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I really like this passage: >It is always the case that there are benefits available from relinquishing core civil liberties: allowing infringements on free sp

I really like this passage: >It is always the case that there are benefits available from relinquishing core civil liberties: allowing infringements on free speech may reduce false claims and hateful ideas; allowing searches and seizures without warrants will likely help the police catch more criminals, and do so more quickly; giving up privacy may, in fact, enhance security. > But the core premise of the West generally, and the U.S. in particular, is that those trade-offs are never worthwhile. Americans still all learn and are taught to admire the iconic (if not apocryphal) 1775 words of Patrick Henry, which came to define the core ethos of the Revolutionary War and American Founding: “Give me liberty or give me death.” It is hard to express in more definitive terms on which side of that liberty-versus-security trade-off the U.S. was intended to fall.

jaco6 8mo ago
[dead]
roywiggins 8mo ago
I think the security/liberty tradeoff is actually often a false promise. You can end up trading away liberty for nothing at all. I don't like buying into this, even to say "liberty is better, we should do that instead" because it implicitly concedes that you would really get the security on the other side of the bargain. And if you don't get the security you were promised, it's too late to do anything about it.
- zugi 8mo ago
  > "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety" -- Benjamin Franklin The key phrase is "a little temporary safety". 250 years ago people understood that the "security" gains were small and fleeting, but the loss of liberty was massive and permanent.
  - weaksauce 8mo ago
    basically the patriot act was a big piece of temporary safety that never produced any.
  - roywiggins 8mo ago
    Well, quite. And in an American Revolution context it's not like the colonies were notably less secure places to live after they gained independence.
  - Terr_ 8mo ago
    Aside, the original meaning of Franklin's words are less-inspiring but perhaps more-interesting. He's saying the local democratic legislature must not give up its "freedom" to pass laws taxing the powerful Penn dynasty which almost owns Pennsylvania. He wants to reject a deal offered by the Penns: A big lump of money for temporary military security now, in exchange for an agreement that they can never be taxed ever again.
    - mathgradthrow 8mo ago
      That's not an aside. The quote is pernicious because of its attribution to Ben. People invoke it without ever asking themselves if its true because they think of it as the hard won wisdom of a great man.
      - deleted 8mo ago
        [deleted]
      - bigbadfeline 8mo ago
        > The quote is pernicious because of its attribution to Ben. It's not pernicious for any reason because it's absolutely true in general, Franklin was simply using a general piece of wisdom to justify particular government actions. Yes, using it that way was an improvisation and a bit of a stretch, but the real issue here is why he needed to resort to it - that's a rabbit hole that pretty much goes to the bottom of today's problems which we're handling in a much worse manner than him back then.
        mathgradthrow 8mo ago
        What do you consider "absolutely true" or "in general" to mean?
    - superb_dev 8mo ago
      I don’t find that to be less inspiring
  - js2 8mo ago
    FWIW, the context of the Franklin quote is him defending the ability of the legislature to tax a family that was trying to bribe/lobby the governor to do otherwise. The quote is in defense of the government: WITTES: It is a quotation that defends the authority of a legislature to govern in the interests of collective security. It means, in context, not quite the opposite of what it's almost always quoted as saying but much closer to the opposite than to the thing that people think it means. https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famous-liberty-safety-quote-lost-its-context-in-21st-century https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou...
    - deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
    - BobbyTables2 8mo ago
      Too bad Franklin didn’t just quote Spock: “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few…” (/s) Thanks for educating us!
    - b00ty4breakfast 8mo ago
      the phrase fits the modern usage, even if it's been decontextualized. kinda like "who watches the watchmen?" originally being about cheating wives bribing the folks keeping her locked up in the house.
    - Der_Einzige 8mo ago
      This dynamic always happens with quotes and attempts to deploy the founding fathers in arguments. Most of the founding fathers (except Thomas Paine) were terrible, horrible, no good people. I’d have been a loyalist in that era.
      - nathan_compton 8mo ago
