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The US Government is the entity that weaponizes the data. The most obvious example is the Census Bureau compiling lists of people of Japanese descent to impriso

by bagels 4mo ago

The US Government is the entity that weaponizes the data. The most obvious example is the Census Bureau compiling lists of people of Japanese descent to imprison during WWII. That's just the most obvious one that I know of without looking up more. The real push for this now is to form lists of people to disenfranchise.

conception 4mo ago
Remember “leftist “ and transgender activists are terrorists now. First they came for…
- whattheheckheck 4mo ago
  What's the actual antidote to this? 5calls.org?
  - estearum 4mo ago
    Voting and getting everyone you know to vote
    - p-e-w 4mo ago
      Turnout in the past few elections was already extraordinarily high. Clearly this isn’t the answer. And neither is protesting, considering that 4 of the 5 largest demonstrations in US history happened in the past 10 years and achieved nothing.
      - estearum 4mo ago
        Well right... you also need to vote for the correct ("less-bad") people and get your friends to do the same. Voting for the worse people makes things worse.
        gs17 4mo ago
        You also need the option to vote for "less-bad" people. Where I am now, my vote doesn't matter, even if it means the "less-bad" people win with no competition (as opposed to where I moved from where things were skewed the opposite way).
        Retric 4mo ago
        Somewhere between just going out to vote and revolution sits moving to an area where your vote counts. I’ve not quite reached that threshold, but I avoid moving to DC due to the lack of voting rights.
        godelski 4mo ago
        Vote strategically. Candidates notice btw. So if you're in a heavily red state but you're blue, then vote in the primaries for the more centered Republican. If you're in a heavily blue state but red, do the opposite. Either way this actually helps because more people are centered and we're getting wilder and wilder candidates because there's increased tribalism. They go to the extremes because they get more voters that way. They figured out that the mainstay voters will just end up voting left or right regardless, and that by catering to the extremes it actually pulls the mainstream voters too. (Both Reps and Dems are using this strategy) Remember, you don't have to vote for the person you actually like. And keep doing this until we get a sane voting system which can embed actual preference (any of the cardinal systems: i.e. Approval or STAR). This strategy still works with ordinal systems (i.e. Ranked Choice) because a weak spoiler is still really good at splitting the vote (happened in a pretty famous Alaska election).
        usefulcat 4mo ago
        Totally agree. I did exactly this in the recent primaries, and then got to vote again in a runoff. I think of it this way: in a state where one party is clearly dominant, most offices will end up being held by members of that party. That means that the primaries for that party actually matter more than the general election.
        dubya 4mo ago
      - deaux 4mo ago
        > Turnout in the past few elections was already extraordinarily high. In a sense, this in itself is the issue. It's long-term _worse_ to vote for the "lesser of two serious evils". This extreme "long-term pain for short-term gain" attitude is what's gotten the US to where it is. If in 2016 of 2024 even 20% of the dems would've stayed home or voted third party, the DNC's continuous forcing of awful corpocrats with zero charisma would've become completely untenable and Trump would've been limited to one term. Yet instead they were rewarded for it, so you'll see Newsom get the candidacy and presidency in 2028 (if 2028 even happens at this point), and then in 2032 you'll get something like Hegseth or Thiel winning and it's all over. There is an answer: relentlessly vote, but only for candidates who are actually slightly decent - including third-party - and otherwise stay at home. "Relentlessly" means "at every level", including locally from the very bottom, all the way up. The whole idea of "third-party voting is a complete waste in the US" is incredibly dumb because a vote for someone who loses isn't a wasted vote. It shows the others that there's a voter there who can be convinced if catered to, if they select a better candidate. The powers that be have done a fantastic job of brainwashing the entire population of the myth that anyone who _doesn't_ go out and vote for either major candidate is a morally bankrupt person, because it directly benefits them. The reply to this will be "well it's too late for that now!". It's wrong because the alternative doesn't help you one bit. You're just wishing for a miracle, that in 4 years something happens, kicking the can down the road making things worse long term. And that's actually what's got you here. It's a symptom of the terminal disease which has infected all layers of American society and has gotten it to where it's at: short-termism. Everyone just looks at the next quarter, the next election. China's ascendency is 1:1 tied to doing the exact opposite. Some smartypants will now point "but zero Covid", great you found a potential exception, now look at the other 90% of policy. Every time I've explained this I've gotten instantly downvoted without a single reply making an argument against it, because it's too painful for people to admit that they've been part of the road to where the US is at. And again, short-termism: rather feel the short-term tiny dopamine hit by slamming that downvote button than thinking about it. Let's see if this happens again.
        amanaplanacanal 4mo ago
        You are saying the candidates are forced on us by someone else. But that's just wrong, we choose the candidates. Anybody can run, there is no secret cabal that decides who can run and who can't.
      - deleted 4mo ago
        [deleted]
      - SmirkingRevenge 4mo ago
