#BlueAnon is a term to describe libs and their obsession with Russiagate and other conspiracy theories that may be somewhat more credible than the idea we’re ruled by Satanist pedophiles – but not not by all that much relative to the sanity gap between them:
QAnoners tend to say things that are wildly implausible.
Russiagaters tend to say things that are unsubstantiated & highly improbable.
So, yeah: "they're not the same."
But the respectability gap between hardcore Russiagaters & QAnoners is a LOT wider than their sanity gap.
— Alice, you idiot, stay out of this. (@AliceFromQueens) August 16, 2020
(It might have some connection/overlap to #BlueMAGA, a term invented by Chapos/the “dirtbag left” to describe instances of “progressive” bigotry and xenophobia, squealing about Bernie/Corbyn’s “anti-Semitism”, etc.).
Anyhow, #BlueAnon has been deranked from Google:
"Blue Anon": Goolag vs. Yandex, DuckDuckGo
Blue Checks don't want their conspiracy nutters to become objects of scrutiny and mockery. pic.twitter.com/GOrM7RRPvz
— Anatoly Karlin (@powerfultakes) March 7, 2021
And even banned from the Urban Dictionary, which has definitions for multiple extremely offensive terms whose repetition on Twitter would rapidly lead to my suspension.
I have never even heard of a word being banned from @UrbanDictionary before they banned Blue Anon pic.twitter.com/MdwhTzXeGA
— Jack Poso 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) March 7, 2021
So it’s not just a respectability gap between Qanon and #BlueAnon.
It’s that representatives of the latter are literally in positions of ultimate social and cultural power, and as per Voltaire, do not intend to allow themselves to be criticized.
Which is fine. Google search doesn’t have ads and works quite well for non-political things.
But it’s another question why sovereign countries outside the Western orbit are obligated to tolerate Google pushing the #BlueAnon agenda on them and undermining the sanctity of their democracies.
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On the morning of May 29, 1787, in the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia, Edmund Randolph, governor of Virginia, opened the meeting that would become known as the Constitutional Convention by identifying the underlying cause of various problems that the delegates of thirteen states had assembled to solve. “Our chief danger,” Randolph declared, “arises from the democratic parts of our constitutions.” None of the separate states’ constitutions, he said, had established “sufficient checks against the democracy.”
Since the beginning, the US Oligarchic Republic has fought tooth and nail against democracy, against nationalism and populism, and against polities where the state controlled the business and the well off, restricting their reach… And against limits on US Capital…
China is tricky now. US Capital can get in, wants in, but the state is blocking that. China is treated worst than Nazi Germany now…
I think in the not too distant future, there will be three main network/comms blocs: the Anglo/West, the Sinosphere, and the Russosphere.
Each bloc will sponsor the comms of the dissident talkers of the other two blocs to varying degrees, depending on the current state of relations between their respective blocs. Each will find it convenient to varying degrees to host/subsidize these foreign dissidents. The blocs’ authorities may or may not ask/compel the foreign dissidents they host to carry certain messaging on their behalf. The smarter blocs will find it advantageous to establish foreign-friendly internet ecosystems to accommodate dissident content: foreign language and foreign currency accepted.
The natives of each bloc will have to seek out their own dissident thinkers on foreign blocs as they will be banned in their native bloc. Depending on their pretensions of “freedom”, each bloc will make it more or less difficult to reach content from “unauthorized” foreign blocs. Any rapprochement between blocs may be accompanied by the deplatforming of relevant dissidents as part of the terms of rapprochement.
There may be certain Switzerland-/Nauru-esque “islands” of autonomy where relative internet freedom is tolerated, but they will suffer the same reputations as tax havens today do, and be subject to the same strong-arming that tax havens today are subject to.
I used to think so too, but urbit will make this moot.
Spandrell’s last post is about Urbit, too. It sounds great, but can we be sure they will not find a way to supress that, too?
Not possible short of shutting down the Internet. Or getting control of a majority of the 256 galaxies, but that’s equally implausible, given their decentralization.