        Maybe I'm just America Pilled but I'll support almost anyone against a hereditary monarchy. The idea should be fundamentally disgusting to any self-respecting human being.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- gcanyon 8mo ago
  If you assume that the security side of the equation is a false promise, then you are not making a decision at all: choosing between liberty with no security, or no liberty plus no security (because it's fake). And for me, it seems somewhat disingenuous to imply that a decision is being made when your premise belies that.
  - roywiggins 8mo ago
    It's not that security is fake, it's that giving up liberty doesn't naturally produce more security, and pursuing greater liberty doesn't necessarily erode security either. It's not like pre-Revolutionary America was a notably secure place that inevitably see-sawed into a freer but insecure place afterwards.
    - gcanyon 8mo ago
      As I said to the other respondent, I think it's important to justify the idea that both security and liberty can be achieved simultaneously.
      - roywiggins 8mo ago
        Equally, the idea that there is a tradeoff in some particular situation is frequently asserted without evidence. The quote from the article is "It is always the case that there are benefits available from relinquishing core civil liberties." That is 1) presented without evidence and 2) almost certainly false. It is not always the case.
  - foxyv 8mo ago
    It's a false dichotomy. There are 4 options: 1. Don't give up liberty, give up security. 2. Give up liberty, give up security. 3. Give up liberty, don't give up security. 4. Don't give up liberty, don't give up security. Number 4 is completely possible. It's just that people in power don't like it because it means they have less power. They want to pretend that only options 1 and 3 are available and ignore that they are actually offering option 2.
- nkrisc 8mo ago
  When you've given up all liberty, there's nothing left to stop the security being used against you.
StopDisinfo910 8mo ago
I would like it a lot better without the mention to the "West", which, as usual, is a code word for: "I want to pretend my point extend outside the USA but I have absolutely no knowledge of how true that is. I don't intend to do any research because that would demand efforts from me so bear with my casual imperialism". Queue the purely American historical lesson following.
- wredcoll 8mo ago
  If we're nitpicking, is it queue or cue?
  - StopDisinfo910 8mo ago
    I guess it's cue like on cue but it's late on a Sunday. You will have to excuse my brain. It wasn't a nitpick by the way. I deeply resent American using "the West" like if my own country and culture was somehow fungible in their experience. They are not. We don't have that much in common. That doesn't include a legal tradition, or a conception of what freedom of speech should be, neither does it include values or history. Edit: Enjoy downvoting me. It doesn't make what I said any less true. If you think the various European countries can be grouped with the US in a coherent whole, you are deeply deluding yourselves. They can't even be lumped together.
    - wredcoll 8mo ago
      It would probably help if you made a more specific point rather than just ranting in very vague terms. Grouping terms like "the west" can be broad enough to include over half of all living humans or so narrow that it applies to a small village. It is, admittedly, not a particularly useful term, but it's not like americans are reaponsible for it.
      - StopDisinfo910 8mo ago
        Where have you seen it used outside of Americans pretending their culture is somehow a standard and NATO apologists? The world doesn't even exist as such in my own language. It's a staple on Hacker News and nearly always for the bad reasons. I'm supposed to politely nod and shut up when people are casually erasing my culture?
majormajor 8mo ago
We concurrently see failures on both the "attempts to preserve liberty" and "attempts to preserve security" front, so let's stop arguing about abstract principles. Quotes are pointless, discussion should be limited to what's happening on the ground. For any given thing that happens, do we think that it, specifically, is helpful or harmful. It's trivial to reverse that quote: we can, and have, pushed to keep the US population armed with increasingly-advanced personal weapons (in the name of liberty) without actually gaining any protection against authoritarian styles of government use of force or surveillance as a result. While just making civilian-on-civilian violence easier and more lethal.
- themafia 8mo ago
  > discussion should be limited to what's happening on the ground Does anyone actually have any idea what's actually happening "on the ground?" > without actually gaining any protection against authoritarian styles of government use of force There are three weapons for every man, woman, and child in the USA. You may enjoy more of this protection than you realize. > While just making civilian-on-civilian violence easier and more lethal. 80% of murders happen after an argument. More suicides happen by firearm than murders by a factor of 2:1. States with lower population densities like Alaska have 6x the suicide rate of states with higher densities like New York. There's a reason people aren't given these statistics.
