[trod123]

I disagree that people are complacent. What we are seeing today is the same thing East-germany saw under The Stasi.

The primary issue is that there is no means to correct the situation non-violently.

When you have people as a group lie for profit, and they corrupt your representatives and there is no one to hold them to account. They don't give you the choice, and you can't hold them accountable first because you find out about it later, but you still have no choice and you reach out to the people whose job it is to solely represent you in government and they do nothing, and the courts are inaccessible so you have no means.

At that point, despite declarations, there really isn't a rule of law then, it along with most of what people think of as their rights were taken by collusion gradually and quietly.

When that type of problem occurs, every citizen has a choice based upon the individual risk. Totalitarian governments kill people, or lock them up from kafka kangaroo courts (before they kill them) to give a semblance of legitimacy when that legitimacy has already passed. You show me the person, I'll show you the crime; is a famous saying.

When feedback systems fail, and can no longer respond, things will get worse until people will do something, and that will be destructive. The only choice they are given is when.

Totalitarian governments make no distinction between peaceful protests, they may not go after you initially, but collecting all the information upfront of everyone that does to black bag you later; or keep you under their thumb through enhanced coercion (given the systems) and harassment from every direction is not unheard of.

The moment you start surveilling peaceful protests is a known indicator that you are in fact in a totalitarian government.

Its not the people who are the problem. Its the fact that feedback mechanisms have been corrupted and are now broken.

Privacy is a necessary and requisite element for any insurgency in its beginnings, so by eliminating it no corrective action can take place and abuses will continually get worse.

You've had agency stripped from you without your consent and told all your life you live in a world that doesn't exist while misleading you at every step.

These situations historically always cascade, which is why we almost certainly will have a violent civil war in the near future. Its destructive, but that is the inevitable outcome when feedback systems are interfered with to the point where they can no longer function to keep people within reasonable bounds.

[JumpCrisscross]

> primary issue is that there is no means to correct the situation non-violently

Are you a regulator voter? Do you have a dialogue with your electeds’ offices? If not, try starting there. Express, as unemotionally as you can, why you believe this is something you believe in. If possible, get your views seconded in writing.

If you’re in America or Europe, there are plenty of non-violent remedies at the ready. The problem is privacy is uniquely afflicted with the uselessly cynical, to the point that it’s considered electoral junk at the national level.

> What we are seeing today is the same thing East-germany saw under The Stasi

Please don’t do this. It’s one step below analogising petty complaints to Auschwitz. (Archer can do it. You can’t.)

[trod123]

> Are you a regular voter

I regularly reach out to my representatives in writing. Nothing ever comes of it. None of the issues I bring up are ever brought into discussion. Fake job postings, and interferance in labor relations have been a recent subject that only receives boilerplate responses. No action has been taken, its been 5 years since I started doing this which is an appropriate measure of sampling time to show trends and inform on larger systems, though 10 years is better.

I vote every time I have a chance. The problem with voting systems is first, the money vote (tweedism) just to get on a ballot. It's a filter and acts to make the system captive to those with concentrated wealth, by limiting those who can successfully run.

Second, the concentration of representative power in few representatives leads to dynamics where many are not represented simply because there are too many competing interests within that group (as opposed to an upper limit per representative like it used to be @80,000).

Seniority by committee limits power to only those who get re-elected regularly (further concentrating power).

Third, the voting as a plurality which is also exclusionary. You can skew any system holding at least 66 percent of the vote.

It is also an all or nothing vote (not ranked choice), where inherently when a representative can't win the majority, none of the people who voted for them technically have much representation among other competing and more favorable members of that group who voted for that person.

Finally,

> Please don't do this. Its one step below analogising petty complaints to Auschwitz.

These are not petty complaints. They are fundamental and foundational to the functional operation of any feedback system. Its based solidly in actual history, not hyperbole. Its not funny... at all. Archer is meant to be absurd and funny; its not a fair characterization or comparison.

