MasterBlaster

Didn't you hear? China's been one gigantic people's union since 1949. That's the whole point of Communism. As you can see, it's working swimmingly well.

It could be FOMO. Personally, I see value in keeping social media from children. The problem is I don't believe this is all about that. As usual, it's all about surveillance.

Wow, the Baltimore one I didn't know about and that's *also* beyond dystopian. Jeez, the response by authorities being "sorry, but it did the right thing, move along" reminds me of the movie "Brazil". If you read the article, you already know that yes, it's like that one, but in England, and every public place. Worse though, because it's judgment of where you stand, sit, walk or cast your eyes in relation to any woman in the area.

You mean like Musk's "Boring company"? Too late, they're already on it.

Exactly. This is a privacy issue, not a "men's" issue, otherwise I'd have found a "manosphere" forum for it (don't know if one actually exists on Lemmy). As you say, this is equivalent to "we must protect the *children*" as motivation for pretty much everything that takes away liberty, except it's the women who are the "children" in this version. It's just a means to getting the controls in place so it can be used freely to everybody's detriment.

Oh, you mean like the Spill the Tea app? That would never be used to infringe on privacy or destroy reputations of innocent people, right? Right?

I'm not going to go further and turn this into a discussion for a different forum, except to suggest a search on harassment and gender. Regardless of gender issues this and similar "protective" activities only serve to enhance control over populations.

So your take-away from this article about a surveillance tool that seeks patterns of behavior and movement amongst hundreds of random people in a public space is "those privileged men will do anything to remain unaccountable" for... minding their business on in the tube, mall, or sidewalk? This is waaaayyy bigger than that level of bigotry, and in fact pandering to that very bigotry is exactly the tool used to get 51% of the population on board with implementing it without considering the very real consequences for *them*.

I'm a linux user with a synology NAS, and I scan my documents to a shared folder, the process them with ocrmypdf and move them into an archival home. The NAS is a 4 disk RAID6, data loss is almost impossible if you replace failing disks promptly. I have a regular backup to an external drive of all the important folders. I use OpenVPN to connect to my network when I am away from home with Android and my Linux laptop. I use Recoll to index my documents for full text search. It's very effective.

The point of scanning it all usually includes getting rid of the papers.

Oh, you were serious! Well, I think what they need is Democracy first, then unions. Communism theoretically eliminates the need for unions, but the reality is that it's just a dictatorship. Unions in China would likely either be co-opted by the Communist party through subterfuge, or through "reeducating" the misguided leadership and defining the unions - thus landing them right where they are, with a new bureaucracy. Unions represent the spirit of the checks and balances envisioned in the U.S. Constitution. It is only by being of near equal power to the company that employees can negotiate for fair compensation and treatment. Without that, they're just resources. It's an effort to use human nature to gain good outcomes.

Yes there are. Perhaps the "between the lines" of all this is that to protect women, they should be confined to the home and when out (with permission and escort of course) they should be covered head to toe in garments that hide everything but the eyes! Oh, wait.....

Rationalizing the mass surveillance by claiming people rationalize their bad behavior (no way to really know that) is a very bad approach. Rule of law is concrete. If one thinks they're a good person while both taking someone else's agency and breaking a felony-level law, that is *on them*. Taking away everybody else's freedom and privacy because some people are narcissistic sociopaths is the kind of thing authoritarian narcissistic sociopaths do to get and maintain control. We don't have to instill in the minds of anyone anything other than basic human empathy and an understanding of the Golden Rule as a *starting point* of social interaction. People forget that the surveilling party can be narcissistic sociopaths like anybody else. The difference is the scale of damage they can do.

LOL, well yes, but mostly for conservation purposes, I think.

Well, I put this as side to look closer and respond intelligently, and never really took that time. Based on your response and the fact I'm not going to analyze your earlier post and my response more deeply, I'm going to acknowledge that I likely misinterpreted your intent given I agree with most of this particular comment's apparent intent. TL;DR; I probably misunderstood you and apologize for the accusation.

Wow - I didn't even know about that part. That pretty much clinches it, doesn't it?

Hah! They don't have to. Many have "assistants" listening constantly, door cameras linked to central surveillance hubs, security cameras also linked to those hubs. It's too late for most people - they took the bait. Hell, even the televisions record audio and send it back to the hub, and I've heard now that cameras are the new rage for them so we can "control the TV with motion". Yeah, most are already cooked. I had to replace my old LG, bought a new one. I didn't give it access to the internet. Even so, who knows if it's still secretly doing it? And then there are our phones in which they *swear* they're not tracking us. Yet, plenty of proof they are in fact recording our conversations and tracking our locations.

Thank you for the assist. You are correct. I made the fatal assumption that most people discussing such things would have the context of Mao, the long march, the various purges, the decades of poverty, the suppression and outright murder of minorities under their belt and would recognize that the statement was so obviously false that it could only be taken as sarcasm. Unfortunately, I didn't account for people having arrogance and a sense of other people being ignorant morons by default.

Yes. I simply found it somewhat ironic that someone would point out that a *Communist* nation would need unions given the definition of Communism. It was to me a Monty Python level of dry humor to suggest that, and I felt my response should match that dry humor.

