#War and Treaty

[blaze42323]

Ok pipes?!

[sweetietray]

Trotter Jr. continued, “It’s not fair. It’s something that white artists don’t have to worry about at all. … It just happens to come through the bowels of this genre. So, I feel that it’s not enough for us to talk about it, we have to demand that we be about it.” SMGDH

[theindyreview]

Live Report: Grammy Gala 2024

Live Report: Grammy Gala 2024 The #Grammy #HallofFame inductees were honored by @AndraDayMusic @hansonmusic @warandtreaty @Shinedown @ElleKingMusic @WBellMusic @RecordingAcad @GRAMMYMuseum @2BENTERTAlNMENT @AtlanticRecords @MsLaurynHill @TheNovoDTLA

The 2024 Grammy Hall of Fame inductees were honored in what would be the first of a new annual tradition of galas, hosted at the Grammy Museum and Novo in Downtown Los Angeles this last Tuesday night. Outside of a few delays and moments of miscommunication, the evening was a swift and enjoyable tribute to some groundbreaking albums and memorable songs, with a slew of famed modern artists paying…

[unratedmagazine]

The War and Treaty Live

The War and Treaty Live Crecsent Ballroom Phoenix, Arizona March 21, 2023 by Mary Andrews Welcome to the Church of War and Treaty.The band is lead by the husband-and-wife duo Michael Trotter Jr. and Tanya Blount Trotter. They took their powerful vocals across the universe in a sea of harmony for all of us to revel with an all too short evening of gut-wrenching songs. War and Treaty released…

[midnight-star-world]

#CountryMusic

The 56th Annual CMA Awards

So today on the MSR (Midnight Star Review), I will be talking about the 56th Annual CMA Awards. This show was hosted by Luke Bryan & Peyton Manning on Wednesday 11/9/22 at 8pm EST (Eastern Standard Time) on channel 9 ABC (Where I am at). So let's get started with the performances first.

Performances (Who played and what they played). Loretta Lynn Tribute. Carrie Underwood - Woman enough to take my man. Miranda Lambert - Don't come home a-drinkin'. Reba McEntire - You're looking at Country. Carrie Underwood, Miranda Lambert, & Reba McEntire - Coal miner's daughter. Ashley McBryde, John Osborne, Pillbox Patti, Brandy Clark, & Caylee Hammack - When will I be loved? Cody Johnson - 'Til you can't. Cole Swindell - She had me at heads Carolina featuring Jo Dee Messina's Heads Carolina, tails California. Miranda Lambert - Geraldene. Carrie Underwood - Hate my heart. Luke Combs - The kind of love we make. Luke Bryan - Country on. Carly Pearce with Ricky Skaggs & Sonya Isaacs - Dear Miss Loretta. Zac Brown band with Marcus King - Out in the middle. Thomas Rhett & Katy Perry - Where we started. Hardy featuring Lainey Wilson - wait in the truck. Kelsea Ballerini featuring Kelly Clarkson & Carly Pearce - You're drunk, go home. Morgan Wallen - You proof. Chris Stapleton, Morgane, & Patti Loveless - You're never leave Harlan alive. Brothers Osborne with War & Treaty - It's only rock 'n' roll (but I like it). (Rolling Stones cover). Elle King & The Black Keys - Great balls of fire (Jerry Lee Lewis cover). Alan Jackson tribute. Carrie Underwood - Remember when. Dierks Bentley - Chattahoochee. Jon Pardi - Drive (for Daddy Gene). Lainey Wilson - Chasing that neon rainbow. Alan Jackson - Don't rock the jukebox. And that's a wrap for the performances on this night.

Awards (Who won and who should have won according to my weekly list). Musical event of the year goes to Carly Pearce & Ashley McBryde - Never wanted to be that girl. Maybe this one could have gone to Jason Aldean & Carrie Underwood's - If I didn't love you. Music video of the year goes to Cody Johnson - 'Til you can't. Looking at the choices for the award and that is the correct choice. Song of the year goes to Jordan Davis featuring Luke Bryan - Buy dirt. This one could have also gone to Morgan Wallen - Sand in my boots. Vocal duo of the year goes to Brothers Osborne. We really haven't heard much lately from any of the duos this year lately. Vocal group of the year goes to Old Dominion. This one should have gone with the Zac Brown band. Single of the year goes to Cody Johnson - 'Til you can't. This is truly the song/single of the year. Album of the year goes to Luke Combs - Growin' up. Luke should have won this but maybe another choice should have been Lainey Wilson. New artist of the year goes to Lainey Wilson. Could have also gone to Cody Johnson. Female vocalist of the year goes to Lainey Wilson. According to the stats, she should have won. But second I guess Carly Pearce. Male Vocalist of the year goes to Chris Stapleton. But maybe should have gone to Morgan Wallen. Willie Nelson lifetime achievement award goes to Alan Jackson. Entertainer of the year goes to Luke Combs. But could have gone to Morgan Wallen.

