Disclaimer - I'm Australian. There's something really weird about the contemporary Australian culture that's seems to be permitting increasingly authoritarian governance.
If think if you asked my grandparents what defined 'being Australian' it would be been belief in freedom, mateship and irreverence of authority.
In America, it's been a persistent psyop campaign under the guise of fighting terrorism for the last 20 years. Trading freedom for security. People are more and more conditioned that control and authority in their lives is there to keep them safe. Whether or not they consciously believe it, subconsciously these ideas still permeate our everyday lives and now we just sort of accept it. Governments and powerful people have, and always will, push these boundaries, since it's essentially the quest for power (control). I don't know what the solution is, because more or less I feel everyone is so divided (and in that sense, conquered). There's an undercurrent of distrust (albeit mostly aimed in the wrong directions) but it hasn't really boiled over enough yet. More and more I think this is just an inevitable outcome to where we are as a society. I'm not trying to doom and gloom but it feels like the writing is on the wall. These things have happened before. Seems to be human nature in that we tend to repeat the same mistakes and it looks like we're currently doing that now.
I can't find hard numbers on how many republicans/dems votes yes or no on it, but it passed 98-1 in the senate, and only 66 no votes in the house. Yes a lot of republicans in congress (probably all of them at the time) voted yes on it, but most democrats voted yes on it too.
Banning him was so unnecessary. The overwhelming majority though he is basically a nutjob and made fun of him for selling his man pills. Attempts to silence him almost made him a martyr. Everyone arguing he was or is a security threat should think about therapy and has now people against them that are concerned with the larger picture.
And the panic will continue because of that. More people will get banned. It isn't a fallacy to believe these things escalate.
Alex Jones was never right wing, but has continually been tarred with being so by anxious liberal mobs. He was really anti Bush, and across partisan lines has always been against anything that could be construed as authoritarian.
You've cherry picked an outlier. How many non-crazy conservative pundits or politicians can you name who opposed the Patriot Act, or the formation of Homeland Security, or the expanded powers given to cops and federal agencies? How many prominent conservatives spoke out in defense of Edward Snowden? Was it conservatives or liberals in the media who risked their lives and careers to organize and document the information he released?
During the Bush era, the opposition to the authoritarian trajectory of the war on terror was largely from liberals, although it was often strictly partisan. Conservative media completely fell in line with the Bush administration. I thought this would change when Obama was elected, but it didn't, and authoritarianism remained a driving force in conservative politics and media throughout Trump's presidency.
COVID-19 has brought some more conservatives onto the anti-authoritarian side for sure. But I'm not confident this is a durable change.
Count me in too. I can't stand erosion of society through identity politics and woke'ism. It's on the coverpage of the Economist this week (I am what they refer to as classical liberal): https://www.economist.com/weeklyedition/2021-09-04
Nah is a blanket response to the parent post of hyperbole and faux-objectivity.
His whole post was ridiculous; the GOP has always been just as, if not moreso ready to trade ANYTHING for "security" (security theater mostly), usually if there is a correlating premise of ensuring electoral results in their favor, which they usually beat the Dems over the head with as the "national security" party. With the last half decade of debacles under Trump, the "national security" moniker is arguably up for grabs, but the Dems are half-assed and flailing and the GOP is a viscous joke looking for a punchline (hence why I left the latter to go independent, since the former is a lousy home, even if they aren't a traitorous one).
Almost all the "left wing" continued on with the war on terror and upped the anty in some cases. Obama essentially doubled down on what Bush did and Biden sure didn't oppose it.
It might do you some good to go back and look at who supported all of it in the beginning. It certainly was not some right wing only endeavor. There were very few politicians opposed to any of it.
American authoritarians are generally partisan hypocrites – approving of authoritarianism by their own tribe, aghast at authoritarianism by the other tribe.
Plus a deluded belief that the authoritarian tools being handed to their ideological leaders will forever be in those hands and never used against them in the future by their ideological foes.
Yeah, that’s basically the same in Australia. The ones who claim to be small-Government free market types or pretend to be libertarians seem to be the most authoritarian of all…
For example, the ruling party has strong links into coal, oil and gas companies (big political donations going one way, much bigger grants and subsidies going the other). They cut subsidies for renewables because they “always let the market decide”, and now when older coal power stations are increasingly uneconomic they’re literally bringing in a forced subsidy to keep them going (sold as a “capacity payment” to “ensure reliability of the grid” - even though the clunkers are increasingly unreliable). It’s going to cost somewhere between $150 and $400 a year per-household on our power bills if they get it through.
Other things are like trying to come up with some kind of way to fine or sanction banks who refuse to lend to fossil fuel companies, or stop activist investors trying to force companies to go green. This is all by the side of politics who claim the utmost commitment to free markets and small Government! Same party pushing all these authoritarian surveillance laws too…
It's really easy to take a both-sides stance here, but the last presidency (ending in that same president causing an insurrection attempt at our capital) shows that one side is clearly more dedicated to authoritarianism than the other - socially, politically, and legally.
People really seem to be hung up on equivocating a sitting president attempting to overturn an election with people on twitter saying mean things.
TBF the Obama administration set some nasty precedents internally (whistleblower prosecutions under espionage act) and externally (assassinations), plus plenty of similar precedents set by previous administrations both D and R
I don't consider my framing to be a "both-sides" false equivalency — I simply did omitted labels, because I felt that was rhetorically stronger. The framing is entirely compatible with the possibility that one side exhibits much more severe authoritarian tendencies than the other.
It's more painful and fear-inducing to lose something you have, so the more you have the stronger the allure of laws that are sold as reducing your risk of loss.
Coupled with rising inequality and pressure on the working class.
The distance between rich and poor is now so big, both in economic and cultural terms, that anyone with even a modicum of wealth is obsessed with "not becoming one of Them", and will accept any rule as long as "it keeps Them in their place".
> I don't know why that is, or if it's more or less common now.
Curious if we saw a similar trend in pre-WWII America. The point being, maybe banding together and tolerating more-authoritarian tendencies is a natural human response to perceived threat. For Australia, this comes from China. For America...I don't know.
Yes, obviously. We interned Japanese-Americans during WWII. During the Civil War, habeas corpus was suspended.
There's the PATRIOT Act for GWOT, but a lot of people don't seem to realize it didn't actually give law enforcement new powers. It extended powers they already had for drug and organized crime cases and let them apply to terrorism cases. We had already accepted an erosion of due process and civil liberties in order to defeat the Mafia and fight the War on Drugs.
This absolutely happens as a response to the perception of threat.
In fairness, it's not always clear this is universally wrong. The only reason the US has a federal government and a permanent standing military at all, which were not always givens, is in response to the threat that European colonial powers would have retaken all the land if we didn't, and this was probably a correct assessment.
I think it's one thing to have these measures during an actual hot war with the destiny of the world in the balance or during a declaration of martial law. But WTF, when we're otherwise enjoying peace as never before?
It is tragic how we seem to be unable to enjoy peace and prosperity. Blame it on politics, or the media, or perhaps just the national character, but Americans are a restless bunch. Prone to paranoia and rebellion, our reflex is to respond aggressively to perceived threats, and we can be tricked into rattling our sabres over any old thing these days.
Maybe rising authoritarianism is simply the natural outgrowth of overusing this impulse. The population, exhausted by the constant blaring of sirens over increasingly esoteric threats, would rather hand over the task of vigilance to some authority so they can finally catch some shut-eye.
I don’t think it’s just Americans. I think it’s a natural human reaction.
We always need high level stress in my opinion. We need to always have a little bit of “it’s bad” in our life to set our priorities. Being comfortable for more than a few months is the absolute worst thing that you can ever do to yourself.
People who have time on their hands at home watch their neighbors and become Karens because they don’t have anything important to deal with.
People who don’t have an existential threat of world wars and a small country taking over the world don’t think it’s worthwhile to guard against that. (Not that I want a world war.)
They say you don’t know good until you’ve had it’s bad and I think that’s so true.
technically, "we" (as in, the US as a whole) didn't intern Japanese-Americans, only the specific states of California, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Arkansas. this is a distinction that I was not taught in school and only learned relatively recently.
The definition of "authoritarian ideas" has recently inflated to meaninglessness. Depending on who you talk to, authoritarian includes basically anything that isn't total anarchy. Whenever the government puts any constraint at all on what you can do or can't do, there's someone who disagrees and will (now) call it authoritarian overreach. The word is so overused now, it's getting hard to take it seriously. That and "tyranny". Whenever the government does anything you don't like anymore, it's tyranny. These words which used to describe significant problems have been watered down and are now being used to describe mask mandates and high taxes.
I'm not sure it's an "issue". People just think differently. I'm Canadian and I'm probably way more comfortable with what would be described as authoritarian ideologies than you folks. I'm relatively well educated, I'm not ignorant to history etc etc - but there are aspects of authoritarian ideas that I don't outright object to, central planning per the CPC, as one example. I have a lot of reasons, and I've thought about this deeply over years, I don't particularly care to write an essay on my views for this thread as it's not really the point, the point is people can just think differently, have a different perspective on these things without a direct reason.
This comment bothers me. It's points are: (1) People think differently. (2) Authoritarian ideologies have some good aspects, like central planning. (3) I am smart and my ideas well thought out. (4) I will not participate in a detailed discussion. Have I missed any?
The first two points are fine, obvious even. Although they are not a satisfying answers to the questions "Why are authoritarian ideologies becoming more popular?" These answers seem equivalent to answering a physics question with "we live in a strange world" and then just leaving it at that.
The latter 2 points are bothersome. I much prefer the default "social contract" implied by most messages: "These are my thoughts. I welcome further thoughts or counter arguments. I may or may not participate in further discussion." That goes without saying and seems much nicer than "I'm smart and my arguments are sound, but don't expect further discussion, see ya".
There's an interesting discussion to be had around point 2 and the pros and cons of different ideologies. All of that was buried beneath points 3 and 4, asserting your intelligence and discouraging further discussion.
