In late 2021, Wired, the formerly libertarian magazine that now champions surveillance and censorship, called for spying on private messaging in the name of preventing harm. Encrypted messaging apps “are intentionally built for convenience and speed, for person-to-person communication as well as large group connections,” wrote Wired. “Yet it is these same conditions that have fueled abusive and illegal behavior, disinformation and hate speech, and hoaxes and scams; all to the detriment of the vast majority of their users. As early as 2018, investigative reports have explored the role that these very features played in dozens of deaths in India and Indonesia as well as elections in Nigeria and Brazil.”
The Omidyar report explicitly argued against the right to privacy in text messaging. “Privacy is essential to building trust, but it is not a singular standard for safety,” wrote Omidyar Foundation authors. “We believe online safety is the result of trustworthy technology and enlightened regulation. While the shift toward adopting end-to-end encryption has reinforced trust between users, the technological architecture that encourages scale, virality, and monetization has ultimately facilitated the rapid and large-scale spread of dangerous, distorted, and deceitful content.”
It is a shocking statement to read, especially when you realize that Omidyar, with a net worth of $9 billion, has long claimed to be a champion of free speech and privacy. He even bankrolled the online magazine, The Intercept in response to revelations by Edward Snowden that the U.S. government was illegally spying on American citizens. What is going on here? Why is the censorship industry now trying to spy on and censor our private messages?
“Hate Speech” is speech with which the establishment rulers disagree.
“Disinformation”, in the sense of lies, is mostly spread by governments and major corporate bodies (including NGOs) – they do not need to “encrypt” their lies, as they are spread openly every day by the education system and the mainstream media.
“Wired” are a bit worse than “no longer libertarian” – they are now very much on the side of governments and corporate bodies (the government and corporate bureaucracy in what was once, but IS NO LONGER, the West, being essentially the same).
Even in the time of President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher it was horribly clear that the West had massively declined in terms of liberty – the state (the government) had massively expanded in both size (spending) and scope (regulations) for more than a century. However, it still, at least sort-of, made sense to talk about “The West” or “The Free World” in the time of President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher.
It no longer makes sense to talk about “The West” or “The Free World” – not in these days of Agenda 2030 (once Agenda 21 – which dates from the early 1990s but has gradually developed over time) Sustainable Development Goals (including the “cultural aspect” which is censorship) and DEI (or which ever way round you want to put the letters) – Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (and the persecution of anyone who does not go along with every aspect of the agenda – or does not support every aspect of the establishment narrative), “The West” or “The Free World” no longer exists.
Part of the problem is that as far as I see it, a lot of today’s tech business leaders are hostile to the typical constraints, checks and balances of a broadly liberal order. They’ve embraced a technocratic worldview in which people such as them – wise, hip and not reactionary bigots like other people – call the shots. It doesn’t occur to them, until too late, that what they are creating will come back to bite them. Hard.
In my day job I write a fair bit about privacy. It is interesting that there has, at the margins, bit a bit of pushback against relentless assaults on privacy from campaigners who want everything to be “transparent”, even if it means putting beneficial ownership data of private individuals into the public domain. In November 2022, a top European Union court actually voted against https://www.mishcon.com/news/european-court-of-justice-strikes-down-public-registers-of-beneficial-ownership such beneficial ownership public registers. We’ve seen the assaults on medical privacy during the lockdowns, and the Snowden revelations, etc. Another big worry that could galvanise opinion is the threat of central bank digital currencies, which could be part of a Western-style form of “social credit system” that already operates in China.
As for Wired magazine, I haven’t read it for years, and it is sad to see it fall to the level of championing censorship and controls on privacy. It is also fully on board with the Green agenda, in its full alarmist sense.
Johnathan Pearce – yes indeed.
Nor do they hide it – when the corporate business leaders (and not just from tech companies) meet (and not just as WEF meetings – at every other national and international body as well) they openly discuss their plans to plan society – i.e. control the lives of ordinary people, and the government officials and “independent experts” at these meetings AGREE (they are all much the same sort of people – corporate managers, government officials, NGOs, academic “experts”) – they all want unlimited power over the lives of ordinary people. There is no “conspiracy” – it is all being done openly.
As for the currency – it is already just lights on computer screens, with no link to any real commodity at all. “Digital Currency” makes official what is already the case de facto – the “money” can already be manipulated (or just turned off) on the whims of the powerful. To push political and cultural agendas.
All very Saint-Simon from two centuries ago. Saint-Simon rather than Karl Marx.
When I did some digging it turned out that the majority of “Fact Checkers” were financed by Omidyar one way or another.
Omidyar is a totalitarian creep who spends huge amounts of money financing almost every left wind loony crank organization going. Usually through shell foundations. Second only to Soros in his outright evilness. But unlike Soros Omidyar did not make most of his money by direct financial fraud (insider trading of FX for Soros) but Omidyar did make a large chunk of his cash from the first Dot Com Bubble. So make his money from what was little more than a giant pump and dump operation. Most of the money lost in the crash was by pension funds.
I imagine any former libertarian organisation which now champions the big surveillance state has had a discreet talking to from powerful people. It can be a good life if you toe the line, otherwise…
Really? The vast majority? Why are they still using it then?
Let’s just change a few words here:
Bring on the telescreens. Stop that, Citizen 12875-XGH, we can see you.
When you get down to it, privacy and anonymity are somewhat unique concepts in human affairs, only prevalent under conditions you find since about the dawn of the modern age. Before that, everyone lived in small communities that you basically had no such things as either one. Everyone knew your business, and you knew everyone else’s, as well. Yes, you could pull up stakes and exile yourself, but… That was not as easy as we like to think of it, today. Wasn’t anyone running a U-Haul dealership before the 20th Century; the sheer logistical challenge of abandoning your established life was a hell of a lot harder.
What has changed, however, is how widespread that “small-town feel” is becoming, thanks to the digitization of everything. You’re now in a situation where you can’t hide from your past any more.
I’m kind of a radical when it comes to all of this. I think we ought to do away with secrecy and privacy, especially for government figures. You want to be a senator, a representative, a member of parliament? Fine; here’s your camera. Keep the damn thing on 24/7; everything you do and say for the duration of your power as an elected official is now public. Your constituency gets to watch you in real time as you go about representing them. Any attempt to hide from them? Capital crime.
I am sure it would eventually be gotten around, but the glorious first few years while the politicians are trying to work out how to game it…? LOL. Imagine Bill Clinton and his interns, broadcast in living color for all to see. Was Monica an abused little naif, or was she a conniving little tramp out to bag the biggest politician she could get… Imagine the ratings that’d get.
Put it all out into the open. Sunlight disinfects. Hell, I’d legalize bribery, and make them put a chunk of the bribe into the treasury. Have the pols wear sponsorship jackets, like they’re race car drivers. You want legislation, Mr. CEO of BigTimeWhatever? Fine; make your play. Tell us all what you’re willing to pay for your custom legislation, and then we’ll put that money towards the national debt while you get your legislation. The sponsoring pol can get a cut, with bonuses for bringing in more money.
I mean, all this crap is going on anyway… Why not make it legal, and make it pay for the government while we’re at it? If Verizon is willing to pay big money for beneficial laws, why not? Let them do it on the open market, so we can see it going on in the clear view of day, and make ’em pay for the privilege…
Nothing should be secret, nothing should be private. I’ve never, ever seen anything really beneficial to either concept, especially in public life. If the politicians are getting up to things they don’t want to admit to, then f*ck ’em… They should not be allowed to do that, period.
