> It says that the government “will prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender and anarchist” and “will use all the tools constitutionally available to us to map them at home, identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa.”
So, Democratic candidates who are looking like they will win a seat this midterm cycle are going to get arrested for "domestic terrorism".
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 of it?
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 anti American. Having a country means organizing around a core set of values. We can debate what those are but arguing you can’t stand for anything?
I'm Muslim. Born in the US. I've seen politicians and right wing public figures call my entire faith anti-American. One of them just had a nice memorial for their one-year since their death.
The term may have had an agreed upon meaning at some point, but not anymore.
Edit: it seems like most right-wing people conflate "non-Christian" with "anti-American". i don't know what's worse; the fact that these people say and think it, or the fact that their constituents don't know the difference.
You're forgetting that your faith is also a political institution, not just a religion. It's natural for political institutions to be anti other political institutions (i.e. nations), and Islam is a clear example of one which is because it does conquest and conversion through violence and intimidation. You can be sure Islam would take over America and throw away the constitution if it had the power.
You might be right about the non-Christian confusion, but that's quite different from why Islam can be anti-American. Right wingers are far more tolerant of Jews and atheists than they are of Muslims.
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.
The "American Experiment" isn't an empty concept, but it is about democracy and law and rights as opposed to conservative cultural values, and when people in power start to argue that the former must be sacrificed for the latter they certainly deserve to be clowned on. Not because they are wrong to imagine an American Ideal, but because they have its contents exactly backwards.
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.
It's just the idea that vague terms get misused so much I demand the specific. "Anti" anything can just mean you aren't "pro" it enough, or not pro a particular version.
So for restricting speech, you could say not honoring the first amendment or something like that.
I think about this because sometimes people or ideas are described as "problematic". Sometimes for very good reason, but sometimes you find out the speaker has trouble being specific. I like to hear the specific reason when I can to understand the facts or logic. Sometimes these classifications come third hand.
I mean, there are American values. The country was built around the idea of limiting the federal government's power, and adherence not a person, but to a set of values (like freedom of speech). We're explictly founded on the concept of rule of law.
Through that lens, it is very clear what anti-American means: adherence and loyalty to a person instead of a set of values, expansive government overreach, erosion of individual liberties, including the ability to express dissent.
It was also built around a process by which those values can be codified and changed to reflect changing times, i.e. the amendment process. Which we have forgotten about entirely.
What Trump and his followers mean by it, though, is that any disagreement with Trump on policy, strategy, tactics, procedure, or belief is anti-American. The way they use the term "anti-American" is anti-American. Therefore the term outside of context is meaningless. It's been coopted, twisted, and perverted.
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...
Let's suppose you had your way and the cultural concept of America as a set of ideas and values related to democracy was erased. Would the universal non-national concepts of democracy and civil liberties have been able to inspire Mike Pence to stand up to Donald Trump on January 6th?
Sorry, I don't know what this conversation is about. This is not about a "concept", it is about the label itself.
When the term "anti-American" is used, it is a placeholder for "against my values". Noone is ever anti-American himself, it is only a label applied upon others.
That's why IMO it should be rejected when used by people in a public role, see original comment.
You are free to think otherwise, which I may then label as "anti-American" in passing, while quickly moving on to you mentioning Mike Pence and some random conspiracy I have /s
> The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), was an investigative committee of the United States House of Representatives created in 1938. Their goal was to investigate alleged disloyalty and subversive activities on the part of private citizens, public employees, and those organizations suspected of having communist ties. It was abolished in 1975.
I'd heard of this but didn't realize it went on for decades.
Turning it around, I'd say persecuting political enemies for being "un-American" - or as a recent book declared, "unhuman" - is a very un-American thing to do. At least according to the values for which the nation stands (or supposed to stand).
> I'd say persecuting political enemies for being "un-American" - or as a recent book declared, "unhuman" - is a very un-American thing to do
Dude. Dude. You've said yourself: this Congress committee went on for almost four decades. And before it, it was Yellow Peril, or anti-Irish sentiments, or manifest destiny with its "the only good Indian is a dead Indian". So, no, it's a very American thing to do, has been since the foundation of the US and arguably from even before than that.
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 in the declaration of independence are American values.
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 different leader...
And what I'm trying to explain is, that this paper doesn't matter if it is represented by someone who doesn't uphold its content.
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"
> this paper doesn't matter if it is represented by someone who doesn't uphold its content.
Not at all...that's when the paper matters the most, because the electorate can see that the person in charge is not upholding our values, purely in contrast to the document. The document sets the baseline. Writing things down has value.
The words on the paper represent the ideas of what it means to be American. Trump has nothing to do with that. His actions, when the do not align with that paper, can be described as "anti-American".
The US has had a total of _one_ government and what it means to be American is in the founding document of that government. To be German is to lay claim to a history and cultural lineage that is filled with many different governments and even different states all-together.
The US has distinct regional and cultural identities as well, to be a Texan means something more akin to being German. Texas has a history that extends beyond the US. One can be American and Texan precisely because they are describe a different thing.
To be American is to ascribe to a certain set of ideals and, as far as someone isn't living up to those ideals, they are "anti-American".
> The "American Experiment" isn't an empty concept, but it is about democracy and law and rights as opposed to conservative cultural values, and when people in power start to argue that the former must be sacrificed for the latter they certainly deserve to be clowned on. Not because they are wrong to imagine an American Ideal, but because they have its contents exactly backwards.
From the many responses on this thread, it appears that many either don't want a defintion of "pro-American" or "anti-American" or "an American Ideal" or don't have one but these are core to your point.
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 is wholly unproductive.
The peaceful tour of the capital by pro American demonstrators (sorry, peak Americans) interrupted the proceedings. They were very close to pulling off a strategy of having the senate override the vote, if they hadn’t reconvened before midnight and had Pence left the Capitol like secret service were urging him to do.
Anyway this argument has occurred a thousand times on these boards so if you saw January 6 as peaceful and harmless I can’t change your mind.
that an inssurection was stopped doesnt make it a peaceful transfer of power.
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
The American people deserve to know that President Trump
and his advisors didn’t just ask me to pause, they asked me
to reject votes, to return votes, to essentially overturn the election.
To keep faith with the oath that I made to the American people and
to almighty God, I rejected that out of hand
and I did my duty that day.
- Vice President Mike Pence
This is why the Jan 6 crowd was carrying around an improvised gallows and chanting "hang Mike Pence." The crowd was there to serve as a pretext for what Trump wanted Pence to do, but Pence refused to do it so the self-coup attempt failed.
While the exact point at which it becomes "anti-american" isn't clear there's certainly a category of rhetoric in which people peddle subservience to the state (usually dressed up in obfuscating words, like they'll use "society" instead of "the government") that is undeniably "anti-american" except perhaps by some obtuse technical interpretation of all the words. And I will die on the hill that those who peddle such ideals are bad people and ought to be looked down upon the same way we'd look down upon someone peddling phrenology as a basis for racism.
This is the outcome that every privacy advocate has been warning about for decades and being increasingly challenged by people who were fine with it as 'they have nothing to hide and do no wrong'.
The red scare of the 1950s was ridiculous enough, but at least the Soviet Union was an actual threat. We are now at a point where “pro-transgender” is the new threat?
Sure, if you conveniently drop the qualifying word "radically". But that's not what was said. What was said specifically included the word "radically" for a good reason. Radical anything is a threat.
The administration doesn't like it, therefore it's a threat. Similar to negative news, which are fake, and contrary opinions, which are woke propaganda.
yes probably, and ive been calling this as their playbook for about a year
Make no mistake, this is not some sophisticated conspiracy. This is pure laziness and abuse of power. They have been using "domestic terrorist" as a button to slap anytime they dont want to be questioned. the phrase no longer means anything besides "this person questioned authority"
ICE has used it to label people they shot for videoing them. Note that they knew the video evidence existed and labelled them anyway, assuming they would be able to avoid court altogether and prevent the video evidence being seen. In at least one case, this didnt work and the victim was correctly identified as such.
So this isnt hypothetical. It is a playbook being used right now, and people are testing the waters for how much they can get away with.
That is extremely unlikely. There are definitely some people in Trump's camp who would love to do that, including probably Trump himself. However, Trump does not have enough public or institutional support for him to risk doing something that blatant.
And in the 30s germany started branding things as being anti-german, we all know where that led us. This isn't a new play book by any means. Seeing so many comments debating terminology worries me, we should be discussing the implications.
