(www.michaelgeist.ca)
I feel like WYSIWYG politics is what most of us want, but probably doesn’t actually work. The Ned Stark character that is righteous and right and quickly meets the headman’s axe of the game theory and brinksmanship of everyone else.
I only wish I knew of possible ways for us to get there :(
> then WYSIWYG politics will emerge as a preferred choice.
I think the problem that Waterluvian's is getting at is precisely that WYSIWYG politics is taken as the preferred choice without understanding the implications that make it not actually work. For example, continuing to accept anything that remotely passes as protect-the-children politics without understanding that the consequences are worse than the benefits, even for the children themselves.
> If the quality of those two goes up, then WYSIWYG politics will emerge as a preferred choice.
If the quality of those two goes up, hopefully people start employing second-order thinking and beyond and realize that WYSIWYG politics may not be what it seems to be at the surface level.
> For example, continuing to accept anything that remotely passes as protect-the-children politics without understanding that the consequences are worse than the benefits, even for the children themselves.
Passing a censorship/surveillance bill using the pretext of protecting children is the opposite of WYSIWYG. The true motive is building an apparatus to use to enforce other authoritarian policies and protecting children is the Trojan horse.
If people were better informed about second order effects then that wouldn't work because they would see through the consequences when a pretext is being presented for a bad idea, and then the politicians who attempt it would be more often punished than rewarded. The tactic of lying to people would happen less often because it would be selected against when the number of people who see through you is enough to boot you out of office.
The only possible way to remedy this is to maximize your own ability to exert power, possibly by becoming massively rich, and then hope it doesn't corrupt you enough along the way such that you can still enact good in the end.
Absolutely. Bread and circuses isn't a new idea.
>The only possible way to remedy this is to maximize your own ability to exert power, possibly by becoming massively rich, and then hope it doesn't corrupt you enough along the way such that you can still enact good in the end.
Points for the doing good in the end. But it's a rule in hell/serve in heaven issue, if you first need to create hell with your quest for power you have failed the objective of doing good in the end.
Evil can act Good, but Good cannot act Evil. Evil has that advantage over Good that cannot be matched.
This continuously plays out in our political systems. Good actors cannot fight the deluge of evil of their opponents, who are free to lie cheat and steal.
Good binds its own hands. For good to win, it must act with even greater evil. At which point, it becomes the very thing that it tried to defeat.
The assumption here is that being Evil is advantageous. It's obviously advantageous to personal gain, but the relevant thing is whether it's advantageous to staying in power, and then the system you want to design is the one where it isn't.
Notice also that it isn't binary. You can make it harder to be Evil and then have less of it even if you never have none.
Rarely a great RPG forces my good party to make difficult decisions.
The most confident I ever was that I was "obviously correct" was when I was 20.
“Unions can be corrupt” or “You don’t need unions to get your voice heard” is the kind of rhetoric that leads to disinterest in unions over the years.
> The “good” side therefore needs to fight that complexity with simplicity and empathy.
Empathy, yes. Simplicity doesn't normally lead to empathy; complexity does.
Also, it's not about not being able to see any bad, but some things that obviously seemed correct, stop seeming so obvious.
Reminds me of that clip where a man in some TV show gets slapped by the woman host and he slaps her back. Then a bunch of men from the audience come to beat him up. It's one thing to have the moral "never hit a woman" and "protect women", but if women abuse these views to mistreat and humiliate others without consequence, that doesn't seem right either.
It doesn't seem right for the men to have beat him up for defending himself. They thought they were being moral, but they weren't.
Sometimes moral views can require nuance.
Entropy. Things will dissolve enough that eventually someone will make changes. It takes a long time though, this is likely a feature.
Which is just the saying as "I'm right you're wrong" without adding any value. Most politically contentious issues have at their root a difference of value or tradeoffs, and it is only by understanding that we can really have civil discourse and reduce the polarization. And to be clear if you believe that the difference in value is simply between evil and good, e.g. everyone who belongs to Party A loves puppies and wants to bring happiness and love where anyone who votes for candidate B wants to revive Rasputin and unleash the legions of hell. You are part of the problem. (And if you're immediate response to this is to point out how Bernie/Trunp/Tredau/Harambee actually does want to feed puppies to Morgoth you're part of the problem)
Currwntly, politicians each have a series of meetings over time with different parties (constituents, lobbyists, domain experts, coalition members) and then at some point one of them drafts and tables a law (that's probably already been informally planned for ages among those in the know) and others vote for it (where many of those votes have probably also been informally pre-arranged for ages.)
