Not news to this crowd, but still important to note. So many times as commentators we focus on evil companies, or evil governments, or evil agencies.
Nope, it's all of the above. Or rather, nobody is evil, just each party needs data for various reasons. Governments trump everybody, so if your information is being recorded, it's accessible to a government somewhere. (And you can be assured that tons of information about you is recorded daily)
Interesting (to me) is the fact that we've spent the last twenty years cranking out various sci-fi dramas about all the things that could go wrong in a future society. There was cloning, nuclear war (an old favorite), alien invasion, designer babies, prison cities, artificial intelligence, memory wiping -- tons of stuff. All the time, the people who produced and consumed such fiction said "You know, it's good that we bring up these ideas. We're going to need to deal with this kinda thing in the future. It's morally important. This is deep, thoughtful work."
Meanwhile we were all happily building and participating in the largest dystopian society that has ever happened to mankind. And now when you point it out to folks, they either think it doesn't matter or they're so overwhelmed they give up thinking about what they could possibly do about it. The unstated question is: Gee, why didn't somebody tell me about this!
Instead, we have an informational-goo. Software is eating the world, turning everything into bitstreams, and contaminating everything it touches as more things become digitised, more things can become digitised. And we're being flooded, swamped, clogged up, with unusably too much data while at the same time adding more at accelerating rates.
It's a kind of digibesity and leads to organizational digibetus and immobility as every employee trapses round through a sludge of gigabytes of old email and log data, reports slow against bloated databases, decisions drag as more and more people need to read more and more procedures and look up references in ever-bigger, ever-slower reference silos.
It's a kind of global hoarding disorder.
I wonder what the mid-stages and end-game of a Gray G0o01100 catastrophe is?
People have been pointing out the problems with snooping, surveillance and the effect of technology for decades now. It is not something people can say that it just snuck up to them.
They either did not care or called people pointing the increasing attacks on our liberties "conspiracy nuts".
>> Meanwhile we were all happily building and participating in the largest dystopian society that has ever happened to mankind.
Ironically that is caused by an increase in freedom that the internet brought about.
We have long had the right to freedom of speech but it was expensive to interact with a large number of people. The internet made it much easier to actually use the rights heralded by politicians.
I think sci-fi has done a better job of realising some of the social implications of this explosion in rights. For example in showing how national allegiance can be lost in favour of geographically desperate groups of like minded indviduals.
Yes, he has a strange definition of dystopia. In Star Trek the leadership clearly knows where everyone is at all times, is that a dystopia? Very few people go full Stallman, although they could.
Maybe he's thinking of a Huxleyan dystopia. Very few of us would call the setting of Brave New World a utopia, but very few of the inhabitants of that world would call it anything else. Our joyful new information-dense world has brought with it compromises that the culture hasn't really assimilated yet, often isn't even aware of yet.
Yes people are evil and these people manifest themselves in the form of corporations, governments and agencies. There is the second system effect as well where one of the mechanisms above manifests itself as something evil when the components are thoroughly innocent. An example of the latter is your typical defence contractor. Also reference the film "The Cube" which discusses this as part of the theme.
People are definitely evil when they shrug off the moral implications of what they're doing for a pile of cash or turn a blind eye to the consequences of doing something. There are a lot of evil people on here and each little action adds a paper cut to society.
You read it here last, from the UN Human Rights Commissioner. Zamyatin, Orwell, Chomsky, Hager, Binney, Drake, Assange, Snowden ... they've been on about this for a century. Ten years ago it was conspiracy theory, now it's mainstream social reality. Still, most people don't care to listen... secure in their televised Colosseum serial economic treadmill stupour... knocking back throwaway media to numb themselves to the truth, competing to buy fallacious fashion facepalm devices that actively discourage intellectual authorship, context, privacy or even direct unmediated expression... but perhaps the tide is finally changing?
