5 ms·

This makes me sad, you are so confident that a government can never do the right thing, that the only solution you see is to prevent any progress, and anchor yo

This makes me sad, you are so confident that a government can never do the right thing, that the only solution you see is to prevent any progress, and anchor yourself to a local minima from the past. Society needs it’s members to believe that they can improve it, that they are represented by a government, and that they can influence it’s path. Anything less is an authoritarian regime. Such deep seated cynicism shows that we are far down a bad path. If you don’t believe that the government will accept regulations that protect its citizens, at the expense of losing surveillance, then the primary goal is to replace that government, not to fight a losing battle for the sunlit uplands of a disappeared past.

autoexec 5y ago
> Society needs it’s members to believe that they can improve it, that they are represented by a government, and that they can influence it’s path. I'll believe in the benevolent government that rejects abusing their authority for the purpose of mass surveillance when I see one. I believe people still have the power to push for small/minor changes in government so long as those changes don't threaten the powerful. Anything else is pretty unlikely. You can call it cynicism, but it's been known for a long time that the only people who can substantially influence government are large corporations or the extremely wealthy (see https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B#sec0 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...) I still support the ideal that people should be able work within the system to challenge the entrenched powerful, but the evidence for it actually working in most cases isn't strong and my government has spent centuries making adjustments when they've been shown to be vulnerable in order to make it harder. I don't think people should stop trying for change, but at a certain point, you have to accept the situation you actually have while you try to find a realistic path to something better.
- 6510 5y ago
  > I believe people still have the power to push for small/minor changes in government so long as those changes don't threaten the powerful. Anything else is pretty unlikely. I use to think the same but apparently the anti corruption tech is getting every bit as draconian as everything else. Governments will eventually have to go full retard and be openly corrupt or they have to deal with oddities retroactively. For example, many would love to award contracts directly without holding a proper bidding process but it gets increasingly unlikely to get away with it.
BoxOfRain 5y ago
Is there much evidence to believe governments won't cheerfully throw their citizens under the bus for the benefit of the surveillance state? The GP's cynicism is completely warranted in my opinion, when given the choice between doing the right thing for its citizens and increasing the scope and power of its own bureaucratic institutions all governments (and all other very large organisations for that matter) pick the latter. It's not just a matter of voting in a new government, we need some serious structural reforms to how politics works with an emphasis on subsidiarity making it very hard for a single entity to consolidate power and we also need severe taboos on things like building surveillance infrastructure. We need governments that assume some percentage of every electoral intake will be corrupt or self-interested and correct for this accordingly rather than assuming all politicians are honourable by default. Political power should be treated like enriched uranium: a vital resource for society that's nonetheless extremely dangerous if it's allowed to reach a critical mass.
- sofixa 5y ago
  > Is there much evidence to believe governments won't cheerfully throw their citizens under the bus for the benefit of the surveillance state Is there much evidence for the reverse? Ignore the US Patriot act bullshit and focus on democratic countries where the political system isn't fundamentally broken.
  - BoxOfRain 5y ago