I’d rather have the country run by the openly corrupt, wherein I could look at the bribes and evaluate the performance of those things resulting from bribery.
I mean, hell… Most of what Congress does these days is done by people in the background. Why not cut out the middleman, the congenital crook who wins popularity contests? Put the whole thing up for bid, I say…
When they start using “enlightened”, you know it’s going to be sooooo woke and progressive . . .
No Kirk, I can’t agree. To me, and I’ve said this before here, privacy is even more fundamental than liberty. Even in the most oppressive societies, people can have some taste of freedom in private, even if it’s only when they’re entirely alone. Heck, Nineteeen Eighty-Four is as much about privacy as it is liberty.
Mind you, I’m not entirely agin your proposal for those in public office. I’m convinced they laugh themselves sick at us when we’re not looking.
Or you just moved to a city. Plenty of privacy and anonymity in Ancient Rome or Medieval London.
Sam Duncan –
Yes; taken together, Partygate and the Hancock files have established that pretty much irrefutably, haven’t they?
How do we fight back effectively against this sort of thing, and bring their agenda to a crashing halt?
Perry – Ancient Rome was not a place of privacy, not if you wanted the subsidised corn dole (and so on), you had to prove your right of residence. And people could not really survive in Rome without the subsidies – remember it was not an industrial city, there were not mass employment opportunities there.
Private patronage also depended on being known – being known to your patron, and being known to enemies of your patron (that was one of the points of having clients – “do not mess with me and my family – I have got all these poor people with clubs to back me up against you”).
London was very different – “the smoke” always had lots of employment opportunities, not for slaves (as in Rome) but for ordinary free people – they were grim employment opportunities, but they existed.
In most European cities one had to be a member of the relevant guild to engage in XYZ – that was not the case in England, many guilds were abolished in the time of Edward VI (the son of Henry VIII) as they were believed to be Catholic (other Protestant countries transformed the guilds into Protestant entities – England just smashed most of them) and such guilds that remained tended to be like the City of London (the square mile) guilds – exclusive social clubs, rather than entities for monopolising production.
People keep asking why this land had an industrial revolution before other nations – but there is no mystery, in most of Europe (for example France since the time of King Henry IV) you had to be a member of a guild (no privacy and so on) to engage in a trade – and the guild (and the state) determined production methods. That was true till the 1790s in France – but even the abolition of the guilds did not abolish the state control – that had to wait for the end of the Revolutionary wars.
This island had an industrial revolution first not because of some wonderful virtue of the population – but because it was illegal (de fact illegal anyway) to have industrial revolution anywhere else.
There were state regulations here – but there was no Civil Service to enforce them (the British Civil Service does not arrive till the Victorian Age and does not start having real power till the 20th century) – the Tudor regulations were largely ignored in such places as Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire. There was no national Civil Service and the only local government was closed corporations (the only one left, after the Act of 1835, is the City of London one) which were largely dining clubs (they did not try to “plan the town” as modern local government does) and unpaid local Justices of the Peace – who concerned themselves with opposing violence and theft (they just did not have the time or the resources to control ordinary human life).
You really could have privacy up there (Lancashire, West Riding of Yorkshire – and so on) – you needed no state permit or license to produce stuff (not in those days), this island was just about the only place in the 1700s where that was true.
The great exception to all this is the Poor Law – like Ancient Rome you had to prove your right of residence in a parish to get government aid. Only a totally insane society (such as the one we live in right now) hands out money and services to people who come from other places (indeed come from overseas).
However, Ireland (before 1838 – the events of the 1840s show the Poor Law in Ireland was not a brilliant success as one in three of the population either died or had to flee the country – one third of the population the establishment calls this policy of ever higher Poor Law taxes “laissez-faire”) and most of Scotland (before the Act of 1845 even Glasgow did not have a Poor Law tax) did not have a Poor Law – 19th century France did not have one either.
The British intellectuals who claimed that a Poor Law was unavoidable (“at this stage of development”) seemed unable to look a few miles over the sea to a country (19th century France) that did not have one.
Still, on further reflection, Perry has a point – he said Medieval London.
In the Medieval period London had no Poor Law (it was a Tudor invention) – so there was no need to prove a right of residence.
If you were in a desperate position you went to the church (not the state) for help – and the priests and monks decided whether they were going to help you and your family or not.
The guilds existed in the medieval period – but they were always rather weak “south of the river” (away from the actual one square mile of the City of London) – no one was really going to hit you for engaging in a trade or profession down there.
There’s one test you should apply to any and every single thing under the sun: Does it work?
Never mind what you want, never mind what you might think “right”, for whatever value you place on that term, the question to be asked is “Does it work?”
The vast majority of our legacy social commons have that one singular virtue going for them: They worked well enough to get us where we are today. Maybe not ideally, but they did work.
Time was, everyone in your little band of hunter-gatherers knew your business; they had to. Survival meant that you carried your part of the load, or they shed you to die alone and unmourned in some unfortunate situation that someone else being around might have saved your ass from going through. Privacy in those circumstances was likely illusory and ephemeral; whatever you got up to in the shadows would eventually come clear to your band-mates. Indeed, privacy probably wasn’t a survival-trait for such small communities; privacy enabled a lot of things inimical to the band’s communal health. You had to give in order to get, and it was everyone’s business what you did.
That’s most of human history. It held true down through the long centuries of our rise from the Paleolithic, and only began to really differentiate when agriculture and settled cities came in. Today’s panopticon is really a return to the old days, without the ancient advantages of being able to drop it all and get out, go off and do your own thing.
And, it ain’t likely to get “better” going forward, either. What do you suppose life will be like in artificial space habitats? Will you be able to maintain “privacy” when much of what you do could wind up killing the entire habitat, simply by inattention or failing to do your duties? Posit a society where the physical and environmental situation mandates treating something akin to failing to replace a shopping cart into its corral as a capital crime? How do you suppose that society is going to view the concept of “privacy”?
Going forward, everything is going to be out in the open, just as if it happened around the band’s campfire. Get used to it; it’s only going to get worse, in this regard.
And, consider: What benefit does privacy actually afford society? D’you suppose that serial killers would be able to kill serially, were we all under 24/7 surveillance? Or, would they be “one and done”? How about corrupt politicians? How’re they going to be corrupt if everything they do is public?
I think a good argument could be made that “privacy” as a concept enables a lot of bad things, and that it’s abolition would be a net good. You would have to actually do more than pay lip-service to the ideas and ideals of “virtue”; you’d be forced to actually demonstrate them.
Secrecy in international affairs ain’t much more beneficial, either. You make everything known, and then the whole charade becomes quite clear, and it’s a lot harder to con the marks. We gain little from secrecy, I fear. And, when you get down to it, an awful lot of the “secret” boils down to a bunch of bell-ends in offices wanting to one-up everyone else and feel important, ‘cos they “know things” the rest of us don’t.
Often, things that would result in said bell-ends being driven from office and lynched, were the world a just place.
So… Privacy? Secrecy? So far as I am concerned, things we don’t need and shouldn’t have. They both enable a lot of evil in the world, and I think we’d be much better off, were they to be abolished. Everyone’s actual acts and conduct ought to be visible to everyone else, at all times. You ought to be considering every single little thing you do, because those things will be inevitably seen by others; if you’re ashamed of what you do in the dark, then you should rightly fear the light. If you’re not ashamed, why fear public knowledge of your activities?
I think, in the finalmost analysis, that the two concepts of “privacy” and “secrecy” do not actually work, in the sense that the function they fulfill is illusory and actually extremely damaging to the collective interest of us all.
