Social media itself is a grand experiment. What happens if you start connecting people from disparate communities, and then prioritize for outrage and emotionalism? In years prior, you would be heavily shaped by the people you lived near. TV and internet broke this down somewhat, but social media really blew the doors off. Now it's the case that almost no one seems to be able to explain all the woes we're facing today: extreme ideas, populism, the destruction of institutions.
All of this because people are addicted to novelty and outrage, and because companies need their stock price to go up.
This isn’t inherent to social networks though. It is a choice by the biggest social media companies to make society worse in order to increase profits. Just give us a chronological feed of the people/topics we proactively choose to follow and much of this harm would go away. Social media and the world were better places before algorithmic feeds took over everything.
> This isn’t inherent to social networks though. It is a choice by the biggest social media companies and to make society worse in order to increase profits.
going beyond social media it's IMHO the side effect of a initially innocent looking but dangerous and toxic monetization model which we find today not just in social media but even more so in news, apps and most digital markets
I will say I am strongly against what social media algorithms do.
But I am fascinated by the black mirror element. They said "hey algorithm what gets likes, what gets views - look into human nature and report back" - "human nature shows polarization does! emotional charged divisive content!" - that's just fascinating. Not learning, philosphophy, growth, education, health, no, the naughty stuff, the bad stuff. That's not to exonerate social media companies, no, such would be the same as exonerating big tobacco for what they do.
We like to pretend that we aren't just dumb animals, prone to getting scared and angry in order to protect our pack. These algorithmic feeds almost dehumanize us with the way they play off our innate animalistic psychology. Big tobacco really does seem like the best analogy.
Yeah unfortunately this seems to be a common, if not inevitable, result of any product where "attention" or "engagement" are directly correlated with profitability.
And if we want to go beyond that, we really just have to blame capitalism. What happens when you build a society around the adversarial collection of money? You get a society that by and large prioritizes making money above all else including ethics and morals.
That and the fact that money and media presence is essentially what wins elections. The only way we can really have democracy is with a truly informed populace and the only way people can make a truly informed vote without all the noise is to have anonymous voting. By which I mean you do not know which politician/party you are voting for, you just know the policies they have promised to enforce.
Further to that, there needs to be accountability. Right now, in the UK at least, governments are not held to account, at all. They get into office with grand promises of flying elephants and golden egg laying geese but obviously never follow through with said promises. The populace, ultimately, just shrugs it off with ‘politicians lie’ and continue complaining about it within their social circles.
Our political systems are fundamentally broken. We shouldn’t care if policies are from party A or party B. All that should matter is the content of the policy and whether it is ever actually materialised.
Right now we have a situation where people are manipulated left, right and centre into believing a given party’s absolute BS manifesto which they write under the full knowledge that not delivering will have very little impact on them as they’ve just had a substantial amount of time getting paid lucrative salaries to essentially argue with a bunch of other liars in a shouting match on tele.
Remove the football-esque fandom which applies to political parties by removing any ability to publicly affiliate any given person with said party and I’d bet we see different results across the bar. Remove all this absolute nonsense of politicians promoting their ideologies on TV/Twotter etc and you will remove a lot of the brainwashing which happens. Remove the most corrupt situation of all: private firms and individuals being able to fund political parties and you level the playing field.
Obviously this is a hard pill for many to swallow as no one likes to be told they’ve essentially been brainwashed into their thoughts and ego is everything in modern society.
It's the combination of software that is infinitely malleable, and capitalism. Successful entrepreneurs in software want liquidity. So no matter how benevolent they start out being, they eventually lose control and the software gets turned into an exploitative adversary to satisfy investor owners.
This is fine if you can refuse the deal. Lots of software and the companies selling it have died that way. But if you've made a product addictive or necessary for everyday survival, you have the customer by the short hairs.
The technology underlying Bluesky is deliberately designed so that it's hard to keep a customer captive. It will be interesting to see if that helps.
like if you look at original reasoning why capitalism is a good match for democracy you find arguments like voting with money etc. _alongside with what things must not be tolerated in capitalism_ or it will break. And that includes stuff like:
- monopolies, (or more generic anything having too much market power and abusing it, doesn't need to be an actual monopoly)
- unfair market practices which break fair competition
- situations which prevent actual user choice
- to much separation of the wealth of the poorest and richest in a country
- giving to much ways for money to influence politics
- using money to bare people from a fair trail/from enforcing their rights
- also I personally would add in-transparency, but I think that only really started to become a systemic issue with globalization and the digital age.
