Privacy is normal.
Anti-privacy (AKA surveillance) is abnormal.
To all intelligence agents, political operatives, collectivists, and bureaucrats everywhere: that you want to know what I am thinking, doing, saying, where I'm going and who I'm associating with does not make it ok for you to know those things.
That you want to know those things makes you a pathological human. That you think you have a right to know them makes you a dangerous human.
The Most Dangerous Force in the World in 2023 (in one sentence)
The most dangerous and divisive force in the world right now is the apparently complete lack of awareness on the part of self-styled, developed-world “liberals” (which I quote because the version of “liberalism” or “progressivism” that pertains now has nothing whatsoever to do with the principles, values, and priorities of what was called “liberalism” up to about 2016) that their program of “inclusiveness” and “diversity” enforced in practice by the most extreme measures of censorship, persecution, marginalization, and even criminalization of any speech and thought that doesn’t conform to their preferred narratives is ouroborosly hypocritical and entirely self-negating.
Agree that revolution is not a permanent solution and was not intending to present it as such though I can see how it might read that way.
Instead as implied in the quote from Jefferson at the end of the essay, I think it's a periodic necessity.
I also think you could hope that humanity might one day mature to the point where cycles of crapification and cleansing were no longer necessary, but that's not where we are now.
The absurd election of Trump was those angry people growling. Unfortunately, the political left in America interpreted that growling not as a warning related to their own, let's call it "questionable" behavior, but instead as an indichtment of the mental health and morality of the numerical majority of Americans.
I'd say that the most important and relevant thing they are ignorant of is the fundmental hypocrisy at the core of nearly all the values they are currently mindlessly championing; Ardern, for example, calling for government regulation of online speech as a means of protecting free speech.
She (using her here as a representative example of the political left in the west) really does not seem to be aware at all of the self-contradictory nature (much less the embedded elitist, superior tone) of this sentence: "As leaders, we are rightly concerned that even the most light-touch approaches to disinformation could be misinterpreted as being hostile to the values of free speech that we value so highly,"
Oddbean new post about login | logout
Notes by A Scientist | export