3 ms·

I feel that the partisan takes generally miss the larger picture.

api 5y ago
To get past the partisanship all you have to do is change the jackets. Imagine if Hillary Clinton had won in 2016, rallied the extreme left with dog whistles and charged divisive rhetoric, and then had lost to a fairly moderate Republican in 2020. Before the election can be certified she gives a speech to a mob of angry protestors telling them to march to the capitol. Embedded among them are actual paramilitary and militia groups with strong extreme-left ideologies. The protestors go full riot, start fights, bludgeon a police officer to death with the American flag, march into the capitol, and start ransacking the place. Many of them are wearing shirts with hammers and sickles on them, "Lenin was right," "Camp gulag," etc. A number of them are dressed in all black and are seen climbing around with zip ties calling the names of various congress members and senators. They erect a gallows out front and are chanting things like "hang Mitch McConnel!" Clinton is reported by numerous witnesses to be watching the events on TV while she calls and threatens officials in states where her opponent won by a narrow margin, pushing them to overturn the results. She also has a team of attorneys working on tactics to overturn the election. She refuses to give a speech to call off the riot for hours and hours until the national guard shows up to clear the building. Even after that she refuses to concede the election. I'd call that a coup attempt. You might call it an insurrection. I think that's quibbling over semantics. I brought it up to argue for the risk posed by complete loss of privacy. We are creating a system of total surveillance that will be available to whatever much worse regime might take power in the future. If the thought of right-wing populist authoritarians is fine with you, imagine instead that it's an American Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro. That is not out of the question either if the same people backing right wing populism become disillusioned with it and flip to left wing populism instead. Stranger things have happened. For the record that could be every bit as awful as a right wing authoritarian, especially with the kind of surveillance powers they will be able to seize and mobilize. People who think there's nothing wrong with this panopticon we're building should convert to Islam and move to Xinjiang province.
- l34jtlkjl 5y ago
- aww_dang 5y ago
  You can take another 180 spin and ask what the Trump people think about the election results. You might even ask, given what we know about the media's willingness to mislead, how we would know if any election result was valid? You might also ask if the figure head president is as half as important as some project meaning onto the office? There are many hypotheticals you could take. None of it feels relevant to the discussion about compulsory DNA collection.
- mistermann 5y ago
  > I'd call that a coup attempt. You might call it an insurrection. I think that's quibbling over semantics. This seems like a good opportunity: since this scenario/though experiment is a product of your mind, you should have access to knowledge of whether it actually was a coup attempt (the people in question genuinely had the intent to overthrow the government, and a legitimate plan of sorts) - so, did they?

api 5y ago

To get past the partisanship all you have to do is change the jackets. Imagine if Hillary Clinton had won in 2016, rallied the extreme left with dog whistles and charged divisive rhetoric, and then had lost to a fairly moderate Republican in 2020. Before the election can be certified she gives a speech to a mob of angry protestors telling them to march to the capitol. Embedded among them are actual paramilitary and militia groups with strong extreme-left ideologies. The protestors go full riot, start fights, bludgeon a police officer to death with the American flag, march into the capitol, and start ransacking the place. Many of them are wearing shirts with hammers and sickles on them, "Lenin was right," "Camp gulag," etc. A number of them are dressed in all black and are seen climbing around with zip ties calling the names of various congress members and senators. They erect a gallows out front and are chanting things like "hang Mitch McConnel!" Clinton is reported by numerous witnesses to be watching the events on TV while she calls and threatens officials in states where her opponent won by a narrow margin, pushing them to overturn the results. She also has a team of attorneys working on tactics to overturn the election. She refuses to give a speech to call off the riot for hours and hours until the national guard shows up to clear the building. Even after that she refuses to concede the election. I'd call that a coup attempt. You might call it an insurrection. I think that's quibbling over semantics. I brought it up to argue for the risk posed by complete loss of privacy. We are creating a system of total surveillance that will be available to whatever much worse regime might take power in the future. If the thought of right-wing populist authoritarians is fine with you, imagine instead that it's an American Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro. That is not out of the question either if the same people backing right wing populism become disillusioned with it and flip to left wing populism instead. Stranger things have happened. For the record that could be every bit as awful as a right wing authoritarian, especially with the kind of surveillance powers they will be able to seize and mobilize. People who think there's nothing wrong with this panopticon we're building should convert to Islam and move to Xinjiang province.

l34jtlkjl 5y ago
aww_dang 5y ago
You can take another 180 spin and ask what the Trump people think about the election results. You might even ask, given what we know about the media's willingness to mislead, how we would know if any election result was valid? You might also ask if the figure head president is as half as important as some project meaning onto the office? There are many hypotheticals you could take. None of it feels relevant to the discussion about compulsory DNA collection.
mistermann 5y ago
> I'd call that a coup attempt. You might call it an insurrection. I think that's quibbling over semantics. This seems like a good opportunity: since this scenario/though experiment is a product of your mind, you should have access to knowledge of whether it actually was a coup attempt (the people in question genuinely had the intent to overthrow the government, and a legitimate plan of sorts) - so, did they?