Congressional debate is supposed to be the forum in which details like that are noted and discussed.

getting moderate or traditional conservatives (let alone democrats or independents) to sign this is another matter entirely. FISA has become a babadook policy the US government would just as soon slowly forget about and expire, similar to GITMO and the more acerbic policies of the Bush administration during the WoT. these types of regulations enjoy pretty unilateral disapproval because they have the potential to bite the hand that feeds.

from what I've seen its the traditional democrats and republicans who are in favor, with the leftists opposed on human rights grounds and the hardcore trumpers opposed due to their grudge against the FBI

Just because modern republicans hate it does not mean the hate is unwarranted.

Congratulations, you have recorded the first indexed hit of "babadook policy" recorded by Google Search.

Now would you care to explain the phrase you have just effectively coined.

One way to fix this is to actually hold these unelecteds criminally responsible for knowingly violating the law, just like citizens are held accountable for their actions.

And root out the Cheneys, Clintons, Schumers and Grahams from ever holding public office again.

Your comment was a bit all over the place in attributing the world's ills.

For instance, something like the Department of Education, is overstepping the role of Federal Government, and I think the statistics prove me correct. I also believe that FBI/CIA has been weaponized in favor of what would historically been perceived as Un-American activities across the globe. Let's start with the Iran-Contra affair and the very well known fact of cocaine running ruining the mostly black inner cities of the 1980's. This in my opinion is something heads should roll for, and those involved should be held accountable and thrown in jail. I think these people are POS, and frankly if you disagree with my statement, I think you are too. It's inhumane and disgusting.

To me, much of the US's power comes from its centralization and radically ceding that back to the states would leave it diminished on the world stage.

The CIA/FBI rabbit hole, to me, collapses down to the "Who watches the watchers?" question.

I'm of the opinion that there will always need to be clandestine activities (domestic and international), that proficiency in that domain generates outsized benefits to a nation, and that oversight should continually be improved and strengthened (but is fundamentally impossible to accomplish completely, due to the nature of the enterprise).

In the Democratic party, there's the group advocating for involvement on the basis of individual rights and one on the basis of supporting the post-WWII rule of law world order.

In the Republican party, there's still the group advocating for American exceptionalism. However, given that Republican presidents initiated the last two major wars (Afghanistan and Iraq), general party support for military interventionalism is at a low ebb. Give it a few more years for memories to reset (~2028).

If you want a substantive discussion, try dropping the fear-words like "unelected"s: this isn't the Fox News comment section.

What's your point?

The above comment is an excellent example of what type of comment should be grey texted into oblivion.

Or do I misunderstand the American system of government?

Do you think that was better?

And if not, how would you propose re-politicizing civil service positions without falling victim to spoils again?

It is more nuanced than that. Technically, the constitution establishes a federal democratic republic form of government:

- federal: union of 50 states

- republic: ultimate power held by the people and their elected representatives AND has an elected or nominated president rather than a monarch

- democratic: governance by officials elected by voting of the population

Representation in a republic may or may not be freely elected by the general citizenry. In our case, representation is via electing representatives of the people, i.e. democratic.

I am not yet sure why there are these soundbites of "democracy" vs "republic", since we are both.

One interesting feature of our setup is while we are a democracy, we also have inalienable rights that the majority cannot vote away.

Personally, I get suspicious when elected leaders start talking about the powers they need to fight the "threats to our democracy".

Worth revisiting is the CGP Grey video "Rules for Rulers": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

The whole “We’re a republic not a democracy,” lie isn’t about that at all. It dates to only WWII. Specifically, it was coined by America First’s Boake Carter as quip in response to Roosevelt’s talk about “the defense of democracies” and “the arsenal of democracy” while arguing that it was perfectly fine for the nazis to run wild in Europe. This phrase continued on with John Birch Society, where it morphed into its sophomoric partisan quip and excuse for unpopular minority rule it is today.

When anyone utters this phrase today, it’s a tell that they literally have no idea what any of the words they say actually mean.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/27/opinion/aoc-crenshaw-repu...

I'd argue it's a tell that they don't understand the history of the term or the perception of it held by those who disagree with them.

For most people who say it, I believe "we're a republic, not a democracy" means "we're not majority rule, there are structures in place to protect the interests of the minority". This is why they don't trot out the phrase every time the word "democracy" is used. It's a rebuttal to specific instances where people invoke "democracy" to mean "most people I know disagree with you, so your opinion doesn't matter".

Maybe I'm projecting my own views here, but I generally agree with what I believe people are trying to convey when they use the phrase. I don't use it myself, because I know it's not an effective way to communicate my position - not because it's technically not a true statement.

