5 ms·

Only until the next Reichstag fire, I suspect, because by then there won't be any more democracy.

by exe34 1y ago

kubb 1y ago
Can you phrase your thought as a causal chain so that I don’t have to guess what you mean?
- BiteCode_dev 1y ago
  In the 1930s, the Dutch government conducted a census that included religion. The Netherlands, after all, had a comprehensive population registry system (Bevolkingsregister) established in the 19th century. This registry was centralized, continuously updated, and included religion, addresses, family connections, and occupations. After the German occupation in 1940, the Nazis accessed and exploited the Dutch population registry, including religious affiliation. About 75–80% of the ~140,000 Jews in the Netherlands were killed. This is the highest percentage in Western Europe. Compare that to France, which had a more fragmented administrative system, and less complete central records and 25% of Jews in France were deported and killed — a much lower percentage than the Netherlands. As usual, when reaching the Godwin point, the idea is not for you to take it at face value, but to extrapolate to your situation. The concentration of power and centralized people tracking are eventually always abused, and once your system becomes less free (which has historically eventually happened on a long enough timescale), you will pay the price for it. In our case, having a full history of all opinions, interactions, locations, and behavior linked to full identity of people is what we are ultimately talking about here. It's already well on its way, but it will make it worse. The more you concentrate power and feed data about people, the greater the potential damage. And of course, it doesn't need to be a full-on dictatorship to get problems with those. It's a spectrum of increasing problems you will get, the more you lean into it.
  - kubb 1y ago
    [flagged]
  - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
    >This registry was centralized, continuously updated, and included religion, addresses, family connections, and occupations. Sorry, but why would the Dutch government need to know all those details in the first place? Did Dutch citizens never ask that question back then? Nazis or no Nazis, that was an issue waiting to happen. I guess it wouldn't have mattered if they did, since the Netherlands was a kingdom and people didn't have much say into how the monarchy ran things.
    - johnisgood 1y ago
      Do Americans or Europeans ask any questions with regarding to why the Government wants to pass these anti-privacy laws, or how is it even supposed to reduce "child grooming", etc.? Maybe the Dutch citizens did ask these questions you think they did not ask, but the Government won.
    - speleding 1y ago
      To do governing properly you want to understand the impact your policies are having, and I general that means more data can give you better answers. In a world where the invasion had not happened yet it was not unreasonable to collect as much as we could and store it in threefold. Things are different now, once bitten twice shy.
    - harvey9 1y ago
      Your post highlights how shocked people who don't live in a database state can be when they encounter one. In the UK you can expect to be asked your ethnicity, sexuality, sex, gender, religion and a few other things every time you apply for a job or interact with the state.
      - rwmj 1y ago
        Simply not true.
        harvey9 1y ago
        I was asked all of the above the last time I applied for a job, and the last time I was admitted to hospital.
  - sofixa 1y ago
    > In our case, having a full history of all opinions, interactions, locations, and behavior linked to full identity of people is what we are ultimately talking about here. It's already well on its way, but it will make it worse. Well, not really. Age verification doesn't have to, and IMO should not, lead to a linked identity. Just a blind check "are you a real human older than X years old? Yes! OK". That way you get the benefits of age restrictions and real human validation, without any of the potential privacy ramifications. But to be clear, most real people's online presence is under their own names (or linked trivially to their own names, like a cutesy turn on their name for an instagram handle that is linked to their Facebook account which has their full name). It's already possible, and done, to track your public social media presence and interactions. Places like HN and even Reddit are much more niche than that.
    - BiteCode_dev 1y ago
      That's the whole point of this thread, the current setup makes a google account mandatory, with all the terrible consequences on private life that it has. It should not.
    - mbac32768 1y ago
      This implies you can control your name being linked to your social media profile based on whether or not you type it in? That's not required though. Your friends have already given your name to them by allowing the app access to their contacts.
  - tremon 1y ago
    This registry was centralized Not to detract from the rest of your message, but it wasn't centralized; the data was collected and stored in each municipality separately. The only part that is centralized is the historical archive: after death, each person's info card is moved to the National Archives. This system has never been centralized, even after digitization: birth records are still kept only in the town of birth, and when moving house your active records must be officially requested and the transfer manually authorized between municipal systems.
    - BiteCode_dev 1y ago
      Thanks for this correction.
FirmwareBurner 1y ago
We're already there if you live in places like Germany or the UK. Go on social media and criticize some politicians in the UK/DE about their open borders policies being directly responsible for some of the terror attacks there, and there's a high chance police will knock on your door for "being a right supremacist" and for committing the "speech of hate". I think France, Italy are also following the same path. You know you don't have free speech anymore, when saying facts gets you in trouble. And this is only the beginning. It will be more and more difficult to speak against the actions of your government the more unpopular the politicians become and the more people hate the results of their policies. And instead of changing course and following the wishes of the voters, politicians instead will clamp down on free speech.
- soco 1y ago
  You mean France and Italy where the parties which blame open border policies are governing? Somehow the whole rightwing discourse looks to me based on scare tactics: it will be so bad, it's not yet bad but just wait and it will be! All fortune tellers in that wing indeed.
  - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
    >You mean France and Italy where the parties which blame open border policies are governing? Is Le Pen governing in France and I'm not aware of? Because I've never seen Macron do that. And people are the ones blaming open borders, then some parties choose to capitalize on that (even if they ultimately do nothing), while some other parties choose to suppress that viewpoint as being right wing propaganda and that in reality there are no issue with open borders, that all the crime is imaginary, which is why they push for online censorship and anti-encryption laws, to make sure only their viewpoint becomes the only legally allowed one.
    - pydry 1y ago
      Nobody is suppressing the view that outsider migrants are the root of most evil in the west, just as nobody suppressed view that the outsider Jews are the root of most evil in the west in the 1930s. It's been a mainstream view in multiple mainstream media outlets for years.

