free-speech-activists

"[T]his feedback loop has re-engineered our system cryptically and turned it into an engine for the concentration of wealth and power. ...It has installed amongst an unelected group of very powerful and wealthy people effective power over any attempt to change from the status quo."

"The agents in the market are responding to opportunities that we have left open. It makes no more sense to be angry at them... than it does to be angry at the mosquito for sucking your blood. ...[Y]ou have to close down the opportunity."

"[T]he personal responsibility vortex... sucks good people in... [W]e should redirect any effort that we are tempted to spend on personal responsibility, towards collective action... that can restructure the s that surround the market so that we... have a chance of altering the behavior."

"Something is seriously and dangerously amiss. At this moment in history, the center does not hold. and political corruption have rendered government ineffective, predatory and often cruelly indifferent to the suffering of American citizens. is a natural result."

"Why is an evolutionary theorist talking about climate change? ...[C]limate change is not really a problem, it's more a symptom of a problem... that caused the financial collapse of 2008, that caused the in the Gulf in 2010, and the ongoing Fukushima disaster starting in March of 2011."

"(5) In environments where extrinsically induced mortality is frequent, selection against senescence is comparatively weak as few individuals live long enough to suffer a substantial phenotypic decline. The weaker the selection against senescence, the further the optimal balance point moves toward shorter telomeres and increased tumor suppression. The stronger the selection against senescence, the farther the optimal balance point moves toward longer telomeres, increasing the capacity for tissue repair, slowing senescence and elevating tumor risks."

"[T]he boundaries of the evolutionary environment do not stop at the market's edge."

"There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and underappreciated roles... and a group encouraging another group to go away. The first is a forceful call to consciousness, which is... crippling to the logic of oppression. The second is a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself."

"Antagonistic pleiotropy, the evolutionary theory of senescence, posits that age related somatic decline is the inevitable late-life by-product of adaptations that increase fitness in early life. That... provides the foundation for an integrative theory of vertebrate that reconciles aspects of the 'accumulated damage' 'metabolic rate', and 'oxidative stress' models."

"We hypothesize that (1) in vertebrates, a telomeric fail-safe inhibits tumor formation by limiting cellular proliferation. (2) The same system results in the progressive degradation of tissue function with age."

"Strategies evolve within markets and their larger regulatory context."

"As a member of the Intellectual Dark Web, I find myself at the vanguard of an emerging non-ideological, non-partisan movement. Along with and the (FIRE), we are fighting to restore and respect for competing perspectives."

"[My] work... looked at the fact that shortening was being looked at by two different groups... by people interested in counteracting the aging process, and... in exactly the opposite fashion, by people who were interested in tumorigenesis in cancer. ...Tumors ...always had active, that's the enzyme that lengthens our telomeres. So those folks were interested in bringing about a halt in the lengthening of telomeres... to counteract cancer, and the folks that were studying the process were interested in lengthening telomeres... to generate greater repair capacity. ...[M]y point was evolutionarily speaking this looks like a pleiotropic effect, that the genes which create the tendency of the cells to be limited in their capacity to replace themselves, are providing a benefit in youth... that we are largely free of tumors and cancer at the inevitable late life cost that we grow feeble and inefficient, and eventually die. ...[T]hat matches a very old hypothesis in evolutionary theory by somebody I was fortunate enough to know, George Williams..."

"Human beings... we are not a blank slate, but we are the blankest slate that nature has ever devised. ...It's where our flexibility comes from. ...We are robots in which ...a large fraction of the ...behavioral capacity has been off-loaded to the software layer which gets written and re-written over evolutionary time. That means, effectively, that... the important part of what we are is housed in the cultural... and the conscious layer, and not in the hardware, or a hard coding way. That layer is prone to make errors... [C]hildren make absurd errors all the time... That's part of the process... It is also true that as you look across a field of people discussing things, a lot of what is said is pure nonsense, it's garbage. But the tendency of garbage to emerge and even to spread in the short term, does not say that over the long term, what sticks is not the valuable ideas. So there is a high tendency for novelty to be created in the cultural space, but there's also a high tendency for it to go extinct. ...Things are being created, they're being destroyed, and... obviously, we've seen totalitarianism arise many times, and it's very destructive each time it does. So it's not like... freedom to come up with any idea you want hasn't produced a whole lot of carnage. But the question is, over time, does it produce more open, fairer, more decent societies, and I believe that it does. I can't prove it, but that does seem to be the pattern. ...I don't know how strongly I believe that it will work, but I will say, I haven't heard a better idea."