For what it's worth, there's also more nuance to the word "democracy" than you seem to be presenting here. At the time of the founding, it basically meant "rule by popular vote", and was pretty much a synonym for "mob rule". A large part of the US system was explicitly designed to work around the shortcomings of direct democracy.

But even this is a misunderstanding of the terms as even (mis)understood in 18th century. Representative (i.e. indirect) democracy doesn't inherently provide any defense of the minority. It's literally just a scaling solution. Nor does the constitution as drafted provide any protections to a minority. In fact, this lack of protections was one of the biggest arguments against ratification, and directly resulted in the Bill of Rights to address some of these issues. Even judicial review of unconstitutional laws didn't exist until 1803, and arguably is extra textual.

What's left is split a legislative and executive, a legislature that is a poor copy of the House of Lords and the House of Commons, and an idiosyncratic points system that 248 years later has not only yielded three unpopular presidents, but elevates whims of a few voters in depopulated states. None of that protects a minority from an abusive majority, nor does it make an affirmative case about why the majority rule should not apply. Far from protecting the minority, electoral college actually enables minority rule. The same can be demonstrated with gerrymandering and legislative seats. A real concern for minority representation balanced with majority rule would address these obvious failures, but it doesn't.

Even the Wish.com House of Lords is joke as originally conceived, since it empowered state legislatures rather than the people of the state. It's a very concept that is an opposition to the very idea of a common nation, but not alien to the idea of a confederation. Now this may have made sense in a 18th century drawing room, but hasn't made sense over 160 years. They thought they were making a European Union, but that's not what developed.

The American constitution may have been great 250 years ago, but it's not by any modern standard today.

Probably as some weird way to further the divide between left and right. It is really popular to demonize the other side because it's a very effective way to get people riled up enough to vote.

Even if that were true, it's not really up to the people who intended it to be something else 200 years ago. It's now on us to figure out what kind of nation we want to be.

Too bad we seem to have decided to just ignore the whole thing (except when it suits us, of course)

Approval voting doesn't have this problem. When there's a clear winner, it's obvious and you can get back to business.

The US is a republic. You could call it a form of democracy, but you would first call it a republic before a democracy. Representativity is what makes it NOT a democracy.

James Madison, a US founding father, felt that (direct) democracy led to mob rule and did not think that people directly voting on issues was a good idea. You can read his opinion from 1788 in the Federalist Papers, #55: https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/text-51-60#s-lg-box...

"Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob." - Alexander Hamilton or James Madison

The world of political science is massive. There is no "best" system because once you read through this entire body of study, you realize it consists of compromises. People have been trying to figure this out for a very long time.

The mere fact that most people feel that way shows, to me, that the system works. Compare that to e.g. France where Macron got less than 20% in the first round. It means that 80% of the votes were not for him, and of the 20% remaining, a lot did not want him but just thought he was the best chance against the far-right candidate. Right when Macron was re-elected, you could say that more than 80% of the people who voted did not want him. That's a problem IMO.

Not even talking about the US presidents...

It was more political theater at the time. Not that it was a good vote, but I wouldn't say that the Swiss democracy doesn't work based on that. Switzerland is an example of consensus, and a functional democracy.

Too many people think they have to run for congress or president instead of thinking more locally. Jesse Ventura is a great example of what the founders envisioned as encouraging people to get involved in politics. He was unhappy with the local city government. He ran for mayor and won and spent four years in charge. Went back to his private sector life and then five years after leaving office, ran for governor and won.

I've had friends get involved in their local politics and have been effective. My buddy was a professional skateboarder and run twice for a local office and he barely lost both times and has vowed to stay involved in his cities politics.

You're seeing more and more people getting involved at the national level who said they never had any inkling of getting involved in politics but have thrown their hats in the ring.

There was a reason the founders made the barrier extremely low to get involved in politics, either locally or nationally. They wanted people to have a say in how their governments are run and to make it simple for them to be the change they want to see.

Jesse had been out of wrestling for years before running for mayor of Brooklyn Park. You have to remember this was back in the late 80,s early 90's when there wasn't any internet or social media. I remember reading an article about him resolving some issue the voters brought to him thinking, "I had no idea the guy was still living in the state, let alone running a city as their mayor."

I will give you he did use his radio show to air his grievances and tell stories about his wrestling years and being a frogman (the precursors to the SEALs) so that did bring him back into the public spotlight. He ironically had always dabbled in politics, and even appeared on Howard Stern saying he was going to run for president with gulp Donald Trump who made a guest appearance with him talking about it when he was governor.

So you're right, by the time he ran for governor, he was back to being very well known and leveraged that to a degree where he had to give up his radio show in order to run for governor.

