It's a great write up thankyou. I propose we build and distribute easy to use services designed to run on our own devices, in our own homes, to take full advantage of 1st and 4th amendments, then distribute these services widely with billboards so that people have alternatives and can take advantage of these protections.

You mean the 3rd amendment, right?

Third Amendment is about not quartering troops. Fourth Amendment is protection against warrantless seizures.

https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-3/

https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-4/

We are trying, but the interop of these self hosted services currently suck. Fediverse is hard to get in to unless you have many users or you just have to join a popular instance. Who knows what they do in this instance, and it turns back into a loop.

Surveillance and totalitarian control is a downward spiral of misery and suffering for everyone, even those in power.

It reminds me of some quotes from the Tao Te Ching -

Restriction breeds the disorder it's meant to prevent (ch. 57) The more prohibitions there are in the world, the poorer the people become. The more sharp weapons, the more the state falls into confusion. The more laws and edicts are posted, the more thieves and bandits there are.

The world isn't a thing to be managed (ch. 29) The world is a sacred vessel; it cannot be manipulated. Whoever acts on it ruins it; whoever grips it loses it.

Yet there's incentive structures that push it forward.

It's a classic example of us being dragged along by incentives and emergent patterns against our individual wills and better judgement.

People think it's a conspiracy of the elite, but the last part of your message is true and it makes me wonder to what extent everyone is being dragged along by everyone else and nobody can stop because nobody can stop.

I mean if I were a multi-billionaire, I'm not sure I could do anything. I could piss into the wind with a somewhat larger amount of piss.

I've come to believe that our lack of agency over emergent behaviors in our own societies and economies is a central problem of the human condition.

I mostly agree with your take. The ultra wealthy are entrapped by their own minds & machines of wealth that have tight demands.

And yet they still hold immense power to make our lives shittier. It is far easier to destroy a functioning system than it is to build one from the ground up

And yet the lives of everyone on this board has never been this comfortable in the past.

Do we live in different worlds? I can't think of a single meaningful way my comfort has increased in the past 25 years. In fact, with the rise of the homeless and mental health crises, the encroachment of more and more people who have no business touching computers into cyberspace, the increased relevance of flash mob power on the internet, I would say my comfort has been actively degraded on a fundamental and significant level.

On a broader timescale, we can take a look at the fact that goods which were designed to be affordable and mass-produced have been elevated to refined luxury goods, like the Herman-Miller Eames, as an indicator that material standards have fallen very far. Not the least of which because of an ever-dwindling labor share of capital (beginning in the 1970s), which silently impoverishes working households and degrades their comfort while being completely invisible to an uncareful eye on paper.

Much of the major boons of comfort were established prior to the transition to shareholder capitalism. Things like e-commerce, IoT, online banking, these are for the birds. Meaningful advances are things like HVAC and refrigeration, ubiquitous motorized transport, electrical lighting.

I believe the parent is implying that we sit uncomfortably at home, silently, rather than uncomfortably marching through the streets, demanding. Yet, I say that while uncomfortably sitting in my home, typing on a screen

Mass demonstrations are common and frequent, more than ever. The thing is that these are mild pressures at best. What came from Occupy Wallstreet? The George Floyd protests? The No Kings marches? Anti-ICE demonstrations? They're not nothing and we should continue to have them and participate in them, but we have to recognize them as what they are: background radiation. On their own, they don't affect change or bring about course correction. We clearly need something more, people inside of these institutions, sharks who are going to fight and win against the entrenched powers on their home turf. There's a very limited pool of people who are capable of doing that.

The ultra wealthy are entrapped by their own minds & machines of wealth that have tight demands.

But only within their minds. They could change their minds, donate or pay enough taxes that their billions would be distributed far and wide. Then they'd no longer be trapped.

Plenty of people make the choice to stop acquiring, stop increasing their wealth, and stop having more everything (kids, houses, cars, pets, hobbies, etc).

It's hard for those who have no choice, and those who've made different choices, to relate to the insatiable appetite of billionaires.

These people also have much more leverage to change the world in substantial, albeit often short lived ways. My family has been hurt by the DOGE cuts. Hopefully it's not a permanent injury. Yet it's very real.

Well said, I have exactly the same thoughts.

However, overcoming these forces is something people did successfully in the past. I think right now we are just in a cycle of mass confusion caused by the technological revolutions, which prevents us to see clearly (as it happened in the past as well).

Without alignment we just drift by natural forces of a system in place in whatever direction. When we adapt and if the world survives, this should not be an issue.

The problem of billionaires is that they are one level below from the top in abstraction of a society. They are required to play by the rules of the state designed by someone else, and they lack the knowledge and experience to go one level higher and think about the policies and rules for society itself - and this is much harder than doing business, and requires completely different skills.

