The New York Times did what I think was the best article ever on this entire subject in 2022, and while it is a very long read, it is a deep and accurate dive into the French history, endless threats of war and repayments, and then the US coming into take whatever was left in the 20th century. And the pictures are also incredibly good, especially the ruins of La Citadelle in the fog (having just read exactly what it was there for).

Easily the most informative – and moving – piece I have ever read on Haiti. If I remember correctly, it started off as a journalist’s attempt to tally the actual numbers, and ended up being a great deal more. It also explores how it wasn’t just the loss of Haiti’s cash to France, but the parallel loss of not having any of that cash invested in its own people, commerce, or society: it was a double blow that has gone on for centuries.

Here are the links for anyone interested:

NY Times – The Root of Haiti’s Misery: Reparations to Enslavers

Gift link

Excellent response. You put it perfectly.

I like this sub exactly the way it is. If something isn’t for me, I move on. Not a big deal. And OP asked a great question. I never thought about it either, lol.

“Sheeple” I think is the word you need there. Just sayin. It’s outrage lite without that touch of overt negging.

But damn, that was fantastic for a first try. I think you got something there.

I never heard it explained that way. What an excellent comment. Thank you for taking the time.

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Get some time and space to yourself, 10 to 30 minutes, depending on the complexity of the situation. Think about exactly who/what you are angry with, and why (including yourself*). Don’t worry about solving it, just get it front and center in your mind. Pile up a huge number of couch cushions. Beat the ever livin’ fuck out of them with your fists and feet until you break down or wear yourself out. Repeat as necessary.

*Note: One of the reasons some emotional things never die is because we try to solve them without including ourselves in the equation: we see forgiveness is needed but we don’t include ourselves, for example, or guilt needs addressing but we don’t want to measure our own part in it because someone else’s betrayal was so overwhelming that it’s almost unbearable to think of the self as participatory in that destruction. Yet those are examples of exactly the kind of inner situation that keep us stuck in unhealthy emotional patterns. If you really want to get out of an emotional trap, including anger that doesn’t quit, and you think you’ve tried everything, try specifically looking for exactly what you don’t want to see about your own part in it.

You’ve gotten some really good advice in this thread, especially from the comment to which you are responding here: a bit blunt, but if you can accept it, excellent advice.

The only two things I would add is that

1. Self-medication, by any means, EXTENDS any grief process, whether it’s your lady, your job, your grandmother, or your dog that you lost. The grief (what I am calling what you are now experiencing, even if it doesn’t look like sadness anymore) is the natural process of breaking of those emotional bonds. As many and as deeply as you created them, grief is now the process of breaking them, separating you from the person/object you lost so you can live freely again. There is no rushing this, but you CAN slow it down, and self-medicating is one of those ways of dragging it out into infinity. The only way to get past grief is go through it, literally to feel those breaking emotions and in feeling them, to drain them of their power. That’s just how it works. Self-medication does not decrease those emotions, which for you are already intense because you had so much of your own identity as a person invested in who you were WITH her. Medicating simply postpones them and spreads them out over time. I’m not judging you for your choices, but you might well be moving through this much faster if you were not overall numbing your emotions daily with substance use.

2. When you give in to the darker desires to inform yourself of her current situations without her knowledge, consent, or participation, you are literally recreating/reinforcing the very same emotional bonds you’re trying so hard and so painfully to break. That’s why doing it feels good: it feels like righting a wrong, like regaining a lost balance, like taking some power back. But in reality it’s none of those things, and far worse for your inner situation than you might think. So stop. Every time you think about tracking her down, checking her social media, finding out what she’s up to, ask yourself how many more minutes, hours, weeks, or months you want to suffer what you’re already going through, because in doing this you are actively retying bonds your own grief is trying to free you from. Regardless of whether it’s right or wrong or creepy or not, stalking feeds the beast. Remember this when you go to do it again.

Yeah. When you already know there’s nothing better coming, no point in waiting.

Look at their post history, lol

I hope so too, and yes, it does have the possibility of helping others, especially by forcing procedural loopholes into the law and also forcing the exception for complicated pregnancies that many people want.

But I just saw an article about a letter just issued by Ken Paxton saying that the judge’s ruling will not protect her, her husband, her doctors or her hospital from criminal charges if she goes ahead with the abortion. Note the URL: this is straight from his own office. (Just so you know, a TRO is a temporary restraining order and in this case it is the specific part of the judge’s ruling that allows this abortion, so when Paxton talks about the TRO in negative terms, he’s speaking directly of the judge’s ruling.)

https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/attorney-general-ken-paxton-responds-travis-county-tro

I have dealt with real evil in my life. Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton are wholly amoral, and their actions look just as evil as those I have ever had to deal with. If they are forced to back down to save this lady’s health and future ability to bear children, they will try to find ways to punish anyone involved, because that’s what evil does. So this further update about how they will be criminally charged despite the judge’s order doesn’t really surprise me.