Urbit will never reach any real critical mass. Boomers would migrate to foreign sites in order to MAGApost well before they installed Unix
Urbit is semi-anonymous, it seems to me, but I don’t know much about it yet. There is a way to track down an identity of a person behind a planet since they have to buy it, and if people use Windows virtual machine or Apple to access it, there could be a way to record who the person is behind the channel through the OS accessing your browser. So the authorities in a country could figure out who is the dissident and just get rid of them physically by arresting them until they give up the ID and password for their planet/star.
It sounds harsh and like a big escalation in censorship, but it can be argued it’s like Parler and a danger to a peaceful and free society and therefore it’s banned. And if you’re using it you’re breaking the ban. Since a provider can’t turn it off, the authorities have to enforce the ban by confiscating your Urbit ID.
Of course, for me that would be the level of ‘banning the Republican Party’ outright levels of Blue Basedness, so I would avoid going the US at all in the future if that happened, even if I don’t have an Urbit ID.
One benefit of the tech censorship
The GOP base has now swung against the H-1B visas, even though many in the political class want to issue more.
It was rhetorically hard to signal against “legal” immigration, but thanks to Big Tech you can do so without dipping into white identity politics.
That’s correct, but there’s surely going to be some cherry-picking there. There’s a range of views among both groups; if you contrast half-heard suspicions about Carter Page and “There needs to be an investigation about Russian hackers” with the full-on mole children theory, you can exaggerate the “sanity gap” significantly.
And as always, it’s worth pointing out that QAnon was correct in spirit. Western elites are evil corrupt paedos who keep each other in line with blackmail and aim to enslave us: “where’s the lie?” “Mole children” is not an accurate fact, but it is an accurate metaphor.
I thought if you were an IQist you would want mass H-1B Indian immigration?
The Urban Dictionary page on ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ was a battleground which resembled a Wikipedia editor’s war.
Though TDS was an accepted phrase enjoying widespread use, the SJW brigade could not leave it alone. The original definition has been replaced by this:
Urban Dictionary:
Trump Derangement Syndrome
A term used by many supporters of Donald Trump in an attempt to invalidate anyone that happens to disagree with the stupid shit that he is doing
A real disease afflicting many Trump supporters that causes one to blindly agree with the current president no matter how much he embarrasses himself or what criminal shit that he “gets away with” and then accuse their opponents of having (see definition 1)
For that to happen you’d need levels of repression to upgrade from “decentralized witch-hunt” levels to “totalitarian”.
Good luck to the authorities with that. https://urbit.org/docs/tutorials/concepts/azimuth/
It will be much more user friendly in 2022.
I just looked at it and I am confident in saying that nothing that requires use of the command prompt will ever become very popular.
I also find the apparent lack of anonymity unpleasant.
Well China can certainly shut down or prevent usage of Urbit.
They can require all computers or mobile devices in use to install monitoring software in order to connect to the internet? How has China been able to prevent widespread use of rival services to Wechat in order to circumvent Beijing’s controls? So maybe China has some may to interdict the operation of P2P software services, maybe by spreading spyware along the entire system? Ban the use of blockchain? Install a safe intranet that can be monitored?
You can restrict blockchain use to patriots only like what China did with HK legislative candidates.
Don’t have too much faith in Urbit. It’s key man left the project last year. It’s also more art than technical achievement. Maybe in 10-15 years… if it goes low-level enough.
If Al-Manar (terrorist TV) can still be Googled we’ll be fine. I think the problem is people have gotten so used to relying on browser-based applications that they forgot how to save-to-disk and keep their publishing mobile. The concept of “their holding my data hostage” is so foreign to me… and it makes me vomit that there are people that don’t have applications installed for OFFLINE use on their personal computers. I never really thought about it until recently.
On an old ass off-spec HP Z400:
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Qfd5u056Oic/YEbOocfnaGI/AAAAAAAAHKY/QH3cFvJwzUEWT6uJrZgc2AgD-oUMZTfUwCLcBGAsYHQ/s16000/Screenshot%2Bfrom%2B2021-03-08%2B20-25-11.png
I’ll just stick to .onion and good ol’ fashion Usenet.
How bad is this news? What was his motive?