To get WYSIWYG, every bit of all of those meetings would need to occur in the open. And likely the only way to practically accomplish that, in a “nothing up my sleeve” manner (i.e. to guarantee that there were no meetings outside of the official ones), would be to have all those meetings occur contiguously as part of one long recorded session in one place, with everyone who wants “a seat at the table” needing to operate on that session’s schedule; and where the politicians involved (i.e. those everyone else is there to influence) have a political career that starts and ends with that single session.
In other words, basically do the papal-election thing, or the sequestered-jury-trial thing: lock all the concerned parties (politicians + PAC leaders + lobbyists + etc) in a building together, and don’t let them out until they make a year’s worth of law. (But unlike either of those—record everything! Don’t allow any two people to be in the same room together without a camera.)
Another is that they would just agree on what to do before the official start of the process. Or learn to speak in code. Or pass notes to each other off camera etc.
The closest approximation that might actually do something would be to require the final version of any piece of legislation to be published a year before the final vote. Then the product of a backroom deal can't be enacted before anyone else has a chance to mount an opposition.
Another would be to make it easier to repeal things than to pass them. A lot of current corruption relies on the misfeature that we apply the same purposely-arduous process intended to inhibit bad things from passing as the requirement to un-pass existing bad things, so then if they can corrupt the entire process once they only have to maintain control of a single branch to prevent it from being rolled back.
Well, it wouldn't work for politicians that pick decisions based on what end benfit they get. Would work fine for people. Would need actually honest media tho
Which by definition contains some signalling that deviates from WYSIWYG.
Otherwise I can't really see your point.
I’m running on a campaign of “PUT IT THE %#^* BACK IN THE SAME PLACE EVERY TIME WHEN YOU’RE DONE WITH IT.”
Back to 2024: "Holy CRAP the UN Cybercrime Treaty is a nightmare"
https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-07-23...
Some wonderful countries here: North Korea, Saudi Arabia, China. Thankfully the US hasn't signed it and probably won't because it thinks itself too above international law.
Interestingly, Qatar signed it with [the reservation](https://treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=TREATY&mt...) that
>The State of Qatar does not consider itself bound by the provisions of Articles (16), (15), and (14) of the Convention, as they contradict the provisions of Islamic Sharia, national legislation, and the social and cultural values of the State of Qatar.
These provisions [being](https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/cybercrime/convention/text/co...) Article 14: Offences related to online child sexual abuse or child sexual exploitation material, Article 15: Solicitation or grooming for the purpose of committing a sexual offence against a child, Article 16: Non-consensual dissemination of intimate images.
I am trying to figure out what this means, as I am aware the Prophet married a 9 year old, but Google assures me the minimum age of marriage in Qatar is 16 with parental approval, and it's rare, and I thought Islam required no images of really anything at all, much less females of any age who are to be in burqas when in public.
That said, being a signatory has limited impact as long as it isn't ratified.
[0] - https://treaties.un.org/pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=TREATY&mt...
The EU has their own cybercrime treaty: https://commission.europa.eu/law/cross-border-cases/judicial...
But you'll never hear a peep from "no logs at all costs" VPN companies based in the EU.
Now that's concerning. Europe doesn't want me to know what the law is in the place where I am.
It’s actually a fairly common topic discussed by privacy advocates, including VPN companies
I know for a fact that even the most powerful organizations are powerless to have some relatively unsophisticated group caught and put behind bar.
The idea we would need conventions to start acting is a joke.
For the US, we need a new bill of rights, a bill of digital rights that constitutionally protects right of repair, right to root our own devices, right to be free from dragnet surveillance, right to general purpose computing, and the right to access speech without government-mandated age or identity checks.
With all the libertarian millionaires and billionaires swirling around silicon valley and the venture capital space, why can't we make that happen?
https://www.surveillanceaccountability.com/
>Warrant required Government must go before a judge to access your metadata, location, or financial records — just like searching your home.
>No Data Shopping Agencies can no longer simply purchase data from brokers to bypass the warrant process.
>Face recognition banned Warrantless facial recognition and AI biometric surveillance in public spaces is prohibited.
>You Can Sue Private right of action means if the government violates your rights, you have legal recourse.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/8470...