As a trans woman, enough is enough! I’m tired of us being made into the scapegoat while literal pedophiles and sexual criminals not only walk free but gain ever greater power and idiots keep blaming us for their problems as they close their ears and stomp their feet’s on the ground
You're not a scapegoat you're fodder for a social warfare diversion to enable the treasury to be looted by both parties while the economy collapses. DC's puppeteers don't give a shit about anything unless it starts with $
It's not while, it's because. They have to create a "threat" that's of the same "magnitude" as their actual crimes, vectoring out from the subjective origin of "traditional" man/woman identity and relations. They do that by casting transgenderism not as the benign and modest personal identity that it is, but as the same kind of sexually aggressive comportment as their own; something that you do or perform willfully instead of what you are compelled by natural and intrinsic impulse to be.
The first step in defeating it is untangling the action/identity conflation.
You are: someone who is biologically non-female, but whose gender identity is that of a woman.
He is: a businessman and politician.
You do: upstanding, normal folk things.
He does: reprehensible shit like assaulting teenagers and bragging about "grabbing [women] by the pussy."
Hopefully people are able to see who in this comparison is in the wrong.
Right. Hormones cause an insane amount of changes. The texture of my skin, my scent, how much oil my skin produces, the haemoglobin in my blood, the size and strength of my muscles, how much fat my body stores, and where it goes, how attraction feels, how emotions feel, what I find rewarding. Certain physical attributes do require different interventions but the vast majority of sexually differentiated traits are decided by the dominant sex hormone in the body, not by the XX/XY genes. See: XY females for instance who have non functioning androgen receptors. When we talk about biological women, it’s also ignoring intersex variations. Biology is way more complex than we make it out to be.
As a fellow trans woman, we've been the scapegoat for reactionaries, at least documented, since the rise of the Third Reich. And if we're honest, probably before that.
Fixing society-scale problems is really hard. Being angry at people who make you feel a bit weird inside is easy. People reliably choose easy.
I'm not going to pretend to understand your stuggle, but I will echo it through my lens. I am not trying to hijack your point, inasmuch support it with my view.
I uses to think that it was about fear of the unknown, or as you've said "Being angry at people who make you feel a bit weird inside".
I now firmly believe that it's a modern form of tribalism. Having an "other", whether as a scapegoat, a fear inducing device, or a target is simply too convenient to ignore. Whether or not one is a globalist is orthogonal to the fact that people ultimately decide, or evolve to see through a different lens.
One look no further than Vietnam for how the government learned to use intranational xenophobia to manipulate different slices of the public into identifying as separate groups that could then be played off of each other. Since then, there has never been as successful a political movement, because we have been turned against each other by state-driven manipulation. AFAIK, this is well-documented policy intended to “maintain civil order” (i.e. prevent the revolution that is so richly deserved).
I would say it slightly differently: humans themselves are tribalistic, and politicians are looking for ways to tap into that to gain and hold onto power.
I don’t have a strong view, but I don’t think that should baffle you, you think the reaction comes from nothing at all? One side is pushing to “wedge” (sort of) into a very low level space so that it cements itself at a foundational level and there’s no repeal or return from it - all or nothing view. The other side picks up on that and doesn’t want to let big changes go unchallenged. It’s a pretty understandable process. The niche cases allow the challenging party to present evidence for a consequence or concern that’s difficult to convey.
HN does this constantly with the surveillance, bring up one case of police abusing it, it’s exactly the same thing.
> HN does this constantly with the surveillance, bring up one case of police abusing it, it’s exactly the same thing.
Because in this case, we're talking about maybe a few dozen (if that) relevant cases in trans youth [1]. With police/secret services abusing surveillance... it's huge enough that LOVEINT [2] is a term, and at least 50 cases were serious enough to be brought under official investigation [3].
I’m just saying the process is exactly the same and shouldn’t be surprising. I don’t think we need to go into why one is less harming compared to another and that makes it okay to dismiss concerns.
One of the trans acceptance movement's main problems comes, as is often the case in politics, from some of its most militant and passionate activists. To put it simply, those extreme activists overreached and annoyed people. That's not the fault of trans people in general, but it explains some of the backlash and the focus on niche cases.
Basically, the activists I'm talking about overreached by:
- Pushing for speech control around preferred pronouns
- Being overrepresented among Reddit mods, thus becoming to some extent the "face of censorship" for many highly online people
- Equating the mere act of disbelieving trans people's chosen gender identities with out-and-out bigotry of the KKK kind
- Talking about a mythical "trans genocide" and getting angry when people questioned its existence
- Pushing for equal bathroom access long before the American public had actually been made ready for something like that
Etc.
So what we have now in the highly online discourse is essentially a battle between niche militant trans activists who seem to illogically believe that they are on the brink of being put into extermination camps, on the one hand, and niche militant anti-trans fanatics who exaggerate the relatively rare cases of trans people doing bad things for the sake of pushing an overall anti-left agenda.
The militant trans activists I speak of seemingly just can't stop themselves from continuously providing people who actually hate trans people and people who just hate the left with more and more ammunition by having a prominent online presence while saying a mix of untrue and highly questionable things.
Before anyone jumps in with an angry reaction... yes, if it's not already clear from what I wrote, I also think that the right has a problem with insane deluded militant people.
“Militant” trans activists? How is just using someone’s pronouns “speech control”? It’s no different than using a name. If trans people tell you who they are, just believe them, it’s not that hard. There’s nothing mythical about the ongoing trans genocide. Genocides don’t just happen in gas chambers.
I am not going to say much more here because I’m fairly certain none of this will get through to you given the tone of your comment. Trans people are far more likely to be victims in washrooms than to be perpetrators.
It's cooled down a lot in the last few years, since peak woke passed. But I think that a few years ago, there would have been serious danger of being fired at many companies in the US if you refused to use a trans person's chosen pronouns. Now, one might say, this is just a matter of basic politeness... why wouldn't you use them? However, consider the situation if a white coworker started insisting that people refer to him as black, and you could get fired for not referring to him as black. For the sake of a better comparison, let's say that the white coworker was doing medical treatments to increase skin melanin, hair curliness, and so on.
As for trans genocide, I mean sure, you can make an argument that there is a trans genocide by really really stretching the meaning of the word "genocide" or by using certain parts of highly technical definitions of "genocide". But when trans activists speak of "trans genocide", they are trying to appeal to the emotional resonance of more popularly central examples of genocides, ones with mass killings. If we use the common meaning of the word "genocide", the one that is intended the vast majority of the time the word is used, there is no trans genocide.
As for washrooms, note that I never said that I'm against trans people using their chosen genders' washrooms. What I said is that many trans activists pushed to do this long before the American public had become ready for something of that nature, which contributed to a backlash against the trans movement in general.
As someone who struggles with my position on some of these topics, one of my major self criticisms/fear is the tyranny of the majority. Even if (and that's a hypothetical if) my values would reject transgenderism, my values of freedom and fairness conflict with forcing another human being onto a specific path, especially with the use of force (government). So even if 90% are cisgendered (I didnt look up the real stat), that doesn't mean we vote to make our world cisgendered... A right and fair leaning is to create the freedoms we'd want if the tables were turned.
I say this all to say it surprises me how many republicans I know are pro freedom until it hits certain topics... Pro 2A and anti-(an adult can choose a different hormonal profile for their own body) is an odd pairing in my mind. Pro free-speach like Alex Jones / Citizens united but anti-(choosing to wear clothes or other adornments/appearance of the other gender) is an odd pairing in my mind.
The number of people abject enough to end up with transphobic views is thankfully nowhere near that. Most people, as it turns out, are not creepily obsessed with other people's genitals. Most people also aren't driven by a horrible urge to find minorities to torment. Though those who are would sure claim otherwise, of course; trying to normalize their awfulness is part of the playbook.
Yeah, I don't get this. If they're niche irrelevant issues that affect ~nobody, why not just concede them? Republicans could hardly dominate the discourse with these topics if there was nobody to discourse against.
This isn't a fight we can avoid by retreating. They would just advance and the same battle would happen on different ground. If we abandon the trans, the culture wars will be about the gays. If we abandon the gays, the culture wars will be about blacks or hispanics or jews or god only knows. There's something to be said for picking firm ground to fight on, but there will be a fight and it cannot be won by retreating.
Why am I being interpreted as advocating for abandoning the trans? I don't want to do that and I don't need to be convinced by my empathy for gays or blacks- I care about trans people themselves! I'm saying if an issue doesn't matter- according to the trans people in this thread- and it's a losing issue, why are we insistent on fighting it anyway? Who benefits from this?
Hmm, yes, I see that and that the person I was responding to is getting read the same way, but not clear why that's the case. We're both in this conversation under [1]. The sports issue is the one that's 90/10 [2], while the bathroom one is maybe in the neighborhood of 60/40 [3]- I do think there is a chance of winning ground on the latter and should have been more specific. But nobody is saying there's 90/10 in favor of transphobia- a substantial majority views trans people favorably[3].
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?
