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The web is for everyone, whatever technology stack they use. The reason we have standards is to enable people to make their own choices about what they do in the privacy of their own servers. We don’t have to use the same libraries, so long as we implement the same standards. It doesn’t matter if you programme with Ruby or PHP or C# or Scala or XQuery, you can build a web application because we have the standards of HTTP, HTML, CSS, Javascript and so on.

Just as in wider society, we need to find compromises that balance the needs and desires of different constituencies. We need to balance the rights that everyone has to code as they wish against the rights that everyone has to have a web that works. We need to make sure that the quiet voices are heard, and support the equal rights of those who tread the less worn paths.

Jeni Tennison

"A Fair Web"

My life is a hesitation before birth.

Franz Kafka

Diary, 24th January 1922

Freedom is the right to say two plus two make four. If granted, all else follows.

George Orwell

Heimat trage ich immer bei mir. Sie liegt mehr oben. Also im Himmel, zwischen zwei Sternen.

Janosch

Compare mathematics and the political sciences - it's quite striking. In mathematics, in physics, people are concerned with what you say, not with your certification. But in order to speak about social reality, you must have the proper credentials, particularly if you depart from the accepted framework of thinking. Generally speaking, it seems fair to say that the richer the intellectual substance of a field, the less there is a concern for credentials, and the greater is the concern for content. One might even argue that to deal with substantive issues in the ideological disciplines may be a dangerous thing, because these disciplines are not simply concerned with discovering and explaining the facts as they are; rather, they tend to present these facts and interpret them in a manner that conforms to certain ideological requirements, and to become dangerous to established interests if they do not do so.

Noam Chomsky

"Language and Responsibility" (1977)

In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.

Susan Sontag

First they came for the Tibetans, I did not speak up because I am not Tibetan.

Then they came for the Uighur, I did not speak up because I am not Uighur.

Then they came for Hong Kong, I did not speak up because I am not from Hong Kong.

Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ ... tans_and_uyghurs/f26czpj/

Sie dreht rasch den Kopf um, sieht zum Gang hin. Dann steckt sie die linke Hand in die Tasche ihrer Schürze. Sie zieht sie heraus, die Hand umschließt etwas. Ihr Gesicht verkrampft sich. Sie hält mir die geschlossene Hand hin.

"Nichts sagen", sagt sie leise.
Ich nehme, was sie in der Hand hat.
"Danke."
Was sie in der Hand hatte, ist hart. Ich drücke darauf, es knackt.
Ihr Gesicht entspannt sich.
"Mein Mann ist Gefangener."
Und sie geht weg.
Sie hat mir ein Stück Weißbrot gegeben.

[..]

Es ist kein Brot aus der Fabrik Buchenwald, Brot = Arbeit = Schläge = Schlaf; es ist menschliches Brot.

Robert Antelme

"Das Menschengeschlecht"

Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.

W. Somerset Maugham

The fanatical exultation of American troops is, at its root, a refusal of Americans to accept all the horror they do is the citizen's fault. It's a refusal to actually break down and cry and feel bad that the American lifestyle and comfort has a cost of human lives and misery.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ ... d_airstrikes_hit/dffarmi/

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing. Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails. But whether there are prophecies, they will fail; whether there are tongues, they will cease; whether there is knowledge, it will vanish away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect has come, then that which is in part will be done away. When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known. And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

Paul

1. Corinthians 1

Frage: Zum Schlusse Ihrer nun umfangreichen Vernehmung habe ich die Frage an Sie zu richten, ob Sie nicht aus eigenem Entschluss etwas anzugeben haben, was zur Klärung der Sache beitragen kann oder noch nicht aufgeklärt ist.

Antwort: Auf diese Frage möchte ich noch angeben, dass ich am 5. oder 6. Februar 1943, nachdem ich am 4.2. an der Universität die Aufschrift "Freiheit" gesehen hatte, meinen Bruder unter vier Augen mit den Worten zur Rede stellt: "Das stammt wohl von Dir?" ich meinte damit, das Anschreiben des Wortes "Freiheit", worauf ich von ihm lachend die Bestätigung erhielt. Ich weiss nicht mehr ob er nur mit [dem] Kopf nickte, oder meine Frage mit "ja" beantwortete. Ich habe meinem Bruder in diesem Zusammenhang den Rat gegeben, mich bei ähnlichen Schmierereien mitzunehmen, um ihn vor evtl. Überraschungen zu schützen.

Sophie Scholl

Auszüge aus den Verhörprotokollen

Centralized communications are, on a long enough timescale, an existential threat to a free society.

Jeffrey Paul

https://sneak.berlin/20200421/normalcy-bias/

Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now.

Henry David Thoreau

"Life Without Principle"

Es gibt keine Absurdität, die so handgreiflich wäre, daß man sie nicht allen Menschen fest in den Kopf setzen könnte, wenn man nur schon vor ihrem sechsten Jahre, anfienge, sie ihnen einzuprägen, indem man unablässig und mit feierlichstem Ernst sie ihnen vorsagte.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Mein Augenmerk liegt vor allem auf dem Terrorismus und der Gewalt, die von meinem eigenen Staat ausgeführt werden, aus zwei Gründen. Erstens, weil es den Hauptteil internationaler Gewalt ausmacht. Aber auch aus einem viel wichtigeren Grund; nämlich, dass ich etwas dagegen tun can. Selbst wenn die Vereinigten Staaten für nur zwei Prozent der Gewalt in der Welt verantwortlich wären, wären das die zwei Prozent für die ich vor allem verantwortlich wäre. Und dies ist eine simple ethische Beurteilung. Das heißt, der ethische Wert unserer Handlungen hängt von ihren erwarteten und vorhersehbaren Konsequenzen ab. Es ist sehr einfach, die Abscheulichkeiten anderer zu verdammen. Das hat ungefähr so viel ethischen Wert wie Gräueltaten, die im Achtzehnten Jahrhundert stattfanden, zu verurteilen.

