With due respect, it is time to go outside.

Individual data points like “I take pilates”, “I work nights and weekends”, and “I live in Smalltown, ST” might not mean anything on their own, but if you can connect this data to a single person, then realize there’s only one pilates studio in Smalltown, then look up their hours and notice there’s only one day class on weekdays, you can make a reasonable guess as to a regular time when a person is away from home. This is called data brokerage.

This is a comically contrived example; the real danger is in the association of countless data points spread across millions of correlated identities. It’s not just your data, it’s the association of your data with that of your friends and family. Most people are constantly streaming their location, purchases, beliefs, and affiliations out to anyone who cares enough to look. Bad actors may collate their data and use it to take advantage of them, and the only move they have is to ask for prohibitive legislation. As if we don’t already have prohibitive legislation.

Anonymity is expensive, inconvenient, and fragile, but it’s the only mechanism that protects individuals from the information economy, which I would put right next to ecology in terms of critical 21st-22nd century social problems. It also helps us resist censorship, but that’s a different essay.

He cannot protec
Nor can he attac
But he is a little hat

Your fan fiction about the internal motivations of those who disagree with you is not rational or empirical. You’re literally making stuff up right now.

Not an argument.

That’s not an argument.

Not an argument.

I won’t be dragged down to your level, man.

That’s like saying that a flat income tax is a progressive tax because some people have more income.

Source: Wikipedia

I think you’re talking about the poltiical philosophy of progressivism as opposed to progressive tax, especially progressive income tax.

I do not propose either to purchase or to confiscate private property in land. The first would be unjust; the second, needless. Let the individuals who now hold it still retain, if they want to, possession of what they are pleased to call their land. Let them continue to call it their land. Let them buy and sell, and bequeath and devise it. We may safely leave them the shell, if we take the kernel. It is not necessary to confiscate land; it is only necessary to confiscate rent.
──Henry George, Progress and Poverty

Not an argument.

“Progressive tax” refers to a tax rate which increases as taxable revenue increases. It doesn’t have anything to do with progressive cultural values. Georgism is based on a flat tax of a special resource, economic rent. Given how prone this forum is to willful misinterpretation, I should specify that I don’t support flat income tax, or any income tax for that matter.

That’s not an argument. I’m American, but none of these issues are exclusively American. There’s certainly lots of room for discussion of each of these issues, but the crux of my comment is that public policy is more complicated than @PoopingCough’s implication that there are no valid points outside the Everyone Vs. The Nazis false dichotomy.

Off the top of my head we’ve got progressive taxes, intersectionality (and general racism/sexism, rebranded daily), industrial welfare, the over-criminalization of social and economic conduct, arbitrary nationalization of resources and services, negative ROI public spending, unchecked support for labor unions, the subsidization of academia, and a general willingness to create unconstitutional law from any branch of government according to a broad, irrational, committee morality. Socialists take markets for granted and speak of privacy as though it’s part of the commons. In short, the left wing trends towards institutional collectivism at the cost of the individual liberties which are the foundation of collective action.

I am an economically centrist libertarian. I believe taxes should be based on resource use, not productivity, welfare should be unconditional, not coercive (and half liquid, not locked into the discretion of committee thinking), criminal law should be based on justice, not morality, and public spending should be productive, not performative.

For the record I have a separate laundry list of grievances with the right wing. I’ll zoom out since I’m facing left right now, but theocracy, monopoly, draconianism, the ignorance of systemic violations of natural rights, and support for the growth of industrial complexes (military, prison, healthcare, etc.) are among the issues. There’s a bipartisan willingness to replace justice with morality in the application of force; a viral acceptance of abuse followed by a question of flavor. What symbol would you like to be branded into the boot on your neck?

We are in this sensitive, polarized position because industry overwhelmed our agrarian notions of justice. That does not deprecate those notions. We should focus on the economic limitations that aggravate cultural issues and escalate us towards war.

Relatable. Obviously completely unacceptable behavior. Yet relatable.

That’s a good thing. Discord is chugging its way through the last half of the Web 2.0 service to social media pipeline. It’s a VC-funded multimedia enterprise extended around a novel technology core optimized for its original service offering, real-time voice/text. Nobody is immune to bloat, but because Matrix is a protocol standard, not an app, users have the option of sticking with minimal clients and servers that won’t (necessarily) get destroyed by feature creep.

If you’ve tried Element and thought “ah, slow Discord,” maybe have a scroll through https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/. I don’t want to get off topic but all my favorite software is standard/specification-based.

https://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/

Don’t wait in town.