed people ~~broke into work~~ mysteriously allowed in are looking for you, while dozens of trained armed police officers surround you, it would probably be something you think about a whole lot
FTFY
What happened to Brian Sicknick?
Officer Sicknick did not die from being hit by a fire extinguisher because that never happened <https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brian-sicknick-fire-exting...>. He died of a stroke which the autopsy found no connection with the riot <https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/apr/19/brian-sickn...>.
The one person who died violently was one of the rioters, an unarmed woman who was shot by Capitol Police. Four other rioters died of natural causes around the time of the riot.
> Four other rioters died of natural causes around the time of the riot.
At that rate, how many can even be left by now?
An unarmed woman climbing through a smashed window with a capital police officer on the other side, sidearm drawn, warning her not to advance, in the middle of a crowd storming the capitol building while a gallows stood outside, waiting for the crowd to bring out a member of congress or the Vice President.
> * U.S. representative Markwayne Mullin [currently head of DHS], a witness to Babbitt's attempted breach, said that Byrd "didn't have a choice" but to shoot, and that his action "saved people's lives".* [0]
The shooting was deemed “lawful and within department policy”.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Ashli_Babbitt
>The shooting was deemed “lawful and within department policy”.
I do not disagree with this at all. I only mentioned her death as contrast to the usual rhetoric of how the mob at the Capitol "killed" Officer Sicknick and others (who are always mysteriously unnamed).
It's hard to reconcile a conspiracy theory that protestors were allowed to storm the Capitol with the fact that Ashli Babbitt was shot on video for refusing calls to stop breaching a barricade.
Police and security trying to manage a dynamic situation with minimum loss of life by not immediately gunning down quasi-violent crowd is a more reasonable conclusion.
Regardless, 100% of which is Trump's fault for incitement.
I don't know a single prominent Democrat who thought they had a chance of succeeding, just that they even tried was enough for them to be unpatriotic cultists
Jan 6 didn't work, but it could have worked. Many similar events have worked before. Jan 6 was the only time people tried, that was the point.
I would argue Jan 6 was as larpin as it gets, but I also know how being teargassed feels
Jan 6 was an attempt to convince the American public that the 2020 election was stolen, and to keep Trump in power. Today, more people believe the 2020 election was stolen than on January 7th, Trump is in power despite causing an insurrection, and all the J6 insurrectionists were pardoned.
You can be the judge as to whether it failed or victory was deferred, but they definitely won.
If everyone is so comfortable, what do we need a revolution for? Wasn't that the goal of civilization? If someone doesn't like civilization, why try to bring it down? There's plenty of places on earth you can go to live without it.
It sounds like you don’t know what it means to have your ancestors fighting to death for freedom and rights, being enslaved in work camps…
The fight is to never get to this situation again and to keep the rights people died for you to have.
You act like things are binary “comfort” vs “horrible life”. It’s not like Fascism grows slowly and then suddenly you are locked.
Most people are comfortable, but not everyone. At least, comfortable in the sense that they are not willing to die for their country/people at the moment, and aren't personally affected by most of the bad things their government does. In the US at least, things like high food/gas prices or unemployment/healthcare issues are just one of many other issues, and aren't causing most people so much pain that they are willing to pick up a weapon and give up their lives. Or even peacefully protest.
People that had enough money that they weren't paying attention to the price of groceries before Trump, probably still don't care all that much now. I might eat out less, but that's not worth abandoning my family or dying over to me.
It takes 3.5% of the population to effect change: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3.5%25_rule
"I broke everything like a child and now everything is worse" is not a revolution. It's being a useful idiot
> the only option is to cave
Or sue, or organize and protest, or win the next election. Not every government problem warrants revolution, and not needing to revolt is not a failing of the people.
> Americans/Westerners (left, right, center) are way too comfortable for a revolution
A better read is that the situation for most Americans and "Westerners" whatever that means, is that things are good enough that the people do not see value in revolution, or they are able to adjust the government's course enough through elections, redress, courts and other political feedback mechanisms.
> Honestly, the internet has made folks so lazy.
Or maybe people realize that revolutions, and the civil war that almost always ensue, are a very high price to pay, for a very uncertain reward.
Talking about the Arab spring, look what it lead to:
- Egypt and Tunisia are again being lead by a dictator, it's just a younger one.
- Libya is destroyed, lacks leadership and conflict could resume any day should Haftar decide he doesn't like the result of the upcoming (but long postponed) elections.
- Syria has suffered the worst civil war of the decade and the situation is still very brittle. It looks like Jolani could bring redemption to Syria, but with the Israeli playing around with fire it could also collapse any day. And that's assuming Jolani doesn't turn into a dictator himself: we're not talking about someone with a good track record of honoring his promises (which is a good thing when the promise is made to ISIS or Al Qaeda, but still).
It depends on what you count as "revolutionary". There have been at least two high-profile politically motivated murders in the US after that.
> you are now targeted by the most potent state actor on earth
Well, it is a mafia. See the international court investigating war crimes is also targeted by the orange clown-brigade mafia.
> the only option is to cave
Objectively speaking you are correct, but I don't think this has to be the case. For instance, why is that orange mafia so powerful? That is the thing that has to be fixed on every level, not just by taking back what their billionaires stole from us.
As a person living in the place you're mentioning, I have to confidently state that you've been brainwashed
I see you get your news from the internet.
> which will go as far as blowing up weddings in your neighborhood to stop you.
And in case the wedding reference wasn't explicit enough, this isn't just Trump, it was also Obama.
It pains me to summon the specter of "both sides" because the Republicans are so much worse. But the majority of national level Democrats aren't inherently good. They are just less bad (and on some issues they can be close to equally as bad).
> not technically unwinnable
Most should take those odds over giving up another inch of freedom.
People with minor kids and/or dependent spouses/family often disagree.
I don't have a scientific study at hand, but historically many revolutionaries and resistance fighters were family men and women with children who precisely cared for their children's future.
> When the US government decides to label you “terrorist organization”
We really need laws removing the power from the President to unilaterally declare organizations terrorists. At least not long term without their ability to fight the designation in court.
(Same for tariffs. There is no case where one needs emergency power to tariff or sanction anything. If you need to conduct urgent police action, court-ordered asset freezes are plenty.)
We actually need to decouple ourselves such that such threats can be ignored.
> We actually need to decouple ourselves
We’re in a globalized world with aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons. The fallacy of thinking a major economy (or significant nation) can decouple from any expansionist regime is a lesson I thought we learned from the first half of the last century.
US weapons are near useless due to prolonged institutional corruption, just like Russian ones. This was learned from Iran.
> US weapons are near useless due to prolonged institutional corruption, just like Russian ones
At invading or achieving any geopolitical objective, yes (though I wouldn’t compare the American military-industrial base to Russia’s). At causing at least as much chaos as sanctions, no.
What you really need to do, Americans, is start prosecuting your own war criminals.
Only then will you have the moral altitude you profess to have with the rest of the world, and not until then.
"Terrorist" is just this centurys' n-word - a phrase which racists cannot overtly use any more so they invented a new term to supplant it.
I read it as a very long path, but they've finally got to the end. They say this project is 25 years old and carried by the same people. Now they're tired. They've done enough. Someone else has to carry the torch. That's how I read it
I hereby designate the US government an international terrorist organization.
If that's what you characterize the US government as, I can only imagine what you characterize some of the other governments around the world. Particularly, from the millions of us who migrated to the US legally and willfully and who are very VERY grateful to this country for providing the opportunities people like myself could only dream-of in our former countries.
A/I shuts down
Some of y'all are from countries that are in great turmoil.
Which is partly or mostly our fault.
Maybe we could concentrate on doing less of that.
It really is not the fault of the US that Mexico has drug gangs that kill people at random. It's not the fault that Pakistan and India are nearly at war forever. It's not the US fault that many countries support and require female genital mutilation. The US is not as evil as you think.
> It really is not the fault of the US that Mexico has drug gangs that kill people at random
This is a direct result of the "war on drugs" perpetrated by the US.
The other two are genuinely not the fault of the US, but bringing up two examples where the US wasn't the source of the problem doesn't exactly contradict the original claim.
The war on drugs definitely didn't cause the drug trade or the murders. If anything it's the fault of leftist US government stance on drugs that weaken border security and allow drugs to get in (and therefore fund more drugs to be produced). And besides all that, the drug trade has been going on for far longer than you know. And including the murders.
> Which is partly or mostly our fault.
It does contradict the original claim because it's 3 examples of things we didn't cause - and he said "mostly our fault". If it takes 3 seconds to think of things we didn't cause, then the world's craziness is not mostly the fault of America. Mostly the US has a hand in stopping communist governments where the citizens are kept as slaves.
> The war on drugs definitely didn't cause the drug trade or the murders
You should be a lot less confident in your opinions. The war on drugs required violent interventions against drug production in Mexico, which directly created militarized, violent drug cartels.
Example: pressured by the US, Felipe Calderón launched Operation Michoacán in 2006 with U.S. backing and funding. He deployed tens of thousands of federal forces. Mexico has recorded more than 463,000 homicides since that declaration of war on the cartels, a huge increase.
Just look at the data.
