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De privacy en grondrechten van ALLE Nederlanders gaan op de helling. De Wodg geeft het leger toegang tot onze meest intieme informatie: politieke opvattingen, seksuele voorkeur, ras, biometrische en gezondheidsgegevens. Defensie mag het allemaal gebruiken bij oefeningen met drones, AI en patroonherkenning. Militaire surveillance in de civiele ruimte. Het leger mag onze gegevens uitwisselen met andere landen. Ophef blijft uit. https://t.co/o08m8BFdj0 #privacy #grondrechten #militairesurveillance

FREEZE SERBIA’S EU ACCESSION NOW. If the Vučić regime is using invasive surveillance spyware against Serbian citizens, then Brussels cannot pretend that Serbia is making normal progress toward EU membership. U.S. Congressman Joe Wilson has publicly condemned the use of such https://t.co/TdWdupLD7C #FreezeSerbiaEU #HumanRights #SurveillanceSpyware #RS #US

🔴🇮🇹 ALERTE INFO - Colère de Giorgia Meloni après la libération, seulement 48 heures après son arrestation, d’un homme de 42 ans originaire du Bangladesh accusé d’agression sexuelle sur une fille de 13 ans à Turin. Le juge a pourtant retenu de "graves indices de culpabilité", le témoignage de l’adolescente étant notamment corroboré par les caméras de surveillance. Mais l’homme a été remis en liberté avec obligation de pointage, le juge prenant en compte l’absence d’antécédents, sa coopération et le fait qu’il ait déclaré : "J’ai fait une erreur, je suis désolé." Le parquet avait demandé son maintien en prison et fait désormais appel. Giorgia Meloni dénonce une décision qui « brise toute la chaîne en 48 heures » et demande : "Qui va expliquer cela à cette famille ?" Le ministre italien de la Justice a envoyé des inspecteurs au tribunal de Turin. (RaiNews / The Telegraph) #Justice #GiorgiaMeloni #AgressionSexuelle

They create a new super-authority that can investigate you without concrete suspicion, freeze and seize assets, take over companies, and ultimately confiscate property, even before any conviction. At the same time, they introduce new taxes on wealth that has already been taxed. #SurveillanceState #WealthTax #PropertyRights #Nospecificcountriesarementionedinthetweet.Thus #therearenocountrycodestoreturn.

The article underscores the crucial importance of monitoring critical infrastructure in Belgium, particularly following the tragedy in Ghislenghien in 2004, and highlights technological improvements, such as the use of drones and artificial intelligence, while noting that many companies remain attached to traditional monitoring methods. (translated)

Multiculturalism or Liberalism… You Can’t Have Both Canada’s Combating Hate Act received royal assent on June 18 and became law in July, defining hatred as an intense and extreme emotion and extending emotion’s reach into government and criminal law. Supporters cite a 169% rise in reported hate crimes from 2018 to 2024, but the increase reflects predictable outcomes when groups with deep historical, cultural, and religious conflicts are placed together in large numbers while assuming differences will fade. “Diversity is our strength” can’t replace shared culture: cooperation at scale requires shared values and norms. Import enough difference quickly while demanding universal tolerance, and social order begins to fracture, leaving strangers who share a passport but little else—so the state steps in to do what culture once did. Multiculturalism can drift toward authoritarianism: the state expands to manage conflicts, neutrality becomes impossible without common standards, and unequal treatment follows. Britain illustrates the danger, with thousands of arrests in 2023 under communications laws for alleged offensive messages and long sentences for single posts. Meanwhile, authorities have shown hesitation toward major crimes involving protected communities, often citing fears of racism and community harm—creating a double standard. Canada also has examples, such as the Gladue principles, which require sentencing judges to consider the circumstances of Indigenous offenders, letting group identity influence state treatment. The multicultural liberal state was sold as open, tolerant, and equal—but if groups won’t “melt,” or fundamentally oppose one another, the result is increasingly unequal laws, more surveillance, and less liberty. Multiculturalism and liberalism are incompatible: without shared cultural standards, a society will be governed from above through laws, courts, and coercion.

