#morality-ethics — Public Fediverse posts

NYC woman declined to press charges against subway shover ‘because she didn’t want to put another black man in jail’… weeks later he allegedly killed retired teacher, 76, at station

A young woman in New York City said she declined pressing charges against a violent suspect because she didn’t want to put ‘another black man in jail,’ weeks before he allegedly killed a 76-year-old retired teacher. 

The 23-year-old woman anonymously detailed how she and a friend narrowly escaped Rhamell Burke, 32, after he allegedly attacked them while riding the subway on April 2.

The straphanger told the New York Post she now completely regrets her decision not to work with prosecutors after Burke was charged with murder on Friday for allegedly shoving 76-year-old Ross Falzone down a flight of stairs to his death at a subway station Thursday night.

‘Maybe a part of me was just like, I don’t want to put another black man in jail, but, you know, at some point, if you are a criminal, you’re a criminal, and he was scary, he was a scary guy,’ the unidentified woman told the outlet.

Police say Rhamell Burke was released from Bellevue Hospital roughly five hours before the deadly subway attack on Ross Falzone (Pictured) on Thursday

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Unwise compassion — Buddhism warns against this. The highest virtue in Buddhism is wisdom, not unwise anything. ABN

#abn #bravery #BuddhistPractice #crime #moralityEthics #philosophy #thought

#economics #immigration #moralityEthics

Pyrrho’s thought and practice was a form of Early Buddhism which he learned during his years in Bactria and Gandhāra

The conclusion to be drawn from the evidence about Pyrrho’s thought and practice is that he adopted a form of Early Buddhism during his years in Bactria and Gandhāra, including its philosophical-religious and pragmatic elements, but he stripped it of its alien garb and reconstituted it as a new ‘Greek Buddhism’ for the Hellenistic world, which he presented in his own words to Timon and his other students.

Beckwith, Christopher I.. Greek Buddha: Pyrrho’s Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia (pp. 54-55). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

The earliest attested philosophical-religious system that is both historically datable and clearly recognizable as a form of Buddhism is Early Pyrrhonism, the teachings and practices of Pyrrho of Elis and Timon of Phlius, as shown in Chapter One. Its central features correspond exactly to some of the central features of the traditional putatively “early” form of Buddhism presented in Pali canonical texts.

However, the latter tradition of Buddhism also contains many elements—beliefs, institutions, devotional practices, and so on—which developed at the earliest in the Saka-Kushan period, three centuries after Pyrrho. They spread throughout the ancestors of the attested forms of Buddhism, creating Normative Buddhism. The elements that are attested only from approximately the Saka-Kushan period on—the exact time remains to be established—are far from trivial. They include the Saṃgha, the community of monks; the idea of the bhikṣu ‘monk’ per se, as well as of the bhikṣunī ‘nun’; the vihāra or monastery; the Vinaya, or Buddhist monastic code; worship of the Buddha;4 development of the idea of reincarnations of the Buddha, both human and godlike; abhidharma or “Buddhist scholasticism”; and many others. They are now considered to be essential elements of traditional Buddhism, yet there is no historically sound evidence that they existed at all5 (and some evidence that they did not yet exist) until long after the visit of Pyrrho in 330–325 BC and that of Megasthenes in 305–304 BC. The lateness of the development of devotion for the Buddha and Buddha incarnations, as well as reverence for the Buddha’s teachings (the Dharma) and the community of monks (the Saṃgha), means that the invention of the Triratna (‘Three Jewels’) formula is even later (perhaps as a “popular” substitute for the difficult Trilakṣaṇa1 ‘Three Characteristics’ formula, which is phonetically similar.

Beckwith, Christopher I.. Greek Buddha: Pyrrho’s Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia (pp. 61-62). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

1. The Buddha says, “All dharmas are anitya ‘impermanent’…. All dharmas are duḥkha ‘unsatisfactory, imperfect, unstable’…. All dharmas are anātman ‘without an innate self-identity’.”
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#analysis #BuddhistPractice #history #moralityEthics #philosophy

The founder of the Electronic Freedom Foundation vs the current executive director of the Electronic Freedom Foundation

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a non-profit group founded in 1990 by Mitch Kapor, John Gilmore, and John Perry Barlow to defend civil liberties in the digital world. 

Status: Headquartered in San Francisco, the EFF is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with a staff of approximately 125 (as of 2025) and over 40,000 members, often described as the “online equivalent of the American Civil Liberties Union.” 

Mission: The EFF champions user privacy, free expression, and innovation through impact litigation, policy analysis, grassroots activism, and technology development. 

Key Activities: The organization fights illegal surveillance, defends free speech online, challenges restrictive copyright laws, and develops privacy-enhancing tools like Privacy Badger and Certbot. 

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Looks like classic infiltrate–takeover–invert the org 180 degrees. Virtually every institution in USA and the West has met this fate. It is ideological asymmetric warfare, parasitism, and political ponerology all rolled into one. ABN

#abn #censorship #freedom #infiltration #moralityEthics #ponerology #propaganda #supremacy #usurpation

a native internet protocol for social media ~ Jack Dorsey

[All of the below is Dorsey’s blog on how he thinks Twitter and social media should be operated. I have bolded some sections in addition to the few places he bolded. I completely agree with what Dorsey is saying and hope all readers of ABN and in the world read what he has written. I have taken the liberty of posting his entire blog post here to ensure we have a copy of it. ABN]

There’s a lot of conversation around the #TwitterFiles. Here’s my take, and thoughts on how to fix the issues identified. 

