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Ask HN: How Belarus can keep connected despite internet blackout?

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131–140 of 162 posts

Re: Ask HN: How Belarus can keep connected despite internet blackout?

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the free world Ah the famous free world where our social media posts are heavily censored, where lock-down was / is mandatory for a lot of us, and where protesting can cost you an eye (at least 20 people lost an eye last year in France's Gillets Jaunes protests). Yes we still have it better than the Belorussians but free our world is certainly not.

Why do you conflate corporate enforced moral positioning with people protecting themselves from a pandemic as well as police brutality? None of those 3 things seem at all related to me.

We are not free to post certain things on social media. We are not free to move wherever we want to go. We are not free to protest without being harmed.

Those 3 things are proofs that there is no free world.

Re: Ask HN: How Belarus can keep connected despite internet blackout?

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you be content with calling it 'somewhat democratic world'?

I'll take a mostly democratic world over an openly despotic one a la the CCP.

Me too. But the fact that our prison is shinier than the neighbors isn't enough to make me proud living in it.

Re: Ask HN: How Belarus can keep connected despite internet blackout?

#133

This duscussion is cute, but but situation in belarus is deteriorating and people are being beaten and tortured in jail. Open this with google translate yo get an idea: https://news.tut.by/society/696375.html I would say that if you want to help, first reach out to your representative / government and put pressure on them to put pressure on belarus. It's a small country that depends on trade with the free world. Seco…

No offense but I think this is wrong. We’re trained by society and upbringing to think that only “appeals to management” can effect change- and that “doing it yourself” is amateurish. There is some truth to this- but the world is entirely run by people who believe they can personally effect change through their actions, everyone else be damned.

You are right, but then you should suggest what you believe we should be doing.

on individual level the best actuon I can think of is donating to help folks that lost and eye or were beaten withing an inch of their life.

Otherwise i am not sure what you could do, perhaps we could send equipment like radios, first aid and body protection / armor? Depending on your views you coupd even post crossbows. Would they arrive through customs, assuming you know who to post them to?

Lastly, you could travel there to join the protests, but realisticaly are you going to do that?

Re: Ask HN: How Belarus can keep connected despite internet blackout?

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the free world Ah the famous free world where our social media posts are heavily censored, where lock-down was / is mandatory for a lot of us, and where protesting can cost you an eye (at least 20 people lost an eye last year in France's Gillets Jaunes protests). Yes we still have it better than the Belorussians but free our world is certainly not.

Oh no you are so persecuted. I am so sorry for you that you can’t post racism and gore on Facebook.

First : except a YouTube account that I use to manage my videos playlists I don't use social medias at all. I still see what's going there and I find it appalling.

Second : you don't know me. So don't assume who I am and why I lament the loss of freedom on the web.

Lastly there are plenty of reasonable topics that are censored : you can't even emit any doubt about the COVID "religion" for crying out loud.

Re: Ask HN: How Belarus can keep connected despite internet blackout?

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh no you are so persecuted. I am so sorry for you that you can’t post racism and gore on Facebook.

First : except a YouTube account that I use to manage my videos playlists I don't use social medias at all. I still see what's going there and I find it appalling. Second : you don't know me. So don't assume who I am and why I lament the loss of freedom on the web. Lastly there are plenty of reasonable topics that are censored : you can't even emit any doubt about the COVID "religion" for crying out loud.

The Covid.. religion..?

Re: Ask HN: How Belarus can keep connected despite internet blackout?

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you conflate corporate enforced moral positioning with people protecting themselves from a pandemic as well as police brutality? None of those 3 things seem at all related to me.

We are not free to post certain things on social media. We are not free to move wherever we want to go. We are not free to protest without being harmed. Those 3 things are proofs that there is no free world.

Well, there's freedom and there's liberty. We often use the former to include the latter, but they're completely different. We only have the freedom to do the right thing. We are not free to do evil things. We may have the liberty to do them, of course. Now in a liberal society like the US, we are at liberty to do many things we ought not which is partly motivated by either skepticism on the one hand and a wish to maintain the peace on the other because enforcing certain behaviors would actually result in an even worse status quo (there's a hint: make it uneconomical to suppress certain freedoms). So no perfect liberality exists nor could it. The question of which liberties ought to be tolerated is answered by our constitutions, but even those are bounded in practice. You have blasphemy laws and you have hate speech laws, both of which constrain speech. Now, I don't think which are in force is arbitrary or that it's all the same or relative--tyranny has an objective standard and not suppression of what I happen to want to do--but the fact that we always have had them is proof that freedom (liberty) of speech is always limited.

To your point, the proper way to characterize the current status quo is that a certain kind of leftist orthodoxy or ethos has come to dominate institutions, organizations, and corporations that otherwise pretend to some kind of "neutrality" in ways that don't actually obtain. So what you have is a religious war of sorts and this leftist religion currently has the upper hand. As a result, laws that constrain liberties along traditional lines have been eliminated over the course of the last century, replaced with new ones reflecting leftist norms. What irks me most is the mendacity. At least confessional states give you the courtesy of telling you they're confessional. You can work with that even if the confession is wrong and at least everyone's clear about the circumstances you're in instead of living in a fog of lies. But lying about ideological orientation, also while knowing fully well others disagree with it, is dishonest. But people are noticing. (As people are booted off YouTube and Twitter by an increasingly severe leftist standard, a new market opens up for alternative services. Of course, that doesn't quite extend as nicely to laws. We might have to begin to have to resort to samizdats.)

Re: Ask HN: How Belarus can keep connected despite internet blackout?

#139
post #34

During China's Xinjiang crackdown people use old fashioned dialup modems and 56kbps is better than 0kbps. I think if you can still make cross border International phone calls you can setup modem on both sides and create a end-to-end network.

I imagine it would be relatively easy to detect that kind of activity.

Maybe some kind of ad hoc mobile/mesh network stands a better chance, though that too is detectable and jammable.

Re: Ask HN: How Belarus can keep connected despite internet blackout?

#140

This duscussion is cute, but but situation in belarus is deteriorating and people are being beaten and tortured in jail. Open this with google translate yo get an idea: https://news.tut.by/society/696375.html I would say that if you want to help, first reach out to your representative / government and put pressure on them to put pressure on belarus. It's a small country that depends on trade with the free world. Seco…

No offense but I think this is wrong. We’re trained by society and upbringing to think that only “appeals to management” can effect change- and that “doing it yourself” is amateurish. There is some truth to this- but the world is entirely run by people who believe they can personally effect change through their actions, everyone else be damned.

As a single person your options are to join with others, or buy an army. Not everyone can afford the latter.
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