> and he said "mostly our fault". If it takes 3 seconds to think of things we didn't cause
He said "mostly" because he knows there are counterexamples, so providing counterexamples doesn't contradict his point.
> Mostly the US has a hand in stopping communist governments where the citizens are kept as slaves.
This is such a genuinely undiscriminating statement that I can't help but categorize it as dumb. I don't usually say this, but you need to stop listening to propaganda and pick up a few actual history books. Until you do, any discussion is pointless, because you're so stuck in your ideology that facts can't penetrate the bubble.
That's really all I have for you. It's up to you to fix yourself.
> The war on drugs definitely didn't cause the drug trade or the murders.
Have to stop you right there. The “war on drugs” absolutely has created the conditions for the drug trade and the murders. If you criminalize a large part of the economy, then only criminals will profit from it. If we had sane drug policy, there would not be the profit that attracts these criminals. Additionally, the US intelligence services (and other nations) have a long documented role in cultivating the drug trade for diverse reasons: for profit and paying for operations, for control of regions, and to provide a reservoir of violence to disguise or facilitate their work.
As Stephen Miller loves to remind us, we had the first net emigration in decades this year. They're rounding up legal immigrants and putting them in concentration camps where they're dying because they're being denied medical care.
If you don't see an issue with the White House constantly posting straight up Nazi memes then that's on you. There's also plenty immigrants in Europe who vote for fascists, so? Turns out you can't just leave your "former" country behind like an old coat, it's still your upbringing and horizon. You are grateful "to the country", but what does that mean while also shrugging off what the people in "the country" are saying? What is left of "the country"? A bunch of papers, rights and money, opportunities for you; let the goons roam and fill their warehouses, keep children, even infants in despicable conditions, because you (think you) have nothing to fear?
Yet billions of people would still want to come here.
How do you like them apples?
So you neither acknowledge nor disagree with any of that. As if it's nothing. I would if you don't care when it falls to fascism, it's not your home. You gave up your "former" country and you're not being a fellow country person in your new one, either, kinda like you don't really show up to this conversation, but worse. Since what you say has no substance it's as if you didn't say it in the first place. It just took up space and time, for nothing. Does that answer your question?
How many of these millions only had to migrate to the US because the US destroyed their countries with war, economic sanctions, covert CIA operations, or other attacks?
I don’t know, how many? You are the one throwing blanket statements.
I’m from Latin America and it’s 100% the fault of some of our own corrupt governments and us people living in those places.
Emphasis on “some,” because countries like Chile, Costa Rica, Uruguay and lately Argentina and El Salvador are showing that less government intervention in economic matters and a zero-bullshit policy on crime is how you turn things around to something that reminisces a somewhat livable country.
Many (most?) governments around the world strike no terror on other countries. They don’t go around invading other countries, nor sanctioning them on the basis of belief, nor using their soft/hard power to exert pressure at a global scale.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m grateful for many things the USA has done, and for the inventiveness and generosity of its people; but let’s not pretend like their government(s) have been the kindest or most terror-free in the past decades.
The USA can be both a good and bad thing. And terrorism, by definition, is a bit of what they do abroad.
They already know what they are. There are good reasons the term "terrorist" has yet to be formally agreed upon among members of the United Nations.
Yeah, but do you control international banking the way they do? That's ultimately how they're able to do this.
Which is why efforts by China to stand up independent cross border payment rails are important. You have to cut the US out of any ability to control activities outside of their boundaries.
China, Egypt to do away with the use of the US dollar - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49555056 - September 2026
China nears launch of mBridge as alternative to Swift - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48636931 - June 2026
and Europe. Europe should also decouple itself from the U.S. as much as it is possible, and not repeat the mistake of overreliance with China. not because China is somehow worse, but because you always should be able to say "no", no matter how good your partners are
They are.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49225112
Europe is decoupling itself all ready also. Using SEPA-Inst and wero.
Unfortunately decoupling payments within the EU is insufficient if the US can just threaten to sanction your bank, and in doing so force the bank to drop you as a customer. Even in the presence of an internal European payments network, those banks still need to transact with the US and other US-sphere countries...
For now, but not forever. Skate to where the puck is going to be. Decoupling continues, with the target being independence. Quote this comment five years from now.
Not forever but long enough: there's no foreseeable future where the USA becomes an economy small enough to not be worth trading in.
For most banks the ability to sell financial instruments which end up interacting with the US financial institutions is fundamental.
No but then you can have local bank that will not have US interactions but can still serve you. Since the French judge of the IPC was sanctioned, it’s clear that the EU must completely decouple from the US.
The more times the US uses this as a weapon, the less power it holds and the more effort other countries go through to decouple.
The payment system has to be decoupled first, and then banks can have nothing to fear from US sanctions.
> The payment system has to be decoupled first, and then banks can have nothing to fear from US sanctions.
I'm not sure the payment system is most banks primary concern. Being able to buy/sell US securities turns out to be a fairly fundamental part of the modern economy
The US pressured Europe last time, in 2019, into aligning with their sanctions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrument_in_Support_of_Trade... The Iran situation could have gone better if trade and JCPOA nuclear oversight had continued.
So the rest of the world has the option of relying on China instead? How is that better?
A small third party at the junction of two giants is infinitely more powerful than a small third party obliged to be the client of one.
Sometimes, yes. In the case of bankings systems combined with payment systems you could end up reliant on both. If the US sanctions you only people using a Chinese OS to make payments through a Chinese payment system will be unaffected and vice-versa. Either will be able to take your economy down.
TBH China is not currently bombing a foreign country for no reason and it is not threatening to invade its allies.
It’s not a particularly high bar, but of the big powers, only China currently meets it.
And I know you will say „but payment networks are not a warfare question, they are an economic question“ but that kind of breaks down when they are used to sanction ICC judges presiding over war crime cases.
China has invaded and conquered other countries before, has occupied territories and clearly plans to invade at least one neighbour id it gets the chance. Its hugely oppressive internally and is wiping out minority cultures by any means required.
But for now at least, it’s doing less of that than the US
Why did I say it and get deadened and then 2 hours later you said it and weren't.
100%. I absolutely would prefer my own country to be a global superpower, but it isn’t.
However, currently, only US and Russia have publicly threatened my country, and both are currently engaged in a trade war with us.
China on the other hand is selling us cheap batteries and solar panels.
Free Tibet.
It can be better, if the alternative mechanism is designed with safeguards against hijacking by a single state. Naturally, the threat of sanctions can always bully banks or states into acting one way or another, but at least it would not be through the cutting off of money transfers between willing parties.
Of course, that's an _if_, not something to just take for granted.
Competition is better for everyone
The BRICS organization is precisely setup to not rely on the single actor, China included. They all have strong disagreements, but they all agree having a single global bully (USA) is bad for all involved parties.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRICS
What I find wild is that this control over international banking, and the sanctions it enables, is a key benefit of the US-led world order that Trump is trying to dismantle. I’m quite sure he doesn’t understand this, but a key consequence of his efforts to stop the US from getting “ripped off” is that we will soon no longer have the ability to impose these sorts of sanctions as the global economy re-routes around American control.
> Yeah, but do you control international banking the way they do?
This is why Europe needs to detach itself from the American banking system.
It used to be very practical to use it. Countries renounced to some sovereignty in exchange for ease of doing business. The USA had an advantage but it didn't abuse it too much.
The current situation is that the USA is asking to forfeit sovereignty and to control business in an ideological basis. There is a strong incentive to leave that system as the alternative is become a colony of the USA. And the push for colonization is not subtle as the president takes over other countries resources like Venezuela's oil or tries to take control of the straight of Hormuz (None part of the USA at this moment)
At the moment Europe is getting more reliant on the US. There are new non-Us payment systems but the end user devices are Apple or Google controlled. Governments and banks are very eager to get rid of cash, to introduce digital ID etc. That all relies on American platforms.
> That all relies on American platforms.
Totally true. The EU needs its own platforms, I hope that better regulated than their USA counterparts. Linux started in Europe, it should have been promoted more for internal usage. But privatization of state-owned companies made it ideologically impossible to push for it. Public good was seen as "bad" and "against business", I hope that the obvious failure of that policy makes it now a possibility to use Linux.
We used to. Contactless payments from my phone didn't require Google Wallet a few years ago, but now they do. My bank passes suddenly say VISA and have credit card numbers on them which they didn't have a few years ago. European banks are going in the completely wrong direction and need to reverse.
They will only do so if forced to by regulators, and so far regulators have shown no interest in doing it.
Your bank pass may support multiple systems. I think a lot of European cards (not all) are EC-Karten as well as one of the major credit card brands, and when you use it in an ATM, it uses neither system but directly contacts your bank.
> This is why Europe needs to detach itself from the American banking system.
So far, what it's detached itself from its sources of fossil fuels. With a little help from its great American friends.
I love how Europeans get pumped up on anti-American rhetoric when they are far more submissive to the US than even a Ukraine or a South Korea is. I'm starting to think the rhetoric (always about what they're about to do, something about Trump, something about Musk) is being pumped to them by US admin think tanks.
The US is going to be at peace with Russia, and still pumping anti-Russian rhetoric into Europe to keep them buying US LNG. The big difference will be that they'll start mixing more Trump-Russia rhetoric in - but the result is that they'll be more dependent on the US. The anti-China rhetoric is working great, too.
