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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • “We immediately began to sink, they saw that… They heard us all screaming, and yet they still left us,” he told the BBC.

    "The first child who died was my cousin’s son… After that it was one by one. Another child, another child, then my cousin himself disappeared. By the morning seven or eight children had died.

    It replied that its staff worked “tirelessly with the utmost professionalism, a strong sense of responsibility and respect for human life and fundamental rights”, adding that they were “in full compliance with the country’s international obligations”




  • Really interesting article. The general idea seems to be that people having their access to banking shut down has been a real problem for a long time, and is most commonly imposed on marginalized groups, but people don’t realize it’s going on, and the people on the right making noise about this issue ignore where the bulk of the problem is.

    This is sometimes how I feel when I appear on the ‘anti-mainstream’ ‘free thought’ media outlets. They want to hear about the financial censorship of the Freedom Convoy, but they don’t want to hear about restrictions on Aboriginal payments. This hints to a skew in their freedom of thought, and it’s certainly not open-minded. When they approach me, they’re trying to recruit that mercenary side of me who is nominally prepared to defend their narrow free thinking, but this poses an ethical dilemma, because their selective curation of what examples of payments censorship they’re prepared to ask about or listen to amounts to a silent form of censorship in itself. Selectively hearing, and amplifying, one set of injured voices - the Truckers - can be very similar to blocking another set out.

    Firstly, yes, it’s very important to fight the general principle of payments censorship (and, by extension, to protect the cash system that provides a buffer agai nst it). Secondly, I must inform them that the actual chances of payments censorship being used against them is smaller than the chances of it being used against refugees, migrants, the homeless, or sex workers, who face recent real-world cases of financial censorship.


  • I think it’s an inherent part of not-face-to-face communication

    I don’t know about that, I’ve had many good arguments online and few face to face. In person people are generally going to put too much effort into avoiding conflict to fully or accurately express their possibly controversial thoughts. I think the tendency to talk past someone and take a very combative stance is mostly a culture issue rather than an anonymity one; bad arguments get praise and attention because people agree with it for tribalistic reasons, and treating the ‘enemy’ like people provokes criticism. People end up seeing argument as a vice, something you do purely as a way to vent, and not as a way of working through ideas and seeing new perspectives.





  • IIRC an aspect of this is that earlier forms of trade and currency were more tied up in the personal relationships between the people trading and their culture, which makes for an impractical environment for a foreign mercenary with no local familiarity or trust to do business, hence the terrible power of gold’s fungibility.