Gaslighting is a form of manipulation through persistent denial, misdirection, contradiction, and lying in an attempt to destabilize and delegitimize a target. Its intent is to sow seeds of doubt in the targets, hoping to make them question their own memory, perception, and sanity.

Turn the TV on. Every news broadcast serves up a slice of the truth, hand-crafted by well-meaning folks desperate to inject fairness in reporting into their organisation's output. If you're lucky. Unless you have a range of disparate sources from which to draw, your views will be shaped by what you hear and read. And your friends will help you too.

Democracy (Greek: δημοκρατία, Dēmokratía literally "rule of the commoners"), in modern usage, is a system of government in which the citizens exercise power directly or elect representatives from among themselves to form a governing body, such as a parliament.

We in this modern age, we've never had it, it's all an illusion. The closest we have is adding an 'X' in a box or writing to our local representatives, all of whom have agendas different to yours. Sure we can write emails or tweets, sign petitions and the like, but really? A popular vote couldn't even persuade the British establishment name a ship according to the majority, and yet…

Attempts by powerful people to erode democracy are working everywhere I look outside the comfort of my chosen circle. It's why I've scaled back use of Twitter already, and I've never really got back into Facebook…

To those who would say we must accept it, that protest is futile, or that a march for women or for minorities is essentially against white men: no, we must not! There is better to be had from those we elect; just rolling over and accepting this as being the best there is, is just wrong.

We are living in a time during which the norms of modern society, worked for by those who would protect humanity as a whole rather than a narrow strip running through it, will be wiped out by the stroke of a pen, both here in the UK and, more quickly, in the 'United' States of America.

Of course it's easy for me to say all this, safely nestled in my comfy chair.

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Wikipedia and fact-checking organisations like snopes.com are your friend.

We just watched The Day After Tomorrow again, a fine film and one of my favourites.

Perhaps the events of the last few months have sharpened, enhanced my senses, but I've moved away from appreciation of the film for its obvious climate change slant alone, and towards the now obvious message that 'cooperation' is the key to our future, not isolation and complacency.

An extended quote (Wikiquote) from the film:

“These past few weeks have left us all with a profound sense of humility in the face of nature's destructive power. For years, we operated under the belief that we could continue consuming our planet's natural resources, without consequence. We were wrong. I was wrong. The fact that my first address to you comes from a consulate on foreign soil is a testament to our changed reality. Not only Americans, but people all around the globe have become guests in the nations we once called 'the third world'. In our time of need they have taken us in and sheltered us, and I am deeply grateful for their hospitality."

Oh, if only there was some substitution I could make for climate change here…

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Yes, of course I cried at the end!

I'm scaling back my involvement on Twitter (in addition to a recent step away from Facebook.) It'll mean a more casual attitude to my timeline: no more devotion to reading all the tweets, no more politically-charged retweets, no desire to keep up with and research the background behind the very latest news. In short I need a break, a chance to examine what I want.

So what will I do with the time usually filled waiting for the relief I'm currently finding when there are no more posts remaining to read?

• Read books,
• Write better blog posts,
• Create more stuff at GitHub,
• Watch films,
• Make my girls do their homework on time,
• Er…

Oh yes, this:

I am @bazbt3 at 10Centuries.org, Jason Irwin's bootstrapped/subscription/free social, blogging & podcasting network. Hey, I have invite codes, just ask!

I voted to Remain at the ‘Europe Referendum’ last year, hoping that the political system would take heed of the will of the British people, essentially reinforcing our desire to retain the benefits of being within Europe and substantially outvoting the hopes of a return to the dark times of jingoistic nationalism and a belief that the inhabitants of England are better than anyone in the rest of the world.

Yeah, that went well didn’t it! Whilst not exactly wearing the ‘Remoaner’ badge with pride, I sense my services will be called upon at some time. I’m ready. Ready to moan that is, the incompetence of politics to make our world a better place currently disgusts me.