And that's a wrap for the awards. And on the MSR (Midnight Star Review), I would give this show a 3.5 out of 5 stars. It was a good show with some shocking award winners. But I don't see any performances that stood out to me. Maybe Cody Johnson's 'til you can't. But there wasn't any new songs and that is what i truly look forward to. Thanks for taking the time to read this review. See ya all next time.

[justaz]

i prefer happy ending bbc merlin where morgana becomes court sorceress and arthur becomes king and merlin remains as his servant (until they eventually marry) and lancelot lives and he and gwen marry but that damn game of thrones (?? probably idk) audio on tiktok that goes “i mean to fight this war and win it.” “good. to war then.” keeps giving me visions of king arthur of camelot on the verge of war with other kingdoms and his powerful court sorcerer merlin standing by his throne. arthur declares that he wishes to go to war and merlin (eager to bring about the united albion the prophecies speak of) supports arthur immediately and declares they’re going to war

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Every internet fight is a speech fight

THIS WEEKEND (November 8-10), I'll be in TUCSON, AZ: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.

My latest Locus Magazine column is "Hard (Sovereignty) Cases Make Bad (Internet) Law," an attempt to cut through the knots we tie ourselves in when speech and national sovereignty collide online:

https://locusmag.com/2024/11/cory-doctorow-hard-sovereignty-cases-make-bad-internet-law/

This happens all the time. Indeed, the precipitating incident for my writing this column was someone commenting on the short-lived Brazilian court order blocking Twitter, opining that this was purely a matter of national sovereignty, with no speech dimension.

This is just profoundly wrong. Of course any rules about blocking a communications medium will have a free-speech dimension – how could it not? And of course any dispute relating to globe-spanning medium will have a national sovereignty dimension.

How could it not?

So if every internet fight is a speech fight and a sovereignty fight, which side should we root for? Here's my proposal: we should root for human rights.

In 2013, Edward Snowden revealed that the US government was illegally wiretapping the whole world. They were able to do this because the world is dominated by US-based tech giants and they shipped all their data stateside for processing. These tech giants secretly colluded with the NSA to help them effect this illegal surveillance (the "Prism" program) – and then the NSA stabbed them in the back by running another program ("Upstream") where they spied on the tech giants without their knowledge.

After the Snowden revelations, countries around the world enacted "data localization" rules that required any company doing business within their borders to keep their residents' data on domestic servers. Obviously, this has a human rights dimension: keeping your people's data out of the hands of US spy agencies is an important way to defend their privacy rights. which are crucial to their speech rights (you can't speak freely if you're being spied on).

So when the EU, a largely democratic bloc, enacted data localization rules, they were harnessing national soveriegnty in service to human rights.

But the EU isn't the only place that enacted data-localization rules. Russia did the same thing. Once again, there's a strong national sovereignty case for doing this. Even in the 2010s, the US and Russia were hostile toward one another, and that hostility has only ramped up since. Russia didn't want its data stored on NSA-accessible servers for the same reason the USA wouldn't want all its' people's data stored in GRU-accessible servers.

But Russia has a significantly poorer human rights record than either the EU or the USA (note that none of these are paragons of respect for human rights). Russia's data-localization policy was motivated by a combination of legitimate national sovereignty concerns and the illegitimate desire to conduct domestic surveillance in order to identify and harass, jail, torture and murder dissidents.

When you put it this way, it's obvious that national sovereignty is important, but not as important as human rights, and when they come into conflict, we should side with human rights over sovereignty.

Some more examples: Thailand's lesse majeste rules prohibit criticism of their corrupt monarchy. Foreigners who help Thai people circumvent blocks on reportage of royal corruption are violating Thailand's national sovereignty, but they're upholding human rights:

https://www.vox.com/2020/1/24/21075149/king-thailand-maha-vajiralongkorn-facebook-video-tattoos

Saudi law prohibits criticism of the royal family; when foreigners help Saudi women's rights activists evade these prohibitions, we violate Saudi sovereignty, but uphold human rights:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-55467414

In other words, "sovereignty, yes; but human rights even moreso."

