The original talk was held in English, but there are translations in French and German available as well. Please have a look at the settings icon of the video, you can change the language of the talk there.
It's originally in English with German and French translations also available. You can use the cog icon to select a different stream if it defaults to the wrong one for you.
It isn't. There is a German, a French and a English version of the talk online and the original Audio seems to be in English (note the gear icon on the lower right corner of the video).
The talk was held in English. The website seems to push the wrong audio track in some cases but you can change that with the little gear icon at the bottom of the video.
There is a lesson here about the push for privacy laws. If you can't trust the government, why trust that they would uphold any law about your privacy? Privacy has to be established from a technological perspective - strong encryption, don't put information on the Internet if you don't want it compromised. Laws require a government that will respect them.
There has to be a multi-pronged approach. The central prong is organized public will, without which neither laws nor appropriate tech will be adopted. Governments may violate people's privacy in spite of laws, but without such laws governments will absolutely do so with impunity. Visible evidence of a government breaking its own laws to harm its people draws more citizens to the fight and helps move regime change forward. That being said, everyone should still use the strongest encryprion available for all communications, including boring and unremarkable communication.
The quickest way to autocracy is pretending there's no difference between it and democracy.
This is civics 101: There is no "one ruler". There are parliaments, with multiple, opposing fractions. Then, there are administrations (te "executive branch"), which are separate. Then, also separate: the judiciary.
Of course you already knew that, yet you chose to double down on OP's cynical take declaring democracy dead and asking people to stop trying to save and/or improve it. Why vote, if law has no power? And, for the odd politician that happens not to be corrupt: why bother, when your constituents are just going to spit and yell conspiracy theories in your face, with absolutely no attention being paid to your actual work?
That may have been true in the past, now it’s one more fiction. The real three powers are: the rich (which decide laws in the background), the politicians (gov+parliments that use the existing institutions to push laws decided by the rich) and the media (that create and drive public opinion and chose the politicians). The first two classes are not truly separated anymore, and one may pass from to another (best example is being France’s president Macron).
There's more nuance to this. Take the UK, for example (if only because it's what I'm familiar with). The government, in recent times, attempted to create new laws and got shot down. New laws denied. It may be the case that government makes laws, but (in many places) they still need permission to do so.
Laws also survive governments; subsequent governments have at times tried to remove existing laws, and been shot down in the attempt. While there's a clear link twixt government and law, they're not (in many places) the same thing; they are separate.
I used "government" as meaning all branches of government as a whole. I don't disregard the advantages of dividing power between executive, legislative and judicial branches. That dilution of centralized power is important.
But at the end of the day, when the branches has come to agreement, it's still a sovereign entity that does whatever it wants.
That argument is trivially true for most any civil liberty: the promise of a fair trial is protected only by the next higher court's fairness, etc.
To categorical discount the value of the rule of law, and to apparently consider that idea to be so obvious that just about half a paragraph of argumentation is given for it, strikes me as... just scary?
There are quite a few established democracies that have seen steady improvements in civil rights over their existence. There have been setbacks, such as World War Two. And the last five to ten years may well be similar. But it's still obviously true that "the long arch of history bends towards justice".
And, fwiw, technology alone is not capable to guarantee any meaningful rights when your own government is your adversary. The internet was praised as the killer tool to empower the individual against censorship. And yet there still is no technology that makes accessing Wikipedia in Shanghai as easy as it is in Billings, Montana. Bitcoin was hailed (by the conspiracy-minded) as a tool to overthrow democratically-established institutions. But, as it turned out, regulators were far less interested in shutting down Bitcoin than expected, and did not even break a sweat implementing KYC nad similar regulation across the cryptocurrency universe when needed.
> technology alone is not capable to guarantee any meaningful rights when your own government is your adversary
In fact, I would argue technology has made it easier to abuse individual rights. Its so easy to build mass surveillance systems nowadays that citizens are quickly becoming a row on a spreadsheet. Technology has empowered authoritative governments to become more authoritative. China being the prime example.
> There are quite a few established democracies that have seen steady improvements in civil rights over their existence. There have been setbacks, such as World War Two. And the last five to ten years may well be similar. But it's still obviously true that "the long arch of history bends towards justice".