"[A]ll of our environmental problems look like... somebody making a profit for degrading what belongs to the rest of us. ...[T]his behavior should not be allowed within a marketplace. We are fracturing the world. We are liquidating it, we are draining it, we are denuding it, we are over-exploiting it. It is apparent to anyone... The idea that this should not be allowed is transparent."

"[F]ree speech is the wrong framework to be thinking about this, and... it has very little to do with college campuses. ...What happened at Evergreen that caused it to become a national story was that an unstoppable force met an immovable object. ...I was the immovable object ...for the moment, let's just chalk that up to a personality defect."

"[O]ne can now advance... policies, and almost certainly succeed... if they are properly draped in weaponized terminology. "Equity", for example, has taken on special properties. If a person opposes an "equity" proposal, those advancing the proposal are secure in asserting that their opponent is motivated by opposition to racial equity itself: In other words, that they are racist. ...[O]ne’s right to speak is now dictated by adherence to an ascendant orthodoxy in which one’s race, gender and sexual orientation are paramount."

"But when I saw they were offering bounties on the wanted list, my first reaction was to think why aren't I on the list? Haven't I been doing enough?"

"I don’t want to put it that way but I will. If Google or other technology companies comply with this national security law, it is actually helping indirectly the Hong Kong government, Chinese government, to oppress or crack down on the civil society."

"Making use of common law procedures and the veneer of an independent judiciary, the NSL has successfully infiltrated and taken over Hong Kong's legal system, providing law enforcement and prosecutors with unchecked power and legitimacy."

"There are more than 100 reasons to give up."

"If we say something wrong, then we will be put behind bars. But Hong Kongers never yield. Although they’re not under siege right now because of the pandemic, their mindset about we have to fight the fight for freedom has never actually gone away. They’re still very much aware of the fact that we are still in the middle of the fight, although we seem to be losing and we are not giving up."

"We’re asking for universal suffrage, we’re asking for democracy, we’re asking for freedoms. I ask myself every day if I’m doing enough, so that I won’t feel guilty about the fact that I get to enjoy these freedoms and privileges when my friends and my colleagues cannot. And have I been utilising every moment that I have freely? Do I take breaks responsibly? Do I work hard enough? Do I spend time for myself? And so on. These are all very important questions that you have to ask yourself when everything is going wrong."

"The Hong Kong government continues to spout phrases like ‘law-abiding’ and ‘rule of law,’ but the law now serves to uphold the regime rather than protects and safeguards Hong Kongers’ basic rights and freedoms."

"It's unclear how the crime of 'failure to report' under Article 23 will be enforced, but it's definitely putting pressure on us, hoping we'll retreat in the face of difficulty."

"You never know how they will try to find out where you live."

"I really love the city and would always love to go home. I do fear coming home and do not feel safe coming back. It’s just not the same place that I grew up in."

"We should not suppress our feelings of sadness during our activism. Being upfront with these emotions shows our humanity and gives validation to others feeling the same way."

"We don’t persist because we see hope. We only see hope when we persist. Before we succeed, we are not failing. It’s just that we are not there yet."

"We have one million reasons to give up. But we only need one to continue the fight; that is, we know that what we’re doing is right."

"The motivation for me as an activist is the belief that no one is subordinate to another. The government is merely an agent of the people. We lend authority to it, and when it performs badly, we reserve the right to take it back."

"Without press freedom, society would be a really bad place, because there would be no one to hold the government to account."

