I'm pretty sure 1st and 4th are the ones GP meant.
The 1st amendment (free speech) in order to protect the right to host the service in the first place and the 4th one (unreasonable search and seizure) to protect against surveillance.
Not sure how the 3rd (lodging of soliders in peacetime) would be relevant.
I mean 1 and 4. But you have me thinking about what 3 could mean in the future....and....I would be thrilled to provide a service with my compute to usa solider in need if that's what the future holds. Providing quarters meant food and beds back in the day, but I could see how this could translate to general web services, coms, ect in the future.
We are trying, but the interop of these self hosted services currently suck. Fediverse is hard to get in to unless you have many users or you just have to join a popular instance. Who knows what they do in this instance, and it turns back into a loop.
I just don't think it's gotten to the point that anyone is interested. I wonder if we did do a better job that the aggressive filtering and monitoring wouldn't naturally move down the stack.
for example we could completely obviate Facebook by having a standard mechanism for something like an rss feed. individuals or organizations could publish my stream(s) from their own leaf connections, set up cloud instances, or pay someone to host them. there could be a whole ecosystem of readers with various UIs and policy filters. people/organizations could add value by aggregating trusted streams or filtering them for content some people might find offensive. and at the end of the day it doesn't require people who just want to use it to set up persistent networking and storage.
in any case we just got suckered into handing the keys to the internet to companies like Meta and Google, which make vast amounts of money to control the discourse in corrosive ways. all because we bought into the notion that nothing is real unless someone is making a buck off it.
having a standard and a whole space of compatible programs doesn't preclude people from making lifestyle money selling filters and aggregators and content, but it kind of removes the Meta-style leverage over the whole system.
Fediverse doesn't actually solve a problem I have. I'm not on xitter or instabook or myspace and don't want to be. The one saas i really need is email, which is 1. Already decentralized and 2. Getting harder to self host every year due to the escalating war between slopspammers and security measures.
Signal solves the async messaging and phone surveillance satisfactorily for my "threat model".
I host my own mail, I really did not have any issues for around 3-4 years i've used it. As long as you get your records correct imo it is also very easy to host and use, though Google keeps sending me TLS reports every day.
How about this, but also send them usb sticks with loads of data available on them that they thought was "private" including surveillance footage taken from flock cameras etc. That might be good motivation to be more aware. Not sure about the legality of this though lol
And yet they still hold immense power to make our lives shittier. It is far easier to destroy a functioning system than it is to build one from the ground up
Do we live in different worlds? I can't think of a single meaningful way my comfort has increased in the past 25 years. In fact, with the rise of the homeless and mental health crises, the encroachment of more and more people who have no business touching computers into cyberspace, the increased relevance of flash mob power on the internet, I would say my comfort has been actively degraded on a fundamental and significant level.
Of course, there's further issue with your dismissal. "Comfort" which encourages sedentary living is unhealthy when taken with regularity. Optimizing for it in any way is an exercise in dysgenics. Even if the rhetoric doesn't reflect reality as indicated above, it starts off from an unacceptable point to begin with.
I believe the patent is implying that we sit uncomfortably at home, silently, rather than uncomfortably marching through the streets, demanding. Yet, I say that while uncomfortably sitting in my home, typing on a screen
Mass demonstrations are common and frequent, more than ever. The thing is that these are mild pressures at best. What came from Occupy Wallstreet? The George Floyd protests? The No Kings marches? Anti-ICE demonstrations? They're not nothing and we should continue to have them and participate in them, but we have to recognize them as what they are: background radiation. On their own, they don't affect change or bring about course correction. We clearly need something more, people inside of these institutions, sharks who are going to fight and win against the entrenched powers on their home turf. There's a very limited pool of people who are capable of doing that.
Plenty has come from all those things. But it's those in power who want you to feel like those are fruitless endeavors. That's why their strategy is to overwhelm. Good news takes time to be received and by then your focus will be on something else. But I promise you if you look them up you'll find real progress. It may not be as much as you want, but that's a different thing. Progress is made by small and successive steps. So the strategy to upend progress is to interrupt those steps and make them feel as small as possible. Don't fall for the trap
> We clearly need ... sharks
I am afraid of sharks, just as I am scorpions. It is in their nature to draw blood. Bloodshed should be the last resort. By putting sharks in power is the problem with the current administration. Replacing with a different shark doesn't reduce attacks, it just changes targets. If sharks must be used, they must be well contained.
You have a strong point, and it's probably not the one you want to make.
Non-violent (peaceful, loud, signs) protesting does little to nothing. Historically speaking, what does work is violence, and a lot of it.
Even in the USA, our own labor battles were effectively wars, with the US military fighting against the people. It's where the Pinkertons were created. And it was bloody as hell, until FDR had some sense in making the NLRB to *curb the violence* with peaceful grievances.
When those in power forget the peaceful paths were a compromise, don't be too surprised when violence rears its ugly head.
This is how you get healthcare CEOs gunned down, or ol Scam Altman's house firebombed, or city council person get their house shot up after voting for a data center.
I'm just sitting here. And it definitely is getting worse and worse, for everyone. And some people, when you corner them, do unimaginable things.
To add to your point, I'm struggling to think of any non-violent movement in history that wasn't backed by a more violent movement that made the non-violent movement the more palatable option.
Unconditionally embracing nonviolence is not, properly, a goal. Nonviolence is a strategy. It must be conditional on its effectiveness.
A useful thought experiment is which 80 year period of history would you prefer to live in other than now, with the caveat that you wouldn’t know how things turn out when you lived in that time. It’s easy to pick a single brief moment in history that is in some important ways better than right now. But many of those time periods are bookended by their own periods of strife and struggle. If you had to pick a different time period in history in which to live your life for 80 years birth to death, would you pick any other time than right now? Would you try to thread the needle such that you weren’t eligible to be drafted into the Vietnam war, but still benefit from the economic growth of the 50s-70s? Knowing that the AIDS crisis was still around the corner? And the unrest of the civil rights movement? The impending doom of the Cold War? A world where you rent your phone from AT&T, where your ability to learn about and communicate with the rest of the world list limited largely to passive consumption of limited news sources and books that might be decades out of date if you aren’t in a major metro area? Where your whole town might be dependent on a single employer who might be closing up factories and moving over seas in the 80s, or just plain closing down and taking your pension (and your local economy) with them?
Would you go further back in time and risk the Korean War or the World Wars and the Great Depression? A time when electricity was new and you might very well be using an outhouse as your toilet? When modern sanitation and health laws were in their infancy and debilitating diseases like polio ran rampant?
Would you go back further?
I for one, despite a lot of the issues with today can’t really find a different period of time I would prefer my life to span. I can absolutely identify parts of different times I would prefer to now, but I can’t see myself giving up everything I would need to to actually live in that period of time, and deal with the strife and struggles of the period at the same time.
>with the caveat that you wouldn’t know how things turn out when you lived in that time.
The premise sort of gives it away, doesn’t it? If you don’t know how things turn out you can’t say how you’d respond. Everyone is a product of their time. Some people are miserable, some are resilient.
It's a necessary restriction. Part of what drives modern anxiety is you don't know the future, so it's necessary that while you get to pick a time period where you have perfect visibility into its future (for example, you know that the cold war doesn't lead to the nuclear apocalypse) the person who lives through that moment can't have that knowledge. If you picked the cold war period, it is necessary that you pick it knowing your cold war self would NOT know that, and would be as anxious as their time and circumstances would make them with the information they would have had then, not the perfect* information you have now.
Well if you don't know anything then it is just a numbers game. Most people pre-industrial has a high likely hood of you being a random subsidence farmer. And provided you didn't pick a standout point in history you would most of the time land on and live an uneventful life as a farmer.
And I know plenty of people that would take that kind of life. They would do it today if it didn't completely isolate themselves from society. But atlest in pre-modern times you could trade some random grain or booze for some other goods and pay your taxes with it. But today neither walmart nor the IRS will accept handspun yarn or a sack grain in lieu of money.
There are plenty of people on this board that aren't $200K+ software engineers. The median pay for my local area in the US is $35K at best, assuming it has risen the last few years.
> The ultra wealthy are entrapped by their own minds & machines of wealth that have tight demands.
But only within their minds. They could change their minds, donate or pay enough taxes that their billions would be distributed far and wide. Then they'd no longer be trapped.
Plenty of people make the choice to stop acquiring, stop increasing their wealth, and stop having more everything (kids, houses, cars, pets, hobbies, etc).
It's hard for those who have no choice, and those who've made different choices, to relate to the insatiable appetite of billionaires.
These people also have much more leverage to change the world in substantial, albeit often short lived ways. My family has been hurt by the DOGE cuts. Hopefully it's not a permanent injury. Yet it's very real.
Isn't it like that old story about catching monkeys. You hollow out a gourd with a small hole, tack it to the ground and put a nut in it. The monkey can get its hand in but not out with the nut in their fist. The human can walk over and leisurely whack the monkey because the monkey can't let go.
They act just like drug addicts. More's the pity. They can change but they don't seem to understand that rock bottom is a tough place to be.
It is looking like we are venturing into harder times these new few years for various reasons, as such one has to wonder what things you are still clinging to that can be let go and what is still worth handing on to. Hopefully we don't have to make those choices but it is always handy to keep in mind.
> It's hard for those who have no choice, and those who've made different choices, to relate to the insatiable appetite of billionaires.
If we talk about US, your statement is outrageous hypocrisy.
Median income world-wide is less than 50 cents per hour. Average American person "who have no choice" could start working for like 30+ times more at any moment they want and choose any US government they want.
And how much money from this 30+ times more they have "donated or paid enough taxes" that their several dollars per hour "would be distributed far and wide"? Zero. So we are talking about insatiable appetite of Americans, not Billionaires. Because average American person has literally the same choice you are talking about, and literally choosing "having more everything" instead of "distribute far and wide".
The average American struggles to pay rent, utilities, and food, actually. They can’t just go donate 99.999% of their wealth and still survive like billionaires could.
> The average American struggles to pay rent, utilities, and food, actually.
Do you think your average Billionaire do not struggles to pay for their 500m yacht or flock of supermodels and Hollywood stars?
> They can’t just go donate 99.999% of their wealth and still survive like billionaires could.
They totally can. An average American worker with 12 dollars salary in terms of excess cash is way closer to Elon Musk than to a tantalum mine worker in the Congo who earns 22 cents per hour.
Not 99.999% obviously, but they can easily pay 80%, 90%, 95%, or even 98% of their incomes as fair share to people, who really need it. But they choose not to. They choose to get more rent, more utilities, more food (even if they will literally die from that amount). Or even new iPhone, that has been created by those highly underpaid tantalum mine workers. From the point of view of the average human on planet Earth, average American just as much exploiter as any billionaire.