        The trend has been going that direction, where low turnout elections favor Ds and high turnout favors Rs. But only kind of... that holds when Trump is on the ballot. Trump seems to activate a segment of low-info, low-propensity voters who stay home when their guy isn't on the ballot. Things will probably get scrambled again once Trump is gone though. And don't discount protests. It's crucially important to have big public and forceful displays of united opposition. The regime is unlikely to be toppled by protests, but they will weaken it. That really matters. In an authoritarian take-over institutions are the front-lines, not the masses. Think colleges, media, industry, courts, legal firms, local governments, etc. The dilemma those institutions will face is to follow rule-of-law or submit to authoritarian corruption. Authoritarians win when those institutions decide it's safer to submit than it is to follow the law. And when institutions (and the people within them) feel like they are twisting in the wind alone and nobody cares, they are more likely to buckle. Protest movements help reinforce the rule-of-law side of that calculation. (The rise and fall of Orban is a great lesson on all of this) Also see: https://essayx.substack.com/p/the-35-percent-rule-just-made-history https://essayx.substack.com/p/the-35-percent-rule-just-made-...
      - dgellow 4mo ago
        Protesting one weekend day every 6 months will obviously do nothing. The pressure needs to be non stop
      - intended 4mo ago
        I highly recommend the research done by Robert Faris, Hal Roberts, and Yochai Benkler. In a nutshell, you have an issue where part of the information economy/market is captured. To the point that agenda can get set by theories or podcasts that have little truck with reality. Any checks or reviews of the claims, simply do not get surfaced within that ecosystem. This creates a more efficient system for political messaging. You cannot have an effective democratic system when your consensus building mechanisms have been (intentionally) compromised and weakened.
    - YeahThisIsMe 4mo ago
      The people in power now are doing everything they can to make that as hard as possible by any means necessary. Good luck.
      - patrick451 4mo ago
        No, they are doing everything they can to ensure that only the people who are legally allowed to vote are the ones voting.
        JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
        > they are doing everything they can to ensure that only the people who are legally allowed to vote are the ones voting Illegal voting is so rare that almost every time folks go looking for it they come up empty handed. Examples of voter suppression, on the other hand, are trivial to fine. (And both parties do it, particularly around primaries.) In my state, we’re trying to enact a citizenship-proof requirement which penalizes women who change their name on getting married and those who can’t afford a passport. In effect, a marriage and poll tax. Ironically, this will disenfranchise the MAGA voters who are themselves pushing for it, but I’m not really going to point that out aggressively. (That said, a legitimate fraction of American politics right now is in convincing the other side’s likely voters that elections are rigged, the oligarchs are in charge, why even bother calling your electeds or voting, eat an ice-cream sundae and talk to your AI girlfriend.)
        Jiro 4mo ago
        Illegal voting is "rare" because the system is set up so that it is in most cases impossible to detect.
        estearum 4mo ago
        Can you describe the specific chain of events required to create a fraudulent vote that is "impossible" to detect? Surely if you can confidently state the system not only is this way, but is purposely designed this way, you should have zero problem describing it exactly step by step. Extra credit if you can describe a method that can produce 10, 100, or 1000 votes.
    - JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
      And civically engaging. Less than a fifth of voters regularly contact their electeds.
    - sosomoxie 4mo ago
      Definitely not, you may, at best, shift the problems to someone else. Both of "our" political parties are beyond redemption and cannot be reformed (if they were very not terrible in the first place). The only thing that will change outcomes is direct action and I'm including limitless scaling of that including the armed defense of your ideals.
    - rayiner 4mo ago
      Yes more people should vote: https://data.blueroseresearch.org/hubfs/2024%20Blue%20Rose%20Research%20Retrospective.pdf https://data.blueroseresearch.org/hubfs/2024%20Blue%20Rose%2... (“Projecting onto the full voter file, if every registered voter voted, it’s likely that Trump would have won by even more.”).
      - estearum 4mo ago
        Yes, more people should vote. Always funny when Trumpers try to this out as a gotcha lmao. As a believer in democracy, I think it's better that our government is more responsive rather than less responsive to the public.
        rayiner 4mo ago
        High turnout brings out the low-information voters and changes the composition of the viable coalition for both parties. If we restricted the franchise, we might be able to sustain something closer to the Romney GOP versus the Mayor Pete Democratic Party. And that would make the government a lot more orderly and competent. I doubt the top 10-20% of either side wants a democracy. The difference is in where we want the filtering to happen. I want it to happen up front at the voting stage, but have the government be highly responsive to the people that do vote. The “Mayor Pete” neoliberal democrats favor mass voting, but that the actual governance is done by highly credentialed career bureaucrats that aren’t directly answerable to voters. I’d argue the Mayor Pete model is even less democratic than mine. Because although everyone votes, the effect of that vote is filtered through a fairly narrow class of credentialed bureaucrats, entry into which is gatekept by elite universities and professional organizations.
        fragmede 4mo ago
        I don't know who the > The “Mayor Pete” neoliberal democrats are, but yes, you want career bureaucrats running the show that follow the rules as set forth by Congress, with appointed officials that pass vetting at the top. Otherwise every position becomes political and the laws themselves go further out the window.
    - vjulian 4mo ago
      Many of us find voting insulting, given very low marginal power in a vote; it’s akin to throwing breadcrumbs to the poor. The structure of governance (the reality, not the mythology taught in schools or pushed forth as propaganda) is not in support of ‘the people”. Right or wrong, this is how many of feel. Voting is silly and futile.
      - vjulian 4mo ago
        Civics is a kind of religion, and it is difficult for people caught up in it to approach discussion from a logical and external perspective. This kind of civics is dangerous to society.