Yes, but I can’t help but reflect on what this has cost her not just in terms of available cash, but physical energy and even privacy. She is carrying a baby that will not survive: viciously hard under even the best of circumstances, but she doesn’t even have time or space to grieve.

Because the state of Texas has weaponized her healthcare, she has had to come up with cash for attorneys; she’s had to drag herself to court appearances; she’s had to subject the most intimate of medical information to assholes that never spent so much as an hour in medical school or she, her husband, and her doctors can be charged with a crime; and now the entire fucking nation is all up in her shit.

Hell yeah she’s a hero. But look at how much it is costing her.

So you were talking about your one time ORDER pad. Got it. Best get back to work, kid.

stenography (hiding meaning in something else)

Steganography? I’m assuming your autocorrect took over here: the manual form of steganography is exactly what I am talking about. Though come to think of it, I don’t know anyone who still uses, or can even read, the various forms of shorthand (stenography) that used to be so common; it could work as a hidden language these days. I bet some of the older ladies among us who were secretaries in the 50s and 60s could, though. When I was young I saw a book about learning it; it’s actually pretty brilliant and an elegant use of sound notation.

You nailed it with the lead pipe analogy, though, IMO. Truer words were never spoken. If the people watching never find you to be of any importance, if you are dismissed as too stupid or too sorry to deserve further attention, if you are seen as a waste of resources, you’ve conquered all the tech and cryptography and AI/ML and pattern analysis and digital surveillance an entire government can throw at you before they’ve even had a chance to start.

Lol, no. But okay. You may want to check out another post I wrote above. It’s not about making your code uncrackable, it’s about taking your coded material out of the digital sphere altogether, making cops toss your home for it instead of sitting on their donut-eating coffee slurping asses while they comfortably browse your online life, and understanding that thugs tossing houses are almost invariably non-intellectual brutes who would far rather laugh at a guy whose sole complaint about life is not getting laid instead of closely examining pages and pages of sloppy, self-pitying, handwritten whines for slight inconsistencies that hide the real truth.

He said that this was all for his own reference and not anyone else’s, and here you are talking about a one time pad, lol. Not only does he not need this for communication, if they find a one-time pad he’s just signed up for some torture. Old school book code is best: you’re out of the digital sphere, everyone has books, if they even suspect book code they’re going to have expend all the manhours and effort and budget to compare all your books with everyone else’s books, plus you don’t have to ALL learn fucking Navajo or Tolkien’s Elven script in your little cell of revolutionary homies, lol.

None of that matters when you keep your secrets on paper, in plain but befuddled language, and disguise them as trash.

Pretty sure he’s fighting you because he understands suppressive governments and what they’re looking at better than you do.

You have all the technology bits right. What you don’t understand, at all, is the human element that jumps at governmental occupations like this and personally gets off on looking at secrets and targeting even the minutiae of individuals they suspect, or even just don’t like. It’s an entire world of me vs them in one surveiller’s eyes, and you’ve clearly never been the object of it: it’s exactly like personal stalking, but governmental and for pay. Nothing and no one is too small.

People who lived in pre-WWII Germany or Russia, for example, understand this well, along with those who lived in post-war Stalinist Russia or Stasi-surveilled East Germany. There’s a lot more to it than just encrypting your shit, lol.

If you’ve never seen the movie The Lives of Others, it’s all about this human element that you’re overlooking. I hope you always live in a time and place where you can continue to easily overlook it.

As an older person, I would take a somewhat different path for myself, if only because I know for a fact that the first-level people that are doing the spying are anything but your regime’s very best.

What you want is something that you can have in the open, looks worthless, shitty even; something that invites mockery as opposed to suspicion. Something in your own language and handwriting that the bottom-feeding impatient, intellectually challenged thugs who will actually be doing the searching open up, laugh incredulously, mock you for writing while you stand there silent, embarrassed and ashamed – and then toss aside as worthless.

You’re right that pen and paper are the way to go, IMO, and if English were your native tongue I’d simply recommend that you learn cursive and then enshittify it: in the US, for example, most older people read and still write in cursive, but very few under the age of 40 or so, and even then they don’t see enough of it to be able to read shitty cursive. It’s the same for a number of languages: handwriting will always invite slop, and manual slop will never truly be machine readable. It’s often not even human readable except to its creator, and not always then. So you’d want to look at your own language and its handwriting traditions.

