Are you unaware of both the Stasi, and the fact that within the last 100 years, Germany experienced the rise of not one, but two extremely hostile and repressive government's hell bent on either exterminating every last undesirable, or rooting out any possible resistance/capitalist spy? Do you have no imagination to fill in the blanks of how much worse something like that could be with the assistance of pervasive client side surveillance capability should that ever recur? Have you forgotten that in addition to many other noteworthy controbutions, IBM also was more than happy to help organize and facilitate the systematic destruction of human life through facilitated bureaucracy? These are not even hypotheticals. These are history. Germany stands as one of the only Western civilizations to have recently experienced inflicting and receiving both of those circumstances. With the poignant reminder to all of us that the plight of those in Afghanistan are in the midst of learning, every damn one of us should be giving a cold hard look at the ugly applications of what we do and asking if we are not possibly creating something that we know will be abused. Companies follow the money. Politics change, capabilities, however, do not. Once the system is there, it will be used, and no company, a construct tolerated and given positive manifestation by State fiat will not stand long before that same authority when push really comes to shove consider the longest established U.S. company is a blip in the pages of history.

>And that's not even mentioning the veering into classic flamebait territory.)

We're not context blind rules engines. There is good signal here if you are willing to listen to it. Yes. It's hard. Usually, you hear this, and it all goes the same place, but we've (in the royal sense) lost something important in the last couple years; the ability to back away from something and to just let it sink in without taking a stake in whose saying it or where it fits in the Internet zeitgeist.

I know your mod senses are tingling, and I understand totally why. I didn't post it at first, because I figured you'd shortly follow up with this exact post. However... Well, I felt and thought it too.

Keep an eye on it by all means, and if it devolves into bedlam do as you must, as you always do. I just see signal in the poster's sentiment, as genuinely terrifying as that prospect is.

Dan G would make the perfect Nazi. Makes excuses for censorship, defends censorship by claiming it is his job, acts like something he goes out of his way to do is something he finds necessary but distasteful. Disgusting.