Noam Chomsky

We don't make a photograph just with a camera; we bring to the act of photography all the books we have read, the movies we have seen, the music we have heard, the people we have loved.

Ansel Adams

I think that we have to look back at history and realize that most rebels don’t succeed. We remember the ones that do, but they’re the exception. Most people who rise up and rebel against monolithic systems of power get crushed. And that doesn’t mitigate the magnificence of their lives and their resistance. That’s just a reality. You know, if you take that path, the odds are against you. And yet I think it’s the path that we have to take, because rebellion, especially when we face this monolith of corporate power we call radical evil, there is a moral imperative to stand up to that power with the realization that in all likelihood, especially in a prolonged act of resistance, that power will crush us.

[..]

Hannah Arendt, I think, grasps this when she looks back on her own resistance to the Nazis. I mean, she leaves the University of Heidelberg and she says that she had to unlearn everything she had been taught by Heidegger in the University to become a moral human being. And then she joins—she was not a Zionist, but she joins a Zionist underground movement to smuggle German Jews to Palestine. She’s eventually picked up by the Gestapo, stripped of her German citizenship, becomes stateless—she was almost killed by the Gestapo—and ends up in France as a stateless person.

But she says, number one, I look back on that time period of my life and I say, thank God that I wasn’t innocent, that to be innocent in a time of radical evil is to be complicit, number one. And number two, she says those who are most effective at resisting or not those who say, we shouldn’t do this, this oughtn’t to be done, but those who say, I can’t. And I think there’s something within the DNA—that’s why rebels are very poor—. Once power is attained, rebels very rarely are able to rule, because they have that inability to compromise. You saw it with Che Guevara. I interviewed Ronnie Kasrils in the book, who founded the armed wing of the ANC with Nelson Mandela and becomes the deputy defense minister under Mandela, and he starts criticizing the corruption, the creation of what would be called the new class among the ANC. And then they fire on the miners who are striking—the largest massacre since the Sharpeville massacre—and he denounces his own party, a party that he spent 30 years underground at the risk of his life fighting for. That’s a rebel.

And Kasrils makes an interesting point in the book. He said, I was a rebel, because he’s white, he’s Jewish, he walks out on his own, he actually literally walks into a township—you’re not, as a white person, allowed to be in a township after ten at night—and he doesn’t go back, and he never goes back. And he said, I was a rebel; Mandela was a revolutionary, in the sense that he didn’t rebel against his own. And I think that’s right.

But I think that rebels are absolutely vital. You know, I use that concept from Reinhold Niebuhr about sublime madness. And Niebuhr writes correctly that in moments of extremity, liberals are a dead force. They’re are too ineffectual, too little emotional, too intellectual in order to propel resistance forward, that you need people who are possessed of that sublime madness.

Chris Hedges

http://www.truthdig.com/a ... ance_part_1_of_3_20150709

People have a series of rationalizations. People say for example that science and technology have their own logic, that they are in fact autonomous. This particular rationalization is profoundly false. It is not true that science marches on in defiance of human will, independent of human will, that just is not the case. But it is comfortable, as I said: it leads to the position that "if I don't do it, someone else will."

Of course if one takes that as an ethical principle then obviously it can serve as a license to do anything at all. "People will be murdered; if I don't do it, someone else will." "Women will be raped; if I don't do it, someone else will." That is just a license for violence.

Other people say, and I think this is a widely used rationalization, that fundamentally the tools we work on are "mere" tools; This means that whether they get use for good or evil depends on the person who ultimately buys them and so on.

There's nothing bad about working in computer vision, for example. Computer vision may very well some day be used to heal people who would otherwise die. Of course, it could also be used to guide missiles, cruise missiles for example, to their destination, and all that. You see, the technology itself is neutral and value-free and it just depends how one uses it. And besides -- consistent with that -- we can't know, we scientists cannot know how it is going to be used. So therefore we have no responsibility.

Well, that is false. It is true that a computer, for example, can be used for good or evil. It is true that a helicopter can be used as a gunship and it can also be used to rescue people from a mountain pass. And if the question arises of how a specific device is going to be used, in what I call an abstract ideal society, then one might very well say one cannot know.

But we live in a concrete society, [and] with concrete social and historical circumstances and political realities in this society, it is perfectly obvious that when something like a computer is invented, then it is going to be adopted will be for military purposes. It follows from the concrete realities in which we live, it does not follow from pure logic. But we're not living in an abstract society, we're living in the society in which we in fact live.

If you look at the enormous fruits of human genius that mankind has developed in the last 50 years, atomic energy and rocketry and flying to the moon and coherent light, and it goes on and on and on -- and then it turns out that every one of these triumphs is used primarily in military terms. So it is not reasonable for a scientist or technologist to insist that he or she does not know -- or cannot know -- how it is going to be used.

Joseph Weizenbaum

http://tech.mit.edu/V105/N16/weisen.16n.html