On the flip-side, this one's nicely timed, given the preface and thrust of Cypherpunks[0], for the same day as the review of Assange's case in Sweden... which according to Assange's recent interview[1] should get thrown out after tomorrow's appeal[2]. I wonder if the UN gets it now? Of course, it's semi-irrelevant anyway since the US will cockblock[3] them on actually actioning anything remotely related to real, functional, positive change, but it's a nice gesture on the human rights commissioner's part for national-level change-makers to point the finger at.
I think there will need to be another wave of global revolutions to end this. Even the vast majority of "democratic" governments are extremely reluctant to give this power up now, and the more they use it the harder they will fight against giving it up, which probably means violent and bloody revolutions will be necessary to regain the rights we thought we already (re)gained decades or centuries ago.
When people caught doing it will be severely punished, then you'll know the tide has turned. Until then, even if new laws are passed to "limit" the surveillance, they probably won't change much, as they'll keep doing it in secret, and then get protected by higher-ups when getting caught.
> violent and bloody revolutions will be necessary to regain the rights we thought we already (re)gained decades or centuries ago.
Digital privacy is one of these funny freedoms which everyone either greatly over or under-estimates.
I don't think anyone with a firm grasp on politics really thinks digital privacy will spark violent uprisings, so I'll put the question another way: do you really believe you're morally justified in killing over domestic spying?
It's not "digital" privacy, it's just privacy. Even if you avoid digitally networked devices(which is almost impossible), your photos still appear on facebook et al, you're still being recorded by CCTV everywhere you go, your banking transactions and medical data is still being recorded etc.
Privacy isn't exactly a black and white thing. You have no expectation of privacy if you're in a public street, so being filmed isn't the worst thing in the world. If you're filmed in your own home, perhaps through your webcam, then that's a different story.
If the CCTV cameras weren't connected to the internet and their recordings were periodically deleted, this wouldn't be a problem at all. Even Richard Stallman has said as much.
What however is happening more and more, is that recorded data is kept indefinitely and is networked.
Have you heard what Binney has said what the software he wrote for the NSA does?
There are various domains from where it gathers data (cellphone, banking, social media, gps etc.). These domains are graphed and mapped in such a way that they can pull out all the attributes any individual has from any any or all of the domains.
I don't think anyone except a few fringe anarcho-libertarian types really expects masses of people to start a violent uprising solely because of government and corporate spying.
What's really dangerous about ubiquitous spying is that it enables other abuses and forms of corruption that were previously impossible or cost-prohibitive. It's these abuses, which seem virtually inevitable in a privacy-less world, which will likely incite public anger and resistance.
You can be as bloody and violent as you like, the genie is not going back into the bottle. Satellite imaging is improving, the cost of cameras and storage are falling, all manner of sensors are improving daily. I don't know what the answer is, but it is not some foolish violence.
Sousveillance, as it is called, is part of the answer - governments have no reason to be less transparent than the governed. But areas of opacity are necessary too.
I agree and I wonder if the right thing to do might be completely abandoning the concept of privacy. I think it might happen regardless of what we do, so maybe instead of trying to fight to the last drop of blood, we should just run full-speed in the other direction. Just embrace, as a society, that everyone can know everything about everybody, and learn to live honestly.
It's just a thought that has been floating around my head recently.
Taking responsibility for your own actions is a key part of growing up and the central tenet of major world philosophies such as Buddhism.
However, modern social science indicates clearly that people behave differently when they believe they are under surveillance and when part of large groups. So there is a real, psychological requirement for privacy and anonymity some of the time. There has to be space for this... a balance.
In general, "behind closed doors" has been put forward as an appropriate scope for that in a physical sense, though we are increasingly digitally monitored there as well. For instance, it is not uncommon for national gestapo of various ilks to seize hardware and search for digital evidence when someone is 'suspected' of something (ie. pretty much as they please). Similarly, mobile and landline telephones and wifi access are monitored, as is probably cable TV activity. And in general, the population of many regions is uploading photos of each other in these environments, providing streams of public social network and other online activity that can accurately predict their movements in and out of the home. So pretending that "behind closed doors" means private doesn't really fly anymore. In addition to this personal privacy, we need an option for public anonymity ... including online.
