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> We probably all know that they will show reasons [...], whereas the real motivation is to control people's freedom of speech and communication even though the

• mach1ne 4y ago
  Even though something has a benevolent rationalization, it doesn’t mean the true motives are benevolent. It doesn’t need any New World Order conspiracy either. People in ruling positions often enjoy power, and they may be clueless as to how this desire is affecting their decisionmaking.
  • brookst 4y ago
    I’m always skeptical of phrases like “true motives”. Sometimes people can do the wrong thing for the right reasons, or totally amorally. There doesn’t have to be a secret agenda. Framing things in terms of shadowy cabals that hide their secret motivations weakens the argument and reduces odds of successful resistance to these programs by misunderstanding the opposition.
    • Hizonner 4y ago
      I believe the idea is not that they hide their motives, but that they hide from their motives. May or may not be true, but still...
      • brookst 4y ago
        That’s fair, but it’s still an unsavory argument style. “I know the secret motivations of those in power, which even they don’t know”. It’s a weird way to remove agency from the powerful in the name of, IDK what.
      • rojobuffalo 4y ago
        I think hide implies intent to deceive. It's often more like conscious and sub-conscious reasoning. We constantly tell a story to ourselves about our motives. We're impulsive and wrong a lot of the time. And nobody is the bad guy in their own story. Maybe it's willful ignorance. Ignorance of the misuse and harm of mass surveillance.
        • brookst 4y ago
          Maybe. Are you as open to the idea that those who oppose surveillance (that’s me) also have secret motives and engage in willful ignorance, so you can’t trust my anti-surveillance arguments? Because, the theory goes, even I don’t know the dark motives that are making me say those things? Do you see how impossible any dialog becomes in that model?
          • rojobuffalo 4y ago
            If you frame it as ignorance, the next step is to enlighten the other side with the factual arguments you want to make. "The threat landscape isn't as bad as you claim it is." "Mass surveillance has downsides that are worse than you would think." If you assert deceptive intent, it kind of slides into character attacks. It's true that people sometimes don't argue in good faith, and it's fair to question hidden motives. But I think if you have better facts, you should keep arguing the facts.
    • ethbr0 4y ago
      Better said than me. There are different approaches to changing someone's mind if they're misunderstanding something, versus if they're straight-up lying to you. The fact that there exist highly public straight-up lying politicians doesn't mean the mass of politicians are liars. Most are trying to do a decent thing, with the understanding they have. Casting one's democratic agents as "other" corrodes democracy, decreases participation, and generally furthers the problem being bemoaned: lack of attention to citizen desires.
      • brookst 4y ago
        Yes, and it’s frustrating to see people whose policy positions I generally agree with (less surveillance, please) resort to this kind of rhetoric. People who disagree are not only wrong, and not only intentional wrongdoers, but they have secret motives even they themselves don’t know? These people have obviously never tried to get four people to agree on what movie to see.
        • yunohn 4y ago
          > but they have secret motives even they themselves don’t know? I’m not sure that’s what is implied; it’s just obvious that publicly proving one’s “true motives” is quite difficult.
        • CamperBob2 4y ago
          Secret motives aren't really the right argument, I agree. Citing the seemingly-inevitable negative outcomes may be a better approach. When someone argues for ubiquitous mass surveillance, ask them to explain exactly how the Stasi worked, how they came to power and what can be done to keep it from ever happening again. Point out that these questions have to be addressed before arming the state with surveillance tools that previous abusive regimes couldn't have dreamed of.
          • ethbr0 4y ago
            That's the biggest thing that frustrates me about NWO (as a concept) used as a rhetorical device in argument: it's not necessary. You have world history littered with examples of mass surveillance platforms being used for oppression. No explanation or justification of why that happens seems necessary! It's a stronger and supported argument to just say "Whatever the cause, when mass surveillance has been implemented historically, it is eventually used to errode civil liberties and increase population control."
    • feanaro 4y ago
      > There doesn’t have to be a secret agenda. There doesn't have to be, but there totally can be.
      • ImHereToVote 4y ago
        Nonsense. Government organizations never do things in secret. The very idea is patently absurd. I mean, how would that even happen in practice, someone does something without blasting it on Twitter, as I said, absurd.
