Thomas Jefferson: The most effectual engines for pacifying a nation are the public papers A despotic government always keeps a kind of standing army of news-writers who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, invent and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7956
John Pilger: Although journalism - the 'media' - was always a loose extension of establishment power, something has changed in recent years. With many independent journalists ejected from the 'mainstream', a corner of the Internet has become a vital source of disclosure and evidence-based analysis: what some would call true journalism. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7959
Fred Reed: We now have a press of two tiers, the establishment media and the net, with sharply differing narratives. The internet is now primary. The bright get their news from around the web and then read the New York Times to see how the paper of record will pevaricate. People increasingly judge the media by the web, not the web by the media. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7961
The server went down for a few hours today and resolved before I could look at it. It's also been a really bad day for my physical health so I've had very little capacity.
I am looking into why it happened but have no firm answers at this time.
Katherine Graham: We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets, and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7962
Lenin: What has anarchism, at one time dominant in the Romance countries, contributed in recent European history? - No doctrine, revolutionary teaching, or theory. - Fragmentation of the working-class movement. - Complete fiasco in the experiments of the revolutionary movement (Proudhonism, 1871; Bakuninism, 1873). - Subordination of the working class to bourgeois politics in the guise of negation of politics. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7964
Lenin: This stratum of workers-turned-bourgeois, or the labour aristocracy, who are quite philistine in their mode of life, in the size of their earnings and in their entire outlook, is the principal prop of the Second International, and in our days, the principal social (not military) prop of the bourgeoisie. For they are the real agents of the bourgeoisie in the working-class movement, the labour lieutenants of the capitalist class, real vehicles of reformism and chauvinism. In the civil war between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie they inevitably, and in no small numbers. take the side of the bourgeoisie, the "Versaillese" against the "Communards". https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7966
Lenin: Anarchism, in the course of the 35 to 40 years (Bakunin and the International, 1866-) of its existence (and with Stirner included, in the course of many more years) has produced nothing but general platitudes against exploitation. These phrases have been current for more than 2,000 years. What is missing is (alpha) an understanding of the causes of exploitation; (beta) an understanding of the development of society, which leads to socialism; (gamma) an understanding of the class struggle as the creative force for the realisation of socialism. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7965
Brandon Smith: The Globalist strategy, which was planned by the Club Of Rome along with top globalists, was to create the idea of an environmental threat so potentially devastating that the only option would be for the public to accept global governance as the solution. Global warming and "climate change" became that existential threat. It does not seem to matter how often or how brutal the climate change argument is debunked by real data; the globalists desperately push the ideology. It is a primary key to everything they hope to accomplish in terms of centralization, and their timeline is set for the year 2030. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7967
Fred Reed: The New York Times, Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal are quasi-governmental organs, predictably predictable and predictably dishonest. The truth is not in them. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7968
John Pilger: In 2009, the University of the West of England published the results of a ten-year study of the BBC's coverage of Venezuela. Of 304 broadcast reports, only three mentioned any of the positive policies introduced by the government of Hugo Chavez. The greatest literacy programme in human history received barely a passing reference. In Europe and the United States, millions of readers and viewers know next to nothing about the remarkable, life-giving changes implemented in Latin America, many of them inspired by Chavez. Like the BBC, the reports of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian and the rest of the respectable western media were notoriously in bad faith. Chavez was mocked even on his deathbed. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7969
William M. Arkin: The problem is not that a computer network (Internet) offers an alternative to the information aristocracy. The true crisis is that neither the news media nor the government has enough credibility to be accepted as either truthful or impartial on their own. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7970
David Rovics: If you are getting your news from mainstream media, whether it's from supposedly "conservative," "liberal," or "objective" outlets, whether a corporate-owned or so-called "public" network, if you're in the US, the UK, and many other countries, you are being lied to. How much they're lying depends on what they're reporting on. What you can be sure of, though, is if it's something we really need to know the truth about right now - if a light needs to be shone on an urgent issue, like a possibly imminent invasion of a sovereign country by the US military - you can be sure that that's when they'll lie more, not less. When we need them the most, that's when they'll fail us most spectacularly. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7971
William Cormier: Our Mainstream News Media is demonstrating that when it pertains to reporting important facts to the public, they are absolutely worthless. China and other state-controlled news outlets are no worse than our own news media; the only difference is that our media releases enough valid news to lull the public into believing that we have news that reflects the needs of the public. However, when it comes to important issues, our MSM is no better than any other fascist/authoritarian news outlet that exist in some of the most restrictive societies on earth. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7972
Karl Marx: Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7973
Michael Krieger: Most of the mainstream media has been transformed into little more than complete propaganda over the past several decades. When the various papers and televisions stations aren't covering up for the war crimes and corruption of politicians and intelligence agencies, they are busy protecting their corporate advertisers from any potential criticism. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7974
Peter Oborne: A free press is essential to a healthy democracy. There is a purpose to journalism, and it is not just to entertain. It is not to pander to political power, big corporations and rich men. Newspapers have what amounts in the end to a constitutional duty to tell their readers the truth. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7975
Karl Marx: In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7976
Karl Marx: The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7977
Caitlin Johnstone: There is a system in place which ensures that all the reporters in positions of influence are there not to report factually on the news of the day, but to sell a particular narrative that is friendly to the state and the status quo. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7979
David Rovics: The US consistently sides with dictators and against democracies the overwhelming majority of the time, and has done so since the US has been a country. And every time they do it, they come up with elaborate lies, excuses, and subterfuges to explain why they're doing it. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7980
Joseph Weitz: Between ourselves it must be clear that there is no room for both peoples together in this country. We shall not achieve our goal if the Arabs are in this small country. There is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to neighboring countries - all of them. Not one village, not one tribe should be left. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7983
There was an issue for a little while that I didn't notice until I rebooted my desktop in which visiting https://foggyminds.com/ would give you the login screen regardless of your login status (as opposed to https://foggyminds.com/network or any other address).
Apparently the load balancer was mistakenly caching the root page which caused it to always show the login page.
Hannah Arendt: Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our time is the emergence in the newly created State of Israel of the Freedom Party (Herut), a political party closely akin in its organization, method, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7984
Udo Ulfkotte: I've been a journalist for about 25 years, and I was educated to lie, to betray, and not to tell the truth to the public. But seeing right now within the last months how the German and American media tries to bring war to the people in Europe, to bring war to Russia - this is a point of no return and I'm going to stand up and say it is not right what I have done in the past, to manipulate people, to make propaganda against Russia, and it is not right what my colleagues do and have done in the past because they are bribed to betray the people, not only in Germany, all over Europe. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7986
Eric Zuesse: No country in the world has a press that's more dishonest than the United States of America does. Only people who possess a thoroughly scientific orientation toward confirming and disconfirming allegations, are capable of extracting from such 'news' a realistic understanding of what's actually happening. The vast majority of people can be fooled, and they can be fooled constantly and even for decades, and yet still trust the institutions that have deceived them so mercilessly through all of those decades. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7988
Server News
in reply to Server News • •As far as I can tell, the biggest most obvious culprit is the database backup which was happening at that time.
It looks like the database is big enough that backups are no longer simple and I'll need to change my backup method.
Shiri Bailem
in reply to Server News • •Revised method of backups set up, tomorrow I'll test that it's working and then attempt a restore (on a second server so no impact here).
I've also refreshed the virtual network interface as I learned it may have been dropping packets for some unknown reason and it's working fine now.