There's no such thing as an "impenetrable DMZ" so I don't know why you bring that up. Even the most fortified borders can have gaping holes as the October 7 attack showed. The US can't force anything either. During the Yom Kippur War when the US was a lot more hesitant about giving aid the only result was Israel threatening to use nuclear weapons against the Arab armies.
> There's no such thing as an "impenetrable DMZ" so I don't know why you bring that up.
You know what I mean. I am obviously not claiming that a DMZ can be perfectly impenetrable. I'm talking about one that's actually manned, and one that is significantly better than what is currently in place, to the point that a repeat attack is sufficiently unrealistic.
> The US can't force anything either.
Yes they can. Israel relies on them for their security umbrella and trade relationships. US has an extreme amount of leverage, if only it would use it.
The paper says it makes a connection between human experimentation and foreign policy but I don't really see it. Scientists were interested in how these chemicals or biological agents worked and I don't think it would have made a difference to them whether they worked for the military, or a civilian health agency, or a corporation. Similarly for nuclear materials post WW2 the thinking at the time was that nuclear energy was going to become widespread and so there was plenty of reason to study the effect of nuclear material on the human body without taking into consideration anything foreign policy related.
It's a claim made by the head of the agency that did it. If you're not willing to take their word, I think you're being stubborn and obtuse and this will never be a productive discussion.
If you're willing to believe a US whistleblower -- whose evidence you can't personally verify -- you have to be open to believing the _former head of the agency_.
Well like any subject, you start by studying their history. Declassified documents take a while to become declassified but are a rich source of history. Then historians write books based on those documents and you can get a more reasonable idea of how things worked and fit into a broader picture. For more recent activities it's obviously more difficult but occasionally you get leaks that give you a sneak peek of what is happening (eg Snowden).
Yup. I'm eagerly awaiting root comment poster backing up their wild claims by pointing to declassified or FOIA'd documents that provide concrete evidence of their allegations that "This type of work is much of what the Intelligence Community does."
Actually, I might even settle for reporting from reputable news organizations.
Every time this comes up people talk about protecting privacy and anonymity and what not and while luckily for us most of the time the laws die out they still do pass on occasion. The fundamental issue to me is that society still wants to protect against pedophiles or drug dealers or whatever other group more than protect privacy. As an example, how many people here could go on television onto some talk program or news show with their real name and face and tell a child abuse victim that while their concerns may be valid they are wrong and they should shut up? I doubt very many. I ran into a similar scenario once defending privacy when a lady who said she was abused as a child came into the conversation and told her story to the crowd. As you can imagine the crowd was very supportive of her and my concerns were more or less dismissed afterwards. There is nothing technical I could say that could persuade them as much as the poor lady's life story could.
Say "Most sexual abuse is domestic. Shall we mandate cameras in every room of every house? Or remote engine-lock to stop terrorist car attacks? There are cameras everywhere, forensics is more advanced than ever, 'going dark' is the opposite of reality. But there is always some small remaining scrap of freedom left to sacrifice for supposed 'safety', until we are reduced to cattle. Doing so is spitting on the graves of everyone who ever died for freedom, of everyone who chose to fight instead of 'peacefully' submit to foreign conquest or domestic dictatorship.
But suppose you do prefer 'safety' to all else, to privacy and liberty. Suppose you want to sacrifice everything for it. Will you even get it? We can today build prisons and surveillance far more effective than at any point in history, and once we've turned society into a safe cage, how sure are you the wrong people won't get the keys? Historically, how many governments would you have trusted with such total surveillance of their citizens? Tsarist Russia? Soviet Russia? Present day Russia? Communist China? Present day China? Nazi Germany? The Stasi? The Khmer Rouge? The Ottoman Empire? Iran? The British Raj? But you're sure nothing like that will happen here? This time, benevolent government will last, and we can safely surrender all means of opposition?"
It's a great argument but way over the head of the average citizen. Most people are unable to think about things this way. The government and police are the good guys etc.
> The fundamental issue to me is that society still wants to protect against pedophiles or drug dealers or whatever other group more than protect privacy.
Speaking from a U.S. perspective here.
A pedophile with a cameraphone is terrible. But law enforcement without the 4th amendment is worse.
A racist with a social media account is terrible. But a president without the 1st amendment is worse.
There are people who do terrible things in this world. Unfortunately people who do terrible things can run for government and be appointed to positions of power.
There are darker things down the path of eroding our protections from our government than whatever evil they’re asking us to yield for.
that's only specifically the first 10 amendments, which are generally referred to as the bill of rights as they were added to the constitution when it was ratified and cover most basic freedoms so they're taught in school
other rights-granting amendments are the post civil war ones which are slightly less well known but also covered in school
Most Americans won't know those, because those are state-specific (usually for California; most states don't even have Propositions that citizens can vote on).
