I'm Danish and lars kragh andersen is a bit of a grey zone. He obviously goes over the line, he tried to put GPS trackers on the cars of ministers. He "stalks" their families, and dox their children online. He gave an interview on how he'd ignore people carrying a kilo gram of weed when he was a cop because he doesn't agree with the "war on drugs".
On the flip-side, he's sort of right. I assume that putting a GPS tracker on the car of our minister of justice is illegal, but that same minister (Peter Hummelgaard) is one of the key forces behind anti-encryption here in Europe. Similarily the politicians he stalk and harras are pro Palintir getting access to all our data, so Lars Andersen is sort of giving the politicians a taste of what they want to give everyone.
He goes way too far though. Especially if he actually wants change, the way he "protests" is directly damaging his own cause, since nobody is going to sympathise with harrassing children.
I suspect next time he'll have his cameras running with backup powers though.
>He goes way too far though. Especially if he actually wants change, the way he "protests" is directly damaging his own cause, since nobody is going to sympathise with harrassing children.
I don't think this is a given. Just Stop Oil says that their tactics do make people hate them, but their research tells them that it still makes peoples opinions on the issues move in the direction that they want them to. Their position is that if they achieve what they want while gathering animosity towards their organisation, once achieved, they can disband.
This is referred to as shifting the Overton window. If voices from the extreme are not heard, the Overton window moves away from their position, so protests help their cause even if only a minority completely agree with them.
I don't think Overton implied any causality between the phases of the window, just that distinct phases exist and that forces act on the window to cause it to shrink, expand, and shift.
Interestingly, considering my post above, I think that view of the Overton window misrepresents what Overton thought.
It was first and foremost a decription based on observation, but I think it conveyed that he felt that the Overton window was moved by vorces in the middle, and forces at the extremes moved it in the other direction.
There is a distinction to be made of how strongly the opinion is held compared to how much the opinion differs to the median view.
I think there is a correlation at the extremes, but I think the Just Stop Oil approach is deliberately splitting those two, performing extreme actions to promote a view that is not terribly extreme.
This is consistent with the view of the Overton window that the extremes repel and the moderate attracts.
Compare that to a vegan who doesn't campaign, but silently judges every meat eater as a murderer. If their views were more public, it may drive people the other way.
Teddy Roosevelt was the son of a wealthy and famous railroad baron, but he used that upbringing and status to rein in corporate monopolies and bust the oil barons' empires wide open, which started the decline of the gilded age. All that to say, being a wealthy, elite and privileged oil heiress doesn't necessarily mean this person doesn't want to end oil consumption.
If it is, would that bad? Seems like a person who might really have strong personal investment in the situation. Using the oil companies' profits to try to shrink them, seems good.
They should find some other way to peacock in front of their fellow upper-class friends, because it annoys the fuck out of normal people that Tarquin and Cecily come from money and thus have the free time to throw soup on paintings or whatever publicity-seeking guff they try next.
If they want to fix the climate crisis, they should engage with normal people and find effective ways for them to save money (e.g. like https://energysavingtrust.org.uk/ do) or pressure councils and such into providing better public transport (e.g. like https://bettertransport.org.uk/ do).
People don't consume oil because they intrinsicly like consuming oil. People use private cars that consume oil because nobody else gives a shit (especially not councils) about their needs to get from A to B on time and doesn't offer suitable public transport. People don't buy into mad schemes that require £20,000 upfront and might return about £200 a year in savings, just for ideological reasons. They need cheaper things that pay off sooner, like portable solar panels they can put out in the garden when it's sunny.
Probably the best thing they could do is tell all their other ecological activists to stop being NIMBYs and stop protesting against pylons, so we can get lovely clean renewable energy, generated by turbines in the North Sea, to all the places in Britain where it's needed, especially the south east of England.
If it’s a “well known tactic” (well known by whom?) then it’s a counter-productive one - the more the extreme is heard in the mainstream, the more rational the slightly less extreme version sounds (It’s something the right-wing tends to use extremely effectively, the left wing spends too much energy infighting)
For the first time, I see that being a problem to right-wing parties, specially in USA. Now you have neonazis gathering a community by saying you are not extreme enough, and harassing the Jewish people of your side. It's crazy when you compare that to 10 years ago, but it is what it is.
If politicians are attempting to undermine your children’s right to privacy forever, and yet these same politicians don’t like when this is being done to their own children…it shows either an astonishing level of hypocrisy and/or stupidity.
Europe is filled with these types of authoritarian urbanites, who make decisions from an elitist “i know what’s best for you” attitude while eating 6 course dinners. This is the same class of European leaders who steered the regions entire energy/economic/social policy so bad that the whole European model of the last few decades is in slow collapse and fiscally unsustainable. Yet ironically, the most common phrase you’ll hear while eating these 6 course dinners is “sustainability.”
These people are some of the worst hypocrites on pretty much every topic imaginable and need to be called out for it.
This is what I meant by the grey zone. I personally think it goes too far, but I agree with the point you make here. Where it becomes problematic is that the method does not get the point across to any audience which doesn't already agree with them.
Compare this to Jesper Graugaard, who is know locally as the "Chromebook-dad". He's been campaigning against big tech in our schools for like a decade, and after 6 years we recently had a ruling forbidding our cities from using Google services without proper data ownership agreements. He's obviously not the only party behind this, but he's a massive force in the agenda against non-EU tech in our schools. He does it through reform and political campaigning.
Jesper has wide public support, Lars is not viewed favourable. This story hasn't even hit our news, I've only heard about it here on HN.
I think you and I disagree. I don’t think Jesper is focused on the right issues.
Big tech (private companies who largely just care about profits) and foreign governments (the Americans for example), are way lower on my “things Europe should be worried” about list. They’re there of course, but lower.
Private companies don’t have the ability to ruin your life in the same way your own government does. They just want your money. And the US government is truly a disinterested party. 99% of Americans couldn’t place Denmark on a map (I’m not kidding). When push comes to shove, they fundamentally do not care what happens here.
The real threat is our own governments, who we have given the legal authority to enact all the negative outcomes that will come from totalitarian erosions of privacy and over regulation of individuals. Building up this scary “foreign boogieman” and stoking this moral panic is what is enabling the authoritarian action.
Pointing fingers at Big Tech and the US is a giant distraction tactic so you don’t look at the terrible things our own domestic politicians have done and the fact they have zero plans to do the hard things needed to get us out of this mess. It's just champagne and smiling over dinner, while the old eat the young, the government eats the private sector, and endless legislation eats away your opportunity to do anything more exciting than build powerpoints at a braindead consulting firm.
> Private companies don’t have the ability to ruin your life in the same way your own government does. They just want your money.
And what happens when your money is gone? What happens when the government has no money anymore because the super rich took it all? Your life turns to shit real fast when you can't afford housing, healthcare and food.
I get when you are in an authoritarian country, or one on the path to becoming so like the US, that the government looks to be the most dangerous actor. But in the west that is still free, its the corps that I worry about the most.
It feels like I'm force to pay tax which then evaporates into the pockets of private companies like Palantir, though... I mean, you arguably can't even fully participate in the society you pay taxes to help run if you don't have a Google or Apple spycube.
You’re fundamentally worried about the wrong thing.
It’s an extremely common bias on the left just as the anti-government bias on the right.
Both public and private entities are capable of abusing power.
Only one group however is legally entitled to take 50% of your money regardless of the quality of their product, by holding a gun to your head. They can even take more via the phantom tax of inflation using deficit spending (as is happening now all over Europe). This group is the one you should fear more if looking at it from first principles.
The current runaway deficits across Europe and rising political unrest prove this.
The only thing companies can do to “take” your money is offer you a service that’s better than all alternatives that you chose to buy voluntarily.
If you think that’s the bigger authoritarian risk something is wrong with your mental model of how the world works.
If you think that Jesper isn't attacking the right issues, but Lars does, then you should definitely hope that Lars switches to Jesper's more popular approach.
Unless you think there can never be a democratic consensus in favor of privacy, therefore the only way is for a small vanguard of privacy activists to impose their will on the hostile majority and establish a totalitarian privacy dictatorship. Then it wouldn't matter so much whether you look good in the court of popular opinion or not.
You can not “democratically” decide to abolish certain inalienable personal liberties and still pretend you are a democracy. That’s just mob rule or worse.
> totalitarian privacy dictatorship
That’s an illogical concept. What does that even mean?
> He's been campaigning against big tech in our schools for like a decade
This doesn't tell me much about how he campaigns
> I'm Danish and lars kragh andersen is a bit of a grey zone. He obviously goes over the line, he tried to put GPS trackers on the cars of ministers. He "stalks" their families, and dox their children online. He gave an interview on how he'd ignore people carrying a kilo gram of weed when he was a cop because he doesn't agree with the "war on drugs".
> On the flip-side, he's sort of right. I assume that putting a GPS tracker on the car of our minister of justice is illegal, but that same minister (Peter Hummelgaard) is one of the key forces behind anti-encryption here in Europe. Similarily the politicians he stalk and harras are pro Palintir getting access to all our data, so Lars Andersen is sort of giving the politicians a taste of what they want to give everyone.
> He goes way too far though. Especially if he actually wants change, the way he "protests" is directly damaging his own cause, since nobody is going to sympathise with harrassing children.
> I suspect next time he'll have his cameras running with backup powers though.
By contrast, I've got a much clearer idea of Lars and his strategies by a description of his actions
Even if you don't think he goes too far ethically, you can probably agree that it's reasonable for the police to intervene once he's interfering with the cars of government ministers.
The police definitely need to intervene, but I'd like to think that playing tit-for-tat with the government is a valid protest, and that this won't result in a loss of freedom.
I guess they need to ascertain whether he's operating organically, or at the behest of another nation, and whether he's scouting out ministers for something bigger in the future.
Though, the irony in all this, is that it all could've been avoided if the government weren't acting at the behest of another nation, and scouting out what they can get away with on their authoritarian warpath. Maybe the police are arresting the wrong people.
By the same standard it would be reasonable to intervene when politicians are indiscriminately interfering with personal communications devices of everyone without any judicial oversight?
This is interesting and all but is ultimately just an aside. Are the law enforcement actions on display here legal in Denmark? If not, surely there's prison sentences in store for anyone involved. Right?
lol. No. If anything there would be a minor slap on the wrist for violating procedure. I sincerely doubt the police will get in any trouble for what they did.
I have heard this claim before but I find it unconvincing. I have given up support of movements for which activists have acted cruelly or otherwise immorally. Obviously one person doesn't represent a movement, but if I only ever see immoral people leading a movement, that will form a basis for my opinion of the movement.
My observation of these activists is usually that they seek attention at any cost. They will hurt people to achieve that attention. Worse, I don't even think it's about the movement. They just want the attention personally. Others in the movement tacitly condone this behaviour.
I think the most frustrating part of this is that they claim it's to raise awareness. Who among us has not heard of global warming? Who has not heard of data privacy? The reality is that they're not getting the public support they desire because people just don't agree with their goals or beliefs, not because the public is "unaware."
You do have a valid point but mildly “hurting” (or rather inconveniencing) the justice minister of Denmark out of all places seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. I mean he’s hellbent on using 1984 as a guidebook and forcing it on everyone in the EU.
> I have heard this claim before but I find it unconvincing. I have given up support of movements for which activists have acted cruelly or otherwise immorally.
Most people aren't this particular brand of irrational.
