The All Things Political Thread (The World and US Reunited)

[ComradeYellow]

Yeah I don't know where people are getting the impression that Scandinavian countries are hybrid economies.  They are at best welfare states with a bit of a stronger safety net than that of the U.S.  The free market is ****ing us all equally.

You'll only find actual hybrid economies in the Eastern Hemisphere.

[Azdeus]

Ah, yes, more ********ery from the EU, why not;

https://www.patrick-breyer.de/?page_id=594160&lang=en

The EU wants to scan all text messages, emails and chats, because we might all be spreading pedofilic porn. Well, when I say "might" they obviously assume we all do it, why would they otherwise want everyones conversations scanned? Guilty until proven innocent. But it's ok, it's going to be done in real-time by algorithms/AI so absolutely nothing can go wrong. But don't worry, incase you get false flags when your sexting with your partner a human contractor will manually review it, that's fine right? Noone would mind someone reading through your private chat or viewing personal photos! It's not like the NSA staff has ever shared such things amongst eachother.

Who's going to pay? Why we're privatizing! The service providers are going to screen your messages. Not like it's going to hurt anyone, by say, nuking the safe spaces for abuse victims talking to each other.

 

[Skarpen]

Let's not kid ourselves, not a single serious offender will be caught. There will be however a lot of data leaks, people private information being sold, political rivals surveillance etc. 

Another example of people in charge taking Orwell's writing as a guidelines not a warning.

[BruceVC]

9 hours ago, Azdeus said:

Ah, yes, more ********ery from the EU, why not;

https://www.patrick-breyer.de/?page_id=594160&lang=en

The EU wants to scan all text messages, emails and chats, because we might all be spreading pedofilic porn. Well, when I say "might" they obviously assume we all do it, why would they otherwise want everyones conversations scanned? Guilty until proven innocent. But it's ok, it's going to be done in real-time by algorithms/AI so absolutely nothing can go wrong. But don't worry, incase you get false flags when your sexting with your partner a human contractor will manually review it, that's fine right? Noone would mind someone reading through your private chat or viewing personal photos! It's not like the NSA staff has ever shared such things amongst eachother.

Who's going to pay? Why we're privatizing! The service providers are going to screen your messages. Not like it's going to hurt anyone, by say, nuking the safe spaces for abuse victims talking to each other.

 

How would the scanning of email, and other electronic communication,  for child porn lead to abuse victims not being able to digitally communicate ?

Yes their may be some " false positives " but the two conversations would be very different and could easily he separated by anyone with just a little training

I support the complete eradication of child porn from the Internet and Dark Web so I think this legislation makes sense. I am not sure it will succeed in its objective because real child porn communication occurs primarily on the Dark Web and this wont stop that 

[Gorth]

6 minutes ago, BruceVC said:

I think this legislation makes sense.

You're against governments looking the military over the shoulders, but in favour of them looking normal citizens over the shoulder. Go figure... I wouldn't want to live in your idea of a world.

[BruceVC]

11 minutes ago, Gorth said:

You're against governments looking the military over the shoulders, but in favour of them looking normal citizens over the shoulder. Go figure... I wouldn't want to live in your idea of a world.

No, I am  in favor of the Internet not  being used to disseminate child porn

That has nothing to do with necessary drone strikes, I dont see the parallels at all ?

[Skarpen]

29 minutes ago, BruceVC said:

Yes their may be some " false positives " but the two conversations would be very different and could easily he separated by anyone with just a little training

Who has time for that? Training? Please. Some intern would be just sending all the warnings to the authorities who would have tons of those, so they will just dump them to law enforcement and before we know it some rec center will be swated or some kids dragged out of school. And of course no one will be responsible it will be just "system error". 

Edited March 14, 2021 by Skarpen

[Azdeus]

23 minutes ago, BruceVC said:

How would the scanning of email, and other electronic communication,  for child porn lead to abuse victims not being able to digitally communicate ?

Yes their may be some " false positives " but the two conversations would be very different and could easily he separated by anyone with just a little training

I support the complete eradication of child porn from the Internet and Dark Web so I think this legislation makes sense. I am not sure it will succeed in its objective because real child porn communication occurs primarily on the Dark Web and this wont stop that 

The second you build a system like this you have to have a backdoor, and it's not a question of if, but how soon, the backdoor will leak and be exploited.