All of the methods by which a dark horse can run and win are there. The state will not remove your votes or intimidate voters not to vote for you. You will not be poisoned by radioactive toxins to prevent you from running. You will not be kidnapped, or your family threatened, or a bomb set off in polling locations. This isn't in any way like so many other actually repressive regimes. All you have to do is go and run.

We have more power in this society than anyone in any other. So why do we claim we're powerless? Because it makes us feel better that we're so lazy. I could run for office, but that might restrict my time watching The Office. Better to just say that running is pointless, so I don't have to make the change I want to see.

And even if you don't want to run, you can vote for independents, you can complain to your representatives, you can organize your friends and neighbors to petition local government for local reforms and participate in larger state and federal efforts. Individually we may be a drop in the bucket, but collectively we are a wave. You can't say that isn't powerful.

Look to how unpopular CSPAN is. Everyone says they want the “truth” of politics. The truth is on CSPAN, and no one watches it.

We do have some power, but the system is absolutely intended to suppress the power of the masses. The senate as an institution, the cap on the number of reps in the house, the electoral college, representative rather than parliamentary legislature elections, dark money/super PACs/Citizen's United (and other things that look even closer to outright bribery) and first-past-the-post are ALL anti-democractic institutions intended to preserve the status quo for the already wealthy and powerful.

As for having more power than any other society? Delusional. There are far more democractic electoral systems.

This seems asinine. I am not psychic, I can't always deduce intentions, but sometimes I can see the lack of intent. Things evolve, they develop, and though there might be many factions hoping to steer things in directions they want it to go, the net effect of many factions doing this is our ship just swirling around randomly in the ocean.

When you talk about "intent", it's just rabblerousing. You hope to rile people up, so they'll do what you prefer they would do. It's unnecessary to talk about intent. Whether the system was intended to suppress the power of the masses, or whether the system randomly and quite accidentally developed to do that is moot if it suppresses the masses. The only thing reasonable people should be discussing is:

1. Does this system suppress the power of the masses?

2. Should that change? It's not all that clear that the masses should have power. We've seen what mobs and riots are like, and most of you are ill-informed, opinionated, and susceptible to the effects of rabble-rousing.

As for answers, I think yes, it does suppress power of the masses. I would be skeptical the intelligence of someone who suggested otherwise. And on the second, I'm uncertain... there are days where it seems like only a lunatic would want the masses to have power. But, if they don't have it, others do, and whoever they happen to be, I've not seen many outcomes I've liked.

> the cap on the number of reps in the house

Haha. Do you want that to change? I stumbled upon a weird political science hack a few years back, and I'm convinced that as few as a dozen people (nobodies, even) might change that by the time the next census rolls around. Low effort, you might have to allocate 15 minutes to go talk to a state rep/senator (plus a few hours to prepare... rehearsal, haircut, getting your nice clothes dry-cleaned). It'd bump the number up to something like 5800+ reps in Congress.

The other stuff's all dead in the water. But I know how to ruin the rep cap.

This is the reason why Kennedy's efforts to appear on the ballots can ultimately hand Trump the presidential election by splitting the Biden canp.P

The US has culturally accepted this flawed system. The UK has a multiparty parliament despite first past the post. This comes at the price of up to more than 60% of the votes getting effectively discarded.

I believe firmly that the US would be served better today if it transitioned to a proportional voting system. But the constitution is treated with too much deference to expect meaningful updates to get it in line with 21st century realities.

My state passed a democratic ballot measure to set up a non-partisan redistricting committee. When it came time to instate new district maps, our state Senate pretended to consider the committee's maps, and voted for their own maps; despite the vocal outage of nearly every citizen who shared a comment on the situation.

I can't coordinate with my "community", when my senators have declared it to include downtown SLC, Tooele, Beaver, Cedar City, St. George, etc. To contrast, Utah County (the most consistently Conservative area in the state) basically gets its own district.

I have no idea where this meme comes from, because for 99% of people “republic” just means not governed by a monarch or traditional aristocracy and is orthogonal to democracy. For example, Canada is democratic but not a republic, North Korea is a republic but not democratic, Saudi Arabia is neither, and France is both.

Obviously, the last several years has taught us why the right wing is so intent on getting rid of the word “democracy” in describing the USA, and they fundamentally do not believe in the right to vote.

I can't even imagine writing this comparison of democracy vs. totalitarian regimes while the 'democracy' is behaving in the same way as a totalitarian regime in this context.

For example, Abrahamic religious leaders have made the concept of god toxic. But if you go by their dogma, then their god is responsible for the state of things.

Many of the non-abrahamic religions in the USA don't even have a god in the same sense, or they see their (equivalent to) god as the fabric of the cosmos and thereby not able to be abandoned.

I agree about the money though. It is the leading religion now.

If your question was actually serious, this is a non-exhaustive list.