Because of these factors, we see them being able to hoard wealth but unable to influence the system in any positive way, except for the ones which the system was already designed for (create jobs, innovate, etc.)

Hold on. Panama papers. Epstein files. CointelPro -> NSPM-7.

There absolutely, without a reasonable doubt, is a conspiracy of the elite -- the billionaire class.

The idea that all billionaires work together is hilarious. No real adult could possibly believe such nonsense.

Any adult who has been paying attention has no doubt that enough of the elite do collude to call the duck a duck.

In the real world it's hard enough to get 5 people on the same page about anything. The idea that dozens/hundreds of people with billions of dollars who are in business against each other in many cases are secretly colluding with any effectiveness is a joke. If they were, zuckerberg, larry and sergey would have been squashed in the 90's/00's by the elite of the time. Sam Altman would have been crushed years ago. Obama or Trump would have been put in their place, probably both. Look at all the billionaires all of a sudden kowtowing to Trump. The billionaires just got beat real bad in NYC.

Billionaires just don't have much power. This isn't a movie.

This seems to contradict itself. You first claim that there's no organization but then you claim billionaires have no power because of the more powerful above them. Hierarchy is organization, so which is it

No, nothing above them. No power. That's the point. In a couple years Trump will be gone and he'll be kowtowing to others and so on.

There is no group in charge. No one is in charge.

As a class, they steer things through emergent behavior and overlapping self interest in certain areas. As individuals, they can’t afford to trust each other without leverage.

Sounds clever, makes no sense.

As a class, they have a set of similar incentives (grow/retain resources and power networks) that lead to similar actions (avoid taxation, buy influence, weaken regulators, etc). They may cooperate at times, but they are not a coherent organization with a roster, votes, and leadership.

As individuals, they are dangerous competitors, and they can’t afford to trust each other too much without some kind of mutual leverage. This could be in the form of mutual equity holdings, blackmail, complex arrangements where each party has exposure, whatever. But even then, trust has limits.

There’s no cabal that runs things with rules and elections at this level. It’s all individuals who are immersed in the systems that made them wealthy. Those systems tend to lead to certain behaviors. That’s it.

You could make this statement about any group at all. And then once you realize people are in multiple groups, the whole thing devolves into chaos.

Look into a class on systems thinking.

It says that the government “will prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender and anarchist” and “will use all the tools constitutionally available to us to map them at home, identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa.”

So, Democratic candidates who are looking like they will win a seat this midterm cycle are going to get arrested for "domestic terrorism".

That's inline whit some of the goals of the people behind Project 2025 are calling for.

As a trans woman, enough is enough! I’m tired of us being made into the scapegoat while literal pedophiles and sexual criminals not only walk free but gain ever greater power and idiots keep blaming us for their problems as they close their ears and stomp their feet’s on the ground

As a fellow trans woman, we've been the scapegoat for reactionaries, at least documented, since the rise of the Third Reich. And if we're honest, probably before that.

Fixing society-scale problems is really hard. Being angry at people who make you feel a bit weird inside is easy. People reliably choose easy.

I'm not going to pretend to understand your stuggle, but I will echo it through my lens. I am not trying to hijack your point, inasmuch support it with my view.

I uses to think that it was about fear of the unknown, or as you've said "Being angry at people who make you feel a bit weird inside".

I now firmly believe that it's a modern form of tribalism. Having an "other", whether as a scapegoat, a fear inducing device, or a target is simply too convenient to ignore. Whether or not one is a globalist is orthogonal to the fact that people ultimately decide, or evolve to see through a different lens.

but... but the bathrooms! and the children's sports! /s

it's still baffling to me how incredibly irrelevant niche cases dominate the entire discourse.

Because Republicans get fucking dog-walked on any issue of any importance. The only things they can ever even come close to claiming "victory" on are irrelevant nonsense that no serious person gives a fuck about.

There are now more bills attempting to "solve" the problem of trans girl's in sports (and it is girls, to be clear, trans boys are never an issue) than there are trans girls in sports. It's fucking pathetic.

The funny thing about that is - it's a solved problem. The reason you heard about it for a while is that they hadn't tightened up the rules yet. As with anything, problems are highlighted, they are studied, and new rules are put into place to account for what was learned. Right wing media of course discovered a boogeyman that was so useful they will be using it for years still, even if it doesn't exist.

It wasn’t a problem to begin with. Meta studies recently showed trans women have no biological advantage over cis women after HRT, certainly nothing than cis women don’t have biological variation within anyway. All the rule updates did was exclude and further marginalise an already marginalised extreme minority. There are very few trans women to begin with, fewer of us still are competing in sports. Nothing was studied here, the people who made the rules aren’t scholars, they’re bigots. They’re using us as a distraction from their poor governance.