Apparently it’s not bad. He’s focusing on his Substack.
https://urbit.org/blog/a-founders-farewell/
I’m trying to figure out how to get a planet now without using an external Etherium wallet, since Urbit is supposed to have one built in. Sort of hard to figure out since I don’t know anything. Definitely need to take a week off work if I want to get anywhere with it. And I have to stop reading that guy’s Substack for that week, since his posts take a long time to read.
Oh? Are you saying we are allowed to have non-politicised things again?
Apostates, schismatics, and heresiarchs! Everyone knows the only One True Church of Democracy has its seat in Washington!
…is roughly their thinking, I venture.
Urbit taking off is wishful thinking.
There have already been a number of decentralized solutions for social networking (Diaspora, GNUnet, etc) that are much, much more user friendly than Urbit and did not take off. Didn’t have to pay for a nickname there either, unlike Urbit where you have to “buy a planet”.
Even something like Retroshare, one of the most underrated pieces of software in my opinion, did not take off.
When Skype started getting pozzed, a bunch of people decided to create an open source, peer to peer equivalent of Skype with all of its functionality (audio and video calls, file transfers). And they actually did. It’s called Tox and still exists. User friendly, easily installed on any platform. Never took off. Instead Skype was replaced by other corporate centralized shitty solutions like Zoom or even the horrible facebook messenger.
Only as long as you are able to hide your IRL identity when purchasing, “mining”, or otherwise acquiring a network identity and then hide your origin when using the network. IIUC, “unidentified” nodes are anonymous or rather pseudonymous by design but also untrusted (from the POV of the network) and valueless (from the identity-economy POV).
The network is p2p so there is no one provider (like, say, Gab Inc. or Parler Inc.) to “turn it off”, but I think it is incorrect to imply that the only alternative is “confiscating your private key(s)”. For example they could mandate the installation of network packet inspection (and disruption, Chinese-firewall-style, or maybe just logging, for judicial proceedings) devices into internet operators. Or, since the software is remotely updatable, they could force the company behind the software to push an update which gives the government a censor role. Or, since there is a trust relationship between nodes (those associated to an identity, not the “hairy asteroid” nodes which are explicitly untrusted and consequently unprivileged nodes), they could buy or co-opt privileged nodes to try to compromise downstream nodes. Etc.
Warning, rant:
I’m pretty sure none of the very based people recently shilling for it have a good technical understanding of what the system is (no, it’s not a chat application, nor a distributed “social media”, and don’t bother with the few pages of “introduction”: they contain basically just salesmanship babble and little to no information). A small sampling, I promise, without animus:
– Spandrell, perceptive blogger and someone capable of mastering the limitless hanzi, and, if I have to guess, a generic JavaShit blogrammer (sorry, this is redundant, and not all his fault, I’m sure: lameness is built into js) who vehemently rejected contributing to the riches of one liberal jew so that his efforts can instead accrue to the riches of his favourite monarchist jew.
– Ludwig, someone with a rather sharp geopolitical eye, who considers himself instantly “sold” at the price of a bunch of vaporous techno-utopic promises.
– Karlin, our very excellent political commentator, statistician, and generous host inter alia, of, if I’m not mistaken, political “science” training, and with an affinity for futurism/posthumanism escapades.
Very fine men whose opinions I have come to value richly, but they are not exactly offering the technical analysis that would convince me at any rate. (But, OTOH, it’s not like e.g. the cryptocoin mob was convinced by technical arguments. No, 98.41% of them don’t really care about a digital decentralised currency, they just want to make lots of easy money. Perhaps Spandrell and co. have gotten hold of some PKI infrastructure/identity-issuer keys, but I doubt it.)