This also implies that for market wich have natural monopolies strict regulation and consumer protection is essential.
Now the points above are to some degree a check list of what has defined US economics, especially in the post-Amazone age (I say post Amazone age as the founding story of Amazone was a mile stone and is basically the idea of "let's systematically destroy any fair competition and used externally sourced money (i.e. subsidization) to forcefully create a quasi monopoly", and after that succeeded it became somewhat of the go-to approach for a lot of "speculative investment" founding).
Anyway to come back to the original point.
What we have in the US has little to do with the idea of capitalism which lead to the adoption of it in the West.
It's more like someone took it is twisting it into the most disturbing dystopian form possible, they just aren't fully done yet.
>- giving to much ways for money to influence politics
I think what we're learning is that mass (social) media means that this simply isn't preventable in a world with free speech. Even if the US had stricter campaign finance laws in line with other western democracies, there still needs to be some mechanism so that one rich guy (or even a collection of colluding rich guys) can't buy a huge megaphone like Twitter or CBS.
As long as there is no upper limit on wealth accumulation, there is no upper limit on political influence in a capitalistic democracy with free speech. Every other flaw you list is effectively downstream of that because the government is already susceptible to being compromised by wealth.
The existence of "yellow journalism" in the 19th century would disagree with that statement. That outrage and emotionalism trigger human's attention more so than other feelings is a biological fact that has been exploited for centuries and centuries. The same way gambling has been around for the entirety of recorded human history. It's a default behavior pattern installed in every humans, some can override, most don't.
>> Social media itself is a grand experiment. What happens if you start connecting people from disparate communities, and then prioritize for outrage and emotionalism?
> It is a choice by the biggest social media companies to make society worse in order to increase profits.
I think there can be more pointy way to frame this ongoing phenomenon, such as that, the US invested in social media assuming it'll be the mainstay of its cultural dominance into the 21st century and it wasn't, but more of a giant oil pipeline with a check valve for US to be completely prone to East Asian influence, and it's scrambling at damage control.
US as it is has no cultural industrial base to produce social media contents. East Asian contents, if not East Asian indigenous social media, easily win the Internet leveraging universally strong public education, without even being intentional. That's what happened, and that must be the intent of shift into rage political shows which the US/EU can at least produce, even if it weren't useful.
I’m not sure that’s especially new. In the 1990s, we had Japanophiles, in the US. Right now, Korea is taking the crown. We’ll have to see who’s next. Might be China, but their culture is so controlled, that it might not happen. Russia was starting to have a lot of cultural influence, until Iron Curtain 2.0 slammed down.
Viral culture requires a certain amount of freedom of expression, along with access to media.
I think it's easy to blame the evil profit maximizing social media companies. But IMO even the most simple 'engagement' algorithm will produce negative externalities. Regardless of who's running it.
```
show_me_posts_people_like_me_have_liked()
- John saw 20 posts today and liked 9 of them.
- Cliff saw 20 posts today and liked 9 of them
- Jeff and Cliff had 6 overlapping likes
- Show Jeff the 2 extra posts Cliff liked; show Cliff the 2 extra posts Jeff liked
```
This seems like a simple / logical recommendation system. BUT the end result is that you make Jeff and Cliff closer to the same person over time. And times millions, you build echo chambers. And the biggest echo chambers (often those aligned with some identity politics) see they have a huge community and want to expand it. Making the whole platform worse as a byproduct.
I posit that the growing anti-immigration sentiment partly comes from informational borders being eliminated by social media.
People want some of that friction back but can't put their finger on where the unease is coming from.
I further posit that this partly explains why Trump's approval rating around immigration are very negative despite successfully stopping immigration, which was one of the issued he polled the best on. He took away immigration, but the unease and insecurity from having zero information borders remains. (Yes there are other factors too especially around ICE conduct).
