Hi everyone, I shared the note below with the Blockstack PBC team earlier today and thought it was important to share with the broader community as well.
Know that I, and the Blockstack PBC team, are here for you. We are committed to listening, learning, and advocating for what’s right. Above all, we stand with the movement for justice and we will work to build a community that cares about equality in the real world in addition to equality on the internet.
Please do not hesitate to reach out directly either here or my email with any thoughts or ideas.
As I have seen in my collaboration in Blockstack Community, probably it would be a good idea to declare that Blockstack and its community embraces the principle of Oneness of humankind. We are all one! No space for discrimination of any kind. We are one world family.
All Lives Matter. Skin color doesn’t matter. What is between your legs doesn’t matter (or what you do with it). What matters is what’s between your ears and in your heart. In this age of easy mis-information and covert/passive warfare and/or political infighting we all have to be vigilant, logical, and skeptical of everything especially coming from people of power (politicians, media elite, celebrities, etc.). We must be patient and critical to find truth and keep emotion restrained to keep it from clouding our vision, thinking, and judgement.
Life is full of injustices for the vast majority of people regardless of sex or race. I think a lot of the current problem has at it’s root the wealth equality gap (combined with media driven mis-information). The racial aspect is a problem, while related, is not as big a problem as the mass media would have
us believe. IMO this is obvious since America elected a black man president. Perhaps crypto can help put money and wealth distribution back into the hands of the people and less in the hands of governments and the media elites that get more enriched the more they can keep people divided.
Thank you so much for sharing this message. I appreciate that you took the time to reflect on your personal experience and continued learning. I believe that digital rights and a user owned internet intersects with human rights. In my mind, Blockstack has always stood for these things, and I was very concerned when I did not see any statement about the current situation in the US. Your message alleviated my concerns.
Hey Brad, thanks for sharing your thoughts here. @muneeb can correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think he meant to be exclusionary or imply that Black lives matter more than other lives. The statement “Black lives matter” is a reminder that Black lives are equally as important as other lives.
Another way to think about this is by asking yourself, “If all lives really do matter, then why are so many more Black people harmed relative to their population size?”
The focus is currently on this group because it faces the most danger. This is a matter of urgency–in the same way that an emergency room prioritizes the highest-risk patients, activists, community organizers, politicians, and organizations everywhere are prioritizing the safety and well-being of the Black community.
Given the numerous studies that have reported on this, I think we can all agree that this is a pretty specific problem, whether you believe it is rooted in racial injustice or wealth inequality.
Jenny, my main point was to be skeptical of what you are told is the truth - especially from politicians and media outlets that profit from selling “doom”.
No we don’t “all agree” about what the root-problem is. And using the number of supposed studies as evidence of truth, is one of THE most basic of truth/logic fallacies.
If you don’t understand why or how that could be, then it would take me too long to explain it to you other than to simply say - if you want a lie to work and spread you will repeat it often .
Take the WP article you linked to. It’s clearly pushing a narrative that’s provably false using their own data . And, it took me just a few minutes to spot how they are using incomplete statistics and pertinent information that has been omitted, to spread an un-truth.
If you have a dispassionate desire to know the truth, or at least get closer to truthy-ness, then I can send you a recent news piece which refutes the narrative of this Washington Post article using their own data.
But that said… I really don’t want to get into an argument about politics, or any topics of ideology, with anyone in the Blockstack community so as not to spoil any working relationships. And anyway it’s a distraction from our/community’s shared goals.
My Twitter profile has read “Truth Soldier” for many many years - and this is not put there just be be cute. I take it seriously.
Again, be skeptical of everything/everyone and think critically.
As we say in the crypto-phere “Don’t trust. Verify.”
In the interest of not gatekeeping knowledge, you should feel free to share your explanation openly - I’m sure others would be interested in seeing your news source here as well .
On the contrary, I find that when someone has deep knowledge and expertise on a subject as you seem to have here, it’s quite simple to share what you mean. It might not take you that long to explain yourself at all.
And no need to end the discussion. After sharing your credible sources here, you’re welcome to DM me if you’d like to talk further. Thanks!
@fluidvoice Let’s not confuse ideals with reality. These claims are obviously false. I assume they reflect your personal ethics and opinion; your prescription for how you’d like things to be. As you say, Life is full of injustices for the vast majority of people regardless of sex or race. Privileges matters, and many of them are obtained through luck. Justice and equality are ideals that just like liberty must be refreshed from time to time - or better, actively maintained all the time.
@muneeb In addition to revealing problems of institutionalized racial biases and inequality, the recently exposed police brutality and the Government’s reaction to it showcase problematic aspects of centralized state power.
It depends on how you define the scope of what you’re talking about.
Clearly if skin colored mattered in all things and in the sense of the claims of American “systemic racism” then a black man would have never been elected president, or the many other gov positions. Is it systemic to the police overall, in-general? Again, I don’t think so.
The organization Black Lives Matter is a political organization & the founders admitted to being trained Marxists. Companies should stay out of choosing political sides. It’s very irresponsible & demeans half of the population.
Please do the research before embracing hyper partisan activist groups that divide people instead of uniting them.
This political movement will pass as more people are growing tired of the moral crusading groups like BLM do in destroying people’s lives. That will reflect negatively back on companies like Blockstack.
Decentralized platforms needs to become tools of breaking down political & ideological tribal blindness and build tools to unite people based on MLK’s dream of people being judged on content of character instead of the shallowness of physical attributes.
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