How to stop Donald Trump

I entered the title of this post as a search phrase in Google, and here are some of the top results:

Indivisible.org: Defeat Trump Toolkit – This resource was created in January 2023, has suggestions for organizing events, recruiting group members, and links to other content at Indivisible.org.

DefeatTrump.org: Site created by Indivisible.org. Has a way to sign up for a mailing list, and more targeted resources.

A Citizen’s Guide to Beating Donald Trump: Published in March 2020 and written by Barack Obama’s campaign manager. Quote from the Amazon page: ” A playbook for the common citizen, A Citizen’s Guide to Beating Donald Trump addresses the many things individuals can do in 2020 every day, without having to leave their jobs, move to Iowa, or spend every waking moment on the election.”

Congressman Jerry Nadler: Some specific actions listed, slanted toward stopping Trump during his term as president.

The New Yorker: Nine Ways to Oppose Donald Trump – Written in December 2016 after the election, the article lists nine specific ways to help stop Trump from being successful in office.

The Guardian: “Election season has come. Here’s what you need to do to stop Trump from winning” – Written in September 2023, Robert Reich (former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton adminstration) has some advice/suggestions for getting involved.

In early April, I posted about Cleveland Plain Dealer editor Chris Quinn, who wrote a column saying that he was going to continue to tell the truth about Donald Trump, even when it offends those who are paying for information. Dan Froomkin has an excellent interview on PressWatch with Chris Quinn, including more on how Quinn took a long time in writing the piece, and opinions on the national news media and how editors are afraid. It is a good read!

The joy of podcasting

Over the last few weeks, I restarted recording some short podcasts while I drive home from work. It was fun to do, and I decided on the last one to not do any post-processing or edits, and thought it sounded ok. WordPress automatically creates an enclosure, so anyone could subscribe to my podcasting (of my 3-5 regular readers). My “kit” consists of my Samsung A10 smartphone, the Voice Recorder Android app, and a Logitech H111 headset that plugs into the speaker jack of my phone – that’s it! That’s all that it takes to record the podcast. And, of course, anyone can use any podcast app to listen to the episodes. As Anil Dash said in a post earlier this year commenting on the “wherever you get your podcasts” line, “radical systems can survive and even thrive in the modern world of tech and media. They can inspire new creators to make similar systems that are unowned, uncentralized, and a little bit uncontrollable.”.

To close, I recently listened to a Radio Open Source podcast episode focusing on the life of Hannah Arendt, who lived under authoritarian and totalitarian regimes in the 20th century. One line of her writing stood out to me: “We are free to change the world and start something new in it.”. I think that every podcast is a chance to change the world, and anyone is free to create one and send it out into the world. Thank you, Dave Winer, for making this possible.

An example of semaphore using email

Earlier this week, I commented on Ken Smith’s inquiry into the use of semaphore for communication, noting that I felt his interest in the use of semaphore was to inform people in case of a crisis. This morning, I received an email alert from the Americans of Conscience Checklist. This group sends email on a regular basis with selected actions to promote progressive issues (I am a subscriber). In this email alert, (called a “time-sensitive” action), subscribers were asked to call US senators to ask them to vote “No” on the FISA reauthorization bill. I think this fits the “use case” of semaphore that Ken Smith was discussing. The people subscribed to this list have been “trained” to take action on suggested items on a periodic basis, so they would have the necessary reflexes to take action for a time-sensitive request.

But, you may say, “I get emails asking me to do things (“buy stuff”) all the time – what is the difference?”. I think the difference is those emails mostly go unanswered, and the user has been trained to ignore most, if not all of them. If a group has been trained to take action in a certain way, and there is trust in the communication path, then emails like this can have an effect.

I was reading through a set of articles on CNN.com, and got the following message: “You have reached your daily article limit. Continue reading with a free CNN account or come back tomorrow.”. I have NEVER seen this before – has this happened to anyone else?