Ghandi once said during a visit to the west, "I like your Christ, but I do not like your Christians". It is not irrational to question movements you might nominally agree with but that manifest in immoral or inconsistent ways.
The difference between terrorists and freedom fighters is a matter of which side of the fence you stand on. They are basically the same thing, especially these days when you get marked as terrorist for talking bad about the people in power.
> difference between terrorists and freedom fighters is a matter of which side of the fence
Oft repeated but untrue. Terrorism, empirically, doesn’t work. Non-violent protest, and armed insurrection (aimed at the state, not its population) do. Sometimes freedom fighters can benefit from terrorism. But they are distinct strategies with separate targets.
And freedom fighters are supposed to actually care about "freedom" while terrorists generally do not. I fail to see what great advancements in freedom for anyone involved have come out of the terror attacks performed over the past 25 years.
How many retaliatory terror attacks on americans performed by citizen of those countries?
What point are you trying to make? US bad? Anything more thoughtful to offer?
The US are an empire and they have behaved as an empire over the last 70 years (bombing, overthrowing governments, supporting dictators). By historical standard, they have proved less coercive than empires of proportionally comparable reach. Think of the Mongols, the Assyrians, the Japanese...
When did USA bomb a civilian house that wasn't a part of a larger operation? Terrorist attacks only target civilians, I have never seen such an attack by USA. They always try to target military or leaders.
The last time I know USA did a terror attack was japan in ww2, but everyone did terror bombing during that war, and the first world stopped doing terror bombings since then. If USA still ran that doctrine you would have Tehran and the rest of major Iranian cities leveled to the ground now, that is what it looks like when the strongest military in the world perform terror attacks.
That may very well be true, but the world is a lot bigger than what your eyes can capture. "I don't see it, therefore it doesn't exist" is a state of mind that most people grow out of around the age of 8 months.
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre : When the soldiers got to the village, they did not find any NLF troops. Despite this, many soldiers began to kill the villagers, mainly elderly people, women, and children
> [the USA] always try to target military or leaders
> the first world stopped doing terror bombings since then
Nixon and Kissinger were not part of the first world, then?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Menu : Apart from the large human toll, perhaps the most powerful and direct impact of the bombing was the political backlash it caused [..] The U.S. carpet bombing of Cambodia was partly responsible for the rise of what had been a small-scale Khmer Rouge insurgency, which now grew capable of overthrowing the Lon Nol government
Nixon decided to keep the bombing a secret from the American people as to admit to bombing an officially neutral nation would damage his credibility
> that is what it looks like when the strongest military in the world perform terror attacks
Not really. The Taliban’s attacks on civilians didn’t help their cause. They found success when they started acting as a more-competent government than our fucks in Kabul. If we want to debate whether the Taliban under occupation had any success with its terrorist tactics, I guess I’d concede that one man’s terrorist is another’s guerrilla fighter. But even then, guerilla tactics rely on a sympathetic local population. So a guerrilla team bombing civilians is undermining its own cause.
I'm not exactly an expert on Afghan politics and the reason for the failure of the western backed government are surely multifaceted, but don't you think that destabilizing the country through terror attacks played a role in the sustained weakness of the government as well as the withdrawal of the West?
> don't you think that destabilizing the country through terror attacks played a role in the sustained weakness of the government as well as the withdrawal of the West?
Not an expert either. I haven’t seen one make this case. What I have seen is cross-conflict studies on the success of terrorism, and that sets my baseline for Afghanistan being a special case. (Domestic terrorism works a little bit more frequently than international terrorism. But they’re both very, very bad strategies that frequently blow back.)
> The Taliban’s attacks on civilians didn’t help their cause
Umm, do you mean al-qaeda (if you are referring to 9/11). Al-qaeda and the Taliban are different groups. Neither are particularly nice, but only one did 9/11.
Terrorist is often a term used to describe freedom fighters, in order to delegitimize them. Basically this is such a common tactic that it is unsurprising that the two are sometimes conflated.
Basically all of history. Terrorist is a term people use for people who use violence and intimidation to attempt to cause political change. Freedom fighter is a term used for people who use violence and intimidation to attempt to cause political change that you are sympathetic to.
Both words have identical meanings, the only difference is if you happen to agree with the people commiting the violent acts or not.
Only online. The Viet Cong weren’t targeting civilians. They hit American soldiers. Targeting military and narrow political power are the hallmark of proper rebellions. Targeting civilians is how terrorism works.
The closest analog to terrorism in warfare is actually strategic air campaigns. Dresden and the London Blitz are closer to terrorism than e.g. the uprising in Bangladesh or even the Taliban toppling the Karzai regime. And lo and behold, strategic air campaigns have a history of uniting the enemy much more than undoing them.
> people do not use the word terrorism or freedom fighter to describe the actions of a state actor during open war
People also don’t use the term to relate to rebellions. It’s more an internet meme or cases where like a few people call e.g. Russia a terrorist state by analogy. Freedom fighters fighting rebellion tend to work to keep civilians on their side. When they don’t, they become terrorists and tend to lose.
No, not at all. Methods and targets/victims also matter. Using violence to achieve specific military objectives or as a response to violence is not the same as indiscriminate murder and terrorism.
Terrorism very much does work. The Basque and the Northern Irish terrorists / freedom fighters have gotten a so many of their demands for autonomy met that they disbanded (in one case formally, in the other almost) because they weren't needed anymore. Taliban also got the US out from Afghanistan pretty handily with mostly terrorism.
> The Basque and the Northern Irish terrorists / freedom fighters have gotten a so many of their demands for autonomy met that they disbanded
That’s certainly not how it works.
They just became highly unpopular amongst the populations they were trying to liberate (which generally preferred more peaceful solutions) and lost their support base and had to disband.
When the population was complaining that they had to go to the Taliban for help because the Americans could do nothing to help them when the local military was corrupt and abused the people.
Because it was expensive and the local population did not care for the Kabul government we were protecting. It is hard to prop an unpopular government in a country of 40 million.
The US military was averaging only 12 deaths in the years before withdraw.
Most of what the taliban was doing is closer to asymmetric warfare than terrorism.
yet you fail to account for the fact that said people wouldn't wouldn't be in power did terrorism not have occurred in the first place. How many bad leaders in the west resulting directly or indirectly from terror attacks?
About as many as bad terrorist groups that began due to catastrophically bad decisions of leaders in the West. I'm sorry to break it to you - the plural you - but all the terrorists that are not traditionally domestic (local leftist/rightist extremists are everywhere, after all) - and the fact they are against the West - is simply a consequence of Western politics. Imperialism and neocollonialism are real, actual policies, and it doesn't take a genius to realize that. If such policies hit locales where it's not culturally wrong to die for a cause, it's obvious you'll get terrorists after a while. I suspect this was calculated risk until it stopped being that: the locals got their own exploding sticks and decided to use them.
It's so incredibly sad to watch: for decades, tons of people made mostly rational (from their point of view) decisions, yet each step inevitably brought us closer and closer to the current situation. Add a few cultural, social, and personal pathological cases into the mix, and what you have is basically a speedrun to 9/11.
Note that I'm not justifying terror attacks, just saying they are a very predictable consequence of decades of policy-making.
> I'm sorry to break it to you - the plural you - but all the terrorists that are not traditionally domestic (local leftist/rightist extremists are everywhere, after all) - and the fact they are against the West - is simply a consequence of Western politics.
Then why doesn't south America perform a lot of terrorist attacks? If that was the reason then you would see sub saharan africa perform way more terrorist attacks than the middle east.
No, the elephant in the room is religious zealots, they perform terrorist attacks, most other groups do not perform a lot of terrorism. A history of oppression just makes you happy the oppressors left, it doesn't make you a terrorist that go and try to make the oppressors come back like the middle east does.
no, it's nothing specific to "The West" or the decisions it has taken. The typical "They hate us because our bad policies" does not explain why every empire (western or not) has had to contend with dissenters keen on overthrowing its "yoke".
How would the Mongols, the Russians, the Egyptian empires have solved the israeli/palestine conflict? Do you know where the terms zealots and sicario come from? Did the Romans solve these terror attacks by reconsidering their "catastrophically bad policies"?
> The typical "They hate us because our bad policies" does not explain why every empire (western or not) has had to contend with dissenters
It's interesting that you actually wrote down in this sentence the very explanation you say doesn't exist. It's pretty obvious: instituting an empire is the policy others will hate you for. The fact that you can't imagine this despite spelling out the facts yourself is curious.
Not being an empire is an option, too. That won't save you in all cases, especially if you're seen as a fallen empire, another empire's lackey due to alliances and dependencies, or your culture is simply incompatible with some other culture that happens to be frequently in contact with you. But it will reduce the likelihood of a convincing narrative - one that could lead people to hijack planes and fly them into buildings - emerging.
It's not a topic that can be fully discussed in HN comments, as there are many complexities involved, but "They hate us because we decided on a policy to be an empire" is not that far from the truth, I think.
Indeed, empires do not have to exist, and the world could constitute of individual nations ruling themselves independently in democracy peace and happiness.
By historical standard, over the last 10000 years prosperity, democracy and peace have hardly been the norm, don't you think? Empires have existed all over the world however. Perhaps we should accept what is a fact of life of human societies, and try to minimise its most egregious aspects, rather than wishfulling hoping for the profound change that will never materialise.
The pilots who flew planes into buildings 25 years ago were saudis, Saudi Arabia was never part of a western Empire. They trained in Afghanistan which was never part of a western empire (Alexander the Great does not count).
They were able to strike the American empire because, contrary to the common political discourse on the left, the American empire is a rather open and benevolent hegemon by historical standard, and internal dissent is not crushed or exterminated as it would have been were the Americans behaving as the Ottomans, the Romans, the Mongols, the Spanish, USSR etc...
I am not apologizing the American empire, I am not even american nor do I like the culture that spews out of the US, especially these days, but one has to put things into historical context if we are to understand the nature of terror attacks.
> By historical standard, over the last 10000 years prosperity, democracy and peace have hardly been the norm, don't you think?
Agreed! From my own reading (not a specialist), for example, in Europe, there were only a handful of years (literally) between 3000 B.C. and ~1950 A.D. when there was actual peace on the continent. Wars, rebellions, coups, civil wars, uprisings - every single year for five thousand years there was bloodshed, the borders moved, cities perished, populations starved, and so on.
And yes, this happened both when an empire/global power existed and when none was around. And yes, the Pax Romana (and similar periods) did bring many benefits to the world. At the same time, though, all the empires always incited hatred among the groups under them: the Romans bloodily suppressed quite a few uprisings even during that "Golden Age" (which you know, since you mentioned "zealots" in a previous comment). They wouldn't need to do that were they not an empire, which is my point.
> The pilots who flew planes into buildings 25 years ago were saudis, Saudi Arabia was never part of a western Empire. They trained in Afghanistan which was never part of a western empire (Alexander the Great does not count).
The terrorists don't need to be "part of empire" to feel threatened by that empire. Putting soldiers on the ground, for any reason, half a world away, while demanding special treatment for the troops, assuming their country's jurisdiction naturally follows their citizens in other nations, and so on - just one of those is enough to be seen as an imperialist power by the locals. The USA did all of these and more throughout the world, but especially in the Middle East. They didn't have to act that way, but they did, as it's natural for empires. The violent backlash locally and terror attacks at home are just normal, expected reactions to an empire acting like one. It's also worth noting that the entire Middle East is a fallen, fractured Empire. I'm not sure how much that influenced things, but I can imagine it fueled some ambitions in countries like Saudi Arabia to build another Ottoman Empire, this time centered on Riyadh. (Just a guess - I'm not well-versed in post-Middle Age history of the Middle East.)
