Posts

The Power of Propaganda: From the Roman Empire to Social Media

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Throughout history, those in power have understood that controlling the narrative is as crucial as conquering territory. The Roman Empire, for example, expanded not only through its armies but also through symbols, monuments, and stories that reinforced Rome's image as the center of the world. From triumphal arches to coins stamped with the emperor's face, every object served as a reminder of imperial authority. Over time, propaganda evolved. In the Middle Ages, the Church used art and architecture to convey messages of faith and power. In the 20th century, totalitarian regimes perfected propaganda through radio, film, and posters. Joseph Goebbels, in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, with his revolutionary posters, are compelling examples of how public opinion can be shaped through the relentless repetition of images and slogans. Today, in the digital age, propaganda hasn't disappeared; it has simply shifted its stage. Social media has become a battleground where governme...

Fediverse, the open-source universe for those who want to protect their data

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What is the Fediverse and why should you know about it? Are you tired of social media platforms that invade your privacy, flood you with ads, or decide what you see with their algorithms? Then it's time to discover the fediverse. The fediverse (a portmanteau of "federated" and "universe") is an ecosystem of decentralized social networks that, although located on different servers, can communicate with each other thanks to open standards like ActivityPub. Imagine something like email: you can have an account on one server and talk to someone on another. It works like this! Some fediverse platforms: Mastodon: an alternative to Twitter/X, without algorithms or ads. Pixelfed: similar to Instagram, but without selling your data. PeerTube: a decentralized alternative to YouTube. Pleroma: a lightweight and flexible network. Funkwhale: Perfect for sharing and discovering music. Why is it different? Decentralization: No single company controls everything. Interopera...

Donald Trump, the New Führer

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To continue with our political thread, specifically focused on ideological extremes, today, we will touch on a somewhat heated topic, the Trump effect. If we go back a bit some history, we could go back in time to the last century, where the most important far-right regimes appeared in Europe from 1920-1930 in countries like Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Germany. The regimes of these countries, also known as fascists, were based on authoritarianism and expansionism. Francisco Franco in Spain, Benito Mussolini in Italy, Antonio de Oliveira Salazar in Portugal and Adolf Hitler in Germany shared some characteristics, such as xenophobia, militarism, and exaggerated patriotism. And although we believed that this had remained in the past in the last decade, we have seen the birth of a new breed of leaders with the same or perhaps worse thoughts, cases such as Bolsonaro in Brazil, Uribe in Colombia, or the case, that concerns us Trump the United States. President Donald Trump left us speechless...

Two political trends built in thousand days

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Although I have lived far from my home country for almost 6 years, I closely follow what happens there, one of the topics that I have always wanted to study and I am passionate is politics,   in special about politics and its scope in society. For this reason, I want to focus this blog on world politics, specifically Colombian politics and its two tendencies Liberal and conservative, but in this case of the extreme right and extreme left. Colombian Politics is built from democracy, ok, our teachers tried to teach us that many years ago, but it really is a utopia, so this is not really true these tendencies were born in the past and they have tried to maintain a balance in the political spectrum, have become two insane and dangerous thoughts. This dichotomy born in 18 century when two forces against each other for the power of one country, Liberals leaded for the people and conservatives leaded for the government called like that for your thought.   The Thousand Days War was fo...

Communism vs Nazism a love and hate story

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National-Socialism and Marxism-Leninism; two political doctrines closely linked to two political regimes that are part of contemporary history. The highly interesting distortions of these two doctrines are worthy of study. Each country within its political spectrum, regardless of its tendency, will always be involved in the two most relevant aspects: communism called socialism or progressivism and Nationalism, Nazism, Fascism or the currently called ultra-right. After the Second World War, the powerful propaganda machine of the USSR made possible the almost total disappearance of the term National-Socialism, transforming it into “German fascism”, thus Hitler's National-Socialism had never existed! What Mussolini would have enjoyed in his vanity of having survived…! The explanation for this paradox - or rather, nonsense - is based on 1) It could not be tolerated in any way that the word "Socialism" appeared associated with "Nazism". 2) It was convenient to unify ...