The system they’ve crafted relies on having enough of a working population to pay for the older benefit-receiving population. Their benefits are so large and unwieldy, they know the whole thing will fall apart if they don’t find a way to fund it.
They see this as a threat to their entire way of life.
I mean the message in The Dark Knight is really messy. The characters believe it’s immoral, but they use it anyway, and it saves lives and stops the Joker.
Yeah, as I say in a sibling comment, it's a fair reading of the movie that it's ultimately pro-surveillance because it shows that despite being immoral, unethical mass surveillance catches the bad guy. But "surveillance is unethical but necessary when battling the forces of evil" is worlds away from "surveillance is totally awesome and everyone should buy a Ring camera."
Part of the problem here is that people who love it are affecting people who do not. If you want to put cameras to record inside your home, fine, but this is people recording their neighbors without consent. The sales pitch is finding Fido, but I doubt that is the end game here.
"Recording their neighbors without their consent" implies that consent was ever expected or required. You're walking down a public street and have no expectation of privacy in the US, and correspondingly 0 legal or even "ethical" recourse.
The 1st amendment protects your right to film in public, so my statement is correct.
The limitations only come from edge cases, like stalking, interfering with active law enforcement, or recording conversations in all-party consent states; none of which would apply to a security camera recording a public view.
A camera pointing at the sidewalk is fairly innocuous.
A camera pointing at the sidewalk that live streams everything it sees to several megacorps and law enforcement agencies is troubling. A million cameras doing this is a surveillance state. That's bad!
Legal? Yes. Dangerous to the populous? Also yes. Something can be legal and also be very very bad. You get that, right? Your argument comes across as "well, I'm within my rights to shout the N-word in a public place!!" Sure, and you're also an asshole. Not for having a camera, but for sending the footage to a bunch of creeps and thinking that's a fine thing to do.
Genuinely asking how is that realistically dangerous to the populace?
Set aside a slippery slope argument, because we’re just talking about security cameras in public areas: do you really think you have a right to privacy on a sidewalk?
If someone recognizes a criminal on a sidewalk from a wanted poster, or a missing child from a milk carton, is that surveillance state? Are they an asshole for calling the tip line, instead of keeping quiet?
Thank you for that. But please consider taking down the camera, too; it's just as much of a problem without a subscription, because you are the service being sold, not just the customer. Get one that stores and processes video entirely locally instead.
I would expect so, yes; I certainly wouldn't bet against it. I can think of any number of ways for a network-connected camera to figure out approximately where it is, and even if it doesn't know approximately where it is, it can still provide video and that video could go through any amount of server-side analysis.
This is also true. But once that happened, it was a sort of expectation and often necessity. People couldn't outsource as much hard work to machines, built by someone else far away from their farms
Yep. Birth control made it so women can choose how many times they get pregnant. Pregnancy is not exactly a walk in the park, so it’s no surprise it’s decreasing as birth control increases.
To override this, society needs to make having kids be “cool.” It’s that “simple,” but there’s no real way to coordinate that in society from the top down without being authoritarian.
So it’s a problem that can only be solved by individual change and convincing others one on one that it’s desirable. And people don’t like that.
I totally agree, and my argument with the original post was that the author made it sound so simple.
Has any society successfully done this yet?
Basically, the only prosperous first world groups I see with fertility rates above replacement rate are religious subcultures (like the Mormons, Evangelicals, and Modern Orthodox Jews in the US). I simply don't see any other examples of being able to pull this off.
Anything can become cool and desirable if enough people think it is.
The acceptance of LGBT was largely won this way. Same with women’s rights and environmentalism (although that one is still in the midst of fighting for success).
You just have to settle for a long road ahead before reaching any tipping point.
“A man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.”
>She and I spoke last night and she is increasingly pissed off that people who are in her classes, who don’t do the work, and don’t understand the material get all A’s because they’re using some form of GPT to do their assignments, and teachers cannot keep up
How do they do well on tests, then?
Surely the most they could get away with is homework and take-home writing assignments. Those are only a fraction of your grade, especially at “excellent” high schools.
You (likely) act in a non-violent way every day. If you want some kind of change in your life, you achieve it non-violently.
Does that imply you are are actually a violent person that is choosing not to be violent? Are you implying “something violent” every day you act like a good person?
MLK didn’t have support because people were afraid of the alternative. They supported him because they agreed with him message.
I feel like you are just trying to justify violence to some degree.
Let's say you live in an apartment building and your landlord locks you out and keeps you belongings. Police say its not their problem. Courts decide that they don't aare either. So now you have no recourse or body to complain to.
