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25 years of mass surveillance is enough

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Re: 25 years of mass surveillance is enough

#291

Post by zahlman »

smallmancontrov wrote: post #31
rickdeckard wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, because by the new definition, the leader is "peak American", so everything in collision with his view is naturally "anti-American". The usage of the term "anti-American" by anyone in a public role should be rejected as insufficient definition and unfit for a representative to use. On the spot, immediately. Is it anti-American to brush your teeth after breakfast? or rather before? Is both American? Neither…

When Trump calls Democrats "enemies from within," that's anti-American. When Trump refuses to peacefully transfer power to his victorious opponent and instead plays "heads I win tails you cheated," that's anti-American. When Trump sends the FCC chair to suppress speech "we can do this the easy way or the hard way," or yucks it up with the president of El Salvador over suspending Habeas Corpus, that's anti-American. T…

> When Trump calls Democrats "enemies from within,"

He did not say this.

Please spare me the part where you show me the things that you think establish the claim. I have already seen them and they do not establish the claim. At best you are intentionally conflating "Democrats" collectively with specific individuals who happen to be part of the Democratic party.

I could continue on with the rest but you get the idea.

Re: 25 years of mass surveillance is enough

#292

Post by zahlman »

lux-lux-lux wrote: post #90
smallmancontrov wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_January_6_Unit...

If you go far into the user you’re replying to’s post history, you’ll find them unambiguously referring to the Jan 6 crowd as terrorists. They are very aware . I know there’s a pretty strong norm against dragging people for their posting history here, but that’s in service of maximizing light vs. heat and I feel like pretending to be ignorant of recent events in order to relitigate something unrelated in the comments…

> you’ll find them unambiguously referring to the Jan 6 crowd as terrorists.

While I wouldn't agree with that, there is no contradiction between that claim and Trump himself "not refusing" to "make a peaceful transition of power" (putting aside the downthread arguments about how the transition of power is actually made).

> pretending to be ignorant of recent events

Disagreement on interpretation is not the same thing as ignorance.

Re: 25 years of mass surveillance is enough

#293

Post by rickdeckard »

nonethewiser wrote: post #193
rickdeckard wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, because by the new definition, the leader is "peak American", so everything in collision with his view is naturally "anti-American". The usage of the term "anti-American" by anyone in a public role should be rejected as insufficient definition and unfit for a representative to use. On the spot, immediately. Is it anti-American to brush your teeth after breakfast? or rather before? Is both American? Neither…

Im not quite following. Things can be mislabeled as anti American, but everyone has some idea of whats anti-American in principle. Anti free speech for example is anti American. How that gets applied is a matter of debate. But I think all public officials should agree with that. Its kind of a fundamental thing to have an idea about the nation’s values. If that’s too taboo for someone then they are quite literally ant…

What I'm saying is literally The usage of the term "anti-American" by anyone in a public role should be rejected as insufficient definition and unfit for a representative to use.

Especially when glanced-over mid-sentence, the term evokes the inversion of your idea what being "American" means, without ever clarifying whether your assumption is correct.

Me saying "the liberties of the banking sector are deeply anti-American, we will revert those changes to relieve the increased tension they cause in American households" might evoke an association of "less debt" or "owning a home" in a listener, while I might actually mean "women shouldn't be allowed to own credit cards" (because they weren't until 1974 and MY American values are some form of "vanilla constitution")

Re: 25 years of mass surveillance is enough

#294

Post by pesus »

ToValueFunfetti wrote: post #165
Balinares wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because then they'll move on to the next victims and in having surrendered without even a fight you've granted them momentum for no good reason whatsoever, and you'll have fewer allies left too.

Is there a reason to believe this is how things work? Rather than "within a democracy as long as 'trans rights' means something that most people disagree with, it will be harder to advance the pro- side of the issue"? Is there evidence of 'momentum' being a real thing in politics, as opposed to the 'pendulum' that I've witnessed over the last decade?

If you go back 15 years or so, you hear the exact same "concerns" about gay people pretty much word for word. Now that they're no longer an acceptable target for most people, they've moved on to regurgitating the same baseless fear mongering but targeted towards trans people. If society manages to progress further, they'll eventually come up with another group to serve as the "other" that they can blame everything on.

Re: 25 years of mass surveillance is enough

#295

Post by GarnetFloride »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #219
N_Lens wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly agree with your take. The ultra wealthy are entrapped by their own minds & machines of wealth that have tight demands.

> The ultra wealthy are entrapped by their own minds & machines of wealth that have tight demands. But only within their minds. They could change their minds, donate or pay enough taxes that their billions would be distributed far and wide. Then they'd no longer be trapped. Plenty of people make the choice to stop acquiring, stop increasing their wealth, and stop having more everything (kids, houses, cars, pets, hobb…

Isn't it like that old story about catching monkeys. You hollow out a gourd with a small hole, tack it to the ground and put a nut in it. The monkey can get its hand in but not out with the nut in their fist. The human can walk over and leisurely whack the monkey because the monkey can't let go.

They act just like drug addicts. More's the pity. They can change but they don't seem to understand that rock bottom is a tough place to be.

Re: 25 years of mass surveillance is enough

#296

Post by iamnothere »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #283
iamnothere wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, there is no conspiracy, there’s just multiple actors moving predictably in the same direction, and sometimes coordinating weakly. I don’t know how my comments could have been read otherwise.

