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Plato: The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote6399


Quotes

  • Lenin: Miraculous prophecy is a fairy-tale. But scientific prophecy is a fact.
  • Noam Chomsky: See, people with power understand exactly one thing: violence.
  • George Bernard Shaw: Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.
  • Henry Kissinger: Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.
  • Fidel Castro: This position of the Trotskyists is the same which all newspapers and publicity agencies of Yankee imperialism adopted in relation to the cause of Comrade Ernesto Guevara. All the imperialist press of the United States, its news agencies, the Cuban counter-revolutionaries' press, the bourgeois press throughout the continent and the rest of the world - in other words, this campaign of slanders and intrigues against revolutionary Cuba in connection with the case of Comrade Guevara - coincided with precision with all imperialist bourgeois sectors, all the slanderers and all the conspirators against the Cuban revolution, for there is no doubt that only reaction and imperialism is interested in discrediting the Cuban revolution and in destroying the confidence of the revolutionary movements in the Cuban revolution, in destroying the confidence of the Latin American peoples in the Cuban revolution, in destroying their faith. Therefore, they have not hesitated to use the dirtiest and most indecent weapons.
  • Fidel Castro: Even though at one time Trotskyism represented an erroneous position, but a position in the field of political ideas, Trotskyism became during the following years a vulgar instrument of imperialism and reaction.
  • Fidel Castro: Yon Sosa led the movement of a group of armed officers in the crushing of whom the mercenaries who later invaded Playa Girón participated. Through a businessman who took charge of the movement's political aspects, the Fourth International fixed it up so that that leader, who was ignorant of the profound problems of politics and of the history of revolutionary thought, would permit that agents of Trotskyism, about whom we do not have the slightest doubt that he is an agent of imperialism, to publish a newspaper which copies outright the program of the Fourth International. By doing this, the Fourth International committed a real crime against the revolutionary movement to isolate it from the rest of the people, to isolate it from the masses, when it contaminated it with the stupidities, the discredit, and the repugnant thing which Trotskyism today is in the field of politics.
  • Martin Luther King, Jr.: So today capitalism has out-lived its usefulness. It has brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.
  • Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord: It is the beginning of the end.
  • Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord: Financiers flourish only when nations decline.
  • George Friedman: The primordial interest of the United States, over which for centuries we have fought wars– the First, the Second and Cold Wars– has been the relationship between Germany and Russia, because united there, they’re the only force that could threaten us. And to make sure that that doesn’t happen.
  • Lenin: Prompted by fear of revolution, the old state power, which is independent of the people and is a power over the people, promises the people that it will ensure their freedom. But its promises remain unfulfilled; they cannot be fulfilled.
  • James Connolly: If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organisation of the Socialist Republic, your efforts would be in vain.
  • Lenin: There are moments in history when a desperate struggle of the masses, even for a hopeless cause, is essential for the further schooling of these masses and their training for the next struggle.
  • Kim Il Sung: Our ideal is to build a society where everyone is well fed, well clothed, and lives a long life, a society where everybody is progressive and works devotedly, a society where all people live united in harmony as one big family.
  • Michael Parenti: To make the world safe for those who own it, politically active elements of the owning class have created a national security state that expends billions of dollars and enlists the efforts of vast numbers of people.
  • Edward Snowden: There is nothing more grotesque than a media pushing for war.
  • Lenin: Practice is higher than (theoretical) knowledge, for it has not only the dignity of universality, but also of immediate actuality.
  • Stalin: Only in the highest phase of communism will people, working in accordance with their capacity, receive recompense therefor in accordance with their needs: "From each according to his capacity, to each according to his needs."
  • Stalin: All that Marxism declares is that until classes have been completely abolished, and until work has been transformed from being a means of maintaining existence, into a prime necessity of life, into voluntary labour performed for the benefit of society, people will continue to be paid for their labour in accordance with the amount of labour performed.
  • Stalin: The October Revolution is neither the continuation nor the culmination of the Great French Revolution. The purpose of the French Revolution was to put an end to feudalism and establish capitalism. The aim of the October Revolution is to put an end to capitalism and to establish socialism.
  • Lenin: We shall not achieve socialism without a struggle. But we are ready to fight, we have started it and we shall finish it with the aid of the apparatus called the Soviets.
  • Gilbert Scott-Heron: The first revolution is when you change your mind.
  • Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya: Solidarity among the male and female workers, a general cause, general goals, a general path to that goal - that is the solution to the "woman" question in the working-class environment.
  • Lenin: No idea could be more erroneous or harmful than to separate foreign from home policy.
  • Kim Jong-il: Introducing individualism into socialism, which is based entirely on collectivism, is tantamount to taking poison.
  • Langston Hughes: Put one more S in the U.S.A. To make it Soviet.
  • Lenin: There is a good Latin proverb which says: “It is natural for all men to err; but only a fool persists in his error.
  • Lenin: A Marxist must take cognisance of real life, of the true facts of reality, and not cling to a theory of yesterday, which, like all theories, at best only outlines the main and the general, only comes near to embracing life in all its complexity.
  • Kim Il Sung: It can be said that the life of a revolutionary begins by going among the masses and that it is over when he parts from them.
  • Lenin: Deafened by liberal catch-phrases, people in our country are apt to overlook the actual class stand of the liberal party’s real bosses.
  • Lenin: The proletariat’s struggle against the bourgeoisie, which finds expression in a variety of forms ever richer in content, inevitably becomes a political struggle directed towards the conquest of political power by the proletariat (“the dictatorship of the proletariat”).