  - rob74 8mo ago
    > More suicides happen by firearm than murders by a factor of 2:1 According to https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/05/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-us/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/05/what-the-..., this is true (if you squint) for 2023 (actually in 2023 murders were 38% of gun deaths, suicides and "others" add up to 62%, so 1.6 to 1), but the ratio varies widely for other years. According to the graph https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/05/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-us/sr_25-03-05_gun-deaths_2/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/05/what-the-..., murders and suicides were much closer together in 2021 - after that, the number of murders has dropped, while the number of suicides kept increasing.
crazygringo 8mo ago
> “Give me liberty or give me death.” It is hard to express in more definitive terms on which side of that liberty-versus-security trade-off the U.S. was intended to fall. No, that's a gross misrepresentation of what he said and meant. Patrick Henry was referring exclusively to political liberty from British colonial rule. There is no sense whatsoever in which he was referring to civil liberties against domestic rule. It didn't have a single thing to do with "security". > But the core premise of the West generally, and the U.S. in particular, is that those trade-offs are never worthwhile. Also totally false. This is the core premise of libertarians in the West, who are, and always have been, a minority. It is not, and has never been, the "core premise" of the West or the US. Or else, quite obviously, we wouldn't have the constant tension between these liberties and the need for security. The idea that "those trade-offs are never worthwhile" is not a core American idea. We make those tradeoffs every single day. And continue to argue about them, e.g. over what degree of gun control is proper after each school shooting that happens.
roysting 8mo ago
Unfortunately for us all, the assault on liberty even done of the “normies” have started noticing recent, is only the latter stages of this assault on on America that has been going on for arguably 180 years ago. Many in American history have noted that America is a kind of natural fortress protected by ocean moats. What that assumption just did not take into account is how America’s enemies would take action against America with that assumption taken as granted. It has come in the form of endless amounts of infiltration, subversion, corruption, and pollution… as any half-witted strategist and saboteur would have done. America was simply not sophisticated enough to realize that massive threat, because the leaders relied on that assumption that the USA is an impenetrable fort; never considering what happens if your fort is infiltrated through the many different means you open yourself up to being infiltrated. America, a genuine America or whatever one can scrape together to consider as such, not just one that emulates and imitates like some kind of container cult, is really not long for this world. Another 20 years and Americas simile stops existing in anything but name only, if that, since there’s not even any reason or incentive anymore to keep the name out the branding at that point. What do we call this place post America? Maybe we just come right out and just call it Oceania.
- Nursie 8mo ago
  Sorry, name's taken. I know you're making a point by linking it to 1984, but Oceania is a real name for a continent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oceania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oceania
  - Der_Einzige 8mo ago
    The most bootlicking anglos in the world are the Australians , despite the extreme competition that NZ and the UK give them. The Orwellian definition IS the real name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lucky_Country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lucky_Country
    - Nursie 8mo ago
      Whatever. It’s still taken so you can’t use it for the Fascist States of America.
firen777 8mo ago
>giving up privacy may, in fact, enhance security When the check and balance got tipped over, all this promised "security" will only surface when it benefits the regime. I'm still amused by a certain ccp propaganda video my parents consumed that boast about how quickly the cctv networks helped catch a thief who stole a foreign tourist's phone, yet those cameras would also conveniently stop working at a specific day whenever a highschooler went missing in the campus. All the prerequisite for a similar dystopia is already in place in the US and there is may be one more chance to fix it, although I wouldn't hold my breathe.
