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+--- Thread: About the Recent Deplatforming (/thread-207.html)
About the Recent Deplatforming - jaybreak - 08-19-2018
A number of far-right/alt-right Internet personalities have recently been banned from social media sites, or had their blogs taken away, etc. This should have been expected, given the political climate, media protocols, and with who holds a lot of the levers in the tech industry. Naturally, there are plenty of sources you find online that explain things from various viewpoints, but I wouldn't get caught up in the debate unless you have a predilection for that sort of thing.
We at Radix Fidem are neither right nor left--we're not even on the map of approved political views in the democratic West. If anything, we would look like anarchists, based on our rejection on the modern nation-state as a system God approves of. That's fine if others think that. If you're not a little bit mysterious and weird, you might be doing things wrong. Let your heart guide you, but don't outright reject what some political viewpoints might have to say. At the very least, their vocabulary may be useful to us if we're ever going to explain our position.
We're also pretty much nobodies in the grand scheme of the Internet. Although our door is open for anyone to come in and check us out, we basically talk amongst ourselves in the corner. We're barely a blip on the radar, but that doesn't mean we're completely safe; no one online really is. If someone wants to take us down, they pretty much can.
Ed has some great posts on securing yourself online, if you are so oriented and hear the whispers to do such a thing. Your level of diligence should be determined by the parameters of the mission God is calling you to. Don't let others tell you what that should look like. Though Ed and I have different focuses on what all of this could mean, I can offer my advice based on my years of the doing freelance web design and software development.
1 - Buy a domain (i.e., www.whatevername.com, .org). This is both easy and cheap, as most domains will cost you roughly $10 a year for common top-level domains, like (.com, .org, .net) to maintain ownership. You can set up a simple page for free on Github and point the domain towards that, if you don't have a website or blog, that shows your contact information. If you point it towards a blog that gets taken down, you can simply point it to another blog you start. This is secure mostly because this is something you have the most control over, and serious legal action is required to actually take a domain away from you, as opposed to a tech provider banning you and removing your content.
2 - Buy web hosting. This is taking another step further, and there is more cost to this. Buying your own hosting frees you from a lot of the politics of having a site hosted by a third party, i.e., Wordpress, so there is a lot less scrutiny. Hosting providers are less likely to bother paying customers unless you're really obviously trying to cause trouble and draw attention to yourself. As mentioned in #1, you can host things freely through sites like Github, but those options are limiting if you want to make use of a database for a blog.
3 - Set up a second email account. Preferably a non-US-based one, and don't publicize your email. There are free ones like Protonmail and Tutanota, who are better with security and non-snoopiness, compared to Gmail or Yahoo, etc. I would create an email address that doesn't connect back to you; spinxo is a good resource for generating a weird username. If, for some reason, you get your normal email taken away, you can message your contacts with this second one. You'll get bonus points if you have a domain set up and use whatever@yourdomain.com as an address: you can simply point that email to the second address, so there would be little lag in communications there.
RE: About the Recent Deplatforming - Ed Hurst - 08-19-2018
Good outline, Jay. I note there are multiple free and open source blog packages you can install on your own site. WordPress is also the name of one of those software packages. There are others named things like Ghost, and so many others I can't list them here. This is an area you either learn because you need it, or you ignore it because it's not your mission.
RE: About the Recent Deplatforming - jaybreak - 08-23-2018
(08-19-2018, 10:32 AM)Ed Hurst Wrote: Good outline, Jay. I note there are multiple free and open source blog packages you can install on your own site. WordPress is also the name of one of those software packages. There are others named things like Ghost, and so many others I can't list them here. This is an area you either learn because you need it, or you ignore it because it's not your mission.
Yes. I only know so much, and it's not really that deep, but a few simple steps can do a lot for people's online presence.
I feel like this whole thing, not just with deplatforming, but with shadow banning and sneaky things like that, it's really something of a wonder in a civilization that has reached peak "free speech." There are laws in the West protecting it, everyone knows about the concept and understands it, tech companies are ostensibly bend-over-backwards with being "transparent" and letting users "have control" over their data...all of this using a technology (the Internet) that is literally built on sharing information and data--we're at peak secular "free speech" and having the means to communicate distributed to a lot of people, yet there is still all of this going on. The old canard about free speech referring to government censorship is only part of it; that's just 2nd amendment stuff, particular to Americans. Normal folks tolerate dissenting opinion, but only up to a point. Once a threshold is crossed, certain ideas are literally "dangerous." It's no different than pre-Bacon ideas about certain words or ideas causing actual physical harm and sickness--the types of words blasphemy laws address.
I honestly think that the "free speech" is just fancy moral/logical concept that we can live with for a bit, and nothing more. Humans are tribal at heart, and maintaining stability within the tribe necessarily means there can't be free speech.
RE: About the Recent Deplatforming - Ed Hurst - 08-24-2018
I knew you knew about the software options; I was adding that for the readers who didn't know.
jaybreak Wrote:I honestly think that the "free speech" is just fancy moral/logical concept that we can live with for a bit, and nothing more. Humans are tribal at heart, and maintaining stability within the tribe necessarily means there can't be free speech.
We agree. Absolute free speech is not a biblical value. We should expect some efforts to silence us; we would be compelled to do the same with others at some point. A feudal covenant community has to close down pernicious lies that threaten shalom.
RE: About the Recent Deplatforming - jaybreak - 08-26-2018
Testing...