> They were able to strike the American empire because, contrary to the common political discourse on the left, the American empire is a rather open and benevolent hegemon by historical standard
Agreed. Though I'd say whether an empire is open and benevolent or strict and brutal doesn't influence the number of terrorist attacks. Yes, if you're benevolent, the hatred may be less prevalent - but then your security is weaker, so you can have the same number of attacks even with fewer "freedom fighters". The issue is being seen as an empire: as long as you can be cast as one, some people will hate you automatically, even if, all things considered, you're actually pretty tame and even beneficial to others.
> I am not apologizing the American empire, I am not even american nor do I like the culture that spews out of the US, especially these days, but one has to put things into historical context if we are to understand the nature of terror attacks.
If America is not attacked by terrorists because it is an empire and acts like one - then why? That's what I don't get in your argument. If the USA didn't maintain military presence across the region (ME), didn't wholeheartedly support the "Zionist regime" (which also acts like an ethnocentric empire - Aztecs come to mind as a comparison), didn't historically meddle in the region's politics by both carrot and a lot of stick, etc., would they be hated enough for people to suicide bomb them?
Apparently, 90% of the terror attacks happen in the context of local instability (a civil war, rebellion, uprising, coup, etc.). You really need something special for the foreign terrorists to be willing to travel half a world just to blow themselves up on your doorstep. If it's not the imperialist policies, then what is it? If I understand your argument correctly, it's all religious fanaticism? But then, why would those fanatics attack the US, instead of enjoying some jolly sectarian bloodshed locally, like they did for centuries? There are enough religions and sects in ME to fuel terror attacks for a few more millennia, I'd guess, and it's not like that infighting stopped completely. How come the US was added as another traditional target for "death to ..." calls? I don't think it would happen without America's heavy involvement there...
There have been several public opinion polls that included questions about Luigi Mangione. He’s consistently unpopular among the average population and his actions are generally unsupported. Not at all surprising for an extremist activist who literally committed murder in public.
It’s only when you visit smaller internet bubbles like Reddit where you can start to get into areas where it feels like his actions are widely supported.
A lot of activists are like this: If you go into little bubbles that align with their actions they seem popular. Zoom out and look at the population, including people they were trying to persuade and reach, and they’re not popular like they seem within the bubble.
This is also why twitter drove journalism (and perhaps even the country) off a cliff.
Naive journalists thought twitter was a "public square" that they could conveniently access from the comfort of their living room. They didn't know that it was a powerful echo chamber that resonated the best with strong views, and the space had long been a refuge for people with extreme outlier opinions.
Hence why "topics worthy of national attention" where just whatever was trending on twitter.
> He’s consistently unpopular among the average population and his actions are generally unsupported.
You're missing the story here. Any popularity of a murder in the streets is exceptional. The expected value for "What fraction of the population supports this (alleged) murderer?" is much closer to zero than the ~25% that Mangione polls at, never mind the 40-odd% that he polls with young people.
Did it achieve the effect that everyone is getting cheaper healthcare now?
OR, on the contrary, it only achieved that CEOs are now getting more anonymity and private security, while the plebs are getting more invasive law enforcement tracking like Palantir and Flock shoved up their ass to prevent them from doing something like that again?
More or less the same except a family of kids would not be missing their father and grow up with the idea of wanting to get revenge on their father's murderer. An eye-for-an-eye never makes good societies which is why all civilized countries outlawed their practice.
>Would Palantir or Flock disappear?
The more elites you murders, the more of your tax dollars the elites will send to the military and law enforcement to better protect them from you and the more of your tax dollars they'll send to Palantir and Flock to spy on you. You can't win this by killing elites, they have more money, more guns than you and their guns are bigger and more powerful than yours. You win by enacting change through popular votes.
You don't understand how it works, imagine a world where 9/11 never happened.
Do you think that this alternative universe would not have the equivalent of TSA and Five Eyes?
It would. These things do not exist because $event happened, they exist because they are useful to those in power.
Look at the city of Trinidad, TX for example: Lady is arrested because of Facebook about how she heard that brown colored water coming from pipes has hospitalized people. Another guy because he is protesting the arrest. Her crime is "Felony false alarm". His crime "Disorderly conduct".
Both laws created, I am sure, to combat issues the community or state has had to deal with. But also able to be used to suppress people those in power dislike.
Whoa, you can't do this on HN, regardless of how you feel about health care policy or psychopathy.
You've been here a long time, so you ought to be familiar with why comments like this destroy what HN is supposed to be for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and re-taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. Your recent comments have veered into flamebait and guidelines breakage, and it would be good to course-correct.
>One less psychopath in charge of a US health care provider being around?
What kind of broken logic is this? What good did this do for you if the end result for you is the same or worse now? Other than feel good for vigilante vengeance than then backfires on you in the end. It's not like there's a shortage of CEOs to take his place and keep doing the same thing.
You're not in a comic book movie where if you kill the main "bad guy" then society magically fixes itself at the end, because there is no main villain here, society is broken not because of the decisions of one CEO, but because of a combination of decisions of thousands of people, factors and incentives accumulated over decades that lead to healthcare and other things sucking, and you don't fix it overnight by killing one guy, you instead just make it worse for everyone else who isn't a murderer.
You fix it by talking, campaigning, gathering people and voting, knowing that it will also take decades to undo, the same way as it took decades to get to this stage. That's the only way you enact change that will will guarantee bi-partisan buy-in and actually stick around for the long term. Policy changes implemented by populist movements under threat of violence rarely produce good outcomes that last.
If the system is rigged heavily against you, relying on it to affect change does feel like a losing strategy.
The fact that such a large part of the population supports literal murder could also be considered a political statement. One that would not have been expressed so strongly without what happened.
So much of this madness could be resolved with a simple income cap. Musk’s wealth grew by $1 million per minute over the past year. Who can seriously argue that this is fair and balanced?
Your income may remain constant while your wealth rises significantly (say... because your investments are doing well, because you inherited... etc). The two are often confused when talking about (tech) billionaires.
> So much of this madness could be resolved with a simple income cap.
The problem (to me) is less the "wealth" of these psychopath CEOs, and more that they're literally taking advantage of the people they're supposed to be helping, for their own benefit.
The concept of an income cap might fix that in some situations, but I'm unsure how complete a fix that would be.
>There are a million reasons why we don't want to live in a society where each person tries to solve their political grievances with a gun
You and me are preaching to the quire here and wasting our time. Some on HN they just wanna see rich people get killed, as if that fixes anything that's wrong with society. By rich people, they mean everyone richer than them of course.
My biggest wish in life would be that every champagne socialist that unironically says "America is a third world country", we just send them to an actual thirld world country like Zimbabwe, Congo, Sudan, Cuba, North Korea and import a genuine refugee from there in their place.
This way we can make two people happy at the same time(three if you include me), and the lottery of birth advantage evens out, so the world becomes more fair and less unequal.
> You think you want that but you don't actually. IF you do sincerely want that, then I sincerely hope you get what you want, but both ways for you and only you, while the rest of us stay isolated as spectators.
Nobody wants this. This is the result of the breakdown of trust in the judicial and democratic processes. GP is just acting the zeitgeist.
Sorry the justice system is setup to protect them, not you. By putting fear in the leaders of these companies, and showing people that yes, you CAN actually stand up to their corrupt ways and beat them because in the end they are just people, even if they don't see you that way.
Historically indiscriminate extra judicial murder has never worked as a tool for addressing societal injustice, it has been tried countless times, usually it just made things worse.
>By putting fear in the leaders of these companies
I'm sure people who control the economy, pahrma, law enforcement, military and intelligence agencies are shivering because of fear from people with glocks.
> The fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson has prompted healthcare executives to say they will address growing frustrations among Americans struggling with access to and costs of medical care.
> Months after the killing of a top health insurance executive unleashed Americans’ pent-up anger over denials of medical care, the industry announced Monday that it will take action to “streamline, simplify and reduce” the preapproval process.
I don’t think it is. Healthcare prices are widely tracked. They’ve been rising faster than inflation for years. I have seen zero evidence that trend even temporarily abated after Luigi.
Also because most people presumably aren’t really into indiscriminate irrational murder. The victim was a merely an entirely replaceable cog in an unfair system (also a human being who had a family and there is no real evidence he personally was anymore nefarious than other men in similar positions).
>Also because most people presumably aren’t really into indiscriminate irrational murder
It was murder, but it was neither indiscriminate nor irrational. Certainly not in a culture that enshrines the right to shoot people as its second most sacred Constitutional principle.
There's many anecdotes of people who managed to get lifesaving or lifechanging treatments in the panic after the CEO got murdered. Obviously, anecdotes aren't data - but it is highly likely that even though one life was lost, many were saved.
I don't know about this case, so I can only speak in general.
A lot of times people that say this don't make a strong case that some theoretical more moderate protest would be effective. There is just a feeling that if they personally feel offended by the actions of the protester then it's probably a bad thing.
In reality it's often more complicated. I know some people that are involved with controversial protests, and the effectiveness of their actions is definitely something they think about. It can't be too extreme, that will put people off like you say. But often there is conversations like in this thread, "this protester goes too far, but they do have a point". This moves the Overton window in the desired direction.
The goal isn't too make you like the protester, it's to make you think about the issues.
How can we know the IRA “won”? The country changed a hell of a lot over the course of the Troubles and by the time of the GFA in 1998 I don’t see how it is so clear that the reforms wouldn’t have also been achieved via other peaceful and democratic means.
What makes it giving up sovereignty? I understand it creates the potential for separation in future but not yet. The devolution of Scotland and Wales happened peacefully a couple(?) of years later, and Scotland may also separate in future.
How is force working for Hamas? The shift in general sentiment towards Israel came from Israel's blatant disregard for civilian life and from their apartheid politics being put in spotlight. Hamas are still regarded as terrorist savages by everyone sane and their Oct 7 attack served as an excuse for Israel to set them back and hunt them regardless of collateral casualties, terrorizing their compatriots
On examination of the evidence, Hamas appears to be an organization dedicated to harming Israel, not helping the Palestinian people (or improving public opinion of Hamas). In this regard, I would say that Hamas has been very effective at provoking heinous overreach by the zionists, causing severe damage to Israeli credibility. To Hamas, it seems that Palestinian deaths are the price they are willing to pay, being integral to their strategic mission and personnel supply chain.
Why would you think so? The conflict will most likely be decided by Israel (and by extension USA) having the biggest influence both globally and locally, and the biggest guns, but there is no misconception about it, so I decided not to add it.
Both sides always assume that people must fall on one side or the other instead of disliking both and wishing they would stop trying to make their hundreds of years religious regional conflict the world's problem
The final victory of Islamic Republic was after they did NOT used force against west, but when America and Israel started idiotic war, bragged about using force and then promptly lost.
This was quite literally the case of "actions backfire" situation.
Even if every single Hamas was killed - you have a whole population totally traumatized. That's extremely fertile ground for something like Hamas to pop up again. So, a lot of sufferring but Bibi and "Hamas" (or whatever) prospers.
Hamas has been killed. Again and again and again. But people keep joining this "Hamas" resistance group against Israel so the group never seems to go away. And do you know why they join? They join because Israel killed their whole families.
