Thank you, that was new to me. I always felt a connection between those three books — We, Brave New World, 1984 — but this review really is the missing piece. He opens the review by describing the similarities between We and Brave New World, closes the review contrasting them politically. I can almost hear the wheels turning in his head, it feels like this review is an early treatment for 1984.
> "Perrin now offers a different framing. “Article 8 ter, which I had adopted, was not at all aimed at obtaining encryption keys but at introducing a ghost participant into a conversation before encryption,” he says. The “ghost participant” approach, sometimes called a ghost user proposal, was floated by GCHQ in 2018 and rejected by every major privacy organization, civil liberties group, and security researcher who looked at it. The idea is that the platform silently adds a third recipient, an invisible intelligence agent, to a supposedly two-person conversation. Users never see them. The encryption technically still works, except that one of the parties is the state."
The virtues you mention are not a consequence of the tortuous treatment described in the post though. Conditions could rise to Western humane standards and the underlying Japanese culture that allows for such peaceful living would still remain.
You can't take the Japanese criminal justice system out of Japan. It's part of a larger whole.
The Western mentality, especially in the USA, focuses on independent will. The government is not supposed to stop people from making choices that are bad for society or bad for themselves. In Japan, the mentality is that every person has an obligation to work with society and to fit in at all costs. The Japanese criminal justice system exemplifies that spirit, but it touches all areas, such as employment, personal relationships, behavior in public, talking to strangers, etc.
In short, if you want to have the advantages of Japan, you need to take it with the disadvantages as well.
Skid row isn’t abandonment, CA spends $47K per homeless person per year in direct and indirect assistance. It exists as it does due to intentional and well funded policy.
Even granting that (which... no. How is it true? Any evidence?) it's still less inhumane than what Japan is doing here. The conditions amount to torture.
The fact that many people opt to falsely plead guilty and get a reduced punishment in a society that highly values honor and saving face should say a lot about it.
Californian spend on homelessness is public info, you’re free to search it yourself.
There is something about seeing drug addicted zombies impossibly contorted in on themselves and swaying in the wind that appears very inhuman to me. If given the choice, pre zombification, of a false confession or life as a zombie I know which I would chose.
Extreme control of movement and sleep including deprivation of it for arbitrary amounts, constant lighting, no outside time, nothing to do for months at a time, lack of nutritious food, all those things in combination constitue torture under most modern definitions.
Ooh, I hadn't read that one, have put on my list. I couldn't read the page properly because ads keep popping up and making the page jump around... but it seems the linked section was be about displacement of workers? If so, that's always been true of all technology, but that's less a problem with technology and more with the social system it is applied in. I just posted this comment elsewhere that may be relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48078930
It's not about the displacement of workers. It talks about a fundamental principles-level objection to unbounded "progress". It's not an absolute argument and Orwell himself says so, but it is worth keeping in mind.
Much as we'd like that to be true ideally, does it happen (in terms of inequality reducing)? I see no evidence of that, it ebbs and flows in various time periods and civilizations. One can try to resist that reversion to the mean but they'd historically be proven wrong.
For a start by not tearing down the systems that kept inequality in check in the past. Like union membership or banking regulation etc. just to name some examples.
It's not about "design", because the iPhone is perfectly capable of running arbitrary code, it just refuses to do so if you're not Apple.
The situation is such that the legal owner of the device has less power over it, post-sale, than the company that made it.
That reason alone, the imbalance of power, should be enough to support abolishing those restrictions, preferably by law.
To be clear: this is something that should be beyond market forces, and it should apply to anything that is sold to consumers and can run code. The end goal should be that no user remain less powerful, in terms of code execution and access to content, than the manufacturer.
> It's not about "design", because the iPhone is perfectly capable of running arbitrary code
It is a very intentional UX choice to mitigate malware for users who do not know how to evaluate the legitimacy of software on their own. And studies show that this is a very effective policy, both perceived (e.g. marketing) and real (actual breach statistics).
You can mitigate malware while still allowing for the same level of end-user control as the manufacturer. Look at Windows itself! People getting infected on up-to-date installations is a rarity nowadays, all without draconian lockdown policies.
It took windows many decades to get there and the reputational harm was already done by then. Android is not doing particularly well but it has improved significantly.
> "The fact is that a mere training in one or more of the exact sciences, even combined with very high gifts, is no guarantee of a humane or sceptical outlook."
While the article points out many worrying trends which are true, I would caution against making far-reaching predictions, especially if they involve drastic, rapid change.
This was a good read. The author makes a valid point that there is no distinction to be made between Communism and Fascism as they both represent Authoritarianism.
> "The point is that as soon as fear, hatred, jealousy and power worship are involved, the sense of reality becomes unhinged. And, as I have pointed out already, the sense of right and wrong becomes unhinged also. There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when ‘our’ side commits it. Even if one does not deny that the crime has happened, even if one knows that it is exactly the same crime as one has condemned in some other case, even if one admits in an intellectual sense that it is unjustified – still one cannot feel that it is wrong. Loyalty is involved, and so pity ceases to function."
> you're going to be shocked, SHOCKED, to find out that 28% of Americans now support Hamas
No. The question is "in the Israel-Hamas conflict do you support more Israel or more Hamas?" That's different from supporting Hamas. Even I'd be on the fence about answering "more Hamas" over "more Israel," though I'd mostly be irritated at the false dichotomy and false equivalence the question implies.
(I'd guess 10 to 20% of Americans support Hamas because that's the fraction that support just about anything, from the flat Earth to the genocide of penguins or whatever.)
> that support for Hamas will only grow stronger as the elderly Americans that are still largely against Hamas die off and replaced by younger Americans that support Hamas
Dig deeper into the polls. It's a strong minority in Gen Z and Alpha. It's not commanding. And it reveals itself for what it is when you ask people to name their No. 1 issue.
I respect folks who have turned this into their pet issue. Ultimately, foreign policy isn't going to be front and centre in American politics unless there is a draft. (And most Americans aren't monsters.)
It doesn't matter if it's the #1 issue or not. What matters is the few % of people that cause tight elections to shift. And it was enough to cause Kamala Harris to lose the election. Israel's attack on Gaza was the primary reason Biden 2020 voters chose not to vote for Harris, per scientific polls (YouGov). And that was from 2 years ago. America has only become more pro-Hamas since.
You can defend the existence of the foreign genocidal state all you want but you really have to understand that Israel is cooked. There is no turning back. It's a dead state walking. And the vast majority of their base of support is in the elderly, which will all die off in 20 years.