I’d be interested for you to cite specific example of this. During the Cold War, the threat of the Soviet domination pushed some countries in the direction of greater equality and equanimity. But they seem uniformly in retreat following its collapse, and retreating on the basis of ever shoddier premises (first the War on Terror, now ethnonationalism). While it’s true that the ranks of the elite have diversified, the material reality and civil rights protections of almost everyone beneath them have worsened in many of these countries.
Eastern Europe? Completely authoritarian during the cold war, now various levels of emerging democracies.
Taiwan? US-backed autocracy during the Cold War, now vibrant democracy with some issues.
In terms of steady improvement, while you're right that there have been some recent setbacks, I think you discount just how authoritarian Western governments were during the Cold War. This is a very difficult thing to summarize in a forum comment, so I suggest you look at something like Freedom House's reports (and yes, I know they aren't completely neutral, still think they're reasonable enough to be worth reading). Here's one:
Freedom House is state-funded, US propaganda that has gone so far as to buttress the white supremacist state of Rhodesia, far right politicians in Latin America, and engage in “clandestine operations in Iran.” They have zero credibility:
Eastern Europe is complicated because of the kleptocratic influence of both the US and Russia in the region, various civil conflicts, again rising ethnonationalism. Taiwan’s local trajectory is better from the KMT days, but is largely premised on elite exploitation of workers and resources in mainland China, which has put the country on a deeply unstable economic and political trajectory. Still not seeing a great record of progress versus reversion here.
So I can understand where you're coming from, mind telling me if you'd consider any country presently in existence not "largely premised on elite exploitation of workers"?
Without the appropriate laws to go with them, technological solutions won't work. The state will just make strong encryption illegal, or force people to give up their passwords. Or simply start a propaganda campaign to limit adoption (anybody that uses encryption anyway is automatically suspicious, that makes the secret police's job much easier).
You could personally implement the best technical solution for privacy, and then one of your family will buy the newest phone and go to the hottest site to see cute cat videos, while the phone live-streams your surrounding to 3rd party servers.
And then you could rage about how these stupid people are ruining everything by not understanding privacy, but then again, "Stupid people are ruining my beautiful society!" has been a refrain since the days of Marx, probably earlier.
99% of people won't even understand PKI, ever. They have jobs and other things to worry about. You should structure your society with that assumption.
Somehow. Her grandfather was from Hongkong but she was born in Germany. As far as I know she has been living in Asia for a couple of years and studied in Oxford and at the MIT.
TBH myopic analysis that doesn't acknowledge subsequent protests from around the world have tried to incorporate HK tactics are getting crushed left and right. Military intervention, hundreds dead, media and internet black outs, to the utter indifference of western media or public sentiment. There's a slide acknowledging other protests at 1:25:30, "If you care any of these things, then you should care about it in more than one place". But we know this is demonstrably not true.
Operationally, there's not much to learn except that HK police and the mainland has been forced to be extremely lenient and permissible (by most relative standards) due to structural factors like HKs unique geopolitical position, the geographic strengths of a city state, or other political constraints that put comprehensive crackdown off the table for HK. The operational lessons, which this talk is about, will be clearer over the next few years. I surmise the the government will be able to exploit the massive data collection on the ground after things settle down. Retaliation will come in a variety of ways i.e. employment opportunities and other algorithmic biases. Multinationals in HK are already reluctant to hire locals because it may jeopardize their operations in the mainland (like Cathay).
> I surmise the the government will be able to exploit the massive data collection on the ground after things settle down.
True, the deadliest enemies are invisible.
I bet that at this moment at least 10 universities in mainland China are using the massive surveillance data being collected (security cameras, phone location data, ...) to figure out how to track protestors back.
And even if there is no true leader, surely there are a bunch of people who are more lider-ish than the rest. Some networking analysis, like NSA pioneered surely can be applied here.
China has the time advantage, Hong Kong is not going anywhere. A brutal Chinese intervention would be the worse possible mistake for China to make, it will be hard for the West to ignore that. But keep the policing relatively low key, and the other countries don't have an in angle.