> but Hamas sure doesn't seem to be in a good shape lately.
And who do you see on track to displace Hamas? After years and years of conflict and being "bombed to shit", they're as entrenched as ever while their enemy declines much faster.
Israel is getting to a point where it has no friends left in the world, where the average European youth thinks nuking Israel and turning into a glass parking lot would probably be a net positive. Jews are starting to be broadly despised again thanks to Israeli policy, something that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.
Hamas operatives lead shitty lives in the Gaza strip as they have for decades, but they certainly aren't losing control.
Over the course of a few years, Hamas managed to turn wearing a star of David in big EU cities into a dangerous political statement. And we're supposed to believe that they're not winning?
Your arguments are self-contradictory. You say force is great, but only for Hamas - not for Israel.
A youth who thinks Israel should be genocided doesn’t care about genocide, so why hate Israel?
The hate in Europe is driven primarily by an influx of people who were hating Jews anyway, and who naively think that the hatred won’t backfire on them. Once you start promoting racism it comes for everyone.
>The hate in Europe is driven primarily by an influx of people who were hating Jews anyway
You are mistaken, the sentiments are shifting across the board.
This is probably driven to a significant degree by the Israeli national policy of tying any criticism of Israel with antisemitism, and the broad acceptance of that policy by Jewish communities globally. Because of this implicit endorsement, it is not surprising that many would struggle to separate between the actions by taken by the state of Israel and those who call themselves Jews.
You can’t blame the victims for racism. The whole point of racism is that it lumps people together based on the actions of some.
It’s the same way Islamophobia doesn’t become justified based on the actions of some Muslims.
Anyone who does do that is already a bigot, and would do the same to any other group, regardless of what they do.
A culture that normalizes hatred of Jews (or Israelis) as a group, will very quickly devolve into one where other minorities are hated as well. Because the youth, as gullible as they are, can still detect when a system of values is inconsistent.
Attacking families is firmly across the line and looks like crazy man's personal vendetta. Who can vouch he won't go further and ie won't kidnap a kid to achieve his goals.
No wonder he gets raided, at one point it becomes a topic about protecting one's family, left or right, moral or crook doesn't matter anymore.
Its not activist anymore in any meaningful sense, just a fanatic.
> crazy man's personal vendetta. Who can vouch he won't go further and ie won't kidnap a kid to achieve his goals.
You just committed exactly the kind of escalation that you condemn when it's about him.
So what if someone can vouch for him? What's that worth? "Vouching" is worthless in any circumstance I can think of, and nobody can give you guarantees about anything. I can't vouch that you won't do exactly the same, or that you weren't the masked police who raced to the breakers so he's not filmed while breaking the law (innocent people have nothing to hide, right?), or that you're not one of the politicians pushing for oppressive laws for your personal benefit.
Jeez, you grabbed a single word from an expression that even non-native speakers like me know very well how to interpret and went a bit too deep into your self-made projections and on-purpose incorrect interpretations.
Just to be clear - there is no actual vouching, there never was, nor any plans for that. Fanatics are unpredictable, it doesn't matter in which area, their decisions are primarily emotional. He certainly behaved as one. Rest are details.
Or do you consider family stalking as a correct sane approach that actually achieves the goal effectively?
> He obviously goes over the line, he tried to put GPS trackers on the cars of ministers. He "stalks" their families, and dox their children online.
I agree with you that he goes over the line, but only if these ministers are totally unrelated to the measures they are trying to impose on the population. If not, he just gives them a taste of their own medicine.
I personally would like the police to come down hard on unauthorised and unregulated chemists. Not a fan of dealers being tax exempt, either, given the negative externalities their services provide.
Why fuss over "unregulated" chemists when the vast majority of harms come directly from officially licensed and regulated industry? I don't think cannabis dealers have ever poisoned entire towns or ecosystems. The facade of regulated safety must be more important.
It's not whataboutism. It's poking at the idea that "regulation" doesn't enshrine and enable harms. But by all means, inject lawyers into all aspects of human life. That will surely improve things.
When I go to a bar, I appreciate not having to order 'one alcohol, please', and getting a clear bottle of odourless mystery liquid.
I don't have time to be an expert in every subject. I appreciate using the collective power of society to put stamps of approval on things, so I can use language with an element of trust.
If I want to smoke, I want to know what I'm smoking, and don't want to waste time trying to work out the exact chemical composition. I'm not sure why anybody wouldn't want that control over their bodies.
I quite like the idea of words actually having meanings which are enforced, and not being vague concepts coined on the street by people who don't have me or my community at heart.
A kilo of weed is clearly a dealer, and part of organised crime. The same people are deeply involved in forced sex work and people trafficking, extortion, illegal weapons, etc. There is a clear difference between end users and small time dealers and the distributors.
So prosecute them for those other things, no? Instead of helping criminals grow their business by banning non-harmful stuff and giving them monetary growth opprotunities.
Crime benefits from network effects even more than regular businesses, you have to attack them via every opportunity.
However you are putting words in my mouth, in a typical American style of prosecution-->banning. It is quite possible to legalise and regulate marijuana. American halfway legalisation creates an industry which funds OC and can't be prosecuted. Canadian legalisation creates a revenue source for the provincial governments while providing vertical integration and control, and the volume of illegal weed has plummeted.
I expect he’ll be justified and vindicated in history if we end up in a global totalitarian prison planet scenario that seems to become more possible as the tech reaches that capability. “For the safety of the children” ofcourse.
I still don't understand what that has to do with encryption. Are these two separate policy proposals, one for GPS tracking and one for encryption, that this person is supporting?
Think about why do governments want to ban encryption? Because they want to know everything about you all the time. Collecting information on someone such as their location is of the same order.
He has to use a different method because obviously he does not have a backdoor into the prime minister's phone. The fact that "obviously wrong" invasive methods have to be used (now) to imitate something that the prime minister want to apply to every citizen (except himself and his buddies) in the future can be seen as part of the point.
Yes, but that also means he both goes too far (for people like me who might sympathize with him) and loses the connection with the original issue, creating his own communication problem. Yes, it is good and necessary to show politicians what they are doing to the citizens they are supposed to represent, but that does not justify all means.
It’s not fundamentally different than indiscriminately scanning everyone’s private communication (what the Danish government is trying to accomplish on the EU level)
I think we'll keep disagreeing on what "fundamentally different" means. Agreed that the Danish gov't proposals are reprehensible and deserve counteraction.
It's not that complicated. Minister wants to remove citizens privacy. Protester invades privacy of minister in response. On the one hand I agree that gps-tracking is not exactly the same as analyzing people's messages, on the other hand one can often infer whereabouts through messaging services indirectly or even directly such as when people share their gps location with one another (a feature that e.g. whatsapp has).
Anyway, apparently this Peter Hummelgaard has said:
"I indisputably believe that surveillance creates an increased sense of security ... and given that the prerequisite for freedom is security, yes, I believe that more surveillance equates to more freedom"
so I think you will find it easier to understand these kinds of protest actions if you consider them in the context of privacy vs. surveillance more broadly conceived.
> It's not that complicated. Minister wants to remove citizens privacy. Protester invades privacy of minister in response.
"It's not that complicated"... indeed?
Privacy was a thing long before encryption even existed. So were stalking, wiretapping, etc. That whole time, judicial warrants had always been legally and practically adequate for obtaining and reviewing evidence that was physically accessible. (And for arresting stalkers and wiretappers.)
Encryption changed all that. It effectively undermined the ability of warrants to do their job.
Regardless of how you feel about the above, surely you agree that none of that is factually incorrect, right? Plaintext + privacy were simultaneously a thing for a long time, right?
So, whatever you feel, doesn't it feel a little disingenuous to suggest that the two are necessarily tied together? And to smear someone as hypocritical because they believe in both? Did the guy ever advocate for exposing everyone's real-time location?
Look, I don't even know the guy. And I'm not even trying to defend anything here on its merits. I'm just trying to set the record straight as to what the facts and the logical implications are(n't). Do you(/him/etc.) want an honest debate? Where you can actually win with people coming to support your ideas on their merits? Or do you want to take the craziest logical leaps and lose all your potential supporters in the process?
>That whole time, judicial warrants had always been legally and practically adequate for obtaining and reviewing evidence that was physically accessible.
You're telling me that in Denmark they can't open your letters even with a judicial order?
The Danish constitution also mentions privacy, in the form of paragraph 72 that stipulates that the confiscation and examination of letters and other papers; as well the interception of postal-, telegraph- and telephone communication cannot be done without a judicial order.
> So were stalking, wiretapping, etc. That whole time, judicial warrants had
Those things were costly and didn’t scale very well. Which is why it was more tolerable.
Without encryption and with legally required backdoors the authorities can just “wiretap” everyone just in case they might commit a crime. That is what the Danish government wants to do by pushing ChatControl in the EU. There is absolutely nothing crazy about that and they are perfectly transparent about what they are doing. Most sensible people believe that that’s a too high cost.
Hmmm, in context he was(?) tracking a public ministers car.
I'm Australian and I'm all for peeling back and making transparent all the comings and goings of public officials (within reason) - they deserve a good return, a hefty return even, for dedicated public service .. and they deserve to know that there's a hammer waiting for any betrayal of public trust, shady financial dealings (while in office), etc.
As a "known in advance covenant" that's not altogether unreasonable, raises the bar for would be Trumpesque grifters, and allows for privacy for those not seeking access to public offices, trust, and cookie jars.
Lol that's bullshit. There is a difference between "accessible to law enforcement in a official criminal investigation overseen by a judge" and "public to everyone".
What these weirdo hacktivists don't understand is that the voting public wants to live in a society.
Pretending to be a moral person to harass others is way more important than being a moral person. Jesus in the gospel has no kind words for such people but many "christian" societies haven't yet decided to follow that part.
People who dont pretend it has zero negative consequences as well. I understand the medicinal uses, most people arent even doing that, but we are overlooking so many things. I think someone should fund serious studies that look at all the benefits and negatives, sadly we dont live in a perfect world.
I can count on one hand the number of times I drink alcohol every few years, and I agree. Let's fund detailed studies on the effects (good and bad) for everything. Whataboutism shouldn't be a reason to just let something that could have long-term negative consequences on the mind be blindly advertised as safe. My argument isn't about legality, moreso educating the public about consequences, we do this with cigarettes, and I assume eventually we have to extend vaping to have similar messaging as well.
Legal marijuana in the states is insanely tweaked and modified in terms of THC in order to comply legally, even people I know who have smoked their whole lives feel uncomfortable touching the stuff because its just not even organic anymore.
Its not a whataboutism, its the current line in the sand for comparison. If Alcohol does x and is legal with restrictions, then its only sensible for comparable products that do x to become legal with restrictions.
I once OD'd on caffeine and the hospital staff didnt believe me. They just filled me with saline and kept asking if it was meth until I stopped convulsing.
World is not black and white. Most people would probably prefer to live in a world with low-power petty-crime rings and ability to be free and safe apart from having their wallet stolen once in a while rather than with e.g. Russian-like state mafia country with enormous amount of power and ability to target everyone at every time for their families interests. When you have a destroyed social ladder and everything can be taken at any moment under few people control immediately because they just want it.
That's apart from the fact that in the palantir case you also invite foreign intelligence and CIA to your home.
They're probably not being sarcastic. Wrong, and ppssibly evil, but not sarcastic. There are some weirdly big Palantir fans on HN. No clue what drives them, but I'm guessing they're not keen students of history.
