[CobrastanJorji]

> The citizens of affected nations need to be made angry by their leaders' failure to do their jobs correctly, and that's only gonna happen when there are consequences for their actions.

This is a really dangerous line of thinking. It's the line of thought that slides forwards to "I love America so much, but to save America I have to get Americans to really feel the pain, and to do that I need to <horrible violence> to them to wake them up and make them see how things are bad."

Hurting people in order to make them see how they are being hurt is almost never the right call.

[fumeux_fume]

This is a really dangerous line of thinking. It's the line of thought that slides forwards to "I love America so much, but to save America I have lie and cover up the truth of the <horrible violence> being done to them so they'll never see how bad things have gotten."

Lying to people in order to make them never see how they are being hurt is almost never the right call.

[scheeseman486]

You're describing accelerationism and while the ethics behind it are iffy at best, history contends that it does work to help spur revolution.

[CobrastanJorji]

Lots of shitty, evil things work really well. Most people don't do evil just because they love evil. They do it because it works best.

Lying, propaganda, and shooting a bunch of people are also really effective techniques to spur revolution, but that doesn't mean they're good ideas.

[Yizahi]

If we really think about the issue, then it is clear that 99.99% of the government information can be public with zero consequences to the citizens. I'm guessing the only few exceptions are active military ops, active spy ops and ways to access secure systems (passwords etc.). Everything else is more or less safe. Embarrassing to the politicians, but safe.

[vharuck]

You need to account for the risk of blackmail, persecution, and embarrassment (e.g., evidence of infidelity, refugee status, medical condition). Most of the time, citizens have the right to keep secrets or lie.

[Yizahi]

Citizens - yes. Politicians outside of the job, using whatever comms they wish - also yes. Politicians on the job - no. All their job communications can be public, and humanity and citizens of the country would be actually much safer than now. Outside of the military/intel ones, of course.

[vharuck]

I imagine that any dump of government communications will contain sensitive information about citizens or government employees who didn't directly engage in the chats. Soldiers, contractors, patients in a database. Especially if Congressional Representatives have their chats leaked. One of their roles is helping constituents work through red tape. Mine sends a weekly email tooting his own horn, including how many people he helped with social security or getting VA benefits.

I'm not saying these chats shouldn't be released. But I'd hope the names and other identifying info of people who weren't uninvolved would be redacted, just keeping the context to show what kind of information was being carelessly shared. Of course, given the admin's shamelessness, they'd claim anything with redacted info was faked. It might be better to leave it verifiable.

[rtpg]

I feel like it's valuable to not flatten the context here. We are talking about leaking texts by the Trump admin (and I guess some law enforcement agencies using this?).

There is a lot of daylight between dropping a bunch of texts for government officials and committing horrible violence against people as a whole! These are not the same thing! One could be good/fine while the other is bad!

Having said that I would worry for a WikiLeaks-style "oh now this random person's info is out there because it was in one of these e-mails".

I just want to see the gossip

[oivey]

That quote does not say anything about citizens inflicting pain on others. That’s such a strange way to read it. It’s saying to vote shitty leaders out. I’m not sure what you think any other possible alternative there could be.

[TechDebtDevin]

What if you're hurting people to prevent them from hurting people...