The operational tactics and technological tools China develops by experimenting on HK are probably going to be packaged and sold to foreign governments. If HK is pacified successfully, a few years later there'll be Chinese consultants selling their services around the world, and exhibit A of their marketing decks will be HK. This could be a massive cash cow that'll give China a high tech product they could sell that Western democracies can't or won't develop. In fact, they might even be customers. Imagine being able to maintain a veneer of democracy while using data analysis and surveillance to select dangerous individuals to disappear. Or passing laws to restrict the liberties of citizens secure in the knowledge that the resulting protest intensities can be predicted and managed.
If anyone has tips on how to build privacy-preserving social media without being marked a Nazi, a terrorist, a pedophile or a totally regular suicide I'm listening.
Edit: I'm totally serious, even Signal barely manages to exist, is blocked from federating for reasons of the preservation of the developers' personal safety and has publically been compared to the KKK by FBI officials. It's not a fun or bright situation but it is how things are right now.
Maybe start by not conflating privacy with concerns about censorship.
Then, it'd be great if privacy-focussed platforms would show a commitment to find privacy- and freedom-preserving ways to tackle the very real problem of these platforms overflowing with actual, self-marking Nazis.
As an analogy: if the cryptocurrency community can find ways to curb problems such as scams or the waste of energy with technology, it can avoid the regulation to that effect it so much fears. But every time some cryptobro opines that people really deserve to be scammed if they did not go through each single line of source code their bitcoin wallet depended on, the idea that these communities are sticking up for some larger values and not feeling quite ok with scammers and Nazis loses a bit more of its legitimacy.
You can never have eavesdropping and privacy at the same time. The best one can do is installing mechanical filters, but those cannot be privacy-preserving and constitute effective censorship at the same time. There is no solution to that, there is no middle ground possible without dropping the law of the excluded middle, which make all concepts and words meaningless and thus does not represent a "win".
E.g. even using homomorphic encryption does not solve anything. One could use that to scramble messages containing certain words, but that would only be detectable to the receiving party, and then they could just work around the wordlist, e.g. by communicating in ones and zeroes. And that new form of communication would not be detectable my the middleman until they hack the endpoints using a side channel, so the middle-man will happily pass on this new type of messages indefinitely.
You're conflating scamming with exploiting code vulnerabilities. They're similar but the former is social code and the latter is computer code.
You're also slandering the crypto community; this is part of the reason why we don't yet have user-friendly crypto, and effectively live with massively compromised privacy through the banking system, which is also the main reason surveillance capitalism has been implemented worldwide and is now even set to take over India.
Please try harder, you make Nazi's look reasonable in comparison. Please don't lend the current fascist uprising in India credence just because you're salty about nerds on Twitter.
Edit: please provide me with feedback re. how I'm not adding to the discussion because it is certainly non-obvious to me.
"Please try harder, you make Nazi's look reasonable in comparison" breaks the site guidelines badly. Please see my other reply to you at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21908329.
Not a great holiday season, solitude and painful realisations for Christmas. Delete or cut into my posts if that makes sense to you, I can't edit them anymore.
It would really be great if privacy and anti-censorship advocates could solve the problem of extremism! Seems like a bit of a tall order, though.
What you're really proposing, IMO, is this:
Privacy and anti-censorship advocate (PA): I think we're throwing the baby out with the bathwater when we're trying to curb extremism by requiring messaging services to police their users. The problem is real, but the methods being used to address it are completely antithetical to the fundamental principles of free societies. I want to let people talk to each other on-line without anyone listening in on them or stopping them from saying whatever they want to say.
You: OK, you can do that if you can make sure no Nazis can use your service to further their agenda.
PA: That seems impossible, given the goals I've stated. Furthermore, this is precisely what I meant with "throwing the baby out with the bathwater."
IOW, I don't think there's a technical solution to be found here. This is a fundamental ideological divide, and needs to be dealt with as such.
Name an actual communist/socialist regime that didn't confiscate weapons first. China, NorKo, Venezuela, Soviet Union - hell, even the Nazi's confiscated weapons from the Jews "legally" before loading them into the trains.
Gun confiscation is the canary in the communist coal mine.
HN is a community. Users needn't use their real name, but do need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
> give an example of a country that hasn't had to use violence to exit a communistic regime
DDR, People's Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia...
Basically the only country in Europe that didn't exit Communism peacefully was Yugoslavia, and the reason for the violence wasn't Communism, it was resurgent nationalism/religion.