The best thing for a Europe that wants to separate from the US is to completely isolate themselves from any possible energy or trade replacement for the US./s
That being said, in Europe it's a small elite class (that is still fairly firmly in control of everything) that pushes this (on direct orders and direct payments from US masters.) The rising degree of control of speech and association they have to exert, and the direct election interference they've had to engage in is very disturbing to a plurality of the European population. And that normally politically disengaged plurality is becoming politically active as their living standards drop.
"anti-Russian rhetoric" Phrasing like this is hilarious when Russia is actually invading Ukraine and randomly bombing civilians in order to permanently steal its land. In this context the objective facts are "anti-Russian"
> The US is going to be at peace with Russia, and still pumping anti-Russian rhetoric into Europe to keep them buying US LNG.
The US isn't really a source of anti-Russia rhetoric. In fact, the US may be the biggest source of pro-Russia rhetoric, with Trump constantly sucking up to Putin and repeating Kremlin talking points.
I think what you're missing is that for many Western European countries, like Germany, suddenly gaining a direct border with Russia is a genuine concern. It's not just rhetoric; it's the real world.
It's easy for Americans, who are essentially uninvadable, to discount this as just people saying stuff, but in Europe, we actually have to live with Russia's direct military threat.
Just because millions of us haven't marched on the banks globally in a coordinated effort to control the banking system doesn't mean we can't.
Just have not yet done it.
But meaning what
If only you were the UN and could do something about it.
Oh wait!
> The anarchist cells responsible for sabotaging rail systems across France, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands in 2026, relied on A/I Collective tools and services to claim responsibility for the attacks
Hmm. So they are going by “A/I vets its users” and users sabotaged rail systems so therefore A/I is materially assisting terrorists? I wonder how this vetting works? Do users have to submit government issued documents, write essays? Do they make users sign non-violence agreement ToS. I mean heck, Facebook and Twitter has material supporting various things like that and US government is designated them as terrorists.
I wonder why gun manufacturers aren't responsible for the behavior of their users, but this org is.
Because you don't apply to a gun company to buy a gun. (You actually apply to the government...chew on that one for a while.)
Didn't need to chew, I already know the government doesn't do enough to curb gun violence.
Well, in my state, you don't "apply" for a gun like you apply for a license. It is just document that you purchased it after the seller runs a background check.
The government isn't attesting to your capabilities - that is still on you as a citizen.
But that's an outlier. In normal countries you apply for a license, THEN after you get it, you're allowed to purchase a firearm.
> you don't "apply" for a gun like you apply for a license.
>... background check
Who requires these background checks? Because the seller wouldn't do them unless obligated. Obviously the check and paperwork around it constitutes at least a de facto application to the government for permission to purchase the firearm.
IIRC from the last A/I thread, there's actually a special law that basically says gun manufacturers are not liable for what people do with the guns, and says it specifically about guns, not any other industry.
No other industry needed that law. The PLCAA was put in place in 2005 because anti-gun specifically devised a plan to sue gun makers in lieu of any success in changing gun laws.
It is absolute nonsense to ignore why the law exists while you complain about it existing.
By this logic services like Telegram or Signal would be designated "terrorist organizations". But the current admin is purely vibes-based, so we'll never know for sure
Telegram is openly supportive of cyber crime. I don't think it should be labelled as terrorist organization, but it's not far from that.
I have no way to verify whether the collective really helped the violent acts that are cited in the designation[1] but, as an Italian, given the dialectic and rhetoric in their statements and in their websites, it would not surprise me if this once they - the US government - were not wrong. "A broken clock marks the right time twice a day" and all that.
I have experienced this kind of language personally back when the collective started (they have root in the no-global movement, a protest group that contributed to the violence at the Genova G8).
At the time I was a young activist on their side, but the 'we are not violent' wink-wink nudge-nudge attitude was not main stream but very much all over the place and became hard to ignore.
[1]https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...
edit: forgot the link to the designation
I wasn't aware of this group; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autistici/Inventati is their wiki article, but it is a little light on details.
Some of the claims are interesting - "Decision making in the group takes places collectively instead of through majority voting." - isn't explained by the sourced article.
That seems like two words for the same thing to me but making the distinction seems like a signalling mechanism to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_decision-making alternative political movements care a lot about how decisions are taken. For instance, authors like David Graeber consider that majority voting only makes sense in the context if backed by violence.
So what percent of people are required for "consensus" because it seems like 50%+1 to 100%. There seems to also be an implication that democracy is 50+1 when it isn't. It can require any percentage to reach a decision.
Those two words refer to the same "type" of system where the members make a decision by ascent or descent. Both systems require an agreed upon barrier of acceptance.
They are the same. The US congress reaches decision by consensus.
Consensus is strictly 100% agreement (or at least 0% disagreement). Granted, it's not always possible. But in some setups and given some objectives, it's sometimes possible to have a collective that finds compromises that satisfy everyone (consensus).
IETF for instance, makes the distinction because they do not use a fixed vote threshold, but use a judgement of someone with good judgement, taking all facts into account such as the strength of disagreement.
And of course if that person turns out to have bad judgement they won't listen to him next time.
It is certainly possible for this to become unstable and split into two or more groups. This may work for the IETF which frequently creates and destroys working groups.
This is how you get mindless group-think. Anyone who tries to object to a bad idea is turned into an outcast and seen as a boat rocker, so members are trained to toe the line at all costs. Very unhealthy.
Possible. But the fact they have been running anarchist IT services for 25 years says otherwise.
It sound like you had one bad social experience and are projecting that onto them.
This reminds me how fragile the internet is and how we need other channels of communication.
Maybe LoRa? Doesn't get more sovereign than that. As long you have people to connect with, that is.
LoRa is very short range and extremely bandwidth limited.
There's already TOR, the problem you run in to is you need connectivity and visibility with the rest of the world on the clearnet. lora is even worse here.
Is it related to reticulum?
Reticulum can use it as one of several transport layers. LoRa is just layer 1 only
Not all problems are best served with technical solutions. This is a political problem.
I’m not suggesting technical solutions to be clear.
Real life is a channel of communication.
Exactly my point.
I'm wondering how long until they target CCC :/
That'll be fun. But the CCC doesn't engage in resistance any more. They mostly just hold the conferences where people tinker with stuff in ways that don't matter .
Well A/I doesn't engage in resistance either. All they did was provide email services and host blogs for people. By this standard, Wikipedia or CCC could indeed be next.
Here is the State Department's rationale: https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...
Like trying to scrutinize the motives of a complete lunatic.
Here’s the thing though: if even some of the examples given in the state department page are true (some of them are rather silly), that A/I knowingly provided services to groups that verifiably did some rather violent things they are accused of, I’m not sure how they expected to hide behind their mission.
My impression is that they didn’t say “hey we don’t have customer information but we don’t service violent groups and we will responsibly investigate and discontinue service to offenders.”
Their vibe was much more defiant, like, “we designed this to be anonymous and specifically intend/expect for it to be used in any way regardless of legality and are okay with it.”
Is it right for the US to be the global arbiter of this issue and domains in general? Of course not.
> A/I knowingly provided services to groups that verifiably did some rather violent things they are accused of
If that's disqualifying, a lot of US government contractors are in trouble.
Or J6.
> “we designed this to be anonymous and specifically intend/expect for it to be used in any way regardless of legality and are okay with it.”
That is also what Signal does. Or absolutely any end-to-end encrypted communication service at all - these are explicitly designed not to retain details of communication.
Do you want to declare them terrorists too?
What Signal does is different than what A/I was in a number of ways.
Please elaborate!
You won't elaborate though, just make vague accusations.
I think the difference they alluded to is that they manually vetoed new users, presumably based on their self-declared goals and ideology, whereas Signal etc are neutral platforms.
Yeah I didn’t elaborate since this was explained elsewhere in the thread.
The A/I vetting was in the form of a form asking why do you want A/I email or blog. You could write anything in it.
Meanwhile, Signal requires a phone number, so it knows much more about your identity than A/I did.
How do you know what the A/I vetting consisted of or what standards they held? They don't seem to have published any detailed description of the process, and by their own account they destroyed all records of the vetting after approval.
Maybe they clicked on the signup form while it was still live. You know, to gather actual information instead of speculating.
Several fediverse instances have the same thing. It's just a freeform textbox saying why do you want an account.
Which terrorists and criminals are texting right now on Signal? You (and hopefully Signal) have no idea whatsover, that's the point of privacy.
Now, if you are against private conversations, please state so clearly so we know which side of the fence you lean towards.
I disagree in more ways, so that invalidates your comment xoxox
They're saying the difference is that Signal doesn't say it. If you ask Signal about their support of terrorist groups, they'll say Signal doesn't allow terrorism on its platform (even though it obviously does since it has no way to know). Those are the Right Words. If you ask A/I, they said they didn't care if someone was a terrorist. Those are the Wrong Words. There's a social game being played at the highest levels that A/I have forfeited.
in interviews, they said if you give them examples of "xyz" is prohibited by applicable law, they would remove it. They would not help you spy on them probably, by backdooring their infra or sth.
Most of this has me rolling my eyes (“cadre of radical hackers”? really?), but this part is interesting:
> The A/I Collective… manually vets all potential users for ideological affinity before granting them access to its infrastructure.
