Today Is the Day We Got Rid of the Surveillance State GDR
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Re: Today Is the Day We Got Rid of the Surveillance State GDR
#2Voltaire never made his famous non-statement. It was a paraphrasing of his general philosophy written by Evelyn Beatrice Hall in The Friends of Voltaire (1906).
I generally do not side with this article's overblown credit towards democracy, and particularly representative democracy. A common crippling meme among democratic societies is to absolve representatives of responsibility and instead keep insisting everything is the fault of citizens for not going to the ballot box, voting incorrectly at the ballot, and to keep trying again and again until they get it "right", even if there are obvious inefficiencies in the democratic process that must be corrected. Where even the most ardent, statistically aware rationalist will succumb to their emotions and begin spouting feel-good drivel about voting. None of this is to be admired. It is to be condemned as insanity and self-hatred.
Re: Today Is the Day We Got Rid of the Surveillance State GDR
#3Voltaire never made his famous non-statement. It was a paraphrasing of his general philosophy written by Evelyn Beatrice Hall in The Friends of Voltaire (1906). I generally do not side with this article's overblown credit towards democracy, and particularly representative democracy. A common crippling meme among democratic societies is to absolve representatives of responsibility and instead keep insisting everything…
There is an electoral poster by the docks in The Secret of Monkey Island. On examination, it reads:
Vote No1 Governor Marley. When there's only one candidate, there's only one choice!
It think of it every time I fill in a ballot paper.
Re: Today Is the Day We Got Rid of the Surveillance State GDR
#4The (once) "free world" that boasted to have the Stasi put to an end, are making things much worse now.
The Stasi had paper files and maybe kilobytes of data, that had to be processed by hand of some people -- our today's surveillance systems collect megabytes or gigabytes of data of everybody and can process it in milliseconds.
We Germans should know, what surveillance is all about and how an oppressive system starts out small but grows bigger and bigger. But with all our luxuries and the distractions we get, we forget, what our fathers had to learn the hard way.
We also will have to learn the hard way.
Re: Today Is the Day We Got Rid of the Surveillance State GDR
#5> We simply can't imagine what it is like to live in an oppressive system without freedom of speech.
Nice try. Humanity is not so spectacularly unobservant. Most of us are stuck in an "oppressive system without freedom of speech" half the weekday. (With exceptions, like college.) School where we're constantly told to STFU and move from room to room. Great training for corporations in later life. And the US has the biggest prisons; if you're the wrong color or poor, school trains for that with patdowns and metal detectors.
I have to agree with Marc Andreessen who tweeted: "Wouldn't we be shocked and dismayed if the NSA wasn't doing this? What did people think all those billions of dollars of funding were for?"
No, sentences like this are common in propaganda. Not to convince you of untruths, but to convince you that everyone else believes these untruths and that you're weird. In this case, it flatters anyone who knows better.
Re: Today Is the Day We Got Rid of the Surveillance State GDR
#6> We simply can't imagine what it is like to live in an oppressive system without freedom of speech. Nice try. Humanity is not so spectacularly unobservant. Most of us are stuck in an "oppressive system without freedom of speech" half the weekday. (With exceptions, like college.) School where we're constantly told to STFU and move from room to room. Great training for corporations in later life. And the US has the bi…
Why do you assume freedom of speech exists on college campuses?
Re: Today Is the Day We Got Rid of the Surveillance State GDR
#7Voltaire never made his famous non-statement. It was a paraphrasing of his general philosophy written by Evelyn Beatrice Hall in The Friends of Voltaire (1906). I generally do not side with this article's overblown credit towards democracy, and particularly representative democracy. A common crippling meme among democratic societies is to absolve representatives of responsibility and instead keep insisting everything…
> A common crippling meme among democratic societies is to absolve representatives of responsibility and instead keep insisting everything is the fault of citizens for not going to the ballot box, voting incorrectly at the ballot, and to keep trying again and again until they get it "right", even if there are obvious inefficiencies in the democratic process that must be corrected. Where even the most ardent, statistically aware rationalist will succumb to their emotions and begin spouting feel-good drivel about voting. None of this is to be admired. It is to be condemned as insanity and self-hatred.