I'd venture that drugs that cost hundreds of dollars or more per month in the US are all cutting-edge stuff. I mean, sure, you have stories of people getting charged $10 for a pill of acetaminophen at a hospital, but that's a separate matter unrelated to the fact that you can get a bottle of 500 pills for single-digit dollars at your local Walmart.

> The uninsured. The underinsured. People on the "wrong" insurance plan.

Plenty to criticize about the US healthcare system, but let's remember that countries with nationalized medical care also suffer from their own ills, mainly in the form of long wait times. Ultimately, no place has enough doctors per capita that every sick person can be treated promptly and cheaply; so care must be gated one way or another. In America, you pay with money; in most other countries, you pay with time.

[0]: https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/371090/WHO-MHP-H...

https://www.healthline.com/health/diabetes/16-tips-to-help-y...

I am not a fan of the American healthcare system. Navigating it takes brains and effort that shouldn't be required. But if you have them it is essentially not possible to die here from lack of healthcare, and it's possible but surprisingly difficult to go bankrupt (except from lost wages, which is also a leading cause of bankruptcy in the UK).

The anecdotes in your links (that I read - can't get through all of them right now) have a common theme, which is that people died because they either needed very expensive and/or experimental treatment that probably would not be affordably provided to them under any plausible healthcare system, or else they got a bill, decided they couldn't pay it, and did without or tried to self-ration their healthcare.

The correct course of action in that case is to call the healthcare provider and negotiate A) a 90+% discount and B) a payment plan, both of which are pretty readily available in the American system. You have to know that's possible, and you shouldn't have to, but it is possible. Then you reach out to the charities, government programs, and/or nonprofits from my original link to cover what you still can't afford. Same deal if you get screwed by an insurance company as in the Guardian article.

This is, again, not something I'm trying to defend. It's not the way a sane healthcare system would run. But it is a system that works, more or less, for those who know how to work within it.

The anecdotes show that this is not an 'occasional' or 'edge case' thing but a systemic thing. The statistics show that at least 40,000 people die a year for not having enough money for healthcare and these are the people we know. The statistics don't include those who never go to the hospital to avoid risking medical bankruptcy for their families even if they die themselves. Just being in a hospital bed for one night without anything being done costs $3000/night, whereas waiting in the ER without anything being done can cost $100/hour.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/woman-gets-688-35-er-bill-...

This is a systemic thing. Its not 'not a sane healthcare system'. Its literally a machine that kills people to maximize profit. And it became like this only because people let it and justified this or that other thing in the system.

No, it doesn't. It costs whatever you can negotiate it to cost. I've been without insurance; one experience isn't data, but in my experience just telling the hospital you haven't got insurance is, again, good for 90+% off by itself.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/28/you-can-negotiate-your-medic...

Hospitals (ed: non-profit ones, but I'm pretty sure similar rules apply elsewhere) in particular are required by federal law to have 'well-publicized' financial assistance policies.

https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/financial-assistan...

> Its literally a machine that kills people to maximize profit.

If that were true it would do a good job of maximizing profit. It's not even that good. Healthcare margins in the U.S. are 0.7%, which sucks. If you're the proverbial evil billionaire or whatever you'd rather own almost anything else.

https://www.nadapayments.com/blog/what-is-the-average-profit...

The whole reason I started this thread is because it bugs me when we attribute to malice what is obviously stupidity.

That's a really surreal proposition. People who are sick cannot 'negotiate' anything. People who are recently treated and are recovering from an illness are the same. Something that is life-critical cannot be up for negotiation to start with, but lets allow it for argument's sake.

What if you 'negotiate' and the hospital and the insurance company just reject? Do you have pockets deep enough to fight with their lawyers for years? Do you have the time? One person against corporate behemoths. That defies logic.

> If that were true it would do a good job of maximizing profit

It does. It keeps both the availability of doctors and hospital beds to create artificial scarcity. It does vertical integration and ensures that whatever you do in healthcare ranging from getting insurance to going to hospital, from medicines to secondary care stays within the corporate shareholdership network that owns the entire conglomerate.

> when we attribute to malice what is obviously stupidity.

The reason that the system gets away with murdering people for profit is that people attribute to stupidity what should be attributed to malice. If large corporations are killing people for profit like they are, malice should be attributed to the actions of all the upper echelons of the corporate world rather than any kind of incompetence.

If you are sick and can't negotiate, and no one can negotiate on your behalf, or the provider won't negotiate, and if they sue, and if you have no charity assistance, then you will be one of the folks who goes bankrupt from medical bills. I said it was hard, and you can see from that chain of conditionals that it absolutely is, but of course it does happen.