        Sabinus 4mo ago
        Conversely, I think civics where anonymous people tell you voting isn't effective and promote a kind of resentful powerless nihilism is dangerous to society. Reform is preferable to revolution which is preferable to oppression.
      - robotresearcher 4mo ago
        Ironically, the way to change this is by voting. One election at a time, we can trend towards the better or worse.
        LocalH 4mo ago
        We have to remove the power the current political duopoly has had for generations. Fuck the Republicans. Fuck the Democrats. Rally behind a third-party candidate and blow up the establishment with your vote
        donkey_brains 4mo ago
        Hell yeah. And disregard anyone who says you’re “wasting your vote” or “splitting the vote”; they’re part of the problem and their defeatist thinking will get us nowhere.
  - otikik 4mo ago
    Making the wealthy scared
  - esikich 4mo ago
    Violence. But people are still pretty comfortable so here we sit.
  - dmboyd 4mo ago
    The actual effective strategy is “tit for tat”
  - jrflowers 4mo ago
    The other party needs to run better candidates. It’s their job to drive voter turnout in their favor (not internet argument warriors) and they’ve lost two out of the last three elections by sabotaging their own primaries and doing “Our candidate isn’t good but at least they’re not a got dang cheeto!!” campaigns. “Less bad doesn’t have to mean good” is a mantra with a current 67% loss rate, soon to be 75%, and then 80% four years after that if they keep trying it. And they’ll keep blaming the voters that they failed every time.
    - bobthepanda 4mo ago
      There also needs to be, probably, more party diversity. The fact that the current president has such a stranglehold over their party is pretty unprecedented; normally, the big tent parties have lots of little camps with power bases that somewhat insulate independence, whether that be on an issue or regional level. It's kind of odd that the disenfranchised members of that party have not started up their own party. Also, I think the current gerrymandering race to the bottom has pretty clearly demonstrated the need for a better system of voting and district mapping. The House elections are already regulated by congressional act, not by the constitution.
      - Sabinus 4mo ago
        Ranked choice voting and the implementation of independent impartial redistricting are very urgently needed reforms.
        bobthepanda 4mo ago
        I think rather than redistricting in the narrow sense, we should consider * repealing the cap on house seats, which has been stuck at 435 arbitrarily * requiring that metropolitan areas consist of multimember districts that get allocated by proportional voting
  - vitally3643 4mo ago
    [flagged]
- drnick1 4mo ago
  [flagged]
- bilbo0s 4mo ago
  I'm pretty sure they didn't think this through in a comprehensive fashion. Because making it esy to find all the rich people just seems like a very bad idea given the direction things are going. When it was broad, the only thing you could do was locate, say, large minority groups. Blacks and latinos for instance. And even that led to problems. I can't imagine what will happen when we can drill down and tease out immigrants from citizens. Gay from straight. Rich from well to do. And so on.
  - giancarlostoro 4mo ago
    Do you really need the census to find people of specific demographics in 2026? Pretty sure I can go up to anyone in any state and ask where all the Puerto Ricans live and get an answer (in many cases I'm sure I'll get stared at like I'm crazy, but that's still an answer). I know because my parents moved to predominantly Hispanic parts of Florida before fully settling down where we landed, I REALLY doubt they stopped to pull up census data to decide where to find Hispanics / Puerto Ricans in Florida. You can talk to any local of any area and figure out which areas are a specific nationality without census data.
- joe_mamba 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  - evilsmurf 4mo ago
    Bit of a broad brush to be painting with.
    - joe_mamba 4mo ago
      [flagged]
      - peddling-brink 4mo ago
        Good thing that’s been the only act of political violence in America since 2024, otherwise there might be alternative viewpoints.
        joe_mamba 4mo ago
        Such as?
newZWhoDis 4mo ago
Does anyone actually believe this crap? You think the census is what the government would use to mass identify and imprison people, not the NSA database(s)? You think homeland security, or the FBI, or any other alphabet agency doesn't already have access to a giant list of people? Think about what meta knows about everyone, or Google. You do realize that the US gov has read access to their core databases right? "The census" has absolutely no bearing on any of that which you're worried about. It's just shocking the level of ignorance that gets upvoted in the comments here now.
- smrtinsert 4mo ago
  Even at a quick glance this doesn't make any sense. The census is literally how they get the data. Where else would it come from? Drones? Every computer being hacked Michael Bay style?
  - cj 4mo ago
    Data mining companies? Don’t forget there’s an entire industry that exists solely for this purpose.
    - kajman 4mo ago
      I don't work in this industry so I don't know their secret sauce, but I would be surprised if census data is not used as a baseline for what they're selling. It doesn't make sense to not want to use it if your next best sources are relying on everyone in the household having an app that sells their location to your network constantly. I see outdated data about me on the public versions of these sites all the time, so I know they don't have omniscience.
      - esseph 4mo ago
        It is probably not a baseline for what they're selling. https://www.census.gov/about/history/bureau-history/agency-history-timeline/title-13.html https://www.census.gov/about/history/bureau-history/agency-h... > Title 13 provides the following protections to individuals and businesses: > Private information is never published. It is against the law to disclose or publish any private information that identifies an individual or business such, including names, addresses (including GPS coordinates), Social Security Numbers, and telephone numbers. > The Census Bureau collects information to produce statistics. Personal information cannot be used against respondents by any government agency or court. > Census Bureau employees are sworn to protect confidentiality. People sworn to uphold Title 13 are legally required to maintain the confidentiality of your data. Every person with access to your data is sworn for life to protect your information and understands that the penalties for violating this law are applicable for a lifetime. Violating the law is a serious federal crime. Anyone who violates this law will face severe penalties, including a federal prison sentence of up to five years, a fine of up to $250,000, or both.