Kirk:
There is no such thing as “the collective interest of us all.” There are my interests, and there are your interests, and Joe has interests too. When someone wants me to uphold “the collective interest”, they generally mean I should serve their own interests in place of mine.
Actually, there is.
Society functions because of that, and if the structure doesn’t trend towards supporting the general interest, then the society collapses under the weight of selfishness.
It’s like communists arguing that markets and traditional economics mean nothing; it’s an argument which does not actually work. You can be as much of an individualist as you like, sitting there on the bench in the lifeboat, but if your sorry ass ain’t pulling at the oars with everyone else, you’re going to drown right along with them. Whether or not you’re expressing your self-actuated personal desires and goals, you’re going to drown regardless when that boat sinks because you didn’t want to contribute.
These things exist apart from us and our desires. You can have your privacy, so long as it doesn’t affect the aggregate whole of society. When it reaches the point where your privacy is effectively reducing the viability of that society to fulfill your needs (of whatever nature), then privacy becomes a luxury good, a net detractor. And, it winds up going away.
Your argument against the actual reality of the collective nature of society is as delusional as the communists saying that the facts of basic traditional economics don’t apply; they’re laws of nature, and as such, they don’t give a damn about your sensibilities or what you want.
If privacies and secrecies are inimical to the social commons maintaining the conditions that make life possible for the majority, then guess what? They’re going to go away.
And, they damn sure should. You should not be able to maintain privacy such that you can hurt others, or damage the commons everyone relies on for survival. Your neighbors should be able to monitor what you are doing, when the potential exists for you to impact their lives through malign intent or sheer stupidity; you do not have the right to “privacy” if you’re keeping venomous snakes in your apartment or building a nuclear reactor in your backyard. When you reach a point with your technology such that you can literally kill millions of people through intent or inattention, then your activities must become open and available for others to watch. Anything less is insanity.
The idea of “privacy” trumping all other things is insane, TBH. You do not have some natural right to do as you damn well please, when it affects others. You do not have a right to surprise them with the effects of your private works and intents; you do not have the right to lay in wait and damage them without notice.
Like it or not, you’re a part of the society you live in. You can’t escape that, and you have to participate in it. There is a two-way street of duties and obligations that run with that, however; you are both owed and owing. And, the final arbiter is this: What works, in terms of raw survival.
The only reason you’re able to fool yourself about the nature of things is how little connection you have to the realities of life in this regard; in a smaller, more resource-constrained environment, your illusions about maintaining independence would be shattered. Ain’t none of us going out to live “off-grid”, and if you really tried, truly tried, living off the grid? You’d very likely be dead within a few short years. Whether or not you want to acknowledge it, no man is an island. Never has been, never will be.
This is probably just a terminology argument, but . . what the heck. It’s raining.
You can take any set of datapoints – numbers – and add them up, and figure out the average point. But that average point is only a way of looking at that set – it doesn’t become a new datapoint in its own right. It doesn’t become one of the individuals in the set.
That’s all that “collective interests” are. You add up all of the individual interests in the group, and figure out an average. There is no “collective interest” hovering out there that is its own entity.
This is important only when you consider placing someone’s interests below that of the “collective interest.” The term allows you to take some moral high ground that you would otherwise have no hope of claiming. But, in reality, you’re never serving some “collective interest.” You’re serving the individual interests of the set, and you’re doing it by claiming that my disagreement – which serves me – is disserving some higher entity – the collective.
In your boat example, if it is not in my interest to go in circles – if it is in my interest to go in one direction of choice – I will serve my own interest and cooperate. If the lifeboat will be delivering me to my executioners – if it is NOT serving my interest to proceed in one direction – I will not help, collective interest or not. I will always serve my interests.
“Collective interest” is usually used by someone who wants a group to serve his own interests. It is used to morally coerce a person to give up their own interests in service to the collectivist. Which makes me wonder if I’m misunderstanding you, since such a purpose seems at odds with what you’ve written before.
There was also an enormous underworld.
I could not disagree more utterly and completely. You must have a degree of privacy in your affairs. Indeed, there are aspects of privacy that are worth killing for if need be.
Untrue but if it was true, I’d sooner see the ‘majority’ blown up in a non-figurative sense.
@ Perry de Havilland;
What are you hiding? What are you so concerned with, that you cannot allow your peers to know?
Privacy of thought? By all means; what’s inside your head, is yours. What isn’t private are any actions or inactions you undertake. Do you have a right to privacy such that you can hide and keep private harms you visit upon others?
This is a flip side to the obvious falsities within collectivism. You can’t have either as absolutes, or things within society simply will not work.
You can see that at play in places and historical situations regarding invasive species. Some bright lights wanted Americans to be exposed to all the birds of Shakespeare, so they brought examples in of all of the birds he ever mentioned, and released them. Under the extreme rationale of the individualist, that desire had primacy, and they had every right to “enrich” the lives of their fellow Americans. Without asking them. Ever.
This is what I’m getting at: You can say “Privacy” and “Secrecy”, yet everything you do under those concepts impinges on everyone else. Do you have an inherent and automatic right to do such things?
Consider all the idiots that released snakes into the Everglades; they did so privately and in secrecy, such that we have no idea where or when they did it, let alone how many and what sort of snakes. Those invasive species have wrought havoc upon the ecosystem. Does this ideal of inherent privacy square with the harms, there?
It doesn’t matter what you think about the issue, or what anyone else thinks: Every act of yours eventually impinges upon someone else’s rights, or runs up against the hard physical stops of reality itself. You can’t escape that; you have to deal with it.
Similarly, the idjit collectivist types fail to comprehend that not everything is hard and fast the business of the collective. Both approaches are fallacious; incomplete and inadequate answers to the very real questions of what is both owed and owing by the individual and society.
You cannot say that your right to privacy trumps everyone else rights. If you’re embarrassed by the fact that you’re a carrier of some dire sexual disease? Despite your idealized “right to privacy”, you have an obligation to report that to your potential partners, as well as society at large, such that epidemiology can be performed.
There are no absolutes, in either direction. When the environment has all the slack taken out of it, and there is no slop to things such that you can get away without worrying about other people’s needs, well… Your privacy ceases to be affordable, from the viewpoint of that which enables society in general to survive.
Libertarianism fails in the face of the fact that most of the people who find that philosophy agreeable are selfish bastards who fail to understand that license requires obligation. You cannot separate yourself from society at large, without going to another world and living by yourself; even then, you’re obligated to those which made such a thing possible in the first place.
As late as the 19th Century, privacy and secrecy were affordable things. The world was not all that interconnected or interdependent; you could get away with an awful lot. Today? With modern technologies allowing the average nutter to play around with things like mousepox as a hobby? Are you mad? How can you assert a right to privacy in such a situation, and still expect there to be a society in a few generations?
As the powers of the individual increase, so too do the obligations. You want to have the power to play technological god, then you have to accept that those around you are going to have… Issues, with you doing that all in private, away from critical eyes. This isn’t the world prevalent when our species was young; this is a world where our powers have outstripped the ability of the real world to cope with individuals abusing them.
So, you can argue all you like for the virtues of privacy and secrecy; I’m just going to point at the abuses perpetrated in the name of both concepts, and what could potentially go wrong.
Either way, the entire way this question is framed is inadequate. There is flawed reasoning on both sides of the collectivist/individualist dividing line, and we’d better learn to acknowledge that fact so that we can start working on something better that contains actual workable answers to these questions, rather than an emotional appeal to ideal states that have never (and, will never) obtain(ed).