The Tolerance That Censors Institutions preach tolerance, yet disagreement is increasingly punished. As protected classes expand, demands for compliance, surveillance, and reporting grow. A tolerance-saturated society becomes hostile to dissent. Many call it hypocrisy, but the contradiction may be strategy. In 1965, Herbert Marcuse’s *Repressive Tolerance* argued that liberal “equal hearing” can perpetuate oppression. “Liberating tolerance,” he claimed, must discriminate: intolerance toward the Right, tolerance toward the Left. Why? Classical Marxism expected industrial workers to revolt from misery. Instead, comfort increased and revolution stalled. The Frankfurt School offered a remedy: capitalism colonized consciousness, creating “false consciousness.” If factory revolt won’t start, revolution must begin in the formation of minds—culture, education, psychology, entertainment. If so, neutrality becomes the enemy. Free debate spreads the system’s ideas. Elections let prisoners choose their preferred warden. Liberal freedoms act as “steam valves,” releasing pressure to prevent revolt. Tolerance becomes directional: oppressive ideas are suppressed; liberating ideas are amplified. Censorship and punishment are reframed as freedom’s highest expression. Marcuse also recognized liberal resistance to censorship and proposed “emergency” suspensions when oppression is deemed urgent—a logic echoed when speech is treated as harm and coercion as protection. The unsettling possibility is that nothing is malfunctioning: tolerance may function as a weapon. The final stage requires no visible censor—the individual internalizes it, policing their own thoughts.

