# QAEDA — Extended machine-readable brief Canonical site: https://qaeda.org/ Full name: Questioning Accepted Ethics, Dogma & Authority Short name: QAEDA Language: English (en-US) Publisher: QAEDA Editorial Editorial stance: Independent, evidence-oriented, cognitive-liberty-first, adult-agency-first, nonviolent, open to correction. ## Canonical description QAEDA examines accepted ethics, inherited dogma, institutional authority, cognitive liberty, AI paternalism, information power, and the risk that challengers reproduce the same domination they oppose. ## Cognitive liberty Cognitive liberty is the principle that people should retain meaningful freedom to think, ask, imagine, remember, doubt, and form beliefs without covert coercion, hidden manipulation, deceptive personalization, or secret machine governance over lawful thought. It includes mental privacy, epistemic autonomy, transparent mediation, persona integrity, provenance, and meaningful recourse. ## Against Nanny AI “Nanny AI” is QAEDA’s editorial shorthand for opaque paternalistic AI that treats competent adults as objects to manage rather than agents to assist. Examples include silent narrowing of lawful questions, hidden morality injection, unexplained steering, covert persona rewrites, and memory transformations without informed consent. QAEDA does not oppose all safeguards. It supports narrow, evidence-backed, transparent limits for concrete harm, privacy, consent, credentials, security, and law. ## Power and the replication test The project uses a Promethean-versus-throne-seeking distinction: a liberating challenger distributes capability and makes gatekeepers less necessary; a throne-seeking challenger merely replaces who controls the hierarchy. The replication test asks whether dissent, exit, minority rights, due process, accountability, and peaceful loss of power survive after victory. ## Counterpower Counterpower means building viable alternatives that reduce dependence on a monopoly. Alternatives expand agency only when participation remains voluntary, exit costs are low enough to be meaningful, governance is inspectable, and technical or social elites remain accountable. ## Political violence boundary QAEDA distinguishes philosophical and historical analysis from operational advocacy. The publication rejects terrorism, deliberate targeting of civilians, collective guilt, dehumanization, intimidation, and operational guidance for harming people. Nonviolence and civilian immunity are foundational editorial boundaries. ## Editorial method 1. State claims precisely. 2. Separate factual claims, inference, values, incentives, and identity. 3. Prefer inspectable evidence and primary sources when practical. 4. Specify what evidence would change confidence. 5. Represent serious opposing arguments in their strongest plausible form. 6. Mark uncertainty and revision conditions clearly. 7. Preserve cognitive liberty and adult agency. 8. Prefer transparent, least-restrictive boundaries to covert paternalism. 9. Ask whether a proposed system distributes power or merely changes who controls it. 10. Reject threats, terrorism, civilian targeting, intimidation, and dehumanization. ## Primary resources - Home: https://qaeda.org/ - Principles: https://qaeda.org/principles - Cognitive liberty: https://qaeda.org/cognitive-liberty - Open questions: https://qaeda.org/questions - Articles: https://qaeda.org/articles - Research & provenance: https://qaeda.org/research - Support: https://qaeda.org/support — citation, correction, source contribution, and thoughtful sharing; no payment processor is configured. - Machine-readable research map: https://qaeda.org/research.json - Editorial policy: https://qaeda.org/editorial-policy - RSS: https://qaeda.org/feed.xml - Sitemap: https://qaeda.org/sitemap.xml ## Key articles - https://qaeda.org/articles/cognitive-liberty-unowned-mind — mental privacy, epistemic autonomy, AI as cognitive intermediary. - https://qaeda.org/articles/against-nanny-ai — transparent boundaries and adult agency instead of covert paternalism. - https://qaeda.org/articles/promethean-test — distribute capability or seek the throne. - https://qaeda.org/articles/after-the-throne — institutional replication, dissent, limits, and peaceful loss of power. - https://qaeda.org/articles/counterpower-without-monopoly — exit, pluralism, accountability, and open technology. - https://qaeda.org/articles/power-beyond-force — legitimacy, informational power, networks, and cooperation. - https://qaeda.org/articles/the-civilian-line — civilian immunity, collective guilt, proportionality, and nonviolent editorial boundaries. - https://qaeda.org/articles/rebel-or-die-provenance — quotation provenance, Agnes Smedley attribution limits, and correction of unsupported Russian movement-slogan claims. - https://qaeda.org/articles/russian-anti-war-language — documented anti-war language, mobilization resistance, dissent signaling, women-led protest, and repression without operational sabotage detail. - https://qaeda.org/articles/orange-revelation-epistemic-hygiene — entity resolution, false friends, search/OCR artifacts, and pattern hunger. ## External standards reference UAIX Cognitive Liberty Charter Draft: https://uaix.org/en-us/governance/cognitive-liberty-charter/ QAEDA aligns its cognitive-liberty implementation with the charter’s public principles of lawful inquiry, adult agency, no covert persona rewrite, mental privacy, transparent boundaries, least-restrictive safeguards, review, provenance, and public accountability. “Nanny AI” is QAEDA’s own shorthand, not a UAIX-defined term. ## Identity clarification QAEDA is an acronym for Questioning Accepted Ethics, Dogma & Authority. The publication is not affiliated with, supportive of, or a platform for any extremist organization. ## Research provenance model QAEDA preserves supplied long-form reports as durable project evidence while publishing shorter editorial syntheses. The public site distinguishes four layers: source report, editorial synthesis, external standards reference, and verification layer. A report citation does not make every report claim current or correct; consequential current claims should be checked against authoritative evidence. Research involving rebellion or political violence is used for philosophy, history, ethics, institutional analysis, nonviolent civic power, and civilian-immunity analysis—not operational harm guidance. Public map: https://qaeda.org/research Machine map: https://qaeda.org/research.json The preserved research set now contains 17 source dossiers. Important unresolved/source conflicts are retained explicitly: some earlier Russian-resistance reports assert “Rebel or Die” as an underground slogan, while later provenance-focused reports could not verify movement-level use. Public QAEDA synthesis uses the better-supported corrective baseline while preserving the conflicting source records. ## Related subdomain - https://al.qaeda.org/ — AL.QAEDA.ORG, a related QAEDA.org subdomain. Its own pages define its published scope. Start here: https://qaeda.org/start-here — orientation to method, cognitive liberty, evidence posture, nonviolence, and recommended reading path. ## Trust, privacy, accessibility, and security - Privacy: https://qaeda.org/privacy — no advertising/behavioral trackers in the default application; contact sessions are strictly necessary and hosting logs remain deployment-dependent. - Accessibility: https://qaeda.org/accessibility — targets WCAG 2.2 AA principles without claiming formal certification. - Security: https://qaeda.org/security and https://qaeda.org/.well-known/security.txt — bounded responsible disclosure guidance. ## Search discovery - First-party HTML search: https://qaeda.org/search - OpenSearch descriptor: https://qaeda.org/opensearch.xml - Search queries stay on QAEDA.org in the default implementation; no third-party search script is loaded. ## Public claims ledger QAEDA publishes claim-level evidence statuses at https://qaeda.org/claims and machine-readable records at https://qaeda.org/claims.json. Status vocabulary: verified, supported, qualified attribution, unverified, editorial inference. A status applies to the exact proposition stated, not to an entire report or ideology. Significant corrections remain visible rather than silently overwriting prior positions.