"The press is society’s fourth estate and has the unparalleled role of informing the public."

"In Hong Kong, in order to be able to have discussions at all, we need a free press first. Unfortunately, that is currently not the case."

"There are many activists who fight for different political goals. But no one thought about the future of digital rights."

"For the next four hours, rioters continued to light fires on the street and hurled more mortar fireworks at officers. One sergeant was directly hit by an explosive, which burned through his glove, injuring his hand… Over fifty people were arrested that night, including Kristina Narayan, the legislative director for Tina Kotek, the Democratic Speaker of the Oregon House. Joseph Robert Sipe, 23, was arrested and charged with first-degree attempted murder, first-degree attempted assault, first-degree arson, and possession of a destructive device. Court documents say he admitted to lighting the wick of a Molotov cocktail and then launching it toward the police officers. The district attorney later dropped three of the four most serious charges. The following week. Mayor Wheeler announced a total ban on the use of tear gas for crowd control."

"On September 5, rioters marched to attack the East Precinct, as they had done many times before. But that night, they hurled lit firebombs for the first time. Over the previous months, Portland Police had confiscated unused Molotov cocktails, but none had actually been used at the riots. However, that night, a masked rioter hurled a firebomb in the direction of a line of police. It fell short of its target and instead landed at the feet of a group of protesters. Two people were set on fire,…"

"Between May and October 2020, there were nearly a thousand protest- and riot-related cases in Portland referred to the district attorney’s office… Of the 978 arrests and citations, over 90 percent were rejected for prosecution. The main reason given? Out of the ‘interest of justice’—whatever that means. Despite accusations of systemic racism and misogyny in the Portland Police Bureau, the majority of those arrested (77 percent) have been white and male (67 percent)."

"Responding police cruisers had their tires slashed by rioters who dumped nail-filled pool noodles on the street… the night before, rioters tried to break into the Portland Police East Precinct. Two elderly women who lived nearby tried to stop the mob from setting fire to the building. As one of them used an extinguisher to put out a fire, she was screamed at and harassed. The mob then hurled paint at them. One woman had it thrown in her face and eyes."

"One new phenomenon that developed over the weeks of rioting was antifa activists masquerading as press in order to avoid being arrested by police or to get closer to them to throw projectiles. They simply printed out homemade media badges and wrote ‘press’ on their clothing. On multiple occasions, they were seen participating in violence themselves, such as throwing rocks and fireworks at officers or blinding them with flashlights. Sometimes they actively provoked the police into arresting them so their comrades could record video and send out tweets about police ‘targeting’ media. This was effective, and the ACLU of Oregon sued Portland police and federal agents on behalf of left-wing legal observers and journalists in July. A federal judge granted an emergency injunction exempting anyone who identified as a journalist from dispersal orders."

"From May through August 2020, hundreds had been taken into custody by law enforcement. But the result was the same for almost everyone: the Multnomah County district attorney dropped the charges, even the serious felonies. Assarrah Butler, the accused riot supplier who, in June, sped off in her car, hitting other vehicles, was originally charged with felony riot, felony failure to perform duties of driver to injured person, felony criminal mischief, felony fleeing, reckless driving, and reckless endangering. Every single charge was dropped. Likewise, an accused arsonist who allegedly admitted to roommates she was part of antifa, had all her charges dismissed. The dropping and dismissal of their felony charges were the norm, not the exception."

"After the election, antifa stepped up their violence even though it appeared that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden had won over Donald Trump. On November 4, 2020, several hundred antifa gathered in downtown Portland. Wearing black uniforms and masks, they held a large banner that read: ‘WE DON’T WANT BIDEN—WE WANT REVENGE!’ After marching, they proceeded to smash up dozens of businesses and property on West Burnside Street using hammers and other tools. One of the buildings targeted was Saint Andre Bessette Church. In response to the riot, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown activated the National Guard—a first since riots began six months prior. Thirteen people were arrested. The majority had their charges immediately dropped. The damage to the Catholic church was so severe that it had to halt its charity work and outreach to the city’s large homeless population."

