“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.
At the start of 2018, the company attempted to launch an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) which would enable it to enable payments (and earn the cash that comes from doing so). The initial signals were promising, especially given Telegram’s user base is already fairly crypto-savvy. It raised an initial tranche of cash – worth more than a billion dollars – to help develop the coin before opening sales to the public. Unfortunately, third-party sales of coins bought in those initial fundraising rounds raised the ire of the SEC, which brought the hammer down on the whole operation. In 2020, officials ordered Telegram to pay a fine of $18.5 million and hand back much of the cash that it had raised. "He has kind of an old-school cyber-libertarian world view where technology is there to set you free," Maréchal said. Right now the digital security needs of Russians and Ukrainians are very different, and they lead to very different caveats about how to mitigate the risks associated with using Telegram. For Ukrainians in Ukraine, whose physical safety is at risk because they are in a war zone, digital security is probably not their highest priority. They may value access to news and communication with their loved ones over making sure that all of their communications are encrypted in such a manner that they are indecipherable to Telegram, its employees, or governments with court orders. WhatsApp, a rival messaging platform, introduced some measures to counter disinformation when Covid-19 was first sweeping the world. "And that set off kind of a battle royale for control of the platform that Durov eventually lost," said Nathalie Maréchal of the Washington advocacy group Ranking Digital Rights.
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