Only until the next Reichstag fire, I suspect, because by then there won't be any more democracy.

by exe34 1y ago

Only until the next Reichstag fire, I suspect, because by then there won't be any more democracy.

kubb 1y ago

Can you phrase your thought as a causal chain so that I don’t have to guess what you mean?

BiteCode_dev 1y ago
In the 1930s, the Dutch government conducted a census that included religion. The Netherlands, after all, had a comprehensive population registry system (Bevolkingsregister) established in the 19th century. This registry was centralized, continuously updated, and included religion, addresses, family connections, and occupations. After the German occupation in 1940, the Nazis accessed and exploited the Dutch population registry, including religious affiliation. About 75–80% of the ~140,000 Jews in the Netherlands were killed. This is the highest percentage in Western Europe. Compare that to France, which had a more fragmented administrative system, and less complete central records and 25% of Jews in France were deported and killed — a much lower percentage than the Netherlands. As usual, when reaching the Godwin point, the idea is not for you to take it at face value, but to extrapolate to your situation. The concentration of power and centralized people tracking are eventually always abused, and once your system becomes less free (which has historically eventually happened on a long enough timescale), you will pay the price for it. In our case, having a full history of all opinions, interactions, locations, and behavior linked to full identity of people is what we are ultimately talking about here. It's already well on its way, but it will make it worse. The more you concentrate power and feed data about people, the greater the potential damage. And of course, it doesn't need to be a full-on dictatorship to get problems with those. It's a spectrum of increasing problems you will get, the more you lean into it.
- kubb 1y ago
  [flagged]
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago
  >This registry was centralized, continuously updated, and included religion, addresses, family connections, and occupations. Sorry, but why would the Dutch government need to know all those details in the first place? Did Dutch citizens never ask that question back then? Nazis or no Nazis, that was an issue waiting to happen. I guess it wouldn't have mattered if they did, since the Netherlands was a kingdom and people didn't have much say into how the monarchy ran things.
  - johnisgood 1y ago
    Do Americans or Europeans ask any questions with regarding to why the Government wants to pass these anti-privacy laws, or how is it even supposed to reduce "child grooming", etc.? Maybe the Dutch citizens did ask these questions you think they did not ask, but the Government won.
  - speleding 1y ago
    To do governing properly you want to understand the impact your policies are having, and I general that means more data can give you better answers. In a world where the invasion had not happened yet it was not unreasonable to collect as much as we could and store it in threefold. Things are different now, once bitten twice shy.
  - harvey9 1y ago
    Your post highlights how shocked people who don't live in a database state can be when they encounter one. In the UK you can expect to be asked your ethnicity, sexuality, sex, gender, religion and a few other things every time you apply for a job or interact with the state.
    - rwmj 1y ago
      Simply not true.
      - harvey9 1y ago
        I was asked all of the above the last time I applied for a job, and the last time I was admitted to hospital.
- sofixa 1y ago