seanmcdirmid 8mo ago
If the police actually did their job, took property crimes seriously and would bother with the suspicious guy high on fent looking into kids bedroom reports seriously, then we really wouldn't have to be setting up our own surveillance to make up for lacking local government services. But here we are, I'm not sure why libertarians think we don't have a right to defend ourselves (using new tech to make up for a lack of policing) when the city won't? I frankly see it as a liberty to be able to use this tech, and it would be tyranny to prevent us from using it.
- FireBeyond 8mo ago
  > and would bother with the suspicious guy high on fent looking into kids bedroom reports seriously Wuh? I was a paramedic who probably has responded to nearly 1,000 fentanyl abuse patients. I've never seen one who is all busy-beavering looking for homes to surreptitiously spy in kids bedrooms. Symptoms of fentanyl use include: extreme drowsiness, poor responsiveness, nodding off, profound confusion and inability to focus on even simple acts, delayed reactions, poor body control. The idea of a bunch of fent users sneaking around neighborhoods trying to be pedophiliac perverts seems far more right-wing fearmongering than anything based in reality.
  - seanmcdirmid 8mo ago
    I live in a dense neighborhood, and my kid's bedroom is on the bottom floor. So when they are scalking around looking for something to steal sot hey can buy more drugs, it happens anyways. I'm sure that stealing things is their actual focus, its just an accident of house construction that they wind up at my kid's bedroom window. > The idea of a bunch of fent users sneaking around neighborhoods trying to be pedophiliac perverts seems far more right-wing fearmongering than anything based in reality. This is why I hate the far right and the far left. The far left is like "we should just let the fent users steal all of our stuff because they are humans to! Let them poop freely on the sidewalks!", the far right are like "Those are all illegal immigrants lets deport them to El Salvadore". As a moderate, I hate both sides. It is just too bad that Trump is in power right now so the far left gets a huge electoral boost in local elections.
ryanmcbride 8mo ago
we could have liberty and privacy and security if the people in charge wanted us to. But they don't and they've convinced enough people that they don't either.
- smeej 8mo ago
  It's not liberty if you can only have it if the people in charge want you to.
  - ryanmcbride 8mo ago
    I agree
godelski 8mo ago
For those unfamiliar it's worth learning about Blackstone's Ratio. Blackstone was extremely influential to the writers of the US constitution. I think it should come natural to engineers because I see it as similar to failure engineering, but for the legal system. When you engineer a bridge, building, or even a program you build failure modes into them. Not to cause them to fail but to control fails. A simple version is "fail open" vs "fail closed". A bank safe that fails, fails closed. It is locked and you need to drill it open. Same with an encrypted harddrive but no drill... But a locked door in a public building will typically want to fail opened, least you trap people inside during a fire. A more complex example is the root of a conspiracy. When a tall building collapses you tend to want it to fall in on itself so it doesn't take out neighboring skyscrapers... So Blackstone's Ratio (and Franklin's recounting) is similar. It asks "which mode of failure is better? That innocent man are condemned or that guilty men go free?" This is a question we must all ask ourselves least we back ourselves into a corner. There's no perfect solution. We don't want failure, we should reduce it as much as possible, but if/when it fails, which outcome do you prefer? I'll link the wiki but the topic is so famous you'll find a million and I'm pretty sure it's taught in every law school in America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio
yauneyz 8mo ago
I think part of the problem is a temptation to believe that we can have out cake and eat it too. If the people on charge of deciding when to use the cameras were morally perfect, we have all the upside and none of the downside. The problem is we live in a fallen world and that will simply never work. Nevertheless it is a siren song that causes us to repeatedly make the wrong trade
- whycombigator 8mo ago
  "we live in a fallen world" derp
homeonthemtn 8mo ago
[dead]
mathgeek 8mo ago
> It is hard to express in more definitive terms on which side of that liberty-versus-security trade-off the U.S. was intended to fall. While I agree with Henry, and intend for _my_ life and social impact to fall there, "where the U.S. was intended to fall" is a misnomer here. That quote was one man's opinion. The U.S. is millions of living beings who, if they have liberty, should get to do whatever they want with it (which in itself is an oxymoron).

