Read just the first chapter of John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty" (free via Project Gutenberg etc) and tell me that he didn't have his finger precisely on the pulse — in the 1850s — of the root cause of the authoritarian war for majoritarian supremacy that we're witnessing today. Censorship, the compelled worship of an ever-shifting orthodoxy, the construction and desecration of idols before the temple of consensus— it's all the same thing, arising from the same source, and awaiting a similar solution. In times of trouble, we should look more to our history. Read your Mill, brothers.

Looks like I was able to get this working again, sort of. It says I'm connected to 9-11 relays, but only shows that I have 100 followers (and even Jack only about 40, so it has to be a data gap), and very few notes on timelines (with obvious gaps even for hugely active accounts). Relay.damus.io never seems to pass me any data (0kb both up and down) to me, which j assume is due to my connection coming via Tor, but honestly I don't know. I'm connecting using Amethyst, if anybody sees this and has any ideas—what's the best, biggest relay for Tor users right now? Secondly, and most importantly for anyone who sees this note, please make some noise to try and stop the passage of RISAA (the FISA 702 reauthorization) that's about to hit law as soon as this Friday. Please read about it and push it out on all of your socials, if you agree it's a problem. It's going to be hard to stop this thing, even with all hands. Whoever sees this, thank you for hearing me.

OK, so you guys showed me McDonald's jacked prices at least 130% on the core budget item: the mcchicken. Mentally recalculating McDs as "literally more than twice as expensive is a doozy, sure but what I really wanna know: did they do any shrinkflation on top of that to really wring out the margin? Smaller patties, cups, fries, cheese or something? Or was it all just pure price action?

I know everybody is dunking on the random governor who decided that she could just wave her hand and unilaterally suspend any right she dislikes simply by hissing the word "emergency," but the problem is that she's only wrong if another political force — the courts, politics, disobedience, or Locke's old Appeal to Heaven — proves her wrong. Enforcing the limits of official power isn't some American $currentYear problem, it's a recurring issue throughout history. The question is why we're suddenly seeing the authoritarian instinct activating so much more openly — and frequently. In prior decades, they had to be cute in how they went about it, often requiring laws and lies. Now they're remarkably comfortable simply stating "because of the 'emergency,' you can no longer {travel | donate | engage in commerce | read | communicate | carry}," and that's the whole of it. The next question is what you're going to do about it.