Everything related to the right wing and fox news? We never had a big "swing left" - clinton was the democrats showing they can do economic conservatism as well. Modern acceptance of trans folks isn't a pendulum, most of the people espousing anti-trans views weren't pro trans 5 years ago.
Trying to abstract history into major shifts that are attributable to inanimate objects is just very ludic fallacy.
> Yeah, I don't get this. If they're niche irrelevant issues that affect ~nobody, why not just concede them?
Because there's about 1% of people who are trans in the US [1] and most other populations, on top of that come a further about 1.7% people who are somewhere on the intersex spectrum [2].
Democrats aren't willing to throw literally millions of people under the bus. Republicans aren't just willing to cast them aside - they are knowingly driving trans people to extinction.
But this is not throwing millions of people under the bus. At least according to this thread, there are fewer trans women in sports than bills stopping them. If this issue does represent throwing literally millions of people under the bus- driving them to extinction-, why are you saying upthread that it's niche and irrelevant?
Bostock affirmed core civil rights to transgender people in housing, employment, etc. The fights now are about other things (not "rights") and as such, are much more unpopular. In fact, a majority of people, even on the right, support the core rights affirmed by Bostock.
Because Republicans get fucking dog-walked on any issue of any importance. The only things they can ever even come close to claiming "victory" on are irrelevant nonsense that no serious person gives a fuck about.
There are now more bills attempting to "solve" the problem of trans girl's in sports (and it is girls, to be clear, trans boys are never an issue) than there are trans girls in sports. It's fucking pathetic.
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 studied here, the people who made the rules aren’t scholars, they’re bigots. They’re using us as a distraction from their poor governance.
Yeah, you have to conjure a really weird scenario for there to be any advantage.
Something like waiting until male puberty is already pretty far along and doing extensive strength training and then transitioning and competing immediately in a sport that puts a heavy premium on strength. I think most sports already have rules that would prevent this.
For someone following a more normal transitioning trajectory, there would be zero advantage; probably a significant disadvantage.
A blanket ban is just pure bullying, especially for childrens' sports (which are primarily a social activity, not a consequential competition). Individual sports can have rules to prevent the (primarily hypothetical) abusive cases without preventing children from participating in normal social activities. No one is saying that someone who's 200 lb of solid muscle and started HRT a month ago should be able to compete against girls in football or powerlifting, but pickleball, sure go for it.
> A blanket ban is just pure bullying, especially for childrens' sports (which are primarily a social activity, not a consequential competition).
That I think is the core issue. Way too many people try to live way too hard through their children. Wherever you look, either in the US or (where I'm from) Germany... you'll find absolutely absurd behavior from completely unhinged parents. Just yesterday, that was a topic discussed here [1].
"After HRT" is the key word. The new regulations I am referring to had to do with how soon after was sufficient to remove advantages due to residual testosterone. There were other regulations which were total horse shit to your point.
I would agree that the number of people we are talking about is very small. It was to begin with a very niche issue.
> trans women have no biological advantage over cis women after HRT
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.
Also a weightlifter (masters olympic weightlifting, nationally ranked). TRT and steroids are actually the opposite. Once you go off of them, your body starts to revert, muscle mass is lost, and often by more than you started with (because the body's natural production rates change with supplementation). It does take time, which is why sports regulatory bodies typically require specific time periods of hormonal therapy before they can participate, but their bodies will eventually adjust.
Sports regulatory bodies still test for hormonal PED, but their concerns have long swayed away from them because of the fact that they are so easy to detect and have the built in disadvantage of potentially altering your life negatively outside of sport. The current concerns have shifted to peptides and other forms of PEDs, because they are much harder to detect because they are 1) often naturally occurring but in smaller quantities, 2) don't actually directly act on the musculoskeletal system, but rather trigger natural processes that act on the system, and 3) often have half-lives dramatically shorter than most drug tests can even account for, and therefore require near continuous monitoring.
Agreed you lose your peak, however once a steroids user you will mostly retain more mass than a natural. It only takes a fraction of stimulus to retain mass versus adding it.
The extrapolation I'm making, and admitting it's an extrapolation, is that a sexed at birth male competing in womens sports will have had a developmental period of hormonal advantage over females which follows them regardless of gender identity.
> 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.
Quite the contrary. If you want to publish something going against "the narrative" (if something like that exists in the first place) has never been easier than now. Proper keywords and the far-right and their pseudomedia are going to give even the worst quackery a time in the spotlight - just look at RFK Jr.
> 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.
Oh complete and utter twaddle.
Academia trends toward progressive views because the more educated you get, assuming you have principles and employ critical thinking consistently, the more ridiculous the positions of the right tend to look. You cannot look at the totality of climate change data and go "well clearly it's not man made" unless you either don't understand it, or cherry pick it to oblivion. You can't look at the history of Austerity politics, deployed both here and in the UK by our respective free market goblins (Reagan and Thatcher) and hold that it's good for anyone at all apart from those who are already wealthy.
This boogeyman of BIG SCIENCE holding down all the conservatives is complete and utter dreck. Show me literally one example of it. Show me one individual who's life was ruined and their career decimated to uphold ideological ends.
So the broken records are just coincidence? There's no need to study this a priori, just let them compete and see all records get broken. I don't see why people even discuss it. Just let women not win anything for a few years and this discussion would be over.
And as a fellow enjoyer of HRT, I assure you it didn't enhance shit for me, beyond what I was hoping to get: longer, more full hair, boobies, and smoother skin.
My muscles are gone y'all. Like I've had to buy more breaker bars and larger tools so I can keep working on my cars, otherwise I simply could not break bolts anymore.
I used to be able to do 12 pull-ups, and I did get de-trained but now I can barely manage a single one. I lived and did cardio in the mountains for years and now I get winded up way easier. Maybe the politicians making these rules should go on HRT before making unsubstantiated claims.
I've had to explain to people that lifting something as simple as a case of bottled water can be genuinely difficult after eight-ish years of feminizing HRT.
It's gradual, it's not all at once and I am still slightly taller and heavier-set than the average American woman, so I do have an advantage through having more mass, but anyone that's larger than the average American woman will also have that so it's not really an advantage, just a fact of having a larger body.
another important part isn't just the ideology targeting - it's the directive for local and national law enforcement for form Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) targeting individuals and organizations in this vein. JTTFs are already mobilized and targeting people - see https://atlpresscollective.com/2026/06/12/federal-prosecutor...
I think of that poem, First They Came:
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me
replace 'Jews' with the current minoritized target demographic (ie immigrants of any stripe) and we're already fairly far down that list. see the case of David Huerta for the targeting of unions: https://www.courthousenews.com/los-angeles-labor-leader-arre...
The culture wars are explicitly a tool of the right to provoke fear, anger, and hate against others.
The left gets trapped in it because every single culture war issue (LGBQT+, racism, feminism, reproductive rights, freedom from religion, etc) are responses to the rights reactionary drive to claw back rights from everybody who is not a white male christian.
relevant username lol. I tend to agree though...establishment democrats are a major problem for americans who want to be free of the problems that trump brought to us. Their only complaint about him seems to be that he's on the wrong team and has poor decorum. That's why so much emphasis has been placed on electing non-establishment democrats this time around. But the establishment is pro-corporate and pro-israel and they have all the money.
Totally agree. Establishment Democrats are against these expansion of powers, but then when they have the opportunity to roll them back, they treat them like they got free stuff instead of inheriting toxic waste.
I'd love to see a democratic presidential candidate who vows to openly exploit all of the illegal powers that Trump did, but in a way that hurts republicans and red states, and vow to continue doing it until constitutional amendments are passed to prevent it. Republicans would jump on board because they have no real ideology that they aren't willing to abandon for more power, and democrats would reluctantly be forced to do it because they care so much about being seen as hypocrites. Maybe a silly and potentially dangerous way to solve the problem, but at this point I'd try anything.
Be careful what you wish for, this seems to be the Newsom approach, and he may have a real chance at the presidency. California Uber Alles.
I saw a poll recently showing that close to half the country expects a civil war, and a disturbingly large portion of that group wants a civil war. Cross-spectrum as well.
I mostly agree with you, but the DSA (the only remaining organized anti-establishment political force) is still making real progress. So much so that Third Way is actively allocating resources to fighting them. And winning NYC was a huge step.
Trump and an army of paid influencers completely broke up the America First coalition, who had pinned their hopes on Trump being “their guy”. Now they’re all infighting, so the DSA is the only tangible threat to the establishment at the moment.
It remains to be seen if the DSA has shaken off attempts at disruption. It’s hard to be a small-d democratic organization when your opponents can afford to send endless streams of wreckers into your midst.
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 the other side, merely to point out that this is a non-partisan issue.
Surveillance 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 thieves and bandits there are.
