mellow2020

Well, there's other sources for this, becauses it's actually true. I wonder what "armor" you think HN even has as inane tripe like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24426407 is glued to #1, while something that actually matters and pertains to the responsibilities of this crowd is, once again, penalized.

As a counterpoint here's something Franz Kafka wrote in a letter to Elli Hermann 1921, badly translated by me.

> Parents have an animalistic, senseless love for the children, which confuses themselves with the child all the time, the educator has respect, and this is much more valuable for education, even if there is no love present at all. I repeat: valuable for education, because even though I call parental love animalistic and senseless, that does not value it lowly, it is just as much a unknowable mystery as the artful, creative love of the educator, only in the context of education however it cannot be valued low enough.

For the totalitarian claim to rewrite history all territories are ultimately problematic.

> We don't know a perfected totalitarian power structure, because it would require the control of the whole planet.

- Hannah Arendt

I would add that several totalitarian singularities, that each are closed off from one another or perceive each other through a completely controlled ideological filter, might also constitute such total control.

Well, there's any kind of person anywhere, anyway.

I think it's not wrong to be pre-emptively wary of that (and prepare arguments for it), considering the way F.U.D. about "cookie banners" [1] got many people worked up against a supposedly useless and clueless law that (again, supposedly) "forces" sites to show such banners -- because their desire to track, which is the first link in this causal chain, is being ignored or assumed as given and benign.

[1] banners sites put up because they would prefer to track everyone on the first visit, rather than having an opt-in link somewhere in the footer for example.

Yes, I know, that's still shifting goal posts from

> "being put in jail because you say publicly that tibet should be free"

and if merely pointing that fact out is getting me downvoted, that's the problem of the people who are doing that.

So what you're saying is, when I post that Catalonia should be free and go on holiday in Spain, no spooks would follow me around, and no pressure would be put on German companies to fire me, and this isn't even remotely comparable.

Maybe to people who made "rapey" part of their vocabulary because of internet "humor".

If you remove "in a post-911 world" from that comment the point stays exactly the same.

> The last guy who touched upon it

On the other hand, people like Chomsky aren't being persecuted. Though all in all, I would also say they get ignored very efficiently, Chomsky still isn't exactly unknown either. Is there a Chinese author and speaker with decades of real harsh criticism of their government under their belt, who is living in China with their works being translated in all sorts of languages and also available in China?

> The rationale behind that statements leads to the attitude of not even attempting to be objective.

What is "the rationale behind that statement", other than intellectual honesty? The statement is true, not even attempting to be objective does not follow from it. Denying it to achieve something that isn't even gained by its denial is a refusal to be more objective, plain and simple.

> So while you are correct the statement on its own does not state that

.. I'm still at -1. Not because what I said is wrong, but because some would prefer it to be wrong or something.

> I believe that to be dangerous because it then allows you to engage in sophistry.

That also doesn't follow. I would even say that is sophistry. The statement is true, it doesn't become untrue because of things you claim would follow from it, even if you had shown how they follow from it, which you did not.

Sure, but that has nothing to do with the comment it was in response to, which does in fact not say that.

Nobody said you shouldn't try. But part of that is calling out those who talk of being "unbiased" or "objective" not as a shorthand, but as something they seen think is actually within their possession.

> It is not the greatest of modern scientists who feel most sure that the object, stripped of its qualitative properties and reduced to mere quantity, is wholly real. Little scientists, and little unscientific followers of science, may think so. The great minds know very well that the object, so treated, is an artificial abstraction, that something of its reality has been lost.

-- C.S. Lewis

> We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

-- Werner Heisenberg

It's easy to explain -- just not to people whose salary whose salary depends on not understanding it, who keep shaking their heads as the predictable results of the boat they won't rock roll in.

> people want some understanding of what's happening, but they're not getting it from the media, they're not getting it from the intellectual classes, they're certainly not getting it from the government

[..]