> Social media and the world were better places before algorithmic feeds took over everything
Some times I feel like I'm the only one who remembers how toxic places like Usenet, IRC, and internet forums were before Facebook. Either that, or people only remember the past of the internet through rose colored glasses.
Complain about algorithmic feeds all you want, but internet toxicity was rampant long before modern social media platforms came along. Some of the crazy conspiracy theories and hate-filled vitriol that filled usenet groups back in the day makes the modern Facebook news feed seem tame by comparison.
I agree that there’s always been toxicity on the Internet, but I also feel it’s harder to avoid toxicity today since the cost of giving up algorithmic social media is greater than the cost of giving up Usenet, chat rooms, and forums.
In particular, I feel it’s much harder to disengage with Facebook than it is to disengage with other forms of social media. Most of my friends and acquaintances are on Facebook. I have thought about leaving Facebook due to the toxic recommendations from its feed, but it will be much harder for me to keep up with life events from my friends and acquaintances, and it would also be harder for me to share my own life events.
With that said, the degradation of Facebook’s feed has encouraged me to think of a long-term solution: replacing Facebook with newsletters sent occasionally with life updates. I could use Flickr for sharing photos. If my friends like my newsletters, I could try to convince them to set up similar newsletters, especially if I made software that made setting up such newsletters easy.
No ads, no algorithmic feeds, just HTML-based email.
You’re absolutely right. Shocking, rage bait, sensational content was always there in social media long before algorithmic feeds. As a matter of fact “algorithmic feeds” were in a way always there it’s just that back in the day those “algorithms” were very simple (most watched/read/replies today, this week, this month. Longest, shortest, newest, oldest, etc)
I think the main thing algorithmic feeds did was present the toxicity as the norm, as opposed to it being a choice you make. Like I used to be part of a forum back in the early 2000s. Every few weeks the top most replied thread would be some rage bait, or sensational thread. those threads will keep getting pushed to the top and remain at the top of the forum for a while and grow very quickly as a ton of people keep replying and pushing it to the top. But you could easily see that everyone else is carrying on with their day. You ignore it and move on. You sort by newest or filter it out and you’re good. It was clear that this is a particular heated thread and you can avoid it. Also mods would often move it to a controversial sub forum (or lock it all together if they were heavy handed) So you sort of had to go out of your way to get there and then you would know that you are actively walking into a “controversial section” or “conspiracy” forum etc. It wasn’t viewed as normal. You were a crazy person if you kept linking and talking about that crazy place.
With algorithmic feeds, it’s the norm. You’re not seeking and getting to shady corners of the internet or subscribing to a crazy usenet newsgroup to feed your own interest in rage or follow a conspiracy. You are just going to Facebook or twitter or Reddit or YouTube homepage. Literally the most mainstream biggest companies in the US homepages. Just like every one else.
Having moderated both PHP forums and SM sites, quantity is its own quality.
Not to mention we have adversaries to contend with now. I still remember seeing Palantir slides for sock puppet management tools way back in the day. That was the SOTA at one point. Today?
SM pushed connected humanity past a critical connected mass that Usenet and IRC never could.
You aren’t the only one who remembers. But in that time it was a self-selecting process. The problem with “the algorithm”, as I see it, is not that it increases the baseline toxicity of your average internet fuckwad (though I do think the algorithm, by seeking to increase engagement, also normalises antisocial behaviour more than a regular internet forum by rewarding it with more exposure, and in a gamified way that causes others to model that antisocial behaviour). Instead, it seems to me that it does two uniquely harmful things.
First, it automatically funnels people into information silos which are increasingly deep and narrow. On the old internet, one could silo themselves only to a limited extent; it would still be necessary to regularly interact with more mainstream people and ideas. Now, the algorithm “helpfully” filters out anything it decides a person would not be interested in—like information which might challenge their world view in any meaningful way. In the past, it was necessary to engage with at least some outside influences, which helped to mediate people’s most extreme beliefs. Today, the algorithm successfully proxies those interactions through alternative sources which do the work of repackaging them in a way that is guaranteed to reinforce, rather than challenge, a person’s unrealistic world view.
