[Newfie]

Not uncomfortable with freedom. I was brought up with guns, had them all my life. First thing to do with any newbie is to give them some basic training. Above you mentioned the malitia and marksmanship. Yet we are seeing thousands of new gun owners with a owl ugly no training. What is their marksmanship likely to be like?

I understand it’s a right, but it’s also a responsibility and that doesn’t come with a sales receipt.

I just think we are working against ourselves by resisting reasonable training requirements. For over a hundred years most states have had reasonable gun safety requirements for getting a hunting license. And since the primary reason for getting a gun was hunting it was the rare person who did not have that training. Hence we have had a good safety record. The new wave of gun ownership is something different altogether.

Let me put it this way, you want to be in a squad with 3 guys who have no idea?

[evilgenius]

This is Cog's favorite topic. It was highest on the list. There had been a recent comment here and he hasn't come since early February. I'm worried about Cog.

[C8]

Guns will probably be more needed in the future. The current trend is de-policing and "bail reform" which just lets hardened criminals right back out on the streets immediately after they are caught. These trends are growing in Democrat controlled states and, as I suspect the Democrats will eventually control America for good someday, everyone will have to face a future where there is little in the way of law and order. Those with money will get behind gated communities- everyone else will be on their own.

I myself don't own a gun and never want one- I will just move far from crime. But its sad to see the nation abandon its own people to violence and crime. The US has lost its will to control predators- its an abandonment of governance. We will eventually be like Haiti where the higher govt. officials all live in safe compounds and watch the people kill each other on the news.

[Newfie]

C8,

Much truth to that.

[careinke]

It’s one thing to shoot a rabbit or squirrel or deer, a human is entirely different I would imagine.

To steal a movie line

No it's not, you just have to lead them a little less.

[careinke]

You rarely see me wandering into these topics that are so polarized and emotionally charged but I was thinking about something the other day that I might as well toss in here.

First of all somebody let me know if this is the main thrust of the argument against gun control: The infringement of the 2nd amendment. Not about hunting or even gun safety as much as it is that the right to bear arms as enshrined in the 2nd amendment. The reason the founding fathers enshrined this right was for citizens to be armed and able to form militias in case the state would become rogue or tyrannical. Is this the main argument? Please confirm or correct.
I would have no argument with that except to add the right to self defense is inalienable.
If this is the main argument than how is this reconciled today with the power of the state to use facial recognition software to spy on its citizens. You guys remember recently how the US killed that Iranian military commander with a drone strike. The state today has at its disposal tools that would be able to liquidate and terminate any armed militia no matter how many bunkers full of AK47's they would have squirreled away. It is obsolete to think that any militia could stand up to the government with the simple arsenal of semi automatic weapons when you consider the surveillance and drone capability the states has to squash any civilian militia.

Except there are way more of us gun owners, than military, plus whose side do you think the military will be on? Your talking about neutralizing a lot of people.

An AK47 in your closet seems antiquated and quaint next to the arsenal the state has.

Those AK47's could take out the entire US power system in about thirty minutes, requiring months if not years to bring back on line.

To make the 2nd amendment relevant to its original objective shouldn't we allow citizens to own armed drones so that they can defend themselves against state aggression?

I would have no problem with that as long as I could hunt them over my land.

Or just recognize the obsolescence of the original basis for the amendment and move on to allow gun control since no amount of fire power can repel a tyrannical state with the tools they have available today.

You have been programed to believe this, it makes it easier to control you.

Please comment.

Some good thoughts there, thanks. I would also like to see mandatory weapons training, in all government grade and high schools. It would make for a much safer society.

Thanks

[Newfie]

Both good posts.

I would like to expand on Ibon’s thought about surveillance software. I have pretty much ignored it, who cares where 330 millions are?

Then I read about the Chineses Social Credit System. That is a much more dangerous threat. It encourages us to rat on one another.

One way of describing the social contract with government is that we have given government a monopoly on violence. Government provides a fair system to adjudicate grievances, this reduces revenge killings, the main way early man killed one another. When you have a sufficient gripe you go to the law and it begins a transparent process.

The Chinese system sweeps up grievances, serious and petty, and sums them to punish in some very meaningful ways. You are denied transit ridership, access to schools for your children, you pay higher interest rates,etc. This is done almost automatically, with no formal review or challenge. You can improve your score by good works (bribes.)

It’s not even administered by the government but corporations. It’s not consistent but the share information among one another and the government. In that way it’s organized more like a terrorist network.

Now Enter the virus. They use this cell phone app to assign you a health score; red/yellow/green. Somewhere back on a corporate data base they use algorithms to develop that score. Viral test results, but also GPS tracking so that if you were near an infected person they change your color. So if you go to Joes house tonight, and his test results comes back positive tomorrow, you go from green to red. If you quarantine for 14 days it goes to yellow. Sometime after that you get a clear test it comes back free.