throwawa1 4mo ago
[flagged]
- LPisGood 4mo ago
  As planned by whom?
  - throwawa1 4mo ago
    The Epstein class. Bankers, Zionists who lost their civilization and Temple 2000 years ago: A good google search to view art owned by one family: "Artist funded by de Rothschild's depicts racial violence and rape themes"
    - poslathian 4mo ago
      This take is oversimplified to where it’s literally scary - heres an honest book about the Rothchilds Bankers and Zionists with the additional context I hope you incorporate. https://ia601309.us.archive.org/20/items/historyDEEPWEB/The%20Origins%20of%20Totalitarianism%20-%20Hannah%20Arendt.pdf https://ia601309.us.archive.org/20/items/historyDEEPWEB/The%...
      - throwawa1 4mo ago
        I've read it. A follow for you could be Jews vs Rome - Netanyahu recommended this with a review: "we lost that one, we won't lose the next one" Another follow on for you could be the question of the origins of the Slave Trade: Jews and Negro Slavery in the Old South - 1789-1865. The root of all western Ethnic issues are Zionists.
    - Dylan16807 4mo ago
      Telling me some art depicts a bad thing tells me next to nothing about the merits of that art.
- airstrike 4mo ago
  How do you get the idea that migration is "planned"? You've lost the plot entirely
dathinab 4mo ago
yeah, and implicitly force them to sell the land they own for less then it's worth, which in combination with setting up very messed up tax related laws in some states (1) which highly benefit you if you bought land longer in the past effectively "killed" a budding, wealthy, land owning Asian community and made sure it can't really regrow in that form. (1): I think it was mainly California, but don't remember full
- wahnfrieden 4mo ago
  Canada also did this to its Japanese
  - wahnfrieden 4mo ago
    Interesting to see this downvoted. The mechanism was different - not a tax scheme, but rather the Canadian government directly liquidated their property and put them into camps.
    - dathinab 4mo ago
      > Canadian government directly liquidated their property and put them into camps. While the mechanism was different that was what _effectively_ happened to US Japanese people, too. The taxes part is more like a separate mechanism of discrimination against anyone "new" which "happened" to overlap with this (and tbh. I have no idea to which degree this overlap was intentional or just "tolerated"). -- But if I have to guess why someone down voted the comment (not me) ti might be because it feels a bit like trying to downplaying how bad and against the values the US claimed it stood for, this was. And doing so by pointing at some random other country and saying "they also did bad things so we aren't that bad" which is a really bad argument. Just because others also have done bad things doesn't mean anything is less bad, or more reasonable or more excusable. I mean a lot of countries did some pretty bad things in the past, especially the past 200 years. When I post about stuff like that it's isn't about saying "hey they are bad". It's more because I think people from countries should be aware about all the bad stuff their country did/was done in their country. So that they can learn from this. But sadly most countries try to bury most mistake, atrocities, large scale crimes etc. in history or at least exclude them from anything thought proactively, e.g. in school. And the only way to know about them is to go looking for them by yourself in your free time. Which doesn't work well even if you care as it's hard to learn what you don't know you don't know. Like as a random example the tulsa race massacre should be required teaching in middle school with focus on the dynamics which lead to a mob of people including people in governing positions to thinking it is okay to try to lynch a whole district (more or less, simplified). Or e.g. in Canada there is the genocide of indigenous people (which by now might be through about in school, not sure). Or in Germany the genocide against Jews (which is thought a lot in middle school as required teaching material). Or the crimes Japan committed against China in WW2 and before (which they still bury very deeply AFIK). Or a pretty long list of atrocities in China science 1900. The important part here isn't teaching "that" it happened, but "why/how" it happened, so that if stuff goes in the same bad direction again people realize it and (hopefully) stop it. If we don't learn from the past I really don't know how humans as a species expect to not accidentally collectively press Alt+F4, given the increasingly higher stacks/larger powers involved.
dnautics 4mo ago
There is a significant movement in conservative circles that "the census should literally only be a count". this could be a wedge to prevent detailed demographic data collection by the government
- xnx 4mo ago
  But a count of what?
  - oh_my_goodness 4mo ago
    A count of people.
    - xnx 4mo ago
      All people or citizen people?
      - oh_my_goodness 4mo ago
        https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S2-C3-1/ALDE_00001034/ https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S2-C3-1/...
  - radiator 4mo ago
    Population in a city?
- Alive-in-2025 4mo ago
  If you don’t count people of different races, nationalities, origin, then you can pretend there are only white people. You don’t know if there are any marginalized people gathered in say an extremely poor neighborhood, because they are all people. I see it as a way to pretend there’s just white people.
  - nullc 4mo ago
    Do you think the only, or even primary, thing that determines if a person is marginalized is the color of their skin? -- even taking that you're talking about a POOR neighborhood as a prior?
willXare 4mo ago
[flagged]
Dylan16807 4mo ago
> The US Government is the entity that weaponizes the data. Pointing at an example from so long ago to find "the" misuser is turning a blind eye to lots of active misuse.