    This isn't a US-specific problem, a lot of Europe and the Anglophone world at large is experiencing issues like this. It feels like the last two years especially (but a fair bit leading up to it) have utterly destroyed my trust in not just the political institutions in the UK but a lot of other ones I'd taken for granted in the past too. I genuinely feel like we've become perhaps not a banana republic but certainly a banana kingdom where corruption is the norm and the government exists primarily to serve the powerful rather than the people. We're literally at the point where the Prime Minister can openly flout the law and lie about it to the Mother of Parliaments without consequence, where there's apparently no meritocracy whatsoever in how politicians are appointed to high office, and policy positions are in lockstep with predicted media response rather than any notion of public good. The tail has wagged the dog right into oncoming traffic. All governments will use (or abuse) the powers they have to the absolute maximum extent they can get away with which is why subsidiarity is so important. The less power any individual has, the less damage they can do by using it as a tool for their own self-interest and the more they're forced to build consensus with other influential people which limits extremism. If it were up to me I'd abolish the office of Prime Minister altogether in favour of strong Cabinet collective responsibility and I'd also create an anti-corruption body completely outside of Parliament and the other institutions of state with wide-ranging powers to seek and punish misconduct in high office. Political office is an absolute magnet for people with unpleasant personality traits, instead of assuming good faith in politicians we need to assume bad faith and build the machinery of government defensively to accomodate this. Another remedy to our issues is abolishing general elections in favour of rotating, asynchronous by-elections. This would give us exactly the same amount of democracy, but it means that the media's influence is massively reduced due to a lack of national election campaigns and it also means parties are forced to stick to their manifestos as they're effectively forced to campaign locally at all times so pulling a Nick Clegg becomes much more risky. As well as preventing the election result essentially being a function of how good the media strategy is, it also means the makeup of Parliament changes much more gradually which allows for long-term planning instead of the insane pendulum swinging where nothing gets done if it takes more than five years.
sofixa 5y ago
Very succinctly put. The amount of people who are hell bent on staying in the past and refusing any sort of progress out of ( exaggerated, IMHO) cynical fear and slippery slope fallacies is.. concerning to say the least. Instead of those people using their concerns to help shape the narrative and regulations to fight against what they don't want, they play toddlers and simply refuse to advance. Cashless is so much more practical the battle has already been lost, a while ago. It's only a matter of time before it's fully everywhere.
- auggierose 5y ago
  Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. Anything that can be abused, will be abused. This is not cynical, this is just how it is. Progress is great, but cashless is not progress.
  - artificial 5y ago
    Anything involving authorization introduces the possibility of denial.
raxxorrax 5y ago
> Such deep seated cynicism shows that we are far down a bad path. It isn't just confirmation bias. We had instances where a government blocked bank accounts of protesters, in democracies and autocracies alike. It doesn't get much clearer than that. We also had at least two decades where we only ever saw increased surveillance. And it isn't necessarily cynicism in my opinion, it is realism. It is an fearful older generation that feels it loses control. Sure, government could change course, but I don't see it. To believe otherwise is almost naive at this point. We can be really glad the people that worked on the technology for a global network anticipated such behavior, so I might even want to encourage more cynicism at that point because it provides real safety instead of the fake one that is promised by government. But it doesn't even matter, because your vote does not count on such topics. Experts in the field do not count on such topics. The older generation is set in their way and we will have to endure it for quite a few years at laest.
- walterbell 5y ago
  > endure it for quite a few years at least Or longer, if life extension research is successful..
6510 5y ago
Governments can do the right thing most of the time but things should be designed for the worse case. One of the big motivators behind the general data protection act is how personal data was historically used for genocide. We still have plenty of politicians that want to target people categorically and make them second class citizens.
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
>Society needs it’s members to believe that they can improve it, There are a lot of assumptions about the role of government in society in your comment. There's a heck of a lot of people out there who think society can be improved by refining, restricting or reducing government's role in specific areas or generally.