> but they can easily pay 80%, 90%, 95%, or even 98% of their incomes
Not american but I'd presume food, protection from the elements and healthcare costs arefor the vast majority higher than what's left over even if they only afford themselves the minimum no?
Where I live the absolute bottom segment of housing is proportionally more expensive and the price inflexible because smaller or shitier quite frankly doens't exist or is illegal.
> I'd presume food, protection from the elements and healthcare costs arefor the vast majority higher than what's left over even if they only afford themselves the minimum no?
Obviously no. What a hypocrisy and shifting of blame. "The minimum" you'd get if you are working for less than 20 cents per hour. When you are working for several dollars per hour, you are drowning in luxury comparing to the rest of the world and refusing to pay your fair share to other people, whose work you are appropriating.
> Where I live the absolute bottom segment of housing
That is the same as talking about "absolute bottom segment of housing in which billionaires are living". I mean, duh. Your bottom segment of housing (food, protection from the elements, healthcare) is literally a function of your bottom segment of income, it is not the "minimum".
>Obviously no. What a hypocrisy and shifting of blame.
Obviously yes. Your effort to equate the ability to scale down of billionaires to people who struggle to afford a shoebox appartment and lifesaving procedures if they were to fall ill is ghoulish. "
A lot of those a bit above the minimum do indeed spend more on what were historically luxuries because those luxuries now cost a fraction of their historical price whilst housing and such has typically gotten more expensive.
>That is the same as talking about "absolute bottom segment of housing in which billionaires are living".
It is not in any way shape or form the same because billionaires can go lower.
> it is not the "minimum".
The alternative is no housing (or often moving in with parents) so i'd argue it is.
i'll remind you that a tent on the sidewalk isn't exactly legal everywhere.
The 2021 ProPublica tax leak showed the 25 richest Americans paid a "true tax rate" of roughly 3.4% on their $401 billion in wealth growth between 2014 and 2018, because their wealth grew without triggering realization events.
Honestly, my worry is that the longer we put it off the more likely any revolution or change will happen more chaotically. It should be organized, with strong leaders. But if that fails, I think Reverend King has a famous quote about the unheard. And I think that ends up being chaotic and bloody. I don't want that, I hope we've evolved enough to do transitions of power peacefully, or at least as peacefully as possible
In the real world it's hard enough to get 5 people on the same page about anything. The idea that dozens/hundreds of people with billions of dollars who are in business against each other in many cases are secretly colluding with any effectiveness is a joke. If they were, zuckerberg, larry and sergey would have been squashed in the 90's/00's by the elite of the time. Sam Altman would have been crushed years ago. Obama or Trump would have been put in their place, probably both. Look at all the billionaires all of a sudden kowtowing to Trump. The billionaires just got beat real bad in NYC.
Billionaires just don't have much power. This isn't a movie.
This seems to contradict itself. You first claim that there's no organization but then you claim billionaires have no power because of the more powerful above them. Hierarchy is organization, so which is it
It really sounds like you're trying hard to define a square circle. Your argument isn't even self consistent because what you described sure sounds like someone has power...
Nope. It's perfectly consistent. No one has much power at all. No one is in charge, there is no greater power sitting above us all calling all (or even most) the shots. To use someone else's term, there is no cabal.
You seem to conflate "no one is powerful" with "no one has any power in any situation at all".
I never said nobody hoped to be powerful, or increase the level of power they have. They just don't have much, and they can't/don't coordinate like some conspiracy theorists believe.
As a class, they steer things through emergent behavior and overlapping self interest in certain areas. As individuals, they can’t afford to trust each other without leverage.
To a degree, yes, it’s why looking at people on the level of groups is not that useful for predicting individual behavior and beliefs, only aggregate behavior and beliefs.
However, some groups do have identifiable leadership, rules, membership rosters, etc. Political parties for instance, or governmental bodies. Decisions from groups like this often have an identifiable lineage (from proposal to vote) and are considered binding. This contrasts with the sort of emergent decisions I was discussing in the context of the very wealthy. There was no vote, there was no formal coordination, and the “decision” is not binding, yet everyone can see its effects. Opposing something like this is like boxing with a shadow.
> You could make this statement about any group at all.
Yes, that's the point
> And then once you realize people are in multiple groups, the whole thing devolves into chaos.
You have bad priors. That would only happen if groups could only have singular and simple goals. It requires those goals to be mutually exclusive. Because as soon as they overlap, even just a little, cooperation becomes an effective strategy.
Hell, history shows us enemies often cooperate. Mostly to defeat a mutual enemy, so they can go back to fighting each other, but that's still cooperation
Nobody is suggesting nobody or group cooperates on anything ever. This comment could go in the definition section of "strawman". My comment was in response to the idea that there is "a conspiracy of the elite". It's just an absurd idea to anyone who has spent time in the world working with people, both "elite" and non "elite".
But the comment above wasn't about an explicit conspiracy, with billionaires meeting in dark rooms colluding. It was about implicit, uncoordinated conspiracy, where objectives align. My comment is defending the latter
Maybe I'm overindexing on "they steer" and "effective strategy" - it still reads that this group has way more control and deliberate planning than they do.
And, "implicit, uncoordinated conspiracy" is an oxymoron. The word "conspiracy" has a definition.
If all you are saying is "sometimes billionaires are aligned" - sure. Sometimes politicians are aligned. Sometimes teammates are aligned. If one wants a platitude with some predictive power "people are self interested" is going to work more often.
Exactly, there is no conspiracy, there’s just multiple actors moving predictably in the same direction, and sometimes coordinating weakly. I don’t know how my comments could have been read otherwise.
It doesn't need any intelligence at all. There's mutually beneficial things to any group of people. So it doesn't require explicit coordination. Even fairly unintelligent animals have symbiotic relationships with other species. So your argument is what, that billionaires are less intelligent than an ant?
"When the Tao is present in the universe, The horses haul manure. When the Tao is absent from the universe, War horses are bred outside the city."
I would consider surveillance weapons against the people. I think this reflects all manners of international governance nowadays.
Also Chapter 17.
" When the Master governs, the people are hardly aware that he exists. Next best is a leader who is loved. Next, one who is feared.
The worst is one who is despised."
If you don’t trust the people, you make them untrustworthy."
Our corrupt duopolist politicians, who are bought and owned by the military-industrial complex, continue to vote to renew all of this. There's no "resistance". Some claim that Trump is a fascist but nonetheless rubber stamp the imperial Presidency.
> It says that the government “will prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender and anarchist” and “will use all the tools constitutionally available to us to map them at home, identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa.”
So, Democratic candidates who are looking like they will win a seat this midterm cycle are going to get arrested for "domestic terrorism".
As a trans woman, enough is enough! I’m tired of us being made into the scapegoat while literal pedophiles and sexual criminals not only walk free but gain ever greater power and idiots keep blaming us for their problems as they close their ears and stomp their feet’s on the ground
I don’t have a strong view, but I don’t think that should baffle you, you think the reaction comes from nothing at all? One side is pushing to “wedge” (sort of) into a very low level space so that it cements itself at a foundational level and there’s no repeal or return from it - all or nothing view. The other side picks up on that and doesn’t want to let big changes go unchallenged. It’s a pretty understandable process. The niche cases allow the challenging party to present evidence for a consequence or concern that’s difficult to convey.
HN does this constantly with the surveillance, bring up one case of police abusing it, it’s exactly the same thing.
One of the trans acceptance movement's main problems comes, as is often the case in politics, from some of its most militant and passionate activists. To put it simply, those extreme activists overreached and annoyed people. That's not the fault of trans people in general, but it explains some of the backlash and the focus on niche cases.
Basically, the activists I'm talking about overreached by:
- Pushing for speech control around preferred pronouns
- Being overrepresented among Reddit mods, thus becoming to some extent the "face of censorship" for many highly online people
- Equating the mere act of disbelieving trans people's chosen gender identities with out-and-out bigotry of the KKK kind
- Talking about a mythical "trans genocide" and getting angry when people questioned its existence
- Pushing for equal bathroom access long before the American public had actually been made ready for something like that
Etc.
So what we have now in the highly online discourse is essentially a battle between niche militant trans activists who seem to illogically believe that they are on the brink of being put into extermination camps, on the one hand, and niche militant anti-trans fanatics who exaggerate the relatively rare cases of trans people doing bad things for the sake of pushing an overall anti-left agenda.
The militant trans activists I speak of seemingly just can't stop themselves from continuously providing people who actually hate trans people and people who just hate the left with more and more ammunition by having a prominent online presence while saying a mix of untrue and highly questionable things.
Before anyone jumps in with an angry reaction... yes, if it's not already clear from what I wrote, I also think that the right has a problem with insane deluded militant people.
“Militant” trans activists? How is just using someone’s pronouns “speech control”? It’s no different than using a name. If trans people tell you who they are, just believe them, it’s not that hard. There’s nothing mythical about the ongoing trans genocide. Genocides don’t just happen in gas chambers.
I am not going to say much more here because I’m fairly certain none of this will get through to you given the tone of your comment. Trans people are far more likely to be victims in washrooms than to be perpetrators.
> Pushing for equal bathroom access long before the American public had actually been made ready for something like that
Part of that is the ridiculousness in how many bathrooms are built. On festivals (portapotties), airplanes, trains and most if not all toilets for the disabled, there is no such thing as gender segregation at all - you wait in line, enter the next free booth, do your thing and that's it. Pretty much everyone has used a gender-neutral bathroom at least once in their life, chances are high you used one of them in the last 12 months.
There is no reason at all why toilets cannot be converted to "equal designations". I'd even go as far as to say that "equal" bathrooms are safer for everyone, simply because the facility will be higher frequented.
It's not while, it's because. They have to create a "threat" that's of the same "magnitude" as their actual crimes, vectoring out from the subjective origin of "traditional" man/woman identity and relations. They do that by casting transgenderism not as the benign and modest personal identity that it is, but as the same kind of sexually aggressive comportment as their own; something that you do or perform willfully instead of what you are compelled by natural and intrinsic impulse to be.
The first step in defeating it is untangling the action/identity conflation.
You are: someone who is biologically male, but whose gender identity is that of a woman.
He is: a businessman and politician.
You do: upstanding, normal folk things.
He does: reprehensible shit like assaulting teenagers and bragging about "grabbing [women] by the pussy."
Hopefully people are able to see who in this comparison is in the wrong.
Right. Hormones cause an insane amount of changes. The texture of my skin, my scent, how much oil my skin produces, the haemoglobin in my blood, the size and strength of my muscles, how much fat my body stores, and where it goes, how attraction feels, how emotions feel, what I find rewarding. Certain physical attributes do require different interventions but the vast majority of sexually differentiated traits are decided by the dominant sex hormone in the body, not by the XX/XY genes. See: XY females for instance who have non functioning androgen receptors. When we talk about biological women, it’s also ignoring intersex variations. Biology is way more complex than we make it out to be.