Why Weak Societies Choose Tyranny The pinnacle of tyranny would be a system that allows politicians, elites, and bureaucrats to control a population without force or coercion because the people love their servitude. Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World, an eerily relatable dystopian novel, with this idea at the forefront. Unlike Orwell’s 1984, there is no overt oppression. The state does not have to stamp on human faces with its jackboots or erect an inescapable surveillance state. Rather, the people of Brave New World happily chain themselves with meaningless pleasure and distractions. The authorities do not rule through terror and rage, the central elements of 1984, but instead give the people everything they ever wanted. A pharmaceutical called Soma becomes the opiate of the masses. Mustapha Mond, the World Controller, likens it to Christianity without tears. While religion requires years of moral training, Soma allows citizens to achieve peace simply by swallowing tablets. It is the perfect escape from reality, a holiday from the facts. Lenina, the female counterpart to the protagonist Bernard, cannot comprehend why he refuses Soma, preferring discomfort to something that can remove it. When Bernard states, “I’d rather be myself, myself and nasty, not somebody else, however jolly,” Lenina sees this as a sort of pathology and repeatedly encourages him to take the wonder drug. Bernard explains, “I want to know what passion is.” He understands that there is more to life than merely being content, craving genuine experience, including suffering and intensity, rather than being emotionally regulated by the World State. Lenina’s bewilderment stems from her conditioning to regard unhappiness as a technical problem, encapsulated in the society’s common saying that “a gram is better than a damn.” The people of Brave New World are not captives but satisfied customers. Children are produced by the scientific state, relieving people of the responsibility of parenthood. This grants them the ability to engage in promiscuity, where everyone belongs to everyone else, while filling their free time with cheap entertainment and endless sporting events—what would be referred to as slop today. As Neil Postman observed, Orwell saw totalitarianism through the lens of fear, while Huxley saw it through pleasure. There was no need to ban a book in Brave New Worldbecause there was no one who wanted to read one. An abundance of low-quality information rendered censorship unnecessary because no one could hear the truth through all the noise. Huxley threw shade at civil libertarians who passionately opposed tyranny because they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions. Humanity in its rawest form is portrayed by John the Savage, an outsider free from the World State’s conditioning. Upon coming face-to-face with this spiritually neutered society, he completely rejects it: “I don’t want comfort, I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.” Huxley’s dystopia is not imposed on an unwilling population but instead requested by a hollow one. Which leads us to the question: How do people become so weak that they get on their knees and beg for totalitarianism? Good times make bad times possible. Once a certain level of luxury and safety is achieved, people start to resemble the hobbits from the Shire. They are so far removed from evil that they forget it even exists and become defenseless in the face of it. Andrew Lobaczewski, who studied the psychology of totalitarianism from inside Poland’s communist takeover, wrote: “During good times, people progressively lose sight of the need for profound reflection. They lose the capacity to differentiate human nature, and emotion begins to dominate intellect. Once a critical mass starts operating on the pleasure principle, any excess mental effort seems like pointless labor.” Lobaczewski warned that it is not as simple as some people losing the ability to think rationally. It is worse, because those people then shame anyone capable of doing so. A clever, liberal, and merry individual is a good sport. A more far-sighted person predicting dire results becomes a wet blanket, a killjoy. The ability to have uncomfortable conversations without emotion taking over is, in Lobaczewski’s view, an indicator of whether a society’s future will be good or bad. It is easier to think about pleasant things. This leads people to eliminate any data or facts that cause them discomfort. That becomes a habit and eventually a custom accepted by society at large. Once the general populace accepts that inconvenient truths should be left unsaid, it becomes incapable of reaching correct conclusions. After all, how could you ever describe a picture that you refuse to look at? “Catastrophe waits in the wings of the communities that lose the capacity for psychological reason and moral criticism,” Lobaczewski wrote. “It is on the other side of this weakening of thought that the processes of the generation of evil are intensified at every social scale until they give rise to bad times.” It is precisely man’s dreams of happiness that can lead to chaos and suffering. This hedonistic view of happiness contains the seeds of misery, feeding the eternal cycle whereby good times give birth to bad times. Friedrich Nietzsche viewed socialism as demanding comfort for the greatest number of people possible. To question whether it is good for the masses to live in comfort has become a form of heresy. This reveals the spiritual atrophy that so many suffer from. Considering only the weak believe comfort to be a virtue, it is what Carl Jung would describe as the infantile dream state of mass dependency: the desire to gently slip back into the kingdom of childhood, into the paradise of parental care. Except this lack of friction has consequences. The perfect state destroys the soil in which great intellect grows. Genius, struggle, passion, strength, and wisdom are required to build a safe and abundant society. Yet once a certain level of comfort is achieved, it can destroy the very virtues required to obtain it. Nietzsche observed that it is the warmest heart that aims to alleviate suffering and hardship but fails to realize that it thereby wills the destruction of its own foundation. Comfort breeds mediocrity, which is then called good. Small people want one thing above all: that no one hurt them. We have taken this pathology to such a degree that we now obsess over hurt feelings and call this virtue. Pleasure, in its proper place, is a byproduct of meaningful goals, not a goal in itself. Aristotle saw that pleasure and comfort distort perception and proper judgment. While they do not cause us to misjudge something like geometry or mathematics, they can destroy our ability to decide what is worth pursuing and, therefore, what to do. Consider The Odyssey. Homer depicts Odysseus’ men on the island of the Lotus-Eaters, where they taste the fruit and lose all desire to go home. Much like Huxley’s Brave New World, they are not imprisoned. Rather, they simply stop wanting anything more. Odysseus has to drag his men back to the ships while they weep to stay. This is what comfort can do to men. It empties them of purpose. We intuitively understand this but fail to apply it to our own lives. We must make the same choice as Odysseus when he refuses Calypso’s offer of endless comfort and immortality. He knows she is more beautiful than his wife Penelope waiting at home. He knows that he and Penelope will grow old and die, a fate he could avoid by staying with Calypso. No one who reads these stories wishes he had stayed. We want him to choose the hard way home because if he took the offer, he would stop being admirable. Yet staying is exactly what our modern society asks of us. We are told that the island is the good life. But what happens to the man who caves to this temptation? In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche imagines a risk-averse society taken to its logical endpoint. The elimination of all struggle produces a man so diminished that he fails to possess even self-contempt or higher aspiration. Safety and sameness become the highest goals, creating “no shepherd in one herd.” Anyone who seeks to be anything more than normal becomes an aberration to be dealt with. Or, as Nietzsche puts it, they have “made the wolf a dog in man himself, man’s best domestic animal.”

Defence cooperation between Finland and Sweden is taking a new step forward today. Finland and Sweden are jointly strengthening the surveillance and protection of Finland's territorial integrity. The cooperation will enhance our ability to detect and counter drones. The Nordic #DefenceCooperation #FinlandSweden #TerritorialIntegrity #FI #SE

In the United States, consumer confidence in food safety is shaken by a series of health scandals, including a cyclospora outbreak that has caused deaths, exacerbated by significant budget cuts in health agencies and a food surveillance system deemed to be in decline. (translated)