Many of these information silos are also built at least in part from disinformation, and many people caught in them would have never been exposed to that disinformation in the absence of the algorithm promoting it to them. In the days of Usenet, a person would have to get a recommendation from another human participant, or they would have to actively seek something out, to be exposed to it. Those natural guardrails are gone. Now, an algorithm programmed to maximise engagement is in charge of deciding what people see every day, and it’s different for every person.
Second, the algorithm pushes content without appropriate shared cultural context into faces of many people who will then misunderstand it. We each exist in separate social contexts with in-jokes, shorthands for communication, etc., but the algorithm doesn’t care about any of that, it only cares for engagement. So you end up with today’s “internet winner” who made some dumb joke that only their friend group would really understand, and it blows up because to an outsider it looks awful. The algorithm amplifies this to the feeds of more people who don’t have an appropriate context, using the engagement metric to prioritise it over other more salient content. Now half the world is expressing outrage over a misunderstanding—one which would probably never have happened if not for the algorithm boosting the message.
Because there is no Planet B, it is impossible to say whether things would be where they are today if everything were the same except without the algorithmic feed. (And, of course, nothing happens in a vacuum; if our society were already working well for most people, there would not be so much toxicity for the algorithm to find and exploit.) Perhaps the current state of the world was an inevitability once every unhinged person could find 10,000 of their closest friends who also believe that pi is exactly 3, and the algorithm only accelerated this process. But the available body of research leads me to conclude, like the OP, that the algorithm is uniquely bad. I would go so far as to suggest it may be a Great Filter level threat due to the way it enables widespread reality-splitting in a geographically dispersed way. (And if not the recommendation algorithm on its own, certainly the one that is combined with an LLM.)
The concept is called "yellow journalism" and extends basically to the days of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. Modern culture has poured gasoline on this but it's existed forever.
I think the issue is that we have scaled groupthink--people now engage in circular conversations that reinforce nonsensical beliefs. Where as they might have historically encountered 1 or 2 people that agreed with crazy or inaccurate notions and most of their environment would likely push back on outrageous ideas.
Now, you can find 1000s of people that not only agree, but reinforce biases with other facts, perceptions.
Its interesting that TV is regulated. You can't put certain content on there and I'm sure the governments can ultimately control things. Now todays eyeballs are controlled by Meta and TikTok and I dont really trust them at all - they have too much unchecked power.
> I'm sure the governments can ultimately control things
In the US there is free speech protecting the ability of people to say what they want.
Public TV has limitations on broadcast of certain material like pornography, obviously, but the government can’t come in and “control” the opinions of journalists and newscasters.
The current US admin has tried to put pressure on broadcasters it disagrees with and it’s definitely not a good thing.
You really do not want to encourage governments to “control” what topics cannot be discussed or what speech is regulated. Sooner or later the government will use that against someone you agree with for their own power.
soso, it's mostly that freely accessible channels need their content to be in a certain ~PG/age protection range (and in many countries that also changes depending on the time of the day, not sure about the US)
beyond that the constitution disallows any further regulation of actual content
through that doesn't mean that they can't apply subtle pressure indirectly.
Is that legal? no.
Anyway done for years? yes.
But mostly subtle not forced, i.e. let's say you give "suggestions" not required changes.
Except in recent years it has become a lot less subtle and much more forced. Not just giving non binding "suggestions" but also harass media outlets in other seemingly unrelated ways if they don't follow your "suggestions".
PS: Like seriously it often looks like the US doesn't really understand what free speech is about (as in some of the more important points are freedom of journalism, teaching and also showing your opinions through demonstrations and similar.). And why many historians find it good but suboptimal and why e.g. the approach to free speech was revisited when drafting the west German constitution instead of just more or less copying the US constitution (the US but also France, UK had some say in the drafting of it, it was originally meant to be temporary until reunification, but in the end was mostly kept verbatim during unification as it worked out quite well).
Exposure is a good first step. But what action is taken with that awareness? We seem to be in that post truth era where being told what's happening before your eyes is at best met with apathy and at worst rejected.
> people are addicted to novelty and outrage, and because companies need their stock price to go up
Sounds like news broadcasts. Throw in some politics, murders, rapes and economic downturns and you've got your audience hooked watching through the ads.