I was implying nothing about any other type of societal organization. However, since you mention it, I will point out that Capitalism (which is an economic, not political philosophy) can become horrific for the same reasons Communism becomes horrific - People. Communism was a response to naked, mercantilist Capitalism. Marx's heart was in the right place, but he was describing a Utopia. I think Democracy (in its many forms) designed with checks and balances is a viable answer to the problem. It ain't magic, though. People still need to ensure it remains balanced. We've been having some trouble with that lately. It took fifty years of planning for the authoritarians to get us here. It's a good sign it was so difficult, but now we have to work hard to fix the mess.

You did it when you spent a considerable amount of space explaining how sexual abuse is different because these abusers don't think they're doing anything wrong, so society needs a way to police them. This was the bulk of your response to being against total public surveilance. You also didn't explicitly agree or disagree with my assertion. Instead you gave an explanation of the problems of criminality in society, asserted that *something* had to be done, and presented a *huge cultural shift* as the solution. This neatly leaves the uncareful reader to potentially conclude that the surveilance is a reasonable approach to deal with an intractable social problem. However, it really is not an intractable problem. it is a hypersensitivity to a horrific behavior that gets eyeballs in our truly fucked up profit-driven media system that thrives on manipulating our often morbid curiosity. It is the constant airing of these events twenty four hours a day. If there are only 24 cases of such behavior on the planet in a single day, *you will hear about it*. That is 24 out of 9 billion people. Clearly evidence of the horrific cruelty of most humans, and particularly men, right? We *have* to *do* something to *protect the innocent* (insert women, children depending on the nature of the intractable problem). Our history is littered with authoritarian movements making people believe the reality of a few bad actors is rampant cross society and is due to the "other". They rally the weak willed foolish into destroying freedom, individuality, and life for their dear leaders' enrichment, all while believing their moral certainty is unassailable.

Oh, yeah, that was my point, screen loss. I didn't mean to point out the disrespect and clear statement that we either agree or have to suffer the annoyance of the equivalent of someone standing in front of us at a baseball game repeatedly asking if we would like to buy a hotdog. Why should we complain? We can still see the game around him, after all.

I checked out the link, and noticed that the "we use cookies" obscuring pop-up does not disappear when one chooses to not accept "unnecessary" cookies. I guess we just have to power through the 20% screen loss unless we accept those cookies. Hard pass.

I'd love to hear the logistics of making that work well in the current world.

TIL Sortition. Thanks. Your since you don't believe in democracy, what form of governance do you feel is best?

Oh, I forgot to address the Dr. Strangelove reference. Did you know that was parody and sharp criticism of not just The United States, but of the power structures of the whole (first) world at the time? If that kind of criticism were made in the U.S.S.R. or China, Cuba, etc., of their leadership, the film would be banned and everyone involved would be imprisoned or disappeared. We're allowed to criticize stupidity in leadership over here (for the moment). We believe it is a useful tool to try to make things better, or at least a bit more sane.

Hey, how come you didn't get the snide arrogant insults for saying the same thing I did? I'm jealous! ;-)

Sounds like American Evangelism. I bet they coordinate.

*sigh*. I know what communism is. I also know it's never been implemented in real life and never will be due to the nature of a subset of humans inflicted with various personality traits like Narcissism, Psychopathy, and Sociopathy... not to mention simple greed and basic envy. I find it interesting that you first assigned to me the characteristics of ignorance and arrogance, and then pegged me to a certain nationality, thus revealing your uninformed bias against an entire nation containing over 300 million people - many of whom probably fled whichever morally superior country you call home - simply for living there. Now, as for the assertion that government control of the means of production is the antithesis of communism, I give you first a description of Karl Marx's vision: >Karl Marx envisioned communal ownership on a large scale through the abolition of private property, particularly in the means of production, advocating for these assets to be owned collectively by society. He believed this would lead to a classless society where resources are distributed based on need rather than profit. Now, has it ever crossed your mind how this could possibly be implemented? I mean when you literally have millions of people collectively owning everything and therefore whatever is needed must be somehow made available wherever it is needed. Where will things be stored, and who will manage it? Who will ensure nothing is stolen from the people? Who will ensure item or resource "A" is transited from somewhere to the place it is needed? Word of mouth? Telegraph? What if nobody feels like manning the telegraph or decides not to relay the message to the next person? Heck - how do they know who the next person is? In any sufficiently large group of people, some form of "government" has to exist merely to facilitate meeting the needs of the people being governed. So, I put it to you that the U.S.S.R. was in fact "implementing communism" by being the "people's government" and thus, by their logic, everything is "owned" by the government. They have to know where it is, how to protect it, how to ensure there is enough of it to meet needs, etc.. Unfortunately "power corrupts". Or in the case of the Red revolution, it decapitates a revolution for freedom and democracy the moment it wins power and takes its place.

This is what I thought. I am hoping someone knows something I haven't found. The problem is that I think the installer automatically locks the bootloader, so I have to unlock, do the restore, and relock. Since everything is already wiped, I guess that is not a big annoyance.

all true, but you cannot hold a job with that approach. you will be fired. this works well for people who have agency and can do this stuff for fun or have time before they lose their home to find a revenue stream.

< sips coffee, nods slightly >