And as a fellow enjoyer of HRT, I assure you it didn't enhance shit for me, beyond what I was hoping to get: longer, more full hair, boobies, and smoother skin.

My muscles are gone y'all. Like I've had to buy more breaker bars and larger tools so I can keep working on my cars, otherwise I simply could not break bolts anymore.

Btw, feel free to reach out to me I love connecting with fellow trans women in tech :)

Yeah, you have to conjure a really weird scenario for there to be any advantage.

Something like waiting until male puberty is already pretty far along and doing extensive strength training and then transitioning and competing immediately in a sport that puts a heavy premium on strength. I think most sports already have rules that would prevent this.

For someone following a more normal transitioning trajectory, there would be zero advantage; probably a significant disadvantage.

A blanket ban is just pure bullying, especially for childrens' sports (which are primarily a social activity, not a consequential competition). Individual sports can have rules to prevent the (primarily hypothetical) abusive cases without preventing children from participating in normal social activities. No one is saying that someone who's 200 lb of solid muscle and started HRT a month ago should be able to compete against girls in football or powerlifting, but pickleball, sure go for it.

A blanket ban is just pure bullying, especially for childrens' sports (which are primarily a social activity, not a consequential competition).

That I think is the core issue. Way too many people try to live way too hard through their children. Wherever you look, either in the US or (where I'm from) Germany... you'll find absolutely absurd behavior from completely unhinged parents. Just yesterday, that was a topic discussed here [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49686134

trans women have no biological advantage over cis women after HRT

As someone who's been into weightlifting and only casual observer-like in regards to testosterone therapy, this doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. After taking TRT/Steroids a person retains a good deal of the muscle/strength they gained even after cessation ... It surprises me to hear that this wouldnt carry over to sports where muscle/strength/power matter.

Additionally, you have to realize that a major concern on the right is that academia itself has become ideological to the point where only politically acceptable studies can be 1) studied and more importantly 2) published. There's a lot of people out there afraid to speak what appears to them (and their work) to be truth for fear of the backlash and career consequences.

Also a weightlifter (masters olympic weightlifting, nationally ranked). TRT and steroids are actually the opposite. Once you go off of them, your body starts to revert, muscle mass is lost, and often by more than you started with (because the body's natural production rates change with supplementation). It does take time, which is why sports regulatory bodies typically require specific time periods of hormonal therapy before they can participate, but their bodies will eventually adjust.

Sports regulatory bodies still test for hormonal PED, but their concerns have long swayed away from them because of the fact that they are so easy to detect and have the built in disadvantage of potentially altering your life negatively outside of sport. The current concerns have shifted to peptides and other forms of PEDs, because they are much harder to detect because they are 1) often naturally occurring but in smaller quantities, 2) don't actually directly act on the musculoskeletal system, but rather trigger natural processes that act on the system, and 3) often have half-lives dramatically shorter than most drug tests can even account for, and therefore require near continuous monitoring.

They do it because it wins them elections. It's a 90/10 issue and national democrats are on the losing side.

Yeah, I don't get this. If they're niche irrelevant issues that affect ~nobody, why not just concede them? Republicans could hardly dominate the discourse with these topics if there was nobody to discourse against.

Yeah, I don't get this. If they're niche irrelevant issues that affect ~nobody, why not just concede them?

Because there's about 1% of people who are trans in the US [1] and most other populations, on top of that come a further about 1.7% people who are somewhere on the intersex spectrum [2].

Democrats aren't willing to throw literally millions of people under the bus. Republicans aren't just willing to cast them aside - they are knowingly driving trans people to extinction.

[1] https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-ad...

[2] https://www.ohchr.org/en/sexual-orientation-and-gender-ident...

This isn't a fight we can avoid by retreating. They would just advance and the same battle would happen on different ground. If we abandon the trans, the culture wars will be about the gays. If we abandon the gays, the culture wars will be about blacks or hispanics or jews or god only knows. There's something to be said for picking firm ground to fight on, but there will be a fight and it cannot be won by retreating.

Why am I being interpreted as advocating for abandoning the trans? I don't want to do that and I don't need to be convinced by my empathy for gays or blacks- I care about trans people themselves! I'm saying if an issue doesn't matter- according to the trans people in this thread- and it's a losing issue, why are we insistent on fighting it anyway? Who benefits from this?

It'd probably be best to give an example of an issue you're talking about. I thought you were saying to concede trans topics altogether.

Because then they'll move on to the next victims and in having surrendered without even a fight you've granted them momentum for no good reason whatsoever, and you'll have fewer allies left too.

Is there a reason to believe this is how things work? Rather than "within a democracy as long as 'trans rights' means something that most people disagree with, it will be harder to advance the pro- side of the issue"? Is there evidence of 'momentum' being a real thing in politics, as opposed to the 'pendulum' that I've witnessed over the last decade?

