It was always people who ruled, it's just more apparent when the people who rule are bullies itching for a fight, who care even less about the appearance of consistency.
For moral accountability, it should always in the end be "I say", not "the law says". No one should "just be obeying orders", they should make choices they can stand behind on their own judgment, regardless of whether some group of possibly long dead legislators stood behind it or not.
It's hard to measure the information content of anything, because information is fundamentally about differences which matter, and we don't always know what matters. The text content can be preserved dutifully through centuries through copying, then in our time, we find out that what we really would have wanted was the handwriting style of the original, or the environmental DNA from pollen attached to the original vellum...
But even so, there's so much archive material which hasn't even been digitized. I run into it in genealogy all the time. It's in some box in a museum, if you're lucky they made microfiche images of it fifty years ago.
Presumably it isn't, and you'd need a certain minimum level of technological parity with your tyrants.
Presumably that also isn't fixed. So even if rifles might have been sufficient in the early US even though the government had cannons, rifles may not be sufficient when the government has chemical weapons and armored cars.
So where's the industrial base which makes the weapons? Or the money to buy the weapons? For Iraq, Afghanistan, and for that matter in lots of conflicts the US weren't involved in (or were involved in on the anti-government side!) the answer seems straightforward enough: in foreign countries which also don't like your government. Without a bunch of neighbors and rival powers which really didn't want the US in Iraq/Afghanistan, could the insurgents have done much?
Who do you propose should arm the resistance in the US, if government supported "police" paramilitaries run amok? (Let's for the sake of argument not get into whether that has happened yet). It's going to have to be quite an impressive level of support, too, to stand up against systems developed precisely against that sort of eventuality and battle-tested in the US' sphere of influence.
It depends on the numbers. Do they have 100,000 guys with guns but you have a hundred million with knives? Then you have a chance. But your chances improve a lot if your side is starting off with something more effective than that.
> Presumably it isn't, and you'd need a certain minimum level of technological parity with your tyrants.
You don't need parity, you need a foothold to leverage into more.
> So where's the industrial base which makes the weapons? Or the money to buy the weapons?
In a civil war, you take the domestic facilities and equipment by force and then use them. But first you need the capacity to do that. Can 10,000 guys with knives take a military base guarded by a thousand guys with guns? Probably not. Can they if they all have guns? Yeah, probably.
Then the government has to decide if they're going to vaporize the facility when you do that. If they don't, you get nukes. If they do, now you have a mechanism to make them blow up their own infrastructure by feigning attacks. And so on.
Heck no, they can't. Even if they could, the government's advantage isn't just in weapons. Long before you'd get your 10000 people with their gun safe stash together, they'd know exactly who you were and what you were planning.
I think your proposal reads like bad power fantasy fiction. You can resist a powerful authoritarian/occupying government with force, but not without a lot of foreign backing - like in Iran right now - and I don't think you are prepared to ask the Russians for help. It would of course open a huge can of worms if you did, and you'd be right to ask if the world where you win with such support will even be better than the world where you lose.
> Long before you'd get your 10000 people with their gun safe stash together, they'd know exactly who you were and what you were planning.
It's almost like anonymity and private communications tech belongs next to weapons on the list of things needed to resist authoritarianism.
> not without a lot of foreign backing
Why does it require any foreign backing whatsoever? You're not going to do it if you're three people, but a civil war is when some double digit percentage of the country is on the other side. You don't think that's enough people to supply substantial domestic resources?
Look, I don't want to be mean because if you're in the US right now you're in a situation which sucks. But that situation of 10000 people with guns seizing a military base to bootstrap an effective civil war, is just so absurd I don't even know how to begin.
You're right, private communication is an essential tool of resistance, more important than any weapons. But if you start buying up old Blackberries to give to your kids and all your friends, don't you think that gets you on a watchlist in itself? Not only should your 10000 people have guns to take on a military base, they should have impeccable infosec too?
Pretty much all civil wars in history had foreign backing for one or more sides. It seems no one ever had enough domestic resources to confront the domestic resource control machinery - which makes sense when you think about it. Though the more optimistic way to look at it was that if you had that level of control, you'd win without a civil war.
> that situation of 10000 people with guns seizing a military base to bootstrap an effective civil war, is just so absurd I don't even know how to begin.
What about it strikes you as absurd? A country's military is spread all over the place. It's entirely practical to overwhelm it in a specific location by concentrating your forces there. You then have access to more powerful weapons in order to do it again.