Lars is good at exposing the hypocrisy of the Danish government. In a former case he, sent the exact same threatening text to a prosecutor as that prosecutor had received a police report from a third party about, and that the prosecutor refused to pursue. Lars got jail time for that. Rules for thee but not for me.
Does he have any power to change anything? Or does he have only power to expose the abusers and corrupted?
Only taking action because you can change corrupt ways doesn’t actually change anything because the average person has no power to do so. And the proper channels are gummed up to not change anything.
What Lars does is possibly inform or change perspective of those unfamiliar with their nation/world-state.
You think so? It's a public, anonymous forum. I consider the people here to be as informed as someone from 4chan, except the moderators keep out the explicitly toxic people.
You are correct that two wrongs don't make a right, but I think that it is obvious that the threat was not real, only symbolic. Therefore it wasn't "wrong". Meanwhile the original, not prosecuted threat message, was real. It's clear that it shows both vindictiveness and unwillingness to protect certain people.
You dont have to give up equality under the law, you just have to accept that there is a lot more that goes into a prosecution than the act. Were witnesses cooperative and credible, what was the intent, what was context.
I dont know the specifics of this case. Maybe there was a miscarriage of justice. But just the fact the acts are the same doesn't show that. There is a lot more factors to consider.
Your obfuscation carries no argumentative weight, as the uncertainty your obfuscation attempts to introduce might as well be used in the reverse: maybe the guy who made the original threat (that was not prosecuted) had a criminal record involving violent crimes whereas Lars' text obviously should be taken in the political, non-violent, activist context that is his modus operandi.
I don't think they would reject that. In fact, you are arguing their point: It's the context that matters, not just the act. Without knowing the context it's not valid to presume a particular scenario.
It's obfuscation because you're leaving out that this is an openly political fight of an in-power leftist politician against an "extreme-right" party (of course, they're well to the left of the US democrat party).
The underlying problem is that a LOT of public servants are very scared what will happen if the party who keeps getting threatened gets elected, which is a real possibility. So, they're using all sorts of underhanded tactics to try to prevent it. In a way, it's a fight about public servants trying to keep their job safe. It's political because they all owe their jobs to a particular coalition that's been in power for ages and ages.
Oh and it's a fight about muslim immigration and the influence of that in and on society. So ...
That's why it's obfuscation. You're leaving important things out.
The intent and context are obviously better for the one who's clearly sending the "threat" as a political statement against selective enforcement.
> I dont know the specifics of this case. Maybe there was a miscarriage of justice. But just the fact the acts are the same doesn't show that. There is a lot more factors to consider
... and you're willing to give the benefit of doubt to those with power here. You are aware you're making that implicit statement, right?
> The intent and context are obviously better for the one who's clearly sending the "threat" as a political statement against selective enforcement.
That is far from obvious.
In general i think that attempting to alter the course of justice via a threat is much worse than a simple threat. Any situation where officers of the court are afraid to impartially do their duties to coercion is a fundamental threat to society and should be dealt with harshly.
> ... and you're willing to give the benefit of doubt to those with power here.
I'm basing my view on the arguments presented in this thread.
So far what has been presented is that the prosecutor did something very normal that happens all the time for very reasonable reasons. Its possible that in this case it happened due to inappropriate reasons, idk, but so far nobody has even presented a theory for why the action was corrupt instead of normal.
In general i think it is the job of the person arguing that misconduct occured to present evidence that it actually happened. Otherwise things descend into witch hunts as it is very difficult to prove a negative.
Indeed, that’s why selective prosecution is an effective weapon. The consequences are asymmetric and demonstrating selectivity is impossible without exposing oneself to the downside. It’s definitely a stable incumbent regime tactic.
Pretty tricky by the cops to turn off power directly and to steal his cameras. Shows that if you are concerned something like this would happen to you that you need to invest in more resilient solutions. Probably something with batteries and also hidden.
They did this to Afroman, too. Though, in his case, they didn't lead with the panel and the result is the infamous video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0bNy7XO-SCI0 It makes you wonder how much of an effect this incident has had on protocols.
But, yeah, depending on your threat matrix, you might want to consider hidden trail cams with their own cell service.
Trail cams (and other hidden cams) often have local SD backup. Better break out the “broom,” rip open the walls, and steal every electronic device just in case.
Hm what if he burries some storage server (with UPS) in the yard to which this is streamed. They are never going to find it. Especially if the networking is wireless, but even tracking down where ethernet (copper or fiber) goes is hard.
There have been cases in the US where homeowners shot cops dead who were in the process of unexpectedly raiding their home, because the homeowner had no idea they were cops and not home invasion robbers; and in some cases have been acquitted of murder charges by juries for this.
I'd personally like to see the laws protecting this strengthened, to make sure that cops aren't charging unannounced into peoples' homes and then charging the homeowner with murder when they react with reasonable gun violence in self-defense.
My thought on this is that it's basically not legal to protect your home/family with force because of this. It's impossible to know if someone breaking in is a cop or not, and at 3AM with glass breaking and a group of people claiming to be cops, but aren't, how are you supposed to know? You basically never can. So either you risk going to prison for the rest of your life when it's actually a cop, or you do absolutely nothing and let your family get harmed/your home burgled.
Some people want world peace and denuclearization. Each country is currently as it finds itself and takes a great deal of leadership and buy-in to change.
That’s not the real world. Criminals will always find a way to get guns no matter the amount of gun control you impose, so I’d rather have law abiding citizens be armed as well
It is the real world in many places. "Criminals" are not a homogenous group. Petty criminals will not usually be making the effort to get a gun if getting a gun is inconvenient. Some high level criminals will find ways to get guns but the number of criminals with guns will be much lower with gun controls.
It’s not your real world, lots of other countries have so little gun violence that a shooting makes the national news when it happens and thats maybe once or twice a year.
There are countries in the EU which have pretty lax gun laws and firefighters are fairly accessible they still have fairly low levels of gun crime. Just having access to weapons doesn’t mean that people will start killing each other for no reason, there are many other more important factors.
A German police officer was fatally shot in 2010 after failing to identify himself when his manipulation on the door had alerted the known-armed subject of a planned search. The shooter was (eventually) acquitted. Though the circumstances were rather unusual, the court noted that in that specific case, the inability to ascertain the nature & extent of the threat within available time made acting this way based on his assumptions excusable.
Really? 'Oh, someone I don't know! stab'? What if the person is plain-clothes law enforcement? Or a special needs person who somehow managed to wander into the wrong house? Or your sibling's new partner they want to introduce to you?
Anyway, unless you actually have stabbed someone before you don't know whether you got what it takes until you're actually in a situation where you find out.
>Anyway, unless you actually have stabbed someone before you don't know whether you got what it takes until you're actually in a situation where you find out.
A guy tried to rob me, I fractured his skull with my iphone before I even realized what was going on. You don't just freeze when someone suddenly attacks you, you'll try to swing at them with whatever you have at hand.
At home? I might just have been cooking, or carving a sunday roast. Who knows? But if someone suddenly smashed through my door, I'm pretty sure that whatever object happens to be in my hand would be heading towards the intruder long before I've had time to think about what's going on.
In the EU the answer is always "it's unclear". Yes you can, but you also can't.
ECHR necessarily guarantees the right to shoot some intruders in some situations, but it's kind of impossible to know which situations those are except after the fact.
I'd say it is. Yes there are people that own guns or hunting rifles. Most still don't think about guns or shooting first. Guns are supposed to be locked in a safe etc.
All that does obviously not apply to a criminal who does not follow the law.
> Most still don't think about guns or shooting first.
You base this on what? I know plenty of gun owners where I live, and most would pull open their safe the moment they hear something during the night. I'm willing to bet most gun safes are located in the bedroom.
> They’d basically have to attack you first for lethal force to be legal.
They just violently entered his home in an effort to attack him, dressed in a way designed to intimidate. These cops were deliberately cosplaying as some sort of a hit squad, they obviously wanted him to believe that they were going to kill him.
It's not like the cops just accidentally went out dressed like that.
This is Denmark, not some Brasilian favela. That type of violent crime extremely rare in Scandinavia. But cops wearing civilian clothes while conducting a raid is fairly normal. Especially when they want to preserve evidence which might be quickly destroyed if the suspect sees them coming.
They're also dressed exactly like a group of random middle aged men.
Naturally, getting raided is scary as fuck. And them being plain clothed certainly doesn't make it less so. But based on the part of the video which he chose to shared I don't see why one would suspect anyone other than the police. Had they been out to kill him it would have been easier to just go in blasting instead of yelling while using a battering ram.
Hit squads are truly exotic here. Plain clothes police raids are not, although the norm is for them to be uniformed. I have no idea on why they chose to be plain clothed instead of uniformed on this occasion, but I can't see why we would attribute it to "cosplaying as some sort of a hit squad". Another possibility, which I believe is somewhat common, is that they can take him away without making him look like a criminal in the eyes of his neighbors.
Where in Europe are you from? I get the impression that you are used to a very different kind of society.
We don't have precedent in the way that common law countries do, and the judgements in actual cases point in slightly different directions-- in one case a court felt that the failure to fire a warning shot made it not self-defence, in another fighting people trying to get into an apartment with a knife was deemed acceptable.
Generally though, if someone is breaking into your apartment while you're there, possibly trying to get at you, there's no limit, as long as you're actually trying to defend yourself (so no executing someone who you've clearly disabled, etc.).
If people are breaking into your apartment and you fire a warning shot, then proceed to shoot the attackers, no one will complain.
I am Swedish, and it’s very true that ”it depends”.
This guy for example was convicted of murder because he got his gun out without even trying to contact the police directly or indirectly. So even if he pulled the trigger under reasonable circumstances (a know violent offender was trying to take his rifle) he was found guilty because he should not have gone for the gun without considering alternatives like locking the door or fleeing.
I can’t see him being anywhere near guaranteed to claim self defense even if he had fired a warning shot first.
If a masked person, that doesn't first identify themselves clearly as the police (which is difficult since, well, they are masked) breaks into my house, that's a lethal attack for sure.
What are you going to do after they enter the house (if they aren't indeed the police and you trust they won't kill or rape your family)?
While this is still bad, If you watch the video, the officers announce themselves and enter with empty hands... it's very different from videos of "raids" by US police that I've seen.
You can. But ammunition and the guns have to be stored in separate safes. And it's essentially impossible to get off with a self defense claim if you have time to gather your legal guns
The activist is well known. They likely knew he would answer the door, yet they still broke it down. In the U.S., you'd probably shoot some dog in that situation, if one was available.
The entire scene is probably not meant as effective policing, but as punitive theater. This also explains why they disabled the cameras, as the theater was not intended for content reuse.
Given that, I'd assume they knew he wouldn't shoot them or do anything even remotely like that.
Just because Denmark doesn't have the same gun laws, culture around using guns for self-defense, or prevalence of guns as the US does, it doesn't mean that Danish police face no risk when they raid someone's home. Anytime the cops raid someone's home, regardless of whether or not is it a legitimate raid of a legitimate criminal, it's a violent act and there's risk that the cops will be hurt or killed.
Since 1945 12 cops have been killed in the line of duty (excluding traffic accidents), mostly when responding to a violent crime (trying to stop bank robberies lead to 6 of those fatalities).
That’s such an American mentality. Here’s a short clip which might broaden your mind on possible ways to view how and when police should be using violence.