        • ImHereToVote 4y ago
          /s
        • UncleEntity 4y ago
          Maybe the things that get blasted on twitter are formally secret things that government agencies do that someone blew the whistle on? Which means there could be an untold number of things which they do which are currently secret. I heard once that things, sometimes shady things, exist outside of the twitterverse.
          • candiodari 4y ago
            There are boatloads of laws in any democracy that would never survive a referendum. This law is one example. Let's face facts here: 90% of the aim is to make policing cheaper and more pervasive. To make it possible for algorithms to police people, because then those algorithms can replace attention by police officers. Even most police officers themselves wouldn't agree to that.
          • martyvis 4y ago
            >formally or formerly?
            • UncleEntity 4y ago
              Could be both…
    • yunohn 4y ago
      I’m truly astonished that there are people who refuse to believe that the people in power are constantly conspiring. It’s like you are completely ignoring all evidence, or discounting it as one-offs. Sure, maybe it’s not NWO or the illuminati, but you can’t possibly dismiss all the behavior we see and impacts we experience?
      • KerrAvon 4y ago
        Sure, but it's not a singular shadowy cabal in a star chamber. There are different groups who all have an negative impact on our lives. The banal and stupid: Elon Musk and his fellow trust fund buddies and VCs doing jello shots and going "Antifa sucks amirite?" and acting on their stupidity because they have money and power. Banal and stupid category 2: CEO groupthink. Let's all have layoffs before there's an actual recession because activist stockholders demand it and we don't have the guts to propose something better. Then there's the John Birch Societies of the world: the actual organized shadow political movements. The Koch brothers using massive corporate profits to fund the right wing think tanks over multiple decades. They don't take credit, but the ascent of the right wing crazies is entirely down to them and fellow travelers. Banal and stupid category 3: the people attending the WEF/Davos. enough said. etc. you can probably list your favorites here, and you might slice them differently than I have. What there isn't is a single central group making decisions for the rest of us, nor is there any organized left-wing cabal. If you do think there's any kind of organized left-wing group of any sort in America, I'd love to know about it, because I'd like to join that group and I've never seen one in 20 years of looking.
        • lazyeye 4y ago
          If you study system theory you'll understand that a bunch of seemingly self-motivated actors without a central leader can achieve a system-wide outcome. A ant colony might be a simple example of this.
        • yunohn 4y ago
          > If you do think there's any kind of organized left-wing group of any sort in America I’m neither American, nor was talking about “left wing” American cabals that control the world. I’m not sure why this has to be a singular group. It’s a tale as old as time, rich vs poor. One can clearly observe multiple not-necessarily-colluding but powerful groups globally and locally, who all aim to control and subjugate the rest of us. This makes no sense to be a semantic debate where you grind an axe that “there is not just one illuminati” and act like that means something impressive.
    • admax88qqq 4y ago
      Another way of phrasing this is "always argue against the best possible interpretation of your opponents argument." It's a HN rule for good reason. It makes your own arguments stronger. Even if your opponent _is_ a shadowy new world order cabal member or supporter, arguing against the best possible interpretation which requires of their stance helps sway random citizen X who may not know of or believe in such a cabal.
    • gonehome 4y ago
      Yeah - also sometimes there are legitimate tradeoffs and the answer is non-obvious! Stuff like Google’s CSAM detection really does detect abuse. It also can cause problems for a parent if there’s a false positive. The reason these things are hard is because it’s a discussion of what’s better on net and it’s not the case that there is no tradeoff. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-debates-should-not-appear-one-sided https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-deb... If OP can’t acknowledge that he’s just ideologically partisan and won’t be persuasive to anyone who doesn’t already agree. Deeply understanding the opposite position requires accepting that there are smart reasonable people that hold it (for good reasons!), not that they’re all some “shadowy cabal” lying and hiding bad intent.
      • jeremyjh 4y ago
        There are definitely a lot of smart, reasonable people with sincerely held beliefs who nonetheless lie about their motivations and work with like minded people to draft and support legislation under false pretenses for the greater good. They say they want to stop child pornographers and I’m sure they do, but their actual motivations are to monitor political dissidents.