Some examples of resistance

On April 6, I published a post on “The Resistance” commenting on someone asking where “The Resistance” was. Shortly after after that post, there was a protest in Oregon over plans to log 14,000 acres of forest. This past Monday, my wife told me that there were protesters in Eugene, Oregon blocking the I-5 freeway to protest the Israel-Hamas war. There were also protesters in Hillsboro, Oregon, and later that evening I saw news coverage of multiple protests across the US and the world (see also Truthout coverage (via Denny Henke). The April 15 protests appear to have been a coordinated economic blockade by multiple groups. Looks like there is some resistance going on out there!

PS – see this Instagram post for additional pics

What does “working together” mean?

I read a post by Dave Winer today titled “Working together“. After some recollections about past social networks, his main examples of working together are two discussions he was involved in on the Threads platform. In the first discussion, he replies to someone, and they have a conversation, sharing knowledge. In the second discussion, he is one of many commenters, and it was not apparent to me that anyone replied to his comment.

So – this set of examples are what I would call normal conversations. I would not call it “working together”, but would call it “talking” (no common purpose, no goal, no real accomplishment). Dave says he wants to “crack the nut of figuring out how to work together”. However, at the same time, Dave blocks people who comment on his social media posts. How can you have a conversation (talking) if you block the other person because you don’t like what they have to offer to the conversation? And for calling Chat-GPT “always up for working with you“, that is a laugh. That should be translated as “Chat-GPT always takes my prompt and gives me some response, and I can take it or leave it, or modify my prompt”.

I would offer this post by Colin Wilson from our collaboration on MyStatusTool as a better example of “working together” – and, I would also add, working together with respect, as opposed to this example of working together.

The language of music

This past year, my wife and I resumed singing in our church choir. It was fun to get together with old friends and making music. As we started, I realized how much of a language written music represents. All of the people in the choir are comfortable in reading music, so the duration and pitch of the notes, the rests, all come together in a common, joyful sound. We are all “reading from the same page”, so to speak. Now there can be variation in musical language, just as in computer languages. However, they represent a common grammar, a common ground, where people can come together to create music or software. We are all richer for the experience.

Can the use of semaphore be useful today?

Ken Smith recently wrote about the use of semaphore and RSS in transmitting information. He relates an experience where he organized students to send a message across a university campus. The historic use of semaphore flags was to communicate between ships. In the 18th century, the “optical telegraph” was developed, and messages could be sent from Amsterdam to Venice in an hour. With the development of the electric telegraph, the use of the optical telegraph fell to the wayside.

Today, people can use RSS readers to monitor posts on websites, and use other social media systems (Twitter, Facebook, Threads, Bluesky) to do the same. The rssCloud protocol also provides almost instant notification. I think that the question Ken Smith is asking is “can a group of individuals use this to be able to respond to a crisis“. The answer is “Yes”, but people “would have to be trained to do more than just send or receive a message on the system”.

So – do we choose to do something here? What crisis should we work to avoid?

Knowledge management and organizing information for use

A short podcast on some of my recent experiences on knowledge management and organizing information for use:

Some references from the podcast:

Organizing information for use – A Github repo summarizing writings from Ken Smith on organizing information for use

Link Zettlekasten – My experiment in organizing bookmarks using OPML

Writings on Organizing Information – Frank McPherson list of essays on this topic, this is one on the value of indexes

Op-Ed Links – Source of information on writing op-eds/letters to the editor from Ken Smith

Knowledge management – My collection of knowledge management posts on my weblog

Commonplace book – Wikipedia

Chris Aldrich – Differentiating online variations of the Commonplace Book: Digital Gardens, Wikis, Zettlekasten, Waste Books, Florilegia, and Second Brains

Waste book – think of a “Field Notes” notebook that you capture ideas/info and transfer to something else

Chris Aldrich – Reframing and simplifying the idea of how to keep a Zettelkasten