@bobby b,
We are not talking about the same thing, at all. What you’re apparently thinking of is a happy-dappy sort of “Where are we going for dinner…?” affair, where the individual interests are those that pertain to what sort of cuisine they’re hungry for that evening. That is emphatically not what I’m talking about.
The “collective interest” I’m meaning to discuss here is that duty owed from the individual to the group they are a part of, which is owed whether or not we like it one damn bit or not. You can’t sever these ties short of having been abandoned as a baby on some hillside, and then raised by wolves. Who are then the ones you are in the owed-and-owing relationship with…
There is no such thing as autarky; like it or not, you’re a member of a society. You benefit from membership, whether or not you see that fact. As a result, you have obligations to the greater whole. I honestly can’t think of too many cases wherein that entanglement can honestly be said to have been severed; exposed babies of ancient times, perhaps…
As you are owed, so you owe back. The webwork of duties and obligations are woven into your life with every changed diaper, every meal, every act done bringing you to adulthood. And, as an adult, you owe a debt of some form, back to society. Should you be incapable of paying that debt, it’s one thing; to refuse? Entirely another. The meanest member of our society, be they ever so abused and put upon, still owes the duty of returned care for others.
Or, it all ceases to work. You don’t want to be in a society that has lost perspective on all of this, because that’s no longer a society.
As I’ve said: This is the flip side of individualism, the one of obligation to others. You don’t owe them everything, but you damn sure owe them something, if only respect for what they’ve done for you.
Both the individualist and the collectivist are missing something from their philosophizing. The real truth is that there must be, as in all things, a balancing. You can’t say “I have an absolute right to do my own thing in my own way” any more than you can say “I have an absolute right to demand from you to do my thing my way for all of us”. They’re flawed premises, both of them.
And, the final test is this: Does it work? Can we enable an absolute right to privacy, given the conditions of today’s technology? Can we allow everyone in society to play god for themselves? To what point do we take these things, with our ideals? Is it better to say “Do your own thing”, no matter how absurd someone’s poor judgment might be? Should you have an absolute right to privacy, when it is abused by all and sundry to do bad things?
As I said, I think sunlight needs to be brought. If you fear people knowing what you’re getting up to in the privacy of your own space, you might want to question what it is you’re doing. Why are you embarrassed by it? What is it that you fear others knowing?
I’ve honestly run into very little of that sort of thing that was worth keeping secret, or that should have been. Most cases of “I want my privacy!!” have been smokescreens for intimate abuses of the most heinous nature, sadly. The perpetrators should have had the flags of their abuse flown high, so as to serve as salutary lessons to others; they should not have been allowed “privacy” to hide what they did.
Plainly put, if you don’t want the neighbors knowing that you’re an alcoholic sex abuser, maybe you shouldn’t drink and sexually abuse the weak you’re responsible for? Is that too much to ask?
@Kirk
In terms of your argument about the positive aspects of removing privacy from public servants and government, the enforcement of all this privacy regulation will happen via who? Government. And what do we currently see at the pinnacles of the elites? We see that the laws don’t apply to them. Elected government figures getting rich, where someone lower down would be in jail for insider trading or fraud. Senior figures, surrounded by armed guards when the rest of us are meant to be disarmed. Do you seriously think that your “betters” will not use privacy tools?
In terms of my emotional and visceral reaction to your advocating removing my privacy “for the greater good”: xxxx you 😛 (preceding word encrypted for privacy reasons).
And in terms of your claim that there was little privacy in ancient times, how did they manage all those coups and intrigues? I’m a junior classics student at the moment and nearly everything I read seems to involve a plot or some selective politicking by the protagonists.
Further, this idea of the sunlight from the panopticon cleansing what it views, relies on their being enough eyes to watch and understand what is happening. Our intelligence services admit that they collect many orders of magnitude more electronic surveillance than they can deal with. It is only really useful in retrospect or if someone triggers a keyword. How will that be if every aberrant piece of human behavior must trigger attention and action? A corollary of this is what happens in open source. Theoretically having many eyes upon the source removes the chance of malicious code or errors. In reality, there are not enough competent or interested eyes to fix the many issues of both types which creep through in software and operating systems.
And who decides what harm is enabled by me not being under constant surveillance? Well the state of course. And what constitutes a ‘harm’? Anything that inconveniences the state. There would be no option not to get vaccinated, no cash, no new political movements, no ‘unpopular’ lifestyles in a world without privacy. In a world without privacy, there are no rights, just permissions. Want to see a world without privacy? China in the age of the panoptic social credit system. That is what your preferred future looks like.
Perry – “there was an enormous underworld in Ancient Rome” yet that is true, I can not deny that.
There was also was such a criminal underworld “south of the river” (i.e. outside the one square mile of the City of London) in London – but it was nothing like on the scale, or the utter viciousness, of Ancient Rome.
Although sexual disease seems to have been more dangerous in London (especially after syphilis arrived in the Tudor period) – men who could not control themselves and engaged the services of a prostitute really were risking their lives, and the lives of their families (as they would spread the disease to their wives). This remained true till the 20th century.
However, how many men failed to control themselves is sometimes exaggerated – for example the endlessly repeated story that Randolph Churchill (the father of Winston Churchill) died of syphilis seems to be a myth – with the man really dying of a brain cancer. Prime Minister Gladstone thought that Randolph Churchill had a brain cancer, rather than syphilis, because he, Gladstone, noted signs similar to what he had seen in one of his sons – who had died of a brain cancer. By the way Gladstone himself met prostitutes because that was the charity he had been allocated (essentially at random) in a religious university club he was a member of at Oxford – Gladstone did not have sex with the prostitutes (although his private writings reveal that he found having to work with them a moral strain and wished he had been allocated some other charity – the idea that a religious man loses his sexual desires, or the desire to commit other sins, is total nonsense) – when he found out the Queen Victoria had been told (by that dishonest man Disraeli) that he did have sexual intercourse with prostitutes – Gladstone said “if the Queen believes that about me – then the Queen is correct to treat me in the way that she does”
The myth that masturbation led to blindness or insanity seems to have spread by a strange de facto alliance of moral puritans and people engaged in the sex industry (the later not wanting to lose clients for brothels and so on).
Kirk “the test of something is whether it works”.
So teaches American “Pragmatist” philosophy – which (of course) is an outgrowth of empiricism.
Formally speaking I am AGAINST that – in that I hold that there are some principles that are a priori true – not empirical.
However, (and it is a big “however”) this is better than the British attitude that “Social Reform” (i.e. the increase in government spending and regulations – supposedly for the benefit of “the people”) is automatically a Good Thing (TM) REGARDLESS of the results.
The American “Pragmatists” were not really the open minded people they claimed to be – in practice they had a massive pro statism bias. But, at least in theory, if the results of expanding government spending and regulations are bad – then American Pragmatists are open to the idea of rolling back government spending and regulations.
This is almost “unthinkable” in a British context – as “Social Reform”, from Disraeli onwards (indeed from before him – see the supposedly laissez faire Lord Russell and Sir Charles Trevelyan who were almost as statist as Disraeli’s friend Lord Stanley – later the Earl of Derby) was considered automatically a good thing – regardless of results.
I make no apology for repeating my example of Ireland – within a few years of the introduction of the Poor Law Tax in Ireland one third (1 in 3) of the Irish population were either dead or had fled the country, yet getting rid of the Poor Law Tax (on the “National Schools” or all the rest of it) was not just not thinkable in the mental universe of the establishment.
