How Repression Virtually Wins
The hope of decentralized power that fights repression
“When repression wins” I thought as I woke up and started writing into Facebook. I thought to spend more than one run at this though so I brought it here to substack - because I woke up and realized that this short period of light shining on the way people are abused to deliver a world cup seems to have passed and it’s on to the next news cycle. So repression continues to win and duck criticism.
The World Cup situation and Qatar's abuse of workers or just plain modern virtual slavery and trafficking people into their country where they are exploited. If you arrive expecting something but don’t get it - and can’t leave either - you’ve been trafficked. Qatar qualifies “..use of force, fraud, or coercion to obtain some type of labor” is true. It was going on before world cup but they expanded it to accomplish their World Cup staging. That news cycle had a limited time to play out in the media but now we have other areas of unrest. “Blood soaked stadiums” was ringing in my mind - but in the end we still watch the world cup. You had 1.5+ (in 2015) million migrant workers and there have been many thousands of deaths. There is a fatalistic - “damage is done” where there seems little idea that those people can be rescued or international courts can bring cases but we can’t do anything.
That distraction or rotation of one story to the next rather than any kind of serious sustained effort to undo or prevent this is itself a problem. Limited focus, limited forums for the problem to move to a what next level of activity. I found other people online wondering about this after writing this. On reddit:
Do you ever feel like there’s always something new which dominates the news cycle right after the “normal person” starts demanding a better world? - “/r/TooAfraidToAsk - anonymous
Still how can one not be distracted by China having widespread protests against being repressed by multiple factors - Zero Covid Policy, lack of opportunity, people losing all their savings or a home they paid for to scams and of course intense censorship. It is illegal to protest or question the government this way but they are doing it and there seems to be some kind of organization that organized despite the constant erasing of what people write online. Thus the symbolic blank papers in hand at protests which also is reminiscent of someone being arrested before even writing on their blank paper for their mere intention to protest the war in Russia some time ago before media news from there went cold.
I even watched some random news commentator speculating that "this won't get to the level of Tianamin Square or Hong Kong fighting against governments and police because of all the tools of propaganda, filtering etc that China has in place." Talking about the way protests are encircled and barricaded and people have their western news related apps deleted, images, video deleted before they can leave. That to me is like saying that people are not aware of this and not working towards perhaps bypassing censorship - sending video elsewhere on the internet before it can be deleted. The human spirit of working against repression and bypassing the limited sets of controls that are put there to dominate.
Elsewhere the gun problem in USA rages on and it has two sides - trying to bring change with laws. Then false logic like "if laws could control this problem then it would have already been controlled" when in fact most laws never really got far before being suppressed or watered down by political activity from gun lobbyists. I saw that the ghost gun movement - people who make their own guns using metal and plastic from 3d printers have evolved designs way beyond some single shot toy. Glock handgun replicas and new designs and they say "so, are you going to ban plastic and metal because it might be formed into guns?". So, people connect the censorship in China to their gun rights in the USA while mass shootings create news cycles all to frequently for people to let the issue fade away - but it has faded so many times. There is a kind of fatigue.
Democracy has successes and failures
Those people look at repression and feel repressed and their gun supposedly means that if a police state emerges they will fight it - yet at the same time the political right and center are always wanting to increase funding for the "crime wave". There is a narrative that if you can’t win then you push the idea that democracy is itself not the solution. If you are more angry, vocal and active you can just call those who don’t agree with you sheep who don’t have all the facts. Both sides do this but one side certainly doesn’t seem to take it’s fact checking very seriously and that would be, predictably, the side that sues for more repression. Repression of books and ideas, education and teachers and the rest of the rights that they label wokeism if people dare to suggest that there is systemic racism or hatred towards sexual identity and preference. Woke - to me - is a whole terminology about bringing things into the light and debating them openly to awaken society. So we have a cartoonish level of name calling of the “that never happened” versus “it’s still happening” sides of these issues.
THIS IS PROPAGANDA - I don’t agree with this cartoonist or this but, well why not share it because I’m interested in this way people make a cartoon out of important issues. It is certainly something that I feel like I’m looking into 1900s propaganda that we might laugh at today.
Hacking democracy it is repression and creating repressive laws because you allow bribing and super PAC funding for your next election cycle to be legal. If I didn’t put this cartoon I would be accused perhaps of echo-chamber censors. I would think some readers are on a different side that I am on many of those issues. Twitter and social media - which I would say this Blog on substack is a part of is the answer and the problem in various large organized media news cycles - the de-censoring of twitter is cheered and looked down upon. Like giving up a win - but it was really more about stopping crimes in progress like inciting people to protest the government based on false information that brought it to a head where President Trump’s Twitter account was suspended. Free speech is not pleasant speech all the time - and many people don’t like thinking about or reading about these topics.