Every American knows what the 1st Amendment is, by contrast.
They are more than just a law, they are part of the constitution (much harder to change).
And the reason why the first 10 (the Bill of Rights) and some others are learned by all schoolchildren is because the rights delineated within directly address many dire problems Americans had suffered as British colonies (and why there was a war, so is said), and so the reasons why America was formed by its founders in the first place. Part of the mythology and moral license.
> There are darker things down the path of eroding our protections from our government than whatever evil they’re asking us to yield for.
I agree with you, but this illustrates part of the problem of our messaging. These policies are still just tools which don't have an inherent moral value. The evil comes from their abuse on a mass scale, and the huge temptation to abuse them, with the emphasis on how easily the powerful can be corrupted.
This is prone to being called out for being a slippery slope fallacy, but we need to just back it up with historical precedent, like how similar policies were abused in the US as revealed by Snowden.
There are people who would like the government to outlaw racism/hate speech on social media. The first amendment prevents that. I think r3trohack3r's point is that eroding those 1st amendment rights to outlaw hate speech would be worse than the actual hate speech.
I believe the general concensus is that it doesn't because private media companies aren't public spaces, so the company rules. How far the company enjoys freespeech, whether it extenda to their users and who gets to define hate speech I don't know, but lible is criminalized already and further analogies aren't impossible.
I mean, I could call a hackernews a punk ass neoliberal cunt and wait what happens next.
This is true, but the first amendment should also prevent the government from pressuring said companies to censor speech as well. This would be the government using it's power and coercion to violate people's 1st amendment rights via a third party. Think "hiring someone to murder someone is still murder for the person hiring," or a police soliciting a trespass.
The recent "Twitter files" showed that the government is/was working directly with Twitter and probably all the media companies to censor speech. The government, on multiple occasions, provided specific tweets and people to censor and Twitter complied. I believe they had weekly meetings to do just that.
This stops being true when U.S. government officials (including publicly elected officials and folks in 3 letter agencies) get involved with those moderation policies.
I think it’s still an open question whether it’s acceptable for government officials to be involved in any way with the moderation policies of a company outside of the 1st amendment including:
* asking for changes to moderation policies
* asking for enforcement of existing policies
* passing lists of users to be watched for policy violations
* etc.
Which has happened, is happening, and will continue to happen until the courts figure out whether or not the U.S. government is allowed to launder away 1st amendment protections through collaboration with private companies.
> how many people here could go on television onto some talk program or news show with their real name and face and tell a child abuse victim that while their concerns may be valid they are wrong and they should shut up?
Well, putting aside the "shut up" part, I'd be happy to state publicly that under no (reasonable, peacetime) circumstances should the government be allowed to read my texts, emails, and documents.
Obviously there's a bunch of qualifiers to assign to that (if I'm under suspicion of something, OK, sure, maybe the government can get a warrant) that I'm not qualified to speak intelligently about, but that's the gist. Saying that the government should not be able to read your email or list to your phone calls is not an unpopular opinion, at least in the States, and it's also not one that requires you to be of an overly technical persuasion to have.
People support victims of child abuse and they also distrust the government and don't want it to have awesome powers of espionage it can wield against the entire populace at scale all of the time. Those positions might conflict with each other if you frame the conversation that way, but if you do frame it that way, I don't think it's a given that the child abuse argument is always going to win the debate.
Don't worry about that audience. Us profesional-managerial upper-middle class types are surrounded by people whose beliefs are subordinate to their personal ambition; it's a qualification for entering the class, because it takes an enormous amount of hard work, social connections, and study to reach and maintain that position. So you end up surrounded by people who live a politics of personal interests i.e. real concern about issues that affect them and the people they love (deemed universal), and ephemeral concern that sometimes borders on actual ignorance of things that don't affect them and theirs. This ephemeral concern and ignorance is entirely based in fashion.
Upper-middle class PMCs generally aren't worried about being monitored or censored by authorities (except within the games of party power politics and wedge issues.) If anything, when they hear about it, they look to see if there are job openings. They are concerned about child abuse, because even wealthy children get abused. Universal.
They constitute (if I'm being generous) 20% of the population and are useless to try to convince. It's their duty to explain to you that the society that has rewarded them generously for their hard work actually has everyone's best interests at heart, no matter how ludicrous it seems.
Side argument - why do you need protection from drug dealers? Just don't buy drugs from them if you don't want any.
Main argument: you bring up very important aspect - emotional one. We are very emotional and in the heat of the moment you probably won't be able to make good technical and reasonable case to persuade people, but that doesn't mean they are right.
Also I am not against _solutions_ to the problem. I am against solutions that when implemented have really low cost of switching them into tools of abuse.