The world isn't a thing to be managed (ch. 29)
The world is a sacred vessel; it cannot be manipulated. Whoever acts on it ruins it; whoever grips it loses it.
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 I were a multi-billionaire, I'm not sure I could do anything. I could piss into the wind with a somewhat larger amount of piss.
I've come to believe that our lack of agency over emergent behaviors in our own societies and economies is a central problem of the human condition.
> 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, hobbies, etc).
It's hard for those who have no choice, and those who've made different choices, to relate to the insatiable appetite of billionaires.
These people also have much more leverage to change the world in substantial, albeit often short lived ways. My family has been hurt by the DOGE cuts. Hopefully it's not a permanent injury. Yet it's very real.
And yet they still hold immense power to make our lives shittier. It is far easier to destroy a functioning system than it is to build one from the ground up
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 significant level.
On a broader timescale, we can take a look at the fact that goods which were designed to be affordable and mass-produced have been elevated to refined luxury goods, like the Herman-Miller Eames, as an indicator that material standards have fallen very far. Not the least of which because of an ever-dwindling labor share of capital (beginning in the 1970s), which silently impoverishes working households and degrades their comfort while being completely invisible to an uncareful eye on paper.
Much of the major boons of comfort were established prior to the transition to shareholder capitalism. Things like e-commerce, IoT, online banking, these are for the birds. Meaningful advances are things like HVAC and refrigeration, ubiquitous motorized transport, electrical lighting.
I believe the parent is implying that we sit uncomfortably at home, silently, rather than uncomfortably marching through the streets, demanding. Yet, I say that while uncomfortably sitting in my home, typing on a screen
Mass demonstrations are common and frequent, more than ever. The thing is that these are mild pressures at best. What came from Occupy Wallstreet? The George Floyd protests? The No Kings marches? Anti-ICE demonstrations? They're not nothing and we should continue to have them and participate in them, but we have to recognize them as what they are: background radiation. On their own, they don't affect change or bring about course correction. We clearly need something more, people inside of these institutions, sharks who are going to fight and win against the entrenched powers on their home turf. There's a very limited pool of people who are capable of doing that.
However, overcoming these forces is something people did successfully in the past. I think right now we are just in a cycle of mass confusion caused by the technological revolutions, which prevents us to see clearly (as it happened in the past as well).
Without alignment we just drift by natural forces of a system in place in whatever direction. When we adapt and if the world survives, this should not be an issue.
The problem of billionaires is that they are one level below from the top in abstraction of a society. They are required to play by the rules of the state designed by someone else, and they lack the knowledge and experience to go one level higher and think about the policies and rules for society itself - and this is much harder than doing business, and requires completely different skills.
Because of these factors, we see them being able to hoard wealth but unable to influence the system in any positive way, except for the ones which the system was already designed for (create jobs, innovate, etc.)
Honestly, my worry is that the longer we put it off the more likely any revolution or change will happen more chaotically. It should be organized, with strong leaders. But if that fails, I think Reverend King has a famous quote about the unheard. And I think that ends up being chaotic and bloody. I don't want that, I hope we've evolved enough to do transitions of power peacefully, or at least as peacefully as possible
As a class, they steer things through emergent behavior and overlapping self interest in certain areas. As individuals, they can’t afford to trust each other without leverage.
As a class, they have a set of similar incentives (grow/retain resources and power networks) that lead to similar actions (avoid taxation, buy influence, weaken regulators, etc). They may cooperate at times, but they are not a coherent organization with a roster, votes, and leadership.
As individuals, they are dangerous competitors, and they can’t afford to trust each other too much without some kind of mutual leverage. This could be in the form of mutual equity holdings, blackmail, complex arrangements where each party has exposure, whatever. But even then, trust has limits.
There’s no cabal that runs things with rules and elections at this level. It’s all individuals who are immersed in the systems that made them wealthy. Those systems tend to lead to certain behaviors. That’s it.
To a degree, yes, it’s why looking at people on the level of groups is not that useful for predicting individual behavior and beliefs, only aggregate behavior and beliefs.
However, some groups do have identifiable leadership, rules, membership rosters, etc. Political parties for instance, or governmental bodies. Decisions from groups like this often have an identifiable lineage (from proposal to vote) and are considered binding. This contrasts with the sort of emergent decisions I was discussing in the context of the very wealthy. There was no vote, there was no formal coordination, and the “decision” is not binding, yet everyone can see its effects. Opposing something like this is like boxing with a shadow.
> You could make this statement about any group at all.
Yes, that's the point
> And then once you realize people are in multiple groups, the whole thing devolves into chaos.
You have bad priors. That would only happen if groups could only have singular and simple goals. It requires those goals to be mutually exclusive. Because as soon as they overlap, even just a little, cooperation becomes an effective strategy.
Hell, history shows us enemies often cooperate. Mostly to defeat a mutual enemy, so they can go back to fighting each other, but that's still cooperation
It doesn't need any intelligence at all. There's mutually beneficial things to any group of people. So it doesn't require explicit coordination. Even fairly unintelligent animals have symbiotic relationships with other species. So your argument is what, that billionaires are less intelligent than an ant?
In the real world it's hard enough to get 5 people on the same page about anything. The idea that dozens/hundreds of people with billions of dollars who are in business against each other in many cases are secretly colluding with any effectiveness is a joke. If they were, zuckerberg, larry and sergey would have been squashed in the 90's/00's by the elite of the time. Sam Altman would have been crushed years ago. Obama or Trump would have been put in their place, probably both. Look at all the billionaires all of a sudden kowtowing to Trump. The billionaires just got beat real bad in NYC.
Billionaires just don't have much power. This isn't a movie.
This seems to contradict itself. You first claim that there's no organization but then you claim billionaires have no power because of the more powerful above them. Hierarchy is organization, so which is it
It's a great write up thankyou. I propose we build and distribute easy to use services designed to run on our own devices, in our own homes, to take full advantage of 1st and 4th amendments, then distribute these services widely with billboards so that people have alternatives and can take advantage of these protections.
We are trying, but the interop of these self hosted services currently suck. Fediverse is hard to get in to unless you have many users or you just have to join a popular instance. Who knows what they do in this instance, and it turns back into a loop.
I just don't think it's gotten to the point that anyone is interested. I wonder if we did do a better job that the aggressive filtering and monitoring wouldn't naturally move down the stack.
for example we could completely obviate Facebook by having a standard mechanism for something like an rss feed. individuals or organizations could publish my stream(s) from their own leaf connections, set up cloud instances, or pay someone to host them. there could be a whole ecosystem of readers with various UIs and policy filters. people/organizations could add value by aggregating trusted streams or filtering them for content some people might find offensive. and at the end of the day it doesn't require people who just want to use it to set up persistent networking and storage.
in any case we just got suckered into handing the keys to the internet to companies like Meta and Google, which make vast amounts of money to control the discourse in corrosive ways. all because we bought into the notion that nothing is real unless someone is making a buck off it.
having a standard and a whole space of compatible programs doesn't preclude people from making lifestyle money selling filters and aggregators and content, but it kind of removes the Meta-style leverage over the whole system.
How about this, but also send them usb sticks with loads of data available on them that they thought was "private" including surveillance footage taken from flock cameras etc. That might be good motivation to be more aware. Not sure about the legality of this though lol
I'm pretty sure 1st and 4th are the ones GP meant.
The 1st amendment (free speech) in order to protect the right to host the service in the first place and the 4th one (unreasonable search and seizure) to protect against surveillance.
Not sure how the 3rd (lodging of soliders in peacetime) would be relevant.
One, the move to digital lives made digital surveillance necessary. It wasn't enough to check attendance at the local mosque/far right rally. Then, the counter-move to encrypted communication meant law enforcement now had to rely on metadata.
Second: A wanton disregard of the treasure that is digital data. Most people just don't seem to care. LG is snooping on you? I bet they won't see even a 10% drop in sales next year. When the citizenry as consumer blasts their data everywhere, it's hard to argue as parliamentarian that those same people want it protected. Now people use Apple Watches and Amazon Alexa in their own bedrooms! People say they want their data safe guarded, but their actions suggest otherwise.
> A wanton disregard of the treasure that is digital data. Most people just don't seem to care.
I think the problem is a bit more subtle. People do seem to care but feel powerless. In addition to that, complexity is high. When you tell people what is possible with massive data they label you as a conspiracy theorist because it's much easier to believe that Facebook is listening to you with a microphone than piecing that information together through thousands if individual pieces of data (especially when you're more likely to notice the hits rather than the misses). So now when they do record everything you say it feels like nothing changed.
It's exhaustion, it's impotence, it's desolate. But that's different than apathy. People care, they are just overwhelmed
It isn't going to stop until it becomes a national security issue. If your can spy on your citizens , your enemies can potentially gain access to the same surveillance and hit high profile targets.
