6 ms·

It's weird how many people's perception of this type of behavior is shaped by the person sitting in the White House. EDIT: It's also weird how my comment is be

by slg 1y ago

It's weird how many people's perception of this type of behavior is shaped by the person sitting in the White House. EDIT: It's also weird how my comment is being perceived exclusively as criticizing the critics of this administration rather than criticizing the supporters of this overreach. My comment was intentional phrased very generally, if you think it is specifically about you, that reveals something about you.

analog8374 1y ago
[flagged]
nozzlegear 1y ago
Fwiw, I would be unhappy with the Biden and Obama administrations trying to do this as well. For me this has nothing to do with who's in the White House, it's an overreach plain and simple.
- pixelready 1y ago
  100%. Let’s not let partisanship distract us from the omni-presence of the military industrial complex and the authoritarian bent of everyone who’s been in power in the US over the last several decades. Dems will tinker around the edges to make it more palatable, but there’s still: black sites, torture, drone strikes, unjustified wars, installing of puppet governments in sovereign nations, abuse of the commons for private profit and an absolute hunger for every scrape of your data to monitor and manipulate you no matter who is in the White House. If I have to choose between voting for pro-corporate neoliberalism or fascism 2.0, I’ll vote the former, but that’s basically just asking which speed you’d like quality of life to erode for the average person. I’d really like a couple more options on the ballot please.
  - noduerme 1y ago
    Nit: Quality of life for average Germans went up, not down, once they brought back slavery and started pillaging other countries. If that's the metric we're using to decide what form of government we want, then all bets are off; ethics and morality play no part.
    - aids_bomb 1y ago
      [dead]
    - ksaun 1y ago
      To be fair, pixelready said "average person," not "average American."
      - pixelready 1y ago
        Yes, I would not like my own prosperity to come at the cost of others’ suffering (where “others” here means all of humanity). I understand hard choices must sometimes be made but I think our technology has progressed to the point that we can honestly provide a good quality of life for the vast majority of human beings globally if we were able to overcome old modes of thinking and actually set ourselves to that problem. But it seems there are certain types of people or that under certain circumstances have grown to have this twisted need for “all”, instead of “just enough”. I don’t really understand that mindset as I haven’t experienced it myself. If my friends and family had UBI that allowed us all a good quality of life, I would split my time between spending time with them, reading and endlessly tinkering with new technology and adjacent creative fields, and be perfectly satisfied with that life. I crave the occasional toy, but simply don’t understand this constant ache for material accumulation that some people have. It seems to hurt them as much as it does everyone else around them.
        noduerme 1y ago
        Just from reading your comment, I think I have a very similar view to yours about the meaning of life, what constitutes a life well lived, and what we should spend our time on. Like you, I'm ridiculously uninterested in toys, especially toys that are bought to show status (as opposed to ones you're just interested in). Like you, I'm very satisfied with a life of tinkering and exploring code / art / music / writing that makes me a full person with a sense of accomplishment. As someone who came from the extremely far left (with an anarchist bent), I just want to respond to this, though: >> it seems there are certain types of people or that under certain circumstances have grown to have this twisted need for “all”, instead of “just enough”. My observation has been that the desire for all, or at least more, is inherent to all people. You may be happy with a UBI, but the great complaint is wealth inequality. I look around and find myself pretty well-off, with easy access to goods and services my father struggled for, and which my grandfather could never have imagined. I look around and see people of my own well-off technical elite upper-middle-class touting stuff like Maoism, because America allegedly has worse wealth inequality than China did in the 1970s. And logically I have to ask: Are these people so obsessed with keeping up with the Joneses that they can't see what they have? Greed comes in different forms, right? There's this amazing line in Dostoevsky's "Devils": Why is it that all these desperate socialists and communists are so incredibly miserly, acquisitive, and proprietorial? In fact, the more socialist someone is, the further he's gone in that direction, the stronger his proprietorial instinct. Why is it?" Okay, so imagine you live a life with 100x the material wealth of your grandfather, like me, but you still are in the middle 40-60% of the country in terms of wealth. You'll never own a private jet, you'll never party on a private island. The question is: Are you happy with yourself and your life? Can you see how much prosperity you've achieved and be proud of it? Or do you spend your time worrying that someone else has more than you, that it's unfair, that the system is rigged against you, etc. Maybe this is because I come from an immigrant family mindset, but, prosperity and self-reliance are so much