Honestly, the system sounds interesting and I would read on it myself, if I had enough time and wasn’t so strongly dissuaded by their ridiculous penchant for the coinage of unwarranted neologisms, the perversion of existing technical names, and their apparent predilection for what atm I can best describe as faux arcana. “Operating function”, “star”, “ship”, “pier”, “jam/cue”, “mug”, “fort”, “rune”, “gene”, “mark”, “duct”, “vane”, “mold”, “vase”, “king/serf”, and innumerably more monosyllables, best when four-type long, fuck! It looks to me purposely anti-pedagogical. Indeed, like one “handshakeworthy” individual in the same thread referenced above by Max Payne, I also guessed that the obfuscation may have been deliberate, as a selection mechanism:
OTOH, we know that moldbug really likes to coin terminology or borrow it from seemingly unrelated fields (“repeater/kernel”, “brahmin/vaisya/…”, “armiger/yeoman/…”, etc.) in an effort to disconnect the reader from pre-conceived notions, that is, in an effort to make him more receptive to those notions he intends to promote. It can be a reasonable strategy when discussing aspects of a system for which no good or established terminology exists or when certain facets of it need to be highlighted and brought forth by way of metaphors. But I don’t think it is this case: there are good technical terms for almost all the concepts employed and the new names don’t bring any added value: node/instance, infrastructure, governance, routing, dns, address, data/file type, ast, opcode, rpc, bootloading stages, (de)serialisation, packeting, service, master/slave, etc. In fact the names chosen seem so gratuitous that they remind me of that sleight of hand often used by marketers, merchants, and salesmen: a disguise for the purpose of inducing a sense of novelty/fashion, or forestalling scrutiny, or avoiding association with unflattering or damning facts. Like calling propaganda “public relations”, datacentres “cloud”, programs “sdde”, computerised “smart”, new “next-generation”, extra-governmental policy consultants and lobbyists “thought barrels”, perverts “sexual minorities”, Sachsen-Coburg-Gotha “Windsor”, Bronstein “Trotsky”, Bauer “Rothschild”, etc.
Likely the principal motive was disassociating the company behind the product from his (in)famous reputation; notice that he didn’t just leave the company, but promised: “I will not contribute code to it”, “I will not write nor speak publicly about it”, “I won’t be back”, “a level and neutral platform”, “not a political structure”. I suppose he did most of the hacking he wanted to do, meanwhile the investors are interested in payback. I guess they figured his reputation amongst “handshakeworthy society” could be an obstacle for the company. He still kept a significant fraction of “shares” though (in the company and in the identity-issuing pseudo-PKI business), so will be quite rich if the network gains popularity and people purchase keys.
Quality fud.
It isn’t completely anonymous – but then again, nor is any cryptocurrency, even Monero, given a sufficient lack of opsec and/or government interest. Likewise, sufficiently competent states can block almost anything, but it’s much harder given it’s p2p; to do this with urbit will require Western states to scale up well beyond Great Firewall-tier levels of Internet control. The project is open source, inserting malicious code will not be trivial. You can try to force things legally, but that requires the consent of 50%+ of the galaxy holders. That will be hard, Tlon corporation – the largest single owner – itself holds something like 30% of them.
The biggest problems as I see it are not so much technical as social. Will sufficient numbers of people value greater anonymity, lack of advertising, and lack of (effective) censorship – while effectively solving the spam problem given the limited number of urbit IDs – to generate the network effect to allow it to take off and displace the major social networks? I don’t know. I’m sufficiently open to the possibility to set aside a modest part of my crypto stack on the possibility and buy a few stars.
“Blue Anon” is back on Urban Dictionary and highly upvoted. Probably SJWs flagged it which made the algo make it disappear, then it got reinstated after review.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Blue%20Anon
Had a look on Urban Dictionary and these terms are still there:
femoid, nips, arkancide, dune coon, spaztard, tranny, kaffir
Also this one:
“hebe
slur for a jewish person
Joe Pesci: Let’s make Lethal Weapon 5.
Mel Gibson: Shut the fuck up you dumb fucking hebe”
If they’re going to censor things, that website no longer has a point.
Hmm, it will be interesting to see whether this comment survives any Unz autofilters. Yikes.
Thanks for the info. I’m still going to try to figure it all out. The fact that it’s peer to peer, seems to me will make it possible if someone will design a twitter or Substack program for it, that it can’t be shut down or censored since it can exist outside the major power centers. Be hosted on a star that can’t be touched if traced to a physical person at that location for example and then quickly moved to another star somewhere else if required, without any loss of data.