You seem to have trouble understanding even your own arguments. Above, you asked for "an example of a country that hasn't had to use violence to exit a communistic regime".
So, pray tell: how exactly were East Germany's political prisoners instrumental in...ending that very regime imprisoning them?
Edit: hilarious, I'm getting downvoted for pointing out that the toppling of communism in Romania was very violent. Never expected HN to be a red block stronghold. Kind of hilarious.
This sort of ham-fisted attempt to shove your specific fascination with a two-hundred year old food fight that became irrelevant thirty years ago at the latest is a good example of what's wrong.
FWIW there have been both communist and fascist/autocratic regimes that ended in violence and those that ended without. There have also been countries either self-identifying as socialist or being labelled as such by people sharing your convictions, which still manage to uphold civil liberties and economic success just as well as more market-oriented economies. etc. etc.
1. It is trivially the case that many have overthrown such systems sans guns. See, for example, the DDR, Poland, Hungary etc.
2. The HK protest movement is not about “communism”. The left in Hong Kong, apart from a very small section represented by newspapers such as Ta Kung Pao, is against the CCP and government. That is because the people you refer to as communist here don’t care very much for class struggle or Marxism. They care about power, and so they have sided with the oligarchs instead of the professional and working classes. That’s why they kept laissez-faire capitalism but not the limited progress towards democracy under the British that took place in the 1990s. For this reason there are large numbers of tycoons in the HK political establishment.
3. It is unhelpful to try to shoehorn one’s bugbears into everything without reference to the specificities of the particular situation into which one is trying to shoehorn something.
I'm afraid I find the above justification somewhat off the mark, because a lot of on-topic threads on HN are also quite tedious and predictable, and include generic ideological flamewars (static vs. dynamic and whatever else).
Can't we just say that political {cultural, esthetic, gastronomic, religious, ...} ideological flamewars are off-topic simply because they are not about hacking?
Generic discussion of all kinds tends to be against the mandate of the site (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), but political and ideological ones stand out because of how rapidly they degenerate and how much damage they do.
Edit: I've added nasty to tedious and predictable above. Maybe that makes the point clearer.
The lesson I learned from Hong Kong is you will never take the 2nd Amendment from me. Just come and try and take them. Take a cursory glance at what is going on in VA right now to know what is in store for you if you do.
We've run this experiment several times and gotten the same result every time. Hence the forever wars. Hillbillies with guns and IDEs have shown to be pretty effective against militaries.
Even if you are right, that would imply that the US would enter a protacted civil war that would impoverish everyone. I have a feeling popular support would swing away from the millitias very quickly, just how long do you think millenials will survive without their avocados, yoga classes and fair trade locally brewed artisanal beer.
Just take a look at what is happening in Virginia right now - police and veterans are siding with the militias in opposition to the incoming gun laws. I have a hard time believing that the men and women of the military would side with the government when the orders are to kill your neighbours.
Maybe in a failed state like California or New York, but that's not the entirety of America.
I'm not sure why you started with this. Your odds are way better if it's against your own military, especially in the West. There's going to be a ton of defectors. Have you met anyone from the South? Those same people who are extremely anti government are usually vets. This isn't just speculation either, there's very clear examples.
But something people constantly forget is that you can't rule the dead. People are a resource. You need them to produce your economy, make your food, tax, etc. But there's also an argument here on the converse side, to make your people rich to make your ruling class even richer. But short term thinking...
By being willing to take significantly more casualties, usually because the fighters are ideologically motivated. If you want to be a martyr, keep your guns. How much do you want to bet you'll still be around to see that bright future you take up arms for? Or that once you win, the leaders of your rebellion won't toss you out onto the streets? If you want to stay alive, being a refugee is a much better bet.
I don't agree with your premise, but for the sake of argument let's say that you're right and armed civilians have no chance of winning against an organized state military.
Don't people have the right to die trying to win their freedom?
one dude armed with pretty much any portable weapons is not gonna be able to hold out against police for too long. still, you read a lot of stories of one or two armed citizens who can resist arrest in their home for a couple days. in cases where there are more citizens resisting, this can go on a lot longer. the waco siege lasted 51 days. the police literally had to (or maybe just didn't care enough not to) drop bombs on a rowhouse to end the 1985 MOVE standoff.
a bunch of people with rifles inside a building can be pretty hard to deal with if the government isn't willing to level the place. a large scale revolt of armed citizens could never "win" against the us military, but the conflict wouldn't leave much left worth controlling.
decisions are made in the margins. it is much less risky for a government to impose unpopular laws on an unarmed populace.