“Social Reform” was automatically a “Good Thing” (TM) regardless of results, and if bad things happened it must be because there had not been enough “Social Reform” – the bad thing must have been the result of “laissez faire”.
This attitude continues – for example when Andrew Bridgen Member of Parliament tries to explain that the Covid lockdown policy was a disaster, and that the state pushed injections killed people – the House of Commons empties, and the few people who have to be there (for various official reasons) pretend they can not hear what Mr Bridgen is saying. If they are forced to respond – official people just express shock and horror at the wickedness of the words of Mr Bridgen, they do not take on board his arguments and evidence (and it is not just a matter of Mr Bridgen – anyone who expresses doubts about statism is treated the same way).
Someone said to me recently “it is like Mr Bridgen is speaking blasphemy”.
No it is not “like” he was speaking blasphemy – it-is-blasphemy, here “the State is God” (to cite the German philosopher Hegel).
If anyone doubts that this is a religious faith in the state (not in any elected government, politicians are despised, in the state itself) – then try explaining to the British people that the National Health Service might not be a wonderful thing, on second thoughts do NOT try and do that (as you will be putting yourself in physical danger – by uttering such blasphemy).
There is a folk memory of a time when British towns had voluntary hospitals funded by voluntary donations – as people give money to the NHS (in spite of its vast tax money budget) – but it is a folk memory, it is not in the conscious minds of most people. And I would strongly suggest that you do NOT point this out to people – as you will be casting doubt on their most fundamental religious beliefs and that is likely to lead to danger for you.
By the way – a warning about the modern American left.
It is not the case that they have the same basic objectives as American conservatives and libertarians and just support different policies to get to the same place.
The fundamental objective of the American left is to destroy (destroy) what is left of the existing society – and replace it with a totally different society.
Reader – the left do NOT want the same results as you want, and not just in the United States.
If such things as the sexual mutilation of children do not convince you of this – I do not know what will.
The left, and not just in the United States, are not good people who have different policies to get to the same objective as conservatives and libertarians – independent families in their own homes with a large levels of autonomy in their lives (and so on). On the contrary the left hate everything that we love – our good is their evil, and vice versa.
I fully release the seriousness of what I am saying – for example that “working with the Biden Administration” (which is not really controlled by Mr Biden) is not correct – because what they want for the United States, and the rest of the world, is the opposite of what we want.
It is not a matter of different means to the same end – their end is diametrically opposed to the ends we want.
They are not misguided friends – they are enemies, foes.
@Colli,
Great. You have your privacy. Everyone else has it, too: What are they doing with it, to you, using that as a tool? Notice anything about the previous paragraph you wrote before this one? Do you not grasp that your defense of your specific privacies are enabling those people you rail against, and that you have zero effective privacy in the face of that institutional panopticon? Do you fail to understand that what I am saying is not that your petty little peccadilloes are not worthy of hiding from others, but that everyone needs to give up privacy in the face of this new state capacity for creating an actual panopticon regime? If they demand your loss of privacy, then by God, take theirs away as well.
That’s what I’m getting at, with all of this. As well as the other minor niggling issue of the average person now having the near god-like capacity to kill entire civilizations or do massive harm to my own personal environment.
I don’t happen to think that you should have the untrammeled right to introduce invasive species just because you like snakes, buy some reticulated pythons, and then discover that they’re a huge pain in the ass to care for, so you then release them into the local swamps. Privacy, regrettably, enables that sort of stupidity, which the average dolt out there is too irresponsible to be entrusted with. If this sanctimonious “privacy” you worship enables people like that to destroy entire ecosystems, I’m not sure you can make an argument for the collective public being entrusted with it. Likewise, genetic research, nuclear studies, and all the rest. How would it strike you to find out that your neighbor’s kid decided he wanted to build his own nuclear reactor and had gathered up a few dozen pounds of Americium from smoke detectors, contaminating your property for the next few centuries?
Personal privacy and secrecy are only workable as far as your acts and behaviors are relatively harmless and innocuous. Today? LOL… Yeah, lemme know how that works out for you, going forward. I strongly suspect that there’s a damn good reason we look up into the night sky and don’t see anyone else out there, and that’s down to the majority of technologic civilizations killing themselves through stupidity at about this stage of the game.
You seem to be convinced that the conditions of today are no different than they were generations ago. They’re massively different, and trying to deny that won’t save your ass when your idealized “privacy” enables your fellow humans to carry out the various courses of their folly.
I mean, I’d love to agree with you, but… I don’t see it working. I’m also dubious of the proposition that privacy is all that great a thing, either, given what goes on in the shadows. I can think of a few women I know whose abuse would never have happened to them, absent peoples regard for this sanctity of privacy… What benefit did they see from it, pray tell? I mean, I’m sure that the father and husband in those cases absolutely loved that they kept their perversions private, but… Their victims? Did they benefit?
You hear “ancient times” and think I’m talking about classical civilization, after agriculture. I’m not; I’m talking about the several hundred thousand years we spent as hunter-gatherers, wandering the steppe and savannah in small bands.
Privacy is the vice of civilization; do you think that men like the ones that made up the Roman Senate would have been able to put over on their fellow hunters what they did in Rome? Or, would they have become known for the venal snakes that they were, and dealt with summarily during the hunt? “Oh, yeah… Oog no come back… Mastodon got him…”
There were likely bloody few secrets kept from everyone else, in those days. It wouldn’t have worked. Also, scale: As a leader, you were on view 24/7 by the people you had to rely on. Lying and conspiracy was no doubt possible, but it would inevitably come out through your actions. Once agriculture and the anonymity of the town came in, not so much.
And, in all of this? Tell me, what solution do you see to the problem of endowing Everyman with what amounts to god-like powers of potential destruction? If he or she can get up to things in the sanctity of your vaunted and entirely imaginary “privacy”, which you admit doesn’t actually exist in the face of the state’s tools, how do you propose to deal with that?
Rights imply commensurate responsibilities. So far as the modern conception of privacy goes, there are no responsibilities, just privileges. Ones that damage others, and ones that may potentially kill civilization itself. How do you propose to square that circle?
@Perry de Havilland,
It’s amazing how sanctimonious you get, when someone points out the actual effect of what your ideals gets all of us. You think I’m suggesting that the state maintain it’s status quo, while taking something from you that’s effectively already gone. Believe me, they already know all they want to about you, your life, and everything else. Or, they can easily find out. Your personal privacy is already a dead letter; what I’m suggesting is that theirs should evaporate, as well.
I also don’t have a “preferred future”, and if I did have one, it certainly would not be the one you’re projecting onto me. I’m observing facts; extrapolating from them, and telling you the truth about what I see. If you want to interpret that as me being some statist lunatic, well… That’s your problem and down to your delusions, more than anything else.
Privacy is already dead, if you’re a citizen the state decides to interest itself in. They already know, or can find out more about you from the system than you can imagine. This is fact; you see it played out each and every day in the news and daily life. Why do you hold on to this fantasy of “personal privacy” when you know your abusers have effectively taken it from you?
Pragmatically, how do you fix this? Off hand, I don’t have an answer, but I would suggest that the first step should be to take theirs away from them, so that they cannot hide behind the institutions of the state.
Privacy is already a dead letter. Deal with it. Your illusions are quaint and amusing, but the reality is already clear, and your attempts to hold on to the ideals and conditions which obtained in your youth are both naive and amusing. They’ve taken yours; take theirs from them.