You're not a scapegoat you're fodder for a social warfare diversion to enable the treasury to be looted by both parties while the economy collapses. DC's puppeteers don't give a shit about anything unless it starts with $
Of course, because by the new definition, the leader is "peak American", so everything in collision with his view is naturally "anti-American".
The usage of the term "anti-American" by anyone in a public role should be rejected as insufficient definition and unfit for a representative to use. On the spot, immediately.
Is it anti-American to brush your teeth after breakfast? or rather before? Is both American? Neither of it?
When Trump calls Democrats "enemies from within," that's anti-American.
When Trump refuses to peacefully transfer power to his victorious opponent and instead plays "heads I win tails you cheated," that's anti-American.
When Trump sends the FCC chair to suppress speech "we can do this the easy way or the hard way," or yucks it up with the president of El Salvador over suspending Habeas Corpus, that's anti-American.
The "American Experiment" isn't an empty concept, but it is about democracy and law and rights as opposed to conservative cultural values, and when people in power start to argue that the former must be sacrificed for the latter they certainly deserve to be clowned on. Not because they are wrong to imagine an American Ideal, but because they have its contents exactly backwards.
While I understand the intention of what you're saying, you're still attempting a definition of the term "anti-American", which needs no definition as the term should be rejected as a whole.
It could e.g. be "anti-democratic" by a universal definition of democracy and civil liberties which no single country then gets to fork and redefine...
Let's suppose you had your way and the cultural concept of America as a set of ideas and values related to democracy were erased. Would the universal non-national concepts of democracy and civil liberties have been able to inspire Mike Pence to stand up to Donald Trump on January 6th?
Sorry, I don't know what this conversation is about. This is not about a "concept", it is about the label itself.
When the term "anti-American" is used, it is a placeholder for "against my values". Noone is ever anti-American himself, it is only a label applied upon others.
That's why IMO it should be rejected when used by people in a public role, see original comment.
You are free to think otherwise, which I may then label as "anti-American" in passing, while quickly moving on to you mentioning Mike Pence and some random conspiracy I have /s
> The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), was an investigative committee of the United States House of Representatives created in 1938. Their goal was to investigate alleged disloyalty and subversive activities on the part of private citizens, public employees, and those organizations suspected of having communist ties. It was abolished in 1975.
I'd heard of this but didn't realize it went on for decades. In a way, persecuting political enemies for being "un-American" is a very (US) American thing to do.
> I'd say persecuting political enemies for being "un-American" - or as a recent book declared, "unhuman" - is a very un-American thing to do
Dude. Dude. You've said yourself: this Congress committee went on for almost four decades. And before it, it was Yellow Peril, or anti-Irish sentiments, or manifest destiny with its "the only good Indian is a dead Indian". So, no, it's a very American thing to do, has been since the foundation of the US and arguably from even before than that.
I'm not sure what point your trying to make? I would also say trying to abridge speech is generally "un-American" as well as "anti-American." Are you trying to differentiate between the two terms? Or are you saying because HUAC existed half a century ago that nothing can possibly be considered un/anti-American?
Not really. America stands for something, they wrote a whole document about it.
There is a big difference between being "American" and being something like "German" because Germany has existed for so long as different governments and the thing that ties it together is not an ethos, but an ethnicity. Being American is different, there's no ethnicity that makes one American, there is only it's ethos. The ideals written in the declaration of independence are American values.
And that's the weak link of tying ideals and values to a location like a country:
The group elected to lead and represent this location also represent ideals and values, so THEIR ideals and values become inseparable of the location they were elected to represent.
For a certain period in the mid-1900s, "German values" meant something different than it did before and after, because Germany was represented by a different leader...
It's just the idea that vague terms get misused so much I demand the specific. "Anti" anything can just mean you aren't "pro" it enough, or not pro a particular version.
So for restricting speech, you could say not honoring the first amendment or something like that.
I think about this because sometimes people or ideas are described as "problematic". Sometimes for very good reason, but sometimes you find out the speaker has trouble being specific. I like to hear the specific reason when I can to understand the facts or logic. Sometimes these classifications come third hand.
I mean, there are American values. The country was built around the idea of limiting the federal government's power, and adherence not a person, but to a set of values (like freedom of speech). We're explictly founded on the concept of rule of law.
Through that lens, it is very clear what anti-American means: adherence and loyalty to a person instead of a set of values, expansive government overreach, erosion of individual liberties, including the ability to express dissent.
It was also built around a process by which those values can be codified and changed to reflect changing times, i.e. the amendment process. Which we have forgotten about entirely.
What Trump and his followers mean by it, though, is that any disagreement with Trump on policy, strategy, tactics, procedure, or belief is anti-American. The way they use the term "anti-American" is anti-American. Therefore the term outside of context is meaningless. It's been coopted, twisted, and perverted.
For you that might be a confident definition, for others it might not mean "anti-constitutional" but "against the declaration of independence", for even others it might not create any clear association at all.
That's because something being "American"/"anti-American" is not sufficiently defined in this context. It triggers a highly subjective assumption of what it means, allowing people to evoke "us vs. them" solidarity without actually taking a position.
Example: I can (probably) break your assumed association by stating "women owning credit-cards is anti-American". It (probably) doesn't fit your mental model of what being "anti-American" means, but women were in fact not allowed to own credit cards in US until 1974. So my definition might be more in-line with the era of the constitution than yours.
That's a blunt example. Now imagine I use "anti-American" in a context of "law and order" and then keep talking. People instinctively glance over it because they create the meaning by taking their personal association of being "American" and invert it. You may feel like agreeing but I might actually say the complete opposite of what you think.
That's why IMO the phrase should be rejected from people in a public role.
> Not because they are wrong to imagine an American Ideal, but because they have its contents exactly backwards.
There are two Americas: The United States and the Confederacy. These people in power right now are Confederates, and that shouldn't really be a controversial take anymore since they flew the Confederate battle flag and MAGA flags side by side as they sacked the United States Capitol.
> The "American Experiment" isn't an empty concept, but it is about democracy and law and rights as opposed to conservative cultural values, and when people in power start to argue that the former must be sacrificed for the latter they certainly deserve to be clowned on. Not because they are wrong to imagine an American Ideal, but because they have its contents exactly backwards.
From the many responses on this thread, it appears that many either don't want a defintion of "pro-American" or "anti-American" or "an American Ideal" but these are core to your point.
> When Trump calls Democrats "enemies from within,"
He did not say this.
Please spare me the part where you show me the things that you think establish the claim. I have already seen them and they do not establish the claim. At best you are intentionally conflating "Democrats" collectively with specific individuals who happen to be part of the Democratic party.
I could continue on with the rest but you get the idea.
While the exact point at which it becomes "anti-american" isn't clear there's certainly a category of rhetoric in which people peddle subservience to the state (usually dressed up in obfuscating words, like they'll use "society" instead of "the government") that is undeniably "anti-american" except perhaps by some obtuse technical interpretation of all the words. And I will die on the hill that those who peddle such ideals are bad people and ought to be looked down upon the same way we'd look down upon someone peddling phrenology as a basis for racism.
Im not quite following. Things can be mislabeled as anti American, but everyone has some idea of whats anti-American in principle. Anti free speech for example is anti American.
How that gets applied is a matter of debate. But I think all public officials should agree with that.
Its kind of a fundamental thing to have an idea about the nation’s values. If that’s too taboo for someone then they are quite literally anti American. Having a country means organizing around a core set of values. We can debate what those are but arguing you can’t stand for anything?
What I'm saying is literally The usage of the term "anti-American" by anyone in a public role should be rejected as insufficient definition and unfit for a representative to use.
Especially when glanced-over mid-sentence, the term evokes the inversion of your idea what being "American" means, without ever clarifying whether your assumption is correct.
Me saying "the liberties of the banking sector are deeply anti-American, we will revert those changes to relieve the increased tension they cause in American households" might evoke an association of "less debt" or "owning a home" in a listener, while I might actually mean "women shouldn't be allowed to own credit cards" (because they weren't until 1974 and MY American values are some form of "vanilla constitution")
the more important part that isn't just the ideology targeting - it's the directive for local and national law enforcement for form Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) targeting individuals and organizations in this vein. JTTFs are already targeting individuals - see https://atlpresscollective.com/2026/06/12/federal-prosecutor...
I think of that poem, First They Came:
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me
replace 'Jews' with the current minoritized target demographic (ie immigrants of any stripe) and we're already fairly far down that list. see the case of David Huerta for the targeting of unions: https://www.courthousenews.com/los-angeles-labor-leader-arre...
This is the outcome that every privacy advocate has been warning about for decades and being increasingly challenged by people who were fine with it as 'they have nothing to hide and do no wrong'.
The culture wars are explicitly a tool of the right to provoke fear, anger, and hate against others.
The left gets trapped in it because every single culture war issue (LGBQT+, racism, feminism, reproductive rights, freedom from religion, etc) are responses to the rights reactionary drive to claw back rights from everybody who is not a white male christian.
Nevermind the wedge driven when moderates who think of themselves as being on the left agree with the idea that past weak attempts to nudge things leftward "went too far", or that there actually is an issue with "government waste". Sir/Ma'am - you are complicit in moving the Overton window to the right.
I've been called a "shrill far leftist" and a "fascist appeaser" so does that make me a centrist? Any labeling I may apply to myself is for convenience of packaged assumptions about my values.
> moderates who think of themselves as being on the left agree with the idea that past weak attempts to nudge things leftward "went too far"
Examples please? Not a challenge, I just am not pickup up what you're laying down.
As for "government waste" of course it exists but to various degrees and in various areas. For example, Medicare fraud is estimated $60 billion to over $100 billion annually. That doesn't mean we should get rid of it -- it means we'd be well served to invest a fraction of that amount in preventing such numbers.
And as far as shifting the Overton Window to the right, that has been the Right itself, via culture war bullshit.
Look, sir/madam, I have no tribe, no political party, no religion, no beliefs that I'm unwilling to change when presented with compelling evidence. I've tracked US politics likely longer than you've been alive. I understand how the game is played and this Red vs Blue is a master class in political manipulation. And the culture war is the key tool used to render it.
So you telling me that I'm the reason why the Overton Window is shifting right is a tell that you're the confused one.
I could have been more clear in my writing, but I was adding to your point of things that trap the left. The "Sir/Ma'am" was addressing a hypothetical left-ish "moderate" who gets trapped into criticizing other on the left by conservative talking points - not accusing you personally. I have no idea what your politics are.
yes probably, and ive been calling this as their playbook for about a year
Make no mistake, this is not some sophisticated conspiracy. This is pure laziness and abuse of power. They have been using "domestic terrorist" as a button to slap anytime they dont want to be questioned. the phrase no longer means anything besides "this person questioned authority"
ICE has used it to label people they shot for videoing them. Note that they knew the video evidence existed and labelled them anyway, assuming they would be able to avoid court altogether and prevent the video evidence being seen. In at least one case, this didnt work and the victim was correctly identified as such.
