Because you want real/empathic/joyful/understanding/supportive human connection, but you’re afraid that you will get a fake/judgemental/manipulative/exploitative/pushy/coercive one instead

• Margaret J. Wheatley - Turning To One Another: Simple Conversations To Restore Hope To The Future
• David C. Korten - The Great Turning: From Empire To Earth Community
• Alfie Kohn - No Contest: The Case Against Competition
• Shareable - Sharing Cities: Activating The Urban Commons
• Michael Moss - Salt Sugar Fat: How The Food Giants Hooked Us
• Johann Hari - Lost Connections: Uncovering The Real Causes of Depression–And The Unexpected Solutions
• Michael N. Nagler - The Search For A Nonviolent Future

Adding some general context about Nestle and the pushing/marketing of baby formula

https://ysph.yale.edu/news-article/experts-call-for-an-end-to-the-exploitative-marketing-used-by-the-baby-formula-milk-industry/

https://www.wits.ac.za/news/latest-news/research-news/2023/2023-02/why-south-african-moms-buy-commercial-milk-formula-when-breast-is-best.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Nestlé_boycott

“IBFAN claims that Nestlé distributes free formula samples to hospitals and maternity wards; after leaving the hospital, the formula is no longer free, but because the supplementation has interfered with lactation, the family must continue to buy the formula. IBFAN also alleges that Nestlé uses “humanitarian aid” to create markets, does not label its products in a language appropriate to the countries where they are sold, and offers gifts and sponsorship to influence health workers to promote its products. The company not only made use of mass media promotion (e.g. billboards and posters) and sample distributions, they also had sales people dressed as so-called “milk nurses” to visit mothers in hospital and at their home to praise formula and its benefits.”

I fear they will commandeer them, reprogram them, and unleash them on the population

Also, capitalists and their governmental lackeys have created conditions that caused immigrants to flee their countries - supporting repressive authoritarian regimes that align with their economic interests, going to war and toppling democratic governments that act too much in the interests of their own citizens/local businesses at the expense of foreign interests and become a “threat of a good example”, exploiting the countries through imposing “free trade” and debt through the IMF/World Bank/WTO, etc.

(Adding a video about Guatemala: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpeT0I36MmY)

On the Abraham/Isaac thing, there’s a reason why in religion, generally speaking, parents are pretty much allowed to do anything to their kids (or not strictly forbidden), while kids are required to respect their parents (regardless of what they do to them/how they raise them, “spare the rod spoil the child” and all that). This is how you perpetuate a religion - “You are part of this religion, don’t ask any problematic questions about it, respect ma authoritah!”

(I think it’s also related to Aristotle’s “Give me a child until he’s 7, and I will show you the man”, in the meaning of “indoctrinate them while you can”)

I totally understand him, and I don’t know his policies, but wouldn’t it be great if the name Adolf Hitler got “appropriated” towards egalitarian policies of inclusion and equality, in a sort of opposition to the way the nazis appropriated the swastika

I have some quotes to share, though about the government side of things

“The digital age has created the semblance of social connection, while empowering autocrats to better surveil, control, and disrupt perceived political opponents. China, Iran, Russia, and Saudi Arabia have used digital tools to silence opponents, spread propaganda and disinformation, and sow polarization and division among their rivals. So, too, have regimes in smaller countries, like Togo and Bahrain, relied on digital surveillance to curtail civil society. Recent trends among mass movements also show some cause for concern.” (Erica Chenoweth - Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know)

And 3 from “No Place To Hide”:

“Initially, it is always the country’s dissidents and marginalized who bear the brunt of the surveillance, leading those who support the government or are merely apathetic to mistakenly believe they are immune. And history shows that the mere existence of a mass surveillance apparatus, regardless of how it is used, is in itself sufficient to stifle dissent. A citizenry that is aware of always being watched quickly becomes a compliant and fearful one.”

“All of the evidence highlights the implicit bargain that is offered to citizens: pose no challenge and you have nothing to worry about. Mind your own business, and support or at least tolerate what we do, and you’ll be fine. Put differently, you must refrain from provoking the authority that wields surveillance powers if you wish to be deemed free of wrongdoing. This is a deal that invites passivity, obedience, and conformity. The safest course, the way to ensure being “left alone,” is to remain quiet, unthreatening, and compliant.”