        • gonehome 4y ago
          Sure, but they’re not the entire set - and it’s the people that hold the view earnestly that are more interesting to steelman. The same could be said for people who want encryption (and often is by partisans on the other side, “you just want to hide bad behavior and only pretend it’s about general privacy”). I think strong encryption and user control is important (I work on urbit full time at Tlon and encourage friends to use Signal), but I still recognize there are real tradeoffs that result from empowering individuals this way, I just think on net it’s the right decision even with the often terrible downsides. It’s easy to pretend there are no downsides and people like to structure policy opinions as if this was the case, but it rarely is. ## > “ Robin Hanson proposed stores where banned products could be sold.1 There are a number of excellent arguments for such a policy—an inherent right of individual liberty, the career incentive of bureaucrats to prohibit everything, legislators being just as biased as individuals. But even so (I replied), some poor, honest, not overwhelmingly educated mother of five children is going to go into these stores and buy a “Dr. Snakeoil’s Sulfuric Acid Drink” for her arthritis and die, leaving her orphans to weep on national television. I was just making a factual observation. Why did some people think it was an argument in favor of regulation? On questions of simple fact (for example, whether Earthly life arose by natural selection) there’s a legitimate expectation that the argument should be a one-sided battle; the facts themselves are either one way or another, and the so-called “balance of evidence” should reflect this. Indeed, under the Bayesian definition of evidence, “strong evidence” is just that sort of evidence which we only expect to find on one side of an argument. But there is no reason for complex actions with many consequences to exhibit this onesidedness property. Why do people seem to want their policy debates to be one-sided? Politics is the mind-killer. Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you’re on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it’s like stabbing your soldiers in the back. If you abide within that pattern, policy debates will also appear one-sided to you—the costs and drawbacks of your favored policy are enemy soldiers, to be attacked by any means necessary.”
    • croes 4y ago
      This works both ways. Other motives are also suspected among the people and organisations fighting these laws.
    • omgomgomgomg 4y ago
      The intent does not even matter long term. The danger is an oportunist individual or group taking advantage of the thing. Let us play fantasyland and we assume there is one day a pill that feeds you for a day, tastes better than any food, makes you full and beats obesity. Do you think the ownership of that would not be fiercly fought about and the development should be kept secret? If it is not secret, anyone could just steal that revolutionary idea.
  • purututu 4y ago
    > It doesn’t need any New World Order conspiracy either. NWO is not a conspiracy theory any longer. This exact terminology is openly used by many politicians now, demanding for a NWO. Depending which bubble you live in, you have not seen any or only too little such speeches.
    • themitigating 4y ago
      Evidence?
    • KptMarchewa 4y ago
      Sure, if your bubble is "project veritas".
    • gjsman-1000 4y ago
      Example, even though I don't believe many of the conspiracy theories regarding them, here's the WEF calling for everyone to literally build a "New World Order." https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/12/we-must-work-together-to-build-a-new-world-order-china-russia-us/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/12/we-must-work-together... https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/conspiracy-theories-aside-there-something-fishy-about-great-reset/ https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/conspiracy-theor...
    • alex_young 4y ago
      The term New World Order has been used for over a century by politicians. It’s hardly believable that Woodrow Wilson was using a secret code word to communicate a plan to do evil things in the 21st century when he was advocating for the League of Nations.
      • ChewFarceSkunk 4y ago
        [dead]
    • PurpleRamen 4y ago
      > NWO is not a conspiracy theory any longer. It never was. Conspiracy nutheads just took it for them, and gave it their own evil twist. They always take something and see the evil option in it, and sell it as some fact which never was there. A similar thing happened recently with the term "Great Reset". But the simple truth is, we always strive for a better world, so aiming for a new world order is something totally normal happening. Nobody thinks the world today is flawless.
  • starkd 4y ago
    Not necessarily an intentional conspiracy, but it can just be that of a herd mentality. As a species, we are conditioned to follow the herd, to go along to get alone. Those that do not follow tend to get trampled, their concerns not even listened to.
  • babypuncher 4y ago
    Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity
    • ChewFarceSkunk 4y ago
      [dead]
• oauea 4y ago
  The reason is, and always has been, to enable lazy police work. They won't have to do their jobs if facebook will just tell them who the criminals are.
  • kwanbix 4y ago
    So, if everything is encrypted, how do you expect the police to catch ped0philes, for example?
    • jaywalk 4y ago
      "So if everyone has the right to privacy, how are the police supposed to do their job?" Somehow the police managed to catch bad guys before mass surveillance existed. Maybe they should look at that?
