7 ms·

Signal has 100 million installs on Android alone. Arresting people for having Signal installed is not a scalable approach for a totalitarian state.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
turminal 4y ago
No, but banning them from the cell network is.
- zikduruqe 4y ago
  Then you can go off network... https://berty.tech https://berty.tech
  - NaughtyShiba 4y ago
    Messaging over… Bluetooth?
tux2bsd 4y ago
- sofixa 4y ago
  I find your focus on totalitarian left peculiar. It's not like they were somehow unique - plenty of totalitarian regimes of all kinds have arrested and executed countless people for whatever. A few random examples: * Ottoman genocide of Armenians, on ethnic/religious grounds. The Ottoman Three Pashas regime was as far from left as possible, but plenty totalitarian. * US internment of "foreign elements", including those with US citizenship, during both World Wars. US was never even center-left, let alone farther, and totalitarian is a stretch. Less bad than the other examples here, but still. * The many White and Red terrors in the Interwar and post-WW2 years, where vague association was guilt and execution. * Of course Jews, Roma, Gypsy, dissident in Nazi concentration camps. * The Herero and Namaqua genocide by the rightist totalitarian-ish Imperial Germany. * UK mass internment of Boers. Not leftist, not really totalitarian. Need i go on? Why did you feel the need to pain totalitarian leftist as worse than any other totalitarians?
  - tomohawk 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - jknoepfler 4y ago
      The common factor in mass state murder is militant Facism. There's no right or left, there's a willingness to commit mass-murder and a violent takeover of the state. It's incontrovertible that democide was one of the worst forces of the 20th century, but bizarre and dangerous to associate it with some one-dimensional "left/right" projection of 21st century identity politics. Pol Pot, Mao, Hitler - these are figureheads that became objects of popular worship. If Monarchies were a thing, they would have been monarchs. If Theocracies were a thing, they would have been theocrats. If corporations were a thing, they would have been admirable profiteers. Violent self-righteousness is just that.
    - stephen_g 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - tomohawk 4y ago
  - tux2bsd 4y ago
    Your attempt to invalidate a statement with a another set of information is not useful. During the 1900s the left killed people on a scale never seen before in human history. I suppose I do question the psychological need you have to run defense for the left...
    - sofixa 4y ago
      > Your attempt to invalidate a statement with a another set of information is not useful Unless that information makes the statement seem extremely biased, which it does? > During the 1900s the left killed people on a scale never seen before in human history And during the 1900s totalitarian rightist killed people on a scale never before seen in human history. Industrial murder factories, with brutal precision, murdering thousands per day by the trainload, with an assembly line of transportation, robbing, murder through poison gas, cremation? Never has humanity sunken so low. Brutal ad-hoc genocides of people murdering another group with their hands due to hatred or misinformation or whatever is more understandable and explainable than cold blooded mechanised precision mass murder on an industrial scale. Famines due to ethnic cleansing, stupidity, mismanagement and ignorance are aplenty. The Bengali famine is comparable to the Holodomor in scale and reasons, even if the Holodomor was probably more intentional. Nobody has done what the Nazis did at that scale. So yes, it's extremely stupid to single out totalitarian leftist regimes for their crimes against humanity, as if it's a uniquely leftist thing. It's obvious the people doing that have an anti-left agenda, which is honestly just being stupid.
- franga2000 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - tux2bsd 4y ago
    > throughout the 1900s You chose to ignore that, blathering on about the middle ages is off-topic.
    - franga2000 4y ago
      The original comment was entirely arbitrarily limited to the 1900s, and as it brought "the left" into the discussion unprompted, I can only assume this was done intentionally to justify specifically going after left regimes. So firstly, I don't see why a counter-argument should stick to this arbitrary time frame, and secondly, some of my examples do in fact apply to this time frame too.
      - tux2bsd 4y ago
        Like I said to the other chap, I do question the psychological need you have to run defense for the left...
xorcist 4y ago
Not in Iran. Not during demonstrations. Not in Kurdish-dominated areas. You can narrow it down as much as you'd like. And while you'd think that senseless violence against civilians do not scale, times of civil protests in totalitarian regimes is not good time to be naive. Shutting down routing for the entire country is pretty much par for the course. There's not such thing as collateral damage when the regime itself gets scared.
acdha 4y ago
> Arresting people for having Signal installed is not a scalable approach for a totalitarian state. Not all of those are in the same country, though, and it’s worth thinking about how the install base would change after a particular country banned an app. The first time someone gets an official warning a lot of people are going to say “not worth it”.
masterof0 4y ago
Not in places like Cuba, where I know first hand, people who participated in the protest in July 11th where charged based on the apps the police and G2(Cuban FSB) found in their phones.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

turminal 4y ago

No, but banning them from the cell network is.