Plato: The rulers then of the city may, if anybody, fitly lie on account of enemies or citizens for the benefit of the state; no others may have anything to do with it. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote6400


Quotes

  • Lenin: Miraculous prophecy is a fairy-tale. But scientific prophecy is a fact.
  • Noam Chomsky: See, people with power understand exactly one thing: violence.
  • George Bernard Shaw: Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.
  • Henry Kissinger: Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.
  • Fidel Castro: This position of the Trotskyists is the same which all newspapers and publicity agencies of Yankee imperialism adopted in relation to the cause of Comrade Ernesto Guevara. All the imperialist press of the United States, its news agencies, the Cuban counter-revolutionaries' press, the bourgeois press throughout the continent and the rest of the world - in other words, this campaign of slanders and intrigues against revolutionary Cuba in connection with the case of Comrade Guevara - coincided with precision with all imperialist bourgeois sectors, all the slanderers and all the conspirators against the Cuban revolution, for there is no doubt that only reaction and imperialism is interested in discrediting the Cuban revolution and in destroying the confidence of the revolutionary movements in the Cuban revolution, in destroying the confidence of the Latin American peoples in the Cuban revolution, in destroying their faith. Therefore, they have not hesitated to use the dirtiest and most indecent weapons.
  • Fidel Castro: Even though at one time Trotskyism represented an erroneous position, but a position in the field of political ideas, Trotskyism became during the following years a vulgar instrument of imperialism and reaction.
  • Fidel Castro: Yon Sosa led the movement of a group of armed officers in the crushing of whom the mercenaries who later invaded Playa Girón participated. Through a businessman who took charge of the movement's political aspects, the Fourth International fixed it up so that that leader, who was ignorant of the profound problems of politics and of the history of revolutionary thought, would permit that agents of Trotskyism, about whom we do not have the slightest doubt that he is an agent of imperialism, to publish a newspaper which copies outright the program of the Fourth International. By doing this, the Fourth International committed a real crime against the revolutionary movement to isolate it from the rest of the people, to isolate it from the masses, when it contaminated it with the stupidities, the discredit, and the repugnant thing which Trotskyism today is in the field of politics.
  • Martin Luther King, Jr.: So today capitalism has out-lived its usefulness. It has brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.
  • Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord: It is the beginning of the end.
  • Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord: Financiers flourish only when nations decline.
  • George Friedman: The primordial interest of the United States, over which for centuries we have fought wars– the First, the Second and Cold Wars– has been the relationship between Germany and Russia, because united there, they’re the only force that could threaten us. And to make sure that that doesn’t happen.
  • Lenin: Prompted by fear of revolution, the old state power, which is independent of the people and is a power over the people, promises the people that it will ensure their freedom. But its promises remain unfulfilled; they cannot be fulfilled.
  • James Connolly: If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organisation of the Socialist Republic, your efforts would be in vain.
  • Lenin: There are moments in history when a desperate struggle of the masses, even for a hopeless cause, is essential for the further schooling of these masses and their training for the next struggle.