    • themitigating 4y ago
      Ever think there aren't as many pedophiles as you think? Maybe many have their own children to abuse or organizations with trust, like the church, in which encryption doesn't mean anything.
    • dns_snek 4y ago
      State of the art encryption has become so widespread and well known that anyone with the tiniest interest in privacy can download one of the hundreds of open source E2EE messaging platforms to use for their criminal activities. This line of thinking has always struck me as extremely odd - as soon as current, presumably E2EE, methods of communication are tapped into for intelligence and law enforcement purposes, criminals can and will switch to projects that don't comply with the backdoor laws. It's a violation of privacy that only law-abiding citizens will be subject to, for everyone else it's optional. You might catch a wave of them off guard in the beginning, but in the long term all you end up doing is surveilling innocent people and maybe catching lowest hanging fruit - the types of people who are already dumb enough to share their criminal activities on Facebook.
      • intrasight 4y ago
• A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
  There is no need to pretend. People with power want more power. As a thought exercise consider how you would arrange the world were you in a position to do so and try to determine placement of structures that could undermine your benevolent rule. Freedom of speech is such a structure. It is not really a paranoia if there are people out there working on just that. Now, just because there are also fellow travelers who truly believe 'for the children' cry, that is quite another and separate conversation.
  • worldsayshi 4y ago
    >People with [goals] want more power Sometimes those goals align with other people's interests. Sometimes not. Unless there's a way to portion out power across a population on a case by case basis there's going to be conflict of interest.
  • ethbr0 4y ago
    Indeed. Presumably that's why it made the very first amendment. If only they'd thought to explicitly state that included privacy. :(
• throwbadubadu 4y ago
  > Pretending there's a sinister, organized New World Order (aka "them" How did you got this out of GP? I think you both saying/meaning the same. > and listen to the loudest and most organized group. Which tends to be intelligence or law enforcement. Yep, and their actual desire is to control people's freedom (even admitting that some or all of them themselves belief that this is only for good cause, the reasons that also GP listed.. ).
  • ethbr0 4y ago
    Intelligence and law enforcement aren't typically empowered voters in democratic legislative bodies.
    • marcosdumay 4y ago
      And yet, they tend to be very successful on getting any proposal they want from those bodies. You can wonder why.
      • candiodari 4y ago
        Same reason every parliament in the world, including congress, has their own separate police force protecting them rather than relying on the real one?
        • anticensor 4y ago
          Those two police forces do have competing interests at times, hence the domestic police does not enter the parliamentary premises unless it is specifically called by a parliamentary decision.
      • ethbr0 4y ago
        I don't have to wonder, I know. Because they present a social good (less crime, adherence to law, order) that's one of the bases of civilization to those bodies, and those bodies give them more latitude than competing interests because of the primacy of that good. Which is how I'd want the system to work, because any system fully optimized for freedom without national security exceptions wouldn't survive as a major world power. They don't always get what they want. They do tend to get what they want. Occasionally things are scaled back later, as excesses are discovered. Working as designed and intended. Or to put it another way, what substitute system would you rather put in place, and how would it handle malicious internal groups and external world powers?
• leetcodesucks 4y ago
  [dead]
• FredPret 4y ago
  >listen to the loudest and most organized group I donate money to the EFF in the hope that they turn out to be this group eventually
  • ethbr0 4y ago
    Amen. Every year.
• gjsman-1000 4y ago
  > Pretending there's a sinister, organized New World Order (aka "them") with decades-long plans to restrict freedom is fantasy, and doesn't help us target the actual problem. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, and I don't really believe too much in the existence of such a group, but I can argue this is really bad logic. A. Do you think such a group would be public with their ambitions? Such a group would doubtless deny their own existence. Arguing that they do, or do not exist, can only be based on observation and opinion, because it is not falsifiable. B. Secret societies do exist, and there are some that still exist to this day that had major political power previously. The Freemasons, for example, were pretty influential in the French revolution on both sides, and counted leaders like Napoleon, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Paul Revere, and so on among their members. We know that nine freemasons, at a minimum, signed the US Constitution. (Then, fun fact, they put "Novus ordo seclorum" on the great seal of the US.) C. And even if there weren't powerful secret societies historically (which is doubtful), we currently live in a very globalized world with much easier ability to meet and privately message, so there's always a first. Saying that it never happened, therefore it can't happen, is always misguided. D. The World Economic Forum literally called for everyone to build a New World Order in 2018. With that exact terminology. It's still on their website. I would argue that makes them partially culpable for the conspiracies. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/12/we-must-work-together-to-build-a-new-world-order-china-russia-us/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/12/we-must-work-together...