jaco6 8mo ago

[dead]

roywiggins 8mo ago

I think the security/liberty tradeoff is actually often a false promise. You can end up trading away liberty for nothing at all. I don't like buying into this, even to say "liberty is better, we should do that instead" because it implicitly concedes that you would really get the security on the other side of the bargain. And if you don't get the security you were promised, it's too late to do anything about it.

zugi 8mo ago
> "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety" -- Benjamin Franklin The key phrase is "a little temporary safety". 250 years ago people understood that the "security" gains were small and fleeting, but the loss of liberty was massive and permanent.
- weaksauce 8mo ago
  basically the patriot act was a big piece of temporary safety that never produced any.
- roywiggins 8mo ago
  Well, quite. And in an American Revolution context it's not like the colonies were notably less secure places to live after they gained independence.
- Terr_ 8mo ago
  Aside, the original meaning of Franklin's words are less-inspiring but perhaps more-interesting. He's saying the local democratic legislature must not give up its "freedom" to pass laws taxing the powerful Penn dynasty which almost owns Pennsylvania. He wants to reject a deal offered by the Penns: A big lump of money for temporary military security now, in exchange for an agreement that they can never be taxed ever again.
  - mathgradthrow 8mo ago
    That's not an aside. The quote is pernicious because of its attribution to Ben. People invoke it without ever asking themselves if its true because they think of it as the hard won wisdom of a great man.
    - deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
    - bigbadfeline 8mo ago
      > The quote is pernicious because of its attribution to Ben. It's not pernicious for any reason because it's absolutely true in general, Franklin was simply using a general piece of wisdom to justify particular government actions. Yes, using it that way was an improvisation and a bit of a stretch, but the real issue here is why he needed to resort to it - that's a rabbit hole that pretty much goes to the bottom of today's problems which we're handling in a much worse manner than him back then.
      - mathgradthrow 8mo ago
        What do you consider "absolutely true" or "in general" to mean?
  - superb_dev 8mo ago
    I don’t find that to be less inspiring
- js2 8mo ago
  FWIW, the context of the Franklin quote is him defending the ability of the legislature to tax a family that was trying to bribe/lobby the governor to do otherwise. The quote is in defense of the government: WITTES: It is a quotation that defends the authority of a legislature to govern in the interests of collective security. It means, in context, not quite the opposite of what it's almost always quoted as saying but much closer to the opposite than to the thing that people think it means. https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famous-liberty-safety-quote-lost-its-context-in-21st-century https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou...
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - BobbyTables2 8mo ago
    Too bad Franklin didn’t just quote Spock: “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few…” (/s) Thanks for educating us!
  - b00ty4breakfast 8mo ago
    the phrase fits the modern usage, even if it's been decontextualized. kinda like "who watches the watchmen?" originally being about cheating wives bribing the folks keeping her locked up in the house.
  - Der_Einzige 8mo ago
    This dynamic always happens with quotes and attempts to deploy the founding fathers in arguments. Most of the founding fathers (except Thomas Paine) were terrible, horrible, no good people. I’d have been a loyalist in that era.
    - nathan_compton 8mo ago
      Maybe I'm just America Pilled but I'll support almost anyone against a hereditary monarchy. The idea should be fundamentally disgusting to any self-respecting human being.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
gcanyon 8mo ago
If you assume that the security side of the equation is a false promise, then you are not making a decision at all: choosing between liberty with no security, or no liberty plus no security (because it's fake). And for me, it seems somewhat disingenuous to imply that a decision is being made when your premise belies that.
- roywiggins 8mo ago
  It's not that security is fake, it's that giving up liberty doesn't naturally produce more security, and pursuing greater liberty doesn't necessarily erode security either. It's not like pre-Revolutionary America was a notably secure place that inevitably see-sawed into a freer but insecure place afterwards.
  - gcanyon 8mo ago
    As I said to the other respondent, I think it's important to justify the idea that both security and liberty can be achieved simultaneously.
    - roywiggins 8mo ago
      Equally, the idea that there is a tradeoff in some particular situation is frequently asserted without evidence. The quote from the article is "It is always the case that there are benefits available from relinquishing core civil liberties." That is 1) presented without evidence and 2) almost certainly false. It is not always the case.
- foxyv 8mo ago
  It's a false dichotomy. There are 4 options: 1. Don't give up liberty, give up security. 2. Give up liberty, give up security. 3. Give up liberty, don't give up security. 4. Don't give up liberty, don't give up security. Number 4 is completely possible. It's just that people in power don't like it because it means they have less power. They want to pretend that only options 1 and 3 are available and ignore that they are actually offering option 2.
nkrisc 8mo ago
When you've given up all liberty, there's nothing left to stop the security being used against you.

StopDisinfo910 8mo ago

I would like it a lot better without the mention to the "West", which, as usual, is a code word for: "I want to pretend my point extend outside the USA but I have absolutely no knowledge of how true that is. I don't intend to do any research because that would demand efforts from me so bear with my casual imperialism". Queue the purely American historical lesson following.

wredcoll 8mo ago
If we're nitpicking, is it queue or cue?
- StopDisinfo910 8mo ago
  I guess it's cue like on cue but it's late on a Sunday. You will have to excuse my brain. It wasn't a nitpick by the way. I deeply resent American using "the West" like if my own country and culture was somehow fungible in their experience. They are not. We don't have that much in common. That doesn't include a legal tradition, or a conception of what freedom of speech should be, neither does it include values or history. Edit: Enjoy downvoting me. It doesn't make what I said any less true. If you think the various European countries can be grouped with the US in a coherent whole, you are deeply deluding yourselves. They can't even be lumped together.
  - wredcoll 8mo ago
    It would probably help if you made a more specific point rather than just ranting in very vague terms. Grouping terms like "the west" can be broad enough to include over half of all living humans or so narrow that it applies to a small village. It is, admittedly, not a particularly useful term, but it's not like americans are reaponsible for it.
    - StopDisinfo910 8mo ago
      Where have you seen it used outside of Americans pretending their culture is somehow a standard and NATO apologists? The world doesn't even exist as such in my own language. It's a staple on Hacker News and nearly always for the bad reasons. I'm supposed to politely nod and shut up when people are casually erasing my culture?

