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I must admit Musk has really invigorated the news coming from the US. My wildest ideas of how Trump could gut DoE that I wrote on The Motte no longer look so far-fetched. Elon is driving a bulldozer through every Chesterton's fence he can find in D.C.
If he manages to roll out a biometric national ID card to digitize access to government benefits before the end of Trump's term I'll start a petition to make his position of the man behind the curtain permanent.
Hmmm I personally would hate this, why are you so for it?
And yes I agree, I appreciate that a politician who got elected on downsizing the system is ACTUALLY doing that for a change. It's incredibly refreshing.
Why would you hate it? The only downside I can conceive are trivial relative to benefits.
First, that isn't something the federal government is allowed to do per the Constitution. So it's up to the states. Second, I don't want even the states accelerating the panopticon by incorporating all our biometrics into it. I don't know what benefits you have in mind, but I can't think of any which are not dwarfed by that massive cost.
The State already is a panopticon. The only fly in the ointment is that it's only a panopticon for members of society who are well-integrated into the economy, own assets, and generally "have something to lose."
This extends the panopticon to those who have nothing to lose. So we lose the anarcho part of anarchotyranny. Perhaps losing the tyranny part instead would be better, but throwing out the rulebook altogether seems a bigger lift than just ensuring it's applied universally.
This is undoubtedly true. But it seems to me that it's better to fight for that than to apply the tyranny to everyone (which is what you seem to be in favor of, correct me if I'm wrong).
I live in a city where the government will punish you more (up to putting a lien on your house and, if you don't pay the rapidly accumulating fines, appropriating it) if you change your windows to be double-paned without getting the appropriate permit than if you regularly go to elementary schools, expose yourself, and masturbate to the children. And god forbid if a taxpaying resident decides to perform any vigilante activism against the public masturbator. And, of course, the chronic masturbator can throw a rock through your window, and if you don't respond appropriately and request permission to fix it through the city channels, the same appropriation process begins.
This colors my views.
Is there some method for preventing you from wearing a mask and beating the vagrant senseless with a baseball bat? The police are unlikely to investigate this particularly beyond just declaring it a fight between bums, if he reports it at all. Is there 24/7 surveillance to stop you from just hiring a local Mexican to change the windows when the city isn't looking, and simply not telling anyone you did?
At a certain level, respectable and polite people make it easy to enforce laws unevenly against them.
As far as the vigilantism, more likely than not it would be fine. There's the risk of getting stabbed, and I'm a relatively petite guy. But getting stabbed with a hepatitic knife is kind of a medium case scenario. The worst case is the city figuring out it's some kind of vigilantism, deciding to make a grand symbolic point, and putting in the effort to ruin my and my family's lives. A year or two back a guy took a hose and sprayed down a homeless woman shitting in front of his business during open hours, and the city suddenly took far more interest in charging that assault than in homeless people stabbing each other. Additionally, there are hundreds of people doing the exact same thing or worse; it would be a drop in the bucket for little payoff.
People do do that, but it's taking a risk. You're surrounded by a 24/7 surveillance system called your neighbors. I'm on good terms with all of them, but if someone wanted to screw me over, it would be very easy.
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