What is the truth behind that? Such behaviour would undermine A/I’s claim they are akin to Gmail if they explicitly are not a neutral ISP. After that, it becomes a question of degrees: what were their specific criteria for access to the platform?
Asking out of genuine curiosity. I wasn’t familiar with this group before today.
This is exactly the problem they ran into.
A lot of the state department’s claims of “violent groups” are BS but it also seems like a non-zero number of them are pretty violent organizations.
There’s a big difference between “we have designed our devices to be zero-knowledge but we act swiftly against violent/illegal activity if it’s discovered” versus “we actively endorse the views of our user base.”
for them it basically just means to not platform nazis etc. but then once you have an account, there is no control or anything.
That's exactly the point though: if you are choosing to platform some and not others, and some (many? most?) of the groups you are choosing to platform are violent groups, you very quickly run out of plausible deniability.
Basically, far right extremists targeting antifascists through mechanisms of political repression while having the gall to call themselves pro free speech.
Why is this downvoted? The regime has openly declared that anti-fascist beliefs are now cause for surveillance, censorship, and persecution.
https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/trumps-nspm-7-labels-commo...
> ERR_UNEXPECTED_PROXY_AUTH
I’m not familiar with A/I, but this sounds pretty damning – the ideological vetting of users in particular seems to discount any sort of neutral utility defense.
Ideologically vetting can mean a lot of things. Like, a sign on the door that says "NO TERFS" is a form of ideological vetting.
By this logic any right wing message board would be designated terrorists the moment one person who has posted there commits a violent act.
This is meant to chill domestic left-wing activism. Just like the person who got 30 years for delivering some zines (https://freedom.press/issues/texas-man-sentenced-to-30-years... https://portside.org/2026-06-25/injustice-how-leftist-zines-...)
The use of the word “ideological” in text with a US Gov-anything byline is tantamount to a fart. Its whining “I dont like this thing but I cant cry like a child about it.”
Stop trusting the US government.
Sure, sounding damning is kind of the point of this kind of statement. But its also cheap and easy since there is no requirement that any of the claims are justified by any facts.
I'm not familiar with A/I, but I'm familiar with americans, and they look completely ridiculous talking smack about others doing allegedly "bad things". And they have no defense about supporting war criminals or genocidaires.
Define genocide so we can all be sure we're talking about the same thing.
It's defined in the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Long title but the document is like two pages, easy reading for even the intellectually laziest persons.
That definition is less than ideal from several perspectives. It serves neither side.
The worst reason to hate it is that it relies on proving intent (dolus specialis), which essentially makes it unenforceable unless the perpetrator is a group of simpletons.
It really hit me when I realized that there are only two ways to prove intent: The criminal admits it, or the prosecution proves that there are literally zero other possible explanations that could possibly fit the actions.
So - Back to the point. Did the USA assist people guilty of genocide by your own chosen definition? Not if there could be literally any other intention.
Keep in mind that Hamas's own convention (1988) clearly declares that they partly exist as a group for the purpose of wiping Israel out, and they did actually perpetrate October 7th. It would be very difficult for even the best lawyer in the world to argue that self-defense couldn't be at least one possible intention, and given that the nation of Israel probably has one or two decent lawyers, they'd likely be able to come up with a few other possible intentions as well, but they only need one to completely avoid prosecution.
A second reason to hate it is that it doesn't carve out exceptions for mutual combat situations, even the ones that that have been dragging on for thousands of years. When two religious groups or ethnicities from neighboring regions fight each other in open combat few reasonable people would refer to that as a genocide, but it might be considered genocide against both sides if we interpret the UN Convention as it was actually ratified.
> even the intellectually laziest persons
Yo mama.
To be more serious, this wasn't necessary and was rude. What was your goal? To convince me? To convince others? Neither are best accomplished with this sort of behavior.
> It really hit me when I realized that there are only two ways to prove intent: The criminal admits it, or the prosecution proves that there are literally zero other possible explanations that could possibly fit the actions.
I doubt we'll have absolute certainty about genocide until Nuremberg-style trials take place. The problem is such trials won't happen unless the international community intervenes, and they don't seem willing to intervene without 100% certainty. Chicken-egg problem.
Intentionally creating circumstances that can lead to a destruction of a group as a whole or in part.
Circumstances were created. The destruction of a group also happened in a significant part, and it's only not more horrendous than it already is just because of massive international support to Palestinians, on whose destruction americans participated in very significant part. Almost all of it was done by american supplied bombs, inluding the mass killings of entire families that are still being brought out of rubble to this day, burried by 100s suffocated or burned alive at the time, with their children, women and men, in covardly night attacks from high above.
Like this thing: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/9/5/gaza-teams-recover-r...
Or surprise daylight rushhour mass bombings during ceasefires that killed hundreds of children alone in one go in a day.
This is what I get in mind when I hear "americans" now. This is what americans enabled on purpose. Blergh. Unprovoked aggressions against other countries, like Iran in the last instance that led to permanently increased fuel prices and making everyone poorer around the world, also adds to feeling of disgust when hearing "americans" these days. Americans will learn in time that some things are hard to repair. And their apparent ignorance of what they do in the world and how they are perceived due to that will hit a wall soon enough.
It sounds like you have very strong feelings about this. The kind that may not be ideal for a polite conversation.
The current administration defines disliking fascism as a very bad thing.
The latest US Space Force dress uniforms look like Temu Schutzstaffel costumes.
Hacker news engages in ideological vetting against users. For example, try posting content encouraging violence.
HN only (lazily) filters content. It doesn't engage in ideological vetting, and doesn't need to either.
A good amount of the commenters on this story probably would encourage violence, or at least agree with the sentiment on a different platform, yet here they are. I'm not even sure if they're real people or bots.
We are having a discussion right now that would not be allowed if there was vetting.
What exactly do you think vetting means? Why do you think it's only allowed to happen up front?
HN's filtering is anything but lazy. Do you have showdead enabled in the settings? If not, enable it and refresh this comments page.
A bunch of my comments were mysteriously deadened and I have no idea why - they aren't flagged. This was among them. Maybe it was a retaliation for talking about HN's filtering?
When a post receive a number of flags and downvotes higher than some configured threshold, they're marked as "[dead]".
It really doesn’t, unless they are screening for terrorism. For instance, a company that provides some free tech for low income Catholics, which ends up used in some crime, maybe bombed family planning clinic, can be charged for the terrorism they didn’t do. In fact, this can be leveraged by anti-Catholic terrorists to take out the Catholic tech service.
What if "ideological vetting of users" means "discarding those who you believe would use the services for purposes you loathe".
From my reading of their policy they do not claim to be neutral:
> To be hosted on our servers you have to share our principles of anti-fascism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, anti-transphobia, and anti-militarism
It is the first line of https://www.inventati.org/who/policy
"violent" is used many times in this announcement, but it would seem that one of the most violent entity in the world right now are the US? Also, it's so weird that "antifa" (antifascists) has become a bad thing. If antifa is bad then it must mean "fa" is good? So we should bring back the Nazis?
The "Western hemisphere" (which, of course, is neither) tolerates the US and the way it enforces its decisions outside its own borders, because it used to provide some assurance of stability and protection. But as the US rescinds that policy, weakens Nato, declares a tariffs war to every country on earth, etc., there will be less and less justification as well as, probably (hopefully) less and less public acceptance for any of this posturing.
I too find it really weird. My grandpa was a member of a violent antifascist organization (US Army, 1940s). The US government even awarded him multiple medals for his antifa activities.
The Fa has taken over the US government.
> one of the most violent entity in the world right now are the US?
always has been
e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SG0Ql0VfcRg
Never heard of A/I and I have no idea what they are about, but rather than a government communication this statement reads like an angry rant with lots of unhelpful name-calling.
I would expect a government to be professional and just stick to the (proven) facts and avoiding labels; that would also be more convincing. Oh well.
Remember this is the Trump administration. I think your expectations might be a bit high.
This is the new Republican mainstream, the same mainstream that brings us AI generated videos of the Obamas as apes. They have no shame and are likely irredeemable (certainly their behavior is inexcusable).
And ultimately these statements aren't for the normal citizens. They're for the truly strange, the racists, and the trolls.
Wait this is not true. I’m truly neutral here.
The site lists actual terror attacks where the tools were used. That’s pretty damning if accurate. Anyone care to comment on that? I’m not well informed but the statement does not look like just straight up name calling.
Has any terrorist group ever used Gmail to communicate?
Is Gmail used for anything else? Lots, right?
Now, what about A/I group? Ah… well, there is your answer.
> Now, what about A/I group?
Yes, in my local food distribution networks here in France, quite a few people had autistici emails registered on our mailing list.
Don't talk about something you don't know like you do and you're smarter than anyone.
Really?
> The anarchist cells responsible for sabotaging rail systems across France, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands in 2026, relied on A/I Collective tools and services to claim responsibility for the attacks, publish official communiqués, and disseminate manuals for constructing improvised incendiary devices to target railways and other critical infrastructure.