Maybe he wanted to make sure a lot of copies of the evidence were floating around. Surveillance capitalism is like a free unlimited backup service you can't restore from.
I was on a consultant-assignment at a company that got raided by the police in the EU. The police was extremely careful not to scan any data that where stored on US-servers. The company used Google for mail and file storage, so all computers had to be taken offline before they could scan them.
While I don't doubt they have a way of getting permission to access that data, I don't think they will put in the effort unless you're a relally big fish.
How did he get the videos out of the cameras that were seized if the recording was also not uploaded? Can Nest cameras upload/stream to private servers? (never had one so I have no idea)
He describe himself as an anarcho capitalist so I guess, ideologically, it is government surveillance that he is concerned with and that the free market will sort out the rest.
A Danish privacy activist (not a protected title) using Google Nest.
On a second thought (addendum), ...
1) Publishing PII like phone number of a high profile person in your society is causing them harm since they obviously put effort into not having such out in the open. (e.g. I can find anyone's phone number in my country via leaks. No big deal... but I shouldn't publish such. I shouldn't possess such data either.)
2) SSN is a different category of PII. Publishing this of anyone is an invitation of harm, even more so of a high profile person in your society.
It is akin to inviting people to DDoS a website, or blocking them physically access to exit their house. That kind of thing. Except that on the internet, anyone can abuse this. Even people (including criminals) in foreign countries, residing in hazardous jurisdictions (e.g. Russia).
Either way, what's the point of publishing such information? When German activists published the fingerprint of a German minister, they were making a point. They got the fingerprint via a glass of wine, but the interesting point is that a fingerprint cannot be revoked. It isn't used to authenticate a password, but a user(name). It should therefore not be used as single factor.
Whatever Lars may be, the fact that a lawful arrest could not be filmed sucks. I can find other reasons behind needing to cut the circuit breakers during an arrest of a hacker in an effort to secure evidence.
Peter Hummelgaard on the other hand, can just fuck right off. Former head of the ministry of justice seriously argued that the mass surveillance initiatives he led were right because he "felt" it...
I guess it's like castle doctrine for the information space. Something like "your right to privacy stops when you openly try to undermine mine...".
I see it as a morally valid approach. Politicians are well within their power to not be corrupt and value the US/bigcorp/oligarch x over the people they vowed to represent.
I shouldn't have clicked on his profile. Sorry for him for being raided by the police, but I didn't expect a "Privacy Activist" to be so focused on openly disliking muslims and migrants. I'm not logged in so maybe that says more about the twitter algo, but a lot of what I saw was posts and reposts hating on these groups of people.
remigration, monkey comparisons, generally some awful stuff. yikes. Just focus on privacy, dude.
Nobody in Denmark actually thinks of Lars Andersen as any sort of serious privacy activist. He is a drug-addled moron who just happens to dabble in those things. He's an idiot and contributes nothing of value to society.
> The prefece to the story is, that I in a kind of roundabout and (I think) humorous way published "my two favorite numbers" by spelling out a 10 diget and a 8 diget number with letters. I didn't tell what they ment, but they where prime minister Mette Frederiksen's social security and phone number
Umm, so was he arrested for doxing the prime minister? Is there more to the story than that?
As someone who cares about privacy, arresting people who dox other people seems like a good thing. Obviously i want that to apply to everyone not just the rich and famous, but still at the end of the day i have trouble objecting to someone getting arrested for doxing people.
That same prime minister supports the warrant-less use of medical records in police work and the ban of encryption through chat control. She wants to prevent the Danish population from having privacy, but demands it herself. Sorry, but that's not the Western way.
That's a bit simplified, isn't it? He's pointing out precisely that "doxing" the entire population of Denmark shouldn't be acceptable to her, and that she's literally not accepting herself being "doxxed." If it was about, I dunno, pizza toppings or school budgeting, then obviously the actions would have been different.
> He's pointing out precisely that "doxing" the entire population of Denmark shouldn't be acceptable to her
Denmark is a democracy, that is a decision for the electroate to make during an election. In general we give governments rights and abilities that normal people do not have. Where the line should be is up to the voters to decide.
> and that she's literally not accepting herself being "doxxed."
Not really equivalent. I'm pretty sure the Danish survelience plans, whatever you think of them, intend to have some sort of controls against misuse. (Im not saying that makes them good or ok, just that they aren't equivalent to doxing people)
Having their business transparent makes sense but by restricting people's personal lives like this would disincentivize good people from rising to power, which is not what we want.
It won't prevent bad people from rising to power. After all, i'm pretty sure Putin doesn't have this problem. He just throws people who do this sort of thing out the window. The only politicians that have something to fear from this type of activism is the non evil ones.
People that want to be powerful for personal gain will be filtered. People that legimitely want to give their all for their country will be encouraged.
Is it "just disagreeing with them" or is it taking away privacy _from those publicly renouncing the right to privacy_, with goal of protecting the right to privacy of everyone else, who didn't renounce it, by pointing out the hipocrisy and that it actually is important, even to those who claim otherwise trying to take it from others?
Politicians these days are expected to have harder and harder skin. I've seen lots of stories in the news lately of (in particular young) politicians from scandinavia who dropped out of politics due to harassment, anonymous threats etc. And even more people who never get into politics, because of hearing about such stories. I sure as hell would not get into politics today.
I fear for what our political system will look like when only those who have become completely numb to such threats remain. What kinds people are they, those who can live with hundreds of daily hate messages and death threats, doxing of oneself and family members, having to live with security guards and secret addresses? What are we losing by allowing this kind of "freedom of speech"?
If your morals consist of eye-for-an-eye retribution, then maybe his actions make sense. But I do not believe that that gives us a better society.
> If your morals consist of eye-for-an-eye retribution
It’s still preferable to doing nothing when that politician is publicly declaring their support of indiscriminately violating inherent personal freedoms on an unlimited scale.
> Obviously i want that to apply to everyone not just the rich and famous
Do you really want armed and masked police to break down the doors of people who dox others, disable their cameras, and arrest them while refusing to tell them the charges? Because without these details this would have been a non-story.
Most of the time i would want the arrests to proceed in a more civil manner unless the situation warranted otherwise, but ultimately yes, i think doxing/harrasment is a crime and people who commit it should be arrested and tried.
I think what is much more important, is that it exposes the shortcomings of the Danish SSN system.
It was introduced in 1968, when Denmark was a high-trust society. It was used as a sort of password and key for looking up your information. If you wanted to create a bank account, you told them your SSN. If you wanted to buy a car, you told them your SSN. If you had any contact with the authorities, you told them your SSN. And so on.
The usage has changed, but not that much. So today, when trust in Danish society is not as high, the system falls short. Identity theft. Privacy. Scamming. They have to be detected and stopped by other means.
The proper path forwards would be to radically change the system (or the society).
The tone of the post sounds like smear since it entirely dismisses his advocacy of personal liberty with claims that havn't been published in Danish media as far as I know.
It would be interesting if you could elaborate on the claims that be was a corrupt police officer and drug dealer.
My understanding of his own account is that he left the force when he wasn't comfortable arresting people over weed and that he saw systematic abuse of power that he didn't want to partake in. Is there more to the story?
His recent activism has been focusing on contrasting the privacy people in power demand with their work to deny the broad population privacy.
> you could elaborate on the claims that be was a corrupt police officer and drug dealer.
This is public record. It’s entirely published he’s charged and received a prison sentence for the crime, the investigation into corruption started but needed early when he handed in his resignation. which is just proof that he was a corrupt cop in a corrupt system. I mean no drug dealer who gets charged is going to get off by going “ok I’ll quit then”.
> My understanding of his own account is that he left the force when he wasn't comfortable arresting people over weed
This flips the script. He public made statements that he would carry drugs on the job, and felt I’d should be legal, and that he wouldn’t enforce the drug law. The investigation that followed he handed in his resignation. And the corrupt Danish police force being what it is, dropped the investigation.
His “activism” has since consisted of amongst other things starting to sell drugs and then claiming that its activism when he got charged with prison for it. To be clear, he didn’t stage the public sale of a symbolic amount to get arrested and protest through civil disobedience. He straight up went breaking bad and started a drug peddling operation.
>And the corrupt Danish police force being what it is, dropped the investigation.
How is that corruption? If the issue was that he was saying he wasn't gonna do his job, and then he quit his job, wouldn't that just rectify the situation?
He was saying that he broke the law routinely and they decided to end the investigation. That’s corruption, police should be investigated for routinely failing to do their job just the same as when they break the law or abuse their office.
I get the impression that you have (or claim to have) information that isn't publicly available and think he is disingenuous or imormal as a person.
Do you also disagree with the causes he is promoting or only the person and/or methods?
Some of his ideas, like full anarcho capitalism, I would need to be convinced before being onboard with. But opposing mass surveillance and promoting government accountability seems odd to vigorously oppose.
I don’t have any non public information. This is all public record, he was found guilty and charged with jail on multiple occasions. He pops up in the news periodically for having broken yet another law and i charged and convicted for it.
And “being opposed to mass surveillance” and literally stalking kids of the prime minister to attempt to expose the PET (equivalent to FBI) exposed secret location her family is staying at are not the same.
Obviously every drug dealer is going to “be of the ideology that dealing drugs should be legal” but that doesn’t make dealing drugs activism. Same as abusing the office of being a cop. It doesn’t matter if you believe it should be legal for cops to beat up protestors, that doesn’t make a cop breaking the law to beat up protestors an act of activism.
The guy is just a sleezebag who cries “activism” every time he faces consequences for breaking the law in this illegal activism or when he’s harassing politicians. That’s not actual activism and he’s not supporting any cause he’s just acting like an idiot doing what he’s doing.
I don’t care if you think drugs should be legalized, or even if you do drugs in your free time. If you are a cop doing drugs while on duty and decide to take it on yourself to not enforce the law against drug dealers you are corrupt, because you have decided to subjugate the law you are forced with enforcing. Now it’s true that he wasn’t officially charged with taking kickbacks from the drug dealers he would let operate but in my optics that is entirely due to them letting him hand in a resignation to stop the investigation, propably to protect his fellow cops who would have been named and shamed for also doing drugs on the job. But to be clear, deciding to protect drug dealers in your job as a cop is. It activism it’s corruption.
Claiming it’s about ideology defies the point. He spent years as a cop letting drug dealers deal drugs and then came out saying the only reason he was breaking the law was because he didn’t believe in it. That’s not ideology that’s corruption. If he had decided to stop being a cop to not enforce a law he didn’t like that’s different. But that’s not what happened. He quit hen his illegal enterprise got caught. Cops do not get to enforce the law selectively based on what laws they like and dislike and get off just by claiming “ideology”.
This is the slave mindset that is letting politicians all over the world erode our rights. More and more and more. Every country is now passing deep anti-privacy, anti-VPN, anti-encryption and age-verification laws. The law is not written by us, its written by people who are only barely accountable to us once every couple of years. Authoritarianism is rising very sharply all over the world, corruption amongst the elites is high, they are increasingly unaligned and unafraid of common people. There's a million tricks to pass laws that citizens don't really want, including skipping public debates, secret amendments, or just relying on plain old propaganda and ignorance/inaction by the majority. The only actual power we have is in action and organization. Following the laws that they write with barely any input from us off a cliff is not right or noble, its death.
