======================
 Husserl and blackout
======================

I have read a half of Husserl's "Cartesian Meditations", along with
the corresponding Routledge Philosophy GuideBook, on
phenomenology. Its premise is interesting; the first step, to
investigate the perceived world and the process of its perception,
starting from "I think, therefore I am" and without assuming that the
perceived world is real or not, seems sensible. I imagine that from
that point one could begin testing and investigating whether the
observed world would explain (or at least not contradict) the
investigated consciousness, whether it could be a coherent and
self-explanatory (at least to the extent we are able to confirm)
system. While Husserl (and the guidebook) introduces some new concepts
and vocabulary, describes arbitrary-looking parts of a model of the
mind, and apparently just keeps going that way, without providing
justifications of those parts, let alone the "absolute grounding of
science", so I decided to drop these books for now. Although some
parts were interesting still: the sensible idealist perspective (at
least until the possibility of whole mental life arising from brain
activity is denied, also without a justification accompanying it), the
focus on "consciousness of", intentionality. The mention of
"habitualities" as decisions changing the person made me to connect
virtues as habits in virtue ethics (such as "a wise person is one who
acts wisely") with individualizing choices in existentialism, which
seems obvious, but I do not recall comparing those before. Or maybe I
have simply paid more attention to it than I normally would, since it
was one of the few bits that I was able to make sense of at that
point.

Planned to read Sartre's "Being and Nothingness" after that, and
possibly Heidegger's "Being and Time" between those, but unsure about
it now. Started reading the translator's introduction to "Being and
Nothingness", which presents the book as similar to Husserl's, also
building an arbitrary-looking model. And apparently the book is
criticized for its abstruseness, so it would take slow and careful
reading. Perhaps I should focus on practical philosophy, and
particularly political philosophy and ethics, since it is the kind
that that is being censored. Though I heard that phenomenology used to
be censored around here in the recent past, but back then there were
attempts to ban major religions and promote materialism as a part of
Marxism, while this time around the state tries to exploit religions,
so phenomenology seems less likely to be banned again, unless they
will classify it as "Satanism" or some other kind of
"extremism". History is another area I should study more of, since it
is being rewritten most actively. Apparently along with economics, as
of recently, and yet again. There are many fiction, pop-sci, and STEM
books that I would like to read and study, but going to read those
after the more endangered ones.

Speaking of censorship, another Internet blackout is in effect here
since 2026-01-14, similar to the one described earlier, which happened
on 2025-10-27. As before, multiple Moscow ISPs are affected, and it
did not show up in the general news. Unclear what is the reason behind
these: gradual introduction of a constant blackout, attempts to expose
(or simply block, heavy-handedly) proxy/VPN traffic, or something
else. There is a more complete and overlapping in time Internet
blackout in Iran, but at least they have active protests to explain it
with. The last time it lasted for a day, now it continues for
days. What shows up in the news though is Telegram throttling; that is
the last major instant messenger still widely used here out of those
that are not explicitly backdoored and directly controlled by the
government, despite its voice calls being blocked.

Sometimes I wonder about the future after the current wave of
"conservatism" and related events: there will be these years in the
past still, with all the damage inflicted, complete with those who did
support or inflict it. Actually the time before this wave was similar,
being a break from oppression, but I did not live through its
preceding period of totalitarianism as an adult myself. Hopefully at
least this time the lessons will be learned better, and it will not be
repeated anytime soon afterwards.

In addition to Wikipedia and books, recently I downloaded some of the
textfiles.com archives, so I will have a little more to read during a
potential complete blackout (particularly of less serious, more
lively, playful, and amusing texts), for as long as I have a working
computer, electricity, and the backups. I used to imagine that
steganography would be used when things get particularly bad, to evade
pervasive censorship, and perhaps one may count the methods employed
for proxy protocol obfuscation as such, but I am not aware of anything
like people organizing to hide information in files uploaded to local,
non-blocked resources; I do not even see people switching to open and
federated protocols, OpenPGP or similar systems. Some try out mesh
networks, and maybe I should finally try those out as well; they are
interesting, but their transmitters could easily serve as beacons
inviting the police if used for relaying, as they are supposed to in a
mesh network. But without sufficient prearrangements, even local
communication and socialization are going to be complicated, possibly
turning into a likely-vain quest of search for game-theoretic focal
points. Many did solve the problem for themselves radically, by
emigrating. Out of those who are here, it feels like many do not
resist enough, jumping too readily into the directions they are pushed
to; occasionally I wonder whether I should resist more actively
myself, but that seems like an easy way to mess up one's life
further. Even with a complete and long blackout, and under a serious
continued oppression generally, I think a sensible course of action is
to aim being a decent person, but covertly enough to avoid prosecution
and imprisonment, and not to give up. One can practice that without a
blackout as well.

