Ian Kenway @iankenway@social.cleverlibre.org
Director of the Centre for Information Ethics and Public Policy
Personal website:
My interests include:
#cyberethics #privacy #censorship #encryption #steganography #decentralised_internet #AI #philosophy #ethics #politics #psychedelic_research #music #film #symi #mycology
Joined Oct 2018
Ian Kenway
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Telegraph backs 'Wyddfa' campaign claiming Anglicisation 'driving a dagger through heart' of Welsh language. https://nation.cymru/news/telegraph-backs-wyddfa-campaign-claiming-anglicisation-driving-a-dagger-through-heart-of-welsh-language/
Ian Kenway
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Germany must tighten climate law to protect young people's future, court rules https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climate-change-germany/germany-must-further-tighten-climate-change-law-top-court-rules-idUSKBN2CG0PD
Germany has committed to zero emissions in 2050 and has plans to reduce emissions by 55% (compared to 1990) in 2030.
The judge ruled Germany should also make plans for after 2030.
"Among the plaintiffs was Sophie Backsen, 22, daughter of a farming family on the North Sea island of Pellworm, who fears that rising sea levels would engulf her low-lying island, leaving her with no inheritance."
#phidoc #books #literature #music #greece #symi
The Book of the Month for April is Wolf Solent by John Cowper Powys and the Track of the Month is 'Song for Sharon' by Joni Mitchell.
#self_determination #independence #scotland #wales #NI #eu #uk #democracy #global #future
The EU must welcome an independent Scotland
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/apr/29/the-eu-must-welcome-an-independent-scotland
I was born in England, lived in Wales for sixteen years, and now live in Greece. I whole-heartedly support the peoples of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in achieving self-determination.
Ian Kenway
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RIP, Daniel Kaminski. You saved the DNS system instead of exploiting it.
"When a reporter asked Mr. Kaminsky why he did not exploit the DNS flaw to become immensely wealthy, he said that doing so would have been morally wrong, and that he did not want his mother to have to visit him in prison."
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/27/technology/daniel-kaminsky-dead.html
Ian Kenway
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"30 Years Of Linux - An Interview With Linus Torvalds: Linux and Git"
https://www.tag1consulting.com/blog/interview-linus-torvalds-linux-and-git
Ian Kenway
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France planning to allow use of algorithms to detect extremism online - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/28/france-planning-allow-use-algorithms-detect-extremist-activity nope nope nope
Ian Kenway
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Ian Kenway
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“Cryptocurrency is literally like an eight-year-old’s concept of an evil businessman. He just plugs his pollution machine in and gets money for it. It doesn’t make anything, it just. Pollutes. And makes money. Like a fucking Captain Planet villain”
Ian Kenway
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What’s interesting to me about the situation in Israel is that Jews and Palestinians are, ethnically, fundamentally the same people; Palestinians were Jews who stayed there and most of them became Christians and then most of them became Muslims with the Arabization; even calling them “Arabs” is a total misnomer. It’s such a tragedy all around.
Ian Kenway
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Ian Kenway
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Ian Kenway
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I am saying goodbye to Brexit support groups because I am saying goodbye to the UK and London, to my chance to live there. It's a damned website, but these groups have been extraordinarily valuable to know 'what's going on'. The number of times I have quoted them to explain the situation or situations that have led me to take the decisions I have taken.
Samuel Johnson said that anyone who gets tired of London is tired of life. #^https://www.samueljohnson.com/tiredlon.html
I didn't get tired of London at all. I left thinking it was a temporary absence, but while I gave some love to people who needed me around, Brexit happened, and now I have to decide, and despite the pain it causes me or precisely because of that pain, or perhaps to end it, I am forced to say goodbye to London, to the possibility of returning other than the sporadic visit to friends still there, fewer and fewer, because the "hostile environment" worked, and it is not only immigrants who, like me, felt at home in London who are leaving. Also native-born people, with their British passports, disowned their nation and are, I am told, desperately begging for the right of residence in some country with less xenophobia, a welcome like the one we once received from our beloved perfidious Albion.
Today I seek peace in a farewell, because it is not possible to have one foot in each country, like we could before that incredulous night and that morning of shock. We spent four years in disbelief that all of that was for real. There was no sane adult person who could even consider that thing that was soon to be called Brexit, we thought. Poor old us. Because as it turned out, not only there were such people; they were in power.