Ah, "some "false positives";

• You can falsely be reported and investigated for allegedly disseminating child sexual exploitation material. Messaging and chat control algorithms are known to flag completely legal vacation photos of children on a beach, for example. According to Swiss federal police authorities, 90% of all machine-generated reports turn out to be without merit. 40% of all criminal investigation procedures initiated in Germany for “child pornography” target minors.

You're still talking about having complete strangers reading through your private messages and images. Just click the NSA link in my OP. It's horrific. Here it is again https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/21/us/politics/edward-snowden-at-nsa-sexually-explicit-photos-often-shared.html?_r=0

Nothing of it will help find pedofiles, it will just make it even harder to stop and drive it more underground.

22 minutes ago, Gorth said:

You're against governments looking the military over the shoulders, but in favour of them looking normal citizens over the shoulder. Go figure... I wouldn't want to live in your idea of a world.

I'm sure he would flip his **** if cannabis was about to become illegal in SA and something like this would be extended to "fight drug abuse". Or if "private dancers" would turn illegal.

52 minutes ago, Skarpen said:

Let's not kid ourselves, not a single serious offender will be caught. There will be however a lot of data leaks, people private information being sold, political rivals surveillance etc. 

Another example of people in charge taking Orwell's writing as a guidelines not a warning.

Not to mention corporate espionage becoming even easier.

[Azdeus]

17 minutes ago, Skarpen said:

Who has time for that? Training? Please. Some intern would be just sending all the warnings to the authorities who would have tons of those, so they will just dump them to law enforcement and before we know it some rec center will be sweated or some kids dragged out of school. And of course no one will be responsible it will be just "system error". 

Especially since it's going to be an absolutely insanely huge amount of traffic going on. We're talking about surveillance of billions of messages per day, the algorithms are going to pull thousands upon thousands of messages and images out of the cloud and dump in the lap of law enforcement. A huge number of which will be completely legal horny teenagers chatting with eachother.

[BruceVC]

1 minute ago, Skarpen said:

Who has time for that? Training? Please. Some intern would be just sending all the warnings to the authorities who would have tons of those, so they will just dump them to law enforcement and before we know it some rec center will be sweated or some kids dragged out of school. And of course no one will be responsible it will be just "system error". 

Nah, thats a very cynical view to have and overcomplicates something very simple 

Its easy  to read or scan an email and know the difference between someone talking about abuse or sharing a lived experience of being abused and people talking about wanting to have sex with children

I am surprised you guys think its so complicated ?

I think your objections and issues with this legislation is really about a perceived invasion and erosion  of your EU rights. But its not, its about slowing down the scourge of child porn that exists on the Internet 

[BruceVC]

5 minutes ago, Azdeus said:

I'm sure he would flip his **** if cannabis was about to become illegal in SA and something like this would be extended to "fight drug abuse". Or if "private dancers" would turn illegal.

 

You know me well,  I would be absolutely furious and very concerned if they denied me my weed and strip clubs 

But neither of those has anything to do with Drone strikes or EU attempts to reduce Internet child porn, sorry 

 

[Skarpen]

9 minutes ago, BruceVC said:

Nah, thats a very cynical view to have and overcomplicates something very simple 

Its easy  to read or scan an email and know the difference between someone talking about abuse or sharing a lived experience of being abused and people talking about wanting to have sex with children

I am surprised you guys think its so complicated ?

I think your objections and issues with this legislation is really about a perceived invasion and erosion  of your EU rights. But its not, its about slowing down the scourge of child porn that exists on the Internet 

Yeah, because nothing ever has been taken out of context or misinterpreted. Especially if we are talking about 24/7 surveillance of all the online conversation. Where a person verifying will not have a full  conversation or time to even try to understand what is written. 

And it will not reduce CP in any way. Only some complete airhead would belive it would. 

Edited March 14, 2021 by Skarpen

[Azdeus]

17 minutes ago, BruceVC said:

Nah, thats a very cynical view to have and overcomplicates something very simple 

Its easy  to read or scan an email and know the difference between someone talking about abuse or sharing a lived experience of being abused and people talking about wanting to have sex with children

I am surprised you guys think its so complicated ?

I think your objections and issues with this legislation is really about a perceived invasion and erosion  of your EU rights. But its not, its about slowing down the scourge of child porn that exists on the Internet 

It's not a question if it's simple or complicated, it's people who have no right reading through and viewing peoples private ****ing communications! No courts, no judges, no juries, no lawyer - nothing. Just an AI/algorithm that picks out "suspicious" messages with a huge margin of error. It is an invasion of privacy, massively so, and it will do nothing to stop pedos.