  > In our case, having a full history of all opinions, interactions, locations, and behavior linked to full identity of people is what we are ultimately talking about here. It's already well on its way, but it will make it worse. Well, not really. Age verification doesn't have to, and IMO should not, lead to a linked identity. Just a blind check "are you a real human older than X years old? Yes! OK". That way you get the benefits of age restrictions and real human validation, without any of the potential privacy ramifications. But to be clear, most real people's online presence is under their own names (or linked trivially to their own names, like a cutesy turn on their name for an instagram handle that is linked to their Facebook account which has their full name). It's already possible, and done, to track your public social media presence and interactions. Places like HN and even Reddit are much more niche than that.
  - BiteCode_dev 1y ago
    That's the whole point of this thread, the current setup makes a google account mandatory, with all the terrible consequences on private life that it has. It should not.
  - mbac32768 1y ago
    This implies you can control your name being linked to your social media profile based on whether or not you type it in? That's not required though. Your friends have already given your name to them by allowing the app access to their contacts.
- tremon 1y ago
  This registry was centralized Not to detract from the rest of your message, but it wasn't centralized; the data was collected and stored in each municipality separately. The only part that is centralized is the historical archive: after death, each person's info card is moved to the National Archives. This system has never been centralized, even after digitization: birth records are still kept only in the town of birth, and when moving house your active records must be officially requested and the transfer manually authorized between municipal systems.
  - BiteCode_dev 1y ago
    Thanks for this correction.

FirmwareBurner 1y ago

We're already there if you live in places like Germany or the UK. Go on social media and criticize some politicians in the UK/DE about their open borders policies being directly responsible for some of the terror attacks there, and there's a high chance police will knock on your door for "being a right supremacist" and for committing the "speech of hate". I think France, Italy are also following the same path. You know you don't have free speech anymore, when saying facts gets you in trouble. And this is only the beginning. It will be more and more difficult to speak against the actions of your government the more unpopular the politicians become and the more people hate the results of their policies. And instead of changing course and following the wishes of the voters, politicians instead will clamp down on free speech.

soco 1y ago
You mean France and Italy where the parties which blame open border policies are governing? Somehow the whole rightwing discourse looks to me based on scare tactics: it will be so bad, it's not yet bad but just wait and it will be! All fortune tellers in that wing indeed.
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago
  >You mean France and Italy where the parties which blame open border policies are governing? Is Le Pen governing in France and I'm not aware of? Because I've never seen Macron do that. And people are the ones blaming open borders, then some parties choose to capitalize on that (even if they ultimately do nothing), while some other parties choose to suppress that viewpoint as being right wing propaganda and that in reality there are no issue with open borders, that all the crime is imaginary, which is why they push for online censorship and anti-encryption laws, to make sure only their viewpoint becomes the only legally allowed one.
  - pydry 1y ago
    Nobody is suppressing the view that outsider migrants are the root of most evil in the west, just as nobody suppressed view that the outsider Jews are the root of most evil in the west in the 1930s. It's been a mainstream view in multiple mainstream media outlets for years.