more important to me than trying to compare my life to what anyone else has. Personally, I'd be happy enough in a prison cell or on my death bed, if I had a pen and paper to write on. So I'm okay with other people having luxuries I don't have. I count each day as an amazing blessing if I can wake up, find work, get laid, eat a good meal, watch a good Netflix show, get stoned and go to bed with my lover. Every single one. I never for a moment thought that Elon or Bezos or any of them were happy. Their toys always seem to rot, their possessions don't intrigue me because they're clearly miserable. In large bore: Those "certain types of people" you mention exist on both the Left and the Right - they will find a way to blame anyone who has something they don't have. That's the genesis of all the nasty politics we see. I'm not advocating for having less or having nothing or anything like that. I'm just saying, a small amount of appreciation (historically) for what you have now goes a long way toward letting people be happy and chill instead of angry and aggrieved. And someone will always have more unless you're the King of AI or King of Logistics or King of Twitter. So, we lead more modest lives, but lives are all finite, and we have happiness that they can't possibly achieve.
doctoboggan 1y ago
I see it as a blessing: privacy advocates have previously argued that yes these invasive tools might currently help an honest government do its job to stop bad guys, but the tools could eventually fall into the hands of a not so honest government. Now, you don't really need much of an imagination to see what happens when the tools fall into the wrong hands, and hopefully more of the citizenry can get behind the idea of privacy as a fundamental right, and not just something for those who have something to hide.
harimau777 1y ago
Wouldn't it be weird if that didn't shape their perception? It's not surprising that people are less trusting when an authoritarian is in power.
- postingawayonhn 1y ago
  But the assumptions should always be that one day someone like that could take power and gain access to that data.
  - ModernMech 1y ago
    The way to prevent authoritarians from abusing power is to not elect them, and to throw them in jail when they violate the law. They're not hard to spot; people warned about the current guy for a decade before he took over. What's happening right now is not because the government had a database lying around and an unspecified authoritarian picked it up. What's happening is that after a specific authoritarian staged a coup against the government, he was nevertheless allowed to continue his anti-democratic efforts. Trump should have a 27 year sentence like his Brazilian compatriot Bolsonaro, who in monkey-see-monkey-do fashion, similarly affected a coup against his government. Had we actually prosecuted those crimes the way Brazil did, we could still be talking about how to prevent theoretical authoritarian governments from abusing their power. But now we have a specific instance, and in this case, all the anti-authoritarian measures in the world mean jack if the government just allows actual insurrectionists to run for president, which is barred by the Constitution for a good reason. In that case they're just asking for it.
    - slg 1y ago
      >The way to prevent authoritarians from abusing power is to not elect them, and to throw them in jail when they violate the law. This was the true motivation for my comment. It's futile trying to design your laws to withstand the dangers of a future authoritarian regime taking power when that authoritarian regime can just as easily change or ignore those laws once they take control. Our government is experiencing a rubber hose attack, the strength of our encryption doesn't matter.
comrh 1y ago
Biden cancelled this during his administration
jMyles 1y ago
It's also weird how people gatekeep resistance on the basis of their perception that it's motivated by the person sitting in the White House. If people are ready to resist now, let's welcome them, rather than questioning whether their motives are related to some tangentially related disagreement.
- potato3732842 1y ago
  >It's also weird how people gatekeep resistance on the basis of their perception that it's motivated by the person sitting in the White House. Because let's be real here, whether such discussion is allowed to stand or is shut down in a politically fairly homogenous community is typically a direct reflection of that fact. You see the same thing on the opposite side of the isle. >If people are ready to resist now, let's welcome them, rather than questioning whether their motives are related to some tangentially related disagreement. You have to draw a line somewhere. This sort of shortsighted expediency based politics is how we got the current political parties.
epolanski 1y ago
I don't think it is. I think it's selective attention plus recency bias. This drift has started 24 years ago with 9/11 and no president has stopped or slowed it. People who dislike who's in charge say the same things as always, people who dislike such measures same the same things as always regardless of who's in the white house, etc.
hedora 1y ago
Do you have any evidence that public concern over privacy changes depending on who is in the white house? A quick search suggests a solid majority has been consistently upset about this issue for decades. The phrasing of the question seems to have more impact than the year, but I cannot find any hard data on consumer privacy concern trends over years. Such trend data would be useful.

