Even though something has a benevolent rationalization, it doesn’t mean the true motives are benevolent. It doesn’t need any New World Order conspiracy either. People in ruling positions often enjoy power, and they may be clueless as to how this desire is affecting their decisionmaking.
I’m always skeptical of phrases like “true motives”.
Sometimes people can do the wrong thing for the right reasons, or totally amorally. There doesn’t have to be a secret agenda. Framing things in terms of shadowy cabals that hide their secret motivations weakens the argument and reduces odds of successful resistance to these programs by misunderstanding the opposition.
Better said than me. There are different approaches to changing someone's mind if they're misunderstanding something, versus if they're straight-up lying to you.
The fact that there exist highly public straight-up lying politicians doesn't mean the mass of politicians are liars. Most are trying to do a decent thing, with the understanding they have.
Casting one's democratic agents as "other" corrodes democracy, decreases participation, and generally furthers the problem being bemoaned: lack of attention to citizen desires.
Yes, and it’s frustrating to see people whose policy positions I generally agree with (less surveillance, please) resort to this kind of rhetoric. People who disagree are not only wrong, and not only intentional wrongdoers, but they have secret motives even they themselves don’t know?
These people have obviously never tried to get four people to agree on what movie to see.
Secret motives aren't really the right argument, I agree. Citing the seemingly-inevitable negative outcomes may be a better approach.
When someone argues for ubiquitous mass surveillance, ask them to explain exactly how the Stasi worked, how they came to power and what can be done to keep it from ever happening again. Point out that these questions have to be addressed before arming the state with surveillance tools that previous abusive regimes couldn't have dreamed of.
That's the biggest thing that frustrates me about NWO (as a concept) used as a rhetorical device in argument: it's not necessary.
You have world history littered with examples of mass surveillance platforms being used for oppression.
No explanation or justification of why that happens seems necessary! It's a stronger and supported argument to just say "Whatever the cause, when mass surveillance has been implemented historically, it is eventually used to errode civil liberties and increase population control."
If OP can’t acknowledge that he’s just ideologically partisan and won’t be persuasive to anyone who doesn’t already agree. Deeply understanding the opposite position requires accepting that there are smart reasonable people that hold it (for good reasons!), not that they’re all some “shadowy cabal” lying and hiding bad intent.
There are definitely a lot of smart, reasonable people with sincerely held beliefs who nonetheless lie about their motivations and work with like minded people to draft and support legislation under false pretenses for the greater good. They say they want to stop child pornographers and I’m sure they do, but their actual motivations are to monitor political dissidents.
Sure, but they’re not the entire set - and it’s the people that hold the view earnestly that are more interesting to steelman.
The same could be said for people who want encryption (and often is by partisans on the other side, “you just want to hide bad behavior and only pretend it’s about general privacy”).
I think strong encryption and user control is important (I work on urbit full time at Tlon and encourage friends to use Signal), but I still recognize there are real tradeoffs that result from empowering individuals this way, I just think on net it’s the right decision even with the often terrible downsides.
It’s easy to pretend there are no downsides and people like to structure policy opinions as if this was the case, but it rarely is.
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> “ Robin Hanson proposed stores where banned products could be sold.1 There are a number of excellent arguments for such a policy—an inherent right of individual liberty, the career incentive of bureaucrats to prohibit everything, legislators being just as biased as individuals. But even so (I replied), some poor, honest, not overwhelmingly educated mother of five children is going to go into these stores and buy a “Dr. Snakeoil’s Sulfuric Acid Drink” for her arthritis and die, leaving her orphans to weep on national television.
I was just making a factual observation. Why did some people think it was an argument in favor of regulation?
On questions of simple fact (for example, whether Earthly life arose by natural selection) there’s a legitimate expectation that the argument should be a one-sided battle; the facts themselves are either one way or another, and the so-called “balance of evidence” should reflect this. Indeed, under the Bayesian definition of evidence, “strong evidence” is just that sort of evidence which we only expect to find on one side of an argument.
But there is no reason for complex actions with many consequences to exhibit this onesidedness property. Why do people seem to want their policy debates to be one-sided?
Politics is the mind-killer. Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you’re on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it’s like stabbing your soldiers in the back. If you abide within that pattern, policy debates will also appear one-sided to you—the costs and drawbacks of your favored policy are enemy soldiers, to be attacked by any means necessary.”
Nonsense. Government organizations never do things in secret. The very idea is patently absurd. I mean, how would that even happen in practice, someone does something without blasting it on Twitter, as I said, absurd.
There are boatloads of laws in any democracy that would never survive a referendum. This law is one example.
Let's face facts here: 90% of the aim is to make policing cheaper and more pervasive. To make it possible for algorithms to police people, because then those algorithms can replace attention by police officers. Even most police officers themselves wouldn't agree to that.