majormajor 8mo ago

We concurrently see failures on both the "attempts to preserve liberty" and "attempts to preserve security" front, so let's stop arguing about abstract principles. Quotes are pointless, discussion should be limited to what's happening on the ground. For any given thing that happens, do we think that it, specifically, is helpful or harmful. It's trivial to reverse that quote: we can, and have, pushed to keep the US population armed with increasingly-advanced personal weapons (in the name of liberty) without actually gaining any protection against authoritarian styles of government use of force or surveillance as a result. While just making civilian-on-civilian violence easier and more lethal.

themafia 8mo ago
> discussion should be limited to what's happening on the ground Does anyone actually have any idea what's actually happening "on the ground?" > without actually gaining any protection against authoritarian styles of government use of force There are three weapons for every man, woman, and child in the USA. You may enjoy more of this protection than you realize. > While just making civilian-on-civilian violence easier and more lethal. 80% of murders happen after an argument. More suicides happen by firearm than murders by a factor of 2:1. States with lower population densities like Alaska have 6x the suicide rate of states with higher densities like New York. There's a reason people aren't given these statistics.
- rob74 8mo ago
  > More suicides happen by firearm than murders by a factor of 2:1 According to https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/05/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-us/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/05/what-the-..., this is true (if you squint) for 2023 (actually in 2023 murders were 38% of gun deaths, suicides and "others" add up to 62%, so 1.6 to 1), but the ratio varies widely for other years. According to the graph https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/05/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-us/sr_25-03-05_gun-deaths_2/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/05/what-the-..., murders and suicides were much closer together in 2021 - after that, the number of murders has dropped, while the number of suicides kept increasing.

crazygringo 8mo ago

> “Give me liberty or give me death.” It is hard to express in more definitive terms on which side of that liberty-versus-security trade-off the U.S. was intended to fall. No, that's a gross misrepresentation of what he said and meant. Patrick Henry was referring exclusively to political liberty from British colonial rule. There is no sense whatsoever in which he was referring to civil liberties against domestic rule. It didn't have a single thing to do with "security". > But the core premise of the West generally, and the U.S. in particular, is that those trade-offs are never worthwhile. Also totally false. This is the core premise of libertarians in the West, who are, and always have been, a minority. It is not, and has never been, the "core premise" of the West or the US. Or else, quite obviously, we wouldn't have the constant tension between these liberties and the need for security. The idea that "those trade-offs are never worthwhile" is not a core American idea. We make those tradeoffs every single day. And continue to argue about them, e.g. over what degree of gun control is proper after each school shooting that happens.

roysting 8mo ago

Unfortunately for us all, the assault on liberty even done of the “normies” have started noticing recent, is only the latter stages of this assault on on America that has been going on for arguably 180 years ago. Many in American history have noted that America is a kind of natural fortress protected by ocean moats. What that assumption just did not take into account is how America’s enemies would take action against America with that assumption taken as granted. It has come in the form of endless amounts of infiltration, subversion, corruption, and pollution… as any half-witted strategist and saboteur would have done. America was simply not sophisticated enough to realize that massive threat, because the leaders relied on that assumption that the USA is an impenetrable fort; never considering what happens if your fort is infiltrated through the many different means you open yourself up to being infiltrated. America, a genuine America or whatever one can scrape together to consider as such, not just one that emulates and imitates like some kind of container cult, is really not long for this world. Another 20 years and Americas simile stops existing in anything but name only, if that, since there’s not even any reason or incentive anymore to keep the name out the branding at that point. What do we call this place post America? Maybe we just come right out and just call it Oceania.

Nursie 8mo ago
Sorry, name's taken. I know you're making a point by linking it to 1984, but Oceania is a real name for a continent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oceania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oceania
- Der_Einzige 8mo ago
  The most bootlicking anglos in the world are the Australians , despite the extreme competition that NZ and the UK give them. The Orwellian definition IS the real name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lucky_Country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lucky_Country
  - Nursie 8mo ago
    Whatever. It’s still taken so you can’t use it for the Fascist States of America.