It's also going to piss off almost all of society if their data cannot be monetized, because pretty much all notable services will go from free to paid overnight.
Perhaps something like a mandatory "Do not track" option for all data supported services, where you can "buyout" your data (at market rate) to prevent it from being sold.
Okay, but what's so bad about getting something positive done? It doesn't have to be comprehensive to apply to data brokers to be an improvement. That would bring in the data broker lobby and big tech. This bill would cement protections for Americans from their government.
>It's also going to piss off almost all of society if their data cannot be monetized, because pretty much all notable services will go from free to paid overnight.
Does it ban data brokers and selling data? From the website it seems to be focused on government privacy invasions. Its not a GDPR although we need that too (hopefully a better version).
Why? Where is any equivalent measures coming from the US left?
It is because that’s how people identify as Democrats want them to behave? There seems to be a rift there.
There were more people willing to stand up for privacy after 9/11 during the “with us or against us” GWOT, which really says something.
It's a super Trump-loving district with mostly elderly turnout, kind of crazy they had Massie for so long, him being a good guy and smart and all.
This went too far with the whole woke thing, and resulted in 2 non-consecutive terms of trump, handing the right a litany of power they had no idea how to wield, and they hit every stupid branch falling down the failure tree.
Education isn’t the answer, dictating “I know what’s best” isn’t the answer, doge wasn’t the answer, starting random wars isn’t the answer.
Maybe by process of elimination we can find the answers. I am Hopeful that if the left gets a foothold again in the coming midterms they do not repeat their past mistakes.
Hopeful != optimistic. Lot of angry people out for blood.
I imagine you know what “the whole woke thing” is referencing and are instead looking to have an unproductive debate. I have no interest in that.
An apathetic and ill informed public doesn’t help matters.
For the average person, 20 years of data profiles and tracking has given them tons of services that they have never paid a penny for. Something totally non-existent 30 years ago when you needed to pay money for everything.
So to them, they are getting free services, and the worst that has come of it is seeing the same Dawn ad four times a day.
When it comes to laws, libertarianism faces an internal contradiction. A libertarian believes that they shouldn't be able to control other people; therefore, if a company wants to make an unrepairable unrootable surveillance device and the population consents to using it, the libertarian believes that it is not their right to interfere. The only thing they can do is create a better repairable rootable device, which is how we got GCC, Linux, Ubuntu, Firefox, Graphene, etc.
There's a different remedy for the current situation.
Twenty words into your post and you've pivoted to the US.
What mechanism or discussion can we have to encourage the users to show some restraint on this?
One thing we can do is try to upvote the citizens of the country being discussed.
Or calls to action -- who does someone who's Canadian call to complain about this? (Their MP I presume?)
I'd also be curious, given you have a multiparty system and not our peculiar two party one, why you struggle so hard to get candidates from NDP elected who would probably not push such terrible legislation?
Multiparty yes, but also first-past-the-post, which favours 2 dominant parties.
An explanation as to why the NDP fail to gain any substantial power could fill an entire book but imho the overarching reason comes down to the demographic distribution of Canada and dominance of the Bloq Quebecois has over Quebec preventing the establishment of any lasting NDP influence in such a densely populated part of the country.
As for the subject at hand, I wish it would be so easy as to just call an elected official, but as I said above, with the Liberal control of parliament for the remainder of their term and their high support in the polls there’s nothing that will Make them backtrack.
And this speaks to what Waterluvian mentioned in another thread. Too often with these kinds of surveillance laws the drive for them doesn’t seem to be originating by from the electorate, and it feels like this kind of stuff has an exogenous source and is meant for a whole different audience or player in the game.
So the social democrats won't play nice with the social democrats who want to secede, to grossly oversimplify? :-)
Here in the states (and sorry to do the thing parent was complaining about), I've seen the same people who used to vilify Ralph Nader for splitting the vote melt down they're getting primaried by "extremists" -- the generation that brought us South Park and the Iraq War has grown up to be fragile as fuck.
> Too often with these kinds of surveillance laws the drive for them doesn’t seem to be originating by from the electorate, and it feels like this kind of stuff has an exogenous source and is meant for a whole different audience or player in the game.
Too often we refuse to listen to victims and pretend there is a technical issue preventing the prosecution of serious violations of the non aggression principle.
Our prime minister pretty much has full and complete control of the legislative and executive branches and even the appointment of judges. If you vote against your party then you can be kicked out. The whip is pretty absolute.