Which brings me back to the precipitating incidents for the Locus column: the arrest of billionaire Telegram owner Pavel Durov in France, and the blocking of billionaire Elon Musk's Twitter in Brazil.

How do we make sense of these? Let's start with Durov. We still don't know exactly why the French government arrested him (legal systems descended from the Napoleonic Code are weird). But the arrest was at least partially motivated by a demand that Telegram conform with a French law requiring businesses to have a domestic agent to receive and act on takedown demands.

Not every takedown demand is good. When a lawyer for the Sackler family demanded that I take down criticism of his mass-murdering clients, that was illegitimate. But there is such a thing as a legitimate takedown: leaked financial information, child sex abuse material, nonconsensual pornography, true threats, etc, are all legitimate targets for takedown orders. Of course, it's not that simple. Even if we broadly agree that this stuff shouldn't be online, we don't necessarily agree whether something fits into one of these categories.

This is true even in categories with the brightest lines, like child sex abuse material:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/09/facebook-reinstates-napalm-girl-photo

And the other categories are far blurrier, like doxing:

https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/trump-camp-worked-with-musks-x-to

But just because not every takedown is a just one, it doesn't follow that every takedown is unjust. The idea that companies should have domestic agents in the countries where they operate isn't necessarily oppressive. If people who sell hamburgers from a street-corner have to register a designated contact with a regulator, why not someone who operates a telecoms network with 900m global users?

Of course, requirements to have a domestic contact can also be used as a prelude to human rights abuses. Countries that insist on a domestic rep are also implicitly demanding that the company place one of its employees or agents within reach of its police-force.

Just as data localization can be a way to improve human rights (by keeping data out of the hands of another country's lawless spy agencies) or to erode them (by keeping data within reach of your own country's lawless spy agencies), so can a requirement for a local agent be a way to preserve the rule of law (by establishing a conduit for legitimate takedowns) or a way to subvert it (by giving the government hostages they can use as leverage against companies who stick up for their users' rights).

In the case of Durov and Telegram, these issues are especially muddy. Telegram bills itself as an encrypted messaging app, but that's only sort of true. Telegram does not encrypt its group-chats, and even the encryption in its person-to-person messaging facility is hard to use and of dubious quality.

This is relevant because France – among many other governments – has waged a decades-long war against encrypted messaging, which is a wholly illegitimate goal. There is no way to make an encrypted messaging tool that works against bad guys (identity thieves, stalkers, corporate and foreign spies) but not against good guys (cops with legitimate warrants). Any effort to weaken end-to-end encrypted messaging creates broad, significant danger for every user of the affected service, all over the world. What's more, bans on end-to-end encrypted messaging tools can't stand on their own – they also have to include blocks of much of the useful internet, mandatory spyware on computers and mobile devices, and even more app-store-like control over which software you can install:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/05/theyre-still-trying-to-ban-cryptography/

So when the French state seizes Durov's person and demands that he establish the (pretty reasonable) minimum national presence needed to coordinate takedown requests, it can seem like this is a case where national sovereignty and human rights are broadly in accord.

But when you consider that Durov operates a (nominally) encrypted messaging tool that bears some resemblance to the kinds of messaging tools the French state has been trying to sabotage for decades, and continues to rail against, the human rights picture gets rather dim.

That is only slightly mitigated by the fact that Telegram's encryption is suspect, difficult to use, and not applied to the vast majority of the communications it serves. So where do we net out on this? In the Locus column, I sum things up this way:

Telegram should have a mechanism to comply with lawful takedown orders; and

those orders should respect human rights and the rule of law; and

Telegram should not backdoor its encryption, even if

the sovereign French state orders it to do so.

Sovereignty, sure, but human rights even moreso.

What about Musk? As with Durov in France, the Brazilian government demanded that Musk appoint a Brazilian representative to handle official takedown requests. Despite a recent bout of democratic backsliding under the previous regime, Brazil's current government is broadly favorable to human rights. There's no indication that Brazil would use an in-country representative as a hostage, and there's nothing intrinsically wrong with requiring foreign firms doing business in your country to have domestic representatives.

Musk's response was typical: a lawless, arrogant attack on the judge who issued the blocking order, including thinly veiled incitements to violence.

The Brazilian state's response was multi-pronged. There was a national blocking order, and a threat to penalize Brazilians who used VPNs to circumvent the block. Both measures have obvious human rights implications. For one thing, the vast majority of Brazilians who use Twitter are engaged in the legitimate exercise of speech, and they were collateral damage in the dispute between Musk and Brazil.

