"Another thing to be optimistic about (although time will tell if it actually catches on) is federation—a more decentralized version of social networking. Federated networks like Mastodon, Bluesky, and Meta’s Threads are all just Twitter clones on their surface—a feed of short text posts—but they’re also all designed to offer various forms of interoperability. Basically, where your current social media account and data exist in a walled garden controlled entirely by one company, you could be on Threads and follow posts from someone you like on Mastodon—or at least Meta says that’s coming. (Many—including internet pioneer Richard Stallman, who has a page on his personal website devoted to “Why you should not be used by Threads”—have expressed skepticism of Meta’s intentions and promises.) Even better, it enables more granular moderation. Again, X (the website formerly known as Twitter) provides a good example of what can go wrong when one person, in this case Elon Musk, has too much power in making moderation decisions—something federated networks and the so-called “fediverse” could solve.

The big idea is that in a future where social media is more decentralized, users will be able to easily switch networks without losing their content and followings. “As an individual, if you see [hate speech], you can just leave, and you’re not leaving your entire community—your entire online life—behind. You can just move to another server and migrate all your contacts, and it should be okay,” says Paige Collings, a senior speech and privacy advocate at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “And I think that’s probably where we have a lot of opportunity to get it right.”"

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/10/17/1081194/how-to-fix-the-internet-online-discourse/

The right paved the way for these once-unthinkable bans by first pursuing goals that were more palatable to the public, using bathroom bills and school sports bans to normalise hateful anti-trans rhetoric in the American public sphere. This tactic has been effective.

The logical next step is to begin to restrict adult access to gender-affirming care, while pretending you’re not pursuing outright bans that would likely be ruled unconstitutional.

This requires borrowing a page from the anti-abortion legislative playbook, where so-called TRAP (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) laws became common in the early 21st century. State governments passed unnecessary building codes in ways that would cause abortion clinics to be in violation, or required abortion providers to have ‘admitting privileges’, meaning a person affiliated to an abortion clinic must have the right to admit patients to a hospital.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/republican-states-gender-affirming-care-adults-bans-tactics/

The real issue is that Israel has no right to self-defense against the territory and the people that it occupies. According to the Fourth Geneva Convention, it has a duty and a responsibility to protect those people until the reversion to a status quo ante that preceded hostilities, meaning until sovereignty is returned to the Palestinians. Of course, Israel denies that this is applicable, because it denies that Palestinians are a people, and so they say there is no sovereign to whom to revert.

Israel also claims that this territory belongs to them. They claim that they had the right to acquire it by force, which proceeds from their claim that the 1967 War was a war of self defense. Neither of those claims are true. Israel insists that the attack that launched the 1967 War—in which it destroyed Egypt’s entire air fleet while it was still on the ground—was a preemptive strike against an inevitable attack by Egypt. In reality, Egypt was cooperating with the United States as it worked toward a mediated agreement. This was not a defensive war—but even if it was, since the adoption of the UN Charter in 1945, there has been no principle in international law that permits the acquisition of territory under any circumstances.

Israel has created and perpetuated legal fictions to deny the applicability of international law. For one, Israel says there is no occupation. It says the territory is “disputed” and applies occupation law on a de facto basis, which allows it to cherry-pick the provisions with which it complies. It has created a sui generis regime that has no analogy or precedent, and thus it neither recognizes Palestinians as part of its domestic order—which would characterize its confrontation with Palestinians as a civil war—nor acknowledges the existence of a regular war against a nascent sovereign fighting for national liberation. Instead, Israel has been creating new law to cover what it calls “armed conflict short of war.” This enables Israel to usurp Palestinians’ sovereignty, and associated policing power, while also using military force against them

https://jewishcurrents.org/unpacking-israels-legal-fictions

Bevins also sees specific, clearly articulated, democratically determined demands as key to realizing a movement’s objectives. The South Korean Candlelight Revolution can be “marked as a success,” he writes toward the end of the book, in large part because its goal—to oust then-President Park Geun-hye for her part in a corruption and bribery scandal—was “clear and achievable.” The U.S. civil rights movement of the 1960s also achieved “limited successes,” Bevins implies, because its leaders articulated a clear and specific set of demands, such as the ability to exercise voting rights.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2023/10/why-havent-the-protest-movements-of-our-time-succeeded/

Using this multi–rule systems approach, we found that the CCP is seeking, with the help of its state, to expunge the ‘illegitimate’ realm of social organising, to change the rules for determining passage into the ‘legitimate’ realm, and to plan and manage the ‘legitimate’ realm dynamically through tangible and intangible means. We roughly conceptualise this as the Party’s pursuit of a ‘command civil society’. Just as a command economy is characterised by its attempt to suck away all space for markets to determine prices and allocate goods and services, the project to build a ‘command civil society’ attempts to suck away space for the operations of any actors and actions that do not fit within its planned and regulated sphere.

The pursuit of a ‘command civil society’ is operationalising Party-and-state joint documents and Party documents alongside state laws and regulations to target the social norms—the ‘survival wisdom’ (Deng 2011)—formed over past decades by social organisers and state administrators. The Party is using its characteristically Leninist penetration of societal and state entities to create rules for tech companies and universities to undermine means for SOs outside the state’s regulatory purview to exist.

This pursuit is not only about tearing down and suppressing; it is also about building a civil society that works reliably in the service of the preferences of the CCP, on the assumption that it knows what is best for society. It seeks to gatekeep access to legitimate identity as a ‘social organisation’ and to influence those SOs which do manage to enter the ‘legitimate’ realm using the Party’s presence in their decision-making mechanisms, the Party’s influence over their leadership makeup, and the Party’s sculpting of the discursive environment in which they operate (in turn influencing the projects they can design, the fundraising strategies they can pursue, and so on).

https://madeinchinajournal.com/2023/11/13/towards-a-command-civil-society/

"When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such injury that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence – knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual"

Engels, the condition of the working class in England. 1845.

Umwelt