  • Kim Il Sung: Our ideal is to build a society where everyone is well fed, well clothed, and lives a long life, a society where everybody is progressive and works devotedly, a society where all people live united in harmony as one big family.
  • Michael Parenti: To make the world safe for those who own it, politically active elements of the owning class have created a national security state that expends billions of dollars and enlists the efforts of vast numbers of people.
  • Edward Snowden: There is nothing more grotesque than a media pushing for war.
  • Lenin: Practice is higher than (theoretical) knowledge, for it has not only the dignity of universality, but also of immediate actuality.
  • Stalin: Only in the highest phase of communism will people, working in accordance with their capacity, receive recompense therefor in accordance with their needs: "From each according to his capacity, to each according to his needs."
  • Stalin: All that Marxism declares is that until classes have been completely abolished, and until work has been transformed from being a means of maintaining existence, into a prime necessity of life, into voluntary labour performed for the benefit of society, people will continue to be paid for their labour in accordance with the amount of labour performed.
  • Stalin: The October Revolution is neither the continuation nor the culmination of the Great French Revolution. The purpose of the French Revolution was to put an end to feudalism and establish capitalism. The aim of the October Revolution is to put an end to capitalism and to establish socialism.
  • Lenin: We shall not achieve socialism without a struggle. But we are ready to fight, we have started it and we shall finish it with the aid of the apparatus called the Soviets.
  • Gilbert Scott-Heron: The first revolution is when you change your mind.
  • Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya: Solidarity among the male and female workers, a general cause, general goals, a general path to that goal - that is the solution to the "woman" question in the working-class environment.
  • Lenin: No idea could be more erroneous or harmful than to separate foreign from home policy.
  • Kim Jong-il: Introducing individualism into socialism, which is based entirely on collectivism, is tantamount to taking poison.
  • Langston Hughes: Put one more S in the U.S.A. To make it Soviet.
  • Lenin: There is a good Latin proverb which says: “It is natural for all men to err; but only a fool persists in his error.
  • Lenin: A Marxist must take cognisance of real life, of the true facts of reality, and not cling to a theory of yesterday, which, like all theories, at best only outlines the main and the general, only comes near to embracing life in all its complexity.
  • Kim Il Sung: It can be said that the life of a revolutionary begins by going among the masses and that it is over when he parts from them.
  • Lenin: Deafened by liberal catch-phrases, people in our country are apt to overlook the actual class stand of the liberal party’s real bosses.
  • Lenin: The proletariat’s struggle against the bourgeoisie, which finds expression in a variety of forms ever richer in content, inevitably becomes a political struggle directed towards the conquest of political power by the proletariat (“the dictatorship of the proletariat”).




Sorry I've not been on here for a while. Been busy.


Life has been very busy lately. I have been diagnosed with Breast Cancer and had a lump removed & a lot of appointments. I dressing changes 3 times a week. I am having CBT counselling. There is the decluttering. And that is on top of my caring duties, trying to cope with my osteoarthritis, etc & trying to sort out a motorbility car.


Mastodon vs the Fediverse


I don't mean this title as a comparison, but as an antagonistic relationship...

