That law was a response to Robert Bork's video rental history being published during his confirmation hearings.
For the issue at hand, I'm well in favor of subjecting our lawmakers to the privacy breaches we all should be protected from. No better way to get them to act.
What's funny about the VPPA is that it's so narrow in scope, to the point where it must have been deliberately so. It's not like people were unaware in the late 80s of where the information economy would lead. Of course nothing like "ad tech" existed back then, but the fact that only a specific type of product purchase/rental was covered suggests that the law was never intended to actually protect consumers.
You are not a moral arbiter. Moralism is relative - some people will find it quite ethical to make sure that the people in power are being held to the same standard as their constituents. Especially when those people in power are removing autonomy from people. AND especially when those people in power can keep their autonomy by ensuring they can travel to blue states or overseas in case they need more freedom.
Some people have so little empathy that they can't identify with a situation until it happens to them. It's about showing them why this shit is a bad idea in literally the only way possible.
You mistake what the issue is in this thread. This isn’t D vs R or the 2 sides of the abortion legality issue.
This thread is about whether there is hypocrisy among the lawmakers and whether law should allow such sensitive data to be available for purchase. Data of this sensitive nature are fairly costly to violate for people governed by HIPAA, but few or no penalties for others.
I’m curious if any existing blackmail or cyberstalking statutes could cover the likely uses of these data.
It does end, because real world antagonists are not the evenly-matched abstractions of game theory.
Consider an iterated dyadic game, but with a different weighting matrix for each participant, or a single matrix defining percentage rather than fixed payoffs. Chaotic factors aside, differentials will compound with iteration. It's NP-hard to say when (like predicting when or how a poker or a baseball game will terminate) but the fact that it will terminate is a very safe bet.
You are right that it might well end in war, but wars themselves are eventually won or lost (even if they have sequels). If avoiding war is your overarching goal, you need to minimize the fraction of the population experiencing life-and-death issues. If their self-assessment of their lives' net present value falls too low, they're incentivized to bet on reducing that of their opponents.
Are civil wars the fault of the people who hold politicians accountable? The tit for tat here only works if the politicians arw actually up to shady stuff. Thats the issue
The tit for tat exists because there is nothing left binding your country together.
Do you not see there are now people with complete, diametrically opposed views on morality in your country?
The exact same thing, one person will look at it and see murder and another see nothing wrong. One will see transexuals in kindergarten and say “how brave” other will see a nightmare horror. One looks at your very government and sees either the far left or the far right.
Do you not see there is no such thing as the american people now?
Why do you keep pretending you are a country when you are clearly not. Why do you want to live with the other in the same country? Why do you want to force them to live with you?
> Why do you keep pretending you are a country when you are clearly not. Why do you want to live with the other in the same country? Why do you want to force them to live with you?
I'm unsure what else the nation could do with these people. Ship them somewhere else? One side is waiting for the other side to attrition out (Pew Research Voter Demographics corpus). What other options are available? Who else would want them?
The people who don't believe in the peaceful transfer of power and believe in subjugating the rights of others due to their own belief systems don't want to negotiate or compromise. How do you work with opposition who doesn't want progress, but only to make someone suffer? You cannot, so you lean into whatever will work.
> “One of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty,” he told the group. “We encourage you to be neat, obedient, and loyal, and faithful, and all those Boy Scout words, which would be great around the campfire but are lousy in politics.”
You don’t need to post articles, or, well, not to me at least. I didn’t go to the link. I won’t either. It doesn’t matter what it says.
What matters is it’s a vox article. Sending a vox article is like quoting a bible verse. I’m sure it is very meaningful to you. But to many other americans, it simply is not.
On the other side, if someone posted some right wing newspaper, it would be like them quoting the quoran at you. Surely it’s deeply meaningful to them, but, how can the quoran be true? The bible is true! They are stupid and their heads are filled with lies!
And they think exactly the same about you. You are the stupid one with the head filled with lies.
I’m sure you are convinced you are actually in fact right. You have “science” or “statistics” or “reputable journalists” on your side.
There are a million ways to convince one’s self of something. They are just as convinced as you.
As for your question
> What else would you have us do with them?
Work towards a peaceful breakup of the united states, based not on geography but on moral outlook.
It won’t happen though. So, I guess the tit for tat will continue and escalate until it gets to guns and worse.
—-
PS: When I wrote that I’m sure you are convinced you are right, the article spam was precisely the kind of thing I was trying to preempt. I’m sure all those articles support your point of view. I have no doubt. “The others” articles, they support their point of view.
Let me propose an experiment. For a whole week, do not consume your regular media diet and instead consume “the others”. Walk a mile in their mocassins as it were. Take it as an exercise in empathy.
> You don’t need to post articles, or, well, not to me at least. I didn’t go to the link. I won’t either. It doesn’t matter what it says.
> Let me propose an experiment. For a whole week, do not consume your regular media diet and instead consume “the others”. Walk a mile in their mocassins as it were. Take it as an exercise in empathy.
You're aware you wrote these two paragraphs in the same post, yes?