It wasn't rice farmers who took on the US. It was the battle hardened vietnamese army who fought imperial japan and then imperial france for many years. Also, even though they ultimately won, they didn't really kick ass. More than 4 million vietnamese died in the vietnam war. Less than 60 thousand americans died. It was one of the most lopsided bloodbaths in human history. That's with tons of sino-soviet military aid to the "rice farmers".
I think that the protestors would lose local and international support the moment they started shooting. Most successful protest movement have tried to stay nonviolent.
I really don't think that people in Hong Kong get their democracy taken away because there are too many people on the planet, or in the area around HK. Why do you believe that overpopulation is the cause?
89 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] thread(That I can do even without understanding any German)
In reality, government makes the laws. They're an expression and codification of the ruler's will.
This is civics 101: There is no "one ruler". There are parliaments, with multiple, opposing fractions. Then, there are administrations (te "executive branch"), which are separate. Then, also separate: the judiciary.
Of course you already knew that, yet you chose to double down on OP's cynical take declaring democracy dead and asking people to stop trying to save and/or improve it. Why vote, if law has no power? And, for the odd politician that happens not to be corrupt: why bother, when your constituents are just going to spit and yell conspiracy theories in your face, with absolutely no attention being paid to your actual work?
Laws also survive governments; subsequent governments have at times tried to remove existing laws, and been shot down in the attempt. While there's a clear link twixt government and law, they're not (in many places) the same thing; they are separate.
I used "government" as meaning all branches of government as a whole. I don't disregard the advantages of dividing power between executive, legislative and judicial branches. That dilution of centralized power is important.
But at the end of the day, when the branches has come to agreement, it's still a sovereign entity that does whatever it wants.
To categorical discount the value of the rule of law, and to apparently consider that idea to be so obvious that just about half a paragraph of argumentation is given for it, strikes me as... just scary?
There are quite a few established democracies that have seen steady improvements in civil rights over their existence. There have been setbacks, such as World War Two. And the last five to ten years may well be similar. But it's still obviously true that "the long arch of history bends towards justice".
And, fwiw, technology alone is not capable to guarantee any meaningful rights when your own government is your adversary. The internet was praised as the killer tool to empower the individual against censorship. And yet there still is no technology that makes accessing Wikipedia in Shanghai as easy as it is in Billings, Montana. Bitcoin was hailed (by the conspiracy-minded) as a tool to overthrow democratically-established institutions. But, as it turned out, regulators were far less interested in shutting down Bitcoin than expected, and did not even break a sweat implementing KYC nad similar regulation across the cryptocurrency universe when needed.
In fact, I would argue technology has made it easier to abuse individual rights. Its so easy to build mass surveillance systems nowadays that citizens are quickly becoming a row on a spreadsheet. Technology has empowered authoritative governments to become more authoritative. China being the prime example.
I’d be interested for you to cite specific example of this. During the Cold War, the threat of the Soviet domination pushed some countries in the direction of greater equality and equanimity. But they seem uniformly in retreat following its collapse, and retreating on the basis of ever shoddier premises (first the War on Terror, now ethnonationalism). While it’s true that the ranks of the elite have diversified, the material reality and civil rights protections of almost everyone beneath them have worsened in many of these countries.
Taiwan? US-backed autocracy during the Cold War, now vibrant democracy with some issues.
In terms of steady improvement, while you're right that there have been some recent setbacks, I think you discount just how authoritarian Western governments were during the Cold War. This is a very difficult thing to summarize in a forum comment, so I suggest you look at something like Freedom House's reports (and yes, I know they aren't completely neutral, still think they're reasonable enough to be worth reading). Here's one:
The Civil Liberties Implications Of Counterterrorism Policies: https://freedomhouse.org/report/todays-american-how-free/civ...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_House
Eastern Europe is complicated because of the kleptocratic influence of both the US and Russia in the region, various civil conflicts, again rising ethnonationalism. Taiwan’s local trajectory is better from the KMT days, but is largely premised on elite exploitation of workers and resources in mainland China, which has put the country on a deeply unstable economic and political trajectory. Still not seeing a great record of progress versus reversion here.