Is funny how quickly the ground shifts. Not that long ago, discussions over this kind of stuff were generally the province of the institutionally paranoid and subjects such as echelon occasionally cropped up in sci-fi books and the manifestos of folk like David Icke, along with his rambling lizard bobbins.
These days, my gran might mention these subjects over a cup of tea after talking about the cricket, and she's a dyed in the wool establishment conservative.
I think we (everyone who participants here on Hacker News) have to learn how to be smart freedom fighters who can use nonviolent methods to overthrow dictatorships if we are to have any hope of reversing these trends, whether the snooping comes from governments directly or indirectly through poorly guided business corporations. We can't win this fight by imagining violent revolutions. Dictators become dictators by being practiced in using violence to gain power. We probably can't learn enough about violent means soon enough to overcome a slide to dictatorship in any country.
I advocate nonviolent means to fight dictators for two reasons: I don't like seeing my innocent neighbors get killed, and I have seen nonviolent means work to overthrow dictators. The largely peaceful transition from martial law and one-party dictatorship to pluralistic rule by law with free press and free elections that I saw in Taiwan[1] is just one example of a people power revolution where the dictator was baffled because there were few violent incidents on the part of the opposition to stir up a violent response from the regime. There are other examples from around the world.
An organization that collects real-world advice on how to win freedom even under dictatorship nonviolently, and how to keep the revolutionary movement from turning into another dictatorship, is the Albert Einstein Institution founded by Gene Sharp, an occasional nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize. I have recommended before here on Hacker News that readers who are really, truly interested in winning freedom for themselves and guaranteeing freedom for people around the world ought to read the free, downloadable materials on the Einstein Institution website.[2] If you are not willing to learn the art and craft of forging a cohesive, effective resistance movement based on real-world examples, this is all just talk. Talk is cheap. I know actual freedom fighters who succeeded against dictators whose techniques included total control of all mass media with "prior restraint" of publication and complete domination of the country's education system and targeted assassinations of opponents. The dictators still lost. You (we) can win, but only if you (all of us) learn to fight effectively. That doesn't take violence. Winning in a people power democracy movement does take mental toughness, because the dictator's side could use violence, but always the people outnumber the rulers. The people just have to learn how to stand together, overcoming their own fear.
Start your reading with From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation if you are wondering where to start among the several handbooks on the Einstein Institution website.
I think we (everyone who participants here on Hacker News) have to learn how to be smart freedom fighters who can use nonviolent methods to overthrow dictatorships if we are to have any hope of reversing these trends
I'd settle for the HN crowd stopping scooping up gobs of data under a "it's different when I do it" copout. But even that much won't happen. (por exemplo the inevitable rationalizations in reply to this comment)
I don't think it's necessarily the scooping up of data that's scary. If you use a service, the service has a right to collect certain data about you. It only becomes an issue when the company behind that service has its hand in many pies and correlates all of the related data, or worse, if they share or sell that data to other entities.
> If you use a service, the service has a right to collect certain data about you.
I think this is the crux of the problem. The reality is that no, a service does not have a right to collect data about you. The service provider may ask that you provide certain data to use the service, but that collection is not a right.
> It only becomes an issue when the company behind that service has its hand in many pies and correlates all of the related data, or worse, if they share or sell that data to other entities.
The notion that one has a right to collect data from users of a service is the same notion that says the service provider has ownership of that data. But this is faulty, the data is not owned by the service provider, it was merely collected and stored. This distinction is important: if you feel you own the data, you feel that you should be able to sell it. If you feel you are a custodian of data, then you are defaulting to protecting that data from others that a user never agreed to give it to in the first place.
"The notion that one has a right to collect data from users of a service is the same notion that says the service provider has ownership of that data."
Last year my family went to have a family portrait taken by a professional (service provider or portraits) photographer. The photos (data) that were produced from the photo shoot belonged to the photographer. That photographer was more than happen to sell me family portrait, but the law is fairly clear that he in fact owns the data (all photos that were taken), i.e. he has copyright over the data.
