Comment by slg
1 day ago
It's weird how many people's perception of this type of behavior is shaped by the person sitting in the White House.
EDIT: It's also weird how my comment is being perceived exclusively as criticizing the critics of this administration rather than criticizing the supporters of this overreach. My comment was intentional phrased very generally, if you think it is specifically about you, that reveals something about you.
Wouldn't it be weird if that didn't shape their perception? It's not surprising that people are less trusting when an authoritarian is in power.
But the assumptions should always be that one day someone like that could take power and gain access to that data.
The way to prevent authoritarians from abusing power is to not elect them, and to throw them in jail when they violate the law. They're not hard to spot; people warned about the current guy for a decade before he took over.
What's happening right now is not because the government had a database lying around and an unspecified authoritarian picked it up.
What's happening is that after a specific authoritarian staged a coup against the government, he was nevertheless allowed to continue his anti-democratic efforts. Trump should have a 27 year sentence like his Brazilian compatriot Bolsonaro, who in monkey-see-monkey-do fashion, similarly affected a coup against his government. Had we actually prosecuted those crimes the way Brazil did, we could still be talking about how to prevent theoretical authoritarian governments from abusing their power. But now we have a specific instance, and in this case, all the anti-authoritarian measures in the world mean jack if the government just allows actual insurrectionists to run for president, which is barred by the Constitution for a good reason. In that case they're just asking for it.
8 replies →
I mean I think, while that possibly always _should_ have been the assumption, 20 years ago the assumption would have been very much that someone like that could _not_ take power, and that the worst the US had to fear was the likes of Dick Cheney (admittedly still pretty bad). The idea that the US might just transform into a weird batshit autocracy is really _pretty new_; it wasn't taken all _that_ seriously even in Trump's first term, because, well, the courts will just slap him down, right?
1 reply →
At this point, at least a third of the country always thinks an authoritarian is in power.
FWIW, I've believed we've had an authoritarian in power for quite a while now. Obama, Trump, Biden, and Bush have all tried and succeeded in expanding executive power. They've all engaged in extrajudicial killings overseas.
Nothing sets me off like seeing people think this behavior from Trump doesn't have shared roots across both parties.
Biden kept kids in cages. Obama bombed weddings. Yes, the current admin is accelerating hard but like, prior admins were accelerating.
People should really try to stop thinking about politics like it's a two party game where you have to pick a side. Figure out your principles, and start finding candidates who match those principles.
10 replies →
>Wouldn't it be weird if that didn't shape their perception?
No. I flat out reject the excuse you make on their behalf and consider you lesser than you would be had you not made it.
We're presumably discussing adults, not ten year olds or monkeys. They ought to f-ing act like it.
These people are almost all likely capable of the emotional restraint and logical thinking and sufficient abstract thought to think these things through and decide whether policy or action is good or bad regardless of if it's their guy doing it or their interest being served by it. The fact that they decline to do so is a failing of them. To excuse it only serves to reinforce or validate it and should be ridiculed.
What makes this objectionable is that it's an authoritarian thing to do.
They should bear in mind that someone they consider an authoritarian will inevitably be elected.
> It's not surprising that people are less trusting when an authoritarian is in power.
The majority of Americans don't feel that way, but did about the last administration, and enough to do something about it. What's surprising is, given that revelation, a few people still actually think that.
I see it as a blessing: privacy advocates have previously argued that yes these invasive tools might currently help an honest government do its job to stop bad guys, but the tools could eventually fall into the hands of a not so honest government. Now, you don't really need much of an imagination to see what happens when the tools fall into the wrong hands, and hopefully more of the citizenry can get behind the idea of privacy as a fundamental right, and not just something for those who have something to hide.
Do you have any evidence that public concern over privacy changes depending on who is in the white house?
A quick search suggests a solid majority has been consistently upset about this issue for decades. The phrasing of the question seems to have more impact than the year, but I cannot find any hard data on consumer privacy concern trends over years.
Such trend data would be useful.
I don't think it is.
I think it's selective attention plus recency bias.
This drift has started 24 years ago with 9/11 and no president has stopped or slowed it.
People who dislike who's in charge say the same things as always, people who dislike such measures same the same things as always regardless of who's in the white house, etc.
Fwiw, I would be unhappy with the Biden and Obama administrations trying to do this as well. For me this has nothing to do with who's in the White House, it's an overreach plain and simple.
100%. Let’s not let partisanship distract us from the omni-presence of the military industrial complex and the authoritarian bent of everyone who’s been in power in the US over the last several decades. Dems will tinker around the edges to make it more palatable, but there’s still: black sites, torture, drone strikes, unjustified wars, installing of puppet governments in sovereign nations, abuse of the commons for private profit and an absolute hunger for every scrape of your data to monitor and manipulate you no matter who is in the White House.
If I have to choose between voting for pro-corporate neoliberalism or fascism 2.0, I’ll vote the former, but that’s basically just asking which speed you’d like quality of life to erode for the average person. I’d really like a couple more options on the ballot please.
Nit: Quality of life for average Germans went up, not down, once they brought back slavery and started pillaging other countries. If that's the metric we're using to decide what form of government we want, then all bets are off; ethics and morality play no part.
3 replies →
It's also weird how people gatekeep resistance on the basis of their perception that it's motivated by the person sitting in the White House.
If people are ready to resist now, let's welcome them, rather than questioning whether their motives are related to some tangentially related disagreement.
>It's also weird how people gatekeep resistance on the basis of their perception that it's motivated by the person sitting in the White House.
Because let's be real here, whether such discussion is allowed to stand or is shut down in a politically fairly homogenous community is typically a direct reflection of that fact. You see the same thing on the opposite side of the isle.
>If people are ready to resist now, let's welcome them, rather than questioning whether their motives are related to some tangentially related disagreement.
You have to draw a line somewhere. This sort of shortsighted expediency based politics is how we got the current political parties.
Biden cancelled this during his administration
[flagged]