That cartoon above of Mickey fighting and all those things that the right use to have a culture war with the “radical left” are about trying to undo the work to normalize things that people don’t feel are acceptable. As of to say black people will beat us up for being white and trying to flip the victim side to the “white priviledge side”. So ... that means people probably won’t listen to something like this which is very raw the sound quality is rough
There was also a very serious set of comedian performances about what’s wrong with white people and that really pissed a lot of white people off. There was one person and its almost like he is flabbergasted that this is even comedy [USA] “As a country, we just can’t agree. We just fight about everything. We can’t even agree on Black Lives Matter. That’s a controversial statement. Black lives -matter-”. He emphasises this in a high pitch. Then continues “Not matters more than you, just matters. Matters, just matters. That’s where we are starting the negotiations. Matters. We can’t agree on that shit. What the fuck is less than matters? Black lives exist, can we say that?”. Then he goes on that they are only fighting for the lowest rights and that it’s actually a stance you can have, being for equal rights, and that there are people who disagree. Then he explains that in the past black people were fighting for civil rights … not even equal, just civil. Finally he talks about how people say “all lives matter” as some kind of semantic come back as if one set of lives mattering reduces the mattering of other set of lives? As if everyone is lined up to get on board that single boat survival boat on the sinking titanic and someone said “black lives matter” but this was a problem. Its really something you have to see and think about what it means.
Someone really close to me, they told me one day that they didn’t like Black Lives matter and that it was some kind of corrupt scam because of some news article about people fixing their house or being wealthy. I told them this was debunked and it isn’t really an organization it is a grass roots movement, a saying and that some people did fund-raise to hold events. People who can organize fundraising often have time and wealth - it’s normal for wealthy white people to fund-raise and hold elitist dinners to get someone elected or for a charity. So these stories are hack journalism but its hard to redirect people to fact checking websites (as I have been redirected by my friends, which I am happy about). “The conspiracy theory alleges that the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement is some kind of a front to launder money to Democrats because the BLM website uses ActBlue to process its online fundraising payments.”
Even if there was some kind of misappropriation it is not “BLM” as just a few people. That reminds me of the way they keep shitting on Bitcoin any time someone does a crypto scam, yet they don’t shit on banks when one bank dissolves and loses all it’s savers funds. The opportunity to paint the target, which you get paid to write about, using inevitable acts of greed or fraud that has been a big education for me in the last decade. After all I’m just learning to cope with all this as it comes - but it is like watching George Orwell’s 1984 come to life as people predicted it was. In fact he was writing about what was already happening and how it would just keep happening.
Anyway, that person hasn’t spoken to me since showing me a link to the story and blocking me. Made me really sad because I guess his circle of friends have been infected with this kind of thing but it means he is repressing himself because he is very close to me and I know he has had beliefs or preferences that were far more equal rights for everyone in the past. I remember when my father was even saying “looney left” and “woke” in a derogatory way not long before he turned out to have a very serious dementia. Maybe he was on his way as my mother had suggested - as I hadn’t seen him for years due to Covid19 and travel issues. His logical mind had let things through that had influenced him negatively on these topics but he was also part of an older generation where repression had won on many of these things. So there was a way some people had of dismissing those things that were just not talked about and demanding that they not be talked about or heard from.
Strange Economies
So this is the issue that is common - Qatar uses money to repress by hiring so many police and maintaining the regime that has control of the huge wealth coming from selling fossil fuels. That means ... economic sanctions. China's economy is already imploding due to too much corruption and repression. Russia's economy is going through waves of adapting to sanctions and losing more and more ability to resupply itself. There are various states of the unbelievably slow progress of international solutions to these big problems. There are rogue nations that will keep trading with these countries after their repression is deemed a problem by the rest of the world.
It really is the protesting that needs to be far more organized and widespread - so people really need to break away from using social media to be lost and distracted and find some level of agreeing where lines and boundaries can be drawn to avoid fueling the repression machines. I had a quite practical talk with a computer programmer and he said he was interested in visiting China and finding out how to get through their firewall and route to external websites. If China has blocked the VPN and proxie web that would give unfiltered access then - you have to be able to find those addresses and services faster than the Chinese Authorities can or know the schemes. How long until censorship rolls out to the point where we have to know that in other parts of the world?
So this seems to be some kind of lynchpin that needs to be dismantled openly where everyone can clarify the lies for what they are.That means we are back to journalism and that includes a lot of independent journalists with ethics are needed. Decentralization - small groups that can't be controlled but that can be funded to keep working at it. Centralized media always gives a throat to be squeezed for the least cost to get the most effect - silencing the whole organizations ability to focus on one of these topics or name the corporations and countries involved in crimes. So that is how you can connect it to something like Bitcoin - it is a decentralized marvel.
I imagine a day where you have to pay for your news independently and use Bitcoin because banks are censoring independent journalists so you need a censorship proof money. If you remove Bitcoin you remove the ability for many activists that are already censored in countries like China, Iran, Russia from functioning. However, then you have countries like North Korea that are under sanctions that like Bitcoin so then you can paint it as a criminal type money - but money is not evil or good and centralized money is definitely vulnerable to being mis-used which is why so many countries have collapsed economies and hyper-inflated currencies. Maybe USA will keep the dollar going but other countries have to turn to Bitcoin because US dollars are harder to work with and banks won’t operate in their borders.
I can even imagine that Bitcoin will help migrant workers escape slavery Qatar when they get to a point of desperation where they have to buy their freedom.