Me, I’d go back to writing in English cursive, but now with a system of added hooks and slight errors that, on the surface, just make me look more sloppy and stupid (not hard, lol) but which mean something to me, and me only. Cursive is incredibly easy to fuck up in such a way that it is unintelligible to everyone but you; doctors do it all the time, and most people after a decade or two of signing their own name in it. You can easily fuck up your own in the same exact way, in whatever archaic but lingering handwriting system your native language uses, and that’s the writing part done.

Then, you’ll also want a list of acronyms and code words that mean something to you only – and for good measure, learn to write absolutely horrifying poetry about sexual partners you will never have. Make all your journals look like the condensation of self-pitying incel tears running down the pages. Put your genuine thoughts between lines of rancid, revolting “oh no one will ever love me the grocer looked at me wrong I feel so misunderstood” horseshit, but remember that you can use theme as a keyword index: for example, whenever you mention “grocer” or another frequent character in your anguished tales, you know the next line contains references to a rally; “pretty girl” is a specific contact, whatever.

Get into cheap fountain pens, and now paper and pen journaling is a legitimate hobby for you. And paper journals are easy to destroy: should you ever want to tear a page out and burn it in the kitchen sink, all you need is a lighter. You could even throw in some shit about how you were so angry (or ashamed, or depressed, or whatever) about what you’d written that you could never bear to see it again so you ripped it up and threw it away, oh woe is you. On every page, badly draw a lot of squiggles and useless illustrations and marginalia to make it visually confusing and difficult to follow. Cross out irrelevant words and underline other irrelevant words. Use different colors. Spill drinks on it every so often. Smear ink now and then.

Make it look like a ten-year old got hold of a fountain pen and some meth.

And in the middle of that shit, hide the information you want to keep, right there in the open.

There’s literally no downside to paper these days. I’m guessing that your regime expects you to write everything online, keep everything online, just for ease. But your paper journals can be kept in plain sight, as well as your cheap pens and ink and fountain pen hobby supplies. (The uglier the better, but don’t go overboard: if you’re neat and clean, then your physical journals should be as well.)

But should you ever come under suspicion, and the cops toss your home, they’re going to pick up those journals and read it and laugh at you and your truly shitty poetry, probably openly and in your face, before flinging it down and looking for your REAL digital cache of subversive info.

I have great respect for unbreakable codes, such as the Navajo language referred to elsewhere in this thread, but in real life, an unknown language will attract attention and cause low-level enforcers to seize that book and pass it up to real translators and code breakers.

Instead, if you openly make it trash to the thugs who will be doing the searching, creating journals that they just laugh at, mocking you and what they think is your sorry self-pitying life, it will never get that far. That’s where I’d put my own efforts, anyway.

I am sorry you have to take these precautions, and wish you well in your endeavors. May you be a thorn up the ass of your regime, lol. Good luck to you.

I believe a USB WiFi dongle will be a better idea than modifying live images of various distros

Yeah, you and me both. But I’d be willing to do it for one or two, just to be able to prove that THIS laptop can and will run Linux with its current hardware, should he choose install it.

Also, the only thing lost by modifying LiveUSB trials is my time. If I corrupt the image, or it doesn’t work, or I make it crap out somehow – all of which is likely, lol – I still have done no harm at all. It’s just a USB stick. And I will also have learned a few things along the way, like how Linux distros install and use drivers.

you would be installing the firmware on the Linux system, not onto the WiFi module.

Then technically (not that I personally have the chops to do it) this “firmware” could also be something plugged into the distro on the LiveUSB stick along with the wl driver. That distro is getting its current drivers from somewhere on that USB already, so I’m not reinventing the wheel, just adding to what is already there.

I guess I just have to read up more. Thanks for letting me know the difference.

This I can do. Thanks!

Might want to take a look at this then.

And this.

And this too.

EDITED TO ADD: While court cases involving “debtors prison” exist, NONE of them have “made debtors prison a thing of the past” in the US because imprisonment for private debt is very much alive and well today in 2023. Given that a person imprisoned over debt is unlikely to sue unless an organization such as ACLU takes on the case, and even more unlikely to win in courts that are dominated by commercial interests and partisan judges, it’s only going to get worse, not better. Going by the above linked articles that is exactly how it’s working out right now. Trying to prove that this horrific problem of criminalizing poverty does not exist today by pointing to a single 1983 lawsuit and going, “See! I told you!” is just completely privileged assholery.