Throw into the mix inherent mimetic desire and where we are in society makes sense. There's a need for a more that frankly can't be satisfied and hard to see how we turn back from that without a structural rejig
More like the exposure of institutions. It’s not like they were more noble previously, their failings were just less widely understood. How much of America knew about Tuskegee before the internet? Or the time National Geographic told us all about the Archaeoraptor ignoring prior warnings?
The above view is also wildly myopic. You thought modern society overcame populist ideas, extreme ideas, and social revolution being very popular historically? Human nature does not change.
Another thing that doesn’t change? There are always, as evidenced by your own comment, always people saying the system wasn’t responsible, it’s external forces harming the system. The system is immaculate, the proletariat are stupid. The monarchy didn’t cause the revolution, ignorant ideologues did. In any other context, that’s called black and white thinking.
Doesn't matter. Every time some maniac invents some, we all need to scramble to adopt it. This is what _progress_ is. Is there's a new technology, we don't think about the consequences. We all just adopt it and use it so thoroughly that we cannot imagine living without it.
Calm down, what actually happens is there is a reaction to new technology and then once its been used there is a counter reaction which takes into account what works and what dosent.
Is there a previous decade you'd prefer to return too for quality of life? Why?
I suppose cars will continue to get worse. I'd say "before they get better" but I'm not sure there's any light at the end of the tunnel here.
I don't want iPads in my dash, I don't want an LLM in my car, I don't want $1000 headlights, I don't want molded plastic that cannot be serviced, I don't want an infotainment system, I don't want it integrated with the CAN bus, I don't want huge aluminum rims, I don't want auto start/stop, I don't want GDI, I don't want turbos, I don't a mobile connection in my car, I don't want crazy-high belt lines, I don't want a $50k median new car price, I don't want a car that weighs 5,000 lbs, etc, etc, etc.
Wireless headphones were never a good idea. You need a buggy, annoying pairing protocol. You need a source of batteries. Lithium, in most cases, a deeply rare and valuable material is wasted so some idiots don't need to spend half a second managing a cable. Of course, the batteries wear out over time, and the tech eventually stops being supported. It's tons of waste just to make people slightly more comfortable.
I was gifted $250 pro airpods that stopped working after a few months, and then the replacements they gave me stopped working again after a few months. I went back to using the $10 wired earbuds that have always worked fine.
"All VPN providers, except ProtonVPN, appeared in court to argue a defense. They raised various arguments, with the “no-log” defense from Surfshark and NordVPN standing out."
Proton is relocating their servers out of Switzerland and into Germany over privacy concerns. They are now facing the possibility of the same privacy concerns in EU countries. Ironically, the safest place to host a private VPN service may actually be USA given the way privacy-related things in the EU are going.
The EU member states are still sovereign, though. This French court ruling doesn't really affect the prospects of certain kinds of privacy in Germany. I think the parent might have been referring to the fact they didn't raise a no-log argument, thus implying they do log. But I don't think that makes much sense either.
Heartbreaking but true. The most popular pickups today are not the most useful pickups. There are no more basic utilitarian pickups any longer, at least in the US.
Pickups are a little bit interesting in this regard. For any given model (eg: Tacoma, Frontier, etc.) the more premium the truck, the worse it is at being a truck. Each feature you add reduces its payload, and in the case of the Frontier, you could drop from a 6' bed with ~1,600 lbs of payload on the base model all the way down to a 5' bed with ~900 lbs of payload for the most premium offroad model.
I would be willing to say that a small Japanese kei truck is more than the average American would ever need for hauling furnishings, appliances and lumber. If you really need something bigger renting a trailer or truck is dirt cheap
>If you really need something bigger renting a trailer or truck is dirt cheap
It’s neither convenient nor cheap to rent a trailer in much of the US. Major cities have options, rural areas less so. Full disclosure I have a mid-sized pickup, but I recently looked into renting a trailer for a landscaping project that was above the weight limit for my truck. First issue I ran into was that there were not any trailers available for rent anywhere near my location. Second issue was that after factoring in driving distance + rental cost + dump fees, it was ~ the same price just to pay a junk company to haul the materials…and it was not cheap. Anecdotally, my pickup was cheaper than most other vehicle options at the time I bought it, my commute is short (so fuel economy is less an issue), and as a homeowner I use the bed to haul something at least once/month (Unfortunately kei trucks weren’t available at the time). So the cost/benefit/convenience factor of owning a truck over renting a trailer works for me. YMMV.