There is nothing to stop someone from simply noting Joe is an activator and if you visit Joe you are suspect. There is no review process, no appeal. This becomes a de facto ban on meetings among dissidents.

So back to Ibon, How would you have fared in such a system? Would you have your retreat? In view of this do we throw the guns away and surrender?

One bullet, one cell phone.

[C8]

Social Credit is just part of a worrisome trend where people are being encouraged to snitch on others. The Covid thing has sent this into overdrive but it was growing. Colleges are encouraging students to snitch on each other just if they say something someone deems inappropriate (even more concerning is that the snitch doesn't have to provide proof).

America'a big tech companies such as Google and Facebook are actively helping dictatorships track and trap their own people. It is unbelievable there is not an outcry against this in the US. My big fear is that the US, Russia, EU, China, etc. develop a consortium that agrees that all parties will not host servers that allow their people ways around big surveillance.

Censorship and control in the US is not going to be led by the US govt. but by businesses. Currently, Google, Facebook, twitter, You Tube are deleting stuff that goes against their ever stricter guidelines. Soon it will be Visa, Discover, etc. denying credit, then Exxon denying gas, etc. This is how it will happen in the US.

I used to think technology and the internet favored free speech, and it did, for about 20 years. But now I am beginning to believe that, in the long run, technology favors censorship far more. Today, servers hosting alternate views can be effectively blocked to the 99%.Tech is asymmetric- it favors those with the greatest power. I can see where entire political parties will be "de-platformed" as hate groups. In China only one party controls online speech and our companies are helping many other nations get there. Do we really expect Google and Facebook to not bring this tech back against us?

It should be obvious to all that speech has mainly moved online, yet the Supreme Court still views online speech as unprotected. We are moving into the era of de facto dictatorship, for how can any nation be really considered a democracy if its citizens are afraid to speak? In the US we will have soft dictatorship where people who are unapproved will not be thrown in jail, but have their credit cards cancelled, their jobs terminated, and their benefits cut. It will be all digital, and it will be all stunningly successful. Watch the EU, they are usually 10-15 years ahead of us on these trends. People are scared to speak in most of the EU today.

[Newfie]

C-8,
You note good additional points.

And in India

Critics have repeatedly warned that the scheme puts personal information at risk and have criticised government efforts to compulsorily link it to bank accounts and mobile phone numbers.

"This government has argued that privacy isn't a fundamental right in court," Mr Pahwa said. "We cannot trust it."

India's Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that the controversial Aadhaar scheme was constitutional and did not violate the right to privacy.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-52659520

[Newfie]

Israel

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-52579475

Israel turns surveillance tools on itself

Others believe mass surveillance programmes scrambled to deal with the pandemic are rife for abuse around the world. "What scares me is that, at least for now, the norm is suddenly changing," says cybersecurity analyst John Scott-Railton of the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab.

"People who have been [quietly] doing these things which are highly questionable are suddenly saying: 'Look, we're your saviours here.'"

Meanwhile, police in Israel have enforced isolation orders partly drawing on the surveillance data. Since March, more than 110,000 checks have been carried out to confirm people are at home. In one case, officers flew a drone up to the window of an 18th floor flat to check on a coronavirus patient's quarantine. She waved at the aircraft filming her.

[C8]

War always advances invention. Covid is a war that has speed up the timetable of surveillance that was already in the works.

It is to a great many people's advantage to keep the threat of infection "ever present" (just as the Bush administration used the endless War on Terror to conduct mass spy operations on Americans). Covid is the Democrats 9-11.

Underneath it all, is the steadily advancing technology of interconnection. The internet gives way to the internet of things. The more items that are linked up, the more ways they can be hacked into by the govt. Technology is inherently totalitarian. There is a massive asymmetry between the powers of Google vs. the average citizen.

This inequality is reflected in the record income inequality in California. A waitress can't hope to make as much as Mark Zuckerberg or do anything to him, but he can completely spy on her and destroy her life by damaging her credit, falsely implicating her in child porn crimes, terrorism, etc. The deeper technology progresses, the more we move towards dictatorship. As people perfect the ability to produce deep fake videos, we will lose any ability to know what is true and what is false. No candidate who runs against the elite will have a chance as viral fake videos blast from the high walls of the Silicon Valley castle.

It won't be long before free wheeling open debate websites, like this one, exist only in people's memories.

The internet won't democratize debate for much longer, it will end it.

[Newfie]

C-8

I hope you are you are wrong.

I fear you are right.