"Accusations of there being ‘secret police’ and ‘unidentified federal agents’ were false. Every officer wore official uniforms that displayed their agency via badges on the shoulders with clear words on the front that read ‘POLICE.’ That politicians and journalists did not or pretended not to recognize the uniforms is not an excuse. And no one was ever ‘disappeared.’ All those detained were properly processed and read their Miranda rights. Most were released within hours."

"Every use of force by officers, whether it be tear gas, smoke, pepper balls, or arrests, was heavily scrutinized. Out-of-context video snippets were released on social media and published by news outlets, generating mass rage and universally negative press for law enforcement and the Trump administration. The officers were called ‘Trump’s gestapo,’ ‘storm troopers,’ and ‘thugs’ by Democratic politicians and the media."

"As bad as the riots already were, city council and local politicians actively worked to undermine the federal government’s attempts to protect federal property. In effect, they were cobelligerents with antifa in their uprising. When Acting Secretary Chad Wolf of DHS flew to Portland from Washington, DC, in mid-July to survey the extent of the violence and destruction, local officials preemptively refused to meet with him. ‘We’re aware that [DHS leadership is] here. We wish they weren’t,’ tweeted Mayor Wheeler. ‘We haven’t been invited to meet with them, and if we were, we would decline.’ Oregon Democratic senator Ron Wyden called federal officers an ‘occupying army.’ Oregon governor Kate Brown echoed and amplified the false media headlines. ‘This is a democracy, not a dictatorship. We cannot have secret police abducting people in unmarked vehicles,’ Governor Brown tweeted."

"Then in July, the mob’s attention fully switched to the federal courthouse with an intensity not previously seen… Several in the mob openly carried rifles and handguns. One of the men arrested at the riot was antifa shooter Michael Reinoehl. He was carrying an illegal firearm and resisted arrest, requiring three Portland Police officers to be subdued. However, he was only cited and released because he claimed to be injured. His criminal charges were later dropped by the Multnomah County District Attorney. Reinoehl went on to kill a Trump supporter the following month in downtown Portland."

"Within less than two weeks, there were nearly a hundred arson fires in and around downtown Portland. Despite the violence and vandalism, a federal judge temporarily banned the [Portland Police Bureau] PPB from using tear gas. The response from elected city officials was to deny the violence and praise the protests. After the first night of mass looting, arson, and violence, Mayor Wheeler tweeted: ‘We talked about agitation—yes even violent agitation and how it has historically occurred with purpose and resulted in change that has moved this country forward.’"

"For the next four weeks, antifa’s plan of escalating attacks on federal property to provoke a federal response for the cameras produced the exact propaganda they wanted. On any given night, there were dozens who identified as press. At its peak there were probably more than one hundred journalists and livestreamers, most of whom were sympathetic to the rioters and protesters. Instinctively, and at the urging or demand of others, their cameras were trained solely on law enforcement to capture their every move. Those who ran afoul of antifa’s rules were forced out or assaulted and robbed. Left-wing livestreamer Tristan Taylor was beaten to the ground and had his recording equipment stolen."

"In mid-July, the federal government put up a strong reinforced barrier around the courthouse. Other barriers previously put up were quickly torn apart. This one was made of thick steel, and it was reinforced by concrete blocks on the other side. The fence withstood for many days, but on the fifty-ninth night of rioting, hundreds gathered with tools and equipment to bring down the barrier. They used electric saws to cut into the fence, but the holes they made were too small for people to fit through. Next, they tied rope around strategic points of the fence, and hundreds of rioters participated in pulling it down."

"Democrats thought they could pacify antifa by refusing to condemn or even acknowledge them. But they were playing with fire. On November 8, 2020, several dozen antifa in black bloc marched to the headquarters of the Multnomah County Democrats office. They destroyed the building by smashing most of the glass windows. On the building, they spray-painted: ‘FUCK BIDEN’ and ‘No presidents.’ They drew a symbol of anarchism to make it perfectly clear who was responsible."