> The anarchist cell responsible for sabotaging the Transalpine Pipeline (TAL) in March 2026, which temporarily halted crude oil flows to Austria, Germany, and the Czech Republic, relied on A/I Collective tools and services to claim responsibility for the attack and publish official communiqués, as well as to disseminate a manifesto calling for additional attacks on critical infrastructure and referring adherents to another A/I Collective platform, which provides detailed sabotage manuals as well as maps of vulnerable critical infrastructure across North America.
> The far-left extremist network responsible for multiple arson attacks and acts of sabotage against Germany’s rail and energy infrastructure between 2011 and 2026, including a January 2026 attack on Berlin’s power grid that cut power to 45,000 households and resulted in a fatality, relied on A/I Collective tools and services to claim responsibility for attacks, publish official communiques, and disseminate a manifesto calling for additional attacks on energy infrastructure worldwide.
Seems quite specific to me.
Well, the far left extremists also used ISPs, mobile phones, energy infrastructure to do this.
Are those terrorist organizations too?
Moreover, ask yourself: why hasn't Germany accused A/I of being co-responsible of the attacks?
They also probably used Signal for comms, and it's safe to assume some of them used protonmail.
And maybe they used a Google camera for taking photos of their acts.
By the same logic, what prevents US from labelling Signal, Proton, and Google as ones supporting terrorist organizations?
Is the car manufacturer responsible for their use of a car? The power tools manufacturer? The paper sheet manufacturer? The restaurant that fed them?
Technical intermediaries could be held responsible specifically for hosting the manifestos (under freedom of the press laws), but that requires an actual due process. Meanwhile, 100% of the authors and websites who inspired or relayed Anders Brejvik and other neo-fascist terrorists are still online and are not facing any kind of repression.
"statement reads like an angry rant with lots of unhelpful name-calling."
This is the standard of communication for the Trump administration.
Check whitehouse.gov next. You'll think it's been defaced by a script kiddie.
> A/I’s cadre of radical hackers and tech developers provide a full spectrum of services
Pun intended?
Unfortunately I can no longer take any official communication from my government at face value. They have lost my trust that they are operating as directed by the letter of the law without fear nor favor.
We must all fight for independent hosting or we will lose the right.
Punish those trying to stop it by coming back stronger. Spin up in a few new countries if you have to.
Friends and I have been giving out free shell accounts, service hosting, and mentorship for anon randos for over 25 years. Apparently this makes us cyber-terrorists. Neat!
We have had our infrastructure taken from us many times, and quickly come back online, often in a new country, every time.
Looking forward to 25 more years of people trying to kill us. Every attempt makes us stronger and smarter.
So the oppression does work. It won't stop.
> History shows that people always choose convenience over autonomy.
The mere fact that revolution exists disproves this statement.
Well, you can interpret revolution as happening only when convenience breaks down too much.
It only proves just how hard people’s lives were in order for them to prefer actual revolution over the status quo.
>Sorry, but we don’t accept Bitcoin.
https://www.inventati.org/donate
Should have focused on Monero donations from the get-go. Banks are a plague. Like what is a group like this using banks for or at least diversifying??
It's like choosing not to use E2EE.
It's not even left political groups that get debanked or screwed—it's everyone often.
Even GrapheneOS, but intelligently, they use crypto heavily:
>Unfortunately, PayPal permanently locked our GrapheneOS Foundation account today. No reason has been provided for the account being locked. All we've done is accept donations. We added our bank account information yesterday in order to begin withdrawing money and it was locked.
https://xprivate.lol/GrapheneOS/status/1684663777273233408
https://xprivate.lol/GrapheneOS/search?f=tweets&q=Pay+monero...
Not surprising. Far-leftists tend to be ideologically opposed to Bitcoin. They say so themselves: "Bitcoin are an investment fund pump & dump done to dupe the ultra-libertarian anarco-capitalists."
The problem with repression is not financial. Since A/I's goal was never to make profit, Bitcoin can't do anything to help them.
I've been following the collextive for 10 years. They promoted and hosted violent/terrorist activity.
Parler was ripped off the Internet for 1% of this.
You reap what you sow. If you don't support the freedom of people you disagree with politically, I don't support your freedom either.
Covid has forced me to take a hard stance on this.
"They promoted and hosted violent/terrorist activity."
What kind exactly?
They are neutral. So violent terrorist activity is cracked down via their provider. So called secondary sanctions.
https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...
Check the <li> near the bottom. Some are named, such as Armed Proletarian Justice, Revolutionary Class Self-Defense, and Jane’s Revenge, but some unnamed ones as well (at least their actions have been described).
Because as we all know, the US government (and especially this one) would never lie.
How are the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq doing?
I heard MS13, and Tren de Aragua.
Parler was "ripped off the Internet" because it was delisted from app stores and dropped by AWS for violating their ToS due to having (If I remember correctly) approximately zero content moderation, which is not really compatible with the mainstream distribution model they wanted. The owners were not subjected to sanctions by a foreign government.
Unless the US government ripped parler off the Internet, this is not a sensible comparison.
> They promoted and hosted violent/terrorist activity.
like?
Political risk becoming infrastructure risk ; aservice can be viable technically and still disappear when the institutional environment changes
Can just rename themselves into I/A. “A/I? That’s shut down. We are not affiliated with them…”
Possibly. The content can be saved and posted on a variety of other platforms.
While this is very heavy handed censorship, there are plenty of ways around it.
What did they do??
Sounds like providing encrypted communications?
I think we can all see the potential problems with this, even if a specific group is awful.
“The specific claim: a far-left media group that describes itself as a “tool” for militants to share information “to be acted upon” used A/I’s services to publish communiqués and calls to action for U.S.-designated terrorist groups, including FAI/FRI, the IRGC, Hamas, Hizballah, ELN, NPA, PFLP, and PIJ. That same media group was cited in a federal complaint against a domestic terrorist sentenced to 19 years for attacking a federal building and a police car with IEDs.”
> Hizballah
Is that Hezbollah's little brother?
Hizballah and Hezbollah are different spellings of the same thing, with Hizballah probably being more accurate and the one regularly used by the US government.
Oh...the US government. That clarifies a lot...
That's what the USA alleges. There is no evidence of any of this is true, and the USA is known to be a habitual liar and a terrorist state itself.
If I was someone who funded/relied on A/I's services I would have been trying to figure out what would it had taken for the US State Department to produce evidence for their allegations and would have lobbied for some sort of determination of whether the scope of A/I's involvement with said parties and their actions violated their own policies/terms of service.
Otherwise there is a way to look at this as A/I getting away scot-free for failing to administer their policies, failing to hold bad actors accountable and ultimately letting down individuals and organizations who lawfully used their services.
I'm also not surprised that A/I themselves never anticipated something like this happening and did not have some sort of protocol in place to deal with it. They had 25 years to do so.
I hereby designate the US dollar the currency of an international terrorist organization
What is this nonsense even about? Site I’ve never heard of making bombastic claims without any citations. Can someone please provide context and sources? Because this looks like a hoax or something?
Edit: just so we are clear, I’ve no idea what A/I is, the linked page gave no details, nor do the current top comments. The current top comment is rambling about free shell accounts and stuff. The ones I read after that were mourning the loss of this mysterious site/service/something. Does anyone want to clueinthe rest of us?
What does it means?
The US government designated a long-running web/email hosting services collective that served political dissidents as a terrorist organization.
https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...
It means the government won.
The U.S. government’s track record is concerning. After their actions against AntifaOst, numerous NGOs, such as 'Die Rote Hilfe,' were stripped of their banking access in Europe.
I think everybody should read the two Economic Hitmen books by John Perkins.
So I guess they just relaunch under a different name ?
And break everyone's e-mail address in the process? It is not a trivial step to migrate to a new domain an e-mail account that had been active for decades.
Love these people and what a powerful message
If anyone from A/I is reading this know you always have a place to stay/eat if you need it
Hopefully riseup can pick up some of the slack here, but more decentralized services are needed.
Are there interesting approaches to the problem? Tor comes to mind but that's not really accessible for readers
It's interesting how a terrorist organization is now labeling others terrorists. This is how far we've come.
This is unfortunately nothing new. The hegemonic power defines resistance to it as criminal, terrorist, immoral, heathen, satanic, reactionary etc.
I also oppose fascism, militarism, racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, like what A/I do... And none of that is illegal... At least not in any civilised society. So what did they do to trigger so many? I remember the Norwegian stuff (since I’m Norwegian), and I remember thinking it sounded like bullshit to copy their entire server drive when they wanted access to the blog of two people.
From what I could gather, it seems various governments accused them of deliberately providing infrastructure to groups whose violent activities they supported, such as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), with communications associated with railway sabotage, attacks on energy infrastructure and the “Jane’s Revenge” arson campaign (whatever the hell that is).
Here’s a snippet I found on the net: "Italian police installed a server backdoor in 2004 during an investigation into the anarchist collective Crocenera. It was discovered in 2005. According to contemporary EDRi reporting, the access potentially exposed communications belonging to thousands of unrelated users; EDRi explicitly noted that actual collection of unrelated data had not been proven. EDRi’s contemporary report"
Huge disclaimer on this, since it’s just my musings: This might be one of the situations where both sides are in the wrong. It’s possible that A/I willfully turned a blind eye to actual illegal activity by its users, and refused to cooperate with legal investigations. At the same time, various governments, including mine, overreacted and behaved unethically and maybe even illegally because A/I “didn’t want to play ball.”