[C8]

This will be the way the US goes: it avoids first amendment challenges:

France's Determination to End Free Speech

On May 13, the French parliament adopted a law that requires online platforms such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat[1] to remove reported "hateful content" within 24 hours and "terrorist content" within one hour. Failure to do so could result in exorbitant fines of up to €1.25 million or 4% of the platform's global revenue in cases of repeated failure to remove the content.

The scope of online content deemed "hateful" under what is known as the "Avia law" (after the lawmaker who proposed it) is, as is common in European hate speech laws, very broadly demarcated and includes "incitement to hatred, or discriminatory insult, on the grounds of race, religion, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation or disability".

The French law was directly inspired by Germany's controversial NetzDG law, adopted in in October 2017, and it is explicitly mentioned in the introduction to the Avia law.

"This law proposal aims to combat the spread of hate speech on the internet," it is stated in the introduction to the Avia law.

"No one can dispute the exacerbation of hate speech in our society... the attack[s] on others for what they are, because of their origins, their religion, their sex or their sexual orientation... hints... [at] the darkest hours in our history... the fight against hatred, racism and anti-Semitism on the Internet is an objective of public interest that justifies...strong and effective provisions... this tool of openness [the internet] to the world, of access to information, to culture, to communication, can become a real hell for those who become the target of 'haters' or harassers hidden behind screens and pseudonyms. According to a survey carried out in May 2016, 58% of our fellow citizens consider the internet to be the main locus of hate speech. More than 70% say they have already been confronted with hate speech on social networks. For younger people in particular, cyber-harassment can be devastating...However... Few complaints are filed, few investigations are successful, few convictions are handed down - this creates a vicious circle..."

Having acknowledged that online "hatred" is tricky to prosecute under the existing laws because "few complaints are filed and few investigations are successful, few convictions are handed down", but nevertheless determined that censorship is the panacea to the perceived problems, the French government decided to delegate the task of state censorship to the online platforms themselves. Private companies will now be obliged to act as thought police on behalf of the French state or face heavy fines. As in Germany, such legislation is bound to lead to online platforms exhibiting overzealousness in the removal or blocking of anything that might conceivably be perceived as "hateful" to avoid being fined.

The purpose of the law appears to have been twofold -- not only to achieve the actual censorship of speech by the removal or blocking of online posts, but also the (inevitably) chilling effects of censorship on online debate in general. "People will think twice before crossing the red line if they know that there is a high likelihood that they will be held to account," French Minister of Justice Nicole Belloubet said in what sounded ominous for a government representative to say in a country that still claims to be democratic.

From the beginning, when French President Emmanuel Macron first tasked the group led by Laetitia Avia with preparing the law, the proposal was met with criticism from a number of groups and organizations. France's National Consultative Commission on Human Rights criticized the law proposal for increasing the risk of censorship, and La Quadrature du Net, an organization that works against censorship and surveillance online, warned that, "Short removal times and large fines for non-compliance further incentivize platforms to over-remove content". The London-based free speech organization Article 19 commented that the law threatened free speech in France. According to Gabrielle Guillemin, Senior Legal Officer at Article 19:

"The Avia Law will effectively enable the French state to devolve online censorship to the dominant tech companies, who will be expected to act as judge and jury in determining what is 'manifestly illegal' content. The Law covers a wide range of content so this is not always going to be a straightforward decision.

"Given the timeframes by which companies have to respond, we can expect them to err on the side of caution when it comes to deciding whether content is legal or not. They will also have to resort to using filters that will inevitably lead to the over-removal of content.

"The French government has ignored the concerns raised by digital rights and free speech groups, and the result will be a chilling effect on online freedom of expression in France".

The passed law was also met with disapproval in France. On May 22, Guillaume Roquette, editorial director of Le Figaro Magazine, wrote:

"Under the pretext of fighting 'hateful' content on the Internet, it [the Avia law] is setting up a system of censorship that is as effective as it is dangerous... 'hate' is the pretext systematically used by those who want to silence dissenting opinions.

"This text [law] is dangerous because, according to lawyer François Sureau, 'it introduces criminal punishment... of the conscience'. It is dangerous...because it delegates the regulation of public debate... on the internet to American multinationals... A democracy worthy of its name should accept freedom of expression".

Jean Yves Camus. from Charlie Hebdo, called the law "a placebo for fighting hate" and pointed out that the "hyper-focus on online hate" masks the real danger:

"It is not online hatred that killed Ilan Halimi, Sarah Halimi, Mireille Knoll, the victims of the Bataclan, Hyper Cacher and Charlie; it is an ideology called anti-Semitism and/or Islamism... Who determines what hatred is and its [distinction from] criticism? A Pandora's box has just been opened... There is a risk of a slow but inexorable march towards a digital language hyper-normativized by political correctness, as defined by active minorities".