Frankly, I think a condition of government employment ought to include automatic and complete 24/7 personal surveillance and monitoring. For everyone, from dog catcher to Congressman.
@Paul Marks,
If those truths are not empirically proven, then how do you know that they are truths? How do you convince others of their nature as truths?
Likewise, if something is “true” in your system of logic, and yet still produces a dysfunctional work product, how the hell do you manage to maintain that it is “true”? It either works, or it does not; if it does not work, it cannot be much of a “truth”, now can it?
I’d agree with you that there are things we chose to believe because they’re ideals, principles we won’t violate. I’d hesitate to term such things truths, especially if you can’t lay out logically and provably that they are indeed, true. I happen to believe a lot of things I can’t prove, which are really only beliefs and ideals. I still live by them, but… Prove them, in an empiric sort of way? Can’t do it.
By the way, we already see government officials commit crimes. But no one is going to jail for them.
Kirk – A is A.
Logical truths are not unimportant, they are the foundation of everything else.
Even Francis Bacon, who rejected everything to do with Aristotelian logic, in practice assumed that various things are true – true by definition.
This is NOT to deny the importance of the method of natural science – empirical evidence. But it rests on logical foundations – foundations (necessary truths) that are themselves not empirical.
As for economics – any theory is fine as long as predicts accurately (the “Positivist” position that even Milton Friedman takes in his early 1950s) is the road to madness – to irrationality.
Yes (a thousand times yes) if a theory keeps getting refuted by what happens (by history) some horrible mistake has been made in reasoning- but a theory has to make logical sense in the first place, one can not (or rather should not) follow any-old-theory as long as it seems (seems) to “predict” stuff.
By the way – in the very comment you cite I go on to praise (yes praise) Pragmatism in a comparison with dogmatic statism (the sort of thoughtless assumption that “Social Reform”, i.e. a bigger government, is automatically a “good thing” that one gets here).
One can not put the full truth in one sentence – one presents one thought in one sentence, and then goes on to qualify that thought in other sentences.
Is there a logical basis for statism? No there is not – not since at least the 1870s when the Labour Theory of Value (already refuted as far back as the 1820s) was finally destroyed. Is there an empirical basis for statism? No there is not – one only needs to look to at the decay of society in American cities to see that ever more government spending and regulations have bad consequences (not good consequences) yet the demands for more statism continue.
By the way – one does not refute something like the Labour Theory of Value empirically, it is logically wrong. One shows that it does not make logical sense.
@Paul Marks,
I’m a card-carrying pragmatist. If it works, it works; I don’t necessarily need to have a theory explaining why to keep on keeping on with what works. In fact, I think that the “urge to theory”, if you will, is a destructive and inimical force. Some things are simply beyond our current understandings and observational powers; perhaps, one day, the inexplicable “working thing” will show itself and allow theory to be created from it.
The problem with the way we’ve mostly been doing things down the years is that we don’t wait to develop all sorts of stupid theories before really observing what is going on and dealing with things from there. The inimical drive to theorize is horribly destructive; it causes people to cease thinking and observing that which is really going on around them; they conform their thoughts to the theories, and ignore all else, no matter how wrong they are. This is the essential failure of socialism and communism; no contrary evidence is ever allowed to enter into the pristine and thought-free minds of its adherents. Any contrary evidence is automatically rejected, and ascribed to the various and sundry “wreckers”, rather than leading to further thought and development.
You see this line of specious thought play out everywhere in society, these days: Homelessness? Well, we have these sweet-sounding theories about why people take free money and do drugs and defecate in public. Nobody bothers to test those ideas, can’t even be bothered to think of a way to do such a thing.
It’s all of a piece with everything else that’s failing in our civilization; pragmatic thought and conduct are anathema, completely beyond the pale. You can’t even observe that the Emperor is wandering around all nakkies and waving his wing-wang in everyone’s faces; that’ll get you cancelled, likely jailed.
You can see this playing out right here in this very thread; people defending the idea of privacy and secrecy, without bothering to consider whether or not either idea actually, y’know… Works, in our modern world. They also fail to note that privacy for the individual citizen is essentially a dead letter; the state knows all, and yet you know nothing of the state’s agents or the people making these decisions. Do away with privacy and secrecy; demand that you know at least as much about them as they know about you.
Hell, here’s a thought: Say you’re a state agent, an actor in the vast machinery. You order up the details of someone’s life: What recourse do they have? Well, I would suggest that there should be some skin in the game for our state agent, should they prove to be mistaken in their violation of a citizen’s rights: They took his privacy? They lose theirs; they call up a dossier on your activities, and then you should have the right to go looking at their equivalent information. With the freedom to copy it for your lawyers and anyone else they come in with.
I don’t know if you folks here on this site were tracking what happened this last year with regards to Air Force personnel records on Republican candidates being released to the Democrat opposition research folks, but I think something like this reciprocal action would be a salutary lesson for all parties concerned; your records were taken up and reviewed by unauthorized parties? Fine; all such records for all involved parties are now fair game and must be turned over to the victims.
This is what I’m getting at with this; privacy is dead, so long as the state has the powers it has arrogated to itself. We need to take those back, inflict significant pain on the transgressors, and the only way you’re going to see that happen is if the entire concept of “privacy” is blown up. Right now, it’s a one-way street; it will remain such so long as the fantasy continues.
My ideals? The actual effects? The ideals I prefer regarding secrecy & privacy are widely shared & have worked just fine for much of the modern age. And as for being sanctimonious, all I am doing is pointing out that when someone says…
Well, you are describing modern China. That is what a world without privacy or secrecy looks like. It does not level the playing field.
Oh I can imagine a lot, because I actually understand the system just fine, which is how I manage to have a fair degree of privacy & secrecy about the things I want to be private & secret. And it is all perfectly legal at the moment. The key issue is to make sure that stripping away that privacy & secrecy is not a trivial administrative matter (i.e. something any functionary with access to a social credit system can do) but rather something that requires effort & meaningful checks & balances.
Kirk:
Obviously not. Were this true, I’d be in some federal prison somewhere.
Your idea that we ought to just be law-abiding and compliant because then privacy is unnecessary only works when my friends are in charge and making and enforcing laws. We have enacted, in the past 100 years, over 30,000 federal statutes, and every state also has its own set. You can prosecute nearly everyone in the US for some crime, and we’ve reached the age of selective politically-driven enforcement. Privacy has never been more critical.
And, don’t confuse privacy with secrecy. When a government person acts in their official capacity, they have no privacy expectation. They may have democratically-enacted secrecy regs covering what they do, but increasing my privacy rights in no way affects their right to “privacy” in their official dealings. They have none.
We would do better to increase privacy and decrease secrecy.
Amazing to observe the mentality, here: I’m not the guy doing these things, but I’m attacked as though I am, because…?
What I’m telling you is unpleasant to mid-20th Century sensibilities and beliefs. I don’t particularly like it, either, but… As observational fact, there it is. You either acknowledge it and deal with it, or you don’t. Most of the respondents to what I’m saying are denying the problem, retreating into their imaginary sand-castles and saying “My privacy or my death…”, never noticing that their position is untenable on the face of things.
This is the problem, I fear. It’s just like the idiot government drive to classify everything as secret, never realizing that doing that just renders everything unmanageable. When everything is classified, then nothing really is, except for the ability to prosecute people for “violating secrecy”, which is also a pointless act once things go far enough.