And then you could rage about how these stupid people are ruining everything by not understanding privacy, but then again, "Stupid people are ruining my beautiful society!" has been a refrain since the days of Marx, probably earlier.
99% of people won't even understand PKI, ever. They have jobs and other things to worry about. You should structure your society with that assumption.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jobckq4USM
TBH myopic analysis that doesn't acknowledge subsequent protests from around the world have tried to incorporate HK tactics are getting crushed left and right. Military intervention, hundreds dead, media and internet black outs, to the utter indifference of western media or public sentiment. There's a slide acknowledging other protests at 1:25:30, "If you care any of these things, then you should care about it in more than one place". But we know this is demonstrably not true.
Operationally, there's not much to learn except that HK police and the mainland has been forced to be extremely lenient and permissible (by most relative standards) due to structural factors like HKs unique geopolitical position, the geographic strengths of a city state, or other political constraints that put comprehensive crackdown off the table for HK. The operational lessons, which this talk is about, will be clearer over the next few years. I surmise the the government will be able to exploit the massive data collection on the ground after things settle down. Retaliation will come in a variety of ways i.e. employment opportunities and other algorithmic biases. Multinationals in HK are already reluctant to hire locals because it may jeopardize their operations in the mainland (like Cathay).
True, the deadliest enemies are invisible.
I bet that at this moment at least 10 universities in mainland China are using the massive surveillance data being collected (security cameras, phone location data, ...) to figure out how to track protestors back.
And even if there is no true leader, surely there are a bunch of people who are more lider-ish than the rest. Some networking analysis, like NSA pioneered surely can be applied here.
China has the time advantage, Hong Kong is not going anywhere. A brutal Chinese intervention would be the worse possible mistake for China to make, it will be hard for the West to ignore that. But keep the policing relatively low key, and the other countries don't have an in angle.
I don't think they usually add translations after the talk, but I guess they wouldn't outright reject it if someone provided a Mandarin translation.
If you do know Mandarin, you can help out if you want to.
Edit: I'm totally serious, even Signal barely manages to exist, is blocked from federating for reasons of the preservation of the developers' personal safety and has publically been compared to the KKK by FBI officials. It's not a fun or bright situation but it is how things are right now.
Then, it'd be great if privacy-focussed platforms would show a commitment to find privacy- and freedom-preserving ways to tackle the very real problem of these platforms overflowing with actual, self-marking Nazis.
As an analogy: if the cryptocurrency community can find ways to curb problems such as scams or the waste of energy with technology, it can avoid the regulation to that effect it so much fears. But every time some cryptobro opines that people really deserve to be scammed if they did not go through each single line of source code their bitcoin wallet depended on, the idea that these communities are sticking up for some larger values and not feeling quite ok with scammers and Nazis loses a bit more of its legitimacy.
E.g. even using homomorphic encryption does not solve anything. One could use that to scramble messages containing certain words, but that would only be detectable to the receiving party, and then they could just work around the wordlist, e.g. by communicating in ones and zeroes. And that new form of communication would not be detectable my the middleman until they hack the endpoints using a side channel, so the middle-man will happily pass on this new type of messages indefinitely.
You're conflating scamming with exploiting code vulnerabilities. They're similar but the former is social code and the latter is computer code.
You're also slandering the crypto community; this is part of the reason why we don't yet have user-friendly crypto, and effectively live with massively compromised privacy through the banking system, which is also the main reason surveillance capitalism has been implemented worldwide and is now even set to take over India.
Please try harder, you make Nazi's look reasonable in comparison. Please don't lend the current fascist uprising in India credence just because you're salty about nerds on Twitter.
Edit: please provide me with feedback re. how I'm not adding to the discussion because it is certainly non-obvious to me.
Not a great holiday season, solitude and painful realisations for Christmas. Delete or cut into my posts if that makes sense to you, I can't edit them anymore.
I'll go watch the Grinch and be quiet.