Example: There is law that allows banning of websites (just DNS resolution) that promote gambling, illegal porn etc. It was recently used to "take down" a website that leaked emails of politicians of current government (it could be bad if we speak of some national security / military stuff, in that case they share info about corruption and nepotism)
Conflating privacy stripping laws with paedophilia protection is something I'd happily deconstruct, whether in front of a camera or otherwise. It's not difficult to show with logic how one doesn't help the other, and I could even go as far as showing how the laws make things worse.
> Convincing people not to support privacy eroding laws isn't a logic fight as you are imagining it
Who said anything about convincing people? The logic will stand on it's own merit, regardless of who "wins" the argument. Anybody caring to examine the arguments — or continue arguing logically — can make up their own minds.
I'll happily argue logic, but other people's opinions aren't my problem.
> As an example, how many people here could go on television onto some talk program or news show with their real name and face and tell a child abuse victim that while their concerns may be valid they are wrong and they should shut up? I doubt very many.
I think I'm misunderstanding you here, are you implying presently real politicians would have to do that to advocate for privacy laws?
It isn't logic, and I think that's the point--it's an appeal to emotion, and if you pit logic vs emotion, emotion will almost always win in the broader culture. (A few oddball cultures like ycombinator and lesswrong etc. aside, perhaps).
It's always a matter of availability, balance, justification, right. The justification is there, so your argument is a strawman.
It would be more relevant in a direct comparison to gun control, which. Blades are fairly easy to furnish on the spot, easier than guns, so this comparison fails, too.
Balance requires a need for knives, which is difficult to put aside and certainly not the point of this argument. The ball park figure alone is not making a rational argument.
The internet is not the breaking point either way, though it could be used to implement access control.
So, I am effectively unsure if your whatabout'ish strawman is in favour of intrusive regulation.
This is an awesome point, and one I think geeks need to hear often: We act based on our emotions even if they are well-hidden beneath logical explanations.
Perhaps the "answer" to the lady who was abused as a child is to tell another emotional story--for example, Ann Frank:
> Have you heard the story of Anne Frank? She was a Jewish girl who lived in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in World War II. She and her sister lived in hiding for two years until they were eventually discovered and arrested by the Gestapo. They later died of typhus in a concentration camp.
> How did surveillance play a role? No one knows who betrayed her. She lived through constant fear of being caught. Knowing they were being watched added to the already difficult conditions of living in hiding--the stress of the situation affected their relationships and mental health.
> If you or those you care about ever find yourself on the "less desirable" list in society, it's vital that you have some control over things you say to others in confidence. The Nazi's oppression of the Jewish people limited their freedom and contributed to Anne's tragic end.
Not to worry, as someone also of Asian descent in a hundred or so years the amount of those living in the current British Isles with heritage to the colonialists will become a small minority and hopefully out of power (as I doubt the majority will want to be ruled by a minority).
I don't see how this is a "weird asian supremacy replacement theory" when Britain wholesale welcomes these changes as a part of their future, many Western countries welcome immigrants for a) brain drain from other countries and b) so their economies maintain growth. Nothing supremacist in that and nothing I said implies anything about supremacy or Asians beyond the fact I myself have Asian heritage.
I mean, when any high profile white person does complain that they don't want this, they are called a replacement theory conspiracist nazi. And they are basically cancelled from mainstream media.
But to be fair, you are right in a way, I personally believe the UK is the most welcoming non racist nation on earth. I'm saying that as someone who's experienced it firsthand.
I don't have any real care for it either way because I'll be likely dead by the time it happens, I am just pointing out demographic trends. However I don't see what your point about dog whistling far-right viewpoints is for. Britain as a whole is completely supportive of current demographic trends and I don't see any serious rejection of it in politics the way you might if one brought it up in a non-Western nation.
> I don't see any serious rejection of it in politics
It's the policy of the Tory party to reduce immigration, has been for years, and is popular policy that wins them votes. The Tories don't actually do it and among the politicians you're right: there is no serious rejection, for the reasons you've outlined.
But among the population, you seem to have an opinion based on TV, Twitter, urban areas, or maybe the youth. But to most of the country multiculturalism and mass immigration is controversial at best, and often very unpopular. In fact you can (and I do) often find critics of mass immigration among immigrants themselves, and their descendants.