by bagels 4mo ago

conception 4mo ago

Remember “leftist “ and transgender activists are terrorists now. First they came for…

whattheheckheck 4mo ago
What's the actual antidote to this? 5calls.org?
- estearum 4mo ago
  Voting and getting everyone you know to vote
  - p-e-w 4mo ago
    Turnout in the past few elections was already extraordinarily high. Clearly this isn’t the answer. And neither is protesting, considering that 4 of the 5 largest demonstrations in US history happened in the past 10 years and achieved nothing.
    - estearum 4mo ago
      Well right... you also need to vote for the correct ("less-bad") people and get your friends to do the same. Voting for the worse people makes things worse.
      - gs17 4mo ago
        You also need the option to vote for "less-bad" people. Where I am now, my vote doesn't matter, even if it means the "less-bad" people win with no competition (as opposed to where I moved from where things were skewed the opposite way).
        Retric 4mo ago
        Somewhere between just going out to vote and revolution sits moving to an area where your vote counts. I’ve not quite reached that threshold, but I avoid moving to DC due to the lack of voting rights.
        godelski 4mo ago
        Vote strategically. Candidates notice btw. So if you're in a heavily red state but you're blue, then vote in the primaries for the more centered Republican. If you're in a heavily blue state but red, do the opposite. Either way this actually helps because more people are centered and we're getting wilder and wilder candidates because there's increased tribalism. They go to the extremes because they get more voters that way. They figured out that the mainstay voters will just end up voting left or right regardless, and that by catering to the extremes it actually pulls the mainstream voters too. (Both Reps and Dems are using this strategy) Remember, you don't have to vote for the person you actually like. And keep doing this until we get a sane voting system which can embed actual preference (any of the cardinal systems: i.e. Approval or STAR). This strategy still works with ordinal systems (i.e. Ranked Choice) because a weak spoiler is still really good at splitting the vote (happened in a pretty famous Alaska election).
        usefulcat 4mo ago
        Totally agree. I did exactly this in the recent primaries, and then got to vote again in a runoff. I think of it this way: in a state where one party is clearly dominant, most offices will end up being held by members of that party. That means that the primaries for that party actually matter more than the general election.
        dubya 4mo ago
    - deaux 4mo ago
      > Turnout in the past few elections was already extraordinarily high. In a sense, this in itself is the issue. It's long-term _worse_ to vote for the "lesser of two serious evils". This extreme "long-term pain for short-term gain" attitude is what's gotten the US to where it is. If in 2016 of 2024 even 20% of the dems would've stayed home or voted third party, the DNC's continuous forcing of awful corpocrats with zero charisma would've become completely untenable and Trump would've been limited to one term. Yet instead they were rewarded for it, so you'll see Newsom get the candidacy and presidency in 2028 (if 2028 even happens at this point), and then in 2032 you'll get something like Hegseth or Thiel winning and it's all over. There is an answer: relentlessly vote, but only for candidates who are actually slightly decent - including third-party - and otherwise stay at home. "Relentlessly" means "at every level", including locally from the very bottom, all the way up. The whole idea of "third-party voting is a complete waste in the US" is incredibly dumb because a vote for someone who loses isn't a wasted vote. It shows the others that there's a voter there who can be convinced if catered to, if they select a better candidate. The powers that be have done a fantastic job of brainwashing the entire population of the myth that anyone who _doesn't_ go out and vote for either major candidate is a morally bankrupt person, because it directly benefits them. The reply to this will be "well it's too late for that now!". It's wrong because the alternative doesn't help you one bit. You're just wishing for a miracle, that in 4 years something happens, kicking the can down the road making things worse long term. And that's actually what's got you here. It's a symptom of the terminal disease which has infected all layers of American society and has gotten it to where it's at: short-termism. Everyone just looks at the next quarter, the next election. China's ascendency is 1:1 tied to doing the exact opposite. Some smartypants will now point "but zero Covid", great you found a potential exception, now look at the other 90% of policy. Every time I've explained this I've gotten instantly downvoted without a single reply making an argument against it, because it's too painful for people to admit that they've been part of the road to where the US is at. And again, short-termism: rather feel the short-term tiny dopamine hit by slamming that downvote button than thinking about it. Let's see if this happens again.
      - amanaplanacanal 4mo ago
        You are saying the candidates are forced on us by someone else. But that's just wrong, we choose the candidates. Anybody can run, there is no secret cabal that decides who can run and who can't.
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
    - SmirkingRevenge 4mo ago
      The trend has been going that direction, where low turnout elections favor Ds and high turnout favors Rs. But only kind of... that holds when Trump is on the ballot. Trump seems to activate a segment of low-info, low-propensity voters who stay home when their guy isn't on the ballot. Things will probably get scrambled again once Trump is gone though. And don't discount protests. It's crucially important to have big public and forceful displays of united opposition. The regime is unlikely to be toppled by protests, but they will weaken it. That really matters. In an authoritarian take-over institutions are the front-lines, not the masses. Think colleges, media, industry, courts, legal firms, local governments, etc. The dilemma those institutions will face is to follow rule-of-law or submit to authoritarian corruption. Authoritarians win when those institutions decide it's safer to submit than it is to follow the law. And when institutions (and the people within them) feel like they are twisting in the wind alone and nobody cares, they are more likely to buckle. Protest movements help reinforce the rule-of-law side of that calculation. (The rise and fall of Orban is a great lesson on all of this) Also see: https://essayx.substack.com/p/the-35-percent-rule-just-made-history https://essayx.substack.com/p/the-35-percent-rule-just-made-...
    - dgellow 4mo ago
      Protesting one weekend day every 6 months will obviously do nothing. The pressure needs to be non stop
    - intended 4mo ago
      I highly recommend the research done by Robert Faris, Hal Roberts, and Yochai Benkler. In a nutshell, you have an issue where part of the information economy/market is captured. To the point that agenda can get set by theories or podcasts that have little truck with reality. Any checks or reviews of the claims, simply do not get surfaced within that ecosystem. This creates a more efficient system for political messaging. You cannot have an effective democratic system when your consensus building mechanisms have been (intentionally) compromised and weakened.
  - YeahThisIsMe 4mo ago
    The people in power now are doing everything they can to make that as hard as possible by any means necessary. Good luck.
    - patrick451 4mo ago
      No, they are doing everything they can to ensure that only the people who are legally allowed to vote are the ones voting.
      - JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
