“For people, for place” actually means something. In large part, the Western world is drowning in a sea of sentiments that equate to little more than abstractions. These abstractions widen more and more as the Western world inches closer and closer to the globalist utopia and pushes us further away from the love of the soil right under our feet or the people we can reach out and touch. But love is never abstract, as Wendell Berry once reminded us. Humanity requires the ties that bind - our people, our place. We don’t love our own soil or people because of some abstract idea, we love them because it’s a part of us. The roots run deep. The people that sacrificed and put their faces in this mud so we could walk across their back to a better future breathed the same air and carried the same blood in their veins. And we honor them. We won’t squander our heritage and we sure as hell won’t sit idly by while it gets stolen from us and our children.
“For people, for place” actually means something. In large part, the Western world is drowning in a sea of sentiments that equate to little more than abstractions. These abstractions widen more and more as the Western world inches closer and closer to the globalist utopia and pushes us further away from the love of the soil right under our feet or the people we can reach out and touch. But love is never abstract, as Wendell Berry once reminded us. Humanity requires the ties that bind - our people, our place. We don’t love our own soil or people because of some abstract idea, we love them because it’s a part of us. The roots run deep. The people that sacrificed and put their faces in this mud so we could walk across their back to a better future breathed the same air and carried the same blood in their veins. And we honor them. We won’t squander our heritage and we sure as hell won’t sit idly by while it gets stolen from us and our children.
On Telegram’s website, it says that Pavel Durov “supports Telegram financially and ideologically while Nikolai (Duvov)’s input is technological.” Currently, the Telegram team is based in Dubai, having moved around from Berlin, London and Singapore after departing Russia. Meanwhile, the company which owns Telegram is registered in the British Virgin Islands. The company maintains that it cannot act against individual or group chats, which are “private amongst their participants,” but it will respond to requests in relation to sticker sets, channels and bots which are publicly available. During the invasion of Ukraine, Pavel Durov has wrestled with this issue a lot more prominently than he has before. Channels like Donbass Insider and Bellum Acta, as reported by Foreign Policy, started pumping out pro-Russian propaganda as the invasion began. So much so that the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council issued a statement labeling which accounts are Russian-backed. Ukrainian officials, in potential violation of the Geneva Convention, have shared imagery of dead and captured Russian soldiers on the platform. One thing that Telegram now offers to all users is the ability to “disappear” messages or set remote deletion deadlines. That enables users to have much more control over how long people can access what you’re sending them. Given that Russian law enforcement officials are reportedly (via Insider) stopping people in the street and demanding to read their text messages, this could be vital to protect individuals from reprisals. Telegram was co-founded by Pavel and Nikolai Durov, the brothers who had previously created VKontakte. VK is Russia’s equivalent of Facebook, a social network used for public and private messaging, audio and video sharing as well as online gaming. In January, SimpleWeb reported that VK was Russia’s fourth most-visited website, after Yandex, YouTube and Google’s Russian-language homepage. In 2016, Forbes’ Michael Solomon described Pavel Durov (pictured, below) as the “Mark Zuckerberg of Russia.” Groups are also not fully encrypted, end-to-end. This includes private groups. Private groups cannot be seen by other Telegram users, but Telegram itself can see the groups and all of the communications that you have in them. All of the same risks and warnings about channels can be applied to groups.
from vn
