Meanwhile, so called "privacy watchdogs" are toothless.
Couple this with the idea that we soft-spy on our Allies and then trade that data for their spying on our people and yeah, wow.
If the data brokers sell data, then even if they didn't sell it to the government, they would sell it to "PR/Lobbying Firms" who lobby the government. They would sell it to "security contracting firms" who the government contracts with to, um, escort "aid" shipments to widows and orphans in places like Yemen or Colombia, or Nebraska. And so on and so forth.
The fundamental mistake was never about the government. The fundamental mistake was in allowing the data brokers to exist, collect, and sell the data in the first place.
The only ways these status quos change is when people hate the industry so much that being in bed with it threatens the reelection of the politicians and the legitimacy of the institutions can the tide shift.
It's so clear to me now that it was foolish to go after the government for what was, at root, a problem emanating from private industry practices. That was unimaginably dumb. It's clear the issue was obviously the private industry practices the whole time. Those practices are what we should have been trying to stamp out from the start.
I'm hoping that a historically overt, abusive administration will kick news orgs out of their default complacency - and that they'll take surveillance seriously again. For a time.
That said, I am sympathetic that mental bandwidth is a real issue ATM.
Additionally, the gradual removal of personal privacy, and the normalization of it, is another attack on a democratic pillar.
It really does seem like structural cracks are widening rapidly. I too hope that our current realities cause a sort of 'wake up' to occur in the minds of those whom are too busy, deep in "my team" politics or otherwise not concerned about what's going on right now.
Also, the current guy is not exactly that sharp, or improving with age, either. But age seems to no longer be of interest to the press.
At this point, the major party in power is doing all they can to undermine democracy and strip-mine the country for their own benefit and that of their few multi-billionaire sponsors.
The other party is attempting to herd a broad coalition of people to maintain democracy.
Yes, it is imperfect, and the country has fallen often far short of perfection through it's entire history.
That is no reason to set the perfect as the enemy of the good. Simply declaring "every form of government is (or all parties are) awful" is a cop-out, and the logical conclusion of that is a complete power vacuum which leads only to the population being ruled by rival gangs & fiefdoms.
No, you unconditionally need to stop both-siding. When you want to bring a broader issue in the spotlight, do bring the broader issue in the spot light. But when you feel you are inclined to throw in a bothsidism, which is a negative sum contribution to discourse, then the chance that you actually have an insight on the broader issue is quite small.
> Your guy lost, learn from your mistakes and carry on
As a bystander I can say on behalf of the ones that have been "othered" by means of political marketing, there is no guy. The pressing issue at play is the rule of law, separation of powers, due process, fair elections, and basic respect for human rights. If anyone feels they should continue to shout while waiving the merchandise of their favorite team, if anyone thinks this is the right moment to continue behaving like a spoiled hooligan, then they lose the aforementioned basic prerequisites of democracy, and with that, the democratic constitutional state.
So, your solution here is for people who think the current administration is particularly bad to either not complain or accept any whataboutisms you have?
Your ‘both administrations’ quip is a vacuous justification for the current administration’s actions. If this is the basis for your justification, then, regardless of the truth of your claim, you’d be inconsistent to then praise this specific administration for anything positive. Thus, outside of nihilist generalizations about the overall structure of the US, you can’t meaningfully contribute to this conversation. Without giving a positive justification for the administrations behavior, your contributions are ‘logical nonsense.’
I’d rather simply complain about the doublespeakers in office at the moment and say it is wrong to do so, and there is no ‘logical nonsense’ in that.
"The party not in power also has been doing similar things(in regards to the article) if not worse over the past couple of decades but lets completely ignore that, not criticize them at all, don't even bring it up and blame only the current admin because...<party currently in power is baddd>"
But to answer, you worry more about the guy waving a knife in your face than other people who have knives and may have waved them in your face in the past.
I'm curious what the worse one is. The Clipper Chip? Seems like a light pleasantry compared to what's happening now.