"What is hate?" asked French writer Éric Zemmour rhetorically. "We do not know! You have the right not to love... you have the right to love, you have the right to hate. It's a feeling... It cannot be judicialized, legislated."

Nevertheless, that is what hate speech laws do, whether in the digital or the non-digital sphere. Asking private companies -- or the government -- to act as thought police does not belong in a state that claims to follow a democratic rule of law.

Unfortunately, the question is not whether France will be the last European country to introduce such censorship laws, but what other countries are next in line.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/1605 ... ree-speech

[C8]

Surveillance firms around the world are licking their lips at a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to cash in on the coronavirus by repositioning one of their most invasive products: the tracking bracelet.

Take AiRISTA Flow, a Maryland-based outfit that helps corporations track their “assets,” breathing or not. In an April 21 press release, the company announced it would begin selling Bluetooth and Wi-Fi trackers to be worn on an employee’s wrist like a Fitbit — or around their neck like a cowbell.

“When people come within six feet of each other for a period of time,” the company wrote in a press release, “the device makes an audible chirp and a record of the contact is made in the AiRISTA Flow software system.”

But the tracking goes far beyond audible chirps: AiRISTA’s platform allows employers to continuously upload a record of close encounters to a corporate cloud, providing an up-to-date list of presumed social distancing violators that would double as a detailed record of workplace social interactions.

The company’s marketing language is explicit in talking up the nonviral benefits of tracking your workers’ every move: By helping companies “Locate people and things in real time” (the two are seemingly treated interchangeably), they can expect a “Reduction in unplanned downtime,” “Improved asset utilization rates, [and a] reduced need for spares.”

https://theintercept.com/2020/05/25/cor ... -supercom/

[C8]

Petition calls for investigation into Twitter censorship after hiring of Li Fei-Fei
Chinese dissidents say Twitter accounts deleted after Li joined board of directors

AIPEI (Taiwan News) — A White House petition was created last week after news broke that the Twitter accounts of Chinese dissidents started to disappear after a controversial Chinese-American artificial intelligence (AI) expert was hired to serve on the company's board.

On May 11, Twitter announced in a press release that it was hiring Li Fei-Fei (李飛飛), an AI expert and former vice president of Google, to its board of directors as a "new independent director" with immediate effect. Li quit Google in 2018 after a trail of leaked internal emails revealed that she appeared to be more concerned about the public relations damage to Google's image if news broke about the company's work on Project Maven than the ethical issues raised by over 3,000 Google employees.

Project Maven is a U.S. Department of Defense AI project that seeks to use the technology to help military drones select targets from video footage.

During her tenure at Google, there is no public record of Li objecting to the controversial Project Dragonfly, which was meant to be a search engine that would suit China's censorship rules, as she opened an AI research facility in Beijing.

When she took the helm of Google's new AI center in Beijing, Li was quoted in Chinese media as using the CCP slogan "stay true to our founding mission" and said that "China has awakened." In addition, Li allegedly has ties to a student association that is affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP's) United Front, according to Radio Free Asia.

https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3940206

Once we go down the path of US censorship, who is to say China won't take over our tech companies?

[Newfie]

C-8,

This is the kind of stuff I was talking about. The constant harangue about fear softens us up to accepting these intrusions gladly in the quest to be “safe.”

Where this ends is a body’s guess, but it ain’t good.

This conversation reminds me of Kaiser-Jeep.

[Ibon]

I can remember when Kaiser Jeep was all over this topic and at times I thought he was over the top. Funny how as time passes what you thought was on the fringe of credibility suddenly seems highly likely.

In 20 years?

[Newfie]

Yup, where the hell is KJ anyway?

And Cog?

[Ayoob]

Not uncomfortable with freedom. I was brought up with guns, had them all my life. First thing to do with any newbie is to give them some basic training. Above you mentioned the malitia and marksmanship. Yet we are seeing thousands of new gun owners with a owl ugly no training. What is their marksmanship likely to be like?

I understand it’s a right, but it’s also a responsibility and that doesn’t come with a sales receipt.

I just think we are working against ourselves by resisting reasonable training requirements. For over a hundred years most states have had reasonable gun safety requirements for getting a hunting license. And since the primary reason for getting a gun was hunting it was the rare person who did not have that training. Hence we have had a good safety record. The new wave of gun ownership is something different altogether.

Let me put it this way, you want to be in a squad with 3 guys who have no idea?

Shall not be abridged. I don't give a shit about anything else.

That's obviously not what you want. That's fine, but at least be honest.

[Ibon]

Yup, where the hell is KJ anyway?

And Cog?

It is possible KJ decided to minimize and shut down his on line presence for the reasons he often posted about.