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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • I don’t think it’s either/or, having empathy for someone who killed himself because of the horrible things his country persuaded him to do doesn’t preclude having empathy for his victims, and it doesn’t mean absolving the crime. It is reality that everyone involved is victimized by war.

    the world already did what you are scared about to the Palestinians and is continuing to do so

    Part of how this was done is by using the emotional weight of atrocities for dehumanization of those claimed to be responsible. You might say that we don’t need to acknowledge the humanity of everyone universally, because the murderers have crossed a clear line by their own free will. But there is a concerted effort to obfuscate that line and drag everyone into plausible complicity; mandatory military service, suppression and murder of journalists, manipulative propaganda campaigns, it’s all effective and hardly anyone is genuinely immune.

    Which isn’t to say the framing in the OP article is right; saying slaughtering people like that is “difficult to accept”, “psychological trauma”, calling all the victims “terrorists”, makes what should be an issue of recognizing and reacting to injustice into a problem of medical treatment to get people to be ok with doing the evil things the state directs them to do. That’s more manipulative propaganda, and many people will be convinced by it. The simplest counter that is least subject to being twisted is the conviction that everyone is always human and should be treated with empathy, without exception.


  • do they need to? I don’t think so.

    Why not? How can you be sure that all these laws are going to be about all the same things and not have many tricky edge cases? What would keep them from being like that? Again, these laws give unique rights to residents of their respective states to make particular demands of websites, and they aren’t copy pastes of each other. There’s no documented ‘best practices’ that is guaranteed to encompass all of them.

    they don’t want this solution, however, but in my understanding instead to force every state to have weaker privacy laws

    I can’t speak to what they really want privately, but in the industry letter linked in the article, it seems that the explicit request is something like a US equivalent of the GDPR:

    A national privacy law that is clear and fair to business and empowering to consumers will foster the digital ecosystem necessary for America to compete.

    To me that seems like a pretty sensible thing to be asking for; a centrally codified set of practices to avoid confusion and complexity.


  • In 2022, industry front groups co-signed a letter to Congress arguing that “[a] growing patchwork of state laws are emerging which threaten innovation and create consumer and business confusion.” In 2024, they were at it again this Congress, using the term four times in five paragraphs.

    Big Tobacco did the same thing.

    Is this really a fair comparison though? A variety of local laws about smoking in restaurants makes sense because restaurants are inherently tied to their physical location. A restaurant would only have to know and follow the rules of their town, state and country, and the town can take the time to ensure that its laws are compatible with the state and country laws.

    A website is global. Every local law that can be enforced must be followed, and the burden isn’t on legislators to make sure their rules are compatible with all the other rules. Needing to make a subtly different version of a website to serve to every state and country to be in full compliance with all their different rules, and needing to have lawyers check over all of them would create a situation where the difficulty and expense of making and maintaining a website or other online service is prohibitive. That seems like a legitimate reason to want unified standards.

    To be fair there are plenty of privacy regulations that this wouldn’t apply to, like the example the article gives of San Francisco banning the use of facial recognition tech by police. But the industry complaint linked in the article references laws like https://www.oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa and https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/sb21-190 that obligate websites to fulfill particular demands made by residents of those states respectively. Subtle differences in those sorts of laws seems like something that could cause actual problems, unlike differences in smoking laws.





  • If you are at the point where you are having to worry about government or corporate entities setting traps at the local library? You… kind of already lost.

    What about just a blackmailer assuming anyone booting an OS from a public computer has something to hide? And then they have write access and there’s no defense, and it doesn’t have to be everywhere because people seeking privacy this way will have to be picking new locations each time. An attack like that wouldn’t have to be targeted at a particular person.