In that situation saying "i resolve problems non-violently every day" stops being relevenat. The mechanisms that allow you to do so (enforcement, law, etc) have been removed as they were for those fighting for civil rights.
You may still personally choose non-violence in this case, but I'd bet you would understand/sympathize/maybe-even-join those who decided to break into their apartments by force and grab the things that are rightfully theirs.
nobody is secretly violent ... just normal peaceful channels stoped working.
Recognizing that distinction isn't justifying violence its just explaining why nonviolence provides leverage in the first place
And those mechanisms, the military, the police, and the legal system, rely on violence as the ultimate fallback when other options fail.
So you may not be relying on violence to solve your problems, or the threat of violence, or the insinuation of it, but instead relying on the threat of someone ELSE’S violence. That is the social contract pretty fundamentally.
And when people can no longer rely on those figures who are supposed to use violence on their behalf, we shouldn’t be surprised that they attempt to reclaim the ability to use force. The social contract has been voided, in their eyes. The premise and promise broken.
> Let's say you live in an apartment building and your landlord locks you out and keeps you belongings. Police say it’s not their problem. Courts decide that they don't aare either. So now you have no recourse or body to complain to.
If all of the enforcement bodies and normal legal peaceful channels available to you don’t agree with your assessment there is probably a “why”. If the reason that your property was seized is because you chose to not pay your rent, then I am not sure understanding, sympathy, or joining in violence would be an appropriate response.
If all of the enforcement bodies and normal legal peaceful channels available to you don’t agree with your assessment there is probably a “why”
Yeah, like maybe you didn't have $50,000 to appeal a bad decision made because a magistrate couldn't be bothered actually reading the evidence in front of them.
If the case was truly just I suspect you could find pro bono or contingency legal services to handle your appeal much easier than people sympathetic to the violence.
You are commenting about legal avenues not going your way on a thread literally about the concept of a violent response being justified for people when normal legal avenues don’t go your way.
Well I mean that's nice for you but I'm not sure how it responds to the question asked - when did I say anything about violence being justified? I merely responded to your ignorant and empirically incorrect fantasy-world assumption that the legal system is always right.
At no point did I say the legal system is always right. I suggested that in certain situations it might be right and in those situations resorting to violence because you feel aggrieved at a legal loss would not be an appropriate response. Frankly, some people are guilty and some people are legally responsible.
I suggested that if you are having difficulty finding an attorney willing to take your case on contingency, there might be a reason for that. I stand by that. You are asking a person to take a risk on your behalf who has evaluated the environment and didn’t like the odds.
> At no point did I say the legal system is always right
First you made the incorrect assumption that we live in a disney-style fantasy world with "If all of the enforcement bodies and normal legal peaceful channels available to you don’t agree with your assessment there is probably a 'why'."
Then you made the totally unwarranted assumption that "If the case was truly just I suspect you could find pro bono or contingency legal services to handle your appeal"
> I suggested that if you are having difficulty finding an attorney willing to take your case on contingency, there might be a reason for that
No, you made an assumption based on zero information and chose to incorrectly insinuate that the case is not just.
> You are asking a person to take a risk on your behalf who has evaluated the environment and didn’t like the odds.
But "evaluated the environment and didn’t like the odds" doesn't actually have anything to do with the case being just, does it? There's a million possible explanations why someone might choose not to donate their time for free. Like for example "I'm aware of just how corrupt this system is based on my previous experiences and so I choose not to waste my time and energy on this".
And it's almost impressive, in a sad way, how indifferent you are to everyone else on the planet, and how prima-facie ridiculous your fantasy world assumptions are when given more than two seconds thought. But I'm not here for that sort of "discussion".
Unfortunately however since you have no response to any of the points I actually made, I'll just have to say that I hope you run into someone just as horrible when the corrupt system chews you up and spits you out too.
"sadistic vengeance"? I don't know what you're talking about - you yourself claim that you're merely "indifferent". If you're not being a condescending ass, then how is what I wished for "sadistic"? I think you just your entire premise.
> sadistic vengeance"? I don't know what you're talking about
A couple of quotes from your comments above…I added the emphasis that highlights your sadism and vengeance:
“You know, I look forward to the day this unjust system that you blindly and stupidly trust bites you, too”
“I'll just have to say that I hope you run into someone just as horrible when the corrupt system chews you up and spits you out too.”
If you want to claim ignorance about what you wrote, fine. But it’s here for all to see. With every word you post I become more and more convinced that your perception of justice is tilted outside societal norms.