We live in war times and will soon see it happening
When those in power regard the people as the enemy their natural allies are other governments with similar attitudes. So you don't need to wait until another government gains access, you offer it instead.
> your enemies can potentially gain access to the same surveillance
Which has already happened. Though it is less obvious if high profile targets have been blackmailed or coerced. There's at least signs that some have. Even if not foreign governments, Epstein certainly had leverage
I suspect that Mass Surveillance is here for good, and the real project is to regain control of who gains the power and benefits. There are dozens if not 100s of ways that mass surveillance can improve human life. There are also as many where it can be abused to create suffering. I think the real issue is we're trending to the latter. In order to safely continue down this path we (USA) need:
1. EU style governmental pushes to defend digital rights. Data needs to be our own property that we can lend, but can never give up our right to revocation.
2. Stricter controls, and stricter still penalities, need to exist against misuse and abuse. Many of the stories of abuse of data are most stark in their lack of repercussions, some of this is police unions, some of this is "deep state" people who scratch eachother's backs and grant eachother free accesses and immunity. Some of this is a voting issue as in we need to make it known to our candidates that it matters to us, and then push real political power in their hands.
Just to help the imagination of all here's where mass surveilance could plausibly add good to society, all stemming from legitimate use:
1. Criminals like porch pirates can be caught using a neetwork of Ring cameras
2. A lost pet/child can be identified and found by drone surveillance
3. Usage data of roads can be updated in realtime
4. Trends and Sentiment could be used to guide the government intra-elections improving the way government serves us
5. Police officers can avoid risky situations using drones as eyes instead of putting their own bodies in harms way
Your points are, essentially, always true of all power for all time. (Or mostly true of most power for most of time)...
Humans have frequently created systems which contradict steps 6-9, or atleast from Monarchy to Democracy. Constitutions, legal systems, laws et al. have generally served as barriers to abuse. The question is how do we continue to uphold and increase the value for individuals and decrease the expected return of abuse.
1. Cameras don’t prevent porch pirates. They give you a video after the fact of a masked person taking your package. Small theft is prevented by more equality in society, and a stronger safety net. (Source: the lower crime rate in other countries)
2. Lost pets are not being found by drone and camera surveillance. They could, but the system doesn’t give a shit about your dog. Children, maybe. I guess i’m ok with deploying a fleet of drones during a search and rescue operation. As long as there is transparency so it’s not done for other reasons, and they are grounded when they are done.
3. You just need one of those pressure sensitive wire strips across the road to do this. It’s a largely solved problem that doesn’t involve mass surveillance.
4. I am just guessing what this means, but government doesn’t do things that are wildly popular by polling, so why would they react to some ai surveillance sentiment analysis?
5. This isn’t mass surveillance. Like #2, a deployed drone to look around a corner or scan a building before entering is using technology but it’s momentary. If it became a problem where it was being over used we could deal with it as a separate issue.
> EU style governmental pushes to defend digital rights.
No, I don't think we need Chat Control in the US or our government forcing ISPs and CDNs to block whole swaths of the internet just because a soccer game is on TV.
Fair points, I did not mean undermining encryption or privacy, I meant like GDPR and right to erasure.
It'd be even better if there was some form of royalty structure on our data used by companies. It'd be nice if I, at least, received a royalty check each time a data broker sold my data to the CIA.
I hate the EU, The projected was designed by American and European liberal intellectuals. It's an attempt to make Europe a group of Federated States that roughly all have a liberal constitution. To say the EU is something so different from the USA is crazy.
> There are dozens if not 100s of ways that mass surveillance can improve human life.
There are dozens of ways living in a cage can improve human life.
You won't be exposed to dangerous ideas and you might get a calorie allowance. There's little danger of an unwanted pregnancy, and you might be given labor-related chores or exercises to occupy your time.
The danger with all of these systems is what happens when they are abused. That's not a matter of if, just a matter of when.
We are building a cage around society. It's so slow you don't realize the shackles being placed around your ankle and your neck. But one day, when it's too late to protest, the switch will be flipped.
We're already living in 1984. We are always just a few election cycles away from 1934.
One specific example: device attestation and Web Environment Integrity, combined with the internet being increasingly controlled or mediated by a handful of middlemen who would absolutely love to turn this on (Cloudflare, Apple, Google, etc) but if they do it too early there’ll be revolt.
It’s had a couple attempts that got shot down so far, but the pushback gets weaker as time goes on, and as the troublesome/less-compliant generations age out and get replaced by generations who’ve grown up accepting this stuff as the water they swim in.
Proposal: limit access of these camera networks to local jurisdiction. Just like rip-stop fabric and cell walls, boundaries are required for stability, and making it where federal agencies have eyes everywhere is far too dangerous.
I 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. But this is a hopeless fight.
I am from the UK and we are quite far down the surveillance and control mentality (Flock actually seems a greater system of surveillance then what we have here but if such a system was created, the push back would be less). But a lot of people here are slowly beginning to see the benefits in self defense and gun laws that mean you are not dependent on the police, this kind of logic where people have want autonomy and policing becomes less popular as the inevitable abuses or neglect happen is something that creates change.
I would advocate for a shift of power by creating greater individual rights over their data (as their irrevocable property) , and greater oversight and consequences for those in power (ab)using the data.
It's one thing for our data to be out there such that a NSA employee could stalk their girlfriend, it's another thing for said person to be allowed to gracefully "retire" rather than be put in prison.
This is not advocating, this is wishing. It is as meaningful as "advocating" that you were rich and that Elon was poor, or "advocating" that you should be six inches taller.
At this stage I'd settle for echelon era surveillance and consider it a win...
Ad tech/tiktok has proven its possible to deduce what people are think at scale from subtle signals, now sifting info at scale is possible thanks to LLMs and a large portion of everyone's online history is likely to become vulnerable to store now decrypt later attacks. Get rid of cash, force identity verification for every online service, sprinkle some flock cameras on top and you've got a complete surveillance state. Oh and of course you need some goons to scare people into compliance & later in some self-censorship for good measure. We could call the group "Frozen water".
...and we're basically already there on all of it except perhaps the "decrypt later" on https (and even that has rumours).
how not? All of this is "soft" control, if tomorrow 75% of the people in any country decided "this can't keep on going on", all relevant public buildings would be occupied everywhere and the relevant government imprisoned promptly.
On a more positive note, the fact that this doesn't happen indicates things aren't that bad right now. No amount of KYC or age verification can stop large amounts of angry people who want one thing.
People sometimes bring up China - which isn't relevant because people still remember being extremely poor, thus being grateful to the Party - or one of those dictatorships as counterexamples for this, but see the Arab Spring (food got more expensive -> revolutions), Nepal recently... etc.
>if tomorrow 75% of the people in any country decided
No kings protests was a very respectable effort....peaked at 2.3%.
Even the current administration inept as it is is basically home free on this one. Senate neutered, Courts sidelined, Treasury subjugated, loyalist in charge of military, JAG core silenced, secondary personal goons squad established and lavishly funded, Social media captured, Stats department dismantled, Cult of personality created, common enemy created (immigrants), distractions for the masses arranged (culture wars, UFC on whitehouse lawn), truth undermined (prez spouting nonstop lies & AI), oligarch class established, surveillance normalized, norm of kiss the ring & pay tribute established.
Dunno about you but to me that looks like US democracy is so cooked the kitchen smoke alarm has gone off & everyone was too busy doomscrolling to notice.
Hope I'm wrong but that list looks pretty fuckin comprehensive to me. Hell they even somehow managed to throw in a roman salute...
> 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 from a single act and destroying a lot of our freedom. Yeah us.
There’s lots of questions around who was actually behind 9/11, looking at who benefited the most is helpful. We may never know the truth but we know who the real “terrorists” are, because they’re terrorizing everyone now.
> One of the many legacies of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11
I see this more as an excuse used by a small corrupt elite
wanting to enslave the people. The problem is that you do not
have a real democracy in the USA. The current orange clown
brigade shows this best (corrupt to the core), but it is not
really much better with other roleplaying administrations.
Sooner or later people will realise this too, even the not too
terribly bright.
No it is not, and it will get worse. No matter who is in power, power stays. And power by definition is the capacity to control and plunder without restrictions
All these years reading about liberty and philosophy has taught me that the only way out is to make money and disappear, be an eagle, watch the lions eat the sheeple from the top of a mountain, because the sheeple don't want to be freed and worse yet, they will point at you as if you're an outlier, a misfit, a problem that must be fixed by force, their 'democratic' force
So fly high, find your peak and watch from there, we only have 100 years to live as we please, not to spend it fighting for those who don't want to be saved
Do like Nero, let the world burn and enjoy watching, from afar...