> Let me propose an experiment. For a whole week, do not consume your regular media diet and instead consume “the others”. Walk a mile in their mocassins as it were. Take it as an exercise in empathy.
> In an unusual, and labor intensive, project, two political scientists paid a group of regular Fox News viewers to instead watch CNN for a month. At the end of the period, the researchers found surprising results; some of the Fox News watchers had changed their minds on a range of key issues, including the US response to coronavirus and Democrats’ attitude to police. Polls have previously shown that viewers of Fox News, the most-watched cable news channel in the US, are far more likely to believe the false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen than the average American, and are more likely to believe falsehoods about Covid-19. By the end of September, the CNN watchers were less likely to agree that: “It is an overreaction to go out and protest in response to the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin” and less likely to believe that: “If Joe Biden is elected President, we’ll see many police get shot by Black Lives Matter activists”, when compared with their peers who continued watching Fox News. The CNN switchers were also, as Bloomberg’s Matthew Yglesias reported, 10 points less likely to believe that Joe Biden supporters were happy when police officers get shot, and 11 points less likely to believe that it is “more important for the President to focus on violent protests than the coronavirus pandemic”. In addition the CNN viewers were 13 points less likely than the Fox News viewers to agree that: “If Joe Biden is elected President, we’ll see many more police get shot by Black Lives Matter activists.”
> The people in the experiment, Kalla said, were “overwhelmingly pro-Trump Republicans”. Given Trump had spent much of his presidency bashing CNN – a regular chant at his rallies was “CNN sucks!” – the results are particularly surprising. “A lot of people might expect this audience to completely resist what CNN had to say, but we see people learning what CNN was reporting and changing their attitudes, too. It is therefore surprising that watching CNN had any impact at all in this experiment,” Kalla said.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/jrw26 (The manifold effects of partisan media on viewers’ beliefs and attitudes: A field experiment with Fox News viewers)
Well, for the record i would be fine with the us splitting up honestly. But thats not what were talking about, were talkings about politicians who make abortions/morality things illegal then get abortions/those morality things themselves. I dont think either side is on board with that.
It’s not about views. It’s like with vaccination: one side is right, and the other is lunatics. Same with abortion: abortion ban is a moral equivalent of flat earth. It’s not a “view”, it’s organized stupidity.
How is this tit-for-tat? If right-wing lawmakers are banning abortion in their state, yet sending their girlfriends, daughters and mistresses out of state to have the procedure done, how is that tit-for-tat?
Considering this data is dangerous to far more innocent women and abortion doctors than Republican lawmakers, it doesn't seem very wise to gloat about it.
Do you think these lawmakers will care enough to attempt to stop this from happening going forward, if it doesn't affect them personally? I do not. They have shown an almost aggressive lack of empathy.
The country functions with differences in morality. It has for the past 50 years. The only reason it would not work is if some people try to force their morals on others when the situation has nothing to do with them.
If you believe that, using it on lawmakers is probably the absolute fastest, most effective, and best targeted way to limit the damage that can be done.
I didn't say this was good, I'm merely pointing out that this is an inevitability^H^H^Hpossibility now that the data is available. No moral judgement provided.
Maybe. But to get it to stop, you have to make politicians care more about the actual humanitarian issues than the money they get from special interests.
You say that as if it was some law written in stone, whereas it's nothing more than a thought experiment by an influential philosopher (which, in itself, is far from an absolute authority wrt how humans should behave).
> a thought experiment by an influential philosopher
Plus, this particular philosopher would very likely display a lot of intolerance against those proposing its usage so generously. And he would bite himself in the arse for even stating it because of course people misunderstand the meaning.
True, but every system needs some exception handling. The US Constitution is a long-running system but contains several broad exceptions relating to war because that's an existential problem.
Right. I think of the exception handling layer as the human part of a trial that is supposed to look at the spirit of the laws rather than the textual interpretation of them, but in practice it's far from perfect, I know.
Which is the tolerated here? Allowing abortions or not allowing abortions? Because obviously this phrase can be applied to both making it rather useless as a rationalization for either side.
What’s intolerable is being against abortions while simulatenously making use of that service. There's something just too hypocritical about being against medical procedures while personally benefiting from them, be it anti-vaxxers who are fully vaccinated, or anti-abortion activists who want to prevent others from having access to abortions while quietly going a state over and having one for themselves or their wife/girlfriend/mistress/daughter. If you're against something, fine, but practice what you preach. This is especially true for those preaching very loudly.
Hypocrisy never bothers politicians. For every activity X, the staunchest opponents of X will loudly defend their own X actions. Both sides are guilty of this. Laws are meant to bind one's opponents only.
No need. You'll also find their donors on the list. Pointing out how the rules don't apply to these guys isn't really new or interesting. When was the last time a member of the GOP lost their seat because of acting against one of the party's supposed tenants of family values, small government, liberty, etc.? Their voters simply don't care.
Great example of why this is so dangerous, there are people like you who are willing to exploit this data for political purposes.
In this case, this is planned parenthood attendance, but it could very well have been a political rally for your political opponents, that you could then use to get them fired.
