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by jacquesm 900 days ago
Exactly. The number of people making light of this in this thread is unsettling, to put it mildly. If that's the 'tech savvy' crowd then you have to really worry about everybody else. The parallels with the Dutch citizen registry story from WWII are just too much to ignore.
1 comments

Jacques, I respect you, but I'm already apparently living in a world where my genetic markers make me feel like a rabbit-on-the-run, or at least they force me to pre-emptively apologize for other people with similar genes when I want to travel in most countries. I'm not going to be overly concerned about the constituents of this thread; their views are incoherent, but if they had much power to influence anything, they wouldn't be wasting their time writing here, and neither would we.

Perhaps a better way to say this is that 'tech savvy' posters are the least likely to have a good handle on mainstream feelings, and I definitely feel safer among normal people than those who consider themselves arguers for technological progress without a supporting philosophy.

[edit] I had a dream last night that the front of my house was all glass, including the ceiling. And I was on the couch with my girlfriend reading books when a Hamas protest came down the street, waiving green flags. They took positions on the roof of the school across from me, and they were pumping the air with AK47s and shouting slogans, looking down into our glass house and waiting for us to respond. We looked at each other and tried to make ourselves small and we did not want to respond to their slogans. They became more and more agitated that we were refusing to agree with them. We knew that we were marked for death. Then the police showed up and they moved down the street, chanting the same things.

This is a small story. My father, stupidly, put his genes on this website without asking his children; thus I was a victim of this data breach (we're not surprisingly 90% Ukrainian/Belarusian/Ahskenazi Jewish and oddly 10% Irish). But what does it mean to dream people shouting a slogan that you'll either shout with them or die, into the glass living room of your house? It feels like a perfect metaphor for the time we're living in. I wish everyone in the world had that dream so they could understand what it feels like to be a true rebel who is alone against a mob.

> My father, stupidly, put his genes on this website without asking his children

Oh shit. That really sucks. My mother was about to do it but I talked her out of it.