It's "Bloc". The NDP did well in Québec not long ago, when they had a candidate that the electorate liked.
Greed. More money to provide the tools of oppression via government contracts.
Maybe because they're full of shit? (Sorry to swear, but I'm struggling for a better way to phrase this.)
I ran into a lot of open source projects that needed donations that would be considered tiny in any other nonprofit space, but despite all their talk about cipherpunk stuff, they don't seem to put their money where their mouth is.
The "lolbertarians", as I like to call them, seem to want a world where the state has a monopoly on violence and a monopoly on data -- and if you get on their radar, they're just being neutral. (Forgive me if I roll my eyes so hard my retinas nearly detach.)
As a libertarian myself - these people are fake libertarians, actually better described as crypto-authoritarians. So called "right" libertarianism is fertile ground for this, as it's based on an axiomatic/reductionist framing of rights wherein when someone violates a precondition, their rights then become irrelevant. The philosophy is supremely attractive to authoritarians who go down its rabbit hole - finding a whole bunch of reasons to reject appeals to other people's rights while convincing themselves they are advocating freedom.
Whereas in reality, the "freedom" they believe in is merely the freedom for themselves to oppress others - witness how these billionaires have chiefly made their money with centralized proprietary web apps/services based around removing choice away from users (at the edge) in favor of "take it or leave it" top-down monolithic offerings, slowly made worse over time (ie enshittification) to extract value after sticky network effects have been achieved.
There are of course exceptions - some use their wealth to attempt to pivot to making libre software. And I'm sure there are many more who become disillusioned with the "freedom" they thought they were making, and merely check out. But as the general rule this is why you don't see much actual support for freedom from the rich Surveillance Valley types.
Those are pro-surveillance, pro-repair-prevention, pro-fascism.
Libertarianism is about your freedom to restrict others, if you are rich and powerful.
Thomas Massie is a wealthy libertarian and introduced a bill to protect privacy.
recommend reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Money_(book) there's a netflicks documentary by the same name that is NOT a substitute for the book.
I disagree with many other people who dont happen to be like that.
And this is that level of cooperation. And it has all the hallmarks of what comes next, identity verification. And this, is what this is for.
In order to prosecute anyone, you need to validate who did the crime. And that requires knowing who that person is. Not hearsay, not postulated, but validated "who this is". So you need to lock down anonymous access to the internet, in order to ensure you can easily and always prosecute such crimes.
And one of the issues right now, is that if someone in the UK does "bad thing" in Canada via the internet? It's doubly hard to track. So creating frameworks which will (on the backend) require some form of identity verification to work effectively, well... that tracks from where I sit and have seen in the last 2 years.
Frankly, from a government's perspective, this is no different than all the changes with KYC, for example 50 years ago the Government of Canada knew pretty much nothing about its citizenry. Certainly, it had no clue about bank account balances, transactions, investment holdings, a person's wealth and more. Now it knows enormous amounts of data, perhaps an arbitrary example is that your RRSP and TFSA(like American 501k) information, balances, and more are now yearly sent to the GoC. I believe also all information on trades made are, too, even in non-registered accounts. This absolutely wasn't the case, not to this degree, even a decade or two ago.
Some of these obligations are via ratified international treaties. The degree of surveillance, fiscally, is astonishing now. Americans know of this of course, after 9/11 they gave their government enormous data, and keep giving it, eg credit card transactions.
I remember when I was young, my parents arguing about having to get SIN cards (social insurance number). While it as introduced in the 60s, something happened which made it more of a requirement. Its only purpose at the time was for Revenue Canada to track info. Everyone argued about it, discussed it, was upset! It was the first time people needed "a number" to open certain bank accounts.
Yet we come from that, to this in really one generation's lifetime.
One of the problems is that, there is a massive, immense, enormous problem here right now, in terms of bots/foreign actors/asshats spreading immense disinformation for profit or state actor based goals. And with LLMs, it's going to get so much worse. People on HN at least are capable of some filtering, but the average Joe just sees video and 100% believes it is factual and true.
I wish I could see another path to locking out the asshattery, whilst keeping the internet anonymous. But I don't really. And unless a grass roots movement comes around, to ensure that every crime on the internet has a very high degree of success for prosecution? Then we'll be getting an identity managed internet.
