A bill in Louisiana, HB 777, would make it a crime for librarians to use public funds to join the American Librarian Association or attend an ALA conference, punishable with prison time and hard labor for up to two years.
Anti-surveillance sticker spotted in Burnie, Tasmania.
We've got a bunch of copies of these stickers, and numerous other designs.
If anyone is interested in buying a mix pack of radical slaps, check out: https://radicalstickers.bigcartel.com/
Stamp out government mass surveillance and censorship everywhere!
It's not just the Trumps, Orbans, Putins, Tusks, Modis, and Bolsonaros that we need to resist. Mass surveillance and censorship are hallmarks and weapons of totalitarianism police states. And both have been growing in popularity among liberals throughout the world, including most of the elected Democrats in the U.S.
"What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience …"
#HannahArendt, From The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
"Totalitarianism uses isolation to deprive people of human companionship, making action in the world impossible, while destroying the space of solitude. The iron-band of totalitarianism, as Arendt calls it, destroys man’s ability to move, to act, and to think, while turning each individual in his lonely isolation against all others, and himself. The world becomes a wilderness, where neither experience nor thinking are possible."
#Raskin slams Trump, Biden conduct comparisons during House Judiciary hearing >>>
"This is a memory test, but it's not a memory test for #Biden - it's for the whole country. Do we remember #fascism? Do we remember #nazism, #communism, and #totalitarianism? Have we completely forgotten the sacrifices of our parents and grandparents in prior generations? While we play...all of these silly games, [Trump] entertains #authoritarian hustler #Orbán..."
"But, of course, Ring presents itself as more than just the surveillance arm of a multibillion dollar corporation deployed to your front door. It hijacks the human need for security or safety and transmutes it into a need for Ring. It is chiefly the needs of Amazon that are being met, particularly given the way that Ring allows Amazon to also profit from partnerships with police departments."
"I like to pair this claim with Hannah Arendt’s discussion of loneliness, alienation, and superfluousness, which, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, she identifies as ideal conditions for the emergence of totalitarian regimes. 'Under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances', Arendt wrote, 'we watch the development of the same phenomena—homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth'."
Popular Opinion in Totalitarian Regimes: Fascism, Nazism, Communism by Paul Corner
Fascism, Nazism, and Communism dominated the history of much of the twentieth century, yet comparatively little attention has focused on popular reactions to the regimes that sprang from these ideologies.
Another Russian opposition leader murdered by Putin. Is there any doubt #Navalny was murdered? Putin murdered him because he finally feels comfortable doing so. Why? Because donaldtrump is inviting attacks on #NATO, fascist tucker carlson is cheering Putin, the #gop is blocking aid to Ukraine, so time to kill Navalny.
Putin, a hostile foreign intelligence agent, is one of the most infamous cold-blooded killers in human history. Dictator Vladimir Putin is wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court (#ICC). The court #Arrest#Warrant states he responsible for #genocide of Ukrainian children and unlawful deportation of children from Ukraine to Russia.
Hundreds were arrested around the funeral. The FSB shut down the internet, and interrupted the funeral service --dragging the coffin away, before taking it to the grave site. This is what republicans worship.
There’s no “good version” of #nationalism. #Hitler would not have been Hitler without nationalism, which itself creates the conditions necessary for #totalitarianism to thrive. Nationalism requires that people not only focus on the positive, but that they ignore or justify the negative (and in Hitler’s case, the horrific) in hopes of preserving their continued good time.
Today in Labor History February 11, 1938: BBC Television produced the world's first ever science fiction television program, an adaptation of a section of the Karel Čapek play R.U.R., that coined the term "robot." He derived the word “robot” from the Czech word for forced labor by Serfs. R.U.R. is an archetype for many of the science fiction stories and films that followed, like Bladerunner, West World and Terminator, and others about robots, replicants and hosts that rebel against humans. However, “R.U.R.,” like Čapek’s 1936 novel “War with the Newts,” is also a satirical critique of totalitarianism, which was already on the rise in Europe at the time he wrote the play.
Today in Labor History January 9, 1890: Karel Capek was born in Bohemia, Austria-Hungry (now Czech Republic). He was an internationally renowned Czech novelist, short-story writer, playwright and essayist. Two of his best-known works include “R.U.R” (Rossum’s Universal Robots), which first introduced the word “robot,” to the English language, and “War With the Newts,” which satirized fascism and totalitarianism.
“Mass #propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in #cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
― Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism" #quotes#mediaStudies#commOdon#truth#agnotology#history
The masses' flight from reality is a condemnation of the world in which they are forced to live. […] The main disadvantage of reality is that it is not logical, coherent or organised.
~ Hannah Arendt, in "Totalitarianism"
@nicholas_saunders Sure:
The essay #Totalitarianism was fisrt published in 1951 as the third volume of "The Origins of Totalitarianism".
In it, Hannah Arendt argues that totalitarianism was a "novel form of government," in that it applied terror to subjugate mass populations rather than just political adversaries. Further, Arendt states that, owing to the insertion of ideology into the apparatus of coercion, "totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within". She further contends that Jewry was not the operative factor in the genocide of European Jews, but merely a convenient proxy. That totalitarianism in Germany was, in the end, about terror and consistency, not eradicating Jews only.
Adapted from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origins_of_Totalitarianism