Morning, the weekend is here!
Claire is a good follow on X, Labour peer, absolutely sensible head, understands her job, not afraid to do it.
Nothing about the above is untrue. Brazil just banned X, the app stores have been told to remove it and you’ll be prosecuted for accessing it with a VPN. X is just the poster boy for this show of strength, Elon has been very vocal about recent goings on in Brazil and has made himself and his platform an easy target. It shouldn’t be lost on you that X being the social media platform ‘of free speech’ is now Elons’ main selling point for it, so butting heads with heads of state and their senior judges about allowing the public access to it is great advertising. It’s another example of the need to be aware of the friend/enemy distinction. You don’t have to think Elon is the second coming, but if you think that free access to information and discussion is a good thing and should be protected, then even if everything he’s doing is cynical, more concerned with ego, power and money, then that’s secondary to his fight to enable free speech on his platform. Doesn’t mean you’re tied to him for life, it doesn’t mean - despite what the grifter media class and their NPC followers will insist - that having been aligned with someone in the past tarnishes you for life if they change course away from why you supported them. That’s just a looking at your life as a purity contest, one that’s impossible to win, just another way of shutting down inconvenient voices.
In line with the rest of the post above, you either see yourself as a sovereign individual or you don’t. It doesn’t mean you don’t have other beliefs and allegiances, such as to a group or a nation, it just means that you control those things, they’re choices and as such are influenced by the person making them, they will not be standardised. I’m a solider (cosplaying as a t-shirt salesman, badly) and have useful experience and skills that the nation of my birth, the UK, would find useful in a fight. I would not lend them those skills to go and fight in Ukraine, but I would elsewhere, such as an existential threat internal or external to the people of the UK. But that’s my choice.