        > they are doing everything they can to ensure that only the people who are legally allowed to vote are the ones voting Illegal voting is so rare that almost every time folks go looking for it they come up empty handed. Examples of voter suppression, on the other hand, are trivial to fine. (And both parties do it, particularly around primaries.) In my state, we’re trying to enact a citizenship-proof requirement which penalizes women who change their name on getting married and those who can’t afford a passport. In effect, a marriage and poll tax. Ironically, this will disenfranchise the MAGA voters who are themselves pushing for it, but I’m not really going to point that out aggressively. (That said, a legitimate fraction of American politics right now is in convincing the other side’s likely voters that elections are rigged, the oligarchs are in charge, why even bother calling your electeds or voting, eat an ice-cream sundae and talk to your AI girlfriend.)
        Jiro 4mo ago
        Illegal voting is "rare" because the system is set up so that it is in most cases impossible to detect.
        estearum 4mo ago
        Can you describe the specific chain of events required to create a fraudulent vote that is "impossible" to detect? Surely if you can confidently state the system not only is this way, but is purposely designed this way, you should have zero problem describing it exactly step by step. Extra credit if you can describe a method that can produce 10, 100, or 1000 votes.
  - JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
    And civically engaging. Less than a fifth of voters regularly contact their electeds.
  - sosomoxie 4mo ago
    Definitely not, you may, at best, shift the problems to someone else. Both of "our" political parties are beyond redemption and cannot be reformed (if they were very not terrible in the first place). The only thing that will change outcomes is direct action and I'm including limitless scaling of that including the armed defense of your ideals.
  - rayiner 4mo ago
    Yes more people should vote: https://data.blueroseresearch.org/hubfs/2024%20Blue%20Rose%20Research%20Retrospective.pdf https://data.blueroseresearch.org/hubfs/2024%20Blue%20Rose%2... (“Projecting onto the full voter file, if every registered voter voted, it’s likely that Trump would have won by even more.”).
    - estearum 4mo ago
      Yes, more people should vote. Always funny when Trumpers try to this out as a gotcha lmao. As a believer in democracy, I think it's better that our government is more responsive rather than less responsive to the public.
      - rayiner 4mo ago
        High turnout brings out the low-information voters and changes the composition of the viable coalition for both parties. If we restricted the franchise, we might be able to sustain something closer to the Romney GOP versus the Mayor Pete Democratic Party. And that would make the government a lot more orderly and competent. I doubt the top 10-20% of either side wants a democracy. The difference is in where we want the filtering to happen. I want it to happen up front at the voting stage, but have the government be highly responsive to the people that do vote. The “Mayor Pete” neoliberal democrats favor mass voting, but that the actual governance is done by highly credentialed career bureaucrats that aren’t directly answerable to voters. I’d argue the Mayor Pete model is even less democratic than mine. Because although everyone votes, the effect of that vote is filtered through a fairly narrow class of credentialed bureaucrats, entry into which is gatekept by elite universities and professional organizations.
        fragmede 4mo ago
        I don't know who the > The “Mayor Pete” neoliberal democrats are, but yes, you want career bureaucrats running the show that follow the rules as set forth by Congress, with appointed officials that pass vetting at the top. Otherwise every position becomes political and the laws themselves go further out the window.
  - vjulian 4mo ago
    Many of us find voting insulting, given very low marginal power in a vote; it’s akin to throwing breadcrumbs to the poor. The structure of governance (the reality, not the mythology taught in schools or pushed forth as propaganda) is not in support of ‘the people”. Right or wrong, this is how many of feel. Voting is silly and futile.
    - vjulian 4mo ago
      Civics is a kind of religion, and it is difficult for people caught up in it to approach discussion from a logical and external perspective. This kind of civics is dangerous to society.
      - Sabinus 4mo ago
        Conversely, I think civics where anonymous people tell you voting isn't effective and promote a kind of resentful powerless nihilism is dangerous to society. Reform is preferable to revolution which is preferable to oppression.
    - robotresearcher 4mo ago
      Ironically, the way to change this is by voting. One election at a time, we can trend towards the better or worse.
      - LocalH 4mo ago
        We have to remove the power the current political duopoly has had for generations. Fuck the Republicans. Fuck the Democrats. Rally behind a third-party candidate and blow up the establishment with your vote
        donkey_brains 4mo ago
        Hell yeah. And disregard anyone who says you’re “wasting your vote” or “splitting the vote”; they’re part of the problem and their defeatist thinking will get us nowhere.
- otikik 4mo ago
  Making the wealthy scared
- esikich 4mo ago
  Violence. But people are still pretty comfortable so here we sit.
- dmboyd 4mo ago
  The actual effective strategy is “tit for tat”
- jrflowers 4mo ago
  The other party needs to run better candidates. It’s their job to drive voter turnout in their favor (not internet argument warriors) and they’ve lost two out of the last three elections by sabotaging their own primaries and doing “Our candidate isn’t good but at least they’re not a got dang cheeto!!” campaigns. “Less bad doesn’t have to mean good” is a mantra with a current 67% loss rate, soon to be 75%, and then 80% four years after that if they keep trying it. And they’ll keep blaming the voters that they failed every time.
  - bobthepanda 4mo ago
    There also needs to be, probably, more party diversity. The fact that the current president has such a stranglehold over their party is pretty unprecedented; normally, the big tent parties have lots of little camps with power bases that somewhat insulate independence, whether that be on an issue or regional level. It's kind of odd that the disenfranchised members of that party have not started up their own party. Also, I think the current gerrymandering race to the bottom has pretty clearly demonstrated the need for a better system of voting and district mapping. The House elections are already regulated by congressional act, not by the constitution.
    - Sabinus 4mo ago
      Ranked choice voting and the implementation of independent impartial redistricting are very urgently needed reforms.
      - bobthepanda 4mo ago
        I think rather than redistricting in the narrow sense, we should consider * repealing the cap on house seats, which has been stuck at 435 arbitrarily * requiring that metropolitan areas consist of multimember districts that get allocated by proportional voting
- vitally3643 4mo ago
  [flagged]
drnick1 4mo ago
[flagged]
bilbo0s 4mo ago
I'm pretty sure they didn't think this through in a comprehensive fashion. Because making it esy to find all the rich people just seems like a very bad idea given the direction things are going. When it was broad, the only thing you could do was locate, say, large minority groups. Blacks and latinos for instance. And even that led to problems. I can't imagine what will happen when we can drill down and tease out immigrants from citizens. Gay from straight. Rich from well to do. And so on.
- giancarlostoro 4mo ago
  Do you really need the census to find people of specific demographics in 2026? Pretty sure I can go up to anyone in any state and ask where all the Puerto Ricans live and get an answer (in many cases I'm sure I'll get stared at like I'm crazy, but that's still an answer). I know because my parents moved to predominantly Hispanic parts of Florida before fully settling down where we landed, I REALLY doubt they stopped to pull up census data to decide where to find Hispanics / Puerto Ricans in Florida. You can talk to any local of any area and figure out which areas are a specific nationality without census data.
joe_mamba 4mo ago
[flagged]
- evilsmurf 4mo ago
  Bit of a broad brush to be painting with.
  - joe_mamba 4mo ago
    [flagged]
    - peddling-brink 4mo ago
      Good thing that’s been the only act of political violence in America since 2024, otherwise there might be alternative viewpoints.
      - joe_mamba 4mo ago
        Such as?