zikduruqe 4y ago
Then you can go off network... https://berty.tech https://berty.tech
- NaughtyShiba 4y ago
  Messaging over… Bluetooth?

tux2bsd 4y ago

sofixa 4y ago
I find your focus on totalitarian left peculiar. It's not like they were somehow unique - plenty of totalitarian regimes of all kinds have arrested and executed countless people for whatever. A few random examples: * Ottoman genocide of Armenians, on ethnic/religious grounds. The Ottoman Three Pashas regime was as far from left as possible, but plenty totalitarian. * US internment of "foreign elements", including those with US citizenship, during both World Wars. US was never even center-left, let alone farther, and totalitarian is a stretch. Less bad than the other examples here, but still. * The many White and Red terrors in the Interwar and post-WW2 years, where vague association was guilt and execution. * Of course Jews, Roma, Gypsy, dissident in Nazi concentration camps. * The Herero and Namaqua genocide by the rightist totalitarian-ish Imperial Germany. * UK mass internment of Boers. Not leftist, not really totalitarian. Need i go on? Why did you feel the need to pain totalitarian leftist as worse than any other totalitarians?
- tomohawk 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - jknoepfler 4y ago
    The common factor in mass state murder is militant Facism. There's no right or left, there's a willingness to commit mass-murder and a violent takeover of the state. It's incontrovertible that democide was one of the worst forces of the 20th century, but bizarre and dangerous to associate it with some one-dimensional "left/right" projection of 21st century identity politics. Pol Pot, Mao, Hitler - these are figureheads that became objects of popular worship. If Monarchies were a thing, they would have been monarchs. If Theocracies were a thing, they would have been theocrats. If corporations were a thing, they would have been admirable profiteers. Violent self-righteousness is just that.
  - stephen_g 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - tomohawk 4y ago
- tux2bsd 4y ago
  Your attempt to invalidate a statement with a another set of information is not useful. During the 1900s the left killed people on a scale never seen before in human history. I suppose I do question the psychological need you have to run defense for the left...
  - sofixa 4y ago
    > Your attempt to invalidate a statement with a another set of information is not useful Unless that information makes the statement seem extremely biased, which it does? > During the 1900s the left killed people on a scale never seen before in human history And during the 1900s totalitarian rightist killed people on a scale never before seen in human history. Industrial murder factories, with brutal precision, murdering thousands per day by the trainload, with an assembly line of transportation, robbing, murder through poison gas, cremation? Never has humanity sunken so low. Brutal ad-hoc genocides of people murdering another group with their hands due to hatred or misinformation or whatever is more understandable and explainable than cold blooded mechanised precision mass murder on an industrial scale. Famines due to ethnic cleansing, stupidity, mismanagement and ignorance are aplenty. The Bengali famine is comparable to the Holodomor in scale and reasons, even if the Holodomor was probably more intentional. Nobody has done what the Nazis did at that scale. So yes, it's extremely stupid to single out totalitarian leftist regimes for their crimes against humanity, as if it's a uniquely leftist thing. It's obvious the people doing that have an anti-left agenda, which is honestly just being stupid.
franga2000 4y ago
[flagged]
- tux2bsd 4y ago
  > throughout the 1900s You chose to ignore that, blathering on about the middle ages is off-topic.
  - franga2000 4y ago
    The original comment was entirely arbitrarily limited to the 1900s, and as it brought "the left" into the discussion unprompted, I can only assume this was done intentionally to justify specifically going after left regimes. So firstly, I don't see why a counter-argument should stick to this arbitrary time frame, and secondly, some of my examples do in fact apply to this time frame too.
    - tux2bsd 4y ago
      Like I said to the other chap, I do question the psychological need you have to run defense for the left...

xorcist 4y ago

Not in Iran. Not during demonstrations. Not in Kurdish-dominated areas. You can narrow it down as much as you'd like. And while you'd think that senseless violence against civilians do not scale, times of civil protests in totalitarian regimes is not good time to be naive. Shutting down routing for the entire country is pretty much par for the course. There's not such thing as collateral damage when the regime itself gets scared.

acdha 4y ago

> Arresting people for having Signal installed is not a scalable approach for a totalitarian state. Not all of those are in the same country, though, and it’s worth thinking about how the install base would change after a particular country banned an app. The first time someone gets an official warning a lot of people are going to say “not worth it”.

masterof0 4y ago

Not in places like Cuba, where I know first hand, people who participated in the protest in July 11th where charged based on the apps the police and G2(Cuban FSB) found in their phones.