I'm sure a lot of people will say "We can force companies to filter!", well, can you? For every forum out there? For torrents? For everything? And even if you think the "big boys" can be the main filter points, well, do you want a private company to decide what you post or not? And they'll need some way to ensure people don't just create a new account when banned! So they'll want ID too, if they're legislated to filter.
And if they're legislated to filter, can you fight decisions in court? Do you have the presumption on innocence? Do you have the right to face your accusers? A jury of your peers? With Google, Facebook, anyone these days, you get banned and it's nigh impossible to even find out why.
While there are exceptions, our governments are required to have criminal courts, and things prosecuted there.
I really don't want private, fiscally motivated companies to be the gatekeepers, if gatekeepers there must be.
Ah well. This is all a very unpleasant path.
I don't think the government themselves are prepared for the amount of identity theft that is going to follow mass collection of government documents.
Does an entire society have to make the same choices of autonomy and record keeping that are common among members of the uniformed services? Mostly in the West, the answer was "No" but, here we go again.
The other side would make this exact same point about vaccine proponents. How can we differentiate one argument from the other?
Well, because the issue with vaccine doubt, is misinformation. It's disinformation, spread for either profit (followers on youtube), or foreign actors working to reduce the cohesion of the West's societies.
Russia? China? Iran? None of these countries, even together, stand a chance militarily against the West. But if you cannot beat them militarily, you must weaken them from within. So confusion. Distrust. Pour fuel on the fire of any differences between sectors of a society. If you can weaken your political enemy, they it ceases to become a threat. Even better if you can trick your enemy into fighting itself!
It's no secret that a lot of countries are engaged in disinformation campaigns against the West. If you can cause your competitor to have plagues, when they were preventable? Well, that ties up resources, reduces productivity, and so forth.
I honestly believe that much of ID verification on the Internet is about this. A healthy society can handle outliers, handle internally created disinformation. Not so, if 1 guy in a foreign country seems like 1000 youtube channels. And you can see this everywhere. A video with a TTS voice, which is now progressing to entirely crafted video from scratch. Now anyone from China can look like a US citizen, going on about the woes of vaccination.
But if you can identify every person, and they can be sued for slander, libel, or criminal acts? Then you're back to normal, internal, citizen protest. EG, your normal crazies. And it can't be stated enough, there are a lot of marginals. Those "on the fence". If they hear enough nutty stuff, they move into almond territory too.
In the end, China, Russia, Iran won't be truthful or play ball, or will undermine attempts with fake IDs willfully issued, so they'll just get cut of entirely. The West will likely sign treaties.
So. Identity verification, is actually an answer to the vaccine issue. After all, we didn't have this level of issue until crazy Internet posters caused it. Although, to be fair, Elvis Presley is who helped convince youth to get the original polio vaccinations.
One way to look at it, is like driver's licenses. Before them, there was no way to stop a person from legally driving on the road. Take it away, and now they could be fined, jailed, etc for driving "without a license". A few bad actors were just unrepentant, and suddenly everyone could be carded, ID required, just to get around. This is like that. A bad result, eg ID on the net, but the attempt is likely to solve 100 internet pains.
I think if we have any sense, we'll come up with a best-privacy-laden method to allow this to happen. Because I cannot see how it will go away. If we can steer it, make it palatable. make sure it cannot be used by industry to track us, etc., it would be at least a partial win.
By contrast, several US states like Vermont and Alaska have GDP in the double digit billions, while others like South Dakota and Nebraska shrunk.
edit: okay I see the post got flagged even when evidence was provided.
Hard to judge based on short trips/holidays and not living there but my immediate impression coming from south east England was how pleasant everyone was and that everyone seemed pretty happy instead of being depressed, so that was nice
I've lived in Toronto and Montreal for a bit. It's very palpable how demoralized Canadians are once you spend some time there.
Don't mistake politeness/friendliness for closeness.
But I’m quite well travelled and some places have vibe and a lot don’t and for me both Toronto and Montreal have vibe
And from where I'm sitting (in the UK, so I don't have a front-seat view of any of this) it seems as if "it's pissed off its largest trading partner" is pretty inaccurate too: isn't it much more the case (1) that the US picked pretty much all the fights here and (2) that it's largely Donald Trump who's pissed off with Canada, and most US individuals and institutions think Canada is perfectly OK? Mr Trump isn't dictator of the United States yet, and pissing him off is not the same thing as pissing off the US.
And I do think there are some ridiculous inter-provincial bureaucracy issues in Canada, it's hard to take OP's generalized rant seriously.