Just speculation. But the fact that I can’t easily find concrete examples of what A/I supposedly did wrong makes me inclined to feel sympathy for them. I hate unspecific allegations like “facilitation of problematic and terroristic-adjacent activities.” That’s some 1984-ish bullshit.
I have no clue what I’m talking about here, though. Strange situation and too little information...
> And none of that is illegal... At least not in any civilised society
I mean, the capitalist system is a barbaric system with defenders that do make opposition illegal...
Yeah, but there are degrees. I’d rather have a conversation about trans rights here in Oslo than in Afghanistan.
How do you think LGBTQI+ rights came exist? It was not a pretty, blood-free, submissive process. And we're still far from LGBTQI+ rights being normalized.
How about workers rights? Slavery? Any progress that you'd think of as civilizing was not achieved without blood.
Indeed. Must also acknowledge that such tactics generate the seeds of opposition. i.e. hate begets hate and violence begets violence.
I don't remember any LGBTQI+ wars here in the Czech Republic, so "blood free" actually seems like a good characterisation. Sometimes the system just works.
See also the Velvet Revolution for a pretty large shift away from totalitarianism without any deaths.
I don't remember any LGBTQI+ wars inside my house either, but they're respected here. That's strange isn't it?
It is strange. I certainly wouldn't think your house, having been isolated from western society over decades by a communist regime and heavily-patrolled borders, would respond to social activism in foreign countries. But maybe there's just some secret house mycelium for sharing progressive ideas that I don't know about.
It's very clear you do not have a grasp of Marxism or Communism. You'd know that the worker class is only one.
Theoretical aphorisms can't override the facts of recorded history. If the harsh border control and cultural isolation of the East Bloc ran counter to Marxist principles, then you can complain to the dead leaders of the USSR, but that's about it.
Check the history of the different communist movements. Maybe an entrypoint would be this: today there is the Fourth International. The USSR was born out of the Third International with Lenin, and the Fourth International opposed/opposes the USSR's practices and because of that the USSR hunted them down using their agents whom eventually killed Trotski.
People who want bloodshed tend to say this… It’s melodramatic.
You could say that about anything classified as human progress. How did we improve things so that people could have electricity and safety? At the cost of deaths and suffering by everyone who built the Hoover Dam and similar projects. The same goes for "stop killing patients by going dirty from corpses to the delivery room," even when we knew it was unsafe. There is always death and blood related to any topic. How do you think you got the device you are communicating with? Through the death and suffering of someone in Congo, mining cobalt, and someone working themselves to death in a factory.
I have lived through the normalization of gay rights in Norway, and saying that it was a process marked by blood and suffering is moronic. It was painful, unnecessary, overdue, and many other things. But saying that it was a bloody conflict is just not true, at least not any more than many other progressive movements. So progress doesn't have to be violent.
You could say that this is not the lived experience of many people, and that is true. But that doesn’t automatically mean it has to be so for everybody, and it does not have to be inevitable for any cause. It’s not statistically more violent than many other things.
I’m getting tired of the violent and angry rhetoric people spew without pushback. Stop idealizing and glorifying violence and conflict to solve any problem. It seems more and more to me that this is violent ideation first, with the cause being secondary.
I have not glorified violence nor called to do violence to anyone. You seems to have misunderstood: I wish for violence to stop. It was always the oppressed's blood that was spilled by the establishment through police force every time they protested in the streets, and every time they were uncomfortable. Take the workers day as an example. It's egregious to me to call a protest violence.
The only thing the oppressed can do is to be uncomfortable, organize, and not let the system claim their souls and bodies. The only thing the system does is perpetuate itself, inflicting violence to the oppressed, in an endless spiral towards the bottom.
You're right, of course, but you're on a website of a VC firm.
https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20... This designation offers some specific examples of violence being coordinated using their systems. Some are indeed extreme, if true. That doesn’t invalidate their mission or overall contribution to the world at large; it just was sufficient ammo for extinguishing another threat to power.
This does not show what they (A/I) did. The only concrete examples are of bad behavior by some users. Then there’s a bunch of generic claims against A/I, with NO specifics.
So, yeah, it might be true. But I find no concrete examples of what bad stuff A/I themselves did, just their users. Personally, I would like for there to be at least SOME concrete examples. Like, “This convicted terrorist had a blog on their infrastructure, and A/I refused to hand over data they had, even when presented with a valid court order.” Or something like that. Is it too much to ask that the government provide some concrete evidence, not just abstract vage accusations, when doing something as drastic as designating someone a terrorist organization? It would seem so...
This is a knock on the state.gov item, not your comment. Your comment was good.
The problem is that, as A/I themselves explained (https://www.inventati.org/who/collective), they worked hard to ensure that they do not possess any evidence of or data about who is using their infrastructure.
autistici.org said the opposite:
https://web.archive.org/web/20260826145332/https://www.autis...
"We provide our services strictly for non-commercial use, in order to provide support exclusively to individuals or groups we feel we have an affinity with. In order to verify the existence of these pre-conditions, each and every service request is processed manually by one of our volunteers and is in a dialogical form. All requests are anonymized and will be destroyed."
Anonymized how? Before the first contact? After the conversation?
If anyone here wants to set up a similar service: This is patently stupid for an ISP to attempt.
Sounds like they vet the users request before giving them access. After that the usage is anonymous. It’s not that deep
> https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20... This designation offers some specific examples of violence being coordinated using their systems
All that demonstrates is that they operated a public email/messaging server. One could have coordinated the exact same things using ProtonMail or Signal.
> “That doesn’t invalidate their mission or overall contribution to the world at large;”
Give me a break. Ends to not justify all means. This is a completely appropriate response by the state department.
Why aren't they banning Signal?
I note that that extensive list only contains a single death, due to a power failure. Extreme civil disobedience, but not really terrorism.
> I also oppose fascism, militarism, racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, like what A/I do... And none of that is illegal... At least not in any civilised society. So what did they do to trigger so many?
Do you oppose using standardized tests to determine which applicants should get admitted to selective public universities? This is a specific thing that was halted in California because activists argued it was illegally racist (https://publiccounsel.org/our-cases/smith-v-regents-of-unive...). You'll probably find that lots of ways you relate to people around you as gendered beings, men and women, count as either sexism, transphobia, or both, at least according to some activists' definitions. I do not assume that when a political activist group claims to oppose racism, sexism, or other ostensible hostility to a demographic group, that they aren't trying to define this in a way that would result in an immense restriction on your rights, freedoms, or quality of life if enacted.
> We are stopping, but the Resistance and ideas do not stop. Stay human.
How will that be if the resistance is not visible to the public. What are all the people using their services supposed to do? I’m guessing there are plans to reform in a few years. Why is the Italian government not protecting them?
I take it as, talk to people in real life and don’t rely on systems that can be shut down.
The Italian government is also a far-right government like the US, so is aligned in wanting to suppress left-wing views.
Bring evidence that the actions of the two are really comparable. Surprise us (it will take some effort).
>Why is the Italian government not protecting them?
The Italian police wiretapped them for one year without them knowing.
> wiretapped them for one year
Can you share the source? I don't have it.
Note: one big issue in the whole event is that this prosecution is happening without a transparent judgement.
You can read about the Italian police obtained the encryption keys through the Aruba colocation provider in the Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autistici/Inventati
Italian Postal Police wiretapping (2004–2005)
Did they prosecute? Or did they investigate and find nothing wrong ?
Resistance and revolution happened before the internet. People have become lazy and complacent, and want their resistance served up over the wire. Thats not how real resistance happens, but it does make people feel like they are doing something, sucking up their energy while the biggest impact is TikTok memes, the modern version of the sternly worded letter.
This is exactly where the power structures want the struggle to be , online, with no real consequences that matter.
The best thing that could happen to the internet and society would be that it would be absolutely illegal to post anything inciting resistance or change of any kind on the internet.
Then, the resistance would go back to being real people in real rooms, secrets and whispers and actual plots to effect change in society for a more equitable and prosperous human future.
Because that’s how real change takes place. The powerful don’t try to make change by posting on instagram. (Advertisement and PR of course, but it’s not the organizational nexus) they gather in conference rooms, talk in person, and have social gatherings where they decide your future.
When they do use the internet to coordinate, it’s not in public forums, it’s encrypted communications, targeted and limited in scope.
The internet is useful, of course, and encrypted communication in private groups, even darkweb resources. But thinking you can use the official structure of the internet (public domain infrastructure, dns, walled gardens) as a primary means of subverting the dominant paradigm is foolish at best, suicidally counterproductive on the normative.
The internet was once subversive in and of itself. It no longer is. Now you’re just wearing signs at the mall.
The revolution thrives underground, not out in the open.
A caveat: people would have to be talking to each other to talk about resistance to each other. They don't.
Underground resistance forms out of existing "underground" social networks - social clubs, friends, people who know each other through any means. There's no longer any underground socialising at scale. We use the internet for it, where talk of resistance is strictly banned.
Even when you talk offline it's monitored. If you talk in the vicinity of an LG TV, it's converting your speech to text and uploading it to their servers, ostensibly for AI training.