by slg 1y ago

analog8374 1y ago

[flagged]

nozzlegear 1y ago

Fwiw, I would be unhappy with the Biden and Obama administrations trying to do this as well. For me this has nothing to do with who's in the White House, it's an overreach plain and simple.

pixelready 1y ago
100%. Let’s not let partisanship distract us from the omni-presence of the military industrial complex and the authoritarian bent of everyone who’s been in power in the US over the last several decades. Dems will tinker around the edges to make it more palatable, but there’s still: black sites, torture, drone strikes, unjustified wars, installing of puppet governments in sovereign nations, abuse of the commons for private profit and an absolute hunger for every scrape of your data to monitor and manipulate you no matter who is in the White House. If I have to choose between voting for pro-corporate neoliberalism or fascism 2.0, I’ll vote the former, but that’s basically just asking which speed you’d like quality of life to erode for the average person. I’d really like a couple more options on the ballot please.
- noduerme 1y ago
  Nit: Quality of life for average Germans went up, not down, once they brought back slavery and started pillaging other countries. If that's the metric we're using to decide what form of government we want, then all bets are off; ethics and morality play no part.
  - aids_bomb 1y ago
    [dead]
  - ksaun 1y ago
    To be fair, pixelready said "average person," not "average American."
    - pixelready 1y ago
      Yes, I would not like my own prosperity to come at the cost of others’ suffering (where “others” here means all of humanity). I understand hard choices must sometimes be made but I think our technology has progressed to the point that we can honestly provide a good quality of life for the vast majority of human beings globally if we were able to overcome old modes of thinking and actually set ourselves to that problem. But it seems there are certain types of people or that under certain circumstances have grown to have this twisted need for “all”, instead of “just enough”. I don’t really understand that mindset as I haven’t experienced it myself. If my friends and family had UBI that allowed us all a good quality of life, I would split my time between spending time with them, reading and endlessly tinkering with new technology and adjacent creative fields, and be perfectly satisfied with that life. I crave the occasional toy, but simply don’t understand this constant ache for material accumulation that some people have. It seems to hurt them as much as it does everyone else around them.
      - noduerme 1y ago
        Just from reading your comment, I think I have a very similar view to yours about the meaning of life, what constitutes a life well lived, and what we should spend our time on. Like you, I'm ridiculously uninterested in toys, especially toys that are bought to show status (as opposed to ones you're just interested in). Like you, I'm very satisfied with a life of tinkering and exploring code / art / music / writing that makes me a full person with a sense of accomplishment. As someone who came from the extremely far left (with an anarchist bent), I just want to respond to this, though: >> it seems there are certain types of people or that under certain circumstances have grown to have this twisted need for “all”, instead of “just enough”. My observation has been that the desire for all, or at least more, is inherent to all people. You may be happy with a UBI, but the great complaint is wealth inequality. I look around and find myself pretty well-off, with easy access to goods and services my father struggled for, and which my grandfather could never have imagined. I look around and see people of my own well-off technical elite upper-middle-class touting stuff like Maoism, because America allegedly has worse wealth inequality than China did in the 1970s. And logically I have to ask: Are these people so obsessed with keeping up with the Joneses that they can't see what they have? Greed comes in different forms, right? There's this amazing line in Dostoevsky's "Devils": Why is it that all these desperate socialists and communists are so incredibly miserly, acquisitive, and proprietorial? In fact, the more socialist someone is, the further he's gone in that direction, the stronger his proprietorial instinct. Why is it?" Okay, so imagine you live a life with 100x the material wealth of your grandfather, like me, but you still are in the middle 40-60% of the country in terms of wealth. You'll never own a private jet, you'll never party on a private island. The question is: Are you happy with yourself and your life? Can you see how much prosperity you've achieved and be proud of it? Or do you spend your time worrying that someone else has more than you, that it's unfair, that the system is rigged against you, etc. Maybe this is because I come from an immigrant family mindset, but, prosperity and self-reliance are so much more important to me than trying to compare my life to what anyone else has. Personally, I'd be happy enough in a prison cell or on my death bed, if I had a pen and paper to write on. So I'm okay with other people having luxuries I don't have. I count each day as an amazing blessing if I can wake up, find work, get laid, eat a good meal, watch a good Netflix show, get stoned and go to bed with my lover. Every single one. I never for a moment thought that Elon or Bezos or any of them were happy. Their toys always seem to rot, their possessions don't intrigue me because they're clearly miserable. In large bore: Those "certain types of people" you mention exist on both the Left and the Right - they will find a way to blame anyone who has something they don't have. That's the genesis of all the nasty politics we see. I'm not advocating for having less or having nothing or anything like that. I'm just saying, a small amount of appreciation (historically) for what you have now goes a long way toward letting people be happy and chill instead of angry and aggrieved. And someone will always have more unless you're the King of AI or King of Logistics or King of Twitter. So, we lead more modest lives, but lives are all finite, and we have happiness that they can't possibly achieve.

