Feb 2025 – Page 7

The Rise of the Immortal Dictator: What Will AI Mean for Freedom and State Control?

‘We are all just sitting ducks, waiting to be tagged, flagged, targeted, monitored, manipulated, investigated, interrogated, heckled and harassed”

by John & Nisha Whitehead at off-guardian via thefreeonline at https://wp.me/pIJl9-FWJ Tgram.. https://t.me/thefreeonline/2180

Thanks to the 24/7 surveillance being carried out by the government’s sprawling spy network of fusion centers, we are all just sitting ducks, waiting to be tagged, flagged, targeted, monitored, manipulated, investigated, interrogated, heckled and generally harassed by agents of the US American police state.

Without having ever knowingly committed a crime or been convicted of one, you and your fellow citizens have likely been assessed for behaviors the government might consider devious, dangerous or concerning; assigned a threat score based on your associations, activities and viewpoints; and catalogued in a government database according to how you should be approached by police and other government agencies based on your particular threat level.

The Rise Of The Immortal Dictator: What Will AI Mean For Freedom

The Washington Post on how law enforcement agencies across the nation are using “artificial intelligence tools in a way they were never intended to be used: as a shortcut to finding and arresting suspects without other evidence.”

Digital authoritarianism, as the Center for Strategic and International Studies cautions, involves the use of information technology to surveil, repress, and manipulate the populace, endangering human rights and civil liberties, and co-opting and corrupting the foundational principles of democratic and open societies, “including freedom of movement, the right to speak freely and express political dissent, and the right to personal privacy, online and off.”

Fanfare for Anarchism: A Home for the Homeless

“Life itself is anarchist, which explains why anarchistic forms of sociality surface again and again, throughout history, even in the teeth of the most oppressive social conditions imaginable”.

by Darren Allen The Acorn 95 at Nevermore via thefreeomline at https://wp.me/pIJl9-FWT

Occasionally you hear people complain about being ‘politically homeless’. What they tend to mean is either that there is no longer a traditional left-wing, which sought to manage people and nature in the name of a global ‘society’, or that there is no longer a traditional right-wing, which sought to subjugate people and nature in the name of a national ‘tradition’.

The reason they’ve departed from political life is that in our neoliberal, postmodern, online unworld, society no longer exists, the Western working class has been either weakened or subsumed into the [decaying] middle-class and nations are now irrelevant, as are institutions, so there is no place left for either the ideology of the traditional management class (socialism) or for the traditional owner class (capitalism), and this has left those who still adhere to them, ‘homeless’.

While such people remain blind to the true nature of the postmodern condition — a consequence of technocratic capitalism and technocratic socialism — they will be unable to even consider the only home that can ever welcome them; Anarchism…

I say ‘perennial’ because, as I have argued in an introductory article, nature is anarchist, friendship is anarchist, work is anarchist (when the boss is absent), romantic love is anarchist, scientific endeavour is anarchist, all primal (pre-agricultural, pre-conquest) societies were anarchist and artistic creation is anarchist. Life itself is anarchist, which explains why anarchistic forms of sociality surface again and again, throughout history, even in the teeth of the most oppressive social conditions imaginable. Anarchism springs up in prisons, in shanty towns, in peasant communes and even occasionally, and most amazingly, in the modern workplace. Anarchism sprouts through the cracks of the system as weeds do between its paving stones, because it represents the root and spring of our social nature.

You would think then that anarchism would be a popular way of life today. You would think that a movement which in essence includes all great artists and scientists [1] would be extremely attractive. You’d think that a genuine alternative to the system-friendly managerialism of the left and the system-friendly capitalism of the right would be an easy pitch. You’d think that an approach to politics which, like the majority of populations everywhere, pushes leftwards economically (redistributing wealth) and rightwards socially (enforcing organic cultural borders), would find a great deal of popular support. You’d think! But I’m afraid you’d be wrong, for two basic reasons.

Firstly, most people do not want the spiritual and intellectual freedom that anarchism represents. It terrifies them. They want to avoid the crushing oppression of worldly life, but they cling to the institutions, the money, the capital, the comfort, the routine, the technology and the mindless work that are all preconditions of that life.

You can download a PDF of this publication from here

Ukraine War Day #1077: Somebody is blowing up Recruitment Centers

Dear Readers: In recent days Ukraine has seen an interesting phenomenon: All over the country people are blowing up the so-called “recruitment centers”.

Posted on February 4, 2025 by yalensis via thefreeonline at https://wp.me/pIJl9-FWg

Ukraine the acronym is ТЦК which stands for Територіальний центр комплектування та соціальної підтримки (Territorial Center for Recruitment and Social Support).
Ukraine War Day #1077: Somebody is blowing up Recruitment Centers

**A policeman and his dog not far from the site of an explosion in Rivne**. [Don’t click on it, it’s just a static screenshot from a video.]

Despite the benign name, these are, basically, the draft centers where Ukrainian men are dragged, against their will, to serve in the army.

I have this piece from the Ukrainian site New Voice nv.ua to describe what is happening.

On February 1 in the city of Rivne (Western Ukraine), there was an explosion at the ТЦК. One man died, 6 were wounded.

On February 2 in the city of Pavlograd (Dnepropetrovk Oblast), there was an explosion outside the building of the ТЦК. One man was wounded, he was said to be a soldier.

On February 1 in the town of Piryatin (Poltava Oblast), a man wearing a gray balaclava and “pixellated” (greenish camo) pants approached a soldier of the Poltava ТЦК waving a hunting rifle and demanding that he hand over his weapon.

This occurred at the exact time when a group of draftees were being escorted to the 199th training center. When the soldier refused to hand over his rifle, the unknown man shot him dead from a distance of 2-3 meters.

Having killed the soldier, the unknown man helped himself to the soldier’s automatic rifle and then fled, along with one of the men who was being drafted. [In other words, the killer basically was there to rescue one of the draftees.]

In an update to the Piryatin story: The shooter and the draftee he rescued were both apprehended on that very same day. Evgeny Rogachov, who is Chief of Police in Poltava announced that they had apprehended the duo just a few hours after the shooting.

He doesn’t give out his names but says that the shooter was a native of Poltava, born in 1984, and the man he took from the ТЦК is also a Poltava native, born in 1988.

[yalensis: what do you want to bet the two men are brothers or cousins?]

These incidents listed are just the tip of the iceberg, there are other such incidents of resistance, either spontaneous or otherwise, happening all over Ukraine.

Also in Russia there have been a series of attacks on recruitment centers, often by anti/war activists, and some brave anarchists have been jailed under accusations of taking part.

The Ukrainians, of course, blame Russia, claiming that the FSB and GRU are organizing these acts of resistance and sabotage. Andrei Kovalenko, who heads Ukraine’s “Center for Countering Russian Disinformation” is convinced that the Russians are behind it.

He also blames the Russians for the media campaign against mobilization, for example all the videos posted online showing men being dragged into draft centers against their will. Bloggers, bots, and social media are all being directed in this endeavor by the Russian GRU, according to 100% State media under Martial Law..

By now there is absolute horrific chaos as Ukraine has run out of volunteers and, as the frontline of the war collapses, “recruits”, often captured in the street” are sent to near certain death as lowly foot soldiers with little or no training. Any man who could bribe their way out, hide or flee the country has long since disappeared and foreign mercenaries are difficult to hire at any price.

Share: share here

Share: share here

Share: share here

Share: share here

Share: share here

Share: share here

Share: share here