Exactly. Why is it people don’t talk to each other? Why do they choose to have all of their discussions on the world’s largest and most powerful surveillance instrument?
It’s actually not that hard to go to places where phones, cameras, and internet access is banned or heavily discouraged, and guess what? It’s just people talking to each other, like we did up until the mid 90s. Just providing a technology free context is enough to get people to talk to each other.
I am a huge technology freak, but I can’t reasonably deny what I see, and that is that communications technology, in its present form, has been a terrible disaster for human communication because it made it effortless.
As it turns out, making it effortless also made people not value it at an interpersonal level, and to lessen the value of all of the cultural machinery that hinges on communication ( and the effort of it) as a central pivot.
Every step that makes communication more instantaneous and effortless undermines the value of character, honesty, and accountability.
Follow this and you can see how this has brought us to where we are today, step by step, starting with the telegraph.
Nudge theory. It's only got to be 1% more convenient than the alternative (and it's more than that), and you don't notice what you are giving up until it's too late.
You go offline. Paper flyers and meetings are much more effective anyway.
It is also not like Palestinian activism is blocked on X, despite people here saying that only Nazis are on X and everything is censored:
https://x.com/intifada
Controlled opposition is sometimes allowed on X.
It should be noted that this is a very sensible thing to say even if you are not stopping; the only case where you cannot say this is if you are carrying on with the same branding, which is typically necessary if you are carrying forwards funds (which have been seized) or brand recognition (which may not be important for a group who focuses on interpersonal relationships).
America hate thread?
No. America hate anti-fascism.
A DNS alt-root and something like x402 would fix this
I still think a decentralized DNS alternative could scale, if done the right way. I also think that the majority of sites would be more secure if they used a system like ssh to deal with certificates, and government-controlled trust chains should be left for banking and other "official" stuff.
I'm working on something like this with Dap[1] (full disclosure, I used to be heavy into the Handshake[2] ecosystem). Where previous alt-roots failed is having nothing to build on it. Lots of marketing about how "things will be different" this time while providing nothing in the way of getting developers building experiences atop this new naming system.
Claiming your root is more secure isn't enough, what can people DO with it and WHY should they care? I've ranted enough about this to deaf ears over a half decade to no avail. Even if Dap doesn't end up being the first credible alt-root, I do hope something appears and is not immediately linked to (objectively) illegal/evil activity.
Hmm, I would have expected more outrage from the US "free speech absolutists" over this US government decision ;)
Did you really though? I never understood the "free speech absolutists" to care about speech they disagreed with. They made it clear that they only accept "patriotic" speech a long time ago.
That much was obvious for a long time to anyone paying attention. But I honestly believe that their success at newspeak-ing so many concepts was one of the final nails in America's coffin.
I hope I'll live until their fascist phase ends & historians can properly investigate all the immoral and illegal ways they've been influencing the population. My prediction is that they've scaled Cambridge Analytica to a level that'll make you sick.
Did you catch the part where A/I Collective is operated by foreign parties outside the US?
If you believe in civil liberties as rights and ideals, your belief shouldn't stop at borders.
Good point, we should also allow foreign organizations to contribute to US election campaigns and make Facebook ads because they might also believe in civil liberties as rights and ideals, uh... right?
Money isn't speech.
As you said yourself:
> > If you believe in civil liberties as rights and ideals, your belief shouldn't stop at borders.
If you believe in civil liberties as rights and ideals, your belief shouldn't stop at money.
Either the right extends everywhere, including money, or it doesn't.
That doesn't follow.
It's OK to say you wish a politician was dead. It's not OK to pay someone to kill them. It's OK to say that you support some criminal activity (let's say Luigi), but it's not OK to offer direct financial support for their crimes.
> It's OK to say you wish a politician was dead. It's not OK to pay someone to kill them.
Both actions are equivalent, as such words are (social and/or political) capital bounties offered to the masses in return for fulfilling the death of said politician.
Capital always exists, even in the form of words. To deny a variant of capital whilst allowing another variant is inconsistent/doublespeak.
Just because it's not printed onto a piece of denominated paper, doesn't mean that such capital doesn't exist.
> Both actions are equivalent, as such words are (social and/or political) capital bounties offered to the masses in return for fulfilling the death of said politician.
Neither the law nor common interpretation of words agrees with this. There is a significant and crucial difference between words and actions.
Funny, the same US "free speech absolutists" get upset about "censorship" outside the US (mostly in EU countries) all the time, so it would be completely on point.
I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at. You seem to be saying the "free speech absolutists" getting upset about censorship in the EU is a bad thing. While, at the same time, saying them not getting upset about this is a bad thing.
In criticizing their inconsistencies, you are highlighting and simultaneously missing your own inconsistencies.
This is not how accusations of hypocrisy work. I don't have to agree with any particular stance of yours in order to accuse you of hypocrisy.
No E.U. censorship happened here and they're still legally allowed to operate in Italy. In the past they've been attacked by Italy several times and always won. This is a pure US threat against a pure European entity. It's like if France thought it could shut down Samsung - and then Samsung quit operating.
So free speech absolutists don't care about free speech, just free speech for americans on american soil? Not very absolutist then...
"Free speech absolutists" demonstrably don't even care about free speech for Americans on American soil. "Free speech absolutism" is, in 99.9999% of cases, a euphemism for 1) holding abhorrent views and 2) being a gigantic fucking crybaby when someone criticizes you for them.
The US free speech advocates had plenty to day about Julian Assange, an Australian stuck in the Ecuadorean embassy all the way across the Atlantic.
I'm a free speech absolutist (albeit one of apparently few people who actually knows what "free speech" is [0]) and I'm absolutely outraged and infuriated by this action and a long history of anti-speech actions by the USG, though this particular Administration is unprecedented in terms of censorship, general evil and authoritarianism in modern history. I also think it's unfortunate how many people in favor of all sorts of censorship now attack stawmen and treat something so vitally important as a joke like you have. The unseriousness you treat something incredibly serious with has become an endemic problem in our society, and directly inspires nihilism/fatalism/tribalism etc, feelings which in turn directly support authoritarianism.
----
0: For example, if HN bans you, shadowbans you, makes your posts dead by default, flags, or downvotes, that's all free speech.
I am not sure I see a fundamental distinction between HN censoring your speech on their platform or the government preventing you from speaking in public. Both are censoring you right? Is the difference the fact that HN is free to regulate its own platform as it wants to?
For a large part I see people using digital platforms as a primary method of expressing their thoughts and opinions. Governments in both the US and the EU have imposed restrictions on what platforms may host. I think we have not reconciled yet how to reinterpret free speech online.
Im no expert on free speech, of free speech absolutism, so please let inform me :)
If I have a public platform and refuse to sponsor/publish/platform your speech, that is my free speech right! You don't have the right to force me to speak your words. Only the government is prohibited (by 1st amendment) from censoring/limiting speech (that does not cause or promote violence or injury to others). There are also some restrictions and protections also offered to the press (eg libel and defamation) and common carriers, along with the abomination of the DMCA.
Personally, I don't consider paid speech to be free speech, and I don't consider corporations to by humans, but the supreme court does.
Remember, facts aren't real, there is no truth, and crime is legal (in the current "Justice" Dept).
Is ICANN the government?
HN can't put you in jail.
Freedom of association and freedom of speech go hand in hand. You can say whatever you like. You should not be arrested for it. People may choose not to associate with you, or not to do business with you, or not to amplify your speech by hosting it for you.
The USA can't put A/I in jail, since they're Italian and haven't been found guilty of any crimes in Italy .
I don't think absolute free speech exists; there are always some limits to speech. Ideally not too many, but there are kinds of speech that I don't think you have any choice but to restrict if you want to have any kind of decent, safe and free society: threats, libel/slander, blackmail, and hate speech. Those are the kind of things that will silence, mislead or manipulate others, and are therefore by themselves a threat to free speech.
But things like criticising governments, questioning political or economic paradigms, or just making fun of powerful people, should always be legal and protected.
I think this depends on how you define 'hate speech'. Is talking about how billionaires are the scum of the earth hate speech?
I get the idea behind banning hate speech, but it gets really tricky when you try to think how to define and enforce it. Everyone agrees you need to be able to criticize groups that you don't like, so what makes it cross the line to hate speech (besides calls to violence, which would fall under the 'threats' category anyway)?
The worry is always that if you carve out an exception to free speech to protect vulnerable groups from harassment, how do you stop a future government from expanding those groups to include their political allies?
I think calls to violence usually only count as threat when they're targeted at a specific person. To me, hate speech is about creating an unsafe, threatening or oppressive situation for a vulnerable demographic group. Like saying a specific ethic group is a threat to society, or general attacks against women in general. Thing that, when repeated enough, will normalise the idea of violence or oppression against that group.
But what about similar speech against powerful groups, like billionaires? Well, they're not vulnerable or marginalised, they already have a disproportionally large voice, so they're not easily silenced. And of course being a billionaire is a choice; they can abdicate from their wealth in a way people can't do from their gender or ethnic group. So it's not the same. That said, calls for violence against them might still count as hate speech or be considered specific enough to count as threats.
There is obviously some fuzziness, but there also is with other limits to free speech, and there are courts to ultimately adjudicate that.
If it was the government telling a platform to block certain speech, that would be a restriction in free speech.
