"What's amusing to be is how anyone can look at the incompetence of governments across the world, and conclude they'd be capable of any kind of organized conspiracy against the general population."
You see conspiratorial thinking as some kind of bug in the thinking of insuffciently skeptical and analytical minds; a branch of stupidity. But it's not. It's a self-defense mechanism which, like other things considered antiquated and ineffcient like borders and control over immigration saves people from mass death.
These things don't exist because people are stupid and can't reason. They exist because people aren't stupid and do reason and then believe in their own mind's creations.
No matter how smart or sophisticated or computer-aided your reasoning is, no matter how big your data set becomes, you will only match and elucidate upon, but not beat, instincts which evolved under real Darwinian pressures which make you aware and wary of things which kill en masse.
The listed examples are conspiracies by the dictionary definition - "a group of people acting in harmony to a common, illegal end" - but I don't think they're the same thing the parent poster was referring to. Conspiracy theories generally revolve around some secret action by the government or other large organizations, not open slaughter. A better example might be COINTELPRO.
Technically the government itself is a form of conspiracy against the general population. But people don't know that, even educated people, because political science isn't mandatory in higher education. But labeling something as conspiracy theory is a useful tool to silence discussions about all the evil governments and large organizations do.
Right. Conspiracies happen all the time because there are plans, which if understood by those upon whom the planners wish to enact them, would be rejected by their targets.
That describes most plans people have.
So the planners deceive and dissemble. That is how the world has always worked.
What's more, it's instinctive knowledge that this is happening all the time. Suspicion of those in power is a human instinct which, like all instincts, optimizes our survival chances under the conditions for which it evolved. WRT to political conspiracies, those conditions still hold today.
The way to think about conspiracy theories is the same way you think about inventors and inventions.
Nature produces inventors (conspiracy minded individuals) many of whom produce only harebrained inventions ("conspiracy theories" so called) some more who produce hit and miss inventions and a few which produce inventions which are overwhelming important and matter to survival ("Hitler is going to kills us all, we must flee right now!" - spoken by a Jew in 1933 Munich).
What this mapping between domains, inventions and conspiracies, also implies is that just because someone was wrong about one conspiracy doesn't mean they are wrong about all conspiracies and their credibility should not be automatically bankrupted if they believe one or two false conspiracy theories.
I do read some conspiracy theory sites and like to hear plausible (non-alien/ lizard people) ones because I want my mind to at least entertain the idea. It's like panning for gold. Most of it is nothing. Once in a while, maybe a little taste of something and I retain it dimly awaiting future possible supporting evidence.
For example, the "desperate labor shortage" and "Americans don't like STEM" meme is a clear conspiracy amongst employers and attorneys and their clients to control engineering wages and have more of the profits go to business owners. I used to not know about that "conspiracy theory" then I heard it and wondered if it could be true then over time the evidence for it became incontravertible.
> Now, if I were the suspicious type, I might suggest that Sweden’s coronavirus policy was, from the very beginning, formulated with this endgame in mind: the weeding out of aged and infirm Swedes in order to free up residences, welfare benefits, and Lebensraum generally (pardon my French) for Muslim immigrants
Everyone should stop writing webpages which require javascript.
Javascript is a security nightmare responsible for the overhelming majority of web-based CVEs .
Javscript's contributes mostly fluff to the vast majority of webpages.
What's worse, some pages check for it and deliver a totally blank page if it's not enabled, just to punish the non-compliant.
Even worse than all of the above is the fact that Javscript is the vehicle through which users are IDed and tracked. It's the reason why telling your browser to dump-cookie at the end of a session is ineffective.
Javascript is popular because people who own websites demand it be enabled. They demand that so they can fingerprint you- no other REAL reason for Javascript's popularity.
Every single person on this particular forum eithers knows or can clearly see what I am saying is true, but their jobs depend on them selling their Javascript skills and that's the reason this post, as you read it, is fading to gray as its downvoted.
Javscript is the instrumentality of the surveillence state. That's 98% of its utility.
All webpages should have a non-Javascript, "here's the info" version available and the fact they don't is a scandal and we are the culprits.
Tools don't exist for their own sake. They exist to solve problems. In the world before javascript, we still had interactive applications on the internet, we just built them with different tools, which were usually worse than the security model of javascript. If we got rid of javascript, we wouldn't get rid of interactive applications, we'd just build them a different way again.
Also, you can definitely be fingerprinted without javascript. The web is a huge stack of technologies, and most of them can be fingerprinted, all the way down to at least layer 4. (...and layer 2 if you're not on a network you control)
JavaScript is not necessary on the majority of pages it's used on, but to say everybody should stop using it on the web is absurd. JS makes Google Docs, Slack, and a thousand other applications possible; without it, they'd need to be native applications instead (which, while needing to be manually installed, almost always don't have the level of sandboxing that browsers normally provide.)