> But if you start buying up old Blackberries to give to your kids and all your friends, don't you think that gets you on a watchlist in itself?
There are about a billion PCs and laptops made in the last 20 years that can run Linux and whatever communications software you want. If owning a laptop gets you on a list then most of the population is already on the list, and if the list contains everyone then it contains no one.
> Not only should your 10000 people have guns to take on a military base, they should have impeccable infosec too?
Have you considered the other side of that coin? All of these geniuses have their own forces and infrastructure being tracked into the poorly-secured databases of all of these private companies. Compromise those databases and drones start showing up in vulnerable places that weren't expected to be known. But to stop tracking everybody you have to stop tracking everybody.
The thing where members of The Party can turn off the telescreen doesn't actually work. If the millions of people who work for defense contractors are being tracked, you've got a significant vulnerability. If they're not, guess who was already working to infiltrate your defense industry to begin with.
> Pretty much all civil wars in history had foreign backing for one or more sides.
That's just true of wars in general. But also, supposing that something like this were to happen, where there was a sufficient fracture that it isn't immediately obvious who would come out on top, every foreign government would then have to position themselves. And then why would support have to come from some disreputable despots rather than e.g. Canada or Western Europe?
> Though the more optimistic way to look at it was that if you had that level of control, you'd win without a civil war.
If you have 100 people and they have a million, you lose. If you have a million people and they have 100, you win. If it's not that unbalanced then both sides fight until the cost of fighting gets higher than the cost of bargaining.
Knives are basically obsolete technology in military terms. Firearms are not obsolete; that's why almost every soldier (or "paramilitary") carries one. Your technological parity point is technically correct, but it doesn't really apply here.
There are more privately owned guns than people in the US. We are already profusely armed.
I'm not contesting that you're armed. I'm not contesting that guns can still be "useful". But not in resisting a government with anti-"insurgence" drones battle tested against various levels of resistance from Palestine to Ukraine to Afghanistan.
The Afghans won - not without foreign support, by the way - against a foreign occupying force, in the end by promising a lot of amnesties to people who had been working with the occupying government, and convincing them to turn en masse. Promises which they from what I understand, mostly kept. They fought for years and died in droves, then they suddenly won "without firing a single shot", figuratively speaking, with diplomacy directed at their own countrymen. I'm sure there are some lessons to be learned there for resisting your own government too there, but I really only mentioned them as a place where anti armed insurgence technology has been extensively battle tested by the government you're considering picking a fight with.
I think they are worrying about antitrust, and believe (probably correctly, unfortunately) that whether they get hit by antitrust or not is entirely political. There's more than enough evidence, for any justice department which wants to. They're not going to change that by keeping Android moderately open.
What they can do, is make themselves politically useful to whoever will be in charge. Right now the war on general purpose computing is in high gear, due to panic over AI models, social media manipulation and (as always) kids. That's the only ticket to avoid an antitrust crackdown.
And one thing Assange used to say over and over again, was that he was inspired by government attempts to suppress WikiLeaks releases, because that was evidence that they feared the information in them could actually change things. This is pretty much also the main thesis of Chomsky, and many other western dissidents (and some others too, e.g. Ai Weiwei): our leaders are as unaccountable and willing to use brutality as any dictatorship, they just have less reason to.
Call me when the UK government brings the machine guns and starts slaughtering 40k Palestine Action protestors and I promise to agree it's all the same
I'll make it easier for you:
wake me up when the UK government slaughters 1% the amount of the protestors the Iranian government just did in two days.
400 protestors shot by machine guns mounted on SUVs in London.
That just might be approaching slippery slope territory to the current Iranian actions.
Currently I believe we are at zero protestors casually shot on the streets of the UK, so I fail to see the equivalency
Bad as the Iranian regime is, we know that foreign governments are actively working for regime change/collapse in Iran (Mossad boasted in public about being with the protesters on the ground in Iran, whether that's true or not it seems like a statement intended to make things worse). So maybe be extra careful where you source those death numbers claims.
UK is not, and will not be in the situation Iran is in for the foreseeable future. There will not be several powerful countries, some widely hated in UK and openly preferring a UK in smoking ruins to democratic government in the UK, calling for revolution there (although don't get me wrong, UK too could totally could use a revolution). UK has nuclear weapons. UK has a world-class surveillance apparatus, and doesn't have to contend with the cynical people running it getting regularly murdered or bought out by more powerful actors.