So this isnt hypothetical. It is a playbook being used right now, and people are testing the waters for how much they can get away with.
The red scare of the 1950s was ridiculous enough, but at least the Soviet Union was an actual threat. We are now at a point where “pro-transgender” is the new threat?
The administration doesn't like it, therefore it's a threat. Similar to negative news, which are fake, and contrary opinions, which are woke propaganda.
Sure, if you conveniently drop the qualifying word "radically". But that's not what was said. What was said specifically included the word "radically" for a good reason. Radical anything is a threat.
> Poe's law is an adage of Internet culture which says that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, any parodic or sarcastic expression of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of those views.
Don't worry, after Democrats get control, they'll add alt-left, alt-right, radical free speech, socialist, anti-CIA, radical feminist, pro-border enforcement and you'll be happy with it.
I mostly agree with you, but the DSA (the only remaining organized anti-establishment political force) is still making real progress. So much so that Third Way is actively allocating resources to fighting them. And winning NYC was a huge step.
Trump and an army of paid influencers completely broke up the America First coalition, who had pinned their hopes on Trump being “their guy”. Now they’re all infighting, so the DSA is the only tangible threat to the establishment at the moment.
It remains to be seen if the DSA has shaken off attempts at disruption. It’s hard to be a small-d democratic organization when your opponents can afford to send endless streams of wreckers into your midst.
The politicized take on this is not correct. More importantly, it's not helpful.
When the "left" (Democrats) had power recently in the U.S., they were very happy to try to criminalize the protected speech of their enemies. Their tack was to define speech they didn't like as "hate speech", which luckily isn't actually a thing in the U.S., legally. But they were trying to make it happen.
I don't mean to defend one or the other side, merely to point out that this is a non-partisan issue.
One example of many: it would have been a punishable offense to refuse to use someone's preferred pronouns. This is what's called "compelled speech", and it's when someone says to you, "Say $THING or else". It's very reasonable for governments to prohibit saying certain things (like national security secrets, for instance, or other people's bank account login info), but thus far forcing people to say things they don't believe has been a bridge too far.
And, happily, compelled speech is a bright line the Americans have, so far, managed not to cross. Everyone should be trying as hard as we can to not cross that line.
You may not see the harm in this particular instance, but establishing "we'll just force them to say it and punish them if they don't" as a tool in any government's toolbox is a very, very bad idea.
Ah, and I should mention Biden's new Title IX rules became law on August 1, 2024 so they weren't "would". Thankfully, we only had a few months under this particular imposition on our basic rights and push never came to shove.
Why are these supposedly serious violations funny to you?
Most of what you cited is about what a policy might imply or what someone’s rhetoric might lead to. Also, I don’t know if you knew this, but Walz was never part of the Biden administration.
Are you similarly bothered by the actual First Amendment violations the Trump administration has carried out?
The administration targeted pro-Palestinian students and faculty with visa revocations, detention, and deportation efforts because of their political advocacy. A federal judge ruled that unconstitutional:
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-backed-targeting-pro-...
Many of these Trump cases involve the government actually imposing penalties on people or institutions because of protected speech or association, not just an argument about what a rule might eventually imply.
This is not something you get to pretend is equivalent across “both sides”.
> Walz was never part of the Biden administration.
I made a claim about the scarequotes(left), not about the Biden administration specifically. You asked about Biden. They were going for succession, you know!
> Are you similarly bothered by the actual First Amendment violations the Trump administration has carried out?
Yes
> AP reporters not allowed
The executive has leeway here, it's not clear exactly how much. Biden wasn't inviting Breitbart in, for example. That a judge found something doesn't mean much, supremes finding something would be meaningful.
> Targeted pro-Pal students
Specifically, pro-Pal foreign students. The Americans are right now in the process of figuring out when their rights apply to foreigners and when they don't. Often, the fed's tack is: we ask you at the border if you support terrorist organizations. If you say "yes", we don't let you in. Turns out you support HAMAS. That's a terrorist org, it's on our list. You lied. Goodbye!
So in many cases it's not about speech per se, but rather whether you lied to the feds. And if the "unconstitutionality" thing here holds up, well then...I guess USA decided free speech applies to foreigners in the country. But until very recently that was a murky issue. Maybe still is, idk.
> Perkins Cole
"Liberals" do the same thing. Look at Biden pressuring for debanking of crypto people [https://www.forbes.com/sites/tonyaevans/2025/12/06/feds-bowm...]. Or jawboning Meta. I think it's less salient when left does it because they have captured the majority of institutions. So it looks like business as usual. It looks "legit". Except...it's just Blue enacting its will through e.g. the Fed, or whoever it is that regulates banks.
>Canceled grants
Here, I'm an expert! I'm an academic who has been negatively affected by all this. What some district court judge found is irrelevant, so I'll ignore that (just in case: district court judges are small potatoes and their rulings do not have precedential value). What I will say is: the situation had gotten WAY out of hand. The feds were funding a bunch of batshit crazy stuff that was CLEARLY just fraud and woke virtue-signaling. A lot of good stuff got canceled too, which is sad. That good stuff probably had batshit crazy woke signaling in their grant write-ups because that's the only way you could get funded! Which is sad. Should the admin have used a scalpel rather than a sledgehammer? Yes. Should the humanities be getting much less funding and producing far fewer graduate students? Yes. Even graduating from a top (~Harvard) program, humanities graduate students have something like a 10-25% chance of a "real" (professorship) job. And that might be Northwest Arkansas State Community Daycare College.
> Harvard
Harvard was made an example of. Fair? No. Did they break the law A LOT, just like everyone else? You betcha! Did they definitely discriminate in favor of Pal against Israel? Yes, certainly did. Did the admin handle it in the smartest way possible? Definitely not.
> Trump actually did bad things, not "might"
You have to understand: the "speech" climate in academia has been so, so bad for ten years - and that's because of the "liberals", not Trump and co. It's been insane. The speech restrictions were REAL. People got FIRED. Many more people KEPT QUIET ABOUT REAL SCIENCE THINGS FOR FEAR OF PUNISHMENT. Things are better now, crazier but better. You can talk kinda. The institutions are still >80% captured by Team Blue, but there is a breath of fresh air. A waft. One needn't be fearful all the time.
That is extremely unlikely. There are definitely some people in Trump's camp who would love to do that, including probably Trump himself. However, Trump does not have enough public or institutional support for him to risk doing something that blatant.
You read a passage talking about groups of people who provably commit real violence and advocate for more of it, establish "autonomous zones" in cities as part of protest actions, attempt en masse to impede physically the lawful actions of legitimate federal LEO, and explicitly promote agendas that include the destruction of fundamental state institutions; and you imagine that this will be applied to establishment candidates with good chances of winning in a democratic process. This appears to be based on nothing more than your personal impression of the POTUS. I find that to be completely and utterly unreasonable.
Benjamin Song should be all the evidence you need to illustrate that the phrase "domestic terrorism" is completely appropriate to describe things that are actually happening. But there is so, so much more of it.
Our corrupt duopolist politicians, who are bought and owned by the military-industrial complex, continue to vote to renew all of this. There's no "resistance". Some claim that Trump is a fascist but nonetheless rubber stamp the imperial Presidency.
The US Constitution is intentionally anti-democratic (small "d'), plutocratic, to protect the interests of the founding plutocrats. But at the time, the US was a preindustrial, agrarian nation, in which the fastest mode of communication and transportation was the horse. The concentration of power that has become possible now due to technology was inconceivable by the founders. I fear that nothing short of another American revolution can solve this problem; but that would surely be horribly bloody, as with most revolutions.
At this stage I'd settle for echelon era surveillance and consider it a win...
Ad tech/tiktok has proven its possible to deduce what people are think at scale from subtle signals, now sifting info at scale is possible thanks to LLMs and a large portion of everyone's online history is likely to become vulnerable to store now decrypt later attacks. Get rid of cash, force identity verification for every online service, sprinkle some flock cameras on top and you've got a complete surveillance state. Oh and of course you need some goons to scare people into compliance & later in some self-censorship for good measure. We could call the group "Frozen water".
...and we're basically already there on all of it except perhaps the "decrypt later" on https (and even that has rumours).
how not? All of this is "soft" control, if tomorrow 75% of the people in any country decided "this can't keep on going on", all relevant public buildings would be occupied everywhere and the relevant government imprisoned promptly.
On a more positive note, the fact that this doesn't happen indicates things aren't that bad right now. No amount of KYC or age verification can stop large amounts of angry people who want one thing.
People sometimes bring up China - which isn't relevant because people still remember being extremely poor, thus being grateful to the Party - or one of those dictatorships as counterexamples for this, but see the Arab Spring (food got more expensive -> revolutions), Nepal recently... etc.
>if tomorrow 75% of the people in any country decided
No kings protests was a very respectable effort....peaked at 2.3%.
Even the current administration inept as it is is basically home free on this one. Senate neutered, Courts sidelined, Treasury subjugated, loyalist in charge of military, JAG core silenced, secondary personal goons squad established and lavishly funded, Social media captured, Stats department dismantled, Cult of personality created, common enemy created (immigrants), distractions for the masses arranged (culture wars, UFC on whitehouse lawn), truth undermined (prez spouting nonstop lies & AI), oligarch class established, surveillance normalized, norm of kiss the ring & pay tribute established.
Dunno about you but to me that looks like US democracy is so cooked the kitchen smoke alarm has gone off & everyone was too busy doomscrolling to notice.
Hope I'm wrong but that list looks pretty fuckin comprehensive to me. Hell they even somehow managed to throw in a roman salute...
Can't say I entirely buy it in this case, but interesting rule of thumb anyway. It sure didn't feel like regime change was imminent if it were a little bigger.
Marching on a street holding placards with permission from the police is a very different thing than an angry mob marching into the town hall searching for officials.
> One of the many legacies of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 is the government-wide shift from targeted surveillance—such as individual wiretaps or pen register/trap and trace orders—to mass surveillance techniques—such as tapping into the internet backbone or mass collection of telephone or internet metadata.
In other words, we gave the terrorists the victory by accepting being terrorized at the country level from a single act and destroying a lot of our freedom. Yeah us.
There’s lots of questions around who was actually behind 9/11, looking at who benefited the most is helpful. We may never know the truth but we know who the real “terrorists” are, because they’re terrorizing everyone now.