The GP comment was about both the specific "Flood The Zone" strategy promoted by an advisor to the current administration and the overall and absolutely unprecedented assault by this administration on democracy and the rule of law itself.
Yes, I made a reference to the historical fact that the ideals of American democracy have always been aspirational. That is NOT license to whataboutism or claims that "everyone does it".
In a democracy, all the branches of govt (exec, ligislative, judicial) and the institutions of society (press, industry, academy, finance, religion, sport, charity, orgs, etc.) are ALL independent, balance power throughout society, and work for its advancement as best they can.
Under authoritarianism or fascism, all those branches and institutions are coerced or corrupted to concentrate power and serve the executive.
Never in the history of this country has any administration even come within orders of magnitude of this regime's attempt to cut off democracy. They are abusing the power of the state to coerce an corrupt every single branch and institution they can, starting with the judiciary, lawyers, press, and academia.
If you have actually "won young", you should take your gift of time and freedom to learn some history. Particularly relevant are how democracies are converted to autocracies, and it did not just happen in Germany in the 1930s, it happened today in Russia (ya, short weak democracy, but it didn't have to go that way), Venezuela, Hungary, and more; and the current party in power is abdicating it's legislative responsibilities to try to make it happen here. You might think you are safe because of your privilege of wealth, but if they succeed in their efforts to kill the 14th amendment and Habeas Corpus, you are not. Again, history is a guide, and the bog-standard authoritarian playbook is being run in broad daylight and secret Signal chat groups.
You must have misspelled government waste. All of this was exposed by doge and trump and the first thing you did was start minimizing the damage, saying we waste way more in other places, and telling me that the world will end if these lazy wasteful socialist institutions get their fat lips yanked off the teat. I didn't believe your lies then and no matter how much you squeal I don't believe them now. Your whole party has perfected it's use of language control, redefining words, and catastrophizing everything. These aren't MSM viewers in here, you're not fooling anyone. Fix your party by delivering social improvements not just fantasizing and warning about the "end of democracy", and minimizing waste. Fear mongering is not helping your situation if you have any hope of your candidates ever winning again.
Do you believe the Musk's line that "40% of all calls to Social Security are fraudulent", or what he actually found after creating massive IN-efficiencies, both drastically worsening service AND costing more, that only 2 in 110,000 calls might have fraudulent indicators. [0]
The examples would go on for many pages.
And what institutions do you think are actually wasteful? All the scientific research that creates most of the advances that employ most people in this forum, medical research that saves lives every day, disaster recovery programs that restore distaster-hit economies to productivity more rapidly, initiatives to re-shore manufacturing to the US and build infrastructure for the next-generation economy, or just programs to ensure everyone actually has healthcare, or predict the weather so people can get severe storm warnings in real time instead of the next morning after their family got killed?
>>delivering social improvements OK, do you not consider workers' rights, 40-hour workweek standard, overtime pay, ending child labor (remember, 5-year-olds working was common) and building education programs and requirements kids stay in school, requiring a level of workplace safety actual social improvements? Because those were NOT brought by "conservatives", but by "liberals".
Without liberals fighting, and often dying, your life would 99% likely be born poor, to a mother who bore a dozen other siblings, you get no real education, start work in a factory by age 5, and you are lucky to survive to adulthood, as only 1-2 of your brothers and sisters make it. That was life 120 years ago before work standards, education, public health, and many other "liberal" innovations happened. Just got look at an old graveyard and notice the ages on the tombstones - they are overwhelmingly infants and children. And those are the ones wealthy enough to have marked graves.
But evidently, you think it is less "wasteful" to just let 85% of the humans born work from the age of 5, have nearly no education, and die before adulthood.
All this is reality, not some linguistic trick, and if all you have to deny reality is a claim that reality is some linguistic trick, you have a very weak argument.
>>aren't MSM viewers in here I'm no MSM viewer either, and if you think the MSM is "liberal" you are at least several decades out of date. Just look at the ownership, where 90% of the MSM and all local media outlets are owned by just six major corporations, who are all-in on promoting oligarchy.