> it's happening all over and I think you can trace a good deal of it to the effect of neo-liberalism. It had a goal remember: the goal of neo-liberalism was to transfer decisions away from the public to the hands of private power and to atomize the population.

-- Noam Chomsky, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiCeqySVhCE&t=20m55s

> the individual citizen has very little possibility of having any influence - of making his opinion felt in the decision-making. And I think that, in itself, leads to a good deal of political lethargy and stupidity. It is true that one has to think first and then to act - but it's also true that if one has no possibility of acting, one's thinking kind of becomes empty and stupid.

-- Erich Fromm, https://hrc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15878coll...

The less agency people have, and the less expertise is teached to them and expected of them, the less capable and the more exploitable they become.

The majority of people is fine living their lives as to ensure to destruction of all organized human life on the planet, just when it comes to the climate. Thinking of history, all the darkest hours of it involve a majority thinking they're right automatically, by virtue of being the majority, and persecuting minorities, or doing all sorts of stuff that in hindsight is just evil, embarrassing and gross.

> Free thought requires free media. Free media requires free technology. We require ethical treatment when we go to read, to write, to listen and to watch. Those are the hallmarks of our politics. We need to keep those politics until we die. Because if we don’t, something else will die. Something so precious that many, many of our fathers and mothers gave their life for it. Something so precious, that we understood it to define what it meant to be human; it will die.

-- Eben Moglen

If people don't understand that it takes away from them, not from the importance of the issue.

We couldn't otherwise build, light and tear down walls with just our minds. Learning how to handle and accept emotions is possible with our minds and the help of each other, but in societies where the full range of emotions are mostly suppressed in public life, and many causes for negative emotions normalized, people often rely drugs and other "workarounds".

> The answer is simple, protection from them taking it by force.

No force can stand against an infinite amount of drones, to name just one thing. Those who own the means of production that no longer require workers will also own all means of warfare. Few people own more and more, faster and faster. This will not magically wrap around to the opposite.

> Non-repairability is not planned obsolescence.

You already acknowledged that 6 year old phones are obsolete.

And you also claimed claimed that "only someone who didn't work on Apple products" could possibly "buy into" [that's also a huge accusation, one you don't even bother to back up] the idea that Apple is a treadmill of increasingly crappy things. That is demonstrably wrong, yet also not worthy of you even acknowledging it.

> that’s a technical challenge not a financial decision

Proof for that? Nevermind, you just ignore your glaring errors, and demand more proof, as if you watched those videos fully, while dropping laughable claims like that casually.

> The only people who buy the idea of planned obsolescence are the ones who haven’t worked on products like that.

So, how many Apple products Apple said could not be repaired have you repaired?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVAmnV65_zw

There is nothing to "buy into", it's all in the open. There is something to be in denial about however, and you just offer an ad-hominem right out of the gate, plus the statement that phones failing when they cease to be "supported" is fine and normal; but somehow not planned, even predictable obsolescence.

It's a shift from owning things that either break or last, to a constant churn, enforced by software where the hardware can't be made bad enough. Apple is hardly alone in this, but Apple is in it, for sure.

She was arguably a bit careless in the moment that lead to them getting caught, and since pushing that stack of fliers wasn't really useful for their greater aims, that kinda proves your point as well. The idea of the White Rose not getting caught, so rather shortly before the end of the Nazi regime, and Sophie Scholl writing more letters, or even books, is fit to make me cry with homesickness. It's an unspeakable loss.

But otherwise, if you read the interrogation transcripts, I don't think she regretted anything. She knew what she was doing and why she did it, and she knew she did well. IMO her life ended so much better than that of people who just give in to pressure against their conscience. It's not like those are immortal, and then they have to spend the rest of their time with who they became, too. Some find a way back, most don't. As Shakespeare wrote, the coward dies a thousand deaths -- Sophie Scholl died but one, and it was rather majestic, if you squint just right.

I still wish she would never had a chance to prove her greatness in this particular manner and had survived instead, so don't take this as me negating your point.