It's not "easy" to have an algorithm scan all digital communications, they can't reliably find zebra crossings in an image! Recaptchas confuse algorithms! And you expect them to be able to tell the difference between your legal DDLG sexting with your girlfriend and pedofiles?

 

[Guard Dog]

Bruce you are a good dude but you are entirely too optimistic about human nature. There is a rot in the core of the human soul that really shows up when you put one person in power over another. And it is really prevalent in the people who really want to be in power over their fellow man. You empower such people at your own considerable peril.

[BruceVC]

7 minutes ago, Guard Dog said:

Bruce you are a good dude but you are entirely too optimistic about human nature. There is a rot in the core of the human soul that really shows up when you put one person in power over another. And it is really prevalent in the people who really want to be in power over their fellow man. You empower such people at your own considerable peril.

You may be right, I may be too trusting of governments and the advantages of Internet surveillance  and monitoring

But I just battle to believe legitimate Child Porn monitoring means victims of abuse now will somehow not have a voice or be potentially  prosecuted 

This is the EU after all, its not some banana republic or Russia or China where they do monitor and arrest people for many things they say on the Internet

[BruceVC]

1 hour ago, Azdeus said:

It's not a question if it's simple or complicated, it's people who have no right reading through and viewing peoples private ****ing communications! No courts, no judges, no juries, no lawyer - nothing. Just an AI/algorithm that picks out "suspicious" messages with a huge margin of error. It is an invasion of privacy, massively so, and it will do nothing to stop pedos.

It's not "easy" to have an algorithm scan all digital communications, they can't reliably find zebra crossings in an image! Recaptchas confuse algorithms! And you expect them to be able to tell the difference between your legal DDLG sexting with your girlfriend and pedofiles?

 

Has this system been implemented before, you seem to know a lot about all its shortfalls and failures?

[ComradeYellow]

11 minutes ago, BruceVC said:

This is the EU after all, its not some banana republic or Russia or China where they do monitor and arrest people for many things they say on the Internet

The EU are proving to be complete failures and are just pencil pushers who are completely out of touch with the general population.

Russia and China, on the other hand, appear to be on the rise to prominent global competitor status, China is well underway and all Russia needs is a more modern thinking leader and they will certainly get their eventually as well.  Putinism may have worked wonders in the late 90's and early 00's but he and his oligarchy are certainly well past their shelf life.

And because I get a great deal of humor out of pitting parallels between late stage U.S.S.R. and late stage Reagan/Thatcherist U.S.A. I found this to be especially entertaining:

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-sovietization-of-the-american

Reality in Soviet news was 100% binary, with all people either heroes or villains, and the villains all in league with one another (an SR was no better than a fascist or a “Right-Trotskyite Bandit,” a kind of proto-horseshoe theory). Other ideas were not represented, except to be attacked and deconstructed. Also, since anything good was all good, politicians were not described as people at all but paragons of limitless virtue — 95% of most issues of Pravda or Izvestia were just names of party leaders surrounded by lists of applause-words, like “glittering,” “full-hearted,” “wise,” “mighty,” “courageous,” “in complete moral-political union with the people,” etc.

Some of the headlines in the U.S. press lately sound suspiciously like this kind of work:

— Biden stimulus showers money on Americans, sharply cutting poverty

— Champion of the middle class comes to the aid of the poor

— Biden's historic victory for America

[Gorth]

19 minutes ago, BruceVC said:

Has this system been implemented before, you seem to know a lot about all its shortfalls and failures?

It has. The system you favour was implemented in the DDR (for East Germany), Poland (during the Warsaw Pact days), Czecoslovakia, The Soviet Union, The CCP, North Korea, Hungary (during the Warsaw Pact days) and probably a several others, but those were the obvious examples that most Nordic people of a certain age would be familiar with. Guess what? People didn't like it.

 

[Azdeus]

34 minutes ago, BruceVC said:

Has this system been implemented before, you seem to know a lot about all its shortfalls and failures?

 

16 minutes ago, Gorth said:

It has. The system you favour was implemented in the DDR (for East Germany), Poland (during the Warsaw Pact days), Czecoslovakia, The Soviet Union, The CCP, North Korea, Hungary (during the Warsaw Pact days) and probably a several others, but those were the obvious examples that most Nordic people of a certain age would be familiar with. Guess what? People didn't like it.

 

It still is today with the NSA, Edward Snowden leaks.