Everything related to the right wing and fox news? We never had a big "swing left" - clinton was the democrats showing they can do economic conservatism as well. Modern acceptance of trans folks isn't a pendulum, most of the people espousing anti-trans views weren't pro trans 5 years ago.

Trying to abstract history into major shifts that are attributable to inanimate objects is just very ludic fallacy.

As someone who struggles with my position on some of these topics, one of my major self criticisms/fear is the tyranny of the majority. Even if (and that's a hypothetical if) my values would reject transgenderism, my values of freedom and fairness conflict with forcing another human being onto a specific path, especially with the use of force (government). So even if 90% are cisgendered (I didnt look up the real stat), that doesn't mean we vote to make our world cisgendered... A right and fair leaning is to create the freedoms we'd want if the tables were turned.

I say this all to say it surprises me how many republicans I know are pro freedom until it hits certain topics... Pro 2A and anti-(an adult can choose a different hormonal profile for their own body) is an odd pairing in my mind. Pro free-speach like Alex Jones / Citizens united but anti-(choosing to wear clothes or other adornments/appearance of the other gender) is an odd pairing in my mind.

I don’t have a strong view, but I don’t think that should baffle you, you think the reaction comes from nothing at all? One side is pushing to “wedge” (sort of) into a very low level space so that it cements itself at a foundational level and there’s no repeal or return from it - all or nothing view. The other side picks up on that and doesn’t want to let big changes go unchallenged. It’s a pretty understandable process. The niche cases allow the challenging party to present evidence for a consequence or concern that’s difficult to convey.

HN does this constantly with the surveillance, bring up one case of police abusing it, it’s exactly the same thing.

HN does this constantly with the surveillance, bring up one case of police abusing it, it’s exactly the same thing.

Because in this case, we're talking about maybe a few dozen (if that) relevant cases in trans youth [1]. With police/secret services abusing surveillance... it's huge enough that LOVEINT [2] is a term, and at least 50 cases were serious enough to be brought under official investigation [3].

[1] https://glaad.org/fact-sheet-for-reporters-transgender-parti...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/08/02/how-pol...

I’m just saying the process is exactly the same and shouldn’t be surprising. I don’t think we need to go into why one is less harming compared to another and that makes it okay to dismiss concerns.

One of the trans acceptance movement's main problems comes, as is often the case in politics, from some of its most militant and passionate activists. To put it simply, those extreme activists overreached and annoyed people. That's not the fault of trans people in general, but it explains some of the backlash and the focus on niche cases.

Basically, the activists I'm talking about overreached by:

- Pushing for speech control around preferred pronouns

- Being overrepresented among Reddit mods, thus becoming to some extent the "face of censorship" for many highly online people

- Equating the mere act of disbelieving trans people's chosen gender identities with out-and-out bigotry of the KKK kind

- Talking about a mythical "trans genocide" and getting angry when people questioned its existence

- Pushing for equal bathroom access long before the American public had actually been made ready for something like that

Etc.

So what we have now in the highly online discourse is essentially a battle between niche militant trans activists who seem to illogically believe that they are on the brink of being put into extermination camps, on the one hand, and niche militant anti-trans fanatics who exaggerate the relatively rare cases of trans people doing bad things for the sake of pushing an overall anti-left agenda.

The militant trans activists I speak of seemingly just can't stop themselves from continuously providing people who actually hate trans people and people who just hate the left with more and more ammunition by having a prominent online presence while saying a mix of untrue and highly questionable things.

Before anyone jumps in with an angry reaction... yes, if it's not already clear from what I wrote, I also think that the right has a problem with insane deluded militant people.

“Militant” trans activists? How is just using someone’s pronouns “speech control”? It’s no different than using a name. If trans people tell you who they are, just believe them, it’s not that hard. There’s nothing mythical about the ongoing trans genocide. Genocides don’t just happen in gas chambers.

https://translegislation.com/

I am not going to say much more here because I’m fairly certain none of this will get through to you given the tone of your comment. Trans people are far more likely to be victims in washrooms than to be perpetrators.

It's not while, it's because. They have to create a "threat" that's of the same "magnitude" as their actual crimes, vectoring out from the subjective origin of "traditional" man/woman identity and relations. They do that by casting transgenderism not as the benign and modest personal identity that it is, but as the same kind of sexually aggressive comportment as their own; something that you do or perform willfully instead of what you are compelled by natural and intrinsic impulse to be.

The first step in defeating it is untangling the action/identity conflation.

You are: someone who is biologically non-female, but whose gender identity is that of a woman.

He is: a businessman and politician.

You do: upstanding, normal folk things.