I agree, was a hurried comment on the way out the door to the office, my bad. I read OP as basically saying authoritarianism is wrong. What I was trying to say is, the world is a complex place, reasonable people can disagree. I wasn't trying to say I'm particularly smart, only that I don't think I'm totally ignorant, and also that I realize that it's complex and there is further discussion to be had (although it's not for me).
In an Australian context at least, COVID has absolutely nothing to do with this. The Federal Government in Australia has passed more surveillance and ostensibly “anti-terrorism” laws (funnily enough they’re mostly used on whistleblowers) since 9/11 than any other country, despite basically never having a “real” terrorist attack on our soil. The laws started getting worse and the bills more frequent when a certain politician was given a cabinet portfolio with massive power a few years pre-COVID (Home Affairs, a cobbled together super-department with little oversight that is incompetently run).
On the other hand, COVID related restrictions are directives that only have authority all under a temporary declared ‘state of emergency’ in each state, by the State Governments. They literally have no on-going effect once those state of emergencies end, unlike the 86 or so permanent surveillance/ “anti-terror” laws the Federal Governments have passed over the last 20 years (which is why I’m really hoping to get the opposition into minority Government next election so the minor parties can push for repeals and reworking of the whole mess).
Temporary states of emergency have a way of becoming permanent. In the US we are currently under 38 active states of emergency, one of which goes back to 1979.
As long as the risk is limited to downvotes, shadowbans and similar virtual punishments the actual risk is zero - which makes me wonder why there is so little dissent in cases where seems to be a clear need.
I live in Sweden where nobody wears masks. We have not been locked down in any real sense. Primary schools have not been closed, some high schools were but this was mostly left to the schools themselves. Those who want to be vaccinated can get vaccinated, most adults are (myself included). Most children are not vaccinated, they go to school, catch SARS2 and... nothing happens. Not a single teacher was infected in either of my daughter's schools during the whole time.
Why can we live mostly normal lives while you seem to be unable to do so? What is the difference between Sweden and wherever it is you live?
Also, what happened to personal choice and personal responsibility? By now it is clear that the vaccines do not seem to prevent you from infecting others so the argument for getting vaccinated so as not to infect others has been made moot. This leaves masks - which have been proven (yes, proven) not to work unless N95 or better types are used and crowding avoidance. In other words, get vaccinated to avoid personal risk of a severe infection. If you decide not to get vaccinated for whatever reason you'll have to accept the possibility of a more severe infection. Keep your distance from others if you want, do not force yourself upon others who have not made clear to be OK with it. All of these are personal choices which you'll just have to accept if you want to continue living in a free society. It sounds like you are willing to give up those freedoms for a misplaced sense of protection?
In 1775 Benjamin Franklin had the following to say: ‘They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.’. He seems to have said it in the context of some people considering a compromise with the Crown over the stationing of British troops in the colonies. His stance was that giving in to these demands would mean the end of any real hope of freedom.
On the efficacy of surgical (i.e. non-N95/KN95) masks a Danish randomised control study covering 6000 participants, half of whom got 50 disposable surgical masks each and were told to change them after 8 hours of use did not show a significant difference in infection rate (between-group difference was −0.3 percentage point (95% CI, −1.2 to 0.4 percentage point; P = 0.38), 95% CIs compatible with a 46% reduction to a 23% increase in infection). There is a long discussion on CIDRAP [2] triggered by Michael Osterholm's statements on the gap between the perceived and actual efficacy and the downsides of an over-reliance on their protective effect.
On the efficacy of vaccination as a means to slow the infection rate there are several sources, once of which [3] was discussed on this site [4] recently. With regard to the "delta"/"Indian" variant the Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA vaccine offers 43% protection against infection while the Moderna "Spikevax" mRNA vaccine offers 76% protection [5].
Maybe I am wrong about your willingness to give up freedom, this is the impression I get from your approach to those who dare to dissent. When it comes to freedom of speech it is exactly the type of speech which goes against the common narrative (while staying within the bounds of legality) which should be protected [6].
Interesting on the masks, the research I had seen on different materials showed that while some materials (fleece) could actually increase spread of exhaled droplets, others could decrease the spread. Particularly three-layers of cloth, one of cotton and two of either silk of chiffon, could create both a physical and electrostatic barrier and be on a par with N95 masks. It does look like mask are over-relied upon, yes, and they do seem to get clung to like some sort of talisman by various governments. That said, it also looks like your research really just rules out the medical style masks from having much effect, which is hardly surprising having worn them - they don't give much of a seal or seem to filter much.
> the Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA vaccine offers 43% protection against infection while the Moderna "Spikevax" mRNA vaccine offers 76% protection
So while the vaccines may not cut transmission among people who get infected while vaccinated, they still massively cut the spread by cutting down on the number of those infections that happen in the first place, even with the delta variant. So vaccination is still a public health measure and not merely a personal choice.
> Maybe I am wrong about your willingness to give up freedom, this is the impression I get from your approach to those who dare to dissent.
My approach that I explicitly said was great we have the right to dissent, but should choose where when to use it? The same damned approach you espouse when you say things like - "do not force yourself upon others who have not made clear to be OK with it" ?
Yes, free speech should be protected, that doesn't mean I can call my mum a the C word and be free from her being offended, because muh freedom of speech. Free speech and freedom to dissent doesn't mean that dissent on covid vaccination is a virtue. It means that that speech doesn't get punished. You can be on the right side of the law and still be doing the absolute wrong thing. Dissent for its own sake is childish, especially where it causes harm, not something to praise. Which is what I was replying to - the assertion that dissent is a virtue.
Not in all circumstances it isn't. Not purely as a kneejerk.
> My approach that I explicitly said was great we have the right to dissent, but should choose where when to use it?
Yes...
> Yes, free speech should be protected, that doesn't mean I can call my mum a the C word and be free from her being offended,
...but the government is not your mum. Also...
> because muh freedom of speech.
...most of the dissent I see does not come from people who speak like that - this is not a dispute between "uneducated rubes" and "enlightened followers of The Science™", nor is it clear which of the positions leads to the best overall results. From what I gather comparing the outcomes in places with severe restrictions - The UK, New Jersey, New York and California come to mind - with those where the approach is more based on personal responsibility - Sweden and Florida are two examples - there is no clear "winner" [1,2]: the UK has a higher death rate than Sweden, New Jersey has the highest death rate in the USA, Florida and California are comparable while Florida has a much older population and as such would be expected to rank higher.
The core of the dispute is whether people can be trusted to look after themselves or whether they need some authority figure to tell them how to behave. Given access to means of protection - vaccines, behavioural changes, PPE - the results seem to show that there is no significant difference in disease-related outcomes between the former and the latter while the former retain a larger amount of freedom compared to the latter. As to whether this larger sense of freedom translates in a higher trust in authorities is unclear, at least here in Sweden where the rather soft-handed approach is often portrayed as being due to incompetence and lack of direction. Something which is clear is that places which are or have been under severe lockdown will suffer in other ways with children who have not seen their friends for months, small businesses which have been forced into bankruptcy while behemoths like Amazon thrive, social cohesion taking a hit due to the fact that people are starting to see others as sources of infection first, people second, substance abuse increasing, lack of exercise due to restrictions leading to worse health which directly increases the severity of any SARS2-infection, etcetera - the list is far longer than can be discussed here.
Suffice to say that - when regarding liberal western societies - I see the authoritarian approach as the wrong approach which will end up doing more damage to society while not significantly reducing the impact of SARS2.
I’m just going to leave you to it. You have some weird ideas about vaccines and I’m not sure who you’re arguing about authoritarianism with, but it’s not with me.
But you go for it, you beat the shit out of that straw man.
Not just yet. May I ask which country you reside in to get an idea of your frame of reference? Is it a country which is in the process of making vaccination mandatory, either directly or through a vaccine passport which will be needed to participate in society?
Also, what are those weird ideas about vaccines I am supposed to have? I see nothing weird in what I described in the previous posts, just a summation of data from what I assume to be reputable sources. Wherein lies the weirdness?
Being vaccinated and wearing a mask, both of which are scientifically corroborated actions in the midst of a global pandemic, are not politics or toeing party lines or any other insinuation you're trying to make.
But that's what they've been made into. Vaccines, like everything else in the American news cycle, are a point of division. Once you see the news/media is peddling fear-porn for the express purpose of dividing the American people it is rather hard to unsee.
> wearing a mask,[...] which [is] scientifically corroborated actions in the midst of a global pandemic
Sure, it supposedly is, but there is also evidence saying it's bad. [1]
As for vaccination, it should be a risk-based analysis, but instead, we are simply told to get it, no exceptions. That doesn't sound very scientific to me.
Fear, thinking that authoritarianism won't ever hurt them, groupthink, human desire to fit in with the zeitgeist. I honestly don't know but I've had lots of debates with people about forced vaccination (I'm vaccinated myself) and I didn't realize how big the threat of authoritarianism was in the US until I did.
> I find in America too I run into people who are casually ok with authoritarian ideas.
If you are an IT professional, and earning 100k+ a years, there is no wonder you didn't meet much of these before. There is simply not a lot of opportunity for social classes to cross in daily life today.
We, rich people, learned it the hard way in Russia 20 years ago.
I really believe the West needs to learn from how the early modern Russia unravelled, and how it came to 1991 being undone through effectively a democratic process.
There's this really pervasive notion from people on the left that those who vote conservative/republican must have an irrational reason for doing so. My guess is, they have internalized the notion that their worldview is so just and logically sound that the only rationale for someone to oppose it is because they are mislead by Fox News, Russian disinfo, conspiracy nuts, emotions, or just plain spite (owning the libs).
I think it always was a "my team" thing. It is just that the "conservative team" of the past had "anti-authoritarianism" as one of the team virtues, even if it was hypocritical at times. There is a still a vague notion of freedom, but there is not an intellectual anchor for what that means relative to other objectives, like some Buckley-esque defense of free-enterprise vs the USSR.
The principled intellectual wing of the US conservative movement has virtually disappeared. Even those who disagreed with their positions should lament this as a net loss for society as a whole.
>The principled intellectual wing of the US conservative movement has virtually disappeared.
I see similar on the left. You see a lot of people who had good things to say marginalized because they pushed back against the current populism or people who should know better embracing it so save their own hide (my senator being one of the latter).