newZWhoDis 4mo ago

Does anyone actually believe this crap? You think the census is what the government would use to mass identify and imprison people, not the NSA database(s)? You think homeland security, or the FBI, or any other alphabet agency doesn't already have access to a giant list of people? Think about what meta knows about everyone, or Google. You do realize that the US gov has read access to their core databases right? "The census" has absolutely no bearing on any of that which you're worried about. It's just shocking the level of ignorance that gets upvoted in the comments here now.

smrtinsert 4mo ago
Even at a quick glance this doesn't make any sense. The census is literally how they get the data. Where else would it come from? Drones? Every computer being hacked Michael Bay style?
- cj 4mo ago
  Data mining companies? Don’t forget there’s an entire industry that exists solely for this purpose.
  - kajman 4mo ago
    I don't work in this industry so I don't know their secret sauce, but I would be surprised if census data is not used as a baseline for what they're selling. It doesn't make sense to not want to use it if your next best sources are relying on everyone in the household having an app that sells their location to your network constantly. I see outdated data about me on the public versions of these sites all the time, so I know they don't have omniscience.
    - esseph 4mo ago
      It is probably not a baseline for what they're selling. https://www.census.gov/about/history/bureau-history/agency-history-timeline/title-13.html https://www.census.gov/about/history/bureau-history/agency-h... > Title 13 provides the following protections to individuals and businesses: > Private information is never published. It is against the law to disclose or publish any private information that identifies an individual or business such, including names, addresses (including GPS coordinates), Social Security Numbers, and telephone numbers. > The Census Bureau collects information to produce statistics. Personal information cannot be used against respondents by any government agency or court. > Census Bureau employees are sworn to protect confidentiality. People sworn to uphold Title 13 are legally required to maintain the confidentiality of your data. Every person with access to your data is sworn for life to protect your information and understands that the penalties for violating this law are applicable for a lifetime. Violating the law is a serious federal crime. Anyone who violates this law will face severe penalties, including a federal prison sentence of up to five years, a fine of up to $250,000, or both.