Ok, I use ‘England’ to describe the United Kingdom because, let’s face facts, the rest of the UK is seen as utterly irrelevant when it comes to any decision making process. That saddens me. And that’s an understatement. It’s utterly appalling that the wishes of millions of people living both within and outside the tiny geographic area, England, and Parliament, are ignored.

So much for ‘us’ being the cradle of democracy. That’s all gone now, being replaced by, if not a dictatorship, then something very, very close to it. It’s more subtle than most, especially the recent Turkish crackdowns, but it’s nevertheless deeply troubling me.

Yesterday the British Prime Minister stated that our negotiating position, the great plan, the very best our nation can come up with, amounts to this:

We don’t want the financial burden of being a member of Europe, nor do we want any of the benefits; we’re not going to be a part of the Single Market nor the Customs Union. We are instead going to find new markets elsewhere using products and services that our great nation will invent, stuff that cannot be done better or cheaper anywhere in the world and shipped to us whilst still undercutting our best rates.* We’re going to eschew the benefits of shared human rights and business standards, fiscal systems, support structures across all parts of life. No, instead we’re going it alone.

I…

I’m not over-simplifying by much, it really is that stark. It’s saying to Europeans that they’re beneath us, not worthy of continued support or cooperation. Yes, of course we’re entitled to play hardball for the best interests of all of us Brits, but I’m sensing the juggernaut rolling towards a humiliating pyhrric victory here. Legacies. Membership of Europe, though imperfect for us, has to be better than the idiotic alternative offered without debate to the British people. Reform usually comes from within rather than without.

And our main English opposition party, Labour, just aren’t fighting this. ‘Democracy’ again, see. Mind you, a party so splintered, fractured, simply cannot mount an effective opposition. Only the Liberal Democrats seem to have a clue how grave this situation really is; a credit to them, to us.

Some might say it’s us, recognising our lofty position in the world, the world’s fifth-biggest economy, premier financial services centre for an entire economic region, playing hardball.

Lofty. Yeah. We can’t even ensure there are enough staff to efficient run our hospitals when winter pressures, something entirely predictable, occur. And when the people quite rightly complain, we hide, we lie, we quote heavily-obfuscated statistics from partisan-friendly sources. Lofty, world-leading…

In terms simple-enough that our Prime Minister can understand, here’s how it should have gone:

We want all the benefits of cooperation with Europe but without the worst of the attendant costs or restrictions. Let’s chat Europe, what can you do for us?

Negotiation rather than dictating terms. Heck, it doesn’t have to be subtle, but come on!!

Is there any way, short of the slow, horrible deaths of all of the people lobbying to achieve, tasked with implementing or tacitly supporting in the name of ‘Democracy’ this unprecedented, irresponsible, xenophobic, and fiscally-destructive path… is there any way that we can remove these politicians and their supporters and restore sanity, fairness, and some measure of equality to the people of the United Kindgom?

I’m, of course, including the billionaires who run our media and hold the power to mobilise popular opinion to merge with their agendas, whatever the heck they are. The lies we all know about are easy to deal with; anything demonstrably untrue has already been roundly debunked as impossible to implement, but all remain unimportant trivialities by those casual racists ignorant of world finance and our diminishing place in a world whose power is shifting east, those whose only sources of news are run by…

You’ve got to ask, why would powerful people wish to destabilise an entire region, let alone one sovereign nation? Surely it’s not all about money, it’s not all about saving (or creating) reputations, legacies? Is it?

It probably is.

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If you came for the swearies, I thought better of it; I’m keeping them to myself, sorry.