> I just sometimes ask myself if people in previous centuries thought and lived as superficially as today. Or if, piece by piece, as times fade, their bad aspects retreat to the background and their goodness shines especially bright? At any rate I think that the individual, regardless of outcome, has to be vigilant, and especially when it is made hard for them. You also believe that this can never be levelled upwards, as desirable as that seems. When there is levelling, it always happens downwards. But here, too, there is a brilliant opportunity offered by fate to prove ourselves. Maybe one should not underestimate that, either.

-- Sophie Scholl

> People pay huge overhead to apple exactly because apple makes choices for them - regarding what settings are reasonable to have, what software they want you to use etc.

Well, they think it gives them quality. Instead they kinda get fleeced and pushed into a threadmill of planned obsolescence, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2_SZ4tfLns

Sebastian Haffner warned of it as early as 1940. Not of the internet itself of course, but still. Note the bit about a microphone in every house.

> Yet another circumstance must be mentioned which proves favorable for the Nazis and their immensely powerful apparatus of oppression: the development of modern technology gives the rulers, as has long been insufficiently understood, an advantage over the ruled. The more effective the weapons become and the less you can protect yourself against them, the more the armed is superior to the unarmed. The Bastille could not be successfully stormed in the age of airplanes and tear gas. Rifles equipped with rifles have no chance against motorized police forces; it makes no sense to build barricades against a government that has tanks. And in the event of a revolution, it is not only weapons development that favors those in power, the state over the individual: modern technical development and the associated sophisticated organization work in the same direction. Traffic has led to the countries becoming small and easy to monitor. How many hiding places there were in a country a hundred years ago! At that time, every power hit natural barriers! Today there is no loophole and no hideout for the rebel anymore. Even the thoughts that are able to penetrate the walls have become "controllable" because they are tied to the mass distribution of news, to radio, film and the press. How long will it take before every house has its own microphone and every private word, like every telephone call today, can be heard? The ant state is at hand. It may not be a coincidence that states like Germany and Russia have elevated technology to the status of a religion. Conversely, this development of modern technology makes the preservation of freedom a human task that is more urgent than ever.

-- Sebastian Haffner "Germany: Jekyll & Hyde (1939 - Deutschland von innen betrachtet)"

The above is my crappy translation because I don't have the English original (!). Apologies to Haffner as author and anyone who enjoys reading good English, but I think the content speaks for itself.

It's not just so-called conspiracy theorists who warned us, but also people in the midst of our society, near the zenith of human achievement. Our best and brightest. And we paid a LOT of lip service to respecting a LOT of people who warned us, while trampling what they held up as most important underfoot. We just wanted their gimmicks, their clever oneliners, the stuff we could kill time with.

> Now the police dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in what degree of intimacy; and, theoretically, this dream is not unrealizable although its technical execution is bound to be somewhat difficult. If this map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the way of the totalitarian claim to domination; such a map might make it possible to obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never existed at all.

-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"

She wasn't the type to get excited and pushy, about anything. And maybe she wasn't aware of how she hit bulls eye when she wrote that. But here we are, and we know she did.

> If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?

-- George Orwell

What if society became completely digital? What if people completely loose the ability to remember things, and look up their own lifes and history in the data stores? I've seen dozens, countless comments on HN that seem to be longing for something like that, of course while completely ignoring the implications, the destruction of humans and human society that would entail.