The problem here is that conditions have changed. In ye olde dayes, you could afford privacy. Wasn’t anyone doing anything in the privacy of their own homes that could kill millions; that’s getting increasingly easier, what with the state of human progress. You want untrammeled “privacy”? Well, then… You tell me how that squares with your local nutjob gaining the ability to engineer his own private plagues in the sanctity of his own basement laboratories? This isn’t science fiction, either: Where do you suppose all too many of these computer viruses come from, the ones that bedevil our vaunted networks? Would people still be producing that vandalism if they didn’t have privacy, if their acts were known to others?
Ever notice how graffiti goes up anonymously? You never know who did it; do you suppose the various individuals would be doing what they do, absent privacy? If you know who did it, you know who to bill for the work to cover it up. The only thing that enables that stuff is your sainted “privacy”, and it’s all through society. Anonymity and privacy are concepts you can’t actually have, without individual responsibility being taken by everyone. It doesn’t work in the modern world, and honestly, didn’t work all that well before. When some asshole vandal can flood entire towns by damaging the lockwork on the local levees keeping the water at bay, you have a damn problem that can’t be worked around by appealing to some irrational “right to privacy”; you have to know who the hell was out there damaging the locks, in order to hold them responsible, which is what keeps a certain significant proportion of the population from doing these things.
I honestly don’t see a way around it: The way modern technical progress keeps putting more and more power into the hands of individuals, the less we can afford the sick, the indifferent, or the just plain stupid the anonymity of privacy. The only reason people felt like releasing reticulated pythons into the Everglades was that they felt perfectly safe doing so, in that they’d never suffer personal consequences for their acts. Remove privacy? LOL… Suddenly, you’re a stakeholder; you will pay for the damage you do. Leave privacy in place, as an ideal? Well, then… Figure out how to deal with these “minor issues”.
I honestly don’t see how privacy is even remotely viable, going forward into the future. It’s more like a suicide pact. Same with secrecy; the two things are really the same thing, only one is for the government and one is for individuals. If everything the government did had to be done in the open, with zero back-room connivancies going on? If every act were known? How much of what is happening would be tolerated?
You want the benefits of a free and open society, you have to have a free and open internal information environment. Absent that, it’s unworkable.
And, again: I’m not the guy “doing these horrible things to people”, I’m just the guy pointing it all out. What, pray tell, are the benefits of privacy? Can someone explain to me what accrues from their supposed existence, particularly in the face of that which is enabled in our modern world by these ideas? Make some arguments, here: Tell me how to overcome the problems, when lone nutjobs can rewrite mousepox and kill a few million people? Or, go spelunking into the code underlying water system controls, and destroy entire fresh water supplies for major areas? What are your controls, keeping the vaunted “privacy” alive? How do you propose to make it work?
I don’t see any way, other than putting it all out into the light, where you have to take responsibility for your acts, and can’t hide your conduct from everyone else.
Kirk – empirical truths most certainly exist, but they rest on a foundation of fundamental (logical) truths that are themselves NOT empirical.
The problem with the modern world is that it violates those fundamental (logical) truths – what Kipling called “The Gods of the Copybook Headings” (the basic truths that Victorian children wrote out as writing practice).
The Pragmatist philosophers (John Dewey and co) themselves violated those basic truths with their policy proposals (although John Dewey may have repented of that in his old age).
The older “Common Sense” philosophers in America, such as Noah Porter and James McCosh, understood that there were basic (non empirical) truths, that were the foundations for everything else, the Pragmatists (who are sometimes, falsely, considered the heirs of the Common Sense school) did not understand this.
For example, one does not refute the Labour Theory of Value (one of the basic justifications of Collectivism) or David Ricardo’s theory on land (which leads to Henry George and so on) empirically – one refutes these theories logically.
One shows that the theories do not make sense – in logical terms, in terms of the laws of basic reasoning (which is what logic is about – rather than the mathematical “logic” that gests pushed now).
Again none of this denies that the empirical method is not important or that there are not empirical truths – it is just that they rest on a foundation of basic truths (truths from basic reasoning) that are not in-them-selves empirical.
In a zero privacy world, anyone who asks uncomfortable questions about people in power soon discovers that literally no one can live their lives without breaking a few laws & regulations. This then get used to shut them up & ruin their lives. As already mentioned by others, we’ve got China as a real world example of a post-privacy state. Has this make the China accountable & incorruptible, or just made their totalitarian control over everything more effective?
@Bell Curve,
Is China a “post-privacy state”, or is it simply a totalitarian dictatorship where there’s zero accountability for the totalitarian leaders running things, actually enabled by their “sainted privacy”?
How long do you suppose they’d last, were all their various little fiddles and corruptions generally known?
All y’all keep on going to that “Well, they’ll use it to crush you…”, but the sad point you miss is that that’s already happening, and that it’s also mostly enabled by the selective use of privacy. You can’t inspect their activities, but they can know everything about you. The only way to fix that is to do away with privacy for everyone.
And, again… You don’t address the issue of dealing with what I’m talking about: How the hell do you make this lovely (effectively, one-way) privacy thing even work, given all the things a person can now do for themselves? You think we shouldn’t be asking questions of people who order in anthrax cultures, or who equip themselves to do home CRISPR work?
The varied and sundry assholes behind doing the “gain of function” work in China have used privacy to hide themselves from public view; do you think that’s a good idea, and how do you propose to deal with things like that?
I think you miss that much of the evils you decry about totalitarian states have nothing to do with a lack of privacy, but a lot to do with all too little accountability and public knowledge in those regimes. Even the Nazis were reticent about the Holocaust with their public, and with good cause. While the majority of Germans were apparently indifferent to Jews being hauled off somewhere to the East, it is apparent from the evidence that the Nazis at least thought there were some hard stops on things, which was why they went to such pains to keep everything as secret and unmentioned as they did.
I honestly don’t understand why you think any of this is a good idea. Hell, when I think about it, I’m not even sure that secrecy of the ballot is really a good idea, in that it conceals true public opinions from the public itself. As well, it enables a lot of subterfuge that really shouldn’t be there: “Oh, I didn’t vote for that…”, while manifestly, someone did. Also, in today’s world, you have secrecy of the ballot, you also have to have trust in the people doing the counting… Which, here in the US, you’re a damn fool if you do.
Kirk – the People’s Republic of China is indeed a totalitarian dictatorship.
But it is one that allows private ownership and trade – yes under state direction (but in what large nation is the economy not under state power in these evil days?), but private ownership and trade.
China has a real economy (which it did not really under the maniac Mao) – and its industrial production dwarfs that of the decaying United States. Its industrial might means that the People’s Republic of China is a real threat to the world – a clear and present danger. The United States won World War II because its industry dwarfed that of its enemies – now that is no longer true, indeed the position is becoming the other way round.
And anyone, such as the Economist magazine, who claims that “GDP” is a better measure of an economy than industrial production is a fool – or worse.
Yes China is a totalitarian state, and any state that prohibits privacy becomes a totalitarian state. The end of privacy brings the cost of repression down to trivial levels.
On a libertarian website, you’re amazed to hear that people don’t want to join the Borg?
Life would certainly be simpler – even safer – if we ditched the Constitution and individual rights and just recognized collective rights. But that’s the only argument for doing so, and, to me, it isn’t enough.
@Kirk
I’m not even sure that secrecy of the ballot is really a good idea, in that it conceals true public opinions from the public itself.
It is growingly common for people to be persecuted, as in lose their jobs, be chased out of neighborhoods, be threatened, protested against, boycotted and harrassed based simply on who they donated money too based on the public FEC political contribution reports. Me? I don’t think that is a good thing at all, I think publishing donor lists should not at all be required, and I certainly think voting should be in private.