I've been off-and-on in the fediverse for longer than Mastodon has existed, I've followed the building of the fediverse since before ActivityPub ever existed.

I still consider it a blessing the explosive growth that happened within the fediverse... but I'm honestly sickened by the Mastodon effect of it...

So many of the new people hopped on Mastodon and thought that fediverse is just another name for Mastodon... some people even got so far as thinking fediverse is just another name for ActivityPub...

And people came with so many flawed views of what they think the fediverse is as well as completely unrealistic ideas of what it should be.

So many people see it as this miracle pill against all the evils of corporate social servers like Twitter, fixing every single problem that's ever existed in those communities.

... Those people are completely delusional... but they're loud and violent.

They get pissed off any time they run into the actual fediverse... they get pissed off when they realize there's platforms other than Mastodon that don't even remotely behave like Mastodon or especially their imaginary version of Mastodon.

And frankly... I'm getting pissed off at the entitlement of these people.

They think the fediverse is all about their consent on who can see their posts... this is like going to a waterpark and complaining that you didn't consent to getting wet... you went to a waterpark! When you post on the fediverse, you have consented... if you don't consent then you don't post to the fediverse. Reminds me of the annoying cycles of people sharing blocks of vaguely legal looking text to Facebook to try and override the TOS, thinking they can just say "I don't consent to the TOS" to get out of it when you explicitly consented by joining and you revoke that consent by leaving.

They think this is the place for private insular communities... because they walked into an empty park and thought "this public space is mine and will never have crowds of people wandering through". They get pissed at the idea of Meta joining the fediverse with Threads because it means there might be actually be a crowd walking through this public space...

They fuss about community as if their little tiny corner of the fediverse is the whole thing. They mistake their standards and agreements as those for the whole fediverse.

And worst of all these people will actively harass someone over expanding the federation of the fediverse in a way that's not only normal, but part of the specific design of how this place works... especially as these people are so damn clueless they think this is a single instance they can just tear down with pitchforks as opposed to just the one that briefly crossed their attention.

People who want to actively destroy the fediverse by isolating it, breaking it, and otherwise trying to "control" it can get bent.



This. This. This.

Great read that breaks down everything wrong with the whole bridgyfed drama.


A libre networking project that’s designed to bridge protocol spaces together announced its progress and intentions, and Mastodon users freaked out.

https://wedistribute.org/2024/02/tear-down-walls-not-bridges/


Jamie Booth reshared this.



Watching people freak out over someone making a bridge to another fedi platform...

Do people even know how the fediverse works? Interoperability?

Boggles my mind how much impact people think a shittily moderated instance will impact the broader system.

People flip over the idea of connecting to Bluesky or Threads... how many of you know about the trainwreck of Nostr and it's AP bridge? That's the worst network of them all and you still don't hear about it, which tells you everything you need to know.

in reply to Osma A

@osma @jwildeboer
Again: You have the choice to #SelfHost and not limit yourself to anything whatsoever...

But one should also have the freedom to not deal with such spambots to begin with.

Whether that decision should be made individually, by vote.from the users of an instance of sole.discretion of the moderators is a discussion I'll not waste my time with, so I'll move on!

in reply to Shiri Bailem

Just FYI, I've got zero interest in people bringing their whiny bullshit to my posts on the topic. So I'm just blocking strangers who bring the fight here.

I've had my fill of self-centered assholes who want everyone to bend over for their bullshit unrealistic vision of federation.

Your ideal version will never exist and your rage at finding out it doesn't can go fuck itself.



Heads Up For Possible Outage


A reminder that I'm located in the US, and more particularly in Texas and this is a server run out of my home.

With the massive freeze incoming this weekend, there is a decent chance of a significant and extended power outage (Texas has a notoriously awful and poorly managed power grid, notably run completely separate from the rest of the country).



The server has been updated.