There are many experts that are claiming the same thing because rational observable indicators are all showing that this is a growing existential problem. Rome fell largely because of corruption alongside external invasion. There are important lesson's which could be learned but are largely being ignored.

The dynamics are the same with most Empires (where a country seeks hegemony), and the majority of people have not been adequately educated to be able to even hold to rational conversation, instead putting forth beliefs in luei of observable facts being confident in their blindness.

That too is a problem because our enemies take advantage of that blindness.

If you've read any history about the Stasi, you'd know the systems they used to disunite the population, most of those system's have been used by government's today. They also enrolled others in a constant fear of betrayal by those close, and that's very similar to all the embedded devices (where a digital automata/soldier is embedded in each household spying on them).

These things are serious, and deserve rational respect and following rational rules to have any discussion.

[JumpCrisscross]

> regularly reach out to my representatives in writing. Nothing ever comes of it. None of the issues I bring up are ever brought into discussion

Where are you? Can you share a sample of the text you reach out with? Have you ever organised a group of people to sign on to what you’re advocating?

> too many competing interests within that group (as opposed to an upper limit per representative like it used to be @80,000)

You have no state representatives with smaller parcels?

> are fundamental and foundational to the functional operation of any feedback system. Its based solidly in actual history, not hyperbole

It’s hyperbole: the Stasi used violence as a political tool. Normalising them with rhetoric such as yours legitimises all of the mechanisms you describe escalating to including violence in their portfolio.

[advael]

> the Stasi used violence as a political tool

This point is extremely silly. In the modern US, violence is an essentially omnipresent political tool, both at home on every level and abroad. In many cities across the country we just saw police violently crack down on protestors in universities protesting the US support of Israel's present massacre in Gaza, but this also happened at the protests against police killings and bigotry throughout 2020, or at Ferguson before that, or before that against students protesting the Vietnam war, or before that against civil rights protestors, and those are just the really famous cases in living memory. Relatively recently, an activist in Georgia protesting the demolition of a big chunk of forest for the planned enormous training facility for the already armed to the teeth police of that area was essentially gunned down by a whole firing squad of said police, extrajudicially, and you likely didn't even hear about it.

On a federal level, the FBI has been constantly deployed to attack political dissidents with national fame in more targeted ways, and the DHS and DEA were both essentially invented to do this with more impunity under very broad mandates surrounding very nebulous crimes. You could argue that ICE often functions this way too. The NSA's PRISM program is a surveillance apparatus the Stasi couldn't have dreamed of, and that's just what got leaked, and it was at this point like a decade of both capabilities growth and political unrest ago

Political violence is so normalized that when people are scandalized by our use of it abroad (usually via the CIA), it is when they use the tool of political violence for the benefit of American businesses rather than some perceived "pure" political motive, because it smacks of corruption of one of most important functions of US foreign policy, "necessary" political violence against the sovereignty of perceived potential threats

I agree that it is hyperbole to compare the modern US and its various forms of police to East Germany and its Stasi. The Stasi employed a much smaller scale of political violence than the modern US has, and had nowhere near the capacity nor appetite for widespread surveillance, which nonetheless is further dwarfed by that of its corporations, although of course these are often intertwined

[trod123]

> Where are you.

Doesn't really matter. It was drafted and professional, included known problems such as fake jobs and lack of accountability. Recipients included assembly members, house, and senate. To date, only boilerplate responses, no action, and only an increase in spam related to requests for donation for support during re-election.

> It's hyperbole.

It is not exaggerated, and by definition cannot be hyperbole.This is false.

The observations, and references stand on their own and are testable, when following rational methods. Social contract theory is well established, so is much of the referenced history.

Since you did not follow rational norms nor provide specific examples one can only assume you are referring to the entirety of my initial post as being exaggerated, which is an 'all' claim which are the most trivial to contradict as an overgeneralization and thus be shown to be false.