What all this means - and this has been the core message of just about all dissidents in western countries for decades - is that the people with control in the UK don't have to gun down hundreds (or tens of thousands, if you believe the colored reports) in the streets to cling to power. If it was their best option, they might.
It's not literally the same of course. But you should wonder, how much of the difference is due just differences in how much they need to do?
If South American dictatorships could have their way with less blood and less noise, don't you think they would prefer that?
I'm reminded of a tragicomic recent admission from Nate Silver of 538 fame. He said Disney almost never interfered in their editorial process, as if that was a good thing. What that really meant, after all, was that Disney was perfectly willing to interfere in their editorial process, but almost never felt the need to. (As you would expect. I mean, why would Disney care about political polling?)
Could it similarly be that the UK government is perfectly willing to engage in brutal political suppression, but rarely has a need to? In that case maybe people are right to sound the alarm even though we haven't reached South American dictatorship levels yet.
I mean, given that is hasn't worked and hundreds of people have continued to stand up and be arrested for supporting Palestine Action, I'd say that's a no?
It hasn't worked in changing policy, or meaningfully changing who's in charge. Currently the government is getting its way with this sufficient level of brutality.
I think it's likely they will get still more scared that they won't, and ramp up the brutality accordingly.
The path forward is clear: Reform gets into power, builds their own paramilitary "immigration enforcement" groups a la ICE, and you get the occasional summary execution in the streets, along with arrests based on UKs unmatched surveillance system.
The British isles do not have old mushroom foraging traditions (in particular, what mushroom foraging traditions there are, are younger than fairy stories). Without some solid oral tradition, going around sampling mushrooms looking for a high is very risky.
Even if there was a tradition, why would they be limited to only where particular mushrooms grew? They would surely be picked and transported then. For that matter, don't hallucinogenic mushroom varieties grow all over the British isles? Many mushrooms aren't very picky about climate.
FWIW, mushroom rings are real, at least in the UK. They seemed to be affected by EMF, because I wandered past one centered directly centered under street power lines, I have no idea whether that's where a ley-line intersect it or not. I don't think they were psychedelic mushrooms though, but it was pretty cool seeing them growing in a large circle about 3-4m in diameter.
The main point of the article is that they're psychedelic, but don't contain psilocybin as the active molecule.
In earlier centuries it doesn't seem unreasonable to allow the possibility of the mushroom ingester to describe their experience as visiting the fae realm, whether in the UK or otherwise - as an accidental occurence I don't know how else people from the past would be able to explain what they perceived to others?
Of course mushroom rings are real, you get them when the mycelium grows mushrooms at its edges to spread outwards. But it has nothing do to with EMF.
Eating mushrooms without knowledge will kill you. Cultures either don't eat mushrooms, or they develop knowledge of what mushrooms are safe to eat and which ones kill you - or make you see elves. There's no world where people see elves but don't connect it to the mushrooms they ate 15 minutes ago. It's also not very plausible that they as a culture stopped going on elf trips, but remembered the elves and forgot what made you see them. In short there's just so many ways this is a bad theory.
To name and shame two: LinkedIn and MyHeritage. If you ever made an account with either of them, they will never stop spamming you. They have configuration options to select which mail to receive, but they appear to consider them temporary suggestions.
A special dishonourable mention goes to Wal-mart. I never interacted with them in any way whatsoever, as well I wouldn't since they don't exist on my continent as far as I know, yet they still send me spam. DKIM signed and all!
LinkedIn once seemed to somehow go through my (GMail?) contacts and ask if I should invite my, late, grandfather to the platform in the subject of a marketing message.
I guess you also received the Linkedin Gaming spam a couple of weeks ago?
I opted out of almost every category and I never opted in to a category like that. So why is there now a new category which I have to opt out of?
It seems to me blatant, unpunished disregard of GDPR - but their whole business was founded on abuse of emails and there's no reason to expect a Microsoft acquisition to make a company act more in line with the law.
That gaming email took me mentally straight back to Facebook circa 2009, and not in a good way. LinkedIn always serves as a fantastic example of exactly how not to treat your users.
For moral accountability, it should always in the end be "I say", not "the law says". No one should "just be obeying orders", they should make choices they can stand behind on their own judgment, regardless of whether some group of possibly long dead legislators stood behind it or not.
reply