SkyNews reported from their "sources" that it is understood that:
- The armed forces would run out of ammunition "in a few days" if called upon to fight
- The UK lacks the ability to defend its skies against the level of missile and drone strikes that Ukraine is enduring
- It would take five to 10 years for the army to be able to field a war-fighting division of some 25,000 to 30,000 troops backed by tanks, artillery and helicopters
- Some 30% of UK forces on high readiness are reservists who are unable to mobilise within NATO timelines - "so we'd turn up under strength"
- The majority of the army's fleet of armoured vehicles, including tanks, was built between 30 to 60 years ago and full replacements are not due for years
That article seemed to me like a microcosm of what's wrong with UK journalism since Brexit. Every one of those issues is shared with Europe as a whole (or in the case of "the ability to defend its skies against the level of missile and drone strikes that Ukraine is enduring", basically every country on the planet as I understand it), but the article makes the UK look uniquely bad by using a completely different framing when talking about the UK's military vs other countries like France and Germany. For the UK they talk only about the current problems, whereas for other countries they focus only on the fact that those countries have annouced plans to improve their militaries whilst ignoring the current state of their militaries and the question of whether those plans are realistically going to work or actually happen. Germany's military in particular is in an awful state and they've kept on putting off the supposed funding increase it's meant to be getting.
Like, the UK is arguably the main military power in Europe at this point and a major contributor to Ukraine not being outright annexed by Russia, but you wouldn't get that impression at all from the article.
Armchair quarterbacks can always find something wrong with a military.
Many of the force composition decisions for the UK circa 1980, particularly the use of light "aircraft carriers" that the Harrier operated from, were controversial. The war with Argentina went very well for the UK but if they'd had worse luck those decisions would be seen differently.
In the US in the 1980s I remember seeing television documentaries about how the M-1 Abrams tank and the Bradley Fighting Vehicle would not be effective at protecting our forces but then in the 1st Gulf War these turned out to be superb.
> That article seemed to me like a microcosm of what's wrong with UK journalism since Brexit.
If you ask me, the source of the problem is deeper: it is within Western culture itself, and the cognitive style that comes out of it. Speaking inaccurately and untruthfully is not just acceptable, it is enforced. Doing otherwise is taboo.
The UK is an island country with its single actual existential threat getting its own military capability shredded in Ukraine. Unless something wacky happens and France decides to reignite the Hundred Years war the UK really doesn't need much of a military anymore anyway, so why invest in it?
As an island country the UK is still highly dependent on global trade. It makes sense to invest in a strong navy plus some expeditionary land and air forces in order to keep their sea lines of communication open. They need to have their own capabilities as a matter of national survival rather than relying on the US.
It also makes sense for the UK to continue funding a proxy war in Ukraine. This allows them to bleed Russia to death and eliminate that threat for years to come at a minimal cost.
And the UK has done that. It has two aircraft carriers.
It's pretty unclear why it should have an army that's literally ready to go at full strength within days. The US does that but US levels of military spending are hardly normal. Even in WW2 there was time to rearm. Huge military conflicts on your doorstep rarely come out of nowhere, they are seen coming. The most likely next conflict after Ukraine is still Taiwan and the UK's role in that will likely be minimal regardless of the strength of the armed forces.
If the Soviet Union was still around today would be interesting to see how they would deal with modern science regarding gender and sexuality. Modern Russia keeps many of the same cultural ideas from the Soviet Union yet they are very much against it.
My (limited) understanding is that the soviet union was generally pretty pro feminist vs modern russia which refers to it as a "mortal sin", so i dont think the two are comparable culturally. But im not well read on the subject.
USSR was also officially (rural people kept their beliefs though) atheist. Current (I wouldn't call it "modern") Russia seems to be quite Christian Orthodox.
Not just „rural“ people. Unless „urban“ is limited to Moscow. Where soviet elite had to hide church activities even harder than their counterparts in periphery.
There was an attempt to remove religion in early era, but Stalin put an end to that and brought back Orthodox church. Later there was some lip service and lame attempts, but not that serious. Although party members would still get in trouble for openly celebrating christmas. Which many people did anyway, just privately behind closed curtains.
I don't think the so called "second wave" feminism, driven in large part by housewives rebelling against boredom and expectations of passiveness, got much traction in the Soviet Union. In my country, there were certainly conflicts between the older, socialist oriented feminism and the second wave.
My mother told me she left the women's front because it had been "couped" by socialists. In particular, they opposed pension rights for unpaid care work, because they believed that would encourage women to stay at home, and my mom thought it was a lot more important to value the work women had done than to push them into the wage economy.
Looking into it, though, I think maybe the women's front was socialist dominated from the start, and it was 68er, second wave-ish women like her who were "entering".
Important detail -- not just can, but have to work. Not working in soviet union was a crime with only cop-out being parental leave (for women only) or retirement. Women also were present in the military, but didn't have to. Regarding specific occupations -- there was a lot of de-facto segregation, with some jobs being exclusively done by women.
Non-obvious consequence here -- if everybody has to work and compensation is as flat as possible, there are no partner alimonies, which obviously affects gender dynamics. Sprinkle in WW2 which wreked gender balance for generations, you get lasting changes in a society.
I think the change of mind could be attributed leadership trying to recover population growth after a series of demographic collapses of varying scales (ww2, famine, Brezhnevian Stagnation) which really hit birth rates.