Anti-intellectualism is part of populism, I would guess, and currently the Republican Party has been overrun with populists. There are certainly never trumpers talking about the older conservative values, but they are in the minority.
I too see rich people with fascist streak in them, if not a full on fascination with fascism. But those I group as rich idiots, vs angry idiots which which are actually dangerous, and will go and do NSDAP 2.0 once they can.
Second to it, is the reality on the ground is that the latter outnumber the former tens of times over.
Huh? It’s typically the educated elite calling for authoritarian policies. Just like most (not all) authoritarian systems. They are run by the elite educated in the prestigious universities of Europe and America.
Sure, but the recent turn to Populism, is that strange beast of elites pointing out the evils of some other class of elites to garner support. Bolsonaro, Babis, Borisov, Trump and others didn't come to power because they coopted the existing elite infrastructure, but because they tapped into discontent.
The story of populism has always been the same though.
One of the elites who is on the outs or doesnt have a path forward uses it as a tool to grab power for themselves, then uses that power to do what elites always do.
It's pretty much NEVER that one of the lower classes is the one that rise up and gain power via populism. Even Stalin would be "Elite" in that he went to Seminary.
Not that I agree with this but we have a massive problem with trolls, shills, agitators, and foreign intelligence running hog wild because they are anonymous online.
Freedom of speech and anonymity is being weaponized and used against the west.
"Freedom of speech and anonymity is being weaponized" that is always the argument against freedom of speech. There is nothing new there.
I think the trolls, shills and agitators are a symptom of dysfunction rather than the cause. And I think the idea that more authoritarian states are stronger/more stable/better because they don't suffer this is deeply misguided.
In the United States, our political class is deeply and fundamentally unserious. Our legislators seem uninterest in legislating and in general seem to believe that their main job is re-election, and not the work they were elected to do.
>I think the trolls, shills and agitators are a symptom of dysfunction rather than the cause. And I think the idea that more authoritarian states are stronger/more stable/better because they don't suffer this is deeply misguided.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but if 'the west' has a coherent set of moral principles at all they are probably inextricable with the idea that more authoritarian states are more brittle/more stagnant/worse. Even if it's true that free speech is being used against 'the West', turning our back on it in response would mean there's nothing there to defend.
> Our legislators seem uninterest in legislating and in general seem to believe that their main job is re-election, and not the work they were elected to do.
Going to attempt a fix
Our legislators seem uninterest in legislating and in general seem to believe that their main job is re-education, and not the work they were elected to do.
At least in the US we do seem to be electing a lot of folks who appear to be grifters riding on the mob, rather than statesmen with any kind of coherent political philosophy or policy suggestions. It wouldn’t surprise me that this is just the extension of social media into government. It’s getting hard for me to see anything good coming out of social media.
> "Freedom of speech and anonymity is being weaponized" that is always the argument against freedom of speech. There is nothing new there.
Indeed, "Let them eat cake." is the most famous thing Marie Antoinette never said, judging by the various anonymous and pseudonymous pamphlets and other printings that popularised during her time that and many other slanderous or otherwise hurtful remarks.
(( And no, I'm not saying a police state or anarchy would be an appropriate outcome. ))
> "Freedom of speech and anonymity is being weaponized" that is always the argument against freedom of speech. There is nothing new there.
To quote chief Nazi propagandist Goebbels from 1928:
We enter the Reichstag to arm ourselves with democracy’s weapons. If democracy is foolish enough to give us free railway passes and salaries, that is its problem… We are coming neither as friends or neutrals. We come as enemies! As the wolf attacks the sheep, so come we.
The modern-day far right is following exactly the same almost-100-years-old playbook, and there are still people who don't recognize that we are letting history repeat itself. What would your (great-)grandparents have thought if you told them that there would be open marches of swastika flag-bearing people in the US?
> What would your (great-)grandparents have thought if you told them that there would be open marches of swastika flag-bearing people in the US?
That happened to a far greater degree in the 1930s. There is nothing comparable today. Formal, large, organized groups representing literal fascism and communism were present in the US back then. Those great-grandparents were certainly aware of it. The US is a large and diverse nation - formed of the world's peoples in many regards - and you're allowed to follow almost any ideology you choose. That means extreme, violent statist-type elements - socialist, fascist, communist, theocratic, et al. - will never cease to be present.
Is that a real problem? Foreign intelligence services are certainly doing a lot of crap online but it's not clear whether they've actually accomplished anything. Maybe they're just wasting resources?
Humans fundamentally need some out-group to blame all their in-group's problems on. Now that overt racism against another racial group within your own society has mostly fallen out of fashion at least in "the West", foreign intelligence becomes the easiest target to pin blame on.
Seems to me they've accomplished quite a lot. I think you are assuming their idea of a goal matches your idea of an accomplishment (get a law supporting X passed/repealed). It isn't.
Their goal is to make our system dysfunctional by destroying people's trust in the information presented them.
> Foreign intelligence services are certainly doing a lot of crap online but it's not clear whether they've actually accomplished anything.
Isn't this just the ol' "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" problem? Hundreds of years of ago we couldn't see germs with a microscope doesn't mean they weren't effective in our lives.
> we couldn't see germs with a microscope doesn't mean they weren't effective in our lives.
And because we couldn’t see them we misattributed their effects and treated people with bloodletting.
Confidently declaring your understanding of an unseen enemy and applying seemingly-appropriate countermeasures is likely to be harmful.
> The media multiplier effect can, at times, create disinformation storms with potentially dangerous effects for those Russia perceives as adversaries at the international, national, and local level. In the past, Russia has leveraged this dynamic to shield itself from criticism for its involvement in malign activity. This approach also allows Russia to be opportunistic, such as with COVID-19, where it has used the global pandemic as a hook to push longstanding disinformation and propaganda narratives.
> A key element of Moscow's strategy this election cycle was its use of proxies linked to Russian intelligence to push influence narratives- including misleading or unsubstantiated allegations against president Biden- to US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump and his administration.
> Throughout the election cycle, Russia's online influence actors sought to affect US public perceptions of the candidates, as well as advance Moscow's long-standing goals of undermining confidence in US election processes and increasing sociopolitical divisions among the American people.
Most of our own CIA's efforts have resulted in abject failure. They failed to properly predict or influence most of the major world events for decades now (disintegration of the USSR, Balkan wars, 9/11 attacks, increased authoritarianism in China, rise of ISIL, collapse of Afghan government, etc). And yet we keep increasing their funding. Well maybe if we give them another billion they'll eventually get it right?
Government resource allocation is seldom based on a rational cost / benefit analysis.
We're supposed to believe that these tiny FB campaigns are actually outcompeting the tsunami of "buy this junk" ads, and the actual political misinformation campaigns put out by the Uniparty?
> Throughout the election cycle, Russia's online influence actors sought to affect US public perceptions of the candidates, as well as advance Moscow's long-standing goals of undermining confidence in US election processes and increasing sociopolitical divisions among the American people.
The confidence undermining was all a local issue; Russia had nothing to do with it.
This isn't new. The USSR was doing this in various mediums from it's founding in the 1920s to when it became defunct. Returning to the Red Scare and the equivalent of the Hollywood Blacklist for current authoritarian sympathizers/cronies is not the way to battle this issue.
This is getting off topic. Foreign intelligence is just one party. I was also thinking of every fake review on Amazon or products endorsed by shills on reddit. These problems all stem from anonymity.
Amazon already knows, more or less, the real identity of someone leaving the review. They have information such as a postal address, credit card number and IP address. Whether that person goes by the name Bob or Sally or Anonymous really doesn't matter to anyone. Perhaps it really is Bob leaving the review, but he's accepted a "promotional offer" from the seller to be refunded or provided additional product(s) in return for a winknudge honest review?[1] Or perhaps it really is Sally and she works for a competitor and has given it a 1 star review because she weights the colour choice of the product packaging extremely highly, and she hates the colour chosen.
If you were buying a microwave oven via Amazon, you could take a gamble and trust Amazon product reviews by people you don't know or have any real reason to trust. Or you could pay an independent party to review it on your behalf[2][3]. Or you could look for a random reviewer on YouTube that receives free samples from manufacturers and compares multiple models side by side, careful to only highlight positives of each product. In any of these cases, the real identity of the reviewers is largely irrelevant. The YouTube reviewer could be wearing a clown suit and go by the name 'SillyClown123' and the review could be far more trustworthy and helpful than other types of review. What you actually want to know, and may not be able to determine, is the motivations for conducting the review, whether the reviewer has manipulated and narrowed (possibly inadvertently) the field of products compared and whether their criteria and weightings for review align with your own expectations.
Why do you think that stems from anonymity? People are happy to promote pyramid schemes on Facebook under their real name; why do you think any other product endorsement is different?
But you then ignore the problems created by stripping the anonymity away, especially in the political sphere. Just like multitudes of writers/actors/directors had to either hide their political beliefs or just not get hired due to their political beliefs in Hollywood (though, ironically, that is happening now, along different axes.)
The problems you've described are very minor relative to how much more difficult dissent and whistle-blowing become if your statements can be connected to your true identity basically everywhere.
"Better Amazon reviews" and "fewer Reddit shills" aren't worth much.
> I'm not suggesting stripping anonymity or free speech, I'm just pointing out the problem with anonymity online.
In the context of an article about removing anonymity, I don't think it's possible to set "removing anonymity" aside.
I agree; and it's necessary to distinguish anonymity from privacy. Anonymity removes any accountability, and if you add privacy to that then you tend to get the worst of people.
Privacy, however, is something that needs to be strongly enforced, and that means you have complete control of what personal and private information and communication is available to third parties. Anonymity and Privacy are necessary in places (journalists, dissidents, etc), but many people tend to think of anonymity and privacy as one in the same.
Social media with anonymity allows bad actors to masquerade as whomever they want, say anything without recourse or accountability, and social engineer people at large scales. The issue is that we tend to trust people, and if those people are foreign disinformation agents then we end up with the division we have today. Social media should be private - complete ownership of your data and audience - but it should not be anonymous.