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/government-election... Here's a fun little interview. They had a program that apparently worked, for much cheaper than Michael Hayden's program (I think Trailblazer). Got shelved apparently due to "not expensive enough". 9/11 happens and Binney contends his ThinThread program could have stopped it. You don't want more dragnet surveillance; even beyond the abuses, it leads to it being harder to catch things
I find it ironic that in the US, there's this social movement against Flock cameras - which have shown real results in tracking down criminals - while everyone walks around all the time with a personal tracking device in the form of a smart phone. That's wayyyy more invasive than cameras along roads.
Don’t be That Guy please. This tired talking point gets walked out in every privacy discussion. Both things can be (and are) bad at once, but just because one problem exists doesn’t mean that others aren’t worth solving.
In any case this article is about the whole spectrum of mass surveillance, not one specific company.
Phone data requires some actual process to access. It should be more restrictive than it is, but I don’t believe the information is made available to random police officers who can search for whatever they want with no real justification.
The problem with Flock isn’t the cameras, it’s the system built on them that gives panopticon powers to any random law enforcement officer.
So, Democratic candidates who are looking like they will win a seat this midterm cycle are going to get arrested for "domestic terrorism".
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 of it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_Nothing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Scare
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 anti American. Having a country means organizing around a core set of values. We can debate what those are but arguing you can’t stand for anything?
The term may have had an agreed upon meaning at some point, but not anymore.
Edit: it seems like most right-wing people conflate "non-Christian" with "anti-American". i don't know what's worse; the fact that these people say and think it, or the fact that their constituents don't know the difference.
You might be right about the non-Christian confusion, but that's quite different from why Islam can be anti-American. Right wingers are far more tolerant of Jews and atheists than they are of Muslims.
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.
The "American Experiment" isn't an empty concept, but it is about democracy and law and rights as opposed to conservative cultural values, and when people in power start to argue that the former must be sacrificed for the latter they certainly deserve to be clowned on. Not because they are wrong to imagine an American Ideal, but because they have its contents exactly backwards.
So for restricting speech, you could say not honoring the first amendment or something like that.
I think about this because sometimes people or ideas are described as "problematic". Sometimes for very good reason, but sometimes you find out the speaker has trouble being specific. I like to hear the specific reason when I can to understand the facts or logic. Sometimes these classifications come third hand.
I would define confidently that Anti-American is aligned with Anti-Constitutional. By definition, it is this nation's founding document and treatise.
An the Supreme Court's ultimate role is to affirm or deny nebulous case law as aligned with the Constitution.
on edit: fixed grammatical error, based on bad keyboard gesture moving stuff around.
(Truth is its just rhetoric and it doesn't mean much of anything. That's why its main use is as a cudgel).
Through that lens, it is very clear what anti-American means: adherence and loyalty to a person instead of a set of values, expansive government overreach, erosion of individual liberties, including the ability to express dissent.
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 can be anti-other things too, but its certainly anti-american
When the term "anti-American" is used, it is a placeholder for "against my values". Noone is ever anti-American himself, it is only a label applied upon others.
That's why IMO it should be rejected when used by people in a public role, see original comment.
You are free to think otherwise, which I may then label as "anti-American" in passing, while quickly moving on to you mentioning Mike Pence and some random conspiracy I have /s
Again, /s/s/s/s
I'd heard of this but didn't realize it went on for decades.
Turning it around, I'd say persecuting political enemies for being "un-American" - or as a recent book declared, "unhuman" - is a very un-American thing to do. At least according to the values for which the nation stands (or supposed to stand).
Dude. Dude. You've said yourself: this Congress committee went on for almost four decades. And before it, it was Yellow Peril, or anti-Irish sentiments, or manifest destiny with its "the only good Indian is a dead Indian". So, no, it's a very American thing to do, has been since the foundation of the US and arguably from even before than that.
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 in the declaration of independence are American values.
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 different leader...
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"
Not at all...that's when the paper matters the most, because the electorate can see that the person in charge is not upholding our values, purely in contrast to the document. The document sets the baseline. Writing things down has value.
The US has had a total of _one_ government and what it means to be American is in the founding document of that government. To be German is to lay claim to a history and cultural lineage that is filled with many different governments and even different states all-together.
The US has distinct regional and cultural identities as well, to be a Texan means something more akin to being German. Texas has a history that extends beyond the US. One can be American and Texan precisely because they are describe a different thing.
To be American is to ascribe to a certain set of ideals and, as far as someone isn't living up to those ideals, they are "anti-American".
From the many responses on this thread, it appears that many either don't want a defintion of "pro-American" or "anti-American" or "an American Ideal" or don't have one but these are core to your point.
How would you define each?
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 is wholly unproductive.
Anyway this argument has occurred a thousand times on these boards so if you saw January 6 as peaceful and harmless I can’t change your mind.
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot
Show me where this happened in every other election.
It was never claimed that it was successful.
(P.s. don't ask any questions that they don't like, that would be Un-American).
The 'threat' was also the reason many working class Americans had generally higher standard of living than they do today
Many symptoms of undercover fascism.
Make no mistake, this is not some sophisticated conspiracy. This is pure laziness and abuse of power. They have been using "domestic terrorist" as a button to slap anytime they dont want to be questioned. the phrase no longer means anything besides "this person questioned authority"
ICE has used it to label people they shot for videoing them. Note that they knew the video evidence existed and labelled them anyway, assuming they would be able to avoid court altogether and prevent the video evidence being seen. In at least one case, this didnt work and the victim was correctly identified as such.
So this isnt hypothetical. It is a playbook being used right now, and people are testing the waters for how much they can get away with.
It would be fascinating to revisit this comment with you after the midterms and see whether your beliefs have changed in any way.
If it helps, ^^have a brochure explaining all of the ways folks are dramatically misunderstanding us right now. :(
The first step in defeating it is untangling the action/identity conflation.
You are: someone who is biologically non-female, but whose gender identity is that of a woman.
He is: a businessman and politician.
You do: upstanding, normal folk things.
He does: reprehensible shit like assaulting teenagers and bragging about "grabbing [women] by the pussy."
Hopefully people are able to see who in this comparison is in the wrong.
Fixing society-scale problems is really hard. Being angry at people who make you feel a bit weird inside is easy. People reliably choose easy.
I uses to think that it was about fear of the unknown, or as you've said "Being angry at people who make you feel a bit weird inside".
I now firmly believe that it's a modern form of tribalism. Having an "other", whether as a scapegoat, a fear inducing device, or a target is simply too convenient to ignore. Whether or not one is a globalist is orthogonal to the fact that people ultimately decide, or evolve to see through a different lens.
it's still baffling to me how incredibly irrelevant niche cases dominate the entire discourse.
HN does this constantly with the surveillance, bring up one case of police abusing it, it’s exactly the same thing.
Because in this case, we're talking about maybe a few dozen (if that) relevant cases in trans youth [1]. With police/secret services abusing surveillance... it's huge enough that LOVEINT [2] is a term, and at least 50 cases were serious enough to be brought under official investigation [3].
[1] https://glaad.org/fact-sheet-for-reporters-transgender-parti...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/08/02/how-pol...
Basically, the activists I'm talking about overreached by:
- Pushing for speech control around preferred pronouns
- Being overrepresented among Reddit mods, thus becoming to some extent the "face of censorship" for many highly online people
- Equating the mere act of disbelieving trans people's chosen gender identities with out-and-out bigotry of the KKK kind
- Talking about a mythical "trans genocide" and getting angry when people questioned its existence
- Pushing for equal bathroom access long before the American public had actually been made ready for something like that
Etc.
So what we have now in the highly online discourse is essentially a battle between niche militant trans activists who seem to illogically believe that they are on the brink of being put into extermination camps, on the one hand, and niche militant anti-trans fanatics who exaggerate the relatively rare cases of trans people doing bad things for the sake of pushing an overall anti-left agenda.
The militant trans activists I speak of seemingly just can't stop themselves from continuously providing people who actually hate trans people and people who just hate the left with more and more ammunition by having a prominent online presence while saying a mix of untrue and highly questionable things.
Before anyone jumps in with an angry reaction... yes, if it's not already clear from what I wrote, I also think that the right has a problem with insane deluded militant people.
https://translegislation.com/
I am not going to say much more here because I’m fairly certain none of this will get through to you given the tone of your comment. Trans people are far more likely to be victims in washrooms than to be perpetrators.
As for trans genocide, I mean sure, you can make an argument that there is a trans genocide by really really stretching the meaning of the word "genocide" or by using certain parts of highly technical definitions of "genocide". But when trans activists speak of "trans genocide", they are trying to appeal to the emotional resonance of more popularly central examples of genocides, ones with mass killings. If we use the common meaning of the word "genocide", the one that is intended the vast majority of the time the word is used, there is no trans genocide.