What you're really proposing, IMO, is this:
Privacy and anti-censorship advocate (PA): I think we're throwing the baby out with the bathwater when we're trying to curb extremism by requiring messaging services to police their users. The problem is real, but the methods being used to address it are completely antithetical to the fundamental principles of free societies. I want to let people talk to each other on-line without anyone listening in on them or stopping them from saying whatever they want to say.
You: OK, you can do that if you can make sure no Nazis can use your service to further their agenda.
PA: That seems impossible, given the goals I've stated. Furthermore, this is precisely what I meant with "throwing the baby out with the bathwater."
IOW, I don't think there's a technical solution to be found here. This is a fundamental ideological divide, and needs to be dealt with as such.
Edit: Before you down vote this, give an example of a country that hasn't had to use violence to exit a communistic regime.
Gun confiscation is the canary in the communist coal mine.
https://twitter.com/carterforva/status/1211098137823240193?s...
HN is a community. Users needn't use their real name, but do need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
DDR, People's Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia...
Basically the only country in Europe that didn't exit Communism peacefully was Yugoslavia, and the reason for the violence wasn't Communism, it was resurgent nationalism/religion.
"East Germany made about 200,000 people into political prisoners." [1]
1. https://www.dw.com/en/gdrs-victims-continue-fight-for-justic...
So, pray tell: how exactly were East Germany's political prisoners instrumental in...ending that very regime imprisoning them?
Edit: hilarious, I'm getting downvoted for pointing out that the toppling of communism in Romania was very violent. Never expected HN to be a red block stronghold. Kind of hilarious.
Here is how the first attempt went down in Czechoslovakia, some twenty-one years prior to the Velvet Revolution:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_Spring
The difference was that the Soviet machine was in full swing then. They rolled in the tanks, and that was that.
Poland, 1981-83:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martial_law_in_Poland
The formal end of the DDR preceded the end of the USSR.
FWIW there have been both communist and fascist/autocratic regimes that ended in violence and those that ended without. There have also been countries either self-identifying as socialist or being labelled as such by people sharing your convictions, which still manage to uphold civil liberties and economic success just as well as more market-oriented economies. etc. etc.
2. The HK protest movement is not about “communism”. The left in Hong Kong, apart from a very small section represented by newspapers such as Ta Kung Pao, is against the CCP and government. That is because the people you refer to as communist here don’t care very much for class struggle or Marxism. They care about power, and so they have sided with the oligarchs instead of the professional and working classes. That’s why they kept laissez-faire capitalism but not the limited progress towards democracy under the British that took place in the 1990s. For this reason there are large numbers of tycoons in the HK political establishment.
3. It is unhelpful to try to shoehorn one’s bugbears into everything without reference to the specificities of the particular situation into which one is trying to shoehorn something.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Can't we just say that political {cultural, esthetic, gastronomic, religious, ...} ideological flamewars are off-topic simply because they are not about hacking?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Generic discussion of all kinds tends to be against the mandate of the site (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), but political and ideological ones stand out because of how rapidly they degenerate and how much damage they do.
Edit: I've added nasty to tedious and predictable above. Maybe that makes the point clearer.
How are you going to defend against SWAT teams with whatever guns you have?
Organize a militia? Then how do you defend against the army?
Even if you are right, that would imply that the US would enter a protacted civil war that would impoverish everyone. I have a feeling popular support would swing away from the millitias very quickly, just how long do you think millenials will survive without their avocados, yoga classes and fair trade locally brewed artisanal beer.
Maybe in a failed state like California or New York, but that's not the entirety of America.
I'm not sure why you started with this. Your odds are way better if it's against your own military, especially in the West. There's going to be a ton of defectors. Have you met anyone from the South? Those same people who are extremely anti government are usually vets. This isn't just speculation either, there's very clear examples.
But something people constantly forget is that you can't rule the dead. People are a resource. You need them to produce your economy, make your food, tax, etc. But there's also an argument here on the converse side, to make your people rich to make your ruling class even richer. But short term thinking...
ROFL. You most likely meant IEDs.
Don't people have the right to die trying to win their freedom?
a bunch of people with rifles inside a building can be pretty hard to deal with if the government isn't willing to level the place. a large scale revolt of armed citizens could never "win" against the us military, but the conflict wouldn't leave much left worth controlling.
decisions are made in the margins. it is much less risky for a government to impose unpopular laws on an unarmed populace.