No it is not, and it will get worse. No matter who is in power, power stays. And power by definition is the capacity to control and plunder without restrictions
All these years reading about liberty and philosophy has taught me that the only way out is to make money and disappear, be an eagle, watch the lions eat the sheeple from the top of a mountain, because the sheeple don't want to be freed and worse yet, they will point at you as if you're an outlier, a misfit, a problem that must be fixed by force, their 'democratic' force
So fly high, find your peak and watch from there, we only have 100 years to live as we please, not to spend it fighting for those who don't want to be saved
Do like Nero, let the world burn and enjoy watching, from afar...
I think we have to face the fact that we cannot unring this bell. There will be holding actions against things like Flock but in the end they will fail, and at best we will have a loosening of the laws that Flock is being used to enforce and more draconian enforcement of the laws that remain.
Like many on this site I'm in violent agreement with Schneier and have been ever since "security theater" entered the lexicon. But this is a hopeless fight.
I am from the UK and we are quite far down the surveillance and control mentality (Flock actually seems a greater system of surveillance then what we have here but if such a system was created, the push back would be less). But a lot of people here are slowly beginning to see the benefits in self defense and gun laws that mean you are not dependent on the police, this kind of logic where people have want autonomy and policing becomes less popular as the inevitable abuses or neglect happen is something that creates change.
Many are, perhaps not as far as guns yet but wanting self defense and self defense weapons. I think a movement of increasing rights to self defense could mean people are less supportive of surveillance where their own self defense deters crime rather then an expensive and rights destroying leviathan that only acts retroactively.
Im sure people thought the same thing among all the different power structures and technology and cultural norms throughout history, and yet how many of them still stand today?
I suspect that Mass Surveillance is here for good, and the real project is to regain control of who gains the power and benefits. There are dozens if not 100s of ways that mass surveillance can improve human life. There are also as many where it can be abused to create suffering. I think the real issue is we're trending to the latter. In order to safely continue down this path we (USA) need:
1. EU style governmental pushes to defend digital rights. Data needs to be our own property that we can lend, but can never give up our right to revocation.
2. Stricter controls, and stricter still penalities, need to exist against misuse and abuse. Many of the stories of abuse of data are most stark in their lack of repercussions, some of this is police unions, some of this is "deep state" people who scratch eachother's backs and grant eachother free accesses and immunity. Some of this is a voting issue as in we need to make it known to our candidates that it matters to us, and then push real political power in their hands.
Just to help the imagination of all here's where mass surveilance could plausibly add good to society, all stemming from legitimate use:
1. Criminals like porch pirates can be caught using a neetwork of Ring cameras
2. A lost pet/child can be identified and found by drone surveillance
3. Usage data of roads can be updated in realtime
4. Trends and Sentiment could be used to guide the government intra-elections improving the way government serves us
5. Police officers can avoid risky situations using drones as eyes instead of putting their own bodies in harms way
1. Cameras don’t prevent porch pirates. They give you a video after the fact of a masked person taking your package. Small theft is prevented by more equality in society, and a stronger safety net. (Source: the lower crime rate in other countries)
2. Lost pets are not being found by drone and camera surveillance. They could, but the system doesn’t give a shit about your dog. Children, maybe. I guess i’m ok with deploying a fleet of drones during a search and rescue operation. As long as there is transparency so it’s not done for other reasons, and they are grounded when they are done.
3. You just need one of those pressure sensitive wire strips across the road to do this. It’s a largely solved problem that doesn’t involve mass surveillance.
4. I am just guessing what this means, but government doesn’t do things that are wildly popular by polling, so why would they react to some ai surveillance sentiment analysis?
5. This isn’t mass surveillance. Like #2, a deployed drone to look around a corner or scan a building before entering is using technology but it’s momentary. If it became a problem where it was being over used we could deal with it as a separate issue.
In a just and equal society, criminals would be prosecuted and convicted for the economic violence of theft.
Inequality is a useless measurement used to excuse antisocial behavior. The inequality between Bill Gates and I has increased exponentially in the past 20 years, yet I'm significantly better off than I was then back then. Inequality is a feel good measurement thats fundamentally the wrong target.
Because the inequality between you and gates is there but you are above a threshold where you are comfortable. Your needs are met, you feel some sense of security in your position.
If inequality is the wrong measure? Fine. Deep poverty, perhaps? Lack of opportunities and hope for rising out of poverty, maybe? However you feel best describes people who are not “significantly better off” than 20 years ago. Because most of america would say they are worse off than 20 years ago.
> In a just and equal society, criminals would be prosecuted and convicted for the economic violence of theft.
That doesn’t solve the problem tho. Because even if you jail someone for life for petty theft, the funnel is still there creating more petty thieves.
To be clear - i am not absolving people of their crimes. It’s still wrong to steal someone’s packages. I just don’t think that more enforcement is the right way to make it happen less. I say attack the upstream problems first, deal with the downstream effect last.
Surveilling the entire population also has basically nothing to do with solving either upstream causes or downstream effects.
power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. technology is unlocking unprecedented levels of power. make no mistake mass surveillance = power, nothing else. any benefit to society is accidental, not the goal. we don't need this kind power in hands of nobody.
If roles are reversed, and those being watched were responsible for safety and security, little would change. The human race being what it is, the same tools would still be in place and in use in much the same way.
The protest is more about who watches the watchers. And neither will trust the other.
It isn't going to stop until it becomes a national security issue. If your can spy on your citizens , your enemies can potentially gain access to the same surveillance and hit high profile targets.
We live in war times and will soon see it happening
When those in power regard the people as the enemy their natural allies are other governments with similar attitudes. So you don't need to wait until another government gains access, you offer it instead.
> your enemies can potentially gain access to the same surveillance
Which has already happened. Though it is less obvious if high profile targets have been blackmailed or coerced. There's at least signs that some have. Even if not foreign governments, Epstein certainly had leverage
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/government-election... Here's a fun little interview. They had a program that apparently worked, for much cheaper than Michael Hayden's program (I think Trailblazer). Got shelved apparently due to "not expensive enough". 9/11 happens and Binney contends his ThinThread program could have stopped it. You don't want more dragnet surveillance; even beyond the abuses, it leads to it being harder to catch things
I find it ironic that in the US, there's this social movement against Flock cameras - which have shown real results in tracking down criminals - while everyone walks around all the time with a personal tracking device in the form of a smart phone. That's wayyyy more invasive than cameras along roads.
Don’t be That Guy please. This tired talking point gets walked out in every privacy discussion. Both things can be (and are) bad at once, but just because one problem exists doesn’t mean that others aren’t worth solving.
In any case this article is about the whole spectrum of mass surveillance, not one specific company.
You could read up on what "unemployment" actually means. Labor force participation is down on the year. 4.4 million people are underemployed: meaning they want a full time job but can't get one - they still show up as "employed". The "employment" rate ignores those who have been unable to find work for more than four weeks, conveniently. Then there's employment by region. There may be good jobs on the other side of the country, but no means to get there, or no qualifications. etc etc.
You are quite good at making nice little sound-bites that don't hold up to scrutiny. Are you part of the propaganda or just an ignoramus who parrots it?
I find it amusing. Your complaint seems to be that people aren’t really against mass surveillance because they accept it in other areas (even though dumbphone sales are going crazy, showing that many people do care). Then you’re presented with someone who’s done the difficult work to have reasonable privacy, and your reaction is to pretend that the privacy guy is “cringe” or “scary” or something.
It’s almost like you don’t believe your own arguments, and you’re actually just hostile towards the concept of privacy in general. You’re making arguments in bad faith because you actually want a panopticon.
Phone data requires some actual process to access. It should be more restrictive than it is, but I don’t believe the information is made available to random police officers who can search for whatever they want with no real justification.
The problem with Flock isn’t the cameras, it’s the system built on them that gives panopticon powers to any random law enforcement officer.
Stop posting this bullshit argument. the people arguing against Flock are the same people who argue for privacy rights around cellular phone data, availability of encrypted messaging etc. It's thanks to them that the government still needs to get a warrant instead of just doing a search.
Anyone making this argument of yours is also smart enough to be aware of the privacy efforts. Pretending not to know about them is bullshit.
Or uh yeah they're just cameras on public roads, and provide a net benefit to society. I'm sure you weren't triggered by these cameras a few years ago, when it wasn't part of the current "thing to be mad about".
> One of the many legacies of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11
I see this more as an excuse used by a small corrupt elite
wanting to enslave the people. The problem is that you do not
have a real democracy in the USA. The current orange clown
brigade shows this best (corrupt to the core), but it is not
really much better with other roleplaying administrations.
Sooner or later people will realise this too, even the not too
terribly bright.
I don't know why Trump's existence is evidence the US does not have a "real" democracy. As a group, we voted for him, and he went to the Oval Office. That's democracy.
There are certainly governments outlawing political opponents in the first world, but that's not the US.
When the same guy wins when he gets the popular vote, and wins when he doesn't, that may technically be "democracy" in the sense that a vote occurred and votes were counted, but it clearly isn't fair (and it isn't, it isn't designed to be. If it were fair, the people might do something crazy like vote in a populist demagogue...)
And yes, I would say that regarding the other side too.
Yes, it was set up that way to keep slave-owning states in the union, which one assumes should no longer be an issue.
I don't think you should be able to win the presidency by doing really well in the five largest states necessarily, but I definitely don't think you should be able to win the presidency by only doing well in a couple of swing states.
No, it wasn't to keep slave owning states in the union. You're confusing the 3/5th compromise with the electoral college. The reason we have 50 little elections instead of one big one is to keep the largest states from dictating policy to everyone else.
Whenever you have voting you have swing votes. That's just Democracy. If it wasn't swing states it would be swing voters nationwide.
Proposal: limit access of these camera networks to local jurisdiction. Just like rip-stop fabric and cell walls, boundaries are required for stability, and making it where federal agencies have eyes everywhere is far too dangerous.
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] threadhttps://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-3/
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-4/
The 1st amendment (free speech) in order to protect the right to host the service in the first place and the 4th one (unreasonable search and seizure) to protect against surveillance.
Not sure how the 3rd (lodging of soliders in peacetime) would be relevant.
for example we could completely obviate Facebook by having a standard mechanism for something like an rss feed. individuals or organizations could publish my stream(s) from their own leaf connections, set up cloud instances, or pay someone to host them. there could be a whole ecosystem of readers with various UIs and policy filters. people/organizations could add value by aggregating trusted streams or filtering them for content some people might find offensive. and at the end of the day it doesn't require people who just want to use it to set up persistent networking and storage.
in any case we just got suckered into handing the keys to the internet to companies like Meta and Google, which make vast amounts of money to control the discourse in corrosive ways. all because we bought into the notion that nothing is real unless someone is making a buck off it.
having a standard and a whole space of compatible programs doesn't preclude people from making lifestyle money selling filters and aggregators and content, but it kind of removes the Meta-style leverage over the whole system.
Signal solves the async messaging and phone surveillance satisfactorily for my "threat model".