Yeah, I cannot speak for rural US as much, I live in a large metropolitan area, and I would estimate around 1/5th cars here are pickups. You can rent a truck from Home Depot for as low as $100 a day.
I found out a couple of years ago that you cannot rent a vehicle and use it to tow. This is a major barrier to the argument "when you need to tow <X> just rent a vehicle that can do that" (an argument I would like to support).
I found this out recently as well, and it's really interesting since it must mean that a lot of these "just rent a truck when you need to tow" claims must have been unfounded.
I agree with you on the kei truck. They are pretty darn tough, and have so many uses.
However, they are TINY inside. If you are taller 6'1" and/or heavier than 200lbs, it is a tight squeeze, especially for anything longer than 30 minutes. The "average American" can't fit it a kei truck.
Also, the weird manliness of the average American man would make this truck unsuccessful, simply because it is too small. Which is hilarious, because some of the most resourceful, strongest, reliable and adventurous men I have met drive kei trucks.
I guess finally, the big highways with longhaul trucks and fast speeds are not so good in a k-truck.
Except most people also use trucks as daily driver vehicles. You can't exactly fit the wife and kids in a kei. Sure you could also own a car for that but now I need to own/store 2 vehicles instead of one.
Yeah let's not pretend every family with a truck only owns one vehicle. Most families already have a second car anyways. Especially people spending $60k+ on a truck.
That is my argument for EVs as well. One truck with an ICE for take the whole family on long trips, or towing. Then an EV for everyone else - whoever is making the long trip that day gets the truck.
Truck works well for those role because it can do so much. It isn't the best for most of those, but it can do them.
>Heartbreaking but true. The most popular pickups today are not the most useful pickups. There are no more basic utilitarian pickups any longer, at least in the US.
Any OEM will happily sell you a white vinyl floor half ton with your preferred cab/bed/engine/drivetrain configuration.
The GMC 4cyl 1500s were stupid cheap for awhile, because they shat out a bunch for CAFE and weren't selling so they were going for like 25-30k going into the new model year. I wanna say this was 2024 into 25, maybe 23 into 24, idk.
Ford Maverick seems to fit the bill for compact stuff though I suspect it may make the goalposts zip to "single cab option" and "body on frame"
I decide if you need to have a step on your bumper because the truck is too high to get anything in and out of it. Lowering my truck made it way easier to load and unload.
I used to fairly often carry 2x4x8 and 4x4x8 in a Toyota Matrix (Corolla wagon) with the hatch closed. Couldn't do a full-width sheet of plywood, though.
Yes, with room to spare. I assume the grandparent was referring to a stud, i.e. the nominal "2x4" that is 1.5x3.5inches in cross section and 8 feet long :-) Sadly I cannot fit 4x8 sheet goods though I haven't tried very hard. I can definitely fit them if I ask nicely for a lengthwise cut, so I end up with 2' wide 8' strips. Those I can fit and close the hatch.
Ford had a terrible but well packaging rear suspension design in those cars. It was designed to not have strut towers so he gets the full width which is probably around 4ft.
No way does the length check out though. I haul lumber in a similar size car and 8ft is basically trunk to dash so there's no way he's hauling an 8ft by 4ft sheet without it conflicting with the driver's seat if not torso.
Individual boards should fit in just about anything though.
> There are no more basic utilitarian pickups any longer, at least in the US.
What makes you say this? The F-150 series has a pretty serviceable option in their XL trim. 8ft bed, 4x4, "dumb" interior (maybe not, looking at their site looks like the most recent is iPad screen, sigh) - but what else would you look for to call it utilitarian?
You're right that each feature is further limiting, but I would argue premium and utilitarian are reaching for opposite goals.
A F-150 from the previous century is much utilitarian than today's F-150's. The bed height and rail height are much more reasonable heights -- you can reach into the bed from the side.
I would argue that the first couple of these could be considered "features." Not sure what you mean about the bench seat - the "regular cab" configuration is a 3 person bench.
Same. The Slate is so close to what I actually want out of an EV: basic, utilitarian, cheap, not made out of 5 iPads. It's not perfect, but neither is any of its competition.