I like anonymity and wouldn't trust a platform to identify me. I take the disadvantages that come with that. With a lot of effort you could identify me in person, but I like this effort to stay. Even intelligence service members spied on their girlfriends. A human flaw. Better to keep anonymity to the largest degree possible.
People that call for accountability are modern witch hunters in my opinion. The try to put blame on people that are probably not responsible for perceived ills.
I am pretty aware of the difference between anonymity and privacy and there is a strong correlation in many cases.
>Not that I agree with this but we have a massive problem with trolls, shills, agitators, and foreign intelligence running hog wild because they are anonymous online.
If you are subjected to propaganda, chances are high it is from your own government or companies operating on the domestic market.
The net certainly increased possibilities for foreign actors to reach domestic audiences, but claims of such cases are vastly exaggerated in my opinion.
That said, troll, shills, agitators and propagandists might have a good understanding of peoples fears and desires and will use that against you. More effective the more you know about the target. This is why surveillance is dangerous.
We've been hearing this claim since the 2016 election, and I am pretty sure these people/efforts exist, but it's still unclear to me what they've actually achieved.
Do you have a good source explaining concretely how a handful of people, even sponsored by enemy states, can cause such harm? It's hard to imagine that they would have such influence without the general population being more than receptive to it.
An 'authoritarian' company, that has to follow labor, trade, civil laws made by the actual government. That I can 'emigrate' from whenever I want without having to learn a new language...
You can change employers but you can't (practically for most people) change your government. That's the big difference and why the comparison isn't very useful.
I have worked with Canadians for a while, but the past 2-3 years they seem to be more controlling/authoritarian even in the corporate structure. I am in the US, and I am more "here is the outcome we need, achieve that how you like". I think the Canadians I worked with used to be the same way, but now they seem to be more "it needs to be done one way, everywhere, with oversight".
With a global company there are local differences in culture, laws, and priority so the "one way" seems to be a poor fit.
I'm Canadian, have lived all over this country, as well as in the USA, as well as working with Americans for 15+ years. I don't see any recent change in the behaviour of the people I interact with - from either side of the border.
Those over-generalizations of yours don't match my experience in any way. I'm not sure where that perception is coming from, but I see none of that. I think you're drawing correlations from too little data here.
I have seen major changes in politics however, especially as it relates to the progressive left. Perhaps you're seeing a different shift at play.
The "common good" is one of the most fundamental elements of the Canadian perspective and there has never been such a focus on "freedom of speech".
Gun rights, speech rights, etc, all are weighed against the common good at every juncture. Hate speech has never been considered a personal right in Canada.
Common good strikes me as even more nebulous than most other political concepts, especially in absence of direct democracy which could at least shed some light on what the population really prefers.
Not to insult anyone and much less Canadians, but I can see Ghaddafi or Khmer Rouge using this expression to justify whatever they decided to do.
This is what exactly happened. The common good was applied. Today we are making similiar mistakes that future leaders will say sorry for in the future.
There certainly is a focus on freedom of speech, and it's in our charter of rights and freedoms as one of the fundamental freedoms: "freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication".
You're right that we do have a different balance of the common good vs individual liberties as compared to the USA, but of course there are many countries that one could compare to.
Canada certainly doesn't abide by free-speech absolutism, and "hate speech" is a good example. That term used to be applied to very specific, extreme examples. Unfortunately that has been watered down in recent years, and we've seen encroachment in others ways on various freedoms. Not Australia levels, but not great.
All those rights are weighed against a non specific nebulous common good that can mean whatever it needs to mean at that moment to allow activist judges or the government of the day to get what they want.
Freedom of speech would serve Canada better in the long run than censorship and government control of speech
I think the specific case of Australia can be explained like this: If, for example, an arbitrary country in Europe (EU or non-EU) would do things like this, people would consider moving to another country. There would be pressure from neighboring countries, since inter-country trade and commuters would be affected. (Also, the whole EU thing makes it harder for any one country to change too much.)
Australia, on the other hand, can do whatever they feel like, and people who live there have no real recourse. They have, if you will, a monopoly on government.
I lived in Australia 10 years ago. It wasn't like that then. What it meant to be Australian did seem to be troubling the national psyche moreso than in most places, but the authoritarian streak absolutely was not there.
Young and old, irreverence was strong and frequently demonstrated, even towards people's own groups and circles.
On a good day, you could earn an approving glance from an old ANZAC in uniform with a fart joke, if the ceremony wass going overtime.
I think there’s a huge complacency. For the most part you really need to look hard to know this is at all going on - most of these laws over the last few years have been rushed through in record time to avoid scrutiny, and the media is increasingly captured by the Liberal National Party - it used to just be the News Corp, Sky News side, but over the last couple of years they’ve completely cowed the ABC into compliance by forcing out many of the better journalists, and Fairfax has diminished greatly since being bought by Nine (Peter Costello is the chairman and they literally run LNP fundraising events at Nine studios…).
> something really weird about the contemporary Australian culture that's seems to be permitting increasingly authoritarian governance.
Netflix and Uber Eats. Long, long ago that used to be called 'panem et circenses'... Oh, and Facebook/Twitter. Let's not forget circuses imply cheering from the crowd.
Based on my experience working with Australians - I have to agree. It was quite the adjustment to talk to people who wholly seemed not have a problem with lacking fundamental rights and freedoms. "For the greater good!"
It's easy to see why they all have Stockholm Syndrome in relation to the absolute draconian lockdowns.
The issue is always - by the time they get around to YOU it's too late to complain that the law doesn't protect individual rights.
As a Kiwi I've frequently interacted with Australians and must've taken close to a dozen trips across the ditch. I've tended to view Australians as being somewhat similar which makes reading headlines like this rather jarring. What have I been missing here?
Very few people know about most of these laws. I’m actually really surprised to see this from a mainstream news source. In general, the Government and the media increasingly hand in hand to control the narratives, keep people distracted from things they don’t want them to know about, and focused on what they want them focused on.
I do get it, people have lives, they’re busy, it’s “out of sight, out of mind”. None of this is in the news. But it’s really quite distressing to see the manipulation working so well and society unknowingly being taken the direction it is.
I mean, it's definitely not reasonable to say that Fox etc are solely responsible, but I do think Fox has an under-investigated causal role in national/global politics.
I also really like Matt Taibbi's "Hate Inc" hypothesis, which is basically that consensual reality is no longer the business model employed by news organizations to get viewers, its more like contempt and fear of the other. It does strike me that Fox pioneered that, although it seems like the rest of the media apparatus has hopped on board.
Structures like churches and local communities have crumbled away, and parents and family have to work so much that the state via schools do a lot of child raising these days. (there are tons of kids who are with the state from 9am to 5 to 6pm, however late after school will take them), then there parent has to give them to grandma or babysitter on the weekend to work some more. People's guiding authority in their life has become the state.
It’s a big part of the way information is “managed”. Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd (who was on the receiving end of character assassination campaigns for years from them) talks very well on this nowadays, describing it as a “protection racket for the LNP”.
But it’s not just News Ltd anymore. Fairfax has devolved since Nine bought them out, and the ABC is a shell of what it once was. Just look at what happened to Nick Ross for reporting the truth about the NBN, or Emma Albericie for reporting on tax cuts in a way the Government didn’t like. They were basically forced out. Then all the budget cuts leading to redundancies of many of the good voices. There are still a few gems, but the ABC is mostly in a “report in a way we like or it’s more budget cuts” position and are mostly toeing the line.
Very interesting to contrast which political parties in the west are pushing for these things against where fingers are being pointed in much of this thread.
This seeks accurate. The rise of totalitarianism and fascism worldwide seems to largely be the responsibility of Murdoch, Putin, and some American billionaires (among others, I’m sure). For Australia, though, it seems that Murdoch’s fascist influence outweighs all others.
"The Australian Government is planning" is possibly a wee exaggeration. It was one of 88 recommendations from a federal government committee investigating "federal parliament inquiry into family, domestic and sexual violence" [0]
> prevent people from setting up anonymous accounts, and make them liable for defamation suits or even criminal prosecution for menacing messages or harassment.
It's true this could be yet another authoritarian push from a committee chaired by the LNP (oh, what irony: a party founded on the principles of John Stuart Mill championing authoritarianism). However, in the circumstances a mixture political opportunism and gross subject matter incompetence in a cross party committee seems a far more likely explanation.
I'm in my 40s, so based on the American depictions of Australian culture in the 80's and early 90's, that "belief in freedom, mateship and irreverence of authority" matches the impression of the average Australian I've held ever since. Of course you can't believe everything you see on TV and in movies. Still, this acceptance of authoritarian governance is a shocking turn.
There's a very Australian concept of "being a larrikin". The US equivalent might be "brat", "having an attitude", etc. It's a mental stance of giving the middle finger to authority. It seems the Australian government has found a way to neutralize the spirit of larrikinism in its people. Maybe it has something to do with the friendly voice the government has adopted. As an example, while on vacation in Oz, at a train station in Zillmere I saw a sign that read something like the following:
Cross the tracks only at the footbridges in an orderly fashion! Or cop a $100 fine. Don't say we didn't warn you, mate!
The equivalent sign in the USA might read:
DANGER -- KEEP OFF TRACKS -- VIOLATORS WILL BE FINED $100
It's easier to sneak authoritarianism in the back door when the authoritarians seem like your mates, who would never use their power against you, only to keep you and your community safe.
We all know what it means to be Australia(e)n, you have an excellent bureau of homeland PR ;) [0]
Warning, if you start watching, it's difficult to stop haha, love this gem (on EV fear campaigns in Australia) as well: [1], ok... they're all gems. And whatever sh*tf*ckery your government pulls, I'll just always love Aussies because of this channel.
I heard China has been buying Australian land in bulk, so it's not a stretch to assume that the Australian gov has been thoroughly infiltrated by now (bribes from CCP, blackmailing and so on).
History tells us that after every major tragic event like wars or pandemics society pulls to a hard leftist belief. They elect leftist parties, have more of an authotarian ideology and so on.
Same. The consolidation of departments and powers into the new Department of Homeland Affairs under the current incumbency has been an ominous kind of creep towards it too. It feels inevitable that there will be support for this move from the talking-heads who are currently inciting freedumb protests, because either Terrorism or Think Of The Children.