More serious is the prohibition on VPNs, which represents a broad attack on privacy-enhancing technology with implications far beyond the Twitter matter. Worse still, a VPN ban can only be enforced with extremely invasive network surveillance and blocking orders to app stores and ISPs to restrict access to VPN tools. This is wholly disproportionate and illegitimate.

But that wasn't the only tactic the Brazilian state used. Brazilian corporate law is markedly different from US law, with fewer protections for limited liability for business owners. The Brazilian state claimed the right to fine Musk's other companies for Twitter's failure to comply with orders to nominate a domestic representative. Faced with fines against Spacex and Tesla, Musk caved.

In other words, Brazil had a legitimate national sovereignty interest in ordering Twitter to nominate a domestic agent, and they used a mix of somewhat illegitimate tactics (blocking orders), extremely illegitimate tactics (threats against VPN users) and totally legitimate tactics (fining Musk's other companies) to achieve these goals.

As I put it in the column:

Twitter should have a mechanism to comply with lawful takedown orders; and

those orders should respect human rights and the rule of law; and

banning Twitter is bad for the free speech rights of Twitter users in Brazil; and

banning VPNs is bad for all Brazilian internet users; and

it’s hard to see how a Twitter ban will be effective without bans on VPNs.

There's no such thing as an internet policy fight that isn't about national sovereignty and speech, and when the two collide, we should side with human rights over sovereignty. Sovereignty isn't a good unto itself – it's only a good to the extent that is used to promote human rights.

In other words: "Sovereignty, sure, but human rights even moreso."

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/06/brazilian-blowout/#sovereignty-sure-but-human-rights-even-moreso

Image: © Tomas Castelazo, www.tomascastelazo.com (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Border_Wall_at_Tijuana_and_San_Diego_Border.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

[alwaysbewoke]

[fabuloustrash05]

I don’t know if this is a hot take or not, but I dislike it when in modern Greek myth retellings nowadays there’s a side plot of Hera having an affair with one of Zeus’ brothers, Hades or Poseidon.

Webtoon’s Lore Olympus and Netflix’s series Kaos have both done this and I’m already tired of it.

[friedrich-2]

Friedrich Wilhelm III at the Treaty of Tilsit 1807, colorized.

[historicity-was-already-taken]

writing history be like

when i started actually writing i had about 3,000 MS word pages of research organized along chronological chapter lines.

the actual finished product will probably be around ~250 pages

it's a literal (metaphorical) iceberg.

also, my footnotes are CHONKY*

NEW FOLLOWERS NOTE: my ~debut~ work of narrative history, about female jewish resistance workers in poland during the holocaust, will be published by harpercollins next fall.

*and divided into endnotes for sourcing and feetnote for information that doesn't quite fit into the narrative but still needs to be there. those don't really figure into the iceberg metaphor tho

[howlerbat]

my scientific rendition of the Treaties of Tilsit

[wordsaficionado]

If you’re ever insecure about how often you use commas or how long your sentences are I IMPLORE you to read the Treaty of Paris (1783), specifically article two.

510 words.

2 periods.

FIVE HUNDRED AND TEN WORDS.

A GRAND TOTAL OF TWO SENTENCES!

SIGNED BY DOZENS OF PEOPLE TO SET UP A TREATY AND AUTHORIZE LAND!!

Like don’t worry babes your 3 commas and semi colon are NOTHING to the revolution era and that’s what truly matters.

[ciderbird]

was in Hermitage today and found this amazing composition

the exes reunited

[pratchettquotes]

"You thought the bunting and fireworks and handshakes and pledges after Koom Valley was signed and sealed was the end of it, yes? Personally, I have always considered this a mere interlude. In short, Margolotta, peace is what you have while incubating the next war. It is impossible to accommodate everyone and twice as impossible to please all dwarfs."

Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

[vpofcookies]

Have y'all heard the story where hair was a symbol of peace because rulers would cut their hair when they declared war - so long hair represented a peaceful empire, a powerful group that no one dared to threaten, or a ruler that was slow to anger?

Consider: antarctic empire where philza's hair is short to show that he is constantly prepared to battle the threats around them with full military force vs Techno with long hair as a sign that the enemies around them will have no impact on the peace within the empire because the threat they pose is so insignificant he won't even acknowledge it. The threat would be gone before he would finish cutting his hair and so he doesn't.