Except there are also explicit conspiracies like Jobs calling around to stop "poaching" or Zuck leaning over to Trump and asking how much.

True, but these are generally limited agreements among a few individuals (at most a small handful at the top). Pulling off a big conspiracy between many powerful competing actors carries too much risk of defection. It may be possible but it’s certainly rare.

I do think that these limited agreements may be copied by other people in similar contexts, for instance there were other tech firms who made similar agreements with their own competitors. And the big tech anti-poaching agreements may have themselves been copied from similar agreements made in other industries, such as finance and fast food. The illegal conduct probably spread organically through word of mouth, as execs and board members informally exchange this sort of “best practice” with each other.

It’s likely that big shareholders or board members could hold private meetings to advise the CEOs of their companies on how to pull off this sort of trick, if they think it would help the stock price. Given how many people sit on multiple boards, this could be seen as a sort of conspiracy. It’s still very informal and of course it’s nearly impossible to prove.

Re: 25 years of mass surveillance is enough

#297

Post by NoImmatureAdHom »

vict7 wrote: post #237
NoImmatureAdHom wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The politicized take on this is not correct. More importantly, it's not helpful. When the "left" (Democrats) had power recently in the U.S., they were very happy to try to criminalize the protected speech of their enemies. Their tack was to define speech they didn't like as "hate speech", which luckily isn't actually a thing in the U.S., legally. But they were trying to make it happen. I don't mean to defend one or t…

Please cite specifically what the Biden administration did to curtail people’s right to freedom of speech. I’ll wait.

Lololol ok:

Biden: The Biden Administration's promulgation of a Title IX interpretation that, among other things, would have compelled certain kinds of speech:

https://speechfirst.org/case/title-ix/

One example of many: it would have been a punishable offense to refuse to use someone's preferred pronouns. This is what's called "compelled speech", and it's when someone says to you, "Say $THING or else". It's very reasonable for governments to prohibit saying certain things (like national security secrets, for instance, or other people's bank account login info), but thus far forcing people to say things they don't believe has been a bridge too far.

And, happily, compelled speech is a bright line the Americans have, so far, managed not to cross. Everyone should be trying as hard as we can to not cross that line.

You may not see the harm in this particular instance, but establishing "we'll just force them to say it and punish them if they don't" as a tool in any government's toolbox is a very, very bad idea.

Ah, and I should mention Biden's new Title IX rules became law on August 1, 2024 so they weren't "would". Thankfully, we only had a few months under this particular imposition on our basic rights and push never came to shove.

Harris: https://nclalegal.org/opinion/kamala-harris-free-speech-task... Clearly wanted to criminalize speech she didn't like

Walz: https://www.cato.org/commentary/actually-tim-walz-first-amen... Same

Re: 25 years of mass surveillance is enough

#298

Post by NoImmatureAdHom »

howard941 wrote: post #262
NoImmatureAdHom wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The politicized take on this is not correct. More importantly, it's not helpful. When the "left" (Democrats) had power recently in the U.S., they were very happy to try to criminalize the protected speech of their enemies. Their tack was to define speech they didn't like as "hate speech", which luckily isn't actually a thing in the U.S., legally. But they were trying to make it happen. I don't mean to defend one or t…

This is untrue. Throw out your TV.

See below! It is true :0(

Re: 25 years of mass surveillance is enough

#300

Post by tpmoney »

ux266478 wrote: post #192
throwitaway222 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet the lives of everyone on this board has never been this comfortable in the past.

Do we live in different worlds? I can't think of a single meaningful way my comfort has increased in the past 25 years. In fact, with the rise of the homeless and mental health crises, the encroachment of more and more people who have no business touching computers into cyberspace, the increased relevance of flash mob power on the internet, I would say my comfort has been actively degraded on a fundamental and signif…

A useful thought experiment is which 80 year period of history would you prefer to live in other than now, with the caveat that you wouldn’t know how things turn out when you lived in that time. It’s easy to pick a single brief moment in history that is in some important ways better than right now. But many of those time periods are bookended by their own periods of strife and struggle. If you had to pick a different time period in history in which to live your life for 80 years birth to death, would you pick any other time than right now? Would you try to thread the needle such that you weren’t eligible to be drafted into the Vietnam war, but still benefit from the economic growth of the 50s-70s? Knowing that the AIDS crisis was still around the corner? And the unrest of the civil rights movement? The impending doom of the Cold War? A world where you rent your phone from AT&T, where your ability to learn about and communicate with the rest of the world list limited largely to passive consumption of limited news sources and books that might be decades out of date if you aren’t in a major metro area? Where your whole town might be dependent on a single employer who might be closing up factories and moving over seas in the 80s, or just plain closing down and taking your pension (and your local economy) with them?

Would you go further back in time and risk the Korean War or the World Wars and the Great Depression? A time when electricity was new and you might very well be using an outhouse as your toilet? When modern sanitation and health laws were in their infancy and debilitating diseases like polio ran rampant?

Would you go back further?

I for one, despite a lot of the issues with today can’t really find a different period of time I would prefer my life to span. I can absolutely identify parts of different times I would prefer to now, but I can’t see myself giving up everything I would need to to actually live in that period of time, and deal with the strife and struggles of the period at the same time.

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