As for washrooms, note that I never said that I'm against trans people using their chosen genders' washrooms. What I said is that many trans activists pushed to do this long before the American public had become ready for something of that nature, which contributed to a backlash against the trans movement in general.
I say this all to say it surprises me how many republicans I know are pro freedom until it hits certain topics... Pro 2A and anti-(an adult can choose a different hormonal profile for their own body) is an odd pairing in my mind. Pro free-speach like Alex Jones / Citizens united but anti-(choosing to wear clothes or other adornments/appearance of the other gender) is an odd pairing in my mind.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49712333
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/08/11/most-amer...
[3] https://prri.org/press-release/new-survey-finds-strong-major...
Trying to abstract history into major shifts that are attributable to inanimate objects is just very ludic fallacy.
Because there's about 1% of people who are trans in the US [1] and most other populations, on top of that come a further about 1.7% people who are somewhere on the intersex spectrum [2].
Democrats aren't willing to throw literally millions of people under the bus. Republicans aren't just willing to cast them aside - they are knowingly driving trans people to extinction.
[1] https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-ad...
[2] https://www.ohchr.org/en/sexual-orientation-and-gender-ident...
There are now more bills attempting to "solve" the problem of trans girl's in sports (and it is girls, to be clear, trans boys are never an issue) than there are trans girls in sports. It's fucking pathetic.
Something like waiting until male puberty is already pretty far along and doing extensive strength training and then transitioning and competing immediately in a sport that puts a heavy premium on strength. I think most sports already have rules that would prevent this.
For someone following a more normal transitioning trajectory, there would be zero advantage; probably a significant disadvantage.
A blanket ban is just pure bullying, especially for childrens' sports (which are primarily a social activity, not a consequential competition). Individual sports can have rules to prevent the (primarily hypothetical) abusive cases without preventing children from participating in normal social activities. No one is saying that someone who's 200 lb of solid muscle and started HRT a month ago should be able to compete against girls in football or powerlifting, but pickleball, sure go for it.
That I think is the core issue. Way too many people try to live way too hard through their children. Wherever you look, either in the US or (where I'm from) Germany... you'll find absolutely absurd behavior from completely unhinged parents. Just yesterday, that was a topic discussed here [1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49686134
I would agree that the number of people we are talking about is very small. It was to begin with a very niche issue.
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.
Sports regulatory bodies still test for hormonal PED, but their concerns have long swayed away from them because of the fact that they are so easy to detect and have the built in disadvantage of potentially altering your life negatively outside of sport. The current concerns have shifted to peptides and other forms of PEDs, because they are much harder to detect because they are 1) often naturally occurring but in smaller quantities, 2) don't actually directly act on the musculoskeletal system, but rather trigger natural processes that act on the system, and 3) often have half-lives dramatically shorter than most drug tests can even account for, and therefore require near continuous monitoring.
The extrapolation I'm making, and admitting it's an extrapolation, is that a sexed at birth male competing in womens sports will have had a developmental period of hormonal advantage over females which follows them regardless of gender identity.
Quite the contrary. If you want to publish something going against "the narrative" (if something like that exists in the first place) has never been easier than now. Proper keywords and the far-right and their pseudomedia are going to give even the worst quackery a time in the spotlight - just look at RFK Jr.
Oh complete and utter twaddle.
Academia trends toward progressive views because the more educated you get, assuming you have principles and employ critical thinking consistently, the more ridiculous the positions of the right tend to look. You cannot look at the totality of climate change data and go "well clearly it's not man made" unless you either don't understand it, or cherry pick it to oblivion. You can't look at the history of Austerity politics, deployed both here and in the UK by our respective free market goblins (Reagan and Thatcher) and hold that it's good for anyone at all apart from those who are already wealthy.
This boogeyman of BIG SCIENCE holding down all the conservatives is complete and utter dreck. Show me literally one example of it. Show me one individual who's life was ruined and their career decimated to uphold ideological ends.
My muscles are gone y'all. Like I've had to buy more breaker bars and larger tools so I can keep working on my cars, otherwise I simply could not break bolts anymore.
It's gradual, it's not all at once and I am still slightly taller and heavier-set than the average American woman, so I do have an advantage through having more mass, but anyone that's larger than the average American woman will also have that so it's not really an advantage, just a fact of having a larger body.
> The police, "suspecting the conflagration to be the first of a series of Communist acts of terrorism", have arrested a number of Communist leaders.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/1933/mar/28/leadersandreply...
Huh.
I think of that poem, First They Came:
replace 'Jews' with the current minoritized target demographic (ie immigrants of any stripe) and we're already fairly far down that list. see the case of David Huerta for the targeting of unions: https://www.courthousenews.com/los-angeles-labor-leader-arre...The left gets trapped in it because every single culture war issue (LGBQT+, racism, feminism, reproductive rights, freedom from religion, etc) are responses to the rights reactionary drive to claw back rights from everybody who is not a white male christian.
Then I realize I'm probably better off not.
I saw a poll recently showing that close to half the country expects a civil war, and a disturbingly large portion of that group wants a civil war. Cross-spectrum as well.
Trump and an army of paid influencers completely broke up the America First coalition, who had pinned their hopes on Trump being “their guy”. Now they’re all infighting, so the DSA is the only tangible threat to the establishment at the moment.
It remains to be seen if the DSA has shaken off attempts at disruption. It’s hard to be a small-d democratic organization when your opponents can afford to send endless streams of wreckers into your midst.
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 the other side, merely to point out that this is a non-partisan issue.
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 thieves and bandits there are.
The world isn't a thing to be managed (ch. 29) The world is a sacred vessel; it cannot be manipulated. Whoever acts on it ruins it; whoever grips it loses it.
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 I were a multi-billionaire, I'm not sure I could do anything. I could piss into the wind with a somewhat larger amount of piss.
I've come to believe that our lack of agency over emergent behaviors in our own societies and economies is a central problem of the human condition.
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, hobbies, etc).
It's hard for those who have no choice, and those who've made different choices, to relate to the insatiable appetite of billionaires.
These people also have much more leverage to change the world in substantial, albeit often short lived ways. My family has been hurt by the DOGE cuts. Hopefully it's not a permanent injury. Yet it's very real.
On a broader timescale, we can take a look at the fact that goods which were designed to be affordable and mass-produced have been elevated to refined luxury goods, like the Herman-Miller Eames, as an indicator that material standards have fallen very far. Not the least of which because of an ever-dwindling labor share of capital (beginning in the 1970s), which silently impoverishes working households and degrades their comfort while being completely invisible to an uncareful eye on paper.
Much of the major boons of comfort were established prior to the transition to shareholder capitalism. Things like e-commerce, IoT, online banking, these are for the birds. Meaningful advances are things like HVAC and refrigeration, ubiquitous motorized transport, electrical lighting.
However, overcoming these forces is something people did successfully in the past. I think right now we are just in a cycle of mass confusion caused by the technological revolutions, which prevents us to see clearly (as it happened in the past as well).
Without alignment we just drift by natural forces of a system in place in whatever direction. When we adapt and if the world survives, this should not be an issue.
The problem of billionaires is that they are one level below from the top in abstraction of a society. They are required to play by the rules of the state designed by someone else, and they lack the knowledge and experience to go one level higher and think about the policies and rules for society itself - and this is much harder than doing business, and requires completely different skills.
Because of these factors, we see them being able to hoard wealth but unable to influence the system in any positive way, except for the ones which the system was already designed for (create jobs, innovate, etc.)
There absolutely, without a reasonable doubt, is a conspiracy of the elite -- the billionaire class.
As individuals, they are dangerous competitors, and they can’t afford to trust each other too much without some kind of mutual leverage. This could be in the form of mutual equity holdings, blackmail, complex arrangements where each party has exposure, whatever. But even then, trust has limits.
There’s no cabal that runs things with rules and elections at this level. It’s all individuals who are immersed in the systems that made them wealthy. Those systems tend to lead to certain behaviors. That’s it.
However, some groups do have identifiable leadership, rules, membership rosters, etc. Political parties for instance, or governmental bodies. Decisions from groups like this often have an identifiable lineage (from proposal to vote) and are considered binding. This contrasts with the sort of emergent decisions I was discussing in the context of the very wealthy. There was no vote, there was no formal coordination, and the “decision” is not binding, yet everyone can see its effects. Opposing something like this is like boxing with a shadow.
Hell, history shows us enemies often cooperate. Mostly to defeat a mutual enemy, so they can go back to fighting each other, but that's still cooperation
Billionaires just don't have much power. This isn't a movie.