It's a classic example of us being dragged along by incentives and emergent patterns against our individual wills and better judgement.
Of course, there's further issue with your dismissal. "Comfort" which encourages sedentary living is unhealthy when taken with regularity. Optimizing for it in any way is an exercise in dysgenics. Even if the rhetoric doesn't reflect reality as indicated above, it starts off from an unacceptable point to begin with.
Non-violent (peaceful, loud, signs) protesting does little to nothing. Historically speaking, what does work is violence, and a lot of it.
Even in the USA, our own labor battles were effectively wars, with the US military fighting against the people. It's where the Pinkertons were created. And it was bloody as hell, until FDR had some sense in making the NLRB to *curb the violence* with peaceful grievances.
When those in power forget the peaceful paths were a compromise, don't be too surprised when violence rears its ugly head.
This is how you get healthcare CEOs gunned down, or ol Scam Altman's house firebombed, or city council person get their house shot up after voting for a data center.
I'm just sitting here. And it definitely is getting worse and worse, for everyone. And some people, when you corner them, do unimaginable things.
Unconditionally embracing nonviolence is not, properly, a goal. Nonviolence is a strategy. It must be conditional on its effectiveness.
Would you go further back in time and risk the Korean War or the World Wars and the Great Depression? A time when electricity was new and you might very well be using an outhouse as your toilet? When modern sanitation and health laws were in their infancy and debilitating diseases like polio ran rampant?
Would you go back further?
I for one, despite a lot of the issues with today can’t really find a different period of time I would prefer my life to span. I can absolutely identify parts of different times I would prefer to now, but I can’t see myself giving up everything I would need to to actually live in that period of time, and deal with the strife and struggles of the period at the same time.
The premise sort of gives it away, doesn’t it? If you don’t know how things turn out you can’t say how you’d respond. Everyone is a product of their time. Some people are miserable, some are resilient.
And I know plenty of people that would take that kind of life. They would do it today if it didn't completely isolate themselves from society. But atlest in pre-modern times you could trade some random grain or booze for some other goods and pay your taxes with it. But today neither walmart nor the IRS will accept handspun yarn or a sack grain in lieu of money.
But only within their minds. They could change their minds, donate or pay enough taxes that their billions would be distributed far and wide. Then they'd no longer be trapped.
Plenty of people make the choice to stop acquiring, stop increasing their wealth, and stop having more everything (kids, houses, cars, pets, hobbies, etc).
It's hard for those who have no choice, and those who've made different choices, to relate to the insatiable appetite of billionaires.
These people also have much more leverage to change the world in substantial, albeit often short lived ways. My family has been hurt by the DOGE cuts. Hopefully it's not a permanent injury. Yet it's very real.
They act just like drug addicts. More's the pity. They can change but they don't seem to understand that rock bottom is a tough place to be.
It is looking like we are venturing into harder times these new few years for various reasons, as such one has to wonder what things you are still clinging to that can be let go and what is still worth handing on to. Hopefully we don't have to make those choices but it is always handy to keep in mind.
If we talk about US, your statement is outrageous hypocrisy.
Median income world-wide is less than 50 cents per hour. Average American person "who have no choice" could start working for like 30+ times more at any moment they want and choose any US government they want.
And how much money from this 30+ times more they have "donated or paid enough taxes" that their several dollars per hour "would be distributed far and wide"? Zero. So we are talking about insatiable appetite of Americans, not Billionaires. Because average American person has literally the same choice you are talking about, and literally choosing "having more everything" instead of "distribute far and wide".
Do you think your average Billionaire do not struggles to pay for their 500m yacht or flock of supermodels and Hollywood stars?
> They can’t just go donate 99.999% of their wealth and still survive like billionaires could.
They totally can. An average American worker with 12 dollars salary in terms of excess cash is way closer to Elon Musk than to a tantalum mine worker in the Congo who earns 22 cents per hour.
Not 99.999% obviously, but they can easily pay 80%, 90%, 95%, or even 98% of their incomes as fair share to people, who really need it. But they choose not to. They choose to get more rent, more utilities, more food (even if they will literally die from that amount). Or even new iPhone, that has been created by those highly underpaid tantalum mine workers. From the point of view of the average human on planet Earth, average American just as much exploiter as any billionaire.
Not american but I'd presume food, protection from the elements and healthcare costs arefor the vast majority higher than what's left over even if they only afford themselves the minimum no?
Where I live the absolute bottom segment of housing is proportionally more expensive and the price inflexible because smaller or shitier quite frankly doens't exist or is illegal.
Obviously no. What a hypocrisy and shifting of blame. "The minimum" you'd get if you are working for less than 20 cents per hour. When you are working for several dollars per hour, you are drowning in luxury comparing to the rest of the world and refusing to pay your fair share to other people, whose work you are appropriating.
> Where I live the absolute bottom segment of housing
That is the same as talking about "absolute bottom segment of housing in which billionaires are living". I mean, duh. Your bottom segment of housing (food, protection from the elements, healthcare) is literally a function of your bottom segment of income, it is not the "minimum".
Obviously yes. Your effort to equate the ability to scale down of billionaires to people who struggle to afford a shoebox appartment and lifesaving procedures if they were to fall ill is ghoulish. "
A lot of those a bit above the minimum do indeed spend more on what were historically luxuries because those luxuries now cost a fraction of their historical price whilst housing and such has typically gotten more expensive.
>That is the same as talking about "absolute bottom segment of housing in which billionaires are living".
It is not in any way shape or form the same because billionaires can go lower.
> it is not the "minimum".
The alternative is no housing (or often moving in with parents) so i'd argue it is. i'll remind you that a tent on the sidewalk isn't exactly legal everywhere.
They pay giant amounts of tax. The people not paying tax, or costing negative tax, are who you mean.
The 2021 ProPublica tax leak showed the 25 richest Americans paid a "true tax rate" of roughly 3.4% on their $401 billion in wealth growth between 2014 and 2018, because their wealth grew without triggering realization events.
There absolutely, without a reasonable doubt, is a conspiracy of the elite -- the billionaire class.
Billionaires just don't have much power. This isn't a movie.
There is no group in charge. No one is in charge.
You seem to conflate "no one is powerful" with "no one has any power in any situation at all".
However, some groups do have identifiable leadership, rules, membership rosters, etc. Political parties for instance, or governmental bodies. Decisions from groups like this often have an identifiable lineage (from proposal to vote) and are considered binding. This contrasts with the sort of emergent decisions I was discussing in the context of the very wealthy. There was no vote, there was no formal coordination, and the “decision” is not binding, yet everyone can see its effects. Opposing something like this is like boxing with a shadow.
Hell, history shows us enemies often cooperate. Mostly to defeat a mutual enemy, so they can go back to fighting each other, but that's still cooperation
And, "implicit, uncoordinated conspiracy" is an oxymoron. The word "conspiracy" has a definition.
If all you are saying is "sometimes billionaires are aligned" - sure. Sometimes politicians are aligned. Sometimes teammates are aligned. If one wants a platitude with some predictive power "people are self interested" is going to work more often.
The idea that an aggressive handful of them can't, won't or don't work together is even more preposterous than your strawman that all of them do.
Whether they meant all or most, those words certainly don't mean a handful.
"When the Tao is present in the universe, The horses haul manure. When the Tao is absent from the universe, War horses are bred outside the city."
I would consider surveillance weapons against the people. I think this reflects all manners of international governance nowadays.
Also Chapter 17.
" When the Master governs, the people are hardly aware that he exists. Next best is a leader who is loved. Next, one who is feared. The worst is one who is despised."
If you don’t trust the people, you make them untrustworthy."
So, Democratic candidates who are looking like they will win a seat this midterm cycle are going to get arrested for "domestic terrorism".
it's still baffling to me how incredibly irrelevant niche cases dominate the entire discourse.
HN does this constantly with the surveillance, bring up one case of police abusing it, it’s exactly the same thing.
Basically, the activists I'm talking about overreached by:
- Pushing for speech control around preferred pronouns
- Being overrepresented among Reddit mods, thus becoming to some extent the "face of censorship" for many highly online people
- Equating the mere act of disbelieving trans people's chosen gender identities with out-and-out bigotry of the KKK kind
- Talking about a mythical "trans genocide" and getting angry when people questioned its existence
- Pushing for equal bathroom access long before the American public had actually been made ready for something like that
Etc.
So what we have now in the highly online discourse is essentially a battle between niche militant trans activists who seem to illogically believe that they are on the brink of being put into extermination camps, on the one hand, and niche militant anti-trans fanatics who exaggerate the relatively rare cases of trans people doing bad things for the sake of pushing an overall anti-left agenda.
The militant trans activists I speak of seemingly just can't stop themselves from continuously providing people who actually hate trans people and people who just hate the left with more and more ammunition by having a prominent online presence while saying a mix of untrue and highly questionable things.
Before anyone jumps in with an angry reaction... yes, if it's not already clear from what I wrote, I also think that the right has a problem with insane deluded militant people.
https://translegislation.com/
I am not going to say much more here because I’m fairly certain none of this will get through to you given the tone of your comment. Trans people are far more likely to be victims in washrooms than to be perpetrators.
Many if not most of the men who convince themselves that they are women are driven by a sexual desire to see themselves as a pornified image of woman.
That is in stark contrast to the previous popular view of trans as being people who were unfortunate to be "born in the wrong body".
Part of that is the ridiculousness in how many bathrooms are built. On festivals (portapotties), airplanes, trains and most if not all toilets for the disabled, there is no such thing as gender segregation at all - you wait in line, enter the next free booth, do your thing and that's it. Pretty much everyone has used a gender-neutral bathroom at least once in their life, chances are high you used one of them in the last 12 months.
There is no reason at all why toilets cannot be converted to "equal designations". I'd even go as far as to say that "equal" bathrooms are safer for everyone, simply because the facility will be higher frequented.
The first step in defeating it is untangling the action/identity conflation.
You are: someone who is biologically male, but whose gender identity is that of a woman.
He is: a businessman and politician.
You do: upstanding, normal folk things.
He does: reprehensible shit like assaulting teenagers and bragging about "grabbing [women] by the pussy."
Hopefully people are able to see who in this comparison is in the wrong.
If it helps, ^^have a brochure explaining all of the ways folks are dramatically misunderstanding us right now. :(
The usage of the term "anti-American" by anyone in a public role should be rejected as insufficient definition and unfit for a representative to use. On the spot, immediately.
Is it anti-American to brush your teeth after breakfast? or rather before? Is both American? Neither of it?
When Trump refuses to peacefully transfer power to his victorious opponent and instead plays "heads I win tails you cheated," that's anti-American.
When Trump sends the FCC chair to suppress speech "we can do this the easy way or the hard way," or yucks it up with the president of El Salvador over suspending Habeas Corpus, that's anti-American.