The law isn't actually clear at all. Commissioned works (such as a private portrait session) can very often be considered "works for hire," depending on the exact wording of the contract.
I could simply snap at you with "so said the dictator"... but I don't feel like burning away karma with a cheap shot.
Instead, I will point out that most dictators in the world rationalize their actions as necessary to ensure a greater good that will ultimately outshine whatever it is they know they should not be doing. I don't have the time or interest to provide a peer reviewed article about how this pattern repeats over the last 5,000 years of World history, but I will provide an example form my home country. You may google for other examples if you feel it's due.
Porfirio Diaz came to power in Mexico in 1876, under the platform of "no reelection" due to the recurrent problem of 19th century Mexican politicians running for office multiple terms (last example was Benito Juarez, who died during his 4th term, but there are others). After this he:
1. Appointed close friend, Manuel Gonzalez, as successor in 1880 election.
2. Amended the constitution to allow a non consecutive 2nd term reelection.
3. Came back to rule in 1884.
4. Extended the presidential term from 4 years to 6 years (which remains the norm in the country to this date).
5. Removed all restrictions to reelection and remained in office through electoral fraud and assassination of political rivals for the next 27 years.
6. In 1908, he claimed that Mexico was "ready for democracy" and organized an election that allowed other candidates for the first time in two decades.
7. However in 1910, he had the other candidate, Francisco I. Madero, put in jail. Then the election was carried on, and he claimed to have won by "overwhelming advantage".
8. This fact triggered the civil war know as the Mexican Revolution, which forced him to flee to France in 1911, leaving behind a country drawn in open warfare for 6 more years (and in the ballpark of 25 years of instability and low intensity conflict).
If you collect data (and create a walled garden around it through various superficial methods increasingly easier to bypass at scale, so that "only" you can access/leverage it to the fullest without having to go through such artificially erected barriers), your government can quietly collect it from you (and access/leverage it to the same extent).
If you collect data, and it was made accessible to everyone to access and leverage to the fullest if they choose, … ?:
"This paper has engaged in a wide ranging discussion around the issues of information asymmetry in contemporary life. We have examined the relationship between such asymmetries and how power is ineluctably interrelated to such imbalances. Within this, we demonstrated how key technologies and techniques have been, and continue to be, employed to deepen and widen the information gap.
Unsurprisingly, we note that there are marked differences between those who inhabit the opposite banks – we are witnessing an entrenchment of power and information within a small, exclusive group on one side while the general population bears the weight of evermore intrusive surveillance.
One potential,and possibly democratic, move would be to ensure that knowledge is spread more equally and transparently.[…]"
If you collect data, and it was made accessible to everyone to access and leverage to the fullest if they choose, … ?:
Then the government can still use the data.
The point is not that any database has on you it's what you get when you combine the public and private history of everyone. So, suddenly a joke taken out of context or an angry x and your on the next 'no fly list'. The more information someone has the easier it is to find something they dislike even if it's simply being to normal.
It's the lost of anonymity that's important not your drunken photo's.
That is the case now, however under the scenario that I'm putting forth (and what general societal trends are moving towards), what we call "private" today is increasingly becoming "public".
So now that joke everyone can make can still be taken out of context by everyone, but how one ends up on a no fly list or any list anyone is free to see/compile/disregard will no longer be the black box event it is now, especially if the information about people who decide (human biases involved in such decision making will be increasingly open to see for all) how one get's placed on such list becomes increasingly public or theoretically everyone would be on a no fly list because of some aspect social behavioral norms people will violate at least once in their life or because anyone is capable of making such jokes, it will become meaningless to compile such lists in the first place especially if how one becomes on such lists and those who enforce such lists are available to such potential scrutiny by everyone else.
It's the lost of anonymity
I suggest that people/organizations/governments are coming to terms that it's the lost illusion of anonymity/control over what information propagates, that was never an inherit property of the universe, but merely local maxima we have constructed from prior limitations/experience that we were (and increasingly less) constrained to for our relative existence, that now has become (and become increasingly more) something we're able to see beyond and challenge now on multiple levels now that our capabilities have shown us that our constructed ideas of reality and how things are not nearly as absolute as we have conditioned ourselves to be.