He does: reprehensible shit like assaulting teenagers and bragging about "grabbing [women] by the pussy."

Hopefully people are able to see who in this comparison is in the wrong.

Taking hormones activates the genes responsible for making someone biologically a woman. That's kinda the point of taking them.

Right. Hormones cause an insane amount of changes. The texture of my skin, my scent, how much oil my skin produces, the haemoglobin in my blood, the size and strength of my muscles, how much fat my body stores, and where it goes, how attraction feels, how emotions feel, what I find rewarding. Certain physical attributes do require different interventions but the vast majority of sexually differentiated traits are decided by the dominant sex hormone in the body, not by the XX/XY genes. See: XY females for instance who have non functioning androgen receptors. When we talk about biological women, it’s also ignoring intersex variations. Biology is way more complex than we make it out to be.

You're not a scapegoat you're fodder for a social warfare diversion to enable the treasury to be looted by both parties while the economy collapses. DC's puppeteers don't give a shit about anything unless it starts with $

Of course, because by the new definition, the leader is "peak American", so everything in collision with his view is naturally "anti-American".

The usage of the term "anti-American" by anyone in a public role should be rejected as insufficient definition and unfit for a representative to use. On the spot, immediately.

Is it anti-American to brush your teeth after breakfast? or rather before? Is both American? Neither of it?

When Trump calls Democrats "enemies from within," that's anti-American.

When Trump refuses to peacefully transfer power to his victorious opponent and instead plays "heads I win tails you cheated," that's anti-American.

When Trump sends the FCC chair to suppress speech "we can do this the easy way or the hard way," or yucks it up with the president of El Salvador over suspending Habeas Corpus, that's anti-American.

The "American Experiment" isn't an empty concept, but it is about democracy and law and rights as opposed to conservative cultural values, and when people in power start to argue that the former must be sacrificed for the latter they certainly deserve to be clowned on. Not because they are wrong to imagine an American Ideal, but because they have its contents exactly backwards.

While I understand the intention of what you're saying, you're still attempting a definition of the term "anti-American", which needs no definition as the term should be rejected as a whole.

I mean, to pick what is perhaps the easiest example, wanting to abridge speech is anti-American by its very definition.

It is possible to have a thing that is anti-American. So I'm not sure what good it is to reject the term altogether.

It could e.g. be "anti-democratic" by a universal definition of democracy and civil liberties which no single country then gets to fork and redefine...

Let's suppose you had your way and the cultural concept of America as a set of ideas and values related to democracy was erased. Would the universal non-national concepts of democracy and civil liberties have been able to inspire Mike Pence to stand up to Donald Trump on January 6th?

Sorry, I don't know what this conversation is about. This is not about a "concept", it is about the label itself.

When the term "anti-American" is used, it is a placeholder for "against my values". Noone is ever anti-American himself, it is only a label applied upon others.

That's why IMO it should be rejected when used by people in a public role, see original comment.

You are free to think otherwise, which I may then label as "anti-American" in passing, while quickly moving on to you mentioning Mike Pence and some random conspiracy I have /s

Again, /s/s/s/s

Ah, I see, it's the same as "un-American", only without being a word too onerous to use (yet) due to obvious historical implications.

The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), was an investigative committee of the United States House of Representatives created in 1938. Their goal was to investigate alleged disloyalty and subversive activities on the part of private citizens, public employees, and those organizations suspected of having communist ties. It was abolished in 1975.

I'd heard of this but didn't realize it went on for decades.

Turning it around, I'd say persecuting political enemies for being "un-American" - or as a recent book declared, "unhuman" - is a very un-American thing to do. At least according to the values for which the nation stands (or supposed to stand).

Not really. America stands for something, they wrote a whole document about it.

There is a big difference between being "American" and being something like "German" because Germany has existed for so long as different governments and the thing that ties it together is not an ethos, but an ethnicity. Being American is different, there's no ethnicity that makes one American, there is only it's ethos. The ideals written in the declaration of independence are American values.

And that's the weak link of tying ideals and values to a location like a country:

The group elected to lead and represent this location also represent ideals and values, so THEIR ideals and values become inseparable of the location they were elected to represent.

For a certain period in the mid-1900s, "German values" meant something different than it did before and after, because Germany was represented by a different leader...

And that's the weak link of tying ideals and values to a location like a country

My entire post is about exactly how this is not the case, American values are defined in a document[1].

[1]https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcrip...

And what I'm trying to explain is, that this paper doesn't matter if it is represented by someone who doesn't uphold its content.

Germany had the Paulskirche-, the Bismarck- and the Weymar-Constitution, all of them before that certain Leader elected into power. He got to define who is worthy/unworthy, decide how to read the document his party represents and change the definition of "un-German"

Germany specifically hasnt existed for very long. its a younger country than the US, but it was made to combine people of an ethnicity

I mean, there are American values. The country was built around the idea of limiting the federal government's power, and adherence not a person, but to a set of values (like freedom of speech). We're explictly founded on the concept of rule of law.

