Comment on For Spain’s Sánchez, the fight against tech billionaires is personal
coherent_domain@infosec.pub 2 days agoIn a free country, you can tell the government to go fuck itself without a mask
Political infrastructure works well until it is not. U.S. used to have okay political infrastructure in protecting democracy, then patriot’s act happened and many of its loophole identified, now president can just kidnap a foreign president as “law enforcement”.
I would love a system where people don’t have any need to be anynomized, it would make many things much simpler, but that seems hard to imagine for me. And I am not from the U.S. and I have lived in both U.S., U.K., and outside of the west, so it is likely not caused by “U.S. brainwashing”.
I am not entirely sure what is the “EU secret sauce” to prevent Politician in utilizing these loopholes or strong centiment to gradually regulate speech. People in U.S. protested, they shot protester, and no one can protest forever, unfortunately. I am curious what would prevent EU to replay what US have now, except with much much more targeted data at the government’s disposal.
aka_@piefed.social 2 days ago
The US is, very precisely, the poster child on how libertarianism doesn’t advance democracy.
The right to bear arms advances no democratic values, because people who are individualist or distrustful to the point they buy a gun the protect their property won’t fight for democracy, because democracy is a collective enterprise. Where are all those very very brave and very very armed Americans now that the executive is running rampant and shutting down their institutions and agreements? Yeah, I didn’t think so.
Likewise, the right to issue public anonymous opinions advances no democratic values, because if you need them to be anonymous in a free country, either they are malicious/fake and therefore you’re afraid of legal repercussions or you’re lazy/fearful and therefore you would fight no tyranny (same as those who bear arms).
I’m not arguing against the privacy or private communications, that’s an entirely different matter, but when one issues a public opinion one should be responsible and sensible enough to do it non anonymously. That doesn’t even mean I have to know your name, but we could create an open sourced encrypted platform that identifies public personas on the internet as a)individuals b)nationals of their countries in the EU. Simply add a check close to the handle and the official verification.
Our freedoms to express a public opinion freely is precious and shouldn’t be weaponized against us by malign foreign actors. As I said before, nobody would go to a political rally by a random Russian in a balaclava. I don’t want to ban political rallies, I just want to expose farms of Russians in balaclavas.