> Meanwhile, in the course of this "Terrorist Generation" campaign, for Obama to claim, "you know, I'm really worried about terrorists, so I have to to read -- well, they claim they don't read it -- I have to get information about your email, where you are, who you're talking to, what you have on Facebook; I've gotta put that on my big database"... actually, we're moving into a world which was described, pretty accurately I think, by one of the founders of Google... I don't know if you followed the stories about Google Glass? Well, Google has some new, ridiculous thing, they're marketing glasses which have a small computer on them. So you can be on the internet 24 hours a day, just what you want. It's a way of destroying people, but quite apart from that, this little device has a camera, and presumably, if it doesn't already it will soon have a recorder, which means that everything that's going on around you, goes up on the internet. Some reporter asked Erich Schmidt, didn't he think this was an invasion of privacy, and his answer was exactly right, comes right out of the Obama administration, he said: "If you're doing anything that you don't want to be on the internet, you shouldn't be doing it." This is a dream that Orwell couldn't have concocted. We're moving into it, and it's not the only case. if you read the technical journals, there's more stuff coming along. So, for example, right now there are corporations that are concerned about using computers with components made in China, because it's technically possible to build into the hardware devices which will record what the computer is doing and send it to those bad guys. well, the articles don't point out that if the Chinese can do it, we can do it better, and probably are, so it may end up in Obama's database the next time you hit the computer.

-- Noam Chomsky

That was located at http://grittv.org/?video=noam-chomsky-on-secret-trade-deals-... but that site is dead and directs somewhere else. Don't click. I transcribed it 7 years ago, I can't prove that, but if seriously challenged I would go try looking for another source.

My point is, that's not some old man who doesn't understand technology. He understands it better than the people who are used to make it. And did you catch what he called Google Glass? "a way of destroying people" That's not exaggeration, that's cutting right to the heart of the matter.

How does unfreedom hurt freedom? In that any given person cannot be in several places of the freedom spectrum at the same time. If they're a serf, a mere set of eyeballs and a wallet, they cannot be a grown literate human being in an information age also. If a person prefers to be illiterate and have stories read to them, they cannot be an author, or an investigative journalist. If another person prefers to be their master, rather than their peer or at least an unrelated stranger, they likewise aren't free, since all leashes cut both ways.

> We need the clout we would lose, otherwise we won't be big enough to have any say when the next thing comes around.

As John J. Chapman said in 1900:

> I have seen ten years of young men who rush out into the world with their messages, and when they find how deaf the world is, they think they must save their strength and wait. They believe that after a while they will be able to get up on some little eminence from which they can make themselves heard. "In a few years," reasons one of them, "I shall have gained a standing, and then I shall use my powers for good." Next year comes and with it a strange discovery. The man has lost his horizon of thought, his ambition has evaporated; he has nothing to say. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don't be gagged. The time of trial is always. Now is the appointed time.

> would you have sacrificed netflix or other stuff and continued to use pure OSS

Yeah, in a heartbeat. I actually never used Netflix and probably never will. I won't be be party to destroying what is good and not-like-TV about the web, for the sake of stuff that is like TV, and usually is less interesting to me than even silence.

> it would be ~40% of the quarterly profit

Another way to look at it is as just the cost to make that remaining profit, and that the cost has been externalized so far.

If people had utterly insisted on decent customer support from day one, companies like Google would have found a way to grow as big as they can while still providing support.

> He's saying government spying isn't that bad IF the government can be trusted.

Yeah, IF. In reality however, it's orders of magnitude worse than any crimes that could be prevented by it.

So, not caring because because oneself is not being persecuted at this minute, and determined to err on the side of being no threat to any criminals or people who persecute others, ever, and to hand that "value" down the generations. I could get more eloquent descriptions of that argument from history books, and don't even care for those.

I didn't say "it's the same thing", I said "As something that is likely to do good and isn't much of a sacrifice, it's the same thing"

> I would obviously object to other people forcing me into adopting any unreasonable habit.

There is nothing "unreasonable" about naming 3 things you are grateful for each day. If you did it each day, you could probably get it down to taking a few seconds.

> Or do you mean the general attitude by commentators (in the media/on twitter etc.) towards people not abiding by those laws?

I do mean the attitude, but not about not abiding to laws per se. It's just a wholesale dismissal. Like, what does "mentally stable" have to do with anything, why did you weave that in there? Because instable people are complaining about masks or think G5 causes Corona? What do, for example, arguments put forward in the OP article have to do with that?