firen777 8mo ago

>giving up privacy may, in fact, enhance security When the check and balance got tipped over, all this promised "security" will only surface when it benefits the regime. I'm still amused by a certain ccp propaganda video my parents consumed that boast about how quickly the cctv networks helped catch a thief who stole a foreign tourist's phone, yet those cameras would also conveniently stop working at a specific day whenever a highschooler went missing in the campus. All the prerequisite for a similar dystopia is already in place in the US and there is may be one more chance to fix it, although I wouldn't hold my breathe.

seanmcdirmid 8mo ago

If the police actually did their job, took property crimes seriously and would bother with the suspicious guy high on fent looking into kids bedroom reports seriously, then we really wouldn't have to be setting up our own surveillance to make up for lacking local government services. But here we are, I'm not sure why libertarians think we don't have a right to defend ourselves (using new tech to make up for a lack of policing) when the city won't? I frankly see it as a liberty to be able to use this tech, and it would be tyranny to prevent us from using it.

FireBeyond 8mo ago
> and would bother with the suspicious guy high on fent looking into kids bedroom reports seriously Wuh? I was a paramedic who probably has responded to nearly 1,000 fentanyl abuse patients. I've never seen one who is all busy-beavering looking for homes to surreptitiously spy in kids bedrooms. Symptoms of fentanyl use include: extreme drowsiness, poor responsiveness, nodding off, profound confusion and inability to focus on even simple acts, delayed reactions, poor body control. The idea of a bunch of fent users sneaking around neighborhoods trying to be pedophiliac perverts seems far more right-wing fearmongering than anything based in reality.
- seanmcdirmid 8mo ago
  I live in a dense neighborhood, and my kid's bedroom is on the bottom floor. So when they are scalking around looking for something to steal sot hey can buy more drugs, it happens anyways. I'm sure that stealing things is their actual focus, its just an accident of house construction that they wind up at my kid's bedroom window. > The idea of a bunch of fent users sneaking around neighborhoods trying to be pedophiliac perverts seems far more right-wing fearmongering than anything based in reality. This is why I hate the far right and the far left. The far left is like "we should just let the fent users steal all of our stuff because they are humans to! Let them poop freely on the sidewalks!", the far right are like "Those are all illegal immigrants lets deport them to El Salvadore". As a moderate, I hate both sides. It is just too bad that Trump is in power right now so the far left gets a huge electoral boost in local elections.

ryanmcbride 8mo ago

we could have liberty and privacy and security if the people in charge wanted us to. But they don't and they've convinced enough people that they don't either.

smeej 8mo ago
It's not liberty if you can only have it if the people in charge want you to.
- ryanmcbride 8mo ago
  I agree

godelski 8mo ago

For those unfamiliar it's worth learning about Blackstone's Ratio. Blackstone was extremely influential to the writers of the US constitution. I think it should come natural to engineers because I see it as similar to failure engineering, but for the legal system. When you engineer a bridge, building, or even a program you build failure modes into them. Not to cause them to fail but to control fails. A simple version is "fail open" vs "fail closed". A bank safe that fails, fails closed. It is locked and you need to drill it open. Same with an encrypted harddrive but no drill... But a locked door in a public building will typically want to fail opened, least you trap people inside during a fire. A more complex example is the root of a conspiracy. When a tall building collapses you tend to want it to fall in on itself so it doesn't take out neighboring skyscrapers... So Blackstone's Ratio (and Franklin's recounting) is similar. It asks "which mode of failure is better? That innocent man are condemned or that guilty men go free?" This is a question we must all ask ourselves least we back ourselves into a corner. There's no perfect solution. We don't want failure, we should reduce it as much as possible, but if/when it fails, which outcome do you prefer? I'll link the wiki but the topic is so famous you'll find a million and I'm pretty sure it's taught in every law school in America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio

yauneyz 8mo ago

I think part of the problem is a temptation to believe that we can have out cake and eat it too. If the people on charge of deciding when to use the cameras were morally perfect, we have all the upside and none of the downside. The problem is we live in a fallen world and that will simply never work. Nevertheless it is a siren song that causes us to repeatedly make the wrong trade

whycombigator 8mo ago
"we live in a fallen world" derp

homeonthemtn 8mo ago

[dead]

mathgeek 8mo ago

> It is hard to express in more definitive terms on which side of that liberty-versus-security trade-off the U.S. was intended to fall. While I agree with Henry, and intend for _my_ life and social impact to fall there, "where the U.S. was intended to fall" is a misnomer here. That quote was one man's opinion. The U.S. is millions of living beings who, if they have liberty, should get to do whatever they want with it (which in itself is an oxymoron).