There is no group in charge. No one is in charge.
for example we could completely obviate Facebook by having a standard mechanism for something like an rss feed. individuals or organizations could publish my stream(s) from their own leaf connections, set up cloud instances, or pay someone to host them. there could be a whole ecosystem of readers with various UIs and policy filters. people/organizations could add value by aggregating trusted streams or filtering them for content some people might find offensive. and at the end of the day it doesn't require people who just want to use it to set up persistent networking and storage.
in any case we just got suckered into handing the keys to the internet to companies like Meta and Google, which make vast amounts of money to control the discourse in corrosive ways. all because we bought into the notion that nothing is real unless someone is making a buck off it.
having a standard and a whole space of compatible programs doesn't preclude people from making lifestyle money selling filters and aggregators and content, but it kind of removes the Meta-style leverage over the whole system.
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-3/
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-4/
The 1st amendment (free speech) in order to protect the right to host the service in the first place and the 4th one (unreasonable search and seizure) to protect against surveillance.
Not sure how the 3rd (lodging of soliders in peacetime) would be relevant.
One, the move to digital lives made digital surveillance necessary. It wasn't enough to check attendance at the local mosque/far right rally. Then, the counter-move to encrypted communication meant law enforcement now had to rely on metadata.
Second: A wanton disregard of the treasure that is digital data. Most people just don't seem to care. LG is snooping on you? I bet they won't see even a 10% drop in sales next year. When the citizenry as consumer blasts their data everywhere, it's hard to argue as parliamentarian that those same people want it protected. Now people use Apple Watches and Amazon Alexa in their own bedrooms! People say they want their data safe guarded, but their actions suggest otherwise.
It's exhaustion, it's impotence, it's desolate. But that's different than apathy. People care, they are just overwhelmed
We live in war times and will soon see it happening
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes
1. EU style governmental pushes to defend digital rights. Data needs to be our own property that we can lend, but can never give up our right to revocation.
2. Stricter controls, and stricter still penalities, need to exist against misuse and abuse. Many of the stories of abuse of data are most stark in their lack of repercussions, some of this is police unions, some of this is "deep state" people who scratch eachother's backs and grant eachother free accesses and immunity. Some of this is a voting issue as in we need to make it known to our candidates that it matters to us, and then push real political power in their hands.
Just to help the imagination of all here's where mass surveilance could plausibly add good to society, all stemming from legitimate use:
1. Criminals like porch pirates can be caught using a neetwork of Ring cameras
2. A lost pet/child can be identified and found by drone surveillance
3. Usage data of roads can be updated in realtime
4. Trends and Sentiment could be used to guide the government intra-elections improving the way government serves us
5. Police officers can avoid risky situations using drones as eyes instead of putting their own bodies in harms way
7. authoritarians and evil men can have a one-stop shop to know where to round up political opponents
8. power becomes increasingly entrenched and concentrated
9. See 7
Humans have frequently created systems which contradict steps 6-9, or atleast from Monarchy to Democracy. Constitutions, legal systems, laws et al. have generally served as barriers to abuse. The question is how do we continue to uphold and increase the value for individuals and decrease the expected return of abuse.
>> Your points are, essentially, always true of all power for all time
yes, there are very famous examples of good record keeping leading to invaders or coups having an easier time killing people who they don't like.
>> Humans have frequently created systems ... as barriers to abuse
we have systems that law abiding people abide by. Again, when those people change to not-law-abiding, it is a problem that we've not solved.
2. Lost pets are not being found by drone and camera surveillance. They could, but the system doesn’t give a shit about your dog. Children, maybe. I guess i’m ok with deploying a fleet of drones during a search and rescue operation. As long as there is transparency so it’s not done for other reasons, and they are grounded when they are done.
3. You just need one of those pressure sensitive wire strips across the road to do this. It’s a largely solved problem that doesn’t involve mass surveillance.
4. I am just guessing what this means, but government doesn’t do things that are wildly popular by polling, so why would they react to some ai surveillance sentiment analysis?
5. This isn’t mass surveillance. Like #2, a deployed drone to look around a corner or scan a building before entering is using technology but it’s momentary. If it became a problem where it was being over used we could deal with it as a separate issue.
No, I don't think we need Chat Control in the US or our government forcing ISPs and CDNs to block whole swaths of the internet just because a soccer game is on TV.
It'd be even better if there was some form of royalty structure on our data used by companies. It'd be nice if I, at least, received a royalty check each time a data broker sold my data to the CIA.
It will never work like that.
There are dozens of ways living in a cage can improve human life.
You won't be exposed to dangerous ideas and you might get a calorie allowance. There's little danger of an unwanted pregnancy, and you might be given labor-related chores or exercises to occupy your time.
The danger with all of these systems is what happens when they are abused. That's not a matter of if, just a matter of when.
We are building a cage around society. It's so slow you don't realize the shackles being placed around your ankle and your neck. But one day, when it's too late to protest, the switch will be flipped.
We're already living in 1984. We are always just a few election cycles away from 1934.
It’s had a couple attempts that got shot down so far, but the pushback gets weaker as time goes on, and as the troublesome/less-compliant generations age out and get replaced by generations who’ve grown up accepting this stuff as the water they swim in.
Like many on this site I'm in violent agreement with Schneier and have been ever since "security theater" entered the lexicon. But this is a hopeless fight.
I don't think it inevitable that this continues.
There is significant pushback against surveillance.
It's one thing for our data to be out there such that a NSA employee could stalk their girlfriend, it's another thing for said person to be allowed to gracefully "retire" rather than be put in prison.
This is not advocating, this is wishing. It is as meaningful as "advocating" that you were rich and that Elon was poor, or "advocating" that you should be six inches taller.
The extremely detailed "Metadata" they have on you will still exist in your children's time.
Ad tech/tiktok has proven its possible to deduce what people are think at scale from subtle signals, now sifting info at scale is possible thanks to LLMs and a large portion of everyone's online history is likely to become vulnerable to store now decrypt later attacks. Get rid of cash, force identity verification for every online service, sprinkle some flock cameras on top and you've got a complete surveillance state. Oh and of course you need some goons to scare people into compliance & later in some self-censorship for good measure. We could call the group "Frozen water".
...and we're basically already there on all of it except perhaps the "decrypt later" on https (and even that has rumours).
Genuinely don't think this is stoppable anymore.
On a more positive note, the fact that this doesn't happen indicates things aren't that bad right now. No amount of KYC or age verification can stop large amounts of angry people who want one thing.
People sometimes bring up China - which isn't relevant because people still remember being extremely poor, thus being grateful to the Party - or one of those dictatorships as counterexamples for this, but see the Arab Spring (food got more expensive -> revolutions), Nepal recently... etc.
No kings protests was a very respectable effort....peaked at 2.3%.
Even the current administration inept as it is is basically home free on this one. Senate neutered, Courts sidelined, Treasury subjugated, loyalist in charge of military, JAG core silenced, secondary personal goons squad established and lavishly funded, Social media captured, Stats department dismantled, Cult of personality created, common enemy created (immigrants), distractions for the masses arranged (culture wars, UFC on whitehouse lawn), truth undermined (prez spouting nonstop lies & AI), oligarch class established, surveillance normalized, norm of kiss the ring & pay tribute established.
Dunno about you but to me that looks like US democracy is so cooked the kitchen smoke alarm has gone off & everyone was too busy doomscrolling to notice.
Hope I'm wrong but that list looks pretty fuckin comprehensive to me. Hell they even somehow managed to throw in a roman salute...
>On a more positive note
Yeah sorry...above isn't exactly that
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_2026_No_Kings_protests#T...
In other words, we gave the terrorists the victory by accepting being terrorized at the country level from a single act and destroying a lot of our freedom. Yeah us.
it will never go away.
I see this more as an excuse used by a small corrupt elite wanting to enslave the people. The problem is that you do not have a real democracy in the USA. The current orange clown brigade shows this best (corrupt to the core), but it is not really much better with other roleplaying administrations.
Sooner or later people will realise this too, even the not too terribly bright.
All these years reading about liberty and philosophy has taught me that the only way out is to make money and disappear, be an eagle, watch the lions eat the sheeple from the top of a mountain, because the sheeple don't want to be freed and worse yet, they will point at you as if you're an outlier, a misfit, a problem that must be fixed by force, their 'democratic' force
So fly high, find your peak and watch from there, we only have 100 years to live as we please, not to spend it fighting for those who don't want to be saved
Do like Nero, let the world burn and enjoy watching, from afar...
In any case this article is about the whole spectrum of mass surveillance, not one specific company.
There’s also plenty of options for solving car theft that aren’t dystopian.
I find it pretty dystopian that CVS has to lock up cheap products because society has failed to punish criminals.
The problem with Flock isn’t the cameras, it’s the system built on them that gives panopticon powers to any random law enforcement officer.