The difference is that the ownership of HN has their OWN freedom to choose who they let post on here, and what they let be posted.
This is known as the 'Freedom of Association': The right to come together with other people to collectively express, promote, or pursue their common interest. This right also includes the right to accept or decline membership in the group for whatever reason they want. HN can choose to only allow whatever they choose on their site.
In the United States, this right is actually established (according to court rulings) by the same First Amendment that establishes the right to free speech.
The right to free speech does not require a private individual or company give you a platform to make your speech.
>I am not sure I see a fundamental distinction between HN censoring your speech on their platform or the government preventing you from speaking in public. Both are censoring you right?
Wrong. HN is not "censoring" you at all, which requires engaging in violence (or threat of violence) against you to inhibit you from speaking in public. HN is literally engaging in Free Speech itself. Take arguably the most fundamental free speech activity in a democracy: advocating to your peers for the candidate you wish to vote for and have elected to represent you. You've researched and listened to Alice, Bob and Carol. You decide the best is Alice, and to show your support you do the quintessential thing and put out a Vote For Alice lawn sign on your lawn. That's obviously free speech right? Now what if instead some volunteer from Alice's election team comes by and asks you if they can put up a sign on your property, and you say yes. That too clearly involves your free speech rights, even if you didn't pay for the sign. Now say Bob & Carol's campaigns turn up, and they ask to put up signs on your lawn too. You don't support them and say no. Have you censored them? Of course not, that's ridiculous. Free speech isn't "everything is equal nothing matters", everyone is trying collectively to iterate towards truth and value by making their cases and listening, without general use of force. To say that "I think this idea/person/item is the best choice" by definition is exclusionary, it's also saying "I think all the other ideas/persons/items are NOT the best choice". It can also simply be "I wish to engage with these subjects, not those". You can make a forum dedicated to airplanes & cats, and ban anyone who starts threads on boats & lizards. You may have nothing whatsoever against boats or lizards, but that's not what you personally want to focus on on your own forum you're paying for.
Hacker News is the private property of its owners. They have their own free speech rights. Exercising those rights is not censorship.
Others in turn are free to use their property and/or their voice on public property to make their cases, and they can try to convince you and vice versa. And there can be social consequences, if someone really dislikes your speech maybe they don't invite you to dinner anymore and urge others to do the same, who might agree (or go the other way, or just ignore it). Humans can get passionate sometimes. But by keeping violence out of the whole thing outside of narrow exceptions that undermine the approach itself, room is preserved for minds to be changed and rifts mended years or even decades later, and for ideas to come back around if someone cares enough.
Government enforcing things though always involves violence, either directly or one or more orders removed. But a general monopoly on the legitimate use of force is a defining feature of government. If government doesn't like Alice, and tells you take down the sign, or else, that's fundamental infringement. They're closing down the whole cycle (if a private person did that it'd also be a bunch of other crimes AND infringement, because private persons are not allowed to use violence against others at all by default outside of narrow exceptions). And if government tells you "oh you can leave up the sign about Alice, but it's not fair you censor Bob & Carol, you must put up signs for them too. Or else." that'd be equally infringing censorship. If everyone has a sign, it's the same message as nobody having one. It's still suppressing "I think Alice is the best choice".
>For a large part I see people using digital platforms as a primary method of expressing their thoughts and opinions.
It is easier and cheaper than any point in human history to put up your own website, including your own forum to try to form a community around. You have no right to an audience though.
>Governments in both the US and the EU have imposed restrictions on what platforms may host.
What? What restriction has government in the US imposed beyond the long standing and unchanged exceptions that prove the rule (which essentially boil down to threats of violence, comms integral to crime, defamation AFTER a court case to prove it, serious violations of personal self with zero public value like CSAM, and purely commercial speech engaging in fraud)?
>I think we have not reconciled yet how to reinterpret free speech online.
There is nothing to reinterpret. We've gotten it fine since the passage of Section 230. The problem are constant efforts to suppress what we've already got, in some cases coupled with completely orthogonal issues like failure to enforce ancient anti-trust legislation.
> The unseriousness you treat something incredibly serious with has become an endemic problem in our society
Testosterone down 50% since 1970.
Childishness up slightly more than that.
I'm sure those two stats are definitely related. What a childish thing to say.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puer_aeternus
The word "testosterone" is not mentioned on this page at all. Nor any other hormones.
Well I was just noting a suspicious correlation. (Also childishness is up a lot more than 50%, in case my tone was unclear :)
But you've given me quite an interesting endocrinology research project here. Last I heard, the root cause of the drop remains unknown. (And it's still dropping.)
>The puer covets independence and freedom, opposes boundaries and limits, and tends to find any restriction intolerable.
Isn't that the opposite of this?
This is such a small blip in all the crap this administration is perpetrating that most are probably not aware of it or are drowned out in the rage over inflation, tariffs, wars, immigrants, etc.
They shut down basically the entire global left wing blogging space since this group was hosting it.
I hate to see this strawman every single time there is an attack on free speech. You are actually mocking the fight for free speech. You aren't attacking the hypocrites that only use it when convenient.
The only purpose this rhetoric serves is to justify using the power of government to silence opponents the next time your side happens to be in power.
I think the ability for good concepts to be "tainted" by the opposition is the most dangerous manifestation of tribalism/group think, in modern society.
Freeze peach was never a good concept.
The libertarian Internet was a mistake and the world will be a better place when it's gone.
I like how certain HN threads really highlight that the venn of users here and Reddit /r/politics share almost entirely the same area.
"Italian neckbeard collective declared terrorist organization by Donald Trump" - what a world we live in.
I am first hearing about this group today, but here is some context:
https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...
Apparently they provide the digital infrastructure for violent Antifa cells and because of a 9/11 related executive order, the A/I is able to be branded a sponsor of terrorism.
I guess this makes it a crime to give them money or provide aid to them (if you are a US citizen).
EDIT: who is downvoting and why? The 2nd sentence in the PR says "Autistici/Inventati (A/I Collective) is an Italy-based extremist group that builds and operates the digital infrastructure for violent Antifa cells and other far-left militants across the world" Are you mad that I quote the article or mad that you disagree with Trump? In either case, why are you downvoting me exactly? I am genuinely curious.
More boogie man bullshit from our fascist admin.
I think people are downvoting you for several reasons:
- Taking administration propaganda pieces at face value (such as the batshit insane page you linked to)
- Referring to "violent antifa cells". That's the spin Trump has been trying to put on the groups of people who have been resisting fascism. (Do you know what "antifa" stands for?)
Thanks for explaining, I will work on my approach, I didn't think I said anything that presented I agree with or believed the PR, only that it was context for why the A/I situation.
Yes I am well aware of what antifa means.
One can be anti-fascist and violent. https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/better-way/
The "terrorist" definition is just anybody that doesn’t agree with this administration at this point.
They will fabricate anything to justify their thinly veiled intentions.
This isn't new, it changed after 9/11. The US government expanded the definition of terrorism to pretty much mean anything they want.
> Every day we stayed online after August 26, 2026, has been a victory, but now we are forced to stop.
Sad to see big bro tech and AI skynet is winning the war.
> In a world where allegations are disconnected from reality, we can only expect repression to be increasingly disproportionate.
At the very beginning of his first mandate, when he lied about something as trivial as the size of the crowd during his inauguration, and kept to his lies despite absolute evidence to the contrary, never showing any hesitation, second thoughts, or remorse, Trump showed everyone the way ahead.
Do not look at facts. Decide what you want to be true, and act like it is true. Do this every day of every year. In the beginning, people will object; do not get into a debate with them, rather continue making up lies, bigger ones.
I remember seeing videos of a tsunami for the first time. I imagined a huge wave that destroyed everything. It was nothing like that. It started slowly. The water level rose, a few waves went over a wall and onto streets, But the water kept coming, and coming, destroying everything that stood in its path, and in a matter of minutes it was the ocean where before there was a city.
Another reason why EU should be independant of US. Cloudflare never had this kinda of bs...
2 different rules it seems.
Yet another example of the troubling amount of power the United States holds over the internet and global finance.
I really worry about the future of free and open expression over the next few years.
I fucking hate the US so much
So, in 2021-2022 I publically called the See I Ayyy terrorists and advocated against accounts that algorithmically looked to astroturf or divide people on Instagram.
They showed up as actors in my commune where I lived (it was open-to-join, that was the mistake I made among being naive publically thinking truth prevails). I found after that the many past abuses of our government have not stopped and simply adopted to the modern age. Organizations whose interest it is to protect their shadow interests care not about what’s actually good for Americans, their interests are for maintaining status quo.
Status quo supports what - questioning AI and attempting to reverse the power structures or following along obediantly without question? I always wondered if my commentary led me to be put into a database of some kind. After Formerly holding a clearance, and letting it lapse, I’m recently reapplying and let’s see if “calling a government organization a terrorist org” discounts me from that. After reading the article I wouldn’t be surprised if like school yard bullies a leader in the orgs with power respond to viral accusers by marking them in a database as terrorists. Edit; please don’t accuse me of having mental health issues, I’m fine and I am working with my senators office and a “investigatory” agency to look into the abuses. I don’t yet feel hopeful the 3 petter org will reveal anything tho about my case due to security reasons.