That's not to say that anonymity can not exist to any degree, even now, I think people will gain anonymity in other forms like from apathy to sifting through all the information that is increasingly more available about everyone and everything else.
How so? When I say "private" information is increasingly becoming "public", you assume I'm treating privacy as a binary thing?
Whether one declares information as classified or public isn't an inherit property of the information itself, and as everyone has increasingly similar access (relative asymmetry approaches 0 on a scale from 0 to 100) to information (which seems to be the direction of our collective behaviors, especially if we compare to prior times in human history), trying to classify any information in either state or on a spectrum, seems increasingly like an exercise in futility/irrelevance (to me) in the face of what we are seeing take place and the capabilities on the horizon.
The "private" vs. "public" divide is less binary than your suggesting.
Individuals, corporations, low level government workers, and the government as a collective all have differing access to different types of information. Also, it's not just pieces of information but also the ability to deal with that that's restricted. For example you might look at a few tweets, but twitter rate limits you without paying them a lot of money.
Edit: (removed redundant crap).
Sure, Russia got copy's of the design for both the first Atomic and Hydrogen bombs. So, every country with nuclear weapons can trace their designs back to those same researchers. Yet, even after 10's of thousands of people have seen them (or a derivative design) and 70 years good luck finding detailed documentation on Google.
Sure, but you would think the way you hear the media going on and on about people getting access into "types" of information they shouldn't have access to (banks pretty much consider electronic hacks apart of the cost of doing business these days), using the same tools as the people who construct such systems, its not hard to think otherwise compared to say hundreds of years ago. I mean, anyone could easily look up as list of free proxies and crawl twitter to get around the ip rate limits (or any site for that matter, people do this all the time), increasingly more than ever, people have the ability to access such information (and vasts amounts of it) more than before. Whether they feel compelled to is a different story. Same goes for the fission and fusion weapons: the physics behind it is pretty much available in every university in the world (and their online lecture notes), I just think not many people just want to build such things. And all this is pretty much within a century. Took much longer if one looks back throughout human history for knowledge of information to even propagate throughout different cultures.
Beyond that, I don't really know what to say beyond that things change. A lot of the social constructs that we are born into may be totally irrelevant in our lifetime regardless of our opinions about them, some people can adapt to such, and some people will go to their grave with cognitive dissonance of such change clinging to their memories of a world that was but will never be again.
Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. Blanket declarations of nonviolence are one of the surest ways to neuter a revolutionary movement before it has even begun. For every successful nonviolent movement, there are a dozen failures.
For an alternative to your readings, I suggest this excellent book:
It's not like violent revolutionary movements have an outstanding success rate by comparison.
I am amused to see you arguing this just minutes after asserting on another thread that the best response to bullying is to not allow bullies to make you feel bad about yourself, though.
I never actually said that was the best response to bullying, just one possible response. It's what worked for me, and I think it can work for others as well. Sometimes breaking a bully's nose will make them leave you alone, sometimes it will just escalate the problem.
I think it's unwise to universally swear off any tactic when dealing with an oppressive situation, from simple bullying to an authoritarian government. You have to determine on a situational basis which tactics are going to be most effective, and then follow through with them.
I appreciated you sharing a link with a differing perspective (and correspondingly upvoted your comment). I'm wondering if the verdict of history and actual experience will be as kind to the position advocated in that writing as I think it will ultimately be to the writings on the Albert Einstein Institution website, which are based on some real-world cases that are quite amazing.
I was impressed by what you wrote above, but then read this on your HN profile:
My most controversial (gauged by variance in karma as downvotes and then upvotes rolled in) ever comments were about the issue that has been most discussed on HN since early June 2013, namely Edward Snowden's disclosure of NSA documents and Snowden's role in today's world. I'd be glad to see NSA surveillance programs under much more strict legal scrutiny and oversight by Congress. But I think it's more significant than many people notice that Snowden traveled first to the territory of China and then to Russia as the documents were disclosed, so I can't count him a hero any more than I can count Kim Philby as a hero. Both were misguided and ultimately unhelpful to the world in some of the same ways.