Fraudsters usually don't resort to violence once they get caught. In your contrived example, the guy would probably end up paying what he owed and that would be that. Violence mostly emerges from people who feel that they are treated unfairly, and can't use civil channels to solve their issues. Which is why it's important to build a society that treats people fairly.
> I don’t think we can assume that the presence of violence automatically indicates that society isn’t fair.
I think it does, actually. The more unequal the country, the more violent it is. Which is why the best way to get rid of crime is not to give unlimited funding to the police (that has been shown to be very ineffective, and ruinous), it's to make sure no one needs to commit it. That will never get rid of all crimes, of course.
"Let's say you live in an apartment building and your landlord locks you out and keeps you belongings. Police say its not their problem. Courts decide that they don't aare either. So now you have no recourse or body to complain to.
In that situation saying "i resolve problems non-violently every day" stops being relevenat. The mechanisms that allow you to do so (enforcement, law, etc) have been removed as they were for those fighting for civil rights.
You may still personally choose non-violence in this case, but I'd bet you would understand/sympathize/maybe-even-join those who decided to break into their apartments by force and grab the things that are rightfully theirs."
I would say it depends. Are there depts of rent involved in that scenario? Did the locking out just happened out of the blue, or was it communicated before, that it would happen?
Apart from that, I surely see more easy examples of justifying violence - for example to stop other violence.
This happened to me. Police did nothing. I was informed I had the legal right to break the door down to get my belongings. I did so.
The only reason a scummy landlord doesn't enact violence against you for money is that he can expect violence against him in return. So it supports the claim. Nonviolence can only happen when backed up by the possibility of violence.
I've listened to a lot of Malcolm X. He was a better speaker IMO, his rhetoric was better. I believe he had a more accurate understanding of the reality of how power really works. It has nothing to do with wanting to justifying violence, Malcolm X made a number of matter of fact observations.
I think the specific condition here is "change that someone else is willing to prevent using violence". I guess that is not present too often during everyday life.
Everyday you're not trying to achieve political change.
And a lot of those interactions are backed by implied violence: people paying for things at stores is not because everyone has actually agreed on the price.
> people paying for things at stores is not because everyone has actually agreed on the price.
Yes it is. If a normal commodity item such as bottle of milk was outrageous overpriced in a particular store. I would just go to another store.
As for whether I would pay for something without the threat of violence. I do so everyday. I've walked out of stores by mistake with an item I haven't paid for and gone back into the store and paid for it. I don't like my things being stolen, and thus I don't steal other people's things.
I pay for my eggs from a farm and it is a honour system.
> people paying for things at stores is not because everyone has actually agreed on the price.
... I genuinely can't fathom what it's like to live in a developed country and yet have such little social trust.
You really imagine that when others are in line at a checkout, they have the intrusive thought "I could just bolt and not pay, but I see a security guard so I better stay in line"? You really have that thought yourself?
Of course people have agreed on the price. That's why you don't see anyone trying to negotiate the price, even though they would be perfectly within their rights to try. And it's why you do see people comparison-shop.
You're missing the point -- I don't refuse to pay a parking ticket after the court orders me to do so. I don't stand in the checkout line trying to figure out how to run out without paying. I don't threaten people on the sidewalk and take their money when I notice there aren't any police around at the moment. I trust that the vast, vast majority of people act similarly. If they didn't, no amount of law enforcement would be enough.
> I don't threaten people on the sidewalk and take their money when I notice there aren't any police around at the moment.
What do you think happens to people who do that though?
You keep telling me what you don't do and how it proves you're implicitly non violent but you can't even imagine framing that response in terms that don't include representatives of the state's monopoly on violence being within arms reach.
Implying violence is never necessary while repeatedly describing not doing violence even if the state's violence distributing apparatus isn't currently present rather undermines the case.
> but you can't even imagine framing that response in terms that don't include representatives of the state's monopoly on violence being within arms reach.
This is not an accurate representation of GP:
> I don't stand in the checkout line trying to figure out how to run out without paying.... I trust that the vast, vast majority of people act similarly. If they didn't, no amount of law enforcement would be enough.
The OP is presenting a stupidly simplistic model of the problem, as though their regular middle class life ably answers the question of the role or threat of violence when demanding political change.
In a world they note of police, military and security guards, they're acting like whether this might have a reason is determined solely by whether people are planning to steal from a supermarket or not...while they're not poverty stricken or hungry, to boot.
Arguing "I simply obey all the laws" is real easy to do from a position of privilege.
Violence is never the answer is easy to say when it's not happening to you. Its also easy to say while you stand by as violence is done to others.
They see this as a threat to their entire way of life.
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