I’ll start with the principles I’ve come to believe…based on everything I’ve learned and experienced through my past actions as a Twitter co-founder and lead:

1) Social media must be resilient to corporate and government control.
2) Only the original author may remove content they produce.
3) Moderation is best implemented by algorithmic choice.

The Twitter when I led it and the Twitter of today do not meet any of these principles. This is my fault alone, as I completely gave up pushing for them when an activist entered our stock in 2020. I no longer had hope of achieving any of it as a public company with no defense mechanisms (lack of dual-class shares being a key one). I planned my exit at that moment knowing I was no longer right for the company.

The biggest mistake I made was continuing to invest in building tools for us to manage the public conversation, versus building tools for the people using Twitter to easily manage it for themselves. This burdened the company with too much power, and opened us to significant outside pressure (such as advertising budgets). I generally think companies have become far too powerful, and that became completely clear to me with our suspension of Trump’s account. As I’ve said before, we did the right thing for the public company business at the time, but the wrong thing for the internet and society. Much more about this here:jack@jackI do not celebrate or feel pride in our having to ban @realDonaldTrump from Twitter, or how we got here. After a clear warning we’d take this action, we made a decision with the best information we had based on threats to physical safety both on and off Twitter. Was this correct?12:16 AM – 14 Jan 2021

I continue to believe there was no ill intent or hidden agendas, and everyone acted according to the best information we had at the time. Of course mistakes were made. But if we had focused more on tools for the people using the service rather than tools for us, and moved much faster towards absolute transparency, we probably wouldn’t be in this situation of needing a fresh reset (which I am supportive of). Again, I own all of this and our actions, and all I can do is work to make it right.

Back to the principles. Of course governments want to shape and control the public conversation, and will use every method at their disposal to do so, including the media. And the power a corporation wields to do the same is only growing. It’s critical that the people have tools to resist this, and that those tools are ultimately owned by the people. Allowing a government or a few corporations to own the public conversation is a path towards centralized control.

I’m a strong believer that any content produced by someone for the internet should be permanent until the original author chooses to delete it. It should be always available and addressable. Content takedowns and suspensions should not be possible. Doing so complicates important context, learning, and enforcement of illegal activity. There are significant issues with this stance of course, but starting with this principle will allow for far better solutions than we have today. The internet is trending towards a world were storage is “free” and infinite, which places all the actual value on how to discover and see content.

Which brings me to the last principle: moderation. I don’t believe a centralized system can do content moderation globally. It can only be done through ranking and relevance algorithms, the more localized the better. But instead of a company or government building and controlling these solely, people should be able to build and choose from algorithms that best match their criteria, or not have to use any at all. A “follow” action should always deliver every bit of content from the corresponding account, and the algorithms should be able to comb through everything else through a relevance lens that an individual determines. There’s a default “G-rated” algorithm, and then there’s everything else one can imagine.

The only way I know of to truly live up to these 3 principles is a free and open protocol for social media, that is not owned by a single company or group of companies, and is resilient to corporate and government influence. The problem today is that we have companies who own both the protocol and discovery of content. Which ultimately puts one person in charge of what’s available and seen, or not. This is by definition a single point of failure, no matter how great the person, and over time will fracture the public conversation, and may lead to more control by governments and corporations around the world. 

I believe many companies can build a phenomenal business off an open protocol. For proof, look at both the web and email. The biggest problem with these models however is that the discovery mechanisms are far too proprietary and fixed instead of open or extendable. Companies can build many profitable services that complement rather than lock down how we access this massive collection of conversation. There is no need to own or host it themselves.

Many of you won’t trust this solution just because it’s me stating it. I get it, but that’s exactly the point. Trusting any one individual with this comes with compromises, not to mention being way too heavy a burden for the individual. It has to be something akin to what bitcoin has shown to be possible. If you want proof of this, get out of the US and European bubble of the bitcoin price fluctuations and learn how real people are using it for censorship resistance in Africa and Central/South America.

I do still wish for Twitter, and every company, to become uncomfortably transparent in all their actions, and I wish I forced more of that years ago. I do believe absolute transparency builds trust. As for the files, I wish they were released Wikileaks-style, with many more eyes and interpretations to consider. And along with that, commitments of transparency for present and future actions. I’m hopeful all of this will happen. There’s nothing to hide…only a lot to learn from. The current attacks on my former colleagues could be dangerous and doesn’t solve anything. If you want to blame, direct it at me and my actions, or lack thereof.

As far as the free and open social media protocol goes, there are many competing projects: @bluesky is one with the AT Protocol, Mastodon another, Matrix yet another…and there will be many more. One will have a chance at becoming a standard like HTTP or SMTP. This isn’t about a “decentralized Twitter.” This is a focused and urgent push for a foundational core technology standard to make social media a native part of the internet. I believe this is critical both to Twitter’s future, and the public conversation’s ability to truly serve the people, which helps hold governments and corporations accountable. And hopefully makes it all a lot more fun and informative again.

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To accelerate open internet and protocol work, I’m going to open a new category of #startsmall grants: “open internet development.” It will start with a focus of giving cash and equity grants to engineering teams working on social media and private communication protocols, bitcoin, and a web-only mobile OS. I’ll make some grants next week, starting with $1mm/yr to Signal. Please let me know other great candidates for this money.link to original #analysis #BigTech #freedom #moralityEthics #technology #thought