How can you make such a radical (I mean that as a compliment) case for non-violent freedom fighters yet you don't consider Snowden a non-violent freedom fighter (which is implied by you considering him a non-hero).
I'm not so eloquent today, so I'm going to have to let this comment stand as it is for now. Hopefully many readers can see for themselves the contradiction that is so obvious to me.
I'm not eloquent today either, because I have pressing work matters to attend to, but to keep this in context, I'm very glad that the freedom fighters in Taiwan were careful NOT to be collaborators with the regime or any of the agents of the Communist Party of China. I wish Snowden had taken the same care to not give comfort to other dictators while decrying conditions in his own country. Thank you for asking.
I agree with some of your perspectives, but sorry I have to agree with the criticism here. Your opine on this is really disgustingly nationalist. I, too, know to an extent people who were in Taiwan in the 1970s and onwards, those who organize protests in Hong Kong (including those who have just finished jail terms for the same), etc. Unfortunately, that doesn't change reality. It just informs on one past reality.
Also, for someone who constantly adds links to the Albert Einstein institute... something established after he died, I wonder how you reconcile your US nationalist, anti-Snowden views with my favourite Einstein quote: Nationalism is an infantile disease; the measles of mankind?
As long as we're all firmly in the "the problems are global" camp - as per the UN Human Rights commissioner's comments - can't we just agree to drop the ridiculous hat tips to nationalism already?
I'd be happy to see a people power democracy movement bring freedom to people in any country. Freedom belongs to everyone. But a hard-headed realist about winning freedom for people everywhere from all of humanity will recognize that some national regimes today are more harmful to the cause of spreading freedom than others.
Err, "the cause of spreading freedom"? Forgive me if I'm lax in my 'meri-rhetoric, but isn't that the same one where we're either with you or against you? Doesn't seem to have turned out so well for recent victims of assistance, now does it? (Iraq, Afghanistan...)
There is zero evidence that Snowden has "collaborated". The articles you link to in your profile are purely opinion pieces.
Are you as harsh in your judgement about the "freedom fighters" of Taiwan who ended up putting into power rather corrupt DPP politicians? That would be unfair, just as your condemnation of Snowden for purely circumstantial connection to China and Russia. He did not give "comfort" to those regimes. You're showing an excessive bias against anyone who shows any association with the regimes of China or Russia. I lived in Taiwan for 5 years so I understand where it is coming from, but it is built on blind hate, it clouds your reasonableness.
Voters are willingly accepting authoritarian rulers though. They want the heroic leader who fans the flames of sectarianism, uses nationalistic football club support songs in campaigns and wears a shiny uniform. When the economy dives the tried and true solution is the standard scapegoating of whatever visible minority to offset the blame of decades of mismanagement and corruption. Look at all the extreme authoritarian movements taking off in Europe right now. Those are going to appear in a country near you very soon. It's like they don't even need to hide it anymore, these new regimes can openly campaign on a promise to restrict rights and bring back the glory days of yore and get a standing ovation. The reaction to mass surveillance here has been "only illegal immigrants need to worry or criminals".
If a government invites immigrants and then puts them in exclusive neighborhoods with no prospects of integration then don't be surprised when the integrated kick those politicians to the curb. The left is to blame for the rise of the right. Life isn't some fucking fairytale.
I think a non-violent approach is unrealistic. History tells us that tables only turn when soldiers refuse to shoot citizens on order of the government and turn the guns back against them.
The best interim approach is to destroy all means of facilitating the dictatorship. In this case that means destroying the tools by which we work, destroying the banks, the commerce regimes and the communication and logistic platforms muck like the Russians did when they pulled out of the Eastern Bloc. No one has to be hurt to do that but people will go hungry, jobless and penniless. This will however open their eyes to the situation.
