US will win at this like it always does baby
Kier > Mandelson > Palantir > OSA, Digital IDs, Police realtime AI surveillance
No corruption to see here
If Denmark, the country that keeps pushing chat control over and over again until it eventually passes, is at the top of the list then we are all truly fucked
It’s about perceptions of corruption not actual corruption
We’re not fucked, we just have a big job ahead of us. There are millions of us, and few of them. The time to remove them from power has long since past.
I think it underlines how freedom is always inherently a global project, a genuine embrace of freedom as a value requires a humanist embrace of the totality of people who could be bestowed freedom.
It is not enough to just try to get it right in one place, the powers against genuine freedom are too great and the seductiveness of “well I got mine” is too dangerous to our moral integrity, we must seek solidarity with one another from the start or else we will inveitably be encapsulated deeper and deeper in layers of oppression and control whether it is panoptic and pyschological or directly physical in nature.
Democracy is a pleasant illusion, it always has been. It is impossible to have free and open elections under a system where the citizens are split into a ruling class and a working class, a system where money is speech and corporations have freedom of speech, a system where the law is written by the ruling class and enforced against the working class but not against their own.
We need to take back our society, through force if necessary.
Not 100%, though not 0% either. On the spectrum, it does appear to have been closer to democracy in the past than the present.
I note that any action taken via force may not work out well in today’s era of surveillance technology, plus also it would still need the unskippable step of achieving consensus among the people, which is nowhere close to happening.
Watching the fights on the Threadiverse is instructive: we cannot even achieve consensus here, so I think trying to go beyond that to include mainstream normies is hopeless. You can fight against the leaders in a society, but how do you fight both them and the will of the people at the same time? You cannot.
It’s just my opinion, but I think it’s much more likely to achieve any kind of change at all to work within the existing systems.