The "American Experiment" isn't an empty concept, but it is about democracy and law and rights as opposed to conservative cultural values, and when people in power start to argue that the former must be sacrificed for the latter they certainly deserve to be clowned on. Not because they are wrong to imagine an American Ideal, but because they have its contents exactly backwards.
It is possible to have a thing that is anti-American. So I'm not sure what good it is to reject the term altogether.
When the term "anti-American" is used, it is a placeholder for "against my values". Noone is ever anti-American himself, it is only a label applied upon others.
That's why IMO it should be rejected when used by people in a public role, see original comment.
You are free to think otherwise, which I may then label as "anti-American" in passing, while quickly moving on to you mentioning Mike Pence and some random conspiracy I have /s
Again, /s/s/s/s
Gross.
How can you miss this fundamental aspect of what I'm repeatedly stating?
"Sad."
it can be anti-other things too, but its certainly anti-american
I'd heard of this but didn't realize it went on for decades. In a way, persecuting political enemies for being "un-American" is a very (US) American thing to do.
Dude. Dude. You've said yourself: this Congress committee went on for almost four decades. And before it, it was Yellow Peril, or anti-Irish sentiments, or manifest destiny with its "the only good Indian is a dead Indian". So, no, it's a very American thing to do, has been since the foundation of the US and arguably from even before than that.
There is a big difference between being "American" and being something like "German" because Germany has existed for so long as different governments and the thing that ties it together is not an ethos, but an ethnicity. Being American is different, there's no ethnicity that makes one American, there is only it's ethos. The ideals written in the declaration of independence are American values.
The group elected to lead and represent this location also represent ideals and values, so THEIR ideals and values become inseparable of the location they were elected to represent.
For a certain period in the mid-1900s, "German values" meant something different than it did before and after, because Germany was represented by a different leader...
So for restricting speech, you could say not honoring the first amendment or something like that.
I think about this because sometimes people or ideas are described as "problematic". Sometimes for very good reason, but sometimes you find out the speaker has trouble being specific. I like to hear the specific reason when I can to understand the facts or logic. Sometimes these classifications come third hand.
Through that lens, it is very clear what anti-American means: adherence and loyalty to a person instead of a set of values, expansive government overreach, erosion of individual liberties, including the ability to express dissent.
(Truth is its just rhetoric and it doesn't mean much of anything).
It only involves a swathe of South-East Asia and China once you are inclusive of South America... ;-)
I would define confidently that Anti-American is aligned with Anti-Constitutional. By definition, it is this nation's founding document and treatise.
An the Supreme Court's ultimate role is to affirm or deny nebulous case law as aligned with the Constitution.
That's because something being "American"/"anti-American" is not sufficiently defined in this context. It triggers a highly subjective assumption of what it means, allowing people to evoke "us vs. them" solidarity without actually taking a position.
Example: I can (probably) break your assumed association by stating "women owning credit-cards is anti-American". It (probably) doesn't fit your mental model of what being "anti-American" means, but women were in fact not allowed to own credit cards in US until 1974. So my definition might be more in-line with the era of the constitution than yours.
That's a blunt example. Now imagine I use "anti-American" in a context of "law and order" and then keep talking. People instinctively glance over it because they create the meaning by taking their personal association of being "American" and invert it. You may feel like agreeing but I might actually say the complete opposite of what you think.
That's why IMO the phrase should be rejected from people in a public role.
When did this happen? I didn't realize Biden wasn't inaugurated. I could have sworn he was the President for 4 years.
It was never claimed that it was successful.
There are two Americas: The United States and the Confederacy. These people in power right now are Confederates, and that shouldn't really be a controversial take anymore since they flew the Confederate battle flag and MAGA flags side by side as they sacked the United States Capitol.
From the many responses on this thread, it appears that many either don't want a defintion of "pro-American" or "anti-American" or "an American Ideal" but these are core to your point.
How would you define each?
He did not say this.
Please spare me the part where you show me the things that you think establish the claim. I have already seen them and they do not establish the claim. At best you are intentionally conflating "Democrats" collectively with specific individuals who happen to be part of the Democratic party.
I could continue on with the rest but you get the idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_Nothing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Scare
(P.s. don't ask any questions that they don't like, that would be Un-American).
How that gets applied is a matter of debate. But I think all public officials should agree with that.
Its kind of a fundamental thing to have an idea about the nation’s values. If that’s too taboo for someone then they are quite literally anti American. Having a country means organizing around a core set of values. We can debate what those are but arguing you can’t stand for anything?
Especially when glanced-over mid-sentence, the term evokes the inversion of your idea what being "American" means, without ever clarifying whether your assumption is correct.
Me saying "the liberties of the banking sector are deeply anti-American, we will revert those changes to relieve the increased tension they cause in American households" might evoke an association of "less debt" or "owning a home" in a listener, while I might actually mean "women shouldn't be allowed to own credit cards" (because they weren't until 1974 and MY American values are some form of "vanilla constitution")
> The police, "suspecting the conflagration to be the first of a series of Communist acts of terrorism", have arrested a number of Communist leaders.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/1933/mar/28/leadersandreply...
Huh.
I think of that poem, First They Came:
replace 'Jews' with the current minoritized target demographic (ie immigrants of any stripe) and we're already fairly far down that list. see the case of David Huerta for the targeting of unions: https://www.courthousenews.com/los-angeles-labor-leader-arre...The left gets trapped in it because every single culture war issue (LGBQT+, racism, feminism, reproductive rights, freedom from religion, etc) are responses to the rights reactionary drive to claw back rights from everybody who is not a white male christian.
Nevermind the wedge driven when moderates who think of themselves as being on the left agree with the idea that past weak attempts to nudge things leftward "went too far", or that there actually is an issue with "government waste". Sir/Ma'am - you are complicit in moving the Overton window to the right.
> moderates who think of themselves as being on the left agree with the idea that past weak attempts to nudge things leftward "went too far"
Examples please? Not a challenge, I just am not pickup up what you're laying down.
As for "government waste" of course it exists but to various degrees and in various areas. For example, Medicare fraud is estimated $60 billion to over $100 billion annually. That doesn't mean we should get rid of it -- it means we'd be well served to invest a fraction of that amount in preventing such numbers.
And as far as shifting the Overton Window to the right, that has been the Right itself, via culture war bullshit.
Look, sir/madam, I have no tribe, no political party, no religion, no beliefs that I'm unwilling to change when presented with compelling evidence. I've tracked US politics likely longer than you've been alive. I understand how the game is played and this Red vs Blue is a master class in political manipulation. And the culture war is the key tool used to render it.
So you telling me that I'm the reason why the Overton Window is shifting right is a tell that you're the confused one.
Make no mistake, this is not some sophisticated conspiracy. This is pure laziness and abuse of power. They have been using "domestic terrorist" as a button to slap anytime they dont want to be questioned. the phrase no longer means anything besides "this person questioned authority"
ICE has used it to label people they shot for videoing them. Note that they knew the video evidence existed and labelled them anyway, assuming they would be able to avoid court altogether and prevent the video evidence being seen. In at least one case, this didnt work and the victim was correctly identified as such.
So this isnt hypothetical. It is a playbook being used right now, and people are testing the waters for how much they can get away with.
Many symptoms of undercover fascism.
The 'threat' was also the reason many working class Americans had generally higher standard of living than they do today
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
Simply calling it that doesn't make it true.
Trump and an army of paid influencers completely broke up the America First coalition, who had pinned their hopes on Trump being “their guy”. Now they’re all infighting, so the DSA is the only tangible threat to the establishment at the moment.
It remains to be seen if the DSA has shaken off attempts at disruption. It’s hard to be a small-d democratic organization when your opponents can afford to send endless streams of wreckers into your midst.
When the "left" (Democrats) had power recently in the U.S., they were very happy to try to criminalize the protected speech of their enemies. Their tack was to define speech they didn't like as "hate speech", which luckily isn't actually a thing in the U.S., legally. But they were trying to make it happen.
I don't mean to defend one or the other side, merely to point out that this is a non-partisan issue.
I’ll wait.
Biden: The Biden Administration's promulgation of a Title IX interpretation that, among other things, would have compelled certain kinds of speech:
https://speechfirst.org/case/title-ix/
One example of many: it would have been a punishable offense to refuse to use someone's preferred pronouns. This is what's called "compelled speech", and it's when someone says to you, "Say $THING or else". It's very reasonable for governments to prohibit saying certain things (like national security secrets, for instance, or other people's bank account login info), but thus far forcing people to say things they don't believe has been a bridge too far.
And, happily, compelled speech is a bright line the Americans have, so far, managed not to cross. Everyone should be trying as hard as we can to not cross that line.
You may not see the harm in this particular instance, but establishing "we'll just force them to say it and punish them if they don't" as a tool in any government's toolbox is a very, very bad idea.
Ah, and I should mention Biden's new Title IX rules became law on August 1, 2024 so they weren't "would". Thankfully, we only had a few months under this particular imposition on our basic rights and push never came to shove.
Harris: https://nclalegal.org/opinion/kamala-harris-free-speech-task... Clearly wanted to criminalize speech she didn't like
Walz: https://www.cato.org/commentary/actually-tim-walz-first-amen... Same
Most of what you cited is about what a policy might imply or what someone’s rhetoric might lead to. Also, I don’t know if you knew this, but Walz was never part of the Biden administration.
Are you similarly bothered by the actual First Amendment violations the Trump administration has carried out?
The White House excluded AP reporters because the AP wouldn’t adopt its preferred “Gulf of America” wording. A federal judge found that unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination: https://www.ap.org/media-center/ap-in-the-news/2025/ap-wins-...
The administration targeted pro-Palestinian students and faculty with visa revocations, detention, and deportation efforts because of their political advocacy. A federal judge ruled that unconstitutional: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-backed-targeting-pro-...
It targeted Perkins Coie with loss of federal access, contracts, and security clearances over the firm’s clients and political associations: https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-judge-temporarily-blocks-tr...
It canceled more than 1,400 humanities grants based on viewpoint. A federal judge found that violated the First Amendment: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-judge-rules-huma...
It canceled billions in Harvard research funding in an effort a federal judge found violated Harvard’s First Amendment rights: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-unlawfully-canceled-h...
Many of these Trump cases involve the government actually imposing penalties on people or institutions because of protected speech or association, not just an argument about what a rule might eventually imply.
This is not something you get to pretend is equivalent across “both sides”.
Several things:
> Walz was never part of the Biden administration.
I made a claim about the scarequotes(left), not about the Biden administration specifically. You asked about Biden. They were going for succession, you know!
> Are you similarly bothered by the actual First Amendment violations the Trump administration has carried out?