We thought that the economic interests to stay would be stronger than those to leave. The power elites underestimated the strength of the capital flight to tax havens that would mainly benefit from the exit from a European Union that was preparing to eliminate these 'off-shore' peculiarities.
We trusted, we relied too much on human sanity. Immigrants with the privilege of not being illegal, and of having a guaranteed holiday destination back home, full of loved ones. We forgot about the precariousness of a native population that had not had the privilege we had 'at home', a practically free university education that allowed us to fly and pretend to be middle class in a strange but still European country. We underestimated the rage of some of the lower classes, whiter and more desperate than us, who couldn't even afford a Benidorm holiday, and if they visited their parents they slept on the floor or on the sofa because their room had been converted into a workshop when they left home at the age of sixteen, or the flat of their childhood had been sold to buy a smaller one and live a little more comfortably with the difference, while we went back to mum and dad's house on holiday, to the same room where we had studied our university degree, because our parents would never have thought of touching the baby's room, even if she had already got married in London.
And all those privileges that the migrant generations before us didn't have, to be able to look for our first job legally, to be able to receive benefits if we lost it, to live with first class citizenship at least on paper, all those privileges, were pulled out from under our feet.
Before all this hecatomb, the paperwork to get British citizenship started at eight hundred pounds, just to receive the application papers; then we heard that the figure could be as high as three thousand. Now it's dancing around eight thousand
And yet so many European people have fought for citizenship, only to swear fist in fist that they will not stop until Britain rejoins the EU, now that they have the right to vote, which they did not have in the first referendum. And yet even more British people are fleeing a country they no longer recognise as their own, so xenophobic, so racist, so mean.
And in the process, broken families, and broken hearts. Cruel farewells otherwise unnecessary. What need to say goodbye forever, my dear London, that ever since I set my foot on your streets and parks, and my eyes on buildings and rose gardens I swore that one day I would live in one of those streets, even if it was a rental or worse, a vow I have more than fulfilled. And you delivered too, because you gave me things and experiences I would never have dreamed of. You treated me very badly at times - after all, you were, and I'm sure you still are, as disgustingly capitalist as any other European capital. But it was your pubs and your squatted social centres and your carnivals that brought together the most wonderful people from Europe and its surroundings, and in them we quietly conspired to change the world, and some of us even succeeded.
What need to drive us out on the basis of racism and intolerance. What a need to separate us, and condemn us to these video calls or short visits that finish with an uncertain “see you online”. What a need to scatter us all over Europe, go back where you came from, but not only us who fell in love with you because we could, but also those who were born in you. What a need. What pain, I don't know if you know it well. I don’t know if you are bleeding inside as much as the hearts of those who can't even escape and see us go and say goodbye in silence.
But we can't go back, my dear London, because you have changed beyond any ... as we say in my land, not even the mother who bore you knows you. Well, that would be understandable, you are so old. But your radical change, the change that makes people want to run away from you, has happened in less than ten years. I bet you have twice as many empty homes as before. And now it's illegal to squat them. You always had whole empty buildings waiting to be demolished, at the whim of the speculator. Now many people willing to fight to keep them standing have left you, never to return because the madness continues, the Brexit continues its course in the face of all attempts for sanity to prevail.
And so, my dear London, I bid you farewell from my heart in the hope that, by turning my back on you, the skyline, becoming less pointed and more mountainous, will hurt less.
I didn't get tired of London at all. I left thinking it was a temporary absence, but while I gave some love to people who needed me around, Brexit happened, and now I have to decide, and despite the pain it causes me or precisely because of that pain, or perhaps to end it, I am forced to say goodbye to London, to the possibility of returning other than the sporadic visit to friends still there, fewer and fewer, because the "hostile environment" worked, and it is not only immigrants who, like me, felt at home in London who are leaving. Also native-born people, with their British passports, disowned their nation and are, I am told, desperately begging for the right of residence in some country with less xenophobia, a welcome like the one we once received from our beloved perfidious Albion.
Today I seek peace in a farewell, because it is not possible to have one foot in each country, like we could before that incredulous night and that morning of shock. We spent four years in disbelief that all of that was for real. There was no sane adult person who could even consider that thing that was soon to be called Brexit, we thought. Poor old us. Because as it turned out, not only there were such people; they were in power.
We thought that the economic interests to stay would be stronger than those to leave. The power elites underestimated the strength of the capital flight to tax havens that would mainly benefit from the exit from a European Union that was preparing to eliminate these 'off-shore' peculiarities.