I'm not advocating this as a solution nor would act upon it but I'm without a better option in my mind.
Edit: to the down voters. This is not reddit. Don't down vote because you disagree, down vote because it's not relevant. This is relevant discussion.
It has been shown (for example in Altemeyer's research on authoritarianism) that violence increases authoritarian tendencies among population, while violent attacks against nonviolence decrease those tendencies.
This is where American Founding Fathers got it wrong, with the 2nd amendment. The reason why soldiers refuse to shoot against citizens is because they are unarmed and have moral upper hand. Once that happens, the powerful people have to give up, because they themselves can only rely on other people to stay in power.
> "This is where American Founding Fathers got it wrong, with the 2nd amendment. The reason why soldiers refuse to shoot against citizens is because they are unarmed and have moral upper hand."
This is a cute theory, but history provides countless examples of soldiers not refusing orders and shooting unarmed citizens. It's been happening in the Middle East for the past few years. It happened prior to the American Revolution (events such as the Boston Massacre likely contributed to the 2nd Amendment). And it will happen again over and over again.
Soldiers have several things to weigh when contemplating orders to fire on fellow citizens. The "moral upper hand" is one of them, but history has shown it's often not the strongest motivator. The 2nd Amendment is an amendment firmly grounded in reality and written by people who had seen government at its worst. Americans have lived in a relatively peaceful country for a long time and have largely learned to love Big Brother by now, so they are more worried about the 1/1e12 chance of a terrorist attack than the chance of their own government oppressing and spying on them. The 2nd Amendment establishes a firm deterrent that, in the limit, discourages how far and how fast the government can exercise its various forms of abuse.
I think (and I implied) that non-violence is a necessary, not sufficient condition for non-shooting.
And I haven't frankly seen much evidence that 2nd amendment is effective deterrent. First, it's a bit of a fantasy - in the U.S., you hardly see gun owners among the revolutionaries. For a good reason - it's a bit naive to expect people go with handguns against tanks or drones. And U.S. government seems pretty oppressive compared to many countries which don't have equivalent of 2nd amendment.
Second, most people consider violent revolutionaries to be terrorists (e.g. compare how we view Unabomber and Martin Luther King), which actually supports the theory. The same is actually true in islamic countries - for example here: http://www.pewglobal.org/2014/07/01/concerns-about-islamic-e...
>This is where American Founding Fathers got it wrong
They got it right in 1776-1783 when they put their lives on the line, and fought for their independence. Britain never would have "given up" their North American colonies peacefully.
What made the American Revolution succeed through violence were the facts that (1) it was a war of attrition against a foreign, remote power, and (2) it was bolstered by another foreign, rival remote power. Due to its far-flung nature, it cost British Empire a LOT of money to keep the war effort going, and moreover at a time when they were hurting for cash (since this was just after the Seven Year's War with France). The Americans and French were able to make it too costly for Britain to continue to hold on to the colonies.
Britain also tried to take America back in the War of 1812, but was again thwarted by the costs of maintaining a war abroad (and the war had come to a stalemate by 1814).
Unlike most revolutions we see today (which are revolutions at home, and become civil wars if they turn violent), the American Revolution succeeded through violence because it was against a foreign adversary and because the Americans were able to make it too costly for Britain to maintain their war effort. These preconditions do not apply to local revolutions, where no side has an economic incentive to stop fighting until the other sides are crushed. Each factions' lives are on the line, largely eliminating the cost consideration. It's not like King George III or the members of Parliament were in danger of losing their lives, families, and lands if the Americans won.
The United States was certain the Muslim world would "open its eyes" to Western style democracy if only we overthrew their governments and destroyed their infrastructure and just kept killing whoever disagreed with us until we were welcomed as liberators with flowers in the streets. It didn't work, though maybe we just need to keep killing until it does?
I think it's irrational, albeit probably a common bias in revolutionary thinkers, to assume that the likely result of such violence will be the people viewing you as their liberator rather than their oppressor. Which is of course why such revolutions typically require purges and secret police, and spawn violent counter-revolutions of their own. I don't see how one form of oppression is better than the other.