The claim that communicating facts about past events somehow legitimizes and justifies unrelated acts of violence, and causes it, is fundamentally unsound.

Violence absent survival (existential threats) as a general rule can never be justified, or legitimized.

Any good person knows this, and wouldn't try to justify because false justification is an act of self-violation, and this is how you become an evil person (who has willfully blinded themselves).

There was a time when evil people were killed because they had to be stopped otherwise they would bring destruction on everyone, these times were existential threats. WW2 against the Nazi's was one such time. They threatened the world, and your argument against communication for organization and response is an obvious contradiction during those times.

The structured reasoning you use is a foundational example of flawed thinking (fallacy) and an example of tautology, ad absurdum (by contradiction).

The consequence of an action or event, being the causing action of the event may be narrowly valid in some cases, but never sound (and it must be true in all cases to be sound), this is why it is generally considered fallacy, and by contradiction discounts agency and environmental factors, and overgeneralizes by claiming supposition-al elements are the same when they are not. You can't use circular self-reference when seeking sound argument.

As a result, you have made false claims, while choosing to ignore rational norms (given the ambiguity and dissembling). This is twisted.

Needless to say, there can be no rational discourse if you do not follow rational norms. I've shown that several of your statements are false claims, this informs on your innate credibility for future claims.

Without credibility, you don't have any basis for standing and by necessity, your future rhetoric must be considered false and discarded until you can prove rationally that it is not.

The nice thing about following rational rules and norms is it does not require credibility; only unbased rhetoric has that requirement.

Lies, deceits, and falsehoods are easily discarded under rational methods. Dissembling, discrediting, nullification all cease being useful when you have lost credibility and have no standing.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Doesn't really matter. It was drafted and professional, included known problems such as fake jobs and lack of accountability

On multiple occasions the text I drafted was passed into state and twice federal law, in red states and blue. I’ve also guided staffers, when they were dealing with a new field which I was familiar with, on how to sort the nutters from the informed but powerless. (They’re good at identifying those who can organise a constituency, informed or not.)

I was trying to figure out how you can be more effective. Not fight you.

> observations, and references stand on their own and are testable, when following rational methods

By classic rhetorical methods, you left unchallenged my inequivalence claim in respect of the use of violence by the Stasi and our present governments. Herego, I win by default. (Obviously not how conversation works. But at least more precedents than “rational norms,” which is not standard rhetoric.)

Also, “it is not exaggerated, and by definition cannot be hyperbole” is argument by tautology. Hyperbole means exaggerated. You say it isn’t hyperbole because it isn’t exaggerated. You say it isn’t exaggerated because…well, that’s never argued.

You called out argument ad absurdum, too, though I’m not sure you know what that means—neither of us used it, correctly or not, except in misinformation.

> Since you did not follow rational norms nor provide specific examples one can only assume you are referring to the entirety of my initial post as being exaggerated

…did you use this tone in your letters? “Rational norms” are not conventional English.

On a stylistic level, you used the word “rational” in almost every sentence. That’s fine. But it puts your writing into a specific corner of the internet better known for flat Earthers than reasoned policy.

Good luck. I’m signing off this thread.

[ffgjgf1]

> The primary issue is that there is no means to correct the situation non-violently

I think that’s a rather absurd claim. The real problem is that most people couldn’t care less, they neither understand the issues and/or are in the “don’t have anything to hide” camp. Unfortunate I guess that’s just how democracy works..

[trod123]

It is not absurd, it is frightening, because when you look closely at the details of how the systems currently function it shows they are not functioning.

The rule of law is meant as a safeguard for non-violent conflict resolution. It requires 4 components. Accessibility and independent judiciary are two of the most important.

It currently costs an average person's yearly (unspent for necessity/food) salary to bring a case before a superior court to conclusion excluding some niches. That's roughly $50,000, and that was in 2020 dollars. Wages have been suppressed to create a cost wall that excludes those who don't make enough money. There are also other aspects such as forced arbitration, and front of line blocking (i.e. being unable to show standing until an agreement is nullified for discovery, when information that would show standing would be available once done).