Well put.
However, democracy is inherently about the masses. I agree with your statement because I often find myself at odds with the masses (or apparently just ahead of them by 15 years, while they play catch up and groupthink transmutes freedom struggles into poor ideas and even oppression), and do not believe that tyranny of the majority is some ideal to strive for.
However, there are only two ways mass surveillance is going to stop - through technical means or through political means. I believe the technical means is the only practical avenue (even if there were political will to end the state-sponsored orgs and control the big-name mass surveillance companies, the business will continue behind the scenes). But I won't detract from those attempting to do so through public means. Even if they do not succeed in [ae]ffecting the government, I would be quite happy if when talking to an arbitrary person there was a good chance they shared my values about privacy. That's culture.
And to appeal to the masses, you have to fluff their sense of self-importance. So I'll give someone a pass to operate within that framework when they're fighting the good fight - if they were to tell the herd followers that following the herd sucked, they would convince no one of anything.
I would love to live in a world where most individuals' primary measure of an idea's validity was not the number of other people who believe it, but I think that's an even loftier goal than ending mass eavesdropping.
Re: Today Is the Day We Got Rid of the Surveillance State GDR
#8The (once) "free world" that boasted to have the Stasi put to an end, are making things much worse now. The Stasi had paper files and maybe kilobytes of data, that had to be processed by hand of some people -- our today's surveillance systems collect megabytes or gigabytes of data of everybody and can process it in milliseconds. We Germans should know, what surveillance is all about and how an oppressive system start…
The Stasi had a lot more than kilobytes of data. It also managed to be far more effective at oppressing people than institutions we know of with petabytes of data.
Re: Today Is the Day We Got Rid of the Surveillance State GDR
#9> We simply can't imagine what it is like to live in an oppressive system without freedom of speech. Nice try. Humanity is not so spectacularly unobservant. Most of us are stuck in an "oppressive system without freedom of speech" half the weekday. (With exceptions, like college.) School where we're constantly told to STFU and move from room to room. Great training for corporations in later life. And the US has the bi…
Why do you assume freedom of speech exists on college campuses?
It may exist to a greater extent on some college campuses than some corporate campuses.
At college you can choose to work on whichever topic you'd like and discuss it with whomever you would like.
At a corporation, many people are simply told what to do and if they deviate from doing what they were told, are fired and/or treated poorly.
Re: Today Is the Day We Got Rid of the Surveillance State GDR
#10Voltaire never made his famous non-statement. It was a paraphrasing of his general philosophy written by Evelyn Beatrice Hall in The Friends of Voltaire (1906). I generally do not side with this article's overblown credit towards democracy, and particularly representative democracy. A common crippling meme among democratic societies is to absolve representatives of responsibility and instead keep insisting everything…
> A common crippling meme among democratic societies is to absolve representatives of responsibility and instead keep insisting everything is the fault of citizens for not going to the ballot box, voting incorrectly at the ballot, and to keep trying again and again until they get it "right", even if there are obvious inefficiencies in the democratic process that must be corrected. Where even the most ardent, statisti…
do not believe that tyranny of the majority is some ideal to strive for
You know, it's kind of funny that direct democracy is commonly derided as "tyranny of the majority". Is it not the case that all democracy, without separation of powers and a legal civil/common law framework to define boundaries, would be tyranny of the majority? But, those things are not exclusive to any political system in the slightest. In a direct democracy like Switzerland, the cantons operate within limitations set by federal law and any cantonal law which violates boundaries can be struck by the Federal Supreme Court.
This is, of course, not to idealize Switzerland. They have many issues, including ongoing mass surveillance through Onyx and files collected by EJPD, they were among the last to grant women suffrage (federally in 1971, but the canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden didn't budge until 1991!), they maintained a system of indentured child labor called the Verdingkinder well into the 1970s, the median adult income is lower than in the U.S., etc.
But if you really examine it, democracy by its very nature entails, to some extent, a tyranny of the majority. However, directness allows for much more flexible and reactive amendments and proposals. It's not too expedient, but unfortunately we can't rely on philosopher kings.