autoexec 5y ago

> Society needs it’s members to believe that they can improve it, that they are represented by a government, and that they can influence it’s path. I'll believe in the benevolent government that rejects abusing their authority for the purpose of mass surveillance when I see one. I believe people still have the power to push for small/minor changes in government so long as those changes don't threaten the powerful. Anything else is pretty unlikely. You can call it cynicism, but it's been known for a long time that the only people who can substantially influence government are large corporations or the extremely wealthy (see https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B#sec0 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...) I still support the ideal that people should be able work within the system to challenge the entrenched powerful, but the evidence for it actually working in most cases isn't strong and my government has spent centuries making adjustments when they've been shown to be vulnerable in order to make it harder. I don't think people should stop trying for change, but at a certain point, you have to accept the situation you actually have while you try to find a realistic path to something better.

6510 5y ago
> I believe people still have the power to push for small/minor changes in government so long as those changes don't threaten the powerful. Anything else is pretty unlikely. I use to think the same but apparently the anti corruption tech is getting every bit as draconian as everything else. Governments will eventually have to go full retard and be openly corrupt or they have to deal with oddities retroactively. For example, many would love to award contracts directly without holding a proper bidding process but it gets increasingly unlikely to get away with it.

BoxOfRain 5y ago

Is there much evidence to believe governments won't cheerfully throw their citizens under the bus for the benefit of the surveillance state? The GP's cynicism is completely warranted in my opinion, when given the choice between doing the right thing for its citizens and increasing the scope and power of its own bureaucratic institutions all governments (and all other very large organisations for that matter) pick the latter. It's not just a matter of voting in a new government, we need some serious structural reforms to how politics works with an emphasis on subsidiarity making it very hard for a single entity to consolidate power and we also need severe taboos on things like building surveillance infrastructure. We need governments that assume some percentage of every electoral intake will be corrupt or self-interested and correct for this accordingly rather than assuming all politicians are honourable by default. Political power should be treated like enriched uranium: a vital resource for society that's nonetheless extremely dangerous if it's allowed to reach a critical mass.

sofixa 5y ago
> Is there much evidence to believe governments won't cheerfully throw their citizens under the bus for the benefit of the surveillance state Is there much evidence for the reverse? Ignore the US Patriot act bullshit and focus on democratic countries where the political system isn't fundamentally broken.
- BoxOfRain 5y ago
  This isn't a US-specific problem, a lot of Europe and the Anglophone world at large is experiencing issues like this. It feels like the last two years especially (but a fair bit leading up to it) have utterly destroyed my trust in not just the political institutions in the UK but a lot of other ones I'd taken for granted in the past too. I genuinely feel like we've become perhaps not a banana republic but certainly a banana kingdom where corruption is the norm and the government exists primarily to serve the powerful rather than the people. We're literally at the point where the Prime Minister can openly flout the law and lie about it to the Mother of Parliaments without consequence, where there's apparently no meritocracy whatsoever in how politicians are appointed to high office, and policy positions are in lockstep with predicted media response rather than any notion of public good. The tail has wagged the dog right into oncoming traffic. All governments will use (or abuse) the powers they have to the absolute maximum extent they can get away with which is why subsidiarity is so important. The less power any individual has, the less damage they can do by using it as a tool for their own self-interest and the more they're forced to build consensus with other influential people which limits extremism. If it were up to me I'd abolish the office of Prime Minister altogether in favour of strong Cabinet collective responsibility and I'd also create an anti-corruption body completely outside of Parliament and the other institutions of state with wide-ranging powers to seek and punish misconduct in high office. Political office is an absolute magnet for people with unpleasant personality traits, instead of assuming good faith in politicians we need to assume bad faith and build the machinery of government defensively to accomodate this. Another remedy to our issues is abolishing general elections in favour of rotating, asynchronous by-elections. This would give us exactly the same amount of democracy, but it means that the media's influence is massively reduced due to a lack of national election campaigns and it also means parties are forced to stick to their manifestos as they're effectively forced to campaign locally at all times so pulling a Nick Clegg becomes much more risky. As well as preventing the election result essentially being a function of how good the media strategy is, it also means the makeup of Parliament changes much more gradually which allows for long-term planning instead of the insane pendulum swinging where nothing gets done if it takes more than five years.

sofixa 5y ago

Very succinctly put. The amount of people who are hell bent on staying in the past and refusing any sort of progress out of ( exaggerated, IMHO) cynical fear and slippery slope fallacies is.. concerning to say the least. Instead of those people using their concerns to help shape the narrative and regulations to fight against what they don't want, they play toddlers and simply refuse to advance. Cashless is so much more practical the battle has already been lost, a while ago. It's only a matter of time before it's fully everywhere.

auggierose 5y ago
Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. Anything that can be abused, will be abused. This is not cynical, this is just how it is. Progress is great, but cashless is not progress.
- artificial 5y ago
  Anything involving authorization introduces the possibility of denial.

raxxorrax 5y ago

> Such deep seated cynicism shows that we are far down a bad path. It isn't just confirmation bias. We had instances where a government blocked bank accounts of protesters, in democracies and autocracies alike. It doesn't get much clearer than that. We also had at least two decades where we only ever saw increased surveillance. And it isn't necessarily cynicism in my opinion, it is realism. It is an fearful older generation that feels it loses control. Sure, government could change course, but I don't see it. To believe otherwise is almost naive at this point. We can be really glad the people that worked on the technology for a global network anticipated such behavior, so I might even want to encourage more cynicism at that point because it provides real safety instead of the fake one that is promised by government. But it doesn't even matter, because your vote does not count on such topics. Experts in the field do not count on such topics. The older generation is set in their way and we will have to endure it for quite a few years at laest.

walterbell 5y ago
> endure it for quite a few years at least Or longer, if life extension research is successful..

6510 5y ago

Governments can do the right thing most of the time but things should be designed for the worse case. One of the big motivators behind the general data protection act is how personal data was historically used for genocide. We still have plenty of politicians that want to target people categorically and make them second class citizens.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago

>Society needs it’s members to believe that they can improve it, There are a lot of assumptions about the role of government in society in your comment. There's a heck of a lot of people out there who think society can be improved by refining, restricting or reducing government's role in specific areas or generally.