  • lazyeye 4y ago
    I dont think it will be a "secret cabal". It will simply be a bunch of powerful people arguing that their personal interests are the national/global interest. And believing this whether its true or not. And institutions falling in line with this. You see this kind of attitude at a lower level on HN, for example, all the time. And this flaw in human nature only grows the more powerful you become.
    • ROTMetro 4y ago
      When I was in IT, the rule was 'no essential businesses processes in Excel unless defined and approved' to ensure 1. The formulas were actually correct and 2. We could provide continuity should the person leave 3. These items were included in corporate backups not just user level ones, etc. Hardly anyone followed that process. People are going to use the easiest/best/quickest tools available to get their job done. Add in promotions based on making 'big' cases and you have quite the incentive to abuse these tools without some huge conspiracy. Simple human nature.
• Xelbair 4y ago
  no matter the reasons, even if current politicians and institutions are 100% trustworthy, no such law should be made. you cannot guarantee that future institutions, and governments will be benevolent, and with such laws you give them easy access to tools of oppression.
• rdevsrex 4y ago
  Ahem, have you forgotten about the NSA spying on US citizens? Every government covets that power. It's a fantasy to assume they don't.
  • ROTMetro 4y ago
    As a jailhouse lawyer at a Federal Prison the amount of parallel construction in America is shocking. If you know the level the average FBI agent works at, look up other cases they are involved in and the level of work they did on them and 'quality' of their testimony and 'understanding of tech' they demonstrate, and then see these cases where they made amazing leaps of logic and connections and suddenly became technology geniuses it's easy to identify. But of course you need paid access to Lexus Nexus to look any of that up because while 'case law' is the law of the land and cases records are 'public' you have no way to, you know, access it or the information from all those 'public' cases they are involved in without paying big $$$. So the average person has no way to get exposed to how things really operate and instead go off some Constitutional and televisions crime drama 'ideals' that we all want reality to look like. It was really interesting spending hours going through those cases in the law library when I had 'free' (just trade a day of your life) access to it.
• soperj 4y ago
  > it's then used by law enforcement Never seen any abuse by law enforcement before :|
• JustSomeNobody 4y ago
  > Pretending there's a sinister, organized New World Order (aka "them") with decades-long plans to restrict freedom is fantasy I wouldn't be so naive. Groups like the Council For National Policy and Lance Wallnau pushing The Seven Mountain Mandate have been working for DECADES to push the agenda that you're seeing in schools and politics today. Maybe not a "world order", but they'd certainly like to be.
• macrolocal 4y ago
  Is anyone else astonished by how dramatically Hacker News has shifted its tone on this issue over the last five to ten years?
  • ChewFarceSkunk 4y ago
    [dead]
  • stiltzkin 4y ago
    Eternal September, when big social media sites get big enough you will find larpers and bots including Hacker News.
    • macrolocal 4y ago
      Even so, the larpers and bots seem more authoritarian now.
      • ethbr0 4y ago
        Not sure Eternal September is an apt ad hom, when the parent you're responding to has been bitching about government overreach since the original meaning of the phrase.
        • macrolocal 4y ago
          Gadflies play a critical role in the ecosystem! :)
          • ethbr0 4y ago
            Mhmm. And what separates a gadfly from not-gadfly?
            • macrolocal 4y ago
              Gadflies target Bellerophons obviously. It your steed can't handle a few gadflies, riding off to Mount Olympus is irresponsible.
• masterof0 4y ago
  It doesn't need to be a "World New Order" for three letter agencies lobbying to increase surveillance, and hence their power over the people. You are right, bureaucrats are clueless, but they don't need to be sharp, the agencies that will benefit from violating people's privacy and right already are. The is no possible good coming from those laws, the argument of "saving the children" falls flat, because you could extended to anything, "ban knives because children could cut themselves", etc... Privacy is a right, and those agencies(also known as deep state) pushing lawmakers to subvert it, are doing in to control people indeed.