"JS makes Google Docs, Slack, and a thousand other applications .."
...I never use.
Take all the JS on all the webpages and throw away every page to which it's not essential. Call the remainder set A.
From set A, throw away every application whose functionality could be essentially be replaced by something like an ASP or JSP/Servlet round-trip hit without it much bothering anyone, as in the olden days. Call the remainder Set B.
Take everything in set B and task yourself with creating a secure methodology of obtaining the same or similar level of utility not involving Javascript or anything less secure.
Compare the effort to do that with the sum total cost of what Javascript has inflicted on the world.
Include in your calculations direct financial losses, expenditures in counter-measures, all the manhours spent in ameliorating all the breaches in security caused by Javascript, all the human toll of being tracked - by Javascript- online...
In fact, let's just keep this simple, forget all that.
Every time any human being in any security agency in all nations the world over is engaged in any activity, offensive or defensive, which has as its ultimate root cause Javascript, just make that the bill you have to pay.
Now look at the net gain (Google Docs!) and the net cost and tell me Javascript is a great idea.
I got some time ago that not everyone shares my hierarchy of values and concerns. You use Twitter and Facebook and Google etc. etc ad naseum... all forks where each time I chose the other path.
But by saying "no" to that steaming pile of shit I don't find I've said no to modernity and I don't find myself disavantaged in any way. Those things are not modernity or even the web- they're gadgets. Gadgets you love and can't imagine living without, that's all, like the smartphone you have, and I don't.
J'accuse our world of the following. We have cost everyone incalcuable wealth, time, opportunity and frankly the attention of some of the best minds of the past two generations all to buy ourselves a very particular, circumscribed and unnecessary kind of interactivity on our computer screens.
We have recklessly trodden very far down a dangerous and even deadly path, step by step, merely because at each point along the way we counted our own sunk efforts and extant artefacts as the measure of all things. This, and we have effectively coerced the world into following us.
I have to agree with you. The vast majority of websites on the internet don't need JS for any functionality, and it's only used for ads, tracking, etc.
3M was shipping masks overseas until yesterday. Some people were buying out places like HomeDepot and Costco and selling them at huge markup. It's not "their" fault these independent agents behave this way. Culpability can be scrounged up, if it must, to the extent that previous administrations ignored their own experts warnings:
If you operationally define "good" as "fewer dead people" then reserving what masks there are for healthcare workers and first responders is a "good" because they are society's agents that can save people from death.
Not enough masks? Doctors nurses first on the lifeboat folks. That's just the way it is.
Sure, telling people not to buy them is a poor substitute for what ought to be individual conscience. How is the fact that such a substitute has to be sought "their" fault ?
I respect that you believe that and you can meaningfully connect the rhetoric of small government to specious criticism of consumer protections laws.
Just realize that to a significant part of the thinking public, it's NOT about that. It's about the government controlling everything from the size of your soda to your toilet seat size to the way your kids are educated to how you get your healthcare.
A significant part of the public does NOT believe if it's a good idea, and there are bad consequences to someone not following the good idea, it therefore ought to be a law. It's not cynical on their part at all.
Just trying to share with you the perspective of these people.
>It's about the government controlling everything from the size of your soda to your toilet seat size to the way your kids are educated to how you get your healthcare.
I see these things as falling under "consumer protection laws." There are lots of areas where the free market creates perverse incentives and society has created regulations in order to address these issues. We have food regulations because companies used to lie about the food they were selling, we have building codes because companies were constructing unsafe buildings, we have education regulation because schools were failing to provide a base-line education, and we are pushing for healthcare regulations because the private sector has fucked healthcare industry so badly that most of us feel that we should nuke it from orbit.
You might not agree with my take, but I assure you that we are talking about the same thing. You may not think the public agrees with these things, but regulations like this didn't appear out of thin air and private companies certainly didn't put them in place. What happened was the public got tired of dealing with these problems and elected politicians who did something about it.
The phenomena you're refering to is real. I acknowledge that this set of things exist. There also exists a set of regulations and administrative agency issued laws which are fundamentally political- coersive towards a political or social end and not a safety or public-good end, except in the expansive vision of the annointed who created them. People get pursued and punished over this set of regulations.
Anyone can convince themselves that such a set must exist just by answering the question - are there likely to be people in administrative agencies who had the specific ambition to put themselves into those positions to achieve a purely political, not "good public policy", ends?
In otherwords are there crusaders in the adminstrative agencies?
It's like asking if some politicians are crooked or if some people are criminals.
That's why it's an error to dismiss the cries of foul play when they're raised. We know those people are there somewhere.
20:1 minimum good to bad. Minimum. Even one "bad" a week may just be too much.
Also, limit the relative number of times you approach with something that "needs doing". You can't let your relationship turn into mere help-mate-ism.