You are mistaken. This isn't how democracy works. It is historically the early stages of totalitarianism, and those type of governments resort to menticide which is well documented (but largely not taught outside certain niches).

Robert Lifton, and John Meerloo both are experts and wrote books if you care to actually do your own research.

[ffgjgf1]

I was mainly thinking about Europe (with all the controversy about new regulations), you certainly do have a valid point, though.

[advael]

There's a lot to fear from revolutionary uprising, and I think people are very risk-averse, so this becomes a coordination problem even when there's perhaps widespread discontent

I agree with your conclusion that most rich countries are totalitarian in character, and it feels so fundamentally absurd that a lot of how we got here was merely developing the capability and not doing enough to prevent it

However, I don't think any kind of uprising is actually inevitable. One of the most powerful uses of these panopticons is the pre-emption and disruption of coordinated resistance efforts. Is an effective uprising even feasible if not supported by some faction of the extant powerbrokers? Hard to say to be honest. A lot of these capabilities are unprecedented, if not in nature then certainly in responsiveness and scope

[trod123]

> However, I don't think any kind of uprising is actually inevitable.

Certainly not yet, but with history you have to deal with things in a much wider time horizon. The mistakes most people make are having too narrow of a time horizon. The natural dynamics of people-based feedback systems have pulls in multiple directions to keep it in equilibrium. This served us well until perception was broken around the 1950s.

When the feedback system pulling us away from the cliff, in the opposite direction, are no longer functioning, inevitably (as a matter of time), the forces pushing us toward the cliff will push you over the cliff.

This is seen historically as escalating unrest, whose underlying cause is ignored, increasing violence, increasing coercive pressure, shortages, ceding of rights until you have none and its arbitrary.

The point of break is the moment a feedback system can no longer respond to stimuli to correct its equilibrium action. It is broken. The dynamics running up to catastrophe (as a system) almost guarantee it.

In captive systems where changes are done by the people who are incentivized to not solve the problem they simply have to sit back and do nothing and can enrich themselves (front of line blocking). What, after all, can people do about it given the differential of power and broken systems for feedback that would push back?

To answer your question, without privacy you can't organize. This is well documented since shortly after WW2 with regards to insurgency and counter-insurgency circles (i.e. how we fought against the Nazi's during WW2), and further examined with regards to modern day China. When the mere hint of someone not doing their best for the party is sufficient to punish them (and its arbitrary), people fall into menticidal spirals.

If not corrected, eventually, those in power will out of fear silence the dissenting voices under convenient accidents or limit their opportunities (social credit). Left unchecked it creates a environment where there is no hope for the future, and people stop having children. They may kill their own children to forgo the suffering (this was documented in The Wealth & Poverty of Nations with regards to Natives under the Spanish).

Already the manipulation of the currency has put the average person's ability to make enough to cover the expenses of having children in danger.

As the people who would seek reasonable conditions (not disadvantaged) most likely would be in the cohort of rational people, those leaders undermine their own power base of a strong citizenry (against foreign threats). This is well known structure in the fall of empires.

Additionally, when you have selection pressures towards the meek and irrational thinker, you sieve and eventually get a mono-culture of thought, which gets wiped out when they eventually come up against an existential crisis that requires the flexibility they killed off. There are many examples in history of artifacts where cultures died off and no one knows much about those cultures.

What the Stasi systems were capable of was about 1 generation behind our current disclosed systems. Its scaling faster as well with time. Its a very worrying time for the rational person to be alive.

[fsflover]

> > The primary issue is that there is no means to correct the situation non-violently

Support https://eff.org, https://edri.org etc.

[mistermann]

And the last decade has been a master class in solidifying faith if not worship of the very thing that facilitates it all: "democracy", our most sacred institution.

It's so easy, it's like taking candy from babies.