Yes
> AP reporters not allowed
The executive has leeway here, it's not clear exactly how much. Biden wasn't inviting Breitbart in, for example. That a judge found something doesn't mean much, supremes finding something would be meaningful.
> Targeted pro-Pal students
Specifically, pro-Pal foreign students. The Americans are right now in the process of figuring out when their rights apply to foreigners and when they don't. Often, the fed's tack is: we ask you at the border if you support terrorist organizations. If you say "yes", we don't let you in. Turns out you support HAMAS. That's a terrorist org, it's on our list. You lied. Goodbye! So in many cases it's not about speech per se, but rather whether you lied to the feds. And if the "unconstitutionality" thing here holds up, well then...I guess USA decided free speech applies to foreigners in the country. But until very recently that was a murky issue. Maybe still is, idk.
> Perkins Cole
"Liberals" do the same thing. Look at Biden pressuring for debanking of crypto people [https://www.forbes.com/sites/tonyaevans/2025/12/06/feds-bowm...]. Or jawboning Meta. I think it's less salient when left does it because they have captured the majority of institutions. So it looks like business as usual. It looks "legit". Except...it's just Blue enacting its will through e.g. the Fed, or whoever it is that regulates banks.
>Canceled grants
Here, I'm an expert! I'm an academic who has been negatively affected by all this. What some district court judge found is irrelevant, so I'll ignore that (just in case: district court judges are small potatoes and their rulings do not have precedential value). What I will say is: the situation had gotten WAY out of hand. The feds were funding a bunch of batshit crazy stuff that was CLEARLY just fraud and woke virtue-signaling. A lot of good stuff got canceled too, which is sad. That good stuff probably had batshit crazy woke signaling in their grant write-ups because that's the only way you could get funded! Which is sad. Should the admin have used a scalpel rather than a sledgehammer? Yes. Should the humanities be getting much less funding and producing far fewer graduate students? Yes. Even graduating from a top (~Harvard) program, humanities graduate students have something like a 10-25% chance of a "real" (professorship) job. And that might be Northwest Arkansas State Community Daycare College.
> Harvard
Harvard was made an example of. Fair? No. Did they break the law A LOT, just like everyone else? You betcha! Did they definitely discriminate in favor of Pal against Israel? Yes, certainly did. Did the admin handle it in the smartest way possible? Definitely not.
> Trump actually did bad things, not "might"
You have to understand: the "speech" climate in academia has been so, so bad for ten years - and that's because of the "liberals", not Trump and co. It's been insane. The speech restrictions were REAL. People got FIRED. Many more people KEPT QUIET ABOUT REAL SCIENCE THINGS FOR FEAR OF PUNISHMENT. Things are better now, crazier but better. You can talk kinda. The institutions are still >80% captured by Team Blue, but there is a breath of fresh air. A waft. One needn't be fearful all the time.
And I sh...
It would be fascinating to revisit this comment with you after the midterms and see whether your beliefs have changed in any way.
Benjamin Song should be all the evidence you need to illustrate that the phrase "domestic terrorism" is completely appropriate to describe things that are actually happening. But there is so, so much more of it.
The US Constitution is intentionally anti-democratic (small "d'), plutocratic, to protect the interests of the founding plutocrats. But at the time, the US was a preindustrial, agrarian nation, in which the fastest mode of communication and transportation was the horse. The concentration of power that has become possible now due to technology was inconceivable by the founders. I fear that nothing short of another American revolution can solve this problem; but that would surely be horribly bloody, as with most revolutions.
Ad tech/tiktok has proven its possible to deduce what people are think at scale from subtle signals, now sifting info at scale is possible thanks to LLMs and a large portion of everyone's online history is likely to become vulnerable to store now decrypt later attacks. Get rid of cash, force identity verification for every online service, sprinkle some flock cameras on top and you've got a complete surveillance state. Oh and of course you need some goons to scare people into compliance & later in some self-censorship for good measure. We could call the group "Frozen water".
...and we're basically already there on all of it except perhaps the "decrypt later" on https (and even that has rumours).
Genuinely don't think this is stoppable anymore.
On a more positive note, the fact that this doesn't happen indicates things aren't that bad right now. No amount of KYC or age verification can stop large amounts of angry people who want one thing.
People sometimes bring up China - which isn't relevant because people still remember being extremely poor, thus being grateful to the Party - or one of those dictatorships as counterexamples for this, but see the Arab Spring (food got more expensive -> revolutions), Nepal recently... etc.
No kings protests was a very respectable effort....peaked at 2.3%.
Even the current administration inept as it is is basically home free on this one. Senate neutered, Courts sidelined, Treasury subjugated, loyalist in charge of military, JAG core silenced, secondary personal goons squad established and lavishly funded, Social media captured, Stats department dismantled, Cult of personality created, common enemy created (immigrants), distractions for the masses arranged (culture wars, UFC on whitehouse lawn), truth undermined (prez spouting nonstop lies & AI), oligarch class established, surveillance normalized, norm of kiss the ring & pay tribute established.
Dunno about you but to me that looks like US democracy is so cooked the kitchen smoke alarm has gone off & everyone was too busy doomscrolling to notice.
Hope I'm wrong but that list looks pretty fuckin comprehensive to me. Hell they even somehow managed to throw in a roman salute...
>On a more positive note
Yeah sorry...above isn't exactly that
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_2026_No_Kings_protests#T...
no kings only 2/3 of the way there
Think more like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Nepalese_Gen_Z_protests
it will never go away.
In other words, we gave the terrorists the victory by accepting being terrorized at the country level from a single act and destroying a lot of our freedom. Yeah us.
All these years reading about liberty and philosophy has taught me that the only way out is to make money and disappear, be an eagle, watch the lions eat the sheeple from the top of a mountain, because the sheeple don't want to be freed and worse yet, they will point at you as if you're an outlier, a misfit, a problem that must be fixed by force, their 'democratic' force
So fly high, find your peak and watch from there, we only have 100 years to live as we please, not to spend it fighting for those who don't want to be saved
Do like Nero, let the world burn and enjoy watching, from afar...
Like many on this site I'm in violent agreement with Schneier and have been ever since "security theater" entered the lexicon. But this is a hopeless fight.
I don't think it inevitable that this continues.
There is significant pushback against surveillance.
I hope so any way.
1. EU style governmental pushes to defend digital rights. Data needs to be our own property that we can lend, but can never give up our right to revocation.
2. Stricter controls, and stricter still penalities, need to exist against misuse and abuse. Many of the stories of abuse of data are most stark in their lack of repercussions, some of this is police unions, some of this is "deep state" people who scratch eachother's backs and grant eachother free accesses and immunity. Some of this is a voting issue as in we need to make it known to our candidates that it matters to us, and then push real political power in their hands.
Just to help the imagination of all here's where mass surveilance could plausibly add good to society, all stemming from legitimate use:
1. Criminals like porch pirates can be caught using a neetwork of Ring cameras
2. A lost pet/child can be identified and found by drone surveillance
3. Usage data of roads can be updated in realtime
4. Trends and Sentiment could be used to guide the government intra-elections improving the way government serves us
5. Police officers can avoid risky situations using drones as eyes instead of putting their own bodies in harms way
2. Lost pets are not being found by drone and camera surveillance. They could, but the system doesn’t give a shit about your dog. Children, maybe. I guess i’m ok with deploying a fleet of drones during a search and rescue operation. As long as there is transparency so it’s not done for other reasons, and they are grounded when they are done.
3. You just need one of those pressure sensitive wire strips across the road to do this. It’s a largely solved problem that doesn’t involve mass surveillance.
4. I am just guessing what this means, but government doesn’t do things that are wildly popular by polling, so why would they react to some ai surveillance sentiment analysis?
5. This isn’t mass surveillance. Like #2, a deployed drone to look around a corner or scan a building before entering is using technology but it’s momentary. If it became a problem where it was being over used we could deal with it as a separate issue.
But even if you disagree, you must still agree that antisocial asshole criminals will find ways to steal and get away with it, cameras or no.
Inequality is a useless measurement used to excuse antisocial behavior. The inequality between Bill Gates and I has increased exponentially in the past 20 years, yet I'm significantly better off than I was then back then. Inequality is a feel good measurement thats fundamentally the wrong target.
If inequality is the wrong measure? Fine. Deep poverty, perhaps? Lack of opportunities and hope for rising out of poverty, maybe? However you feel best describes people who are not “significantly better off” than 20 years ago. Because most of america would say they are worse off than 20 years ago.
> In a just and equal society, criminals would be prosecuted and convicted for the economic violence of theft.
That doesn’t solve the problem tho. Because even if you jail someone for life for petty theft, the funnel is still there creating more petty thieves.
To be clear - i am not absolving people of their crimes. It’s still wrong to steal someone’s packages. I just don’t think that more enforcement is the right way to make it happen less. I say attack the upstream problems first, deal with the downstream effect last.
Surveilling the entire population also has basically nothing to do with solving either upstream causes or downstream effects.
The protest is more about who watches the watchers. And neither will trust the other.
We live in war times and will soon see it happening
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes
In any case this article is about the whole spectrum of mass surveillance, not one specific company.
There’s also plenty of options for solving car theft that aren’t dystopian.
I find it pretty dystopian that CVS has to lock up cheap products because society has failed to punish criminals.
You are quite good at making nice little sound-bites that don't hold up to scrutiny. Are you part of the propaganda or just an ignoramus who parrots it?
I don’t drive a modern car with built in cell tracking.
I don’t use “smart devices” in my home.
I’m opposed to mass surveillance in all forms.
I find it amusing. Your complaint seems to be that people aren’t really against mass surveillance because they accept it in other areas (even though dumbphone sales are going crazy, showing that many people do care). Then you’re presented with someone who’s done the difficult work to have reasonable privacy, and your reaction is to pretend that the privacy guy is “cringe” or “scary” or something.
It’s almost like you don’t believe your own arguments, and you’re actually just hostile towards the concept of privacy in general. You’re making arguments in bad faith because you actually want a panopticon.
The problem with Flock isn’t the cameras, it’s the system built on them that gives panopticon powers to any random law enforcement officer.
Anyone making this argument of yours is also smart enough to be aware of the privacy efforts. Pretending not to know about them is bullshit.
I see this more as an excuse used by a small corrupt elite wanting to enslave the people. The problem is that you do not have a real democracy in the USA. The current orange clown brigade shows this best (corrupt to the core), but it is not really much better with other roleplaying administrations.
Sooner or later people will realise this too, even the not too terribly bright.
There are certainly governments outlawing political opponents in the first world, but that's not the US.
And yes, I would say that regarding the other side too.
I don't think you should be able to win the presidency by doing really well in the five largest states necessarily, but I definitely don't think you should be able to win the presidency by only doing well in a couple of swing states.
Whenever you have voting you have swing votes. That's just Democracy. If it wasn't swing states it would be swing voters nationwide.