  • ethbr0 4y ago
    "No possible good" is strong phrasing. Putting aside the distracting CSAM branding, I can think of at least five good ones. None of which I'd personally value over freedom, but it's disingenuous and a failure of understanding your opponent to pretend benefits don't exist.
• pelasaco 4y ago
  > A lot of bureaucrats and legislators are instead just disorganized, technically clueless, and listen to the loudest and most organized group. Which tends to be intelligence or law enforcement. I agree with you. We are too dumb, to selfish, to humans to be able to run a a New World Order, with decades-long plans in silence. For sure one stupid member would do a tiktok video while using their funny clothes
• im3w1l 4y ago
  How do you explain the countless tyrants in ancient and modern history? Hell, even in contemporary times. The truth is that there are absolutely very dangerous people around. And also a lot of good people too. We can't know for certain who is who, so the best approach is to be as polite as if they were good people but as cautious as if they were evil.
  • ethbr0 4y ago
    There are only ever two high level options: 1) Put someone in charge, so that they can overrule the evil of the masses 2) Put the masses in charge, so that they can overrule the evil of individuals Naturally the Romans, governmentally smart buggers that they were, adopted both. In modern times, I think the best we can get is putting the masses in charge, with specific prohibitions on dumb things we know they'll try to do (e.g. trade freedom for security when they're scared).
• pessimizer 4y ago
  > In democracies, it really is pushed for {good reasons}. It's marketed to upper-middle class elites as reasonable, and of course it's upper-middle class elites that are paid to put together this marketing. But it's really orders from an owner class that has entirely different interests from the other 99.9% of the population. If an individual member of of the upper-middle class has a problem with {the imposition of the week}, they are harshly corrected, shunned, then eventually ejected from the upper-middle class. Your credentials will be taken away, your friends will avoid you to keep from being suspected themselves (and will rationalize this behavior to overcome cognitive dissonance, becoming energetic state chauvinists), your credit will be destroyed. > Pretending there's a sinister, organized New World Order (aka "them") with decades-long plans to restrict freedom is fantasy, and doesn't help us target the actual problem. This is just a slander. There are people who own large parts of the economy, and people live for decades, and people pass their ownership to their children. They are also friends with their peers. The fantasyland is when we imply that they never speak to each other, never make plans, and have no agendas. It's a failure of thinking at scale.
  • ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    > The fantasyland is when we imply that they never speak to each other, never make plans, and have no agendas. It's a failure of thinking at scale. This fantasyland is denifately common falacy many here believe However it remains to be shown that their plans are what you say they are
    • omgomgomgomg 4y ago
      I think you are wrong here and right. There is no conspiracy, it has all already happened. Maybe not on a global scope, but have you heard of the "stasi"? Any political party can conspire to enforce something against the voter base that is not represented, pretty much any time. The saying "knowledge is power" and 1984 and such havent been there for no reason. People have written conspiracy theories about rfid chips, they have been ridiculous and what could these have given away other than location data and body temperature? Meanwhile, everyone has a mobile phone and a pc and smart devices which are phoning home sending the data to be sold to the highest bidder. There have been terrible people in power on this planet and their paths should be full of obstacles. Ask the people who suffered under pinochet, stasi and countless african dictators. Better to not hand anyone the full infrastructure for absolute power and control if it can be prevented. Nuclear codes and production secrets are not visible on youtube, and I think medical data, bank accounts, browsing history and docs on pcs should not be subject to preemptive surveillance. If there are issues with child pornography, we have police forces for that, by all means, go for them. If there is a terrorist problem, we have armies to sort them out, by all means, go for it.
• bassrattle 4y ago
  This is just such an ignorant take with no regard for real history. The PATRIOT act in America was quickly used to facilitate mass surveillance, and it reflects a greater pattern of government behavior. While there are "useful idiots" who embody the technically clueless bureaucrats you describe, there is absolutely collectives of nefarious actors aiming to control populations.