We trusted, we relied too much on human sanity. Immigrants with the privilege of not being illegal, and of having a guaranteed holiday destination back home, full of loved ones. We forgot about the precariousness of a native population that had not had the privilege we had 'at home', a practically free university education that allowed us to fly and pretend to be middle class in a strange but still European country. We underestimated the rage of some of the lower classes, whiter and more desperate than us, who couldn't even afford a Benidorm holiday, and if they visited their parents they slept on the floor or on the sofa because their room had been converted into a workshop when they left home at the age of sixteen, or the flat of their childhood had been sold to buy a smaller one and live a little more comfortably with the difference, while we went back to mum and dad's house on holiday, to the same room where we had studied our university degree, because our parents would never have thought of touching the baby's room, even if she had already got married in London.
And all those privileges that the migrant generations before us didn't have, to be able to look for our first job legally, to be able to receive benefits if we lost it, to live with first class citizenship at least on paper, all those privileges, were pulled out from under our feet.
Before all this hecatomb, the paperwork to get British citizenship started at eight hundred pounds, just to receive the application papers; then we heard that the figure could be as high as three thousand. Now it's dancing around eight thousand
And yet so many European people have fought for citizenship, only to swear fist in fist that they will not stop until Britain rejoins the EU, now that they have the right to vote, which they did not have in the first referendum. And yet even more British people are fleeing a country they no longer recognise as their own, so xenophobic, so racist, so mean.
And in the process, broken families, and broken hearts. Cruel farewells otherwise unnecessary. What need to say goodbye forever, my dear London, that ever since I set my foot on your streets and parks, and my eyes on buildings and rose gardens I swore that one day I would live in one of those streets, even if it was a rental or worse, a vow I have more than fulfilled. And you delivered too, because you gave me things and experiences I would never have dreamed of. You treated me very badly at times - after all, you were, and I'm sure you still are, as disgustingly capitalist as any other European capital. But it was your pubs and your squatted social centres and your carnivals that brought together the most wonderful people from Europe and its surroundings, and in them we quietly conspired to change the world, and some of us even succeeded.
What need to drive us out on the basis of racism and intolerance. What a need to separate us, and condemn us to these video calls or short visits that finish with an uncertain “see you online”. What a need to scatter us all over Europe, go back where you came from, but not only us who fell in love with you because we could, but also those who were born in you. What a need. What pain, I don't know if you know it well. I don’t know if you are bleeding inside as much as the hearts of those who can't even escape and see us go and say goodbye in silence.
But we can't go back, my dear London, because you have changed beyond any ... as we say in my land, not even the mother who bore you knows you. Well, that would be understandable, you are so old. But your radical change, the change that makes people want to run away from you, has happened in less than ten years. I bet you have twice as many empty homes as before. And now it's illegal to squat them. You always had whole empty buildings waiting to be demolished, at the whim of the speculator. Now many people willing to fight to keep them standing have left you, never to return because the madness continues, the Brexit continues its course in the face of all attempts for sanity to prevail.
And so, my dear London, I bid you farewell from my heart in the hope that, by turning my back on you, the skyline, becoming less pointed and more mountainous, will hurt less.
#pandemic #coronavirus #covid #long_covid #johnson #casualties #deaths #bereavement #inquiry #NHS #care #politics #uk
Toot Redux (first published 26th April 2020)
Ian Kenway
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Google and Facebook are two of the most successful web companies because they have managed to convince everyone that their products do not come at any cost. Yet, their ad-based business model harms people & societies on so many levels, it must end now - and you can help. 😀💪
https://tutanota.com/blog/posts/google-facebook-free
Ian Kenway
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YesCymru committee nominee promises to be ‘voice of minorities’ if elected. https://nation.cymru/news/yescymru-committee-nominee-promises-to-be-voice-of-minorities-if-elected/
Ian Kenway
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@gerald_leppert
Are drugs in phase II development ever tested on American children? I'd love to know more about how test subjects are recruited.
Ian Kenway
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Ian Kenway
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Chartists' rebellion inspiration for new Welsh song of freedom. https://nation.cymru/culture/chartists-rebellion-inspiration-for-new-welsh-song-of-freedom/
Director of the Centre for Information Ethics and Public Policy
Personal website:
My interests include:
#cyberethics #privacy #censorship #encryption #steganography #decentralised_internet #AI #philosophy #ethics #politics #psychedelic_research #music #film #symi #mycology
Joined Oct 2018
