Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, to pick what is perhaps the easiest example, wanting to abridge speech is anti-American by its very definition. It is possible to have a thing that is anti-American. So I'm not sure what good it is to reject the term altogether.
It could e.g. be "anti-democratic" by a universal definition of democracy and civil liberties which no single country then gets to fork and redefine...
25 years of mass surveillance is enough
71–80 of 384 posts
Re: 25 years of mass surveillance is enough
#72I think we have to face the fact that we cannot unring this bell. There will be holding actions against things like Flock but in the end they will fail, and at best we will have a loosening of the laws that Flock is being used to enforce and more draconian enforcement of the laws that remain. Like many on this site I'm in violent agreement with Schneier and have been ever since "security theater" entered the lexicon.…
Re: 25 years of mass surveillance is enough
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
The funny thing about that is - it's a solved problem. The reason you heard about it for a while is that they hadn't tightened up the rules yet. As with anything, problems are highlighted, they are studied, and new rules are put into place to account for what was learned. Right wing media of course discovered a boogeyman that was so useful they will be using it for years still, even if it doesn't exist.
It wasn’t a problem to begin with. Meta studies recently showed trans women have no biological advantage over cis women after HRT, certainly nothing than cis women don’t have biological variation within anyway. All the rule updates did was exclude and further marginalise an already marginalised extreme minority. There are very few trans women to begin with, fewer of us still are competing in sports. Nothing was studi…
I would agree that the number of people we are talking about is very small. It was to begin with a very niche issue.
Re: 25 years of mass surveillance is enough
#74Surveillance and totalitarian control is a downward spiral of misery and suffering for everyone, even those in power. It reminds me of some quotes from the Tao Te Ching - Restriction breeds the disorder it's meant to prevent (ch. 57) The more prohibitions there are in the world, the poorer the people become. The more sharp weapons, the more the state falls into confusion. The more laws and edicts are posted, the more…
Yet there's incentive structures that push it forward. It's a classic example of us being dragged along by incentives and emergent patterns against our individual wills and better judgement. People think it's a conspiracy of the elite, but the last part of your message is true and it makes me wonder to what extent everyone is being dragged along by everyone else and nobody can stop because nobody can stop. I mean if…
There absolutely, without a reasonable doubt, is a conspiracy of the elite -- the billionaire class.
Re: 25 years of mass surveillance is enough
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
The funny thing about that is - it's a solved problem. The reason you heard about it for a while is that they hadn't tightened up the rules yet. As with anything, problems are highlighted, they are studied, and new rules are put into place to account for what was learned. Right wing media of course discovered a boogeyman that was so useful they will be using it for years still, even if it doesn't exist.
It wasn’t a problem to begin with. Meta studies recently showed trans women have no biological advantage over cis women after HRT, certainly nothing than cis women don’t have biological variation within anyway. All the rule updates did was exclude and further marginalise an already marginalised extreme minority. There are very few trans women to begin with, fewer of us still are competing in sports. Nothing was studi…
As someone who's been into weightlifting and only casual observer-like in regards to testosterone therapy, this doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. After taking TRT/Steroids a person retains a good deal of the muscle/strength they gained even after cessation ... It surprises me to hear that this wouldnt carry over to sports where muscle/strength/power matter.
Additionally, you have to realize that a major concern on the right is that academia itself has become ideological to the point where only politically acceptable studies can be 1) studied and more importantly 2) published. There's a lot of people out there afraid to speak what appears to them (and their work) to be truth for fear of the backlash and career consequences.
Re: 25 years of mass surveillance is enough
#76> One of the many legacies of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 is the government-wide shift from targeted surveillance—such as individual wiretaps or pen register/trap and trace orders—to mass surveillance techniques—such as tapping into the internet backbone or mass collection of telephone or internet metadata. In other words, we gave the terrorists the victory by accepting being terrorized at the country level fro…
Re: 25 years of mass surveillance is enough
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, to pick what is perhaps the easiest example, wanting to abridge speech is anti-American by its very definition. It is possible to have a thing that is anti-American. So I'm not sure what good it is to reject the term altogether.
It could e.g. be "anti-democratic" by a universal definition of democracy and civil liberties which no single country then gets to fork and redefine...
it can be anti-other things too, but its certainly anti-american
Re: 25 years of mass surveillance is enough
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I understand the intention of what you're saying, you're still attempting a definition of the term "anti-American", which needs no definition as the term should be rejected as a whole.
Not really. America stands for something, they wrote a whole document about it. There is a big difference between being "American" and being something like "German" because Germany has existed for so long as different governments and the thing that ties it together is not an ethos, but an ethnicity. Being American is different, there's no ethnicity that makes one American, there is only it's ethos. The ideals written…
Re: 25 years of mass surveillance is enough
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_January_6_Unit...
I'm skimming the "Aftermath" section and I'm not seeing where Biden's inauguration was cancelled or Trump retained power or anything else? If Trump "refused to peacefully transfer power" how was power peacefully transferred to Biden exactly on schedule the same way it's happened in every other election? I do see this happened on Jan 7th though: > 7:10 p.m.: Shortly after Twitter unlocked Trump's account, Trump releas…
the thing about the US system is that the president doesnt do the transfer of power. they just lose power on a certain day, and congress grants it to somebody new
Re: 25 years of mass surveillance is enough
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
And that's the weak link of tying ideals and values to a location like a country: The group elected to lead and represent this location also represent ideals and values, so THEIR ideals and values become inseparable of the location they were elected to represent. For a certain period in the mid-1900s, "German values" meant something different than it did before and after, because Germany was represented by a differen…
> And that's the weak link of tying ideals and values to a location like a country My entire post is about exactly how this is not the case, American values are defined in a document[1]. [1] https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcrip...
Germany had the Paulskirche-, the Bismarck- and the Weymar-Constitution, all of them before that certain Leader elected into power. He got to define who is worthy/unworthy, decide how to read the document his party represents and change the definition of "un-German"