Also, @BruceVC https://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-teens-spied-on-chats

 

[Guard Dog]

40 minutes ago, BruceVC said:

You may be right, I may be too trusting of governments and the advantages of Internet surveillance  and monitoring

But I just battle to believe legitimate Child Porn monitoring means victims of abuse now will somehow not have a voice or be potentially  prosecuted 

This is the EU after all, its not some banana republic or Russia or China where they do monitor and arrest people for many things they say on the Internet

Every republic is an oppresive bananna republic if you let it become so. Most "honest" politicians are tyrants if you let them be. There are politicans in the US congress and European Parliament right this minute who would like nothing better than to round up all dissenting citizens, media, activists, etc and get rid of them in one fashion or another. It is folly to give them more tools to perhaps, one day, do this.

Edited March 14, 2021 by Guard Dog

[Guard Dog]

6 minutes ago, Azdeus said:

 

It still is today with the NSA, Edward Snowden leaks.

Also, @BruceVC https://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-teens-spied-on-chats

 

You know the worst thing about the Snowden thing is the US Government won the PR battle. They got people all twisted up over THAT he leaked when they real anger should have been at WHAT he leaked. 

[Azdeus]

15 minutes ago, Guard Dog said:

You know the worst thing about the Snowden thing is the US Government won the PR battle. They got people all twisted up over THAT he leaked when they real anger should have been at WHAT he leaked. 

Quite, they've completely drowned out how they're all being monitored. I live in a bit of a bubble when it comes to my friends that are very informed about things going on, so when I saw John Olivers show where he talked about the Snowden leaks and interviewed people on the streets it was depressing to see how little people knew about it.

Ofcourse, they all did want the NSA ****-pic program shut down.

[BruceVC]

14 minutes ago, Gorth said:

It has. The system you favour was implemented in the DDR (for East Germany), Poland (during the Warsaw Pact days), Czecoslovakia, The Soviet Union, The CCP, North Korea, Hungary (during the Warsaw Pact days) and probably a several others, but those were the obvious examples that most Nordic people of a certain age would be familiar with. Guess what? People didn't like it.

 

Okay, I understand your concern

Dont worry technology and  things like facial recognition software has been improved and is vastly more advanced than the era of the Cold War so that is good news 

Also I am sure during the Cold War monitoring and surveillance in places like the USSR was literally about controlling of freedom of speech and making sure people didn't speak out against the state. Also during most of the Cold War the Internet and most digital communications didnt exist. The www was only invented in 1990

And this is not the same as trying to control or restrict peoples views on any topic, so its not the same as the Cold War

This is about reducing the amount of Child Porn that is prevalent and spread on the Internet and other forms of digital communication 

[Guard Dog]

5 minutes ago, Azdeus said:

Quite, they've completely drowned out how they're all being monitored. I live in a bit of a bubble when it comes to my friends that are very informed about things going on, so when I saw John Olivers show where he talked about the Snowden leaks and interviewed people on the streets it was depressing to see how little people knew about it.

Ofcourse, they all did want the NSA ****-pic program shut down.

In 1776 a band of poorly armed rebels went to war with the world's biggest superpower over far less than the US government has done to us over the years. And that is not even getting in to the race stuff. Not saying we should get our muskets and line up on the bridge at Concord. But sending new folks to Congress certainly has not worked. They become the people they replace and the institution keeps being what it is. Congress talks a good game every two years about rolling back surveliance and stuff. But then when no one is looking they never fail to renew it. When they came out last week and talked about rolling back executive perrogative and taking back the war powers, that are a Congressional power alone, I was somewhat hopeful. But... I'll believe it when I see it. We've heard this s--t from them before. 

[Azdeus]

20 minutes ago, Guard Dog said:

In 1776 a band of poorly armed rebels went to war with the world's biggest superpower over far less than the US government has done to us over the years. And that is not even getting in to the race stuff. Not saying we should get our muskets and line up on the bridge at Concord. But sending new folks to Congress certainly has not worked. They become the people they replace and the institution keeps being what it is. Congress talks a good game every two years about rolling back surveliance and stuff. But then when no one is looking they never fail to renew it. When they came out last week and talked about rolling back executive perrogative and taking back the war powers, that are a Congressional power alone, I was somewhat hopeful. But... I'll believe it when I see it. We've heard this s--t from them before. 

"Also in france, by the way, president Obama signed into law a four year extension of the terrorism fighting patriot act" - 2011 newscast

It doesn't get helped when media are so blasé about things like this. It hurts media aswell with sweeping surveillance of all digital communications, but they don't give a **** generally since it also helps them stay in "power" so to speak.