On online identities linked to passports - the US already asks this kind of in visa / ESTA applications [0]. It’s not currently mandatory to answer, but I get the impression that’ll change.
It’s hard to believe the line that any of this is directed to reducing online bullying, if anything it makes doxxing trivial. Law enforcement already has powers by warrant to do much of what this contemplates, and the rest is not somewhere I want Peter Dutton et al to be able to see.
People like to see themselves as something other than they really are. If your grandparents were indigenous Australians, would they see it in the same way?
Or the relevant question: is this a significant break from previous regimes of censorship and surveillance that Australia has implemented, with popular support?
I always got the impression, that a majority of last century's earlier immigrants were WASP's (white Anglo Saxon protestants) with a strong current of underlying racism to other (non English) nationalities... also remember in the school where I lived over 30 odd years ago a strong conformist current...
As a Canadian I hope this doesn’t come here, though it seems to be creeping in year by year, and as you said it could be entrenched in two generations.
I always thought of Aussies as flippant and carefree, but rugged and hardworking. It seems like there is a new streak of nanny-statism and parochial mindedness similar to ‘Little Englanders’ in the UK; but knowing a little bit about your political history, maybe it was always there among the affluent colonial class vs the farmers and herders.
Think. What is the largest (billions and trillion$ large) and most proximal influencing force that did not exist when your grandparents were growing up?
This was always my perception of Australia. Not to the same extent as the US but a decent amount of frontiersman-ship - independence, questioning authority, etc.
Not doubt those folks still exist they are just a small minority now.
> something really weird about the contemporary Australian culture
One problem is that countries around the world are increasingly being run by Twitter and social media. We're not looking at a blip near the end of history. We're in the middle of a tectonic disruption similar in scale to the introduction of agriculture or the printing press.
"Extremely online" people have found an endless spring of resentment, fear, and totalitarian thinking welling up from some place inside themselves, an ancient and primal source that you can read about in sociology or cultural anthropology textbooks. Regular people don't think like this, but the "extremely online" dominate online conversation through sheer weight of the hours they spend on it. Politicians, journalists, and other decision-makers internalize this online environment as their view of the real world --- consciously or not --- due to availability bias [1]. Regular people have become progressively disenfranchised by the extreme skew of participation in public discussion. (Censorship isn't helping either.)
Yes, policymakers poll the public --- but polls provide only intellectual information. A policymaker might know, at some level, from the polls, that the people as a whole prefer policy X --- but when his experience, online, day to day, is seeing nothing but volume-11 support for policy Y instead and vicious attacks on policy X, the primate part of his brain guides him towards finding a reason to support policy X instead. Motivated reasoning is extremely powerful.
You might think that elections would make policymakers accountable, but that's not really how it works. Elections are infrequent and subject to thousands of confounding factors that make it difficult for them to act as an accountability mechanism for day-by-day decisions. Policymakers have always relied on public feedback for that, and now the "public" (as least the part visible to policymakers) consists of those with some personality tic or mood disorder or whatever that prompts them to spend eight billion hours per day dunking on everyone else on social media.
For a while now, I've had doubts about the fundamental compatibility of the internet with liberal democracy. Social media takes the whole world and puts it into one village, one city-state, one tight ball of low-friction engagement-optimized information flow. It moves actual governance closer to a direct democracy --- but a direct democracy of the dysfunctional and aggrieved.
Thing is, direct democracies tend to be quite unstable. Look at the histories of the Greek and Italian city-states: they end up, via the their beloved democracies, enacting boggingly stupid policy [2], perpetrating grave injustices [3] [4], and ultimately getting destroyed by tyrants [5]. In a community with low-friction, low-latency information sharing (like a tiny ancient city-state or a modern country with Twitter), there's no impediment to memetic propagation. You see wave after wave of resentment, gossip, fear, and anger bounce around the meme-sphere, interacting with each other, intensifying under conformity pressure. Memetic pressure spikes rapidly, and bad decisions get made under incredible passions without proper reflection. It's like a washing machine with a brick in it. It gets worse and worse until --- without the damping effect of high-latency communication latency and indirect representation --- the whole thing explodes into a cloud of outrage. (That might be a mushroom cloud in our age.)
The printing press led to sweeping structural reforms in society that took centuries to play out, and so will the internet, and I don't think the old forms of governance are viable in the new technological environment. What's happening in Australia is this disruption playing out.
>"Extremely online" people have found an endless spring of resentment, fear, and totalitarian thinking welling up from some place inside themselves, an ancient and primal source that you can read about in sociology or cultural anthropology textbooks.
>Social media takes the whole world and puts it into one village, one city-state, one tight ball of low-friction engagement-optimized information flow.
These are very good points. There's kind of a "tree in the woods thing", but people can now hear every tree falling everywhere 24/7.
I think there is also a recency bias creeping in about "things that have never happened before". "Never before" can mean: since the advent of social media or since the internet has been used widely. There's probably also a hole in the pre-DVR or VCR era where things happened, but were not recorded/saved by the normal populace.
I’m not sure this corresponds to Australia too well. The opinion on Twitter is, for the most part, overwhelmingly critical of much of what the Federal Government does (and for much of it, I agree - this Government doesn’t have much of a legislative agenda, being largely reactionary. Much of the policy they do put out, like this, mass surveillance laws, etc. is not good. There are too many whiffs of corruption around, state capture by certain business sectors, generally poor executive governance, politicisation of the public service, etc.).
Twitter users here are (as a group) routinely insulted both in Parliament by Government MPs (usually as something like “that might be popular with the Twitter rabble, but…”) and in the media.
Increasingly the Government actually seems scared of it - for instance many grassroots groups (with names like “Voices of [electorate]”, “Voters of [electorate]”) starting on Twitter are showing potentially some real world clout, raising tens of thousands of dollars to campaign for independents and minor parties in electorates with the ruling party’s MPs. If they manage to swing the couple of percent some of these seats are held by, it could be several seats lost in the electorate. Just today Government figures were kicking up a stink, accusing them of breaching fundraising laws (they aren’t, according to them) which shows they’re at least somewhat rattled.
This is an intriguing post and I appreciate all the effort you put into it.
I'd like to go a step further about your talk of elections and accountability. So many districts, I think, are essentially predetermined by the demographics and drawn boundaries of the district. To eject a Democrat from a deep blue seat, let alone a 60-40 seat is nigh impossible (as with a Republican in a rural red district). In fact, it also seems like the seats that do flip tend to flip as a result of new arrivals moving in with different beliefs. The electoral process seems largely disconnected from popular support and approval.
First, I think comparing our concept of democracies with athenian democracy is rarely a good idea. They didn't go for elected officials in the way we do - even our most extreme concept of direct democracy would be, for the athenians, an oligarchy, because the rich and famous could use these traits to secure general approval and political power.
Second, it's worth noting that most records of Athenian democracy come from its detractors. People like Thucydides were basically members of an oligarchic club who consistently conspired with the Spartans against Athens.
I don't know if direct democracy is unstable. The most direct-democratic nation in Europe is Switzerland, and they are so stable they're basically stationary. I don't even know if Athens was particularly unstable for its time-period - it's not like the surrounding city-states, Sparta included, had a particularly good decision-making record.
This isn't really new though, and if you asked your great grandparents instead of your grandparents you might find it's not new at all.
If you look at what happened during the Spanish Flu pandemic, you'll find a lot of similarities to today. There's a reason we have a fair bit of U.S. Supreme Court case-law from the 20s about vaccine mandates and what-not: those matters were very relevant in the 1918-mid20s time frame mainly because of the Spanish Flu.
You might notice that people generally obey rules regardless of whether the rules are reasonable and/or justified. When rules are not reasonable or justified we might say that we have "authoritarian governance", as you put it.
If you ever wonder how people tolerated atrocities in, say, 1930s Germany, the answer is mainly two-fold, that they accepted their government's authority, and/or more importantly that anyways there wasn't anything they could do about it. It's the same today, except that our current governments aren't committing atrocities, though are being heavy-handed (and getting more so every day).
The fact that it is practically impossible for most individuals to do anything impactful about unreasonable rules in a reasonable amount of time is probably the most important factor in acceptance of authoritarian governance. I.e., it may not be acceptance of authoritarian governance as such as much as it is acceptance of one's inability to resist authoritarian governance. The latter looks a lot like the former, especially in cynical or apathetic populations, where the reasoning might go like this:
Q: Why didn't you oppose X 20 years ago?
A: Well, there wasn't anything I could do,
so I did that, nothing.
Q: OK, but why not protest?
A: And lose my job?!
Elections are too infrequent, and the courts move even slower. As well, when it comes to elections, people don't have decent options regarding these issues, so they may continue to vote as they would usually (e.g., partisan ideology).
In other words, I would say it's necessarily that people willingly accept authoritarian governance, but that we can't really tell how much willing acceptance there is versus how much unwilling acceptance there is, and it doesn't really matter what the breakdown is.
Once a government decides to be authoritarian, it's very hard to stop it. Usually in the West we get to vote them out. In the worst case scenario they'll rig elections or simply assume total power, and then it can be decades before a country can return to a normal state. Like Franco's Spain: he had to die before Spain could return to the Estado del Derecho.
FYI, "Estado del Derecho" is a wonderful Spanish legal term of art that refers to all that which we take for granted in the West, and which translates literally to "State of Laws" ("a law" translates to "ley", while "the law" translates to "derecho", but "derecho" is also a translation of "right" as in "rights"). I wish English had such a pithy phrase in common daily use for the same concept. "State of Laws" doesn't quite capture all that "Estado del Derecho" does, as "Estado del Derecho" means, mainly (among other things), Habeas Corpus and Due Process.
It's happening in all western countries right now. It's particularly terrifying to read some of the comments on social media. A lot people are just a small push away from becoming genocidal maniacs wanting to eliminate sections of society they disagree with.
I'm an "old" millennial but there's certainly a trend among young millennials and gen Z to put government mandates in place to stop all sorts of things they find "distasteful".