doctoboggan 1y ago

I see it as a blessing: privacy advocates have previously argued that yes these invasive tools might currently help an honest government do its job to stop bad guys, but the tools could eventually fall into the hands of a not so honest government. Now, you don't really need much of an imagination to see what happens when the tools fall into the wrong hands, and hopefully more of the citizenry can get behind the idea of privacy as a fundamental right, and not just something for those who have something to hide.

harimau777 1y ago

Wouldn't it be weird if that didn't shape their perception? It's not surprising that people are less trusting when an authoritarian is in power.

postingawayonhn 1y ago
But the assumptions should always be that one day someone like that could take power and gain access to that data.
- ModernMech 1y ago
  The way to prevent authoritarians from abusing power is to not elect them, and to throw them in jail when they violate the law. They're not hard to spot; people warned about the current guy for a decade before he took over. What's happening right now is not because the government had a database lying around and an unspecified authoritarian picked it up. What's happening is that after a specific authoritarian staged a coup against the government, he was nevertheless allowed to continue his anti-democratic efforts. Trump should have a 27 year sentence like his Brazilian compatriot Bolsonaro, who in monkey-see-monkey-do fashion, similarly affected a coup against his government. Had we actually prosecuted those crimes the way Brazil did, we could still be talking about how to prevent theoretical authoritarian governments from abusing their power. But now we have a specific instance, and in this case, all the anti-authoritarian measures in the world mean jack if the government just allows actual insurrectionists to run for president, which is barred by the Constitution for a good reason. In that case they're just asking for it.
  - slg 1y ago
    >The way to prevent authoritarians from abusing power is to not elect them, and to throw them in jail when they violate the law. This was the true motivation for my comment. It's futile trying to design your laws to withstand the dangers of a future authoritarian regime taking power when that authoritarian regime can just as easily change or ignore those laws once they take control. Our government is experiencing a rubber hose attack, the strength of our encryption doesn't matter.

comrh 1y ago

Biden cancelled this during his administration

jMyles 1y ago

It's also weird how people gatekeep resistance on the basis of their perception that it's motivated by the person sitting in the White House. If people are ready to resist now, let's welcome them, rather than questioning whether their motives are related to some tangentially related disagreement.

potato3732842 1y ago
>It's also weird how people gatekeep resistance on the basis of their perception that it's motivated by the person sitting in the White House. Because let's be real here, whether such discussion is allowed to stand or is shut down in a politically fairly homogenous community is typically a direct reflection of that fact. You see the same thing on the opposite side of the isle. >If people are ready to resist now, let's welcome them, rather than questioning whether their motives are related to some tangentially related disagreement. You have to draw a line somewhere. This sort of shortsighted expediency based politics is how we got the current political parties.

epolanski 1y ago

I don't think it is. I think it's selective attention plus recency bias. This drift has started 24 years ago with 9/11 and no president has stopped or slowed it. People who dislike who's in charge say the same things as always, people who dislike such measures same the same things as always regardless of who's in the white house, etc.

hedora 1y ago

Do you have any evidence that public concern over privacy changes depending on who is in the white house? A quick search suggests a solid majority has been consistently upset about this issue for decades. The phrasing of the question seems to have more impact than the year, but I cannot find any hard data on consumer privacy concern trends over years. Such trend data would be useful.