Lessons From Rosa Parks and GameStop

My wife inspired me to use the example of how Jesus' emphasis on non-violent opposition inspired Thoreau and Gandhi.  Gandhi'si's economic resistance to the British salt tax is a direct inspiration.  We are obviously not going to pull a BLM/Antifa: burn down buildings and assault police officers.  The GameStop lesson is look for opportunities to damage the Fascists and their billionaire backers using their own mechanisms.

Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white person on a privately owned bus, bringing the wrath of the legal system down on her.  So the black community withdrew their support from the bus company until it hurt.  This was not painless; they had to walk to work and back home, form carpools, and otherwise engage in lawful resistance.

There are multiple levels of services required.

Blacklist

What companies are woke? And what services by different names will they use to impose gleichschaltung?  YouTube for example.

 Cutting Out Amazon

We can do the same.  I do not see a value to antisocial media so dropping Facebook and Twitter costs me nothing.  Amazon is going to hurt; it is not the prices, which often match what you pay directly going to the manufacturer.  When I buy eyepiece caps from B&H Photo, or parts from Sherline, the price is the same as buying through Amazon, except for the shipping charges.  What I am giving up is the ease of going to one web site that keeps track of my past buying: when I need more shaving cream, I go to my order list and click the last time I ordered shaving cream from them.  One-click ordering, because they have my credit card information on file, makes this a trivial effort.

What we need is a website where you specify what you want (either specific product eyepiece caps, or a category, such as telescope accessories), and you get a list of direct vendors (perhaps with a button to filter out Chinese companies; this information can perhaps be determined by using nslookup).  The vendor list is obviously something determined by both user referral and searching with DuckDuckGo.  (Does anyone know who owns DuckDuckGo?)  It would be nice to filter by American-made products as well, but that may that may be too hard: most of Leupold's scopes are American-made, but not all.  Complicating this is that even American-made scopes usually use foreign lenses.  We can have users post reviews of products, shipping, and customer service.  

 How do we pay for this?  Subscription is obvious but unlikely to produce enough revenue; I suspect that at least some vendors might be willing to kickback some money as advertising revenue.

Blogger

I am busy trying to migrate to WordPress.  I understand that WordPress is beginning to show signs of wokenness, removing the ungood from their free service.  It is possible to set up WordPress to store your blog on your own server with a bit more work than using their servers (still trying to figure this out).  If you don't use JetPack and perhaps other plugins which apparently phone home, this should make you independent of any future bending to the Fascist gleichschaltung (which word is now number one suggestion when you DuckDuckGo gleich).  If not, someone needs to capitalize development of a liberated Blogger alternative. 

This is a good idea anyway; the Blogger server is so overloaded this morning that what I type is not echoing back fast enough to be pleasant.  It reminds me of duplex mode on Teletypes; you typed a letter, but it did not type on the paper until the echo came back from the minicomputer.

YouTube

Is there a liberated alternative?  If not build one.  And do not use AWS.

Servers

There are already many foreign based server companies and enough still independent U.S. server companies, that I am not immediately concerned about this. Still, we need to plan ahead; someone with the expertise needs to put together instructions for buying a PC-based, hopefully Linux server, configuring it on the Internet.  This allows a decentralized ungood network.

DNS

 If you are used to typing in a URL, you may not realize that this address is translated to an IP address (four 8 bit numbers separated by periods).  At some point the Fascists will start removing the unwoke from DNSs.  I do not know enough about the technical details of DNS to know how much work is required to create an alternative DNS.  Replace the primary DNS address with the free DNS address and we are visible.  DNSs copy from master DNSs, so copying and adding our domain names should be pretty simple.  This is likely most sensible as a subscription service. for those want visibility.