Through that lens, it is very clear what anti-American means: adherence and loyalty to a person instead of a set of values, expansive government overreach, erosion of individual liberties, including the ability to express dissent.

Is it exists, something must be antithetical to it.

(Truth is its just rhetoric and it doesn't mean much of anything. That's why its main use is as a cudgel).

I disagree.

I would define confidently that Anti-American is aligned with Anti-Constitutional. By definition, it is this nation's founding document and treatise.

An the Supreme Court's ultimate role is to affirm or deny nebulous case law as aligned with the Constitution.

When Trump refuses to peacefully transfer power to his victorious opponent

When did this happen? I didn't realize Biden wasn't inaugurated. I could have sworn he was the President for 4 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_January_6_Unit...

I'm skimming the "Aftermath" section and I'm not seeing where Biden's inauguration was cancelled or Trump retained power or anything else? If Trump "refused to peacefully transfer power" how was power peacefully transferred to Biden exactly on schedule the same way it's happened in every other election?

I do see this happened on Jan 7th though:

7:10 p.m.: Shortly after Twitter unlocked Trump's account, Trump released a video statement condemning the violence at the Capitol, saying that "a new administration will be inaugurated" and that his "focus now turns to ensuring a smooth, orderly, and seamless transition of power" to the Biden administration.

    The American people deserve to know that President Trump
    and his advisors didn’t just ask me to pause, they asked me
    to reject votes, to return votes, to essentially overturn the election.
    To keep faith with the oath that I made to the American people and
    to almighty God, I rejected that out of hand
    and I did my duty that day.

    - Vice President Mike Pence

This is why the Jan 6 crowd was carrying around an improvised gallows and chanting "hang Mike Pence." The crowd was there to serve as a pretext for what Trump wanted Pence to do, but Pence refused to do it so the self-coup attempt failed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot

Show me where this happened in every other election.

If you go far into the user you’re replying to’s post history, you’ll find them unambiguously referring to the Jan 6 crowd as terrorists. They are very aware.

I know there’s a pretty strong norm against dragging people for their posting history here, but that’s in service of maximizing light vs. heat and I feel like pretending to be ignorant of recent events in order to relitigate something unrelated in the comments is wholly unproductive.

It's like the John Birth society are back in charge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_Un-American_Activities_C...

Im not quite following. Things can be mislabeled as anti American, but everyone has some idea of whats anti-American in principle. Anti free speech for example is anti American.

How that gets applied is a matter of debate. But I think all public officials should agree with that.

Its kind of a fundamental thing to have an idea about the nation’s values. If that’s too taboo for someone then they are quite literally anti American. Having a country means organizing around a core set of values. We can debate what those are but arguing you can’t stand for anything?

I'm Muslim. Born in the US. I've seen politicians and right wing public figures call my entire faith anti-American. One of them just had a nice memorial for their one-year since their death.

The term may have had an agreed upon meaning at some point, but not anymore.

Edit: it seems like most right-wing people conflate "non-Christian" with "anti-American". i don't know what's worse; the fact that these people say and think it, or the fact that their constituents don't know the difference.

It doesn’t have to have an agreed upon meaning. My point is its not inherently bad to think something is anti-American.

In fact, treating the very idea of judging something as “anti-American” as inherently illegitimate is quite literally anti-American. Its saying Americans shouldn’t be allowed to have opinions about what their country stands for.

No, Dem candidates are safe. The culture wars benefit both parties and their billionaire owners.

The culture wars are explicitly a tool of the right to provoke fear, anger, and hate against others.

The left gets trapped in it because every single culture war issue (LGBQT+, racism, feminism, reproductive rights, freedom from religion, etc) are responses to the rights reactionary drive to claw back rights from everybody who is not a white male christian.

The red scare of the 1950s was ridiculous enough, but at least the Soviet Union was an actual threat. We are now at a point where “pro-transgender” is the new threat?

Sure, if you conveniently drop the qualifying word "radically". But that's not what was said. What was said specifically included the word "radically" for a good reason. Radical anything is a threat.

This is the kind of sarcasm on HN that will draw a ton of comments. Good job on really nailing the psyche of the HN community.

I may have issues detecting sarcasm. I hope to god this is sarcasm… because these kinds of takes are rampant on this site.

The politicized take on this is not correct. More importantly, it's not helpful.

When the "left" (Democrats) had power recently in the U.S., they were very happy to try to criminalize the protected speech of their enemies. Their tack was to define speech they didn't like as "hate speech", which luckily isn't actually a thing in the U.S., legally. But they were trying to make it happen.