I think you’ve got his fake activism mixed up. When he was a cop he wasn’t claiming to be a privacy advocates his stick then was that cops should be allowed to do cocain while on the job and that if a cop though selling drugs was ok they should be free to not uphold the law whenever they felt like it.
His fake stance on privacy came later when he faced consequences for doxing politicians and using the public Facebook pages of politics to advertise his drug peddling enterprise.
Could you supply some ressources that make your framing plausible? That would be a valuable service to the community, as this discussion seems to be highly polarized. (from the ratio of downvoted comments to all comments).
Reading through this discussion and not having heared of this before it's hard to tell what's genuine and what's not.
Corruption is defined as "the abuse of entrusted power for private (usually financial) gain". Lars' case falls under the category of conscientious objection, as he's ideologically motivated. Pretty disgusting to frame that as corruption.
One could read this persons activism as a narrative of "lesson learned" in this regard. Well you want the law applied to everyone equally? Well, actually.. you're right. In the sense as it seems to be the case that there is a motive in this persons action of make them experience being subjected to the legal/social order they promote.
I think some context is being lost in a literal translation.
I think they mean secret as in unlisted where their records aren't accessible in public government databases. The same protection you would get if you were stalked for example.
No, it’s not just unlisted number and address. PET (Danish equivalent of FBI) by administrative decision has had her move out of her Copenhagen apartment and to an undisclosed location due to security concerns. Her and her family are literally under protection due to security concerns and this guy is stalking her kids trying to dox her.
I get that it's a secret location now, but I don't understand in context if this activist is the trigger of the situation. An if so how can this be considered a threat.
Stalking falls under the broad category of harassment in my eastern european country. I feel as if this would be a non issue given an official police warning. At most.
At the same time, i would presume if his arrest was this irregular and illegal he would be taking it to actual court instead ofthe court of public opinion.
Not exclusive, but in general its a bad idea to post on social media if you plan to take it up in court, as its very easy to accidentally say something that shoots yourself in the foot.
In a functioning legal system it matters what you said or didn't. In a non-functioning legal system they will just convict you regardless of what was said or done.
> She currently lives at a secret address due to security concerns.
Oh so she cares about her own privacy? Curious then that she seems to be such an ardent advocate for Chat Control and for the erosion of encryption.
Politicians are such a disgusting, hypocritical bunch of "people", more people should be "doxxing" these weasels. Maybe eventually we'll find one of them that has 2 braincells to put together to comprehend their hypocrisy, but I guess there's little chance of that.
She didn’t choose to make that move. PET (the equivalent of FBI) made the decision to protect her address. I’m sure she much prefer the time back when she was living at her own place and her address was freely available to the public without any issues.
There is no hypocrisy here.
As for releasing social security numbers of people, she’s against it no matter who’s doing the doxing and who the target is. But yes, obviously the government knows hos government issued ID corresponds to who. That’s pretty obvious. But that doesn’t mean everyone in the country has to have access to it. Your doctor also has access to your medical journal, that doesn’t give you the right to publish the medical journal of your doctor on Facebook if you get angry at him for giving you a bad diagnosis.
Pretty much every single politician calling for Chat Control wants to carve out protections for themselves to be excluded from it. This is quite literally as hypocritical as it can possibly get, they want the gov't to have the ability to spy on you and every single conversation you have, but they've carved out a nice little enclave for them and their corrupt donors that excludes them from this same scrutiny. 'Cause everyone knows the average Joe needs to have their private messages out in the open, and not the corrupt pedophile politicians.
PET is holding her hostage? They took her in the middle of the night to the new address and told her that if she reveals it to anyone that they will kill her dog?
She is taking the recommendation of PET to move to a secure location and conceal her address.
I have no real clue who any of these people are but I can see the glaring hypocrisy from here.
Because no one has mentioned it here: Lars Andersen is also a right-wing extremist who regularly posts racist content on social media. His privacy/free speech activism seems to be (at least partly) motivated by this.
I think this is useful context for evaluating his judgment.
All too often people throw around the racist buzzword without ever actually providing evidence. It's as if we're expected to just blindly trust and follow that somebody is now excommunicated from modern society.
Sure thing. If you view his X profile without logging in, nearly all his top posts demonstrate what I mean: advocating for remigration (i.e. ethnic cleansing), comparing Muslims to monkeys, supporting far-right figures like Tommy Robinson and Rasmus Paludan, sharing YouTube comments with racial slurs...
https://x.com/LarsAnders1620/status/1885254465160118655, first one that comes up when I view X (not signed in). I don't think this is enough (as OP declared) to authoritatively place him in 'right wing extremist' but probably racist. I don't speak danish, but someone that could would be able to make a more complete judgement because most, if not all posts of his, are in Danish.
If the goal was to maximize attention to the event (in order to use it to steer attention towards the cause) then it was quite successful, no? After all, we're talking about it here. Mostly about him and the details of the event, but some sub-threads are about the cause too.
Success in what exactly? There a very strong political movement in Denmark towards protecting privacy rights, then there’s this nutjob who just got out of jail for bribes, harassment, death threats against politicians and immediately he starts stalking the kids of the prime minister.
He’s not doing anything for the cause he claims to fight for. He’s doesn’t want a right to privacy he wants to be allowed to continue to sell drugs “in private” from the government. And he thinks freedom of speech should cover his freedom to harass and threaten politicians which it doesn’t and shouldn’t.
By what metric? The fact that he got arrested for stalking the prime ministers children and releasing private information speaks toward protecting privacy not an issue if lacking privacy.
You can’t just declare “I am an anti violence activist” then go out and beat up politicians and declare that the system has a problem with violence when you get arrested.
This is the equivalent of what he’s done. He claims to support privacy laws so he violated the privacy of someone who is currently protected by the PET (equivalent of FBI) due to safety concerns and he proudly proclaimed that he did so by stalking her children. He’s not a political activist he’s a drug dealer who’s hell bent on getting revenge on politicians because he just spent 8 months in jail after being convicted on counts of death threats harassment and illegal possession of arms and drugs.
I'm Danish and lars kragh andersen is a bit of a grey zone. He obviously goes over the line, he tried to put GPS trackers on the cars of ministers. He "stalks" their families, and dox their children online. He gave an interview on how he'd ignore people carrying a kilo gram of weed when he was a cop because he doesn't agree with the "war on drugs".
On the flip-side, he's sort of right. I assume that putting a GPS tracker on the car of our minister of justice is illegal, but that same minister (Peter Hummelgaard) is one of the key forces behind anti-encryption here in Europe. Similarily the politicians he stalk and harras are pro Palintir getting access to all our data, so Lars Andersen is sort of giving the politicians a taste of what they want to give everyone.
He goes way too far though. Especially if he actually wants change, the way he "protests" is directly damaging his own cause, since nobody is going to sympathise with harrassing children.
I suspect next time he'll have his cameras running with backup powers though.
>He goes way too far though. Especially if he actually wants change, the way he "protests" is directly damaging his own cause, since nobody is going to sympathise with harrassing children.
I don't think this is a given. Just Stop Oil says that their tactics do make people hate them, but their research tells them that it still makes peoples opinions on the issues move in the direction that they want them to. Their position is that if they achieve what they want while gathering animosity towards their organisation, once achieved, they can disband.
This is referred to as shifting the Overton window. If voices from the extreme are not heard, the Overton window moves away from their position, so protests help their cause even if only a minority completely agree with them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
I don't think Overton implied any causality between the phases of the window, just that distinct phases exist and that forces act on the window to cause it to shrink, expand, and shift.
Interestingly, considering my post above, I think that view of the Overton window misrepresents what Overton thought.
It was first and foremost a decription based on observation, but I think it conveyed that he felt that the Overton window was moved by vorces in the middle, and forces at the extremes moved it in the other direction.
There is a distinction to be made of how strongly the opinion is held compared to how much the opinion differs to the median view.
I think there is a correlation at the extremes, but I think the Just Stop Oil approach is deliberately splitting those two, performing extreme actions to promote a view that is not terribly extreme.
This is consistent with the view of the Overton window that the extremes repel and the moderate attracts.
Compare that to a vegan who doesn't campaign, but silently judges every meat eater as a murderer. If their views were more public, it may drive people the other way.
> but their research tells them that it still makes peoples opinions on the issues move in the direction that they want them to.
I'd really like to see that research.
Isn't Just Stop Oil funded by an oil heiress?
Teddy Roosevelt was the son of a wealthy and famous railroad baron, but he used that upbringing and status to rein in corporate monopolies and bust the oil barons' empires wide open, which started the decline of the gilded age. All that to say, being a wealthy, elite and privileged oil heiress doesn't necessarily mean this person doesn't want to end oil consumption.
(I don't know anything about her.)
If it is, would that bad? Seems like a person who might really have strong personal investment in the situation. Using the oil companies' profits to try to shrink them, seems good.
> but their research tells them
Thier "research" might be full of yes men.
I suspect their research is as rigorous and valid as their philosophy.
what do you think they should do instead of what they currently do?
They should find some other way to peacock in front of their fellow upper-class friends, because it annoys the fuck out of normal people that Tarquin and Cecily come from money and thus have the free time to throw soup on paintings or whatever publicity-seeking guff they try next.
If they want to fix the climate crisis, they should engage with normal people and find effective ways for them to save money (e.g. like https://energysavingtrust.org.uk/ do) or pressure councils and such into providing better public transport (e.g. like https://bettertransport.org.uk/ do).
People don't consume oil because they intrinsicly like consuming oil. People use private cars that consume oil because nobody else gives a shit (especially not councils) about their needs to get from A to B on time and doesn't offer suitable public transport. People don't buy into mad schemes that require £20,000 upfront and might return about £200 a year in savings, just for ideological reasons. They need cheaper things that pay off sooner, like portable solar panels they can put out in the garden when it's sunny.
Probably the best thing they could do is tell all their other ecological activists to stop being NIMBYs and stop protesting against pylons, so we can get lovely clean renewable energy, generated by turbines in the North Sea, to all the places in Britain where it's needed, especially the south east of England.
Its a know tatic to sponsor the extreme fringe to discredit a cause. Just stop oil receiving oil money?
If it’s a “well known tactic” (well known by whom?) then it’s a counter-productive one - the more the extreme is heard in the mainstream, the more rational the slightly less extreme version sounds (It’s something the right-wing tends to use extremely effectively, the left wing spends too much energy infighting)
For the first time, I see that being a problem to right-wing parties, specially in USA. Now you have neonazis gathering a community by saying you are not extreme enough, and harassing the Jewish people of your side. It's crazy when you compare that to 10 years ago, but it is what it is.
I don’t think he goes too far at all.
If politicians are attempting to undermine your children’s right to privacy forever, and yet these same politicians don’t like when this is being done to their own children…it shows either an astonishing level of hypocrisy and/or stupidity.
Europe is filled with these types of authoritarian urbanites, who make decisions from an elitist “i know what’s best for you” attitude while eating 6 course dinners. This is the same class of European leaders who steered the regions entire energy/economic/social policy so bad that the whole European model of the last few decades is in slow collapse and fiscally unsustainable. Yet ironically, the most common phrase you’ll hear while eating these 6 course dinners is “sustainability.”
These people are some of the worst hypocrites on pretty much every topic imaginable and need to be called out for it.
This is what I meant by the grey zone. I personally think it goes too far, but I agree with the point you make here. Where it becomes problematic is that the method does not get the point across to any audience which doesn't already agree with them.