The effects of bankruptcy in the U.S. last seven years, at least as far as credit rating is concerned. Not great, but this is not serious in the way that killing people would be serious, if that happened, which again, it basically doesn't if you can navigate the system.

> It does.

0.7% is an absurdly low profit margin. It just is. The rest of your paragraph is basically true, but doesn't change that. At the same time, the U.S. spends a much higher percentage of GDP on healthcare than most developed nations. Ergo, what the U.S. system is really optimized for is wasting money

Since that is not a rational goal for anyone, it's stupid. Evil at least achieves something for the evildoer. I'll leave it at that.

My understanding is that directly charging a different (higher) amount for insurance is considered to be fraud.

And even if I'm wrong about that, when lacking insurance I didn't encounter a medical provider, including big ones with big compliance offices, who wouldn't do it. But others' mileage may vary.

What if your problem is with your mental health?

It's not like mental health problems are fringe lately.

It feels to me like you're speaking as though you are in the middle of the bell curve, but from my perspective people who can navigate this system are an exception.

They of course noticed and certainly tried to reinforce that message, because they indeed became aware of the split. But the initial reason was a lack of trust in media and domestic politics and not some external propaganda channel.

And expect this to get much worse if you now increase surveillance. That said, NPR just suspended a journalist that did notice some form of propaganda from domestic sources, which might explain why people were distrustful in the first place.

In fact, you might be a victim of propaganda. Maybe read up on it.

It is wise for you too to read up on state sponsored disinformation campaigns. Obviously the U.S. and others are involved in such campaigns. Obviously the U.S. government and institutions like the NYT have collaborated to sell a version of events. For instance the NYT endorsing the invasion of Iraq.

That is has returned to developed countries has probably other issues instead of propaganda. But there aren't any propaganda campaigns in western nations that disincentive vaccination that would create the need for government to spy on your devices. These alleged propaganda campaigns would be easy to find, no? Since they target a broad audience?

That people like you are willing to rationalize anti-vaccine sentiments on the polio vaccine is quite illuminating. And you suggest of me that I’m the victim of propaganda!

You make the argument that because there are people believing X, we must allow the surveillance of our devices.

And your first paragraph above was to rationalize why some people are opposed to the polio vaccine. You just couldn’t equivocally state that this is an example of people being duped into believing something that is entirely idiotic. It’s not the main point you are trying to get across but it’s worth addressing this since you suggested I might be a victim of propaganda. I think, in our exchange, you are more likely to be a victim of propaganda since you can’t just say, “yeah those people are being duped”.

And, the investigations into election meddling ended with finding out that external forces spent some $100,000 on bad Facebook ads before the 2016 election. Not even a drop in a bucket. A simple blog network that the American conservative capital funds among the tens of thousands that they fund has more reach than such an ad.

What is even worse, even non-conservatives do it for money and make millions out of such activities:

https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/50...

And yet they do interfere. We've seen plenty of evidence, from Russia, Iran, China and (I still can't believe how they got competent at this, but there you go) North Korea.

And in some cases they've been successful at destabilizing formerly fairly sane and stable democratic countries. The social divisions that the UK And US currently find themselves in could be attributed in part to this steady drip of caustic interference.

However, as a "short term pessimist, but long term optimist" (Hitchens), I'm optimistic that we will start to introspect a bit more as societies and begin to be less easily manipulated. It will take a while, but I believe even now the tide is turning.

I still can't believe how readily so very many people continue to fall for it time and again, despite the lessons of history.

But just to be clear, my surprise at their abilities stems from the fact that their country is so insular, tightly controlled and technologically backward* (look at a night picture of N. Korea, for instance, 80% dark, with no basic streetlighting), that it surprises me that they can allow a portion of their society to roam and participate in the internet freely without infecting the rest of their country.

The Doublethink needed to pull that off must be staggering (thank you Orwell for giving us a vocabulary to express the concepts and experience of living under totalitarianism).

*I know they have ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons, also I'm pretty sure their internal surveillance tech is also top notch.

A totalitarian country can invest billions of dollars from the federal budget into propaganda in another countries. You don't need technological supremacy to pour money into something. Tight cotroll and insulation makes the task easier, not harder.

> that it surprises me that they can allow a portion of their society to roam and participate in the internet freely without infecting the rest of their country. Isolation and elimination of infected individuals helps prevent the spread of the disease through hte population

“The bigger the trick, the older the trick, the easier it is to pull.”

“You believe it can’t be that old, and it can’t be that big for so many people to have fallen for it.”

Dictatorships though have a more macroscopically sinister agenda against successful democratic rivals.

Just look at catastrophes caused by PG&E in 2018, ERCOT in 2021, or First Energy in 2003. Not a single one was caused by an attack on critical infrastructure, they're just cutting corners!