[0] https://www.yahoo.com/news/doge-fraud-tracker-social-securit...
The President makes a direct threat to Apple, that specifically their products will be made in the US or he will put a 25% tariff on them
This is nothing resembling policy or democracy. This is straight-up autocracy — an autocratic leader with zero input, specifically ordering a single company to take specific actions or he will personally set penalties.
This is not language trickery. This is reality.
Let that settle in; our credibility is was built on growing inequality. Decades of austerity being cheered on behind closed doors to leave a left wing senator believing austerity politics, gentle eugenics is a model for the world.
The problem is not the parties. It’s the people in power.
Worked so far. But social media put everything up for scrutiny. The smart ones hide it. Trump doesn’t care cause no one will revolt with violence.
The truth requires understanding a lot of moving parts.
The lie is simple. We hate complexity (and long comments ;)
Some people they'll never convince, but they don't matter because they'd resist no matter what was proposed.
I mean look at Russia's invasion of Ukraine. It's a major logistical effort to invade a country. They amassed military forces all along the border. The whole time saying "nothing to worry about" and "if we were really going to invade we wouldn't be so obvious about it!" It was happening for months! (Starting in March!) Meanwhile lots of people, including news outlets, bought the lie. Everything was there plain as day, but it's easy to buy the lie. No one wanted to see war break out. Every day they didn't proved they were right too! Sure, plenty of people asserted that the attack would happen and time showed them correct. But that doesn't change how many misses there were nor did it actually stop the attack.[0] Being right didn't matter
But it's impossible to make an attack without telegraphing it. Same thing here.
[0] certainly all the military leaders responded appropriately. You don't take those risks, especially when so blatant. But that also doesn't mean they aren't going to lie through their teeth trying to prevent public panic. Not when there's the faintest of hopes that a war could be stopped before it happens. Again, you can see similarities
It did it; for two generations. The GI's and the Silents were the most civic minded generations we ever had. But those were our grandparents (or great grandparents) now, and living memory has finally faded. Here's hoping it doesn't take another Passchendaele or Hiroshima to reignite it.
And the mass buy-in resulted in the building of systems, creating of institutions and setting of precedents that were and are being used less than civic purposes. So unfortunately I'm not sure that's sustainable either.
Ever since the counter-culture movement of the 1960s, it's been cool to "stick it to the man", which unfortunately translates to anti-institutionalism too often. Tearing things down never yields a positive result when no good institutions exist or are created to fill the vacuum.
At that scale, it takes a lot of power, courage, and integrity for a leader to reform the institution. Power itself can be a corrupting influence when too much is vested onto a single person -- hence the necessity of integrity.
On the specific issue of internal surveillance and its abuses, that is laughable, given the way that accelerated after WWII, with no substantial attempt at checking it until some fairly limited reforms were adopted in the 1970s after the Nixon-era abuses, with those restrictions being fairly flagrantly ignored (and formally weakened) after 9/11.
You are literally talking about the founders of the surveillance state.
Spy agencies don't "rainmake" the American public, that just doesn't make any sense.
This was supposedly in the _charter_ of the department of homeland security. It was supposed to be the controller of all intelligence (all agencies to dump their databases together), from all the spy agencies to prevent the intentional use-case of employing jumbo jet planes as weapons of mass destruction. And forcing all cell phones of every design every where to have GPS. Seems a little bit slow.
Cell phones need some kind of accurate-enough (GPS is arguably overkill) self-locating ability, because the encryption properties of the modulation make passive transmitter location and ranging determination difficult: they need to know when to switch between cell towers (ENodeB).
Wiener functions are cool, and the RADAR applications were top secret during WW II.
Aside from that ENodeB uses GPS for timing. At the base station. In a way that does not require your phone to _also_ have GPS.
Want to do something about it? Come to the Billionaire's SummerCamp in Sun Valley, Idaho on July 6th, and complain to the rich parasites themselves.
Protest! Civil Disobedience! Justice!
Or just got back to watching YouTube and delude yourself into thinking it will fix itself.
joecool1029•8mo ago