I've personally noticed two big schools of though take root in Millennial and Gen-Z folks.
The first is that the idea of inaction is unacceptable. "We have to do something, we can't just do nothing". This manifests itself in ever increasing intervention in problems that seem really minuscule. Removing a statue of Robert E Lee.... well I can understand that. Removing a boulder because it was once given a name with a racist slur nearly a hundred years ago.... come on.
The second is the idea that if you aren't actively helping, you are actively hurting progress. This takes various forms such as "silence is violence" and "it's not enough to just be not racist, you must be actively anti-racist".
The confluence of these two schools of thought is what I think is leading so such rabid polarization and vitriol. I, of course, have no way to actually prove any of this, but I think it is a model with good face-validity.
>I've personally noticed two big schools of though take root in Millennial and Gen-Z folks.
Personally I think this is due to the fact that in westernized nations they are VERY well off all things considered. The downside of this is that life is so easy they're lost and have no purpose. So, they make a purpose by creating issues where they do not exist or turning what are very small problems into gigantic ones.
I'm starting to think that after a few generations people are unable to relate to actual atrocities and they start to pursue things that inevitably lead down bad roads as proven by history. We may be doomed to constantly repeat these authoritarian moments. I guess people have to experience it to understand it unfortunately.
As you can see in my above comment they never respond, they just downvote when I bring this up because they know it's true. They do not want to read things that upset them so they trend towards censorship and having government create laws to remove any chance they might get upset.
"... questions remain unanswered on Australia’s commitment to human rights for all when it comes to marriage equality, transgender people accessing birth certificates and protecting intersex people from harmful medical procedures,"
Well, in Australia it basically is, yeah… Part of the problem is that people can have such different ideas of the terms “left” and “right” depending on their perspective… In the US, I don’t believe there even is a mainstream “left wing” party. The Democrats are obviously to the left, but I would say (trying to be objective) they’re mostly centre-right with a touch of identity politics.
In Australia, our opposition has really moved from the centre left to the centre right as the party in Government has moved further right wing, mostly just over the last few years. We still have a left wing minor party, but they don’t get many seats yet.
Were you alive during the time after 9/11? Have you even listened to conservatives talking about "Big Tech" recently (or "election fraud" and the measures they want taken to combat it)?
Mass surveillance was and the erosion of civil liberties were literally the biggest parts of post-9/11 legislation to the point where drone striking a US citizen became socially acceptable among conservatives. Conservatives also called for the deaths of Snowden and Assange for "treason".
You can at least admit this isn't a partisan issue even if US politicians love to frame it as one.
Oh, right, I remember the uproar from conservatives protesting the drone striking of a US citizen by the far-left Obama.
Remember the PATRIOT Act? Remember the NSA mass surveillance program (which is btw still ongoing)? Remember black sites? Remember Guantanamo Bay? Remember No Fly Lists? Remember the 60 Words? Remember the militarization of the police force? Remember dragnet phone surveillance? ... Remember the PATRIOT Act?
I didn't say it's only right-wingers. I said it's not a partisan phenomenon.
> Have you even listened to conservatives talking about "Big Tech" recently
Uh, isn’t that completely opposite though? No conservatives are pushing for government control of the internet, because we already have it with these companies that are directly working with/for the government.
Governments don’t need to build their own spy apparatuses, they just ask FAANG for the data.
It was popular conservative news for weeks that Jen Psaki admitted they were in contact with Facebook to remove problematic posts about topics that were against the Administration's goals.
Their own AG, Merrick Garland said they needed to be careful that this is “walking on thin ice”.
I think you were misunderstanding some of the conservative points of view, I recommend actually speaking to a conservative.
That's a common misconception. People don't become more right-wing with age, people become more right-wing with wealth. Turns out if you have a lot of personal property you suddenly are a lot easier to convince that you deserve it and others want to take it away.
The good old "if you're not a liberal when you're young, you have no heart; if you're not a conservative when you've grown up, you have no sense" is just a way to morally justify a political shift that happens to align with a change in financial interests, nothing more.
EDIT: Here's a source since people seem to downvote based on their feelings: https://www.insidehook.com/article/politics/millennials-voti... It doesn't outright say the difference is wealth but it does say the expected trend towards conservativism doesn't present in Millennials to the same degree.
It doesnt sound like people in australia are particularly oppressed though. Do you feel like it's affecting you? People often trade some freedoms for some others.
WRT the coronavirus restrictions, australians arguably had a free-er life than most of western europe this past year. Personally i d prefer to sacrifice international travel if it meant that we can still freely go to work/entertainment/gym etc
I'm unsurprised this is occurring in Australia. Australia has for a long time now been pursuing policies which seem on their face to feel more at home in China. I suspect for most Australians though, they'll just go along with this and there will be a greater proportion of tech-savvy people who find a way to dodge this and exclusively connect via VPN.
It's becoming more and more commonplace for people outside the US to connect to the Internet exclusively via a VPN egress in the US, creating "US-based" online accounts, and operating online as if they were a US person. It seems in the future this may be necessary just to experience the Internet with even basic expectations of free access and anonymity.
As long as they continue to play ball geopolitically with the rest of the West, nobody is going to call them out, but the last decade in Australia has seen a significant curtailing of human rights. The most surprising thing is that it seems few people are speaking out about it, generally.
Ausgov will probably classify commercial VPN providers as terrorist organisations, put gag orders on developers or sysadmins to install backdoors, all while oppressing their rights for judicial review.
Australia has lost its way.
Do you think that politicians there are being tempted into authoritarian legislation under CCP influence or is it more homegrown? Most Australians I've met have seemed to be freespritied, I just don't see them so easily rolling over for 24/7 surveillance and 1984 policies like this.
I wonder if the legislation they passed within 24 hours allowing police to read/delete/edit social media posts of anybody without warrants is related to the australian truckers blocking off major highways in the past couple of days.
Australia is more and more like China every day. The rest of the world is next. We're being pushed into an authoritarian globalist society and we're okay with it.
And it's up to us technically literate to develop and evangelize technology that will make it impossible for the Australian, Chinese or any other government to get away with this. As Bruce Schneier says, "It's not sufficient to protect ourselves with laws. We must protect ourselves with mathematics".
They will always find you if it matters for them to do so.
If you don't matter, sure, you can continue to hide in quasi anonymity in the noise. That's only because they don't have a reason to pursue you.
Authoritarian systems turn the people into the ultimate snitching devices. People learn to be careful with computing devices, it's your own trusted family or neighbor or friends that will burn you. Society gets sculpted to reinforce government policies. That happens in all authoritarian systems. You could even see it in the psycho-rabid mask people, in how batshit crazy irrational they've become. They're wildly emotional lunatics unable to comport themselves as normal humans. They can't think rationally any longer, because they've been driven into a frenzy. The propaganda terrorism scare tactics used on the US population after 9/11 had somewhat similar effects. Authoritarian systems always produce large numbers of those people, they act as an extension of the group/person in power to enforce ideology, laws, religion, behavior, you name it.
Totally serious, although it’s hard to say if this is directly related to the trucker strike or not. They have been keeping a tight lip on that news. I didn’t believe it because I couldn’t find any news about it, but it’s pretty hard to fake road closures going entirely across New South Wales.
In the near future, Money, for purposes of personal consumption, will mean nothing because the populace will be forced by their government to consume the bare minimum to live and conserve planetary resources in an endless climate change lockdown.
Democracy is dead because it distributes benefits to the people based on their merit. In the future, all benefit of industry and productivity will be rationed and distributed based on need and consideration for the environment. You will own nothing, and you will be happy.
I think the western elite are in the process of committing civilizational suicide and consenting to being rolled up into Chinese hegemony because they can't do the whole one-child global climate lockdown permanent austerity depopulation agenda under a democratic government. Democracy failed because it was bad for the environment and now we are seeing our leaders commit mass suicide of their countries to save the environment. This is not a temporary emergency, this is forever and they really have to have the systems of control on super tight to manage it. Which is what we are seeing here with the current totally overboard Coronavirus pandemic measures.
What's weird is this pattern has been going on in Australia for a couple decades (at least) and there doesn't seem to be a major crisis driving it most of the time.
> A crisis that was caused by the US government doing cheap "gain of function" virology research in Wuhan.
China was performing the research, not the US. Which was precisely the problem. China's lab incompetence (which was documented prior to the pandemic) may have released the virus. The US apparently provided a very modest amount of funding to the lab in Wuhan toward gain of function research.
You tagged it with a sarcasm tag, but I think your summary is basically what people are feeling in the large, both in Australia and America.
Perhaps people are seeing that, on the one hand, large-scale problems (global warming, global pandemics, global economic boom-and-bust cycles, etc.) are having real consequences for individuals, and on the other hand, they cannot be resolved by simple independent action (because if they could, we'd be seeing trends of improvement, not worsening).
There's a crisis of faith in the reasoning capacity of the common individual. People have traditionally turned to institutional power when individuals seem less trustworthy.
I think if you looked over the last 50 years, you’d actually see a collapse in trust in large institutions. I think what we’re seeing, in the US at least, is an authoritarian response from these institutions (government / media / academia) to the threats posed by the internet and their general decline in prestige since the 70s.
See the other comment in this thread that free speech has been “weaponized” and therefor presumably must be curtailed “for our own good.”
The population has lost trust in large institutions, but they also don't believe in a god or in anything else, so most people are just scared and double down.
Because if the government is wrong, and "science" literally caused the problem by playing with "gain of function" research, then they have nothing left to believe in their lives.
And yet we continue to suck down news-products manufactured by "large institutions", commercial, governental and otherwise, as if they were God's own gospel.
See I think this attitude is unhelpful. Free speech may well be being weaponised. That doesn’t mean that either a) the person bringing it up thinks it must be curtailed or b) that there might not be something other than curtailment we could do to tackle it.
It’s like even pointing out the problem makes you a heretic to the free speech absolutist creed.
That reasoning is interesting because I know most people think it’s true, yet actually governments almost everywhere have progressively gotten larger and more powerful over the last 100 years.
Yet these “global issues” are getting worse.
To me it doesn’t seem obvious larger government is the solution. Of course that’s what most governments and media close to governments want you to believe.