I agree, many divisions are definitely of domestic origin. However we definitely know that foreign interference has been at play to identify and amplify those divisions.

>If so, which message, what topic and who was targeted?

5G - weird one I know, but agitators gonna agitate.

Climate - Russia was a massive oil exporter, de-carbonizing efforts threatened that.

Atomic power in Germany - Russia definitely didn't want Germany achieving independence from their gas imports.

BRICS - China would love to de-dollarize the world.

>And no, you will hardly ever get rid of surveillance powers once established without serious political shifts.

And this is the advantage of democracies, big shifts can happen. With Dictatorships however it usually takes violence. A lot of violence.

Please look away from the curtain hiding rising wealth inequality, cost of living, and the financialization of daily needs. There are no material explanation for the rising contradictions. It is simply our boogymen misleading our population.

It is good we as a society make bets on housing! Who needs to sleep under a roof when you can own shares!

But I have the feeling that that well of constant culture wars has run dry, and people are becoming more wary of being drawn into endless fruitless debates about these things. And after looking up form their smartphones they've finally seen all of the signs for Food Banks, noticed that the weather has gone insane and that the price of biscuits is inhumane and asked themselves 'how did we get here?' 'how do we get back to a better place?' and will hopefully agitate again for a better society.

Swings and roundabouts.

Honestly, I don't believe that statement. I think many people equate the culture war issues to the issues later in that second paragraph with the economy and climate (if they even see an issue there). If our leaders are failing at [insert culture war issue here], then that explains why they're failing at [insert economic issue here].

You can look to old propaganda from the early 20th century in Italy and Germany where characters would speak to this. They would deny class lines based on wealth or capital holdings and insist the true class was defined by in and out cultural identifiers.

These culture wars we've been seeing are not organic. They're seeded by orgs that can make money off the outrage. It might be dramatic sounding to say, but the increasing prevalence of culture wars is indicative of the rising tide of fascism. Our societies have done a lot to weaken unions and redefine the meaning of class.

Because we redefined class boundaries to be cultural, we've created an artificial alignment, where say a working class queer urbanite and and a working class non-queer rural worker get shafted by many of the same mechanisms, but are seen to be in different stations because one has access to a bus and the other drives a pickup.

At the end of the day, material issues are what hurt people, but now the rural working class will blame the urbanite, rather than the capitalist that has strip-mined their town, and the urbanite will blame the backwards bumpkin rather than the capitalist that has strip-mined their city.

It's odd how people are trying to divide politics into "culture war" and real problems; it wasn't that long ago climate change was considered a culture war. Labeling something a "culture war" is just the first kneejerk reaction from the right when they appose something.

"loonie lentil eating lefties", "greenies", "mad Greta" (I'm making these up, but I'm sure I'm sure there's plenty of similar examples). People used to be comforted by these ad-hominems, and it allowed them to continue buying aspirational 4x4 off-road vehicles and 3 flights abroad a year without touching their conscious. They could laugh, share memes, ignore news stories about forest fires in Canada in December or massive loss of ice shelves in Antarctica and carry on as usual.

But as the pot starts to boil harder I get the feeling people are looking away from these distractions and beginning to look more critically at the information they're getting, and beginning to wonder if it's not such a funny joke after all.

In the US, averaging falls short due to said inequality. A smaller group of people have vastly increased wealth, while others stay stagnant. This moves the needle for certain statistics that don't give a full view of the issue.

Its easy to say "hey the average is fine" when you're talking about NYC where stock brokers and high end real estate really drags up that average.

From the 2020 census, the average income was 107k, where the median income was 67k.

Democracy is never ideal, it's always full of crooks, lies, hypocrisy. Especially when most people have more interesting things to do than participating in politics. But it's not even close to anything totalitarian. I've lived in both, and have the perspective.

Winston S Churchill, 11 November 1947

This is not a binary choice. Both can be present. Both can be absent. The US arguably has a degree of both.

If you intended to say something else with more nuance then you should have said something else with more nuance. I do my best to give the best possible interpretations to what people are saying, but don't expect people to bend over backwards to tease out a good faith interpretation of such brief and dismissive comments. You reap what you sow.

You made a very contrarian statement (totally fine!) but left all the work to figure out what you meant up to the reader. Your response is full of as hominem (ironically what you're complaining about), and it still doesn't explain anything about your position

Talk about straw man!

Re. your handle: did you snag it from the Borges short story?

Yeah. I've read most of what he published. Even his poetry is great (El bisonte is one of my favorite poems).

Did you ever speak with someone out of tech about internet spying? I did, no normie gives a shit. This is 100% the will of the people. Just take the L for what it is and accept that this is democracy working as intended.