> Don't down vote because you disagree, down vote because it's not relevant. This is relevant discussion.
Upvoted to compensate even though I don't agree with your opinion as being the best interim approach. As you said, downvotes are for irrelevance, not for disagreement.
Surely, if you push people to the point of starvation they'll grab arms and force change. But I'm not so sure that in the end this will bring a liberal democracy, rather than another dictator taking over and fixing things short-term.
"I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.
"It only becomes abuse when people resort to karma bombing: downvoting a lot of comments by one user without reading them in order to subtract maximum karma. Fortunately we now have several levels of software to protect against that."
Downvotes are, of course, especially appropriate when a comment is BOTH uninformative in the context of the discussion and uncivil besides. I'm happy to upvote comments I disagree with (as a factual matter) if those comments prompt me to think about an issue I haven't thought about before, or if the comment contributes to the discussion being more nuanced in other ways. But there appears STILL to be no general rule in the Hacker News Guidelines[1] prohibiting downvoting to express disagreement. Submissions of course cannot be downvoted by anyone (they can be flagged) and no submitter or commenter can downvote child comments to what they have just posted. It's the overall sense of onlookers that determines net karma of a comment.
This is why you are being downvoted. It seems unlikely you have kids, but you must have parents and grandparents. Are you willing to see them suffer for your anarchist pipe dreams? If you are then how are you any better than the privacy violators?
I have three children so your assertion is incorrect.
If it means that the world is a better place afterwards for them, some hardship for us all is not a bad thing. That includes me and my family. It's not an anarchist pipe dream. It happens when the government sends your country to war as well don't forget.
I talk to a lot of people from the rather war-torn bits of Eastern Europe and they'd do it again to be free from opression.
I talk to a lot of people from the rather war-torn bits of Eastern Europe
but it seems to me that if you had a comprehensive sample of people from eastern Europe of my generation you would come to the conclusion that what I said is the way to go. The countries in eastern Europe that have the brightest prospects now are those whose transition from dictatorship was via a nonviolent people power protest movement, while those that really just traded dictators in palace coups are still very lousy places to live. But don't take my word for it--look up some examples and some principles of how to win freedom with people power, nonviolently.
>Are you willing to see them suffer for your anarchist pipe dreams? If you are then how are you any better than the privacy violators?
What complete and utter nonsense. Someone willing to pay a price now for a better future tomorrow is the same as corrupted governments prying into the private lives of their citizens. What a brilliant comparison you've drawn.
It's this fear of change and desire to protect the status quo that has our societies in the rotting state that they're in, by the way, so while you may take comfort in knowing your parents and grandparents are ok now, and that your pockets are moderately protected, that it's your choices in protecting this status quo that is making the future look very bleak for our children.
The future does not look bleak. For fuck sake progress is accelerating. That may not jive with your doomsday bullshit but that hardly matters because foolish ideas like yours are going fucking nowhere with honest decent people who will tell you to take a flying fuck. If you want to induce suffering on some questionable moral stance you will be crushed under a stampede of reason.
Nope, it's all of the above. Or rather, nobody is evil, just each party needs data for various reasons. Governments trump everybody, so if your information is being recorded, it's accessible to a government somewhere. (And you can be assured that tons of information about you is recorded daily)
Interesting (to me) is the fact that we've spent the last twenty years cranking out various sci-fi dramas about all the things that could go wrong in a future society. There was cloning, nuclear war (an old favorite), alien invasion, designer babies, prison cities, artificial intelligence, memory wiping -- tons of stuff. All the time, the people who produced and consumed such fiction said "You know, it's good that we bring up these ideas. We're going to need to deal with this kinda thing in the future. It's morally important. This is deep, thoughtful work."
Meanwhile we were all happily building and participating in the largest dystopian society that has ever happened to mankind. And now when you point it out to folks, they either think it doesn't matter or they're so overwhelmed they give up thinking about what they could possibly do about it. The unstated question is: Gee, why didn't somebody tell me about this!