Friendica 2023.12 released

We are very happy to announce the availability of the new stable release of Friendica “Yellow Archangel” 2023.12. Finally wrapping up the changes since May – the highlights of this release are

  • the bluesky connector has been made bi-directional,
  • moderation reports can now be send by users and reviewed by the node admins,
  • user defined groups are now called Circles and forum accounts are now Group accounts, and last but not least
  • users now have a better control over their network streams with the new Channels feature.

Note that the minimal PHP version for Friendica was raised to PHP 7.4 with this release.

For details, please the CHANGELOG file in the repository.

What is Friendica


Friendica is a decentralized communications platform, you can use to host your own social media server that integrates with independent social networking platforms (like the Fediverse or Diaspora*) but also some commercial ones like Tumblr.

How to Update

Updating from old Friendica versions


If you are updating from an older version than the 2022.12 release, please first update your Friendica instance to that version as it contained some breaking changes.

Pre-Update Procedures


Ensure that the last backup of your Friendica installation was done recently.

Using Git


Updating from the git repositories should only involve a pull from the Friendica core repository and addons repository, regardless of the branch (stable or develop) you are using. Remember to update the dependencies with composer as well. So, assuming that you are on the stable branch, the commands to update your installation to the 2023.12 release would be
cd friendica
git pull
bin/composer.phar install --no-dev
cd addon
git pull
If you want to use a different branch than the stable one, you need to fetch and checkout the branch before your perform the git pull.

Pulling in the dependencies with composer will show some deprecation warning, we will be working on that in the upcoming release.

Using the Archive Files


If you had downloaded the source files in an archive file (tar.gz) please download the current version of the archive from friendica-full-2023.12.tar.gz (sha256) and friendica-addons 2023.12.tar.gz (sha256)) and unpack it on your local computer.

As many files got deleted or moved around, please upload the unpacked files to a new directory on your server (say friendica_new) and copy over your existing configuration (config/local.config.php and config/addon.config.php) and .htaccess files. Afterwards rename your current Friendica directory (e.g. friendica) to friendica_old and friendica_new to friendica.

The files of the dependencies are included in the archive (make sure you are using the friendica-full-2023.12 archive), so you don’t have to worry about them.

Post Update Tasks


The database update should be applied automatically, but sometimes it gets stuck. If you encounter this, please initiate the DB update manually from the command line by running the script
bin/console dbstructure update
from the base of your Friendica installation. If the output contains any error message, please let us know using the channels mentioned below.

Please note, that some of the changes to the database structure will take some time to be applied, depending on the size of your Friendica database.

Known Issues


Following the release of Friendica 2023.12 the following issues were reported:

  • S3 addon unusable [13760]


How to Contribute


If you want to contribute to the project, you don’t need to have coding experience. There are a number of tasks listed in the issue tracker with the label “Junior Jobs” we think are good for new contributors. But you are by no means limited to these – if you find a solution to a problem (even a new one) please make a pull request at github or let us know in the development forum.

Contribution to Friendica is also not limited to coding. Any contribution to the documentation, the translation or advertisement materials is welcome or reporting a problem. You don’t need to deal with Git(Hub) or Transifex if you don’t like to. Just get in touch with us and we will get the materials to the appropriate places.

Thanks everyone who helped making this release possible, and especially to all the new contributors to Friendica, and have fun!


https://friendi.ca/2023/12/24/friendica-2023-12-released/




DDOSed by... facebook chat?


Apparently some facebook interface decided to DDOS the site a little over an hour ago.

It's not overwhelming the network, just an absolutely ridiculous number of requests.

I've solved it by instituting a global rate limit. It should be high enough to not affect anyone actually using the server.

Basic gist is that any more than 10 requests a second gets a 429 error (Too Many Requests, like all error codes with this site it'll give you a cute cat picture specific to that error). This is purely per second, so if you see that error at any point the time it takes you to refresh again the limit will already be reset.