I never got the sense that real grown-ups, who knew history, believed any such "the internet will topple" twaddle. Carefully-delivered truths (think Voice of America) can annoy and mildly undermine totalitarian regimes. If you want to do more - well, in WWII, British and American bombers dropped vastly more high explosives than information leaflets on the Axis powers.

As long as an authoritative regime keeps these balanced against factions opposed to it, the regime can remain stable without popular support.

(Although doing so while running a functional and healthy economy is more difficult)

By the way there is nothing (no valuable resources) for outsiders to even get involved. Blame nobody but the Pakistani army for it's situation

This is a typical fear reaction. "Disinformation" threatens our democracies, so we need to give up X and Y and allow government access to our most private devices and information.

It is wrong of course. And if we would ask for an example of a case of disinformation that did threaten democracy, we can wait a long, long time.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/29/fbi-co...

The capitalist West was not 'totalitarian' only because up until recently, it was possible to condition or distract the public through the corporate-controlled media. When the people gained the means to share information and organize and the corporate media was not enough to keep them down anymore, the system showed its true nature and stomped down the Occupy movement on the pavement. Sure, they did not jail them for their 'free speech', but they fined tens of thousands of dollars each for 'trespassing on PUBLIC property', effectively bankrupting many students, working-class activists etc, and sending a message to everyone else who 'had ideas'.

Some say that 'Angloamerican democracies are flawed of course'. The above is not flawed. Americans say that neither their vote nor their opinion has any effect on policy (~70%+ on polls each) leaving aside the recent research that shows it to be so, and when they try to change anything, they get what was done to Occupy done to them. Its not democratic

And for those who think that there is more freedom in Europe:

https://www.democracynow.org/2024/4/16/germany_palestine#:~:....

You have freedom as long as you don't disturb the ruling class or go against the incumbent foreign policy.

It's NOT inevitable. Let's not be jaded. This law is terrible.

Being a racist and having racist beliefs is not a crime that should be punished by law. You'd be fully in the territory of thought crime at that point.

To my knowledge, Trump has not actually taken discriminatory actions nor proposed any legislature to systematically oppress people again.

the term racism is getting thrown around so much nowadays it hardly has any meaning anymore...

"If the bill becomes law, any company or individual that provides ANY service whatsoever may be forced to assist in NSA surveillance, as long as they have access to equipment on which communications are transmitted or stored—such as routers, servers, cell towers, etc."

We have the tech (and have had for some time) to prevent this happening. I don't know why some intrepid coder hasn't released an easy to deploy, self-hosted, p2p encrypted platform allowing limited sharing of files, comms, sites etc. I was involved in the development of something like this, and local government (AU) regulation made it untenable, but there are countries where this could be doable without repercussions.

The vast majority of traffic I care about on the internet is related to my close peers and friends. This could all be completely private. The intersections between other communities could be done with ACLs, the largely public stuff can still be hosted on servers.

The 2 main problems this faces are that it's adversarial to advertising and analysis, and that it doesn't involve payment to a 3rd party for hosting / processing. Both of these are positives in my view.

I tried this once. When I was almost ready to release something my government started to illegally persecute companies that provided privacy on the internet, and the heads of the Judiciary power started to comment that hiding your data is criminal.

Normally the Supreme Court as an institution works to keep the other branches in check, but it feels like we're in a new phase of the judicial branch, nowadays, at least from a 4th Amendment perspective.

They have: Freenet, I2P, Tor... none have ever really taken off, _because_ they can be used to circumvent government monitoring. At the end of the day, we'll submit to panopticon censorship because most of us _want_ panopticon censorship.

A long tail of features that users care about. Devs will ship 1/10th of the total package as free, open source and scratch their heads at why the users don't come to enjoy the freedom. As Steve Jobs said, "Design is how it works." And most of these solutions don't work for the average user.

This is a pretty big claim that I feel bears some explanation as to why you feel that way

I have to say this is not my experience at all. In fact I can say I've probably never met anybody who came to that conclusion.

In my experience, most people recognize that, yes, bad people should be caught, but also that widespread surveillance and erosion of privacy is both bad for them and society. The problem arises with the fact that people often have more pressing matters to them - such as feeding their family - so they don't have time or energy to worry about fighting the myriad systemic issues that is needed to fix things on the necessary societal level.

I do not blame people for this, and nor should you; all that does is antagonize people and increases their reticence about politics in general.

Sure, it might catch some instances, but at the expense of everyone's privacy?

Basically, the position comes down to: do you want to stop pedophiles, or do you want to make it easier for them to hide?

And yes, you can rationalize all day long about how that's not accurate and this and that, but then your arguing that most people are willing to sift through al the data instead of just going with something that at first glance seems reasonable.

As long as I can still post my lunch on Instagram and explain to LinkedIn how I organize my inbox, I don't mind if the NSA is watching.