throwawa1 4mo ago

[flagged]

LPisGood 4mo ago
As planned by whom?
- throwawa1 4mo ago
  The Epstein class. Bankers, Zionists who lost their civilization and Temple 2000 years ago: A good google search to view art owned by one family: "Artist funded by de Rothschild's depicts racial violence and rape themes"
  - poslathian 4mo ago
    This take is oversimplified to where it’s literally scary - heres an honest book about the Rothchilds Bankers and Zionists with the additional context I hope you incorporate. https://ia601309.us.archive.org/20/items/historyDEEPWEB/The%20Origins%20of%20Totalitarianism%20-%20Hannah%20Arendt.pdf https://ia601309.us.archive.org/20/items/historyDEEPWEB/The%...
    - throwawa1 4mo ago
      I've read it. A follow for you could be Jews vs Rome - Netanyahu recommended this with a review: "we lost that one, we won't lose the next one" Another follow on for you could be the question of the origins of the Slave Trade: Jews and Negro Slavery in the Old South - 1789-1865. The root of all western Ethnic issues are Zionists.
  - Dylan16807 4mo ago
    Telling me some art depicts a bad thing tells me next to nothing about the merits of that art.
airstrike 4mo ago
How do you get the idea that migration is "planned"? You've lost the plot entirely

dathinab 4mo ago

yeah, and implicitly force them to sell the land they own for less then it's worth, which in combination with setting up very messed up tax related laws in some states (1) which highly benefit you if you bought land longer in the past effectively "killed" a budding, wealthy, land owning Asian community and made sure it can't really regrow in that form. (1): I think it was mainly California, but don't remember full

wahnfrieden 4mo ago
Canada also did this to its Japanese
- wahnfrieden 4mo ago
  Interesting to see this downvoted. The mechanism was different - not a tax scheme, but rather the Canadian government directly liquidated their property and put them into camps.
  - dathinab 4mo ago
    > Canadian government directly liquidated their property and put them into camps. While the mechanism was different that was what _effectively_ happened to US Japanese people, too. The taxes part is more like a separate mechanism of discrimination against anyone "new" which "happened" to overlap with this (and tbh. I have no idea to which degree this overlap was intentional or just "tolerated"). -- But if I have to guess why someone down voted the comment (not me) ti might be because it feels a bit like trying to downplaying how bad and against the values the US claimed it stood for, this was. And doing so by pointing at some random other country and saying "they also did bad things so we aren't that bad" which is a really bad argument. Just because others also have done bad things doesn't mean anything is less bad, or more reasonable or more excusable. I mean a lot of countries did some pretty bad things in the past, especially the past 200 years. When I post about stuff like that it's isn't about saying "hey they are bad". It's more because I think people from countries should be aware about all the bad stuff their country did/was done in their country. So that they can learn from this. But sadly most countries try to bury most mistake, atrocities, large scale crimes etc. in history or at least exclude them from anything thought proactively, e.g. in school. And the only way to know about them is to go looking for them by yourself in your free time. Which doesn't work well even if you care as it's hard to learn what you don't know you don't know. Like as a random example the tulsa race massacre should be required teaching in middle school with focus on the dynamics which lead to a mob of people including people in governing positions to thinking it is okay to try to lynch a whole district (more or less, simplified). Or e.g. in Canada there is the genocide of indigenous people (which by now might be through about in school, not sure). Or in Germany the genocide against Jews (which is thought a lot in middle school as required teaching material). Or the crimes Japan committed against China in WW2 and before (which they still bury very deeply AFIK). Or a pretty long list of atrocities in China science 1900. The important part here isn't teaching "that" it happened, but "why/how" it happened, so that if stuff goes in the same bad direction again people realize it and (hopefully) stop it. If we don't learn from the past I really don't know how humans as a species expect to not accidentally collectively press Alt+F4, given the increasingly higher stacks/larger powers involved.

dnautics 4mo ago

There is a significant movement in conservative circles that "the census should literally only be a count". this could be a wedge to prevent detailed demographic data collection by the government

xnx 4mo ago
But a count of what?
- oh_my_goodness 4mo ago
  A count of people.
  - xnx 4mo ago
    All people or citizen people?
    - oh_my_goodness 4mo ago
      https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S2-C3-1/ALDE_00001034/ https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S2-C3-1/...
- radiator 4mo ago
  Population in a city?
Alive-in-2025 4mo ago
If you don’t count people of different races, nationalities, origin, then you can pretend there are only white people. You don’t know if there are any marginalized people gathered in say an extremely poor neighborhood, because they are all people. I see it as a way to pretend there’s just white people.
- nullc 4mo ago
  Do you think the only, or even primary, thing that determines if a person is marginalized is the color of their skin? -- even taking that you're talking about a POOR neighborhood as a prior?

willXare 4mo ago

[flagged]

Dylan16807 4mo ago

> The US Government is the entity that weaponizes the data. Pointing at an example from so long ago to find "the" misuser is turning a blind eye to lots of active misuse.