Comment by smcin
17 hours ago
To correct the mangling of history, there was no "list of Jews kept by the Netherlands [pre-occupation]". There were only pre-existing Dutch population registries of all people, where the personal details collected by the Dutch had included religion, not for any ill purpose.
(The Nazis subsequently compiled a list, post-occupation, but that's not what you asserted.)
So, the Netherlands kept a list of everyone, and they specifically marked out all the Jews, but that doesn't constitute keeping a list of Jews?
It wasn't a list of Jews, it was a list of everyone from which Jews could be easily identified.
The distinction is important in this context, since the purpose of collecting and keeping the data wasn't specifically to have a list of Jews handy.
This is relevant to data collected by companies and governments today.
Consider a list of children with their parent names and the parents' preferred pronouns. You don't have a list of gays, but you have a list from which gays can be readily identified with high accuracy.
> The distinction is important in this context, since the purpose of collecting and keeping the data wasn't specifically to have a list of Jews handy.
How does that make the distinction important? The lesson to draw is "you shouldn't keep a list of Jews, whether you think you're doing it for good reasons or not". The list is a list regardless of whether you think calling it a list is fair in some abstract sense.
> You don't have a list of gays, but you have a list from which gays can be readily identified with high accuracy.
Well, you're almost right. Except of course that you do have a list of gays. That's why Grindr having Chinese ownership was seen as a national security risk.
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