If it prevented your ability to speak freely about (and with) the candidates who represent your's and many others' wishes in a democracy, leading you to fear, would it become important to you?

That's what it's being used for.

The way I see it, centralized surveillable services promise lucrative investment returns based on monetizing user data, which attracts capital from the everything bubble seeking anywhere to go, which pays for an overwhelming amount of advertising that fakes social proof. And now that users have been trained to wantonly trust web browsers and shy away from native software, and the surveillance industry business model has been proven out, the situation is quite sticky.

But if that fails, tech workarounds might be a lot better than nothing

How times have changed. Not for the best in that respect..

No, that is not why. Yes, they architect so they do not have visibility into much of the data, but not (primarily) because they want to protect their users. It's because they want to save costs spent on lawyers debating whether the subpoena is indeed applicable and lawful and doesn't invade constitutional right to privacy or violate some state or international law or even a third party EULA.

By shutting themselves out Apple weaponizes technology into some legalism that carves the right to privacy or freedom of speech into stone. That's great, but it doesn't magically solve all legal problems; it just makes sure it's not Apple's problem anymore.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

> Oh - and it's irrelevant for anyone who isn't a US citizen (it doesn't apply to visitors or overseas residents).

What country does this successfully? And making the bill of rights relevant to the entire world means violent adversaries are apparently not a concern.

Humans inherently care more about tangible past dangers repeating versus new potential dangers.

No, we aren't. And we haven't tried to ban end-to-end encryption. You're conflating the European political ruling class with regular European citizens. Our interests are mostly opposed, and we don't have a say on none of the shit they do. I get what you're trying to say, but until there's a popular vote held on any of those issues so we can blame general stupidity for how they are tackled, if at all, I'm blaming politicians.

If we're talking banning end-to-end encryption specifically, the general population is largely oblivious to it, or electronic privacy in general, or people wouldn't post like 90% of the stuff they put on Instagram.

I've watched a guy on YouTube discuss his experience buying a plot of land and building a house on it, and I think he straight up pointed out exactly where he lives, what car he drives and what not. No need to put effort into doxxing him, he did everything himself.

This might sound insane to you or me, but most people don't even think about it.

So if you seed couple articles and TV documentaries on how end-to-end encryption is bad because terrorists and pedophiles use it, and you as a law abiding citizen have nothing to fear, while not so carefully avoiding the other side of the coin, I think think the general population would vote for it.

This is all part of the freedom/privacy vs security balance discussion, which we don't have a good solution for.

Why is it insane? For example, my address is more or less public record one you know my name since I purchased a piece of property. Keeping your name hidden while being a public figure is hard. So you'd need to use a shell company to buy the land ahead of time. Normal for movie stars probably but not for someone on YouTube. The vast majority of people don't view their own name as highly sensitive information to never give out. They use it every day all the time.

The risk is that the YouTuber pisses of someone and they swat him or try to steal the land or some such. What that really comes down to however is that "knowing my address someone can do an illegal act on me with impunity." Most people would view that as a societal or government problem versus one they should personally tackle by perpetually hiding. Hiding might be a viable short term or stop gap solution but if it's a long term requirement then you're living in a dystopia which most people would prefer not to.

The exact same thing can be said about "the Americans". In both regions there are more than enough people that want surveillance and banning of encryption, it's not just "the politicians" (because, you know, "think of the children/terrorists").

Isn't the fact that they fail each time rather a sign that people don't want it, and are not happy with it?

In terms of terrorism, let's look at what France could do for the last almost 20 years:

> The ability of the government to establish “individual monitoring and surveillance measures” against individuals who present a “particularly serious” threat of terrorism.

> Police may access an individual's computer files without a warrant to prevent a terrorist act.

> Internet service providers and Internet cafes are required to retain login and connection data for one year and to provide this data to authorities if requested.

> Authorities may receive telephone and cell phone usage details, without the permission of a judge.

> Increased CCTV surveillance in public

> Identity checks, including on board international trains, are strengthened.

> The Prime Minister or a person qualified in the Interior Ministry may authorize listening devices to record conversations.

There's usually a police investigation, but ultimately it's a court that compels people to do things. The police can't issue subpoenas on their own.

A court is not the government. A court is the people (at least if it's an actual court, and not some fake pseudo-court).

That's a fine definition, but not the operative one in a discussion of the US NSA.

In the US, the government is the apparatus of state power. That includes legislative, judicial, and executive. Including police, court, schools run by the state (we call them public schools, but that's another term that likely means something else to you), parks deparments, municipal services (if not private businesses), etc.

Speaking of, I realize that I never really thought (enough) about it, it also matters to which one of these the various espionage and law enforcement organizations report to !