I don't mean to defend one or the other side, merely to point out that this is a non-partisan issue.

Please cite specifically what the Biden administration did to curtail people’s right to freedom of speech.

I’ll wait.

This is untrue. Throw out your TV.

ACLU will have a field day.

At this stage I'd settle for echelon era surveillance and consider it a win...

Ad tech/tiktok has proven its possible to deduce what people are think at scale from subtle signals, now sifting info at scale is possible thanks to LLMs and a large portion of everyone's online history is likely to become vulnerable to store now decrypt later attacks. Get rid of cash, force identity verification for every online service, sprinkle some flock cameras on top and you've got a complete surveillance state. Oh and of course you need some goons to scare people into compliance & later in some self-censorship for good measure. We could call the group "Frozen water".

...and we're basically already there on all of it except perhaps the "decrypt later" on https (and even that has rumours).

Genuinely don't think this is stoppable anymore.

how not? All of this is "soft" control, if tomorrow 75% of the people in any country decided "this can't keep on going on", all relevant public buildings would be occupied everywhere and the relevant government imprisoned promptly.

On a more positive note, the fact that this doesn't happen indicates things aren't that bad right now. No amount of KYC or age verification can stop large amounts of angry people who want one thing.

People sometimes bring up China - which isn't relevant because people still remember being extremely poor, thus being grateful to the Party - or one of those dictatorships as counterexamples for this, but see the Arab Spring (food got more expensive -> revolutions), Nepal recently... etc.

if tomorrow 75% of the people in any country decided

No kings protests was a very respectable effort....peaked at 2.3%.

Even the current administration inept as it is is basically home free on this one. Senate neutered, Courts sidelined, Treasury subjugated, loyalist in charge of military, JAG core silenced, secondary personal goons squad established and lavishly funded, Social media captured, Stats department dismantled, Cult of personality created, common enemy created (immigrants), distractions for the masses arranged (culture wars, UFC on whitehouse lawn), truth undermined (prez spouting nonstop lies & AI), oligarch class established, surveillance normalized, norm of kiss the ring & pay tribute established.

Dunno about you but to me that looks like US democracy is so cooked the kitchen smoke alarm has gone off & everyone was too busy doomscrolling to notice.

Hope I'm wrong but that list looks pretty fuckin comprehensive to me. Hell they even somehow managed to throw in a roman salute...

On a more positive note

Yeah sorry...above isn't exactly that

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_2026_No_Kings_protests#T...

No Comrade Premier, it has only just begun.

One of the many legacies of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 is the government-wide shift from targeted surveillance—such as individual wiretaps or pen register/trap and trace orders—to mass surveillance techniques—such as tapping into the internet backbone or mass collection of telephone or internet metadata.

In other words, we gave the terrorists the victory by accepting being terrorized at the country level from a single act and destroying a lot of our freedom. Yeah us.

I think we have to face the fact that we cannot unring this bell. There will be holding actions against things like Flock but in the end they will fail, and at best we will have a loosening of the laws that Flock is being used to enforce and more draconian enforcement of the laws that remain.

Like many on this site I'm in violent agreement with Schneier and have been ever since "security theater" entered the lexicon. But this is a hopeless fight.

Are you advocating for inaction? If so, what do you wish to achieve?

I would advocate for a shift of power by creating greater individual rights over their data (as their irrevocable property) , and greater oversight and consequences for those in power (ab)using the data.

It's one thing for our data to be out there such that a NSA employee could stalk their girlfriend, it's another thing for said person to be allowed to gracefully "retire" rather than be put in prison.

I am from the UK and we are quite far down the surveillance and control mentality (Flock actually seems a greater system of surveillance then what we have here but if such a system was created, the push back would be less). But a lot of people here are slowly beginning to see the benefits in self defense and gun laws that mean you are not dependent on the police, this kind of logic where people have want autonomy and policing becomes less popular as the inevitable abuses or neglect happen is something that creates change.

I don't think it inevitable that this continues.

I do not know a single person in the UK who wants US style gun laws.

There is significant pushback against surveillance.

I suspect that Mass Surveillance is here for good, and the real project is to regain control of who gains the power and benefits. There are dozens if not 100s of ways that mass surveillance can improve human life. There are also as many where it can be abused to create suffering. I think the real issue is we're trending to the latter. In order to safely continue down this path we (USA) need:

1. EU style governmental pushes to defend digital rights. Data needs to be our own property that we can lend, but can never give up our right to revocation.

2. Stricter controls, and stricter still penalities, need to exist against misuse and abuse. Many of the stories of abuse of data are most stark in their lack of repercussions, some of this is police unions, some of this is "deep state" people who scratch eachother's backs and grant eachother free accesses and immunity. Some of this is a voting issue as in we need to make it known to our candidates that it matters to us, and then push real political power in their hands.