> There's a crisis of faith in the reasoning capacity of the common individual.
I don’t think that crisis of faith is unwarranted, given the reaction large swathes of people have had to public health measures like vaccination, plus political misinformation and straight out bullshit like Q. The average everyday man is a moron.
Nice to see reverting to mean happening post the collapse and defeat of fascism and communism. It just shows people in power craving for authoritarian ways and the populace supporting them are nothing unique to past. Given the us-them mentality at any period, this situation seems inevitable.
So lets welcome the past with all its atrocities but this time for the "correct" reasons. Just like all the previous geniuses did. Who knows may be this time the F&C might win and rewrite history.
Who’s welcoming atrocities? I’m just observing that people are idiots, and it seems to be getting worse.
There are probably things we can do as a society (improve education being one) that might help.
But no, any observation that large groups people are unable to parse the modern world and come to reasonable conclusions simply must be because that person wants to implement newspeak and purge any that disagree.
An idea. Popular. Backed by compelling arguments. Agreed upon by all the smart people. Broadcast from all the right news channels. Yet still totally wrong and utterly fucked.
I sometimes wonder if we have a gap in public education around epistemology.
In this era, we have more sources of signal to access than ever before. I don't know that people are equipped with enough tools for knowing how to know things to discern fact from fiction given those sources.
In an era where people would have barely known about ivermectin / COVID-19 interaction because most doctors who look at the research discard it as insufficient, there would have been no choice to be made. In this era? Now everyone has to have a passing familiarity with how clinical studies work (or trust authority), because the data isn't filtered (and, in fact, there are people who dedicate themselves to spreading misinformation... This observation is independent of whether ivermectin is effective; we know people have been doing dishonest things "for the lulz" for decades).
No, I said it’s not wrong to lose faith in the reasoning capacity of the common individual. Right now we have people hospitalising themselves eating horse pharmaceuticals, all the while congratulating themselves on how smart they are for doing their own “research”. It’s pitiable.
There is nothing new to this in Australia's culture, is was just aimed at the weak and vulnerable, but as the famous quote by Tucidides goes: "The tyranny Athens imposed on others it finally imposed on itself."
Yea it was really awful, got a few lectures on it during my psychology bachelor. I was horrified when I heard what they did. The people who've enacted these policies should be behind bars IMO. You can't displace children from their families because of "cultural integration" reasons.
I left Australia less than a decade ago, but some of the recent changes in politics and culture are so alien to me, it feels like I could have left a century ago.
The state policing what people who receive government aid are spending their money on, for example -- I can't imagine anyone being for this 10 years ago.
I've noticed that it's more acceptable to be xenophobic amongst certain groups too.
Many things have been reduce to "us vs. them". Us vs. the "scroungers", us vs. the immigrants, us vs. the "lefties", us vs. the "climate lunatics"
Only left a few months ago and in hindsight the draconian and somewhat arbitrary lockdown & border control laws have really opened my eyes. If you squint it looks somewhat like a Cold War state.
What's going on with Australia these days? I feel like every time I read about some wildly excessive overreach around privacy, it's coming out of Australia. Granted, I'm American and we have our own problems regarding privacy, but Australia seems markedly more open and and aggressive in their approach.
Australia has always been something of a nanny state.
Unfortunately most of the last decade we've had a Liberal (Conservative) government and a fairly centrist opposition that tries to minimise their attack surface lest Murdochs Newscorp find a new way to attack them in the media.
Unfortunately this leads to things like this, where it is politically infeasible to vote against it with cries of 'think of the children'.
Basically media forcing the Labor party (historically pro privacy and workers rights) to shift more right to avoid losing votes.
Isn't there a thing a lot of people do where they have a professional, respectable, and rarely used social media account there they use their legal name, have photos of their pets and are shown to be giving to charity or otherwise being approachable and respectable?
Then they have other accounts where they use a pseudonym, login with a VPN, preferably on a laptop with FDE, and in a dedicated browser profile where they can 'shitpost' and vent or otherwise say things that could potentially get them fired or stop them from getting a job?
Australia thinks people don't do this. They think people are naive and don't compartment their digital identity, but it's common practice.
> Australia thinks people don't do this. They think people are naive and don't compartment their digital identity, but it's common practice.
It seems like they fully understand that people do this and this is exactly the reason why this topic came up.
I agree with some comments on that Twitter thread - once (if? when?) it goes live in AU, the rest of the world will follow quick. Want VPN? Show the passport. Want your own VPN in x cloud provider? Show the passport. Want a colocated server so you can host that VPN yourself? Show the passport. Want to host the VPN at home? Well, tough luck - your ISP knows who you are. There are only so many places one can connect to the net from.
The governments will not allow any unreegulated medium for long. It will either get regulated and incorporated or banned and criminalized. That's the sad state of things.
Legitimate users can only do so much to "not have anything to hide". Keep it legit and limit your online presence to the legit stuff, I guess.
Fortunately there is already quite a bit of experience in handling these policies given that people inside and outside of China have been working at bypassing restrictions for a long time. There may not be a "Great Firewall of Oz" yet but that is probably one of the next steps they'll proclaim, all to protect us from the conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids [1] of course. So come, all ye Ozzians and prepare to exfiltrate your data from the clutches of your caring government.
How the great are falling everywhere... Australia used to be the country of Crocodile Dundee - "that's not a knife, this is a knife" - but those days seem to be gone. The USA used to be The Land of the free and the Home of the Brave, neither of which are applicable to those who officially represent the country. Quo Vadis, Orbis Occidentis...
Having looked through this comment thread as it has built up over the past couple of hours, I'd like to point to an article in The Atlantic from earlier today that raises many parallel concerns to some expressed here. The article [1] is headlined Australia Traded Away Too Much Liberty and carries the sub-heading How long can a democracy maintain emergency restrictions and still call itself a free country?
I can't view the article as unbiased (and neither would I expect that from The Atlantic), although it does make some effort to support measures introduced for the public good - especially in times of pandemic. However, for me at any rate, it was worth reading and gave me food for thought. I worked in Australia for nearly three years (2013 to 2016) and wouldn't like to see a shift in its society to the extent feared by the writer.
It’s a bit different. The State Governments are enacting health measures that only have any authority under temporary declared state of emergency, and immediately cease as soon as that expires (they have had to be extended a bit).
This proposal is the Federal Government, which has been passing increasingly draconian, increasingly authoritarian mass surveillance, “national security” laws and ostensibly “eSafety” laws over decades now. They have passed the worst in the last four or five years, but really it’s been going back to 9/11, even though we never had any “real” terror attacks on our shores… These federal laws stick.
"It’s a bit different. The State Governments are enacting health measures that only have any authority under temporary declared state of emergency, and immediately cease as soon as that expires (they have had to be extended a bit)."
Worldwide, I'm seeing a heck of a lot of extension and precious little expiry so far...
The only reporting I’ve seen on this dates back to April 2021, and the first comment on the tweet says the video dates to then as well. And that this wasn’t or hasn’t yet been taken up. Is it actually going to happen?
It may be like the recent hacking bill. They talked about it months earlier and 'shelved' it. They let you forgot about it then ram it through parliament in one day. Most people may not even know when it happens
Austrialia is just the beta-version for what's coming to the rest of the "free world". If Covid and global warming didn't exist, they would have to invent them.
Osama Bin Laden, by flying some planes into the World Trade Center, has gotten America to do far more damage to itself than any external entity possibly could. We have given up right after right after right. We stopped thinking of ourselves & the world at large & become narrow minded & thinking only of our "enemy": we lost control of our thoughts to this attack.
And here we are again: underbelly of the world is once again getting what they want, is once again convincing us that freedom & liberty are too dangerous to keep. They once again are goading us into de-legitimizing ourselves, into making democratic society look like a fool.
These attempts to try to wrest control, to walk back rights, to control speech: they're all giving the terrorists (and other anti-westerns) exactly what they want.
We are in a sticky time. The avenues for exploration that I think are worthwhile hinge around better cross-site online reputation systems. We should forge & publish our own crytopgraphic identities, expose them on places like Keybase. This serves as an anchor, where we can use tools like Web Annotations specification to decentralizedly provide feedback/moderation on this person. Where we can begin to let a track record emerge. We can increase the quality of visibility into those who post, we can make Anonymous Cowards notably cowardly, notably anonymous, where-as today, a well established upright citizen of the world doesn't look any different in most sites, doesn't have much more context attached to them, than a sock puppet in a anti-western government's troll-farm, who created an account three months ago.
A lot of these problems are internal, but a huge amount of the strife we are experiencing right now is nation-state sponsored. For us to secure ourselves by stripping ourselves of freedoms, trying to unmask every evil in our realm, gives in to assault being waged against democratic systems. It reverts to the baser means these nations want to lower us to, it assuages their authoritarian guilt, confirms the sense of hypocracy they want us to be guilty of. We need to build up, we need to tool up, we need to become a more robust information society. Not a more authoritarian one.
The Five Eyes (which includes AU already) has already done this.
In the US, you're crazy if you think your cable modem account, IP history, Apple ID, Facebook account, Instagram account, and Google account aren't all linked to your full name, phone number, DOB, street address and passport number by the NSA/IC.
They consider this to be their job, and they're fairly good at it, because they have access to the large US providers to get whatever data they want.
Indeed. I'd add to this list: every major VPN provider too, "no-log policy" be damned. And if you spin up your own wireguard exit, your VPS provider too. They all take credit cards only, and require a non-voip phone number for "verification".
Just a small caution - this is a weird place for the news to break (5:40 am in Adelaide). There’s been talk of this move for 5 months, since a report was tabled in April with this alongside other recommendations [0]. I can’t find other recent mentions of this being drafted into legislation.
The news this week is that the “Identify and Disrupt” bill has been passed to allow federal law enforcement to interfere with computer equipment in a way that deserves its own thread. [1][2] That bill was rushed through without time for members to read it [3]
It'll be interesting to see what effect this has on the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory [0].
Though "normal person" for Straya tends to be someone who considers the c-bomb to be punctuation, so it may be tricky to tell if it's having any effect.