Something worth mentioning in this debate is that the famous, recently overturned, USSC decision Roe vs Wade, that a lot of people are going nuts about, was decided in favor of a right to abortion based on the idea that the constitution has a right to privacy. The argument is ridiculous on its face (and I say this as a person who is largely supportive of a woman’s right to an abortion early on). But it seems rather hypocritical to those who demand privacy for abortion would quickly denounce it in nearly all other matters. But perhaps not surprising since people believe what they believe largely based on what they want to be true rather than what any logical argument would demonstrate.
I also find it a shocking irony that those on the left, who used to be passionate advocates of civil rights, of privacy and free speech, seem to now be its most implacable opponents. Heck, I used to donate money to the ACLU back before they became a wholly owned subsidiary of Big Government.
We libertarians used to say we agreed with democrats on social issues and republicans of fiscal issues. That is so far from the truth now that it is hard to imagine a time when it was true.
Secret ballots mean that you can’t audit your own damn vote, once it’s turned in. Stalin loved that idea, because, as he phrased it, it matters not what the people vote, it’s who counts those votes. I have no idea how the hell the local crook got elected; nobody I know will admit to having voted for him. I have to take the word of the electoral clerks down at the county, and the last time I interacted with those assclowns, I was left decidedly suspicious of their general mien and attitudes.
The flip side to all your vaunted privacy is that it has been weaponized against us all; we can’t observe what the Biden Krime Krewe does in the shadows, because “privacy”. All that stuff is sealed; the state selectively leaks whatever they damn well please about their enemies. Do you think that “privacy” exists if you’re not “one of them”?
Evidence would indicate otherwise.
What I’m saying is pretty simple: Take it away from everyone, all at once. The idea that we still don’t know who was on Epstein’s client list is ludicrous; if you’re so damn certain you were doing right by going to Pedophile Island with him, why aren’t you willing to acknowledge you did? Why are those files hidden? We knew everything about Joe the Plumber within days of his act of lese majestie; we still don’t know what the hell the Biden’s were up to, on the public dollar doing those junkets around the world.
You don’t realize it, but you’re enabling the crooked bastards defending this one-way privacy street. You don’t actually know what the hell your vote was, the last time you cast one. You know what you turned in, but you don’t know what got counted and then recorded. What good is secrecy, when you can’t trust the smarmy bastards counting the votes?
Screw secrecy and privacy, both. I’d take everything in the CIA and FBI files, and put it out in public, let the cards fall where they may. Protect sources and whatever you have to do, but get the information out there so that people can be making informed choices. Also, to hell with “secret ballots” you can’t actually audit. The more I talk to people in my local precinct about the last election, the more I’m wondering about just who it was that got the most votes, and I don’t think it was the guy who was certified by the election officials as the “winner”.
Biden had a Freudian slip during the 2020 elections, wherein he said openly that he was certain he’d win because the Democrats had the biggest vote fraud scheme in history. Sure enough, he won; same-same in 2022. Nobody really knows, ‘cos of dat good ol’ “secret ballot”. I don’t know what the hell they counted; I only know what I put on the ballot.
Frankly, I don’t trust either the electoral officials or much of anyone involved.
Indeed, but open ballots means if you vote the “wrong” way, you are clearly a threat to all that is good & fair, citizen. I am WAY less concerned by who went to Epstein’s island than I am by the people who tell the FBI or MI5 who to lean on, and if you think the FBI or MI5 don’t need to keep secrets in a world shared with the likes of Valdimir Putin and Xi Jinping, well… that would be unwise.
I find it hard to understand how you can be so naïve as to how state, particularly modern technocratic state, develop power relationships. Best not let the people who control the means of collective coercion that will always be there know what is on your ostracon.
The only check on “means of collective coercion” is force that coercion into the open.
You think you’re protected by privacy? Look at the so-called “J-6” prosecutions. What, precisely, is privacy and secrecy doing for those people? None of the people behind the faceless machinery of prosecution and persecution is visible to the public; you know something has to be going on for all of that “unusual activity” to be happening, but it’s conveniently hidden from view, because “privacy” and “state secrecy”.
The taxpayers paid for those videos. Why aren’t they openly available? Oh; that’s right: Privacy for the authorities, who get to selectively release and describe what’s on the whole.
Your entire premise is utter fallacy, as demonstrated by what is going on around us. In the UK, you know everything about Tommy Robinson; you don’t know jack about the men and women who made the decisions and gave the orders to harass him.
You also don’t know about the private doings of your government, that the Labour party would decide to get itself a different electorate, deciding that representing actual natives of the British Isles was too much damn trouble… So, again: What real benefit is all this “privacy” and “secrecy”?
Everything ought to be out in the open for everyone to see. The precise reason that they can get away with harassment is because of those laws and customs; you don’t realize that there are a lot more people who agree with you, until there’s that publicly undeniable Timisoara moment when everyone looks around and realizes that nobody really wants the Ceaucescu mob in power. If every activity and act was required to be out in the open, particularly in government? None of that BS would be possible.
Your attitudes are quaint, but they’re also the reason why we have many of the problems we have today; secrecy isn’t helping anyone. The only damn reason the media were ever able to put one over on the public about the supposed “absence of WMD in Iraq” was because all that information and data was classified and kept out of the public eye for reasons of statecraft. If half the crap had been revealed about who was selling weapons and materials to the Hussein regime, and when they did it, with what monies? LOL… Most of Europe’s governments would have likely fallen. So, Bush screwed himself with secrecy, in the long run. What should have happened was that the festering sore should have been cleaned out, and everything made public for all to see, around the world.
Privacy and secrecy are inimical to any form of republican or democratic government. You can’t have either one, particularly for government officials and employees. You shouldn’t have to file a goddamn Freedom of Information Act request to know what your government is doing, something that requires you actually know the precise documents and records you need. Everything should be conducted in the open; if it can’t be done openly, it shouldn’t be done at all.
I refer the honourable gentleman to the example of privacy-free China, who are quite open about their use of collective coercion.
You truly think that the reason the Chinese government is what it is would be due to a lack of privacy? I would laugh, but the unreality of that view speaks for itself.
Privacy and secrecy is how they got where they are, and what is taking us towards their state. The only beneficiaries from these two allied concepts are the people who benefit from them the most, which are the petty tyrants and creatures of the night who have to hide who they are and what they are doing from everyone else.
If every banking transaction was open and available, with you having to explain why some random Chinese company is depositing millions into you and your family’s bank accounts, could someone like Joe Biden happen?
All that your vaunted privacy and secrecy accomplish is allowing the criminal and corrupt to hide from those who would reveal their acts to the world. If you were to follow your logic to its end point, then the people who released Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop to the public should have been sued into bankruptcy for violating his privacy… Is that what you want to enable?
You frame this as though your noble commitment to the notion of privacy is some grand thing; the reality is, it’s a sordid thing, allowing the various “great and good” types to get away with murder. The rich have access to unlimited lawyers; they’ll sue you into penury because you dare tell the truth about them, using those tools you’ve so dutifully given them. Do you think they’re going to reciprocate, and give you the benefit of privacy, should they decide you oppose their goals?
Shine the light everywhere, illuminating what goes on in the shadows. I don’t see much benefit to it, at all, with the way there’s a whole series of multiple ways it gets administered. One set of rules for Joe the Plumber, and another for the Biden Krime Krewe? How’s that working, for us?