Just to help the imagination of all here's where mass surveilance could plausibly add good to society, all stemming from legitimate use:

1. Criminals like porch pirates can be caught using a neetwork of Ring cameras

2. A lost pet/child can be identified and found by drone surveillance

3. Usage data of roads can be updated in realtime

4. Trends and Sentiment could be used to guide the government intra-elections improving the way government serves us

5. Police officers can avoid risky situations using drones as eyes instead of putting their own bodies in harms way

EU style governmental pushes to defend digital rights.

No, I don't think we need Chat Control in the US or our government forcing ISPs and CDNs to block whole swaths of the internet just because a soccer game is on TV.

Fair points, I did not mean undermining encryption or privacy, I meant like GDPR and right to erasure.

It'd be even better if there was some form of royalty structure on our data used by companies. It'd be nice if I, at least, received a royalty check each time a data broker sold my data to the CIA.

"I want the good stuff from an authoritarian dictatorship without the bad stuff"

It will never work like that.

6. who controls and accesses the data will change over time

7. authoritarians and evil men can have a one-stop shop to know where to round up political opponents

8. power becomes increasingly entrenched and concentrated

9. See 7

Your points are, essentially, always true of all power for all time. (Or mostly true of most power for most of time)...

Humans have frequently created systems which contradict steps 6-9, or atleast from Monarchy to Democracy. Constitutions, legal systems, laws et al. have generally served as barriers to abuse. The question is how do we continue to uphold and increase the value for individuals and decrease the expected return of abuse.

There are dozens if not 100s of ways that mass surveillance can improve human life.

There are dozens of ways living in a cage can improve human life.

You won't be exposed to dangerous ideas and you might get a calorie allowance. There's little danger of an unwanted pregnancy, and you might be given labor-related chores or exercises to occupy your time.

The danger with all of these systems is what happens when they are abused. That's not a matter of if, just a matter of when.

We are building a cage around society. It's so slow you don't realize the shackles being placed around your ankle and your neck. But one day, when it's too late to protest, the switch will be flipped.

We're already living in 1984. We are always just a few election cycles away from 1934.

1. Cameras don’t prevent porch pirates. They give you a video after the fact of a masked person taking your package. Small theft is prevented by more equality in society, and a stronger safety net. (Source: the lower crime rate in other countries)

2. Lost pets are not being found by drone and camera surveillance. They could, but the system doesn’t give a shit about your dog. Children, maybe. I guess i’m ok with deploying a fleet of drones during a search and rescue operation. As long as there is transparency so it’s not done for other reasons, and they are grounded when they are done.

3. You just need one of those pressure sensitive wire strips across the road to do this. It’s a largely solved problem that doesn’t involve mass surveillance.

4. I am just guessing what this means, but government doesn’t do things that are wildly popular by polling, so why would they react to some ai surveillance sentiment analysis?

5. This isn’t mass surveillance. Like #2, a deployed drone to look around a corner or scan a building before entering is using technology but it’s momentary. If it became a problem where it was being over used we could deal with it as a separate issue.

It isn't going to stop until it becomes a national security issue. If your can spy on your citizens , your enemies can potentially gain access to the same surveillance and hit high profile targets.

We live in war times and will soon see it happening

I find it ironic that in the US, there's this social movement against Flock cameras - which have shown real results in tracking down criminals - while everyone walks around all the time with a personal tracking device in the form of a smart phone. That's wayyyy more invasive than cameras along roads.

Phone data requires some actual process to access. It should be more restrictive than it is, but I don’t believe the information is made available to random police officers who can search for whatever they want with no real justification.

The problem with Flock isn’t the cameras, it’s the system built on them that gives panopticon powers to any random law enforcement officer.

Stop posting this bullshit argument. the people arguing against Flock are the same people who argue for privacy rights around cellular phone data, availability of encrypted messaging etc. It's thanks to them that the government still needs to get a warrant instead of just doing a search.

Anyone making this argument of yours is also smart enough to be aware of the privacy efforts. Pretending not to know about them is bullshit.

I think the problem is twofold:

One, the move to digital lives made digital surveillance necessary. It wasn't enough to check attendance at the local mosque/far right rally. Then, the counter-move to encrypted communication meant law enforcement now had to rely on metadata.

Second: A wanton disregard of the treasure that is digital data. Most people just don't seem to care. LG is snooping on you? I bet they won't see even a 10% drop in sales next year. When the citizenry as consumer blasts their data everywhere, it's hard to argue as parliamentarian that those same people want it protected. Now people use Apple Watches and Amazon Alexa in their own bedrooms! People say they want their data safe guarded, but their actions suggest otherwise.