I think it’s very relevant when it intersects with privacy. This often simply is the case in regard to conversations about granting law enforcement more power.
We’ve had numerous threads about various countries, US, (CISPA, SOPA, EARN IT, Section 230) UK, (IPA) EU (chat control) Australia (AA Bill) and anything in relation to government wanting backdoors or tech.
This does come with the territory.
Facts and good faith is what are tenants to this community which is generally why bad faith nonfactual posts aren’t received well.
One of the biggest problems on the internet at the moment is echo chambers where people read posts about what they want to read rather than being able to tolerate opinions different to their own. Partly this is driven by algorithmic factors that prioritize engagement over any sort of quality debate.
As a result we get extremely polarized view points which often don’t match up with reality and a complete inability to participate in a conversation and leave with “huh, I guess I was wrong, but least I learned something” attitude.
Yeah, I think when I proposed this I saw PG as a place where many minds across the political divides came together and it was and is a good opportunity to share our common interest of privacy and individualism while having a variety of ideas on how to implement that.
I do appreciate that this distracts from the goal now despite the fact that you can’t separate the two. I do still think we should collect a list of communities that do foster these types of conversations and make it kind of a practice in the community to suggest continuing the conversation at one of these locations.
The good faith conversations need to happen, and I think best of all would be a kind of consensus building version of reddit that aims to collectively distill points being made into a wiki rather than the back and forth dialogue being front and center. The web design would need to make a clear distinction from Reddit and other social media front ends else people will treat it the same. I think something closer to the workflow of GitHub and Forejo but you see wikis instead of code trees and the editing closer to wiki.js but with all the merging and PR views implemented.
Pretty much you could have a dialogue and cite some references that support your views and slowly build a wiki that descriptively points out what views exist and why, where you agree and disagree.
I think semantics, emotions, and public pressure gets in this way of most political discourse online and if you can first aim to simply state what viewpoints exist then slowly work towards consensus or agree to disagree and let that be a place for further research and discussion be slowly added to, then you get people speaking from the same foundation.
The definition of politics is ‘a set of activities associated with collective decision-making or other forms of power relations between individuals, such as the distribution of resources or social status.’ In other words, politics is the pursuit of power and the means to maintain it.
Privacy and security are fundamentally antithetical to any form of politics; power relations, whether between individuals or groups, cannot exist without compromising these interests. The only way to reconcile these domains is to accept that, in politics:
Certain forces are inherently good while others are inherently evil
We can precisely and objectively identify most of these forces
We must eradicate those we deem evil through a consensus that, at best, is extremely limited or biased
The definition quoted ‘a set of activities associated with collective decision-making or other forms of power relations between individuals, such as the distribution of resources or social status.’ and the interpretation ‘politics is the pursuit of power and the means to maintain it.’ are two completely different definitions.
You could simplify and just say politics are “collective decision-making.”
I agree with the sentiment that privacy is inherently linked with politics.
There is a very real negative connotation associated with the term “politics” though. Lot of people will completely shut down when just hearing the word.
