Comment by anonymous908213
17 hours ago
> I can think of no reason why constituents should not know where the people in power over them live.
I can think of plenty of reasons. Political violence in democracies is on the rise globally, and not the sort of organized political violence that people might use to liberate themselves from the chains of oppressors, but rather the kind of lunatic political violence that is committed by irrational lone actors who are fundamentally mentally unwell.
I believe you can have political transparency without involving people's homes and families.
When an overworked air traffic controller in Germany gave a plane an instruction that happened to be the opposite of TCAS automatic collision avoidance system, and one pilot followed TCAS to avoid a collision and one followed the controller, the planes crashed and everybody died. A family member of one of the passengers looked up, hunted down, and murdered in cold blood the air traffic controller.
> an overworked air traffic controller in Germany
Actually the air traffic controller in question was Swiss not German.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_%C3%9Cberlingen_mid-air_c...
You left out - was a foreigner, managed to escape, faced zero consequences at home (AFAIK).
He didn't escape, he sentence was reduced from 8 to 3 1/2 by a Swiss judge. The reasoning was that his mental state was properly accounted for. Who knows if lobbying from Russia played a part in that. Also, not only did he face no consequences at home, he was celebrated and given a high-level job.
Maybe it's my American-ness showing, but it's pretty shocking to me that 8 years was considered too harsh for someone who stabbed a man to death in front of his family.
On the other hand, I suppose one could argue that the perpetrator was highly unlikely to commit a similar act in the future, if only because his motivation was the death of his own family, who would no longer be around to inspire him to violence a second time.
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Government employees, including and especially elected officials, are employees of the people and the people have a right to the same information any employer has about their employees.
> Political violence in democracies is on the rise globally
Citation needed, but even if we say for the sake of argument this is accurate, that doesn't naturally lead to this outcome.
What makes violence political?
Is political violence inherently worse? I think it is, but there's at least an argument to be made that it isn't.
Is stopping that political violence worth the worst case scenario where we make it harder for the public to get this type of information?
I'd argue that employers shouldn't have access to employee's home addresses either, outside of situations where it's needed (e.g., employee chooses to get paycheck by mail instead of direct deposit). Most employers keep access to personal employee information (PII) restricted to HR/timekeeping/payroll departments anyway.
Why would my direct supervisor need my home address?
To match more closely the question about politicians, why would you need the home address of your direct supervisor? Seems quite suspect to me.
> Government employees, including and especially elected officials, are employees of the people and the people have a right to the same information any employer has about their employees.
I don't think any employer has any right to know their employee's home address, to be honest.
> Is political violence inherently worse? I think it is, but there's at least an argument to be made that it isn't.
I think this question is rather besides the point. Random acts of violence are bad, so let's not make anybody's home address public information. In the age of the internet, we routinely observe millions of people fixating on one person for some perceived grievance or another, wherein it only takes one lunatic among those millions having access to private information to result in a tragedy. We don't have to make it so easy for these tragedies to happen.
> I don't think any employer has any right to know their employee's home address, to be honest.
Regardless of whether this should be the case or not, it is the case is every country I can think of.
I agree I think we're straying from the point a bit. When is the last time you can point to an act of political violence that would not have occurred had some public servant or elected official's address not been on a website or spreadsheet somewhere?
These things simply don't happen enough to warrant further limiting government officials' accountability to the public.
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Its literally the last check of power... rich people will find out exactly where the power people live. The masses also need to know
The last check on power is murdering politicians in their homes? I beg to differ. If the situation is so bad that violence is truly necessary, the last check is an organized revolution, not an assassination. If the figure is a genuine dictator and important enough to have real power, they would have extensive security surrounding their home anyways. This fantasy of assassinating a would-be Putin or whatever does not justify exposing the addresses of city councilmen or judges or whatever random public servant somebody wants to kill over their grievances.
> The last check on power is murdering politicians in their homes?
You said murder, but there are plenty of valid reasons that the public should know who holds positions of power and where they live that don't involve violence of any kind.
Protest is an essential freedom we have and it's perfectly valid to do it outside of the homes of those we have put in power. It's also useful to have that information when investigating fraud and corruption.
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