I always cringe at seeing the anti-mask or whatever protest, but this seems like it's getting out of hand.
Literally taking their cue from China, i.e. 'social credit'?
I find it odd that they don't consider this to be a kind of political suicide, like, after a 18 months of lock-downs, the population has 'had enough' and ready to burst, this seems like a bad idea out of a Will Farrell political comedy.
As mad as they might seem, this is precisely why those protesters have been on the streets - because the slippery slope is all too real. Allow your government a little taste of authoritarianism and they’ll want more.
Consider this: "What would MY government need to do, for ME to decide "This is too much" and take action?
Of course, different people will have different answers, it's a cultural thing. The line often runs close to the physical integrity of themselves or their children.
But knowing the limits of your loyalty to your government (even if those limits seem ridiculously distant now) let's you avoid the fate of "boiling frog". Things tend to go bad slowly for a while – with copious foreshadowing – then all at once.
Examples of people who were "genuinely surprised, SURELY this cannot be happening to this civilized nation" (all the way to the camp/gulag train) are trite in their horrific innumerability.
Cringe more at people protesting reasonable measures, and 'act' by doing your part during a pandemic.
Consider this: "Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country"
It only works if we act conscientiously.
If we start with a selfish mindset, and don't consider our obligations, it will all unravel quickly.
The question of government control is of course important, which is why we have to weigh things carefully.
Anti-mask protests are cringe because the mandates are within reason for a quasi national emergency, and it's a very mild form of control, from what I see it's people who are probably angry over a host of things.
The lock-downs, obviously much more severe curtailment of rights.
Arbitrary controls such as this new proposal should be met with revolt, maybe with some protest, but really at the ballot box. It's the kind of thing that should cause a party to lose most of their support, i.e. they propose it, and then 2 weeks later they recant it and pretend it didn't happen because it was such a bad idea.
This is an investigative committee's proposal, my bet is that it won't go forward.
That's fine. You (jollybean) seem to have the line figured out, for yourself.
I didn't mean anyone to answer publicly – finding the line is a personal, intimate investigation. Pavlik Morozov-style on one end; anarchists on the other.
Either way, it's good to know where government loyalty stops for you. Where the shit hits the fan, and you're past composing carefully worded posts on social media.
When you say “act”, what do you mean? There are a lot of actions that people take every day, from complaining on Facebook, to boycotting companies they don’t like, to going into the streets to protest, to sometimes making bombs and blowing up buildings.
> cringe at seeing the anti-mask or whatever protest
This started the thread.
More generally, act = take active measures to protect whatever is on the other side of the line you drew (wherever you drew it; e.g. your life & the life of your kids). At which point you don't recognize the legitimacy of the government and will break its laws and oppose its agents with clear conscience.
The "action" could be as simple as buggering off to a safer country – the winning strategy in the 20th century (especially for Jews). Jollybean also wrote this:
> Consider this: "Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country"
It's conflating "country" with "government" but otherwise a good litmus test for which side of us-vs-them you see your government. That quote did remind me of Pavlik Morozov [0], when used by jollybean in the context of this particular article on Australia.
Hackernews taking 6-month old Murdoch news story as a credible source? Yes, whatever tickles your alarmist fancy.
Living in Australia for many years, I can't stand reading all those "Privacy in Australia is dead, and look at their lockdowns!" articles here.
I can download whatever torrent I want without getting warning from ISP or some antipiracy body.
I can post "my prime minister is a cunt" wherever I want and be alright.
I don't have mobile ISP injecting ads in my "https" traffic.
I'm not forced to install SSL certificates issued by some government body.
None of E2EE messengers are banned.
Media that have critical view on government do not get their licenses revoked.
All the breaches of privacy from the state and all government fuckups are all over the news and not silenced.
Not many countries that were my home in the past can boast about all of this. What we have here is one of the best tradeoffs you can get in modern democracy.
"Social media" is not the internet. As long as the authoritarians are occupied with the few big tech monopolies, i don't mind. FB et al. brought this on themselves, let them live with it.
Giving into fascism just because you don't like the victims of it is not a good way to just let democracy slip away in Australia. It will eventually come to YOUR doorstep. People should be fighting this tooth and nail and completely fire their legislature and hire someone more sensible.
fb & google are a threat to liberalism themselves, they are not victims. I d rather have the authoritarians from either side fight each other, divide and conquer style
I wonder what this means for users of Australian services who reside outside of Australia? For example I live in the US and use Fastmail as well as some Atlassian products.
Politicians who want to de-anonymize the Internet should first do a trial run of de-anonymizing all of their own financial transactions, Internet browsing, use of the post office, and so on. Maybe for a year or so. Then after they have done that, maybe we can get together and see whether they still think that it is a good idea.
This would be sensible because in a democracy the voters are responsible for their conduct. This would make sense. Also external audits of intelligence agencies and their access on information.
I would be okay with an identity provider that guaranteed a mapping of online account to real person, and online businesses could choose to use this IdP or not. Is this possible without government involvement? Seems like a can of worms to get the govt involved.
I agree it's not cryptographically bullet proof, but that didn't stop everyone from handing over their passwords to the private companies running password managers. Some people even hand over 2FA to them. Yet others have a file in their vault with their driver license or passport number.
One breach there and they have your bank accounts, utilities, and something approximating your identity.
> Seems like a can of worms to get the govt involved.
Yeah because corporations have been a GREAT steward of mapping online accounts to real persons. There's no way corporations could fudge up identity mapping as badly as governments could. There's definitely no way that people would get a false sense of security from corporations handling that and governments getting their data from corporations instead of directly from the real person. Governments are always bad and will never do anything well ever!
It's probably time to start downloading your email and moving to protonmail or tutanota. Maybe fastmail will move their servers completely away from australian territory
Thanks for the smh link. Parliamentary committees propose all kinds of things, they don't become law. The title here is wrong, it isn't the govt proposing it as a law. Not that they mightn't try, but it's silly to conflate the two.
People are acutely aware of the relative anonymity and long-reach that being on the Internet gives them. This felt power enables them to act like total jerks to strangers online in ways they would not do in person. IRL, for such behavior they would garner opprobrium---or a punch in the teeth. There is some sense in adding some friction to online interactions. The details of the mechanism are important, but it's not a terrible or absurd proposition on its face.
Rescinding privacy (and by extension democracy) just because you don't like it when some anonymous person tells you to "go fuck yourself" is not really a good policy to pursue in a supposedly healthy democracy.
Not absurd perhaps, but I think being forced to talk with no threat of being punching people is quite refreshing. Yes, some will exploit that, ironically often those that have a problem with anonymity. But they really need to learn to vent in other ways than hitting people, would be a healthy development.
Highly worrying, but I'm also convinced it will happen in EU soon, too. Let's hope USA remains the USA.. we need a champion for personal freedoms in the world. (Yes some platforms censored Trump and others and they are American and it's bad, but it was not mandated by the government. Let's hope that never happens.)
I think platforms not government banning individual is better. Because that actually distribute poer. I rather have twitter block me and I can move or make a new account-ish then a government blocking and getting around that
That's not really true, if Twitter decided to ban Biden or a big DNC politician they would get obliterated by antitrust laws in weeks. They just were able to do it to Trump because it agreed with the consensus of current day power.
South Korea failed with implementation of similar legislation back in 2009[1].
From a research paper[2] that studied the effects of the legislation:
"The comparison of flaming proportions between identity verified and non-verified groups, as seen in Table 4 above, supports our inference in that the identity verified users are more likely to repeatedly write inflammatory comments and become aggressive against the opposite opinions."
"The results regarding the Identity Verification Law suggest that some potential commenters may withdraw themselves from writing comments due to the inconvenience and risks associated with the verification process, whereas others who undergo the verification process may do so because they perceive the benefits gained from becoming an online community member and expressing opinions to be higher than the costs incurred from the verification process."
The eSafety Commissioner of Australia position[3] on de-anonymizing online discussions appears to call for a repeat of the naive mistakes that South Korea made with their attempts to de-anonymize the Internet. Likely what would happen if de-anonymization legislation is introduced into Australia is:
1) Local Australian websites and online services would lose traffic to international sites that people gravitate towards (and are even less regulated and more out of Australian law enforcement reach).
2) Local Australian websites and online services will be overrun with people with fringe opinions and views that don't care about using their real name for posting up neo-nazism content, anti vaxxer content, etc. Many of these people are comfortable sharing their views today with their real identities. The reason for an overrun is that those with moderate/mainstream views and opinions will perceive online discourse with their real identity as having too much risk, with no outweighing benefits.
3) Memes and other creative methods will become more commonplace, making enforcement particularly hard if not impossible to achieve. If someone shares a meme such as "Happy Merchant"[4], did they share a picture of a happy old man not noticing the connotation of the kippah in the image, or did they deliberately share the image with an intent to incite racism? Or if we look to a case from China, is it a picture of someone relaxing on the grass by a beautiful lake, promoting tourism, or is it someone sharing the picture with an intent to raise awareness of the "Tang ping"[5] movement?
Since you seem to be confident using political labels, could you clarify what you think "left" ideologies are?
For the record, calling these policies "left" or "right" is silly as authoritarianism isn't inherently one or the other. But whether China even qualifies as "leftist" is extremely debatable even if it was already quite authoritarian under Mao.
I agree with you completely, authoritarianism is on a different axis than "left" or "right".
I was commenting on what I am seeing coming from those who described themselves as being ideologically aligned with the "left" today.
I see censorship, speech limiting, "canceling", compelled speech, etc, coming from that area today.
When I was a kid in the 80s and 90s this was very much the kind of thing I saw coming from the "right", limiting expression for political and religious reasons.
Like I mentioned, as a liberal (which I don't belive is inherently left or right) I've been disappointed in the modern "left" which seems to me to be taking a step back from liberalism. I see a lot of authoritarianism coming from that direction right now.
I was going to respond in good faith but unless you qualify what you mean by "compelled speech" I cannot do so in good conscience because the only time I see that phrase is as a dogwhistle for transphobes.
If think if you asked my grandparents what defined 'being Australian' it would be been belief in freedom, mateship and irreverence of authority.