I’m truly astonished that there are people who refuse to believe that the people in power are constantly conspiring. It’s like you are completely ignoring all evidence, or discounting it as one-offs.
Sure, maybe it’s not NWO or the illuminati, but you can’t possibly dismiss all the behavior we see and impacts we experience?
Sure, but it's not a singular shadowy cabal in a star chamber. There are different groups who all have an negative impact on our lives.
The banal and stupid: Elon Musk and his fellow trust fund buddies and VCs doing jello shots and going "Antifa sucks amirite?" and acting on their stupidity because they have money and power.
Banal and stupid category 2: CEO groupthink. Let's all have layoffs before there's an actual recession because activist stockholders demand it and we don't have the guts to propose something better.
Then there's the John Birch Societies of the world: the actual organized shadow political movements. The Koch brothers using massive corporate profits to fund the right wing think tanks over multiple decades. They don't take credit, but the ascent of the right wing crazies is entirely down to them and fellow travelers.
Banal and stupid category 3: the people attending the WEF/Davos. enough said.
etc. you can probably list your favorites here, and you might slice them differently than I have. What there isn't is a single central group making decisions for the rest of us, nor is there any organized left-wing cabal. If you do think there's any kind of organized left-wing group of any sort in America, I'd love to know about it, because I'd like to join that group and I've never seen one in 20 years of looking.
If you study system theory you'll understand that a bunch of seemingly self-motivated actors without a central leader can achieve a system-wide outcome.
A ant colony might be a simple example of this.
> If you do think there's any kind of organized left-wing group of any sort in America
I’m neither American, nor was talking about “left wing” American cabals that control the world.
I’m not sure why this has to be a singular group. It’s a tale as old as time, rich vs poor. One can clearly observe multiple not-necessarily-colluding but powerful groups globally and locally, who all aim to control and subjugate the rest of us.
This makes no sense to be a semantic debate where you grind an axe that “there is not just one illuminati” and act like that means something impressive.
It's like being biten by an unknown insect and refusing to acknowledge the fact for the lack of a correct binomial nomenclature for that insect. No name = no entity, that's their motto.
Another way of phrasing this is "always argue against the best possible interpretation of your opponents argument."
It's a HN rule for good reason. It makes your own arguments stronger.
Even if your opponent _is_ a shadowy new world order cabal member or supporter, arguing against the best possible interpretation which requires of their stance helps sway random citizen X who may not know of or believe in such a cabal.
That’s fair, but it’s still an unsavory argument style. “I know the secret motivations of those in power, which even they don’t know”. It’s a weird way to remove agency from the powerful in the name of, IDK what.
I think hide implies intent to deceive. It's often more like conscious and sub-conscious reasoning. We constantly tell a story to ourselves about our motives. We're impulsive and wrong a lot of the time. And nobody is the bad guy in their own story.
Maybe it's willful ignorance. Ignorance of the misuse and harm of mass surveillance.
Maybe. Are you as open to the idea that those who oppose surveillance (that’s me) also have secret motives and engage in willful ignorance, so you can’t trust my anti-surveillance arguments? Because, the theory goes, even I don’t know the dark motives that are making me say those things?
Do you see how impossible any dialog becomes in that model?
If you frame it as ignorance, the next step is to enlighten the other side with the factual arguments you want to make. "The threat landscape isn't as bad as you claim it is." "Mass surveillance has downsides that are worse than you would think." If you assert deceptive intent, it kind of slides into character attacks.
It's true that people sometimes don't argue in good faith, and it's fair to question hidden motives. But I think if you have better facts, you should keep arguing the facts.
> It doesn’t need any New World Order conspiracy either.
NWO is not a conspiracy theory any longer. This exact terminology is openly used by many politicians now, demanding for a NWO. Depending which bubble you live in, you have not seen any or only too little such speeches.
The term New World Order has been used for over a century by politicians. It’s hardly believable that Woodrow Wilson was using a secret code word to communicate a plan to do evil things in the 21st century when he was advocating for the League of Nations.
It never was. Conspiracy nutheads just took it for them, and gave it their own evil twist. They always take something and see the evil option in it, and sell it as some fact which never was there. A similar thing happened recently with the term "Great Reset".
But the simple truth is, we always strive for a better world, so aiming for a new world order is something totally normal happening. Nobody thinks the world today is flawless.
Example, even though I don't believe many of the conspiracy theories regarding them, here's the WEF calling for everyone to literally build a "New World Order."
Not necessarily an intentional conspiracy, but it can just be that of a herd mentality. As a species, we are conditioned to follow the herd, to go along to get alone. Those that do not follow tend to get trampled, their concerns not even listened to.