Compare this to Jesper Graugaard, who is know locally as the "Chromebook-dad". He's been campaigning against big tech in our schools for like a decade, and after 6 years we recently had a ruling forbidding our cities from using Google services without proper data ownership agreements. He's obviously not the only party behind this, but he's a massive force in the agenda against non-EU tech in our schools. He does it through reform and political campaigning.
Jesper has wide public support, Lars is not viewed favourable. This story hasn't even hit our news, I've only heard about it here on HN.
I think you and I disagree. I don’t think Jesper is focused on the right issues.
Big tech (private companies who largely just care about profits) and foreign governments (the Americans for example), are way lower on my “things Europe should be worried” about list. They’re there of course, but lower.
Private companies don’t have the ability to ruin your life in the same way your own government does. They just want your money. And the US government is truly a disinterested party. 99% of Americans couldn’t place Denmark on a map (I’m not kidding). When push comes to shove, they fundamentally do not care what happens here.
The real threat is our own governments, who we have given the legal authority to enact all the negative outcomes that will come from totalitarian erosions of privacy and over regulation of individuals. Building up this scary “foreign boogieman” and stoking this moral panic is what is enabling the authoritarian action.
Pointing fingers at Big Tech and the US is a giant distraction tactic so you don’t look at the terrible things our own domestic politicians have done and the fact they have zero plans to do the hard things needed to get us out of this mess. It's just champagne and smiling over dinner, while the old eat the young, the government eats the private sector, and endless legislation eats away your opportunity to do anything more exciting than build powerpoints at a braindead consulting firm.
> Private companies don’t have the ability to ruin your life in the same way your own government does. They just want your money.
And what happens when your money is gone? What happens when the government has no money anymore because the super rich took it all? Your life turns to shit real fast when you can't afford housing, healthcare and food.
I get when you are in an authoritarian country, or one on the path to becoming so like the US, that the government looks to be the most dangerous actor. But in the west that is still free, its the corps that I worry about the most.
Private companies want your money but they don’t take it. You give it to them in exchange for something.
It feels like I'm force to pay tax which then evaporates into the pockets of private companies like Palantir, though... I mean, you arguably can't even fully participate in the society you pay taxes to help run if you don't have a Google or Apple spycube.
That's the government taking your money and deciding how to apply it. It isn't a private company taking your money.
You’re fundamentally worried about the wrong thing.
It’s an extremely common bias on the left just as the anti-government bias on the right.
Both public and private entities are capable of abusing power.
Only one group however is legally entitled to take 50% of your money regardless of the quality of their product, by holding a gun to your head. They can even take more via the phantom tax of inflation using deficit spending (as is happening now all over Europe). This group is the one you should fear more if looking at it from first principles.
The current runaway deficits across Europe and rising political unrest prove this.
The only thing companies can do to “take” your money is offer you a service that’s better than all alternatives that you chose to buy voluntarily.
If you think that’s the bigger authoritarian risk something is wrong with your mental model of how the world works.
If you think that Jesper isn't attacking the right issues, but Lars does, then you should definitely hope that Lars switches to Jesper's more popular approach.
Unless you think there can never be a democratic consensus in favor of privacy, therefore the only way is for a small vanguard of privacy activists to impose their will on the hostile majority and establish a totalitarian privacy dictatorship. Then it wouldn't matter so much whether you look good in the court of popular opinion or not.
You're turning things on their heads. Currently there's some modicum of privacy. Politicians are trying to force removal of this on everyone.
You can not “democratically” decide to abolish certain inalienable personal liberties and still pretend you are a democracy. That’s just mob rule or worse.
> totalitarian privacy dictatorship
That’s an illogical concept. What does that even mean?
> 99% of Americans couldn’t place Denmark on a map (I’m not kidding)
sixty one percent of statistics are fabricated on the spot?
Out of curiosity, what is Jesper's strategy?
This doesn't tell me much about how he campaigns By contrast, I've got a much clearer idea of Lars and his strategies by a description of his actionsEven if you don't think he goes too far ethically, you can probably agree that it's reasonable for the police to intervene once he's interfering with the cars of government ministers.
The police definitely need to intervene, but I'd like to think that playing tit-for-tat with the government is a valid protest, and that this won't result in a loss of freedom.
I guess they need to ascertain whether he's operating organically, or at the behest of another nation, and whether he's scouting out ministers for something bigger in the future.
Though, the irony in all this, is that it all could've been avoided if the government weren't acting at the behest of another nation, and scouting out what they can get away with on their authoritarian warpath. Maybe the police are arresting the wrong people.
Will the police intervene and arrest the ministers when the laws the ministers are enacting result in the same outcome for me?
Of course not. There is paperwork and letterhead involved so it is legitimate.
never - the courts must make decisions
By the same standard it would be reasonable to intervene when politicians are indiscriminately interfering with personal communications devices of everyone without any judicial oversight?
I think the sim cards are more important: he wrote that Nest switched to local recording mode and the police took the evidence.
I know of Peter Hummelgaard and I am not even from Denmark. Just because his work and plans. He certainly deserves that tracker and then some...
This is interesting and all but is ultimately just an aside. Are the law enforcement actions on display here legal in Denmark? If not, surely there's prison sentences in store for anyone involved. Right?
Probably not illegal, questionable ethics. Which could have consequences, but probably not.
Regardless, this is enormously dumb. If you want to search and arrest an activist who crosses the line, you make it as boring as possible.
lol. No. If anything there would be a minor slap on the wrist for violating procedure. I sincerely doubt the police will get in any trouble for what they did.
> He goes way too far though
that's what activist have to do to shake people
I have heard this claim before but I find it unconvincing. I have given up support of movements for which activists have acted cruelly or otherwise immorally. Obviously one person doesn't represent a movement, but if I only ever see immoral people leading a movement, that will form a basis for my opinion of the movement.
My observation of these activists is usually that they seek attention at any cost. They will hurt people to achieve that attention. Worse, I don't even think it's about the movement. They just want the attention personally. Others in the movement tacitly condone this behaviour.
I think the most frustrating part of this is that they claim it's to raise awareness. Who among us has not heard of global warming? Who has not heard of data privacy? The reality is that they're not getting the public support they desire because people just don't agree with their goals or beliefs, not because the public is "unaware."
You do have a valid point but mildly “hurting” (or rather inconveniencing) the justice minister of Denmark out of all places seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. I mean he’s hellbent on using 1984 as a guidebook and forcing it on everyone in the EU.
> I have heard this claim before but I find it unconvincing. I have given up support of movements for which activists have acted cruelly or otherwise immorally.
Most people aren't this particular brand of irrational.
Ghandi once said during a visit to the west, "I like your Christ, but I do not like your Christians". It is not irrational to question movements you might nominally agree with but that manifest in immoral or inconsistent ways.
> that's what activist have to do to shake people
That's also the line most terrorist groups use.
Its not exactly wrong i suppose. 9/11 did get Americans to think about the middle east a lot more.
The difference between terrorists and freedom fighters is a matter of which side of the fence you stand on. They are basically the same thing, especially these days when you get marked as terrorist for talking bad about the people in power.
> difference between terrorists and freedom fighters is a matter of which side of the fence
Oft repeated but untrue. Terrorism, empirically, doesn’t work. Non-violent protest, and armed insurrection (aimed at the state, not its population) do. Sometimes freedom fighters can benefit from terrorism. But they are distinct strategies with separate targets.
And freedom fighters are supposed to actually care about "freedom" while terrorists generally do not. I fail to see what great advancements in freedom for anyone involved have come out of the terror attacks performed over the past 25 years.
Islamists fight to be the oppressors, not to help the oppressed.
> Islamists fight to be the oppressors
Eh, the history of Islamism comes out of rebelling against secular dictators who had a habit of imprisoning their thought leaders.
or put simply, just rebelling against any attempt at modernising muslim societies. Anwar Sadat comes to mind.
25 years? Why stop there? How about the US terror attacks on other countries civilians since at least the 1960s?
Yeah... what about those?
How many retaliatory terror attacks on americans performed by citizen of those countries?
What point are you trying to make? US bad? Anything more thoughtful to offer?
The US are an empire and they have behaved as an empire over the last 70 years (bombing, overthrowing governments, supporting dictators). By historical standard, they have proved less coercive than empires of proportionally comparable reach. Think of the Mongols, the Assyrians, the Japanese...
When did USA bomb a civilian house that wasn't a part of a larger operation? Terrorist attacks only target civilians, I have never seen such an attack by USA. They always try to target military or leaders.
The last time I know USA did a terror attack was japan in ww2, but everyone did terror bombing during that war, and the first world stopped doing terror bombings since then. If USA still ran that doctrine you would have Tehran and the rest of major Iranian cities leveled to the ground now, that is what it looks like when the strongest military in the world perform terror attacks.
If you ignore our proxies. Or are Israel's attacks destroying the hospitals and apartment buildings in Gaza and Lebanon "part of a larger operation"?
I guess it's okay we napalmed Vietnam and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians because it was "part of a larger operation"?
American Exceptionalism is a disease.
Are you sure your name isn't Jingo?
> When did USA bomb a civilian house that wasn't a part of a larger operation
Why does that matter? The attacks on the Twin Towers were also part of a larger operation, does that excuse the attacks in any way?
> Terrorist attacks only target civilians
Nope, terrorism can include literally anything when Power deems it convenient.
https://stratnewsglobal.com/europe/united-kingdom/uk-charges... : British MPs on Wednesday voted to declare pro-Palestinian group Palestine Action a terrorist organisation, after its activists broke into a military base and damaged two aircraft
> I have never seen such an attack by USA
That may very well be true, but the world is a lot bigger than what your eyes can capture. "I don't see it, therefore it doesn't exist" is a state of mind that most people grow out of around the age of 8 months.
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre : When the soldiers got to the village, they did not find any NLF troops. Despite this, many soldiers began to kill the villagers, mainly elderly people, women, and children
> [the USA] always try to target military or leaders
Bless your heart.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/02/politics/timeline-us-strikes-... : The US military has killed at least 207 people in strikes that have destroyed 66 vessels
> The last time I know USA did a terror attack was japan in ww2
Yet another example of "one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter"
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/mar/24/worlddispatch.... : To some in the Arab and Muslim countries, Shock and Awe is terrorism by another name; to others, a crime that compares unfavourably with September 11
> the first world stopped doing terror bombings since then
Nixon and Kissinger were not part of the first world, then?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Menu : Apart from the large human toll, perhaps the most powerful and direct impact of the bombing was the political backlash it caused [..] The U.S. carpet bombing of Cambodia was partly responsible for the rise of what had been a small-scale Khmer Rouge insurgency, which now grew capable of overthrowing the Lon Nol government
Nixon decided to keep the bombing a secret from the American people as to admit to bombing an officially neutral nation would damage his credibility
> that is what it looks like when the strongest military in the world perform terror attacks
We know perfectly well what it looks like: https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2025/12/22/2025-in-gaza-12...
The Taliban's terrorism very much did work.
Not really. The Taliban’s attacks on civilians didn’t help their cause. They found success when they started acting as a more-competent government than our fucks in Kabul. If we want to debate whether the Taliban under occupation had any success with its terrorist tactics, I guess I’d concede that one man’s terrorist is another’s guerrilla fighter. But even then, guerilla tactics rely on a sympathetic local population. So a guerrilla team bombing civilians is undermining its own cause.
I'm not exactly an expert on Afghan politics and the reason for the failure of the western backed government are surely multifaceted, but don't you think that destabilizing