  • mistermann 4y ago
    > This is just such an ignorant take with no regard for real history. I take issue with your inclusion of the word "just" in this sentence. I don't disagree that it is an "ignorant" (in the technical sense, not pejorative) take with ~~no~~ little regard for real history, but that isn't all ("just") that it is. Almost certainly, this behavior is a consequence of heuristic (sub-perceptual) intuition, that is as it is as a consequence of the substantial and constant training/propaganda humans have been subjected to regarding "democracy" and "conspiratorial thinking" over the last decade or so, and especially heavily during the Trump and then COVID periods. So when questions like this arise, it genuinely(!) seems to people like government officials are trustworthy, in fact. "Seems in fact" is an oxymoron of course, demonstrating how influential cultural norms can be, and in turn how bizarre "reality" is (and why, partially). If hackers on HN used the same logic & epistemology they use in forum discussions when they are writing code at work, imagine how much of an even bigger disaster things would be out there!! :) While I'm at it, I should probably also take a shot at this comment from above: >> In democracies, it really is pushed for {good reasons}. And who is it pushed by? Politicians. And who is not asked their opinion on the matter? Voters. And what does this demonstrate? That "democracy" in practice is not a match for how it is described, not even close. And yet, day after day millions of instances of these same sorts of illusory discussions take place, here and elsewhere. It may never end. Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream....
• deleted 4y ago
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• mordae 4y ago
  > I don't think this is how it works, absent an already existent police state. > In democracies, it really is pushed for {good reasons}. If public servants were left to their own devices and could mandate any law they like, they would instantly prohibit any behavior that is not explicitly allowed. Because that's how they themselves must function so that public can hold them accountable. The trouble is that they inherently push this mentality to the politicians who must rely on them to get popularity contest points and sometimes manage to win these nonsense laws that help nobody. > Pretending there's a sinister, organized New World Order (aka "them") with decades-long plans to restrict freedom is fantasy, and doesn't help us target the actual problem. Sure, but there actually is "them". They are clueless, individually powerless, out-of-sight, largely disconnected social class that actually makes this happen. And they can wait decades for the right situation. In Czechia, the public servant actually responsible for introducing DNS blocking was actually tasked with online hazard oversight. He pushed it through in order to block just 6 websites because it was somehow easier for him than negotiating banning payments to them, probably because of turf wars. The respective two ministries are rivals and won't ever cooperate. He lobbied for this for like 10+ years and then a bunch of idiots has gotten elected and ran with it. So in a way, you are right. But you are also somewhat wrong. From my experience finding the actual people pushing for this (it's usually not the politicians) and outing them would work way better.
• arrosenberg 4y ago
  > Pretending there's a sinister, organized New World Order (aka "them") with decades-long plans to restrict freedom is fantasy, and doesn't help us target the actual problem. Thankfully, we don't have to pretend! A cadre of wealthy Americans have a documented history of conspiring against the people of this country. https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/assets/usa-courts-secrecy-lobbyist/powell-memo.pdf https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/assets/u... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
• croes 4y ago
  Parts of Germany instated laws that allowed to arrest people without trial for 30days. They claimed to only use it to prevent severe crimes like terrorism. Current statistics show, the most people that got arrested via that laws are climate activists. So either the law makers and police are incompetent and therefore shouldn't make these laws way or they know what they are doing and therefore shouldn't make these laws. BTW these laws made for "good reasons" don't get the jobs done.
  • ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    On the other hand in UK we pass laws that make it illegal to steal dogs. Which was obviously illegal anyway. I think American terror watchist has grown to nearly two million people. Are there really milkions of terrorists in US? How have they not yet blown up everything
    • int_19h 4y ago
      I think the craziest thing you have in UK is Section 60. Specifically, the fact that a measly police inspector can unilaterally declare that "incidents involving serious violence MAY take place in a specified area", and then cops can stop and search anyone in that area without reasonable suspicion.
• zelphirkalt 4y ago
  There is a "them" though: Tech giants. And they are pushing/lobbying hard with their huge financial reserves, which they extracted from clueless uninformed masses. A company like Google would love for all privacy protections to disappear tomorrow, because of the riches they can amass then. It is simply capitalism and greed at work.
• Geee 4y ago
  "Them" is a metaphor for aligned incentives. If there are incentives for something to happen, it will happen. These incentives create a self-organizing conspiracy where the participants don't even need to communicate with each other, but they are co-operating anyway, just by acting in their own interest. It doesn't matter whether "them", the NWO or the lizard people are real or not; the end result is the same.