It's important to note, that the law is not written such that it's only illegal to share classified information when you have a good president. I think a lot of us are very sympathetic when classified information is released to the public due to public interest, concern regarding government action, etc.
But it's still illegal. I'm not making a moral claim here. Rather, people who release classified information without authorization are breaking the law. If I rob a bank to feed my family vs. robbing a bank because it's fun, it's still illegal. A jury might be more or less sympathetic to my cause, but I will still be arrested and charged if the police can manage it.
But also note the government is punishing people for legal acts as well. It’s perfectly legal to tell a soldier they do not have to obey unlawful orders, in fact in many cases it’s a requirement. But the us military started court martial proceedings against a sitting congressman person for doing it.
It’s frequently not illegal to talk to a reporter. Let’s not kid ourselves, this isn’t about classified material it’s about loyalty, so watch what happens to sources that didn’t do anything illegal.
This government brought sham charges against the Fed president, what are they going to do to a run of the mill federal employee?
> It’s frequently not illegal to talk to a reporter. Let’s not kid ourselves, this isn’t about classified material it’s about loyalty, so watch what happens to sources that didn’t do anything illegal.
It is not illegal to talk to a reporter, it is illegal to share classified intel with someone who doesn't have a clearance and a need-to-know.
Do I think they should have raided this persons house? Absolutely not. Is it illegal to share classified information, absolutely.
"For my friends everything, for everyone else, the law" or whatever the saying is, applies here. In this case, the reporter did nothing wrong, but the raid on the home of the reporter can be justified according to the law, so it isn't illegal. Should it be? Probably.
Legislation is good, rules are good, the classified rules seems to make sense if you subscribe to Hanlons Razor at the least. Sometimes though, laws just don't make sense and shouldn't be codified.
For example:
MCL 750.335 - "Any man or woman, not being married to each other, who lewdly and lasciviously associates and cohabits together, and any man or woman, married or unmarried, who is guilty of open and gross lewdness and lascivious behavior, is guilty of a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment for not more than 1 year, or a fine of not more than $1,000.00."
You've misunderstood the parent. They're saying watch out what happens to anyone in the Journalist's book who did not share classified information.
You seriously think this administration is going to get a list of 1,200 government employees who are (legally) informing reporters of the goings-on and just... Let it go? Those people are about to get punished.
And since we're at the point of an unaccountable, unidentifiable Gestapo going door-to-door and arresting / murdering citizens openly in the streets...
You are responding to a thread with the exact quotes:
> But also note the government is punishing people for legal acts as well.
...
> so watch what happens to sources that didn’t do anything illegal.
So we, in this thread, are talking about what happens to the majority of her sources that are NOT sharing confidential information or committing any crime.
Aren't you arguing against a straw man here? It seems that you can't address the concerns of the comment and are instead saying obvious truths as if that is somehow counter to the person you replied to.
I didn't intend to. When he said "But also note the government is punishing people for legal acts as well." I read this as "the government is breaking the law"
I think instead what that poster meant is was "people who didn't share classified information will be targeted and prosecuted as well."
They can and do make whatever they want illegal, but you're correct not to make a moral claim about it. I'm not making a moral claim, either, but a pragmatic one.
At the same time, it's entirely legitimate to look at a set of laws and think "fuck that". Just because you're correct that bad things might happen to folks doesn't mean I have to be happy with it.
At the end of the day, having bad laws doesn't make the rest of us cower in fear.
Rather, those laws help us understand that the folks protected by those laws (and the systems that they are using to harm us) neither have our interests in mind nor have any legitimate claim to authority.
So while your "bad things will happen if I break the law" is maybe pragmatic, consider a similar pragmatic point:
"writing laws that folks feel justified in breaking might lead to shifts in how legitimate people see that government".
I understand what you're saying, but we as a society need to have some sort of baseline above the law and order view of the world. I know a lot of people are either too stupid or too tied up in the propaganda machine but we DEEPLY need to agree on some sort of universal ethical standards as a country or we will die.