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(time passes…)

(time passed…)

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*Ah, fuck it, go on, go on, a late footnote. I’ve just seen a spot on local news that a major British ‘defence’ and flying thing company is looking into developing a high-powered laser system to shoot at fast-moving things far far away. And a deflector shield to protect far-distant speedy things that would otherwise be shot at and destroyed by yes, high-powered laser systems. The very best bit, the spokesman intimated it’s a perfectly-reasonable 10 to 20 years in the future. For fuck’s sake, more bleeding killing machines‽ Bet, bet that, it, like all the crazy hairbrained schemes to come, dreamed up by companies desperate to get into the news and acquire funding from equally-unscrupulous backers, it, it’ll be touted as a fine example of Great British innovation, something to be proud of, a driver towards economic and social greatness. Dyson for instance, Dyson make really good vacuum cleaners, we have one, it’s been repaired a couple of times but keeps going on, but it’s not a £300 vacuum nor is it a £2000 washing machine nor a hairdryer or fan reinvented to pander to rampant consumerism but I am tempted to mention that I think their business policies such as relocating manufacturing overseas, ‘suck’. Ahhh, where was I? Yeah. And then, when we have a world-beating thing, like the jet engine, trains, power generation, our gold reserves, computer chip design and licensing, it’ll be sold off to the highest bidder (or announced early so sold at the lowest price in the case of the gold or industries with national penetration) like Every. Fucking. Thing. this once-great nation has ever produced. Fuck off with your ‘make Britain great’ again you disingenuous twats! But singling out any one company is futile, we need the right environment to prosper. If we had the ability to conquer the world without killing large numbers of indigenous folks, we already would have.

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Not proof-read.

This might sound a little odd. Quite a lot of my prose is indeed odd to the uninitiated, but this is a post about communication, specifically integrations. I know I’m not the first to write about this but I’m on a bit of a journey right now.

You’ll probably have visited web sites integrating a chat thing into their pages. Often it’s an intrusive popup asking cheerfully if you’d like help with something anything. The only time I ever used one I was deeply unimpressed with the abilities of the person at the opposite end of the chat. It seemed to be a copy and paste session, the likes of which is these days run by ‘bots. To be honest I much prefer reading FAQs, and if my query is sufficiently complex I prefer email to a web form.

Today I installed a tiny code snippet on my GitHub Pages site. It creates an anchored button which links to a chat room I created at the GitHub.com-related third-party service, Gitter. The service offers public and private chat rooms, and logins are required, via either GitHub or Twitter. Logins make sense.

I honestly don’t expect my use of it will amount to much, and thus fully anticipate removing the code if no-one really uses it. But why?

I blog at GitHub Pages, to a blog I adapted from a prebuilt solution, composing posts on my phone in Markdown before staging, committing and pushing the post to my repository. Other people may call this ‘publishing.’

I then copy the raw Markdown and paste into a new blog post at 10Centuries.org. Being a not particularly cumbersome workflow it works well for me.

Now, notifications of posting go to 10Centuries chat, to Twitter and to Facebook, and I get occasional feedback at all three.

In a nutshell I see my social networking future at 10Centuries (10C.) It’s a peaceful haven away from the in-your-face occasional nastiness and immediacy that intrudes into Twitter and the insulated, walled garden of Facebook. There’s a web app (linked to above), and Android and iOS apps are being developed right now. Yes I know I’m being awkward here, but it is after all my prerogative!

Ok, back to the point. I’d love to be able to integrate a link to Cappuccino (10C chat) at both my GitHub Pages site and my 10C site but don’t have the skills (or, currently the vision) to implement it elegantly. So right now I’m making do with a thing that only nerds are likely to want to login to use.

I could, I suppose, create a link in the GitHub Pages site header to a page which links to 10C chat, and that might be enough.

But it won’t be. I’ve used message boxes which posted into either Disqus.com and, until recently, App.net (2 months away from closure.) I recall extremely limited use providing me with comments. It’s perfectly reasonable; Disqus is a comments-focused service and App.net is/was a limited-appeal network.

It’d be nice to have all my eggs in the one basket. But, when all is said and done, I do write for myself.

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I am @bazbt3 on 10Centuries.org (Jason Irwin’s social/blogging/podcasting network.) If you want a change from the misery of the mainstream I have invite codes! Oh, I’m also on Twitter.

With weeks to go before a billing cycle I've downgraded my App.net (ADN) account to the 'free' tier. Having not been there for a while the decision was, heartless as it sounds, easy.

I'm not closing the account, I'm thankful for the memories.