How odd that he’s pining for the French Revolution and doesn’t realize his role as an aristocrat.
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Good old John Darnielle. He rocks.
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… a tragicomic perversion of the Monroe Doctrine…
The “Monroe Doctrine” is something I’ve heard about over the years and never tracked down what it means.
My recent quick reading suggests:
The Monroe Doctrine has meant a lot of different things over the years.
When it was first drafted (when the USA had no credible navy power), it was a message to Europe asking them to leave the independent colonies alone.
After the US got the ability to project power (i.e. a navy), it became “only the US gets to fuck with the less powerful countries in the Americas”. It seems to have been used as a backing for invading Haiti in 1915, the 1973 coup in Chile, and supplying and training various death squads in El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua. And lots of other shenanigans besides.
It seems the author of the quote above is thinking of the second version I’ve listed: “only the US gets to…”. And he seems to regard the idea that a sovereign nation in the Americas doing something bad for US business as a perversion.
Do I have that about right? I know there’s a lot I’m missing.
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I give you an A for that break down…
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That’s what I remember studying in history classes in sixth grade, I think, it was in the last century and I don’t remember the dates very well.
I also remember studying Manifest Destiny and the Big Stick. When you’re a kid, these lessons don’t mean much; it’s only years later that you understand the political system that we still live in today. Pre-teens and teenagers are unlikely to understand the meaning of the phrase attributed to Porfirio Diaz: “Poor Mexico, So Far From God, So Close to the United States.”
I like the USA, but we can’t close our eyes to what happens here.
What struck me about Mr. Thiel’s text was the nerve he had in expressing so much crooked ideology in such an open manner and the audacity of defending supposed freedom of expression while deploring the self-determination and freedom of nations.
It even gives the impression that these people greatly resent the post-World War II world, and perhaps the world that emerged after the First World War, and are actively working to return to the good old days.
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Today, a group of former Twitter users who are fed up by the platform’s decline under billionaire control, are launching a new campaign to transform social media into a public good, free from profit-driven incentives, venture capital pressure, and politically-motivated censorship.
The project is called “FreeOurFeeds,” and it has launched with the support of big names including actor Mark Ruffalo, writer Cory Doctorow, businessman Roger McNamee, director Alex Winter, and others.
FreeOurFeeds aims to build a new social media ecosystem on top of the AT Protocol, an open, decentralized framework designed to enable interoperable social media platforms, giving users greater control over their data, algorithms, and online experience (it’s what Bluesky runs on). They want to leverage this tech to create a social media ecosystem focused on individual control, creativity, community well-being, and free expression.
They basically want to build Bluesky out from one company into a whole ecosystem of different apps and companies by making a non profit foundation that opens up its underlying technology so anybody can build on it.
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Any idea how they’ll be handling moderation/hate speech etc?
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This might work, until it becomes popular.
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I have no idea.
Whatever they do, it needs to be something beyond community moderation, because that does not work at scale.
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