We used to have at least vague concepts like that but the admin has eroded that in the pursuit of "anything goes" political maneuvering.
i keep tabs on posts roughly along the lines of "maybe we need guns after all."
imo they're usually too late, as guns without training and a group aren't very useful. but i can tell you the number has went up about 4x the baseline in the holiday season. and thats after its doubling after November's elections.
this country is a powderkeg and what's worse is i think these provocations are international. the admin seems to want to start a civil war.
Yes, this is my problem with references to the ammo box. That exact rhetoric has been with us for decades now, and has in fact helped to get us to the point we're at.
Sure, maybe some ICE home invaders will be shot in self-defense while committing their crimes, but we already know how that plays out legally and even in the court of public opinion sadly (Walker/Taylor). So instances of self-defense won't change the big picture, regardless of such self defense options perhaps being pragmatic for those who are likely to be attacked right now or in the near future.
So that brings us back to the question of the large scale situation, which IME rests entirely on there being so many people Hell-bent on using the ammo box to "save" the country with the net effect of trashing it. We've essentially got flash mobs of brownshirts, understandably frustrated at how they've been disenfranchised and their liberties taken away, but having their frustration channeled into being part of the problem. Which I'd say comes back to filter bubbles, social media, pervasive and personalized propaganda, etc.
Of course freeing people from those filter bubbles is much harder than if we had managed to avoid the corporate consumer surveillance industry from taking hold and strongly facilitating them in the first place.
I reject the current legitimacy of that law. After Donald Trump claimed personal immunity for classified document violations in his interregnum, any prosecutions his government launches based on it are presumptively invalid.
I certainly don't agree that quantity of firepower determines what laws do or don't stand. Ask the federal agents who tried, and failed, to convict a guy for throwing a sandwich at them (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/dc-sandw...).
> The American military couldn't handle rice farmers or goat herders…
The American military at the time cared - at least somewhat - about the international reputation of the United States. That may not always be a thing. It may not be a thing now.
The American military is designed to operate away from its shores. One hunting rifle round into the transformer outside of the bases and they're trucking in fuel for generators, a few rounds into the fuel trucks and they have no power. They would have to mobilize massive resources to secure Lockheed and Raytheon facilities from sabotage...
Keep thinking along these lines and you realize the situation for them is actually quite dire.
Yeah, but... the quoted phrase should not be taken literally as a statement about battlefield capability.
It was a political struggle for legitimacy, not just territory, and the enemy did not have to win any battles, just avoid losing until the political will collapsed.
The thing is, military power does not automatically translate to political success, and guerrilla fighters do not need to defeat tanks and jets, they just need to survive, persist, undermine legitimacy, and exhaust the opponent's political will.
So, in this sense, the US was not beaten by farmers, it was beaten by a strategy that made military superiority irrelevant.
Absolutely, and I think the domestic opposition strategy here makes military superiority irrelevant. The US government doesn't want to, and would collapse if they tried to, shoot everyone who says that Donald Trump is an illegitimate president and any prosecution he wants to succeed should fail.
>The American military couldn't handle rice farmers or goat herders
Eh, they killed them by the hundreds of thousands, and were not even trying to genocide them. If the current regime decided to actually just exterminate people our level of technology would make what the Nazis did look like babies playtime.
>The question is how many people will side with them vs reality
At least 40% of the population given what we've seen so far.
It's reductive, but not totally inaccurate. The Stoics hated the Epicureans, because the Epicureans preached withdrawal from politics and the quest for political (military) honors, whereas the Stoics made those one of the defining principles of the virtuous life. Stoicism was adapted to imperialism in a way Epicureanism was not. Same way Pauline/proto-orthodox Christianity won out over the diversity of early Christianity --- it was usable by the Roman Empire.
Maybe you should consider being more stoic about it.
Stoicism is a technology of control — inward control so the outward system can function.
It’s the same structure as algorithmic behavior modification, as corporate “resilience” doctrine, as military discipline, as American hustle culture.
Maybe see the cup for what the cup is, not what you wish it to be for yourself to cope with reality.
Furthermore it is not “rude” to criticize something. And Aurelius would certainly call you out on that with a laugh.
>Furthermore it is not “rude” to criticize something.
I think it's rude to criticize someone if the criticism is not made in good faith. The fact that Aurelius was part of the Roman Empire does not mean that he practiced stoicism explicitly so that he could justify military actions. It's reductive at the very least.
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