Why privacy is important, and having "nothing to hide" is irrelevant (2016)

Where are you? Can you share a sample of the text you reach out with? Have you ever organised a group of people to sign on to what you’re advocating?

> too many competing interests within that group (as opposed to an upper limit per representative like it used to be @80,000)

You have no state representatives with smaller parcels?

> are fundamental and foundational to the functional operation of any feedback system. Its based solidly in actual history, not hyperbole

It’s hyperbole: the Stasi used violence as a political tool. Normalising them with rhetoric such as yours legitimises all of the mechanisms you describe escalating to including violence in their portfolio.

Doesn't really matter. It was drafted and professional, included known problems such as fake jobs and lack of accountability. Recipients included assembly members, house, and senate. To date, only boilerplate responses, no action, and only an increase in spam related to requests for donation for support during re-election.

> It's hyperbole.

It is not exaggerated, and by definition cannot be hyperbole.This is false.

The observations, and references stand on their own and are testable, when following rational methods. Social contract theory is well established, so is much of the referenced history.

Since you did not follow rational norms nor provide specific examples one can only assume you are referring to the entirety of my initial post as being exaggerated, which is an 'all' claim which are the most trivial to contradict as an overgeneralization and thus be shown to be false.

The claim that communicating facts about past events somehow legitimizes and justifies unrelated acts of violence, and causes it, is fundamentally unsound.

Violence absent survival (existential threats) as a general rule can never be justified, or legitimized.

Any good person knows this, and wouldn't try to justify because false justification is an act of self-violation, and this is how you become an evil person (who has willfully blinded themselves).

There was a time when evil people were killed because they had to be stopped otherwise they would bring destruction on everyone, these times were existential threats. WW2 against the Nazi's was one such time. They threatened the world, and your argument against communication for organization and response is an obvious contradiction during those times.

The structured reasoning you use is a foundational example of flawed thinking (fallacy) and an example of tautology, ad absurdum (by contradiction).

The consequence of an action or event, being the causing action of the event may be narrowly valid in some cases, but never sound (and it must be true in all cases to be sound), this is why it is generally considered fallacy, and by contradiction discounts agency and environmental factors, and overgeneralizes by claiming supposition-al elements are the same when they are not. You can't use circular self-reference when seeking sound argument.

As a result, you have made false claims, while choosing to ignore rational norms (given the ambiguity and dissembling). This is twisted.

Needless to say, there can be no rational discourse if you do not follow rational norms. I've shown that several of your statements are false claims, this informs on your innate credibility for future claims.

Without credibility, you don't have any basis for standing and by necessity, your future rhetoric must be considered false and discarded until you can prove rationally that it is not.

The nice thing about following rational rules and norms is it does not require credibility; only unbased rhetoric has that requirement.

Lies, deceits, and falsehoods are easily discarded under rational methods. Dissembling, discrediting, nullification all cease being useful when you have lost credibility and have no standing.

The real issue, I would argue, is that of governments becoming repressive and using force or threats against those who assert their right to free speech and civil disobedience. The first issue does not imply the second and I found that they were often confounded in comments, making it sound like they both go hand in hand.

I don't believe that to be the case. I'd like to think we can have a healthy democracy while living with increasing surveillance.

Let's keep pushing back on governments when they actually infringe on free speech. Like when they start firing people or limiting their rights based on political affiliation or beliefs.

Do we still have curfews or vaccine passports? No, people pushed back. Does the government know who got the shot and who didn't and what their stance is around it? I imagine they do.

Almost all politicians have something to hide, as part of their job. Even fairly low-level politicians get messages from voters which can contain sensitive (i.e. should not be shared) information.

The problems are:

1) those who don't recognise that almost everyone else has this going on, too.

2) those who think that it's OK because the intelligence agencies are the ones gathering it (never mind that the methods enable others to do likewise), and those working in the agencies are above reproach and won't misuse that data (which we know isn't the case).

Tell that to Parsons, Winston Smith's loyal to the Party neighbour who's betrayed by his own child. If surveillance is allowed to become pervasive enough, nobody is safe.