More on text files: since such archives look useful for archival and
offline reading, I do serve my homepage as an archive, available at
<../files/archive.tgz>, but the relatively useful notes are hypertext,
not plain text as the blog posts are. In the past I thought of
providing alternative versions by converting those into plain text,
but that seemed excessive, since the used HTML is simple enough to do
that automatically. Recently noticed that a better conversion into
plain text would require a distinction between different kinds of
hyperlinks: there are some that are provided for convenience, such as
when linking an uncommon term or a mentioned software project's
website, but which would be better to omit in a plain text version,
and there are important ones, such as those in lists of links or links
to articles, where it would make more sense to omit the link caption
than the URL. And between those two kinds, there are those that can be
moved into footnotes: not essential, but useful to reference
exactly. So maybe it would be useful to mark hyperlinks accordingly,
and then to export into plain text while taking those marks into
account.

Other than that, my sleep is disrupted still, and further reduced and
worsened by the shoulder/neck pain I experience since the New Year,
which seems to worsen while sleeping (not moving), as some injuries
do, and to which I wake up. Hopefully it is just a minor injury that
will heal, and not related to a chronic condition. I try to be more
careful with exercises because of that, even skipped one workout and
reduced another one this week. Probably the sleep is not helped by the
snow removal machines loudly beeping at night, and the ongoing events;
even the Internet radio (music stream) I usually had turned on at
night is blocked now, so now there is an audible reminder of the
general situation around.

Also tried making a carrot cake for the first time. I hoped that they
may be a little healthier than others, but apparently not: this one
had about 1 kg of sugar, including that in the frosting, with the
recipe warning that the texture will change if the sugar is
reduced. It was tasty, but unhealthy, well above the recommended
maximum of 30 to 50 grams of added sugar per day.

Out of relatively fun activities at work, I have finally set systemd
service sandboxing, along with AppArmor profiles, for my programs. It
feels disproportionate to do that for mostly Haskell programs that run
under dedicated users with carefully set permissions already, while
there are Perl and PHP scripts running as root on the same system, but
it was something to play with. SELinux is more advanced than AppArmor,
but I decided to go with the latter, since it is used in Debian by
default, and I expect the software installed from repositories to work
more smoothly with it.

As for personal computing, recently I was reminded that FBReader is
proprietary now, the version in Debian repositories is quite buggy,
and apparently will not get many fixes; looked for other EPUB readers,
but they tend to be quite resource-hungry, based on heavy browser
engines. Maybe I should finally try nov.el, for reading those in
Emacs.

In addition to the unfortunate local developments related to mobile
devices and smartphones in particular, as mentioned previously, news
appear about Google's steps to lock down Android. I have barely
started using smartphone software, but apparently it is almost the
time to cease. On a related topic, in December I received an SMS
notification from my mobile network operator (Beeline/VimpelCom) about
them providing a month of unlimited traffic; I did not use it, but
being familiar with mobile carriers and this one in particular, I was
worried that it is their trick to zero out the prepaid traffic, so
checked that it is still there. A month later, received another SMS
notification, saying that there is under 500 MB of traffic left, and a
new package will be purchased automatically soon. Checked again, found
that the prepaid traffic is gone. Tried to contact their support via a
chat, but there is only a bot now, which works as an alternative
interface to regular website functionality; called them, but there was
a similar voice bot, claiming that it is not possible to contact an
operator. On the next day, I called again, tried different prompts to
switch to an operator, to which the bot kept replying the same thing,
but after three iterations it asked whether I would like to switch to
a specialist, right after claiming that it is not possible to switch
to an operator. Then the operator filed a ticket, and after a week I
received a refund, so I can buy the same service for a higher price
(as those were increased) now. Still unfortunate, and I imagine that
many people do not notice such things, or give up. An online search
suggested that VimpelCom does this sort of thing at least since the
summer. As a side note, my mobile traffic usage was quite modest so
far, and that single 30 GB traffic package would have lasted for two
to three lifetimes at this rate. Availability of both technologies and
connectivity was rising, even for people in worse financial
situations.

Considering purchasing a new laptop and/or building a new computer
this year. The memory prices are high, but in case if it will become
problematic to acquire personal computers here in the future, yet it
will be possible to use the ones I have, better to have relatively new
and spare ones handy, so that I will be able to actually read those
collected books, listen to the music, to program and use software
generally, even if not to communicate and collect more.


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:Date: 2026-01-17