“Mass surveillance is a universal temptation for any unscrupulous power. And in every instance, the motive is the same: suppressing dissent and mandating compliance. Surveillance thus unites governments of otherwise remarkably divergent political creeds. At the turn of the twentieth century, the British and French empires both created specialized monitoring departments to deal with the threat of anticolonialist movements. After World War II, the East German Ministry of State Security, popularly known as the Stasi, became synonymous with government intrusion into personal lives. And more recently, as popular protests during the Arab Spring challenged dictators’ grasp on power, the regimes in Syria, Egypt, and Libya all sought to spy on the Internet use of domestic dissenters. Investigations by Bloomberg News and the Wall Street Journal have shown that as these dictatorships were overwhelmed by protestors, they literally went shopping for surveillance tools from Western technology companies. Syria’s Assad regime flew in employees from the Italian surveillance company Area SpA, who were told that the Syrians “urgently needed to track people.” In Egypt, Mubarak’s secret police bought tools to penetrate Skype encryption and eavesdrop on activists’ calls. And in Libya, the Journal reported, journalists and rebels who entered a government monitoring center in 2011 found “a wall of black refrigerator-size devices” from the French surveillance company Amesys. The equipment “inspected the Internet traffic” of Libya’s main Internet service provider, “opening emails, divining passwords, snooping on online chats and mapping connections among various suspects.” The ability to eavesdrop on people’s communications vests immense power in those who do it. And unless such power is held in check by rigorous oversight and accountability, it is almost certain to be abused.” (Glenn Greenwald, “No Place To Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State”)

I’ll counter and say that it’s culture/conditions-based. Humans have a range of available/possible behaviors/thought patterns and they are reinforced/shaped by their surroundings/the system they live in. There are and have been egalitarian societies that aren’t full of “mean, stupid, and crazy” people.

“The idea that the key features of successive societies and human history have been a result of an ‘unchanging’ human nature […] is a prejudice that pervades academic writing, mainstream journalism and popular culture alike. Human beings, we are told, have always been greedy, competitive and aggressive, and that explains horrors like war, exploitation, slavery and the oppression of women. This ‘caveman’ image is meant to explain the bloodletting on the Western Front in one world war and the Holocaust in the other. I argue very differently. ‘Human nature’ as we know it today is a product of our history, not its cause. Our history has involved the moulding of different human natures, each displacing the one that went before through great economic, political and ideological battles.”

“The world as we enter the 21st century is one of greed, of gross inequalities between rich and poor, of racist and national chauvinist prejudice, of barbarous practices and horrific wars. It is very easy to believe that this is what things have always been like and that, therefore, they can be no different. […] The anthropologist Richard Lee [said]: “Before the rise of the state and the entrenchment of social inequality, people lived for millennia in small-scale kin-based social groups, in which the core institutions of economic life included collective or common ownership of land and resources, generalised reciprocity in the distribution of food, and relatively egalitarian political relations.” In other words, people shared with and helped each other, with no rulers and no ruled, no rich and no poor. […] Our species […] is over 100,000 years old. For 95 percent of this time it has not been characterised at all by many of the forms of behaviour ascribed to ‘human nature’ today. There is nothing built into our biology that makes present day societies the way they are. Our predicament as we face a new millennium cannot be blamed on it.”

-Chris Harman - A People’s History Of The World: From The Stone Age To The New Millennium*

edit: and adding a short video https://youtu.be/Est6nay4Z5E?t=18

edit: some books that are on my TBR that might be worth checking out:

• Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil
• Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness
• The Social Instinct: How Cooperation Shaped the World
• Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis (“shows how new findings in psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology cast human nature in a radically different as the supreme altruists and cooperators.”)

possibly Speak for Yourself by Imogen Heap but I’m not sure

Right, though I believe that when you unload a tab it stays there? With the snooze thing it closes the tab and reopens later

It opens it again as a new/refreshed tab, though it does it automatically at the postponed time and so it’s more convenient than having to do it manually (especially when you snooze several tabs)

It’s not for saving memory but to postpone a tab to check it later (for example to see new comments on a post, or if you don’t currently have time to read an article and want to read it tomorrow)

Tab Snooze - allows you to close a tab and have it reappear at a chosen time later

Domain Volume Control / Better Volume Booster - allow you to set default volume per-domain (note that unfortunately, in the 1st one the set volume gets changed when you change the volume through a site’s player, and the 2nd one currently causes an issue on Nightly with unpaused videos)

Playback speed - allows you to change the speed of videos/audio on any site, even only by x0.01 at a time (you can also change the buttons that appear when you click on the addon in the toolbar/addons menu to have specific speeds readily available) (note that it doesn’t change the pitch of the audio)

• Specifically for YouTube you can also use an addon like Improve YouTube. To configure the feature click on the addon in the toolbar/addons menu > Shortcuts > Playback speed. To change the shortcut so that you hold Ctrl and use the mousewheel (while hovering over the video) click Ctrl and release it before using the mousewheel up or down accordingly (otherwise it acts as a zoom to the settings window)

Media URL Timestamper - automatically inserts the current timestamp of the YouTube/Twitch video you’re watching and updates it in the history in case you accidentally close/navigate away from the page or go to a different time in the video

Feedbro - an RSS reader with filtering capabilities

“The main substantive achievement of neoliberalization, however, has been to redistribute, rather than to generate, wealth and income. I have elsewhere provided an account of the main mechanisms whereby this was achieved under the rubric of ‘accumulation by dispossession’. By this I mean the continuation and proliferation of accumulation practices which Marx had treated of as ‘primitive’ or ‘original’ during the rise of capitalism. These include the commodification and privatization of land and the forceful expulsion of peasant populations (compare the cases, described above, of Mexico and of China, where 70 million peasants are thought to have been displaced in recent times); conversion of various forms of property rights (common, collective, state, etc.) into exclusive private property rights (most spectacularly represented by China); suppression of rights to the commons; commodification of labour power and the suppression of alternative (indigenous) forms of production and consumption; colonial, neocolonial, and imperial processes of appropriation of assets (including natural resources); monetization of exchange and taxation, particularly of land; the slave trade (which continues particularly in the sex industry); and usury, the national debt and, most devastating of all, the use of the credit system as a radical means of accumulation by dispossession. The state, with its monopoly of violence and definitions of legality, plays a crucial role in both backing and promoting these processes. To this list of mechanisms we may now add a raft of techniques such as the extraction of rents from patents and intellectual property rights and the diminution or erasure of various forms of common property rights (such as state pensions, paid vacations, and access to education and health care) won through a generation or more of class struggle.”

• from the book “A Brief History Of Neoliberalism” by David Harvey

“The distinctive and dominant characteristic of the capitalist market is not opportunity or choice but, on the contrary, compulsion. Material life and social reproduction in capitalism are universally mediated by the market, so that all individuals must in one way or another enter into market relations in order to gain access to the means of life. This unique system of market-dependence means that the dictates of the capitalist market – its imperatives of competition, accumulation, profit-maximization, and increasing labour-productivity – regulate not only all economic transactions but social relations in general.”

• from the book “The Origin Of Capitalism: A Longer View” by Ellen Meiksins Wood

I’ve also recently started reading The War Against the Commons and The Invention of Capitalism and they are both poised to be very eye-opening

Oh that’s awesome I didn’t realize cameras are able to create a system where the basic necessities of life aren’t locked down by money, where people aren’t being disenfranchised/marginalized/exploited and not having to fend out for themselves figuring out any way to survive but instead working together to answer everybody’s needs

The crux of the issue is that it’s not the citizens that determine what is hide-worthy.

Are you vocally unhappy with how corporations wreck the Earth and our future for monetary profit? Well then you might have something to hide. Are you not heterosexual and cisgendered? Well then you might have something to hide. Do you complain about taxes being too high while not seeing too many benefits and you’d prefer if they didn’t go to finance wars/invasions and subsidize harmful industries? Well then you might have something to hide.

The ruling class wants citizens with nothing to hide. Those don’t pose any risk to their power and privilege.

And adding a quote I have saved up:

“Whenever the subject of surveillance by police and government agencies is discussed online, invariably some John Doe will come along and declare that they are quite happy to give up some or all of their privacy in exchange for improved security, on the grounds that they have nothing to hide, and “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” from the authorities, or from whomever else might gain access to your “private” data (this can include private security companies, private investigators, banks, insurance companies, lawyers, employers, computer hackers, and any individual or company willing to pay for the information. And that’s in addition to the thousands of agents working at GCHQ, NSA etc.). Dissidents languishing in Chinese prisons and Russian gulags - not to mention millions of Jews and dissidents rounded up by the Nazis in the 1930s - might take a slightly different view”

I’ve been using this site to convert to PDF for forever, so I’m assuming it’ll also be good for the other way around

https://ebook.online-convert.com/convert-to-epub

That’s the right direction but it needs to make sure that the wages stay the same, otherwise everything becomes a part-time job and people are forced to find an additional job to get to their original earnings.

Either way, we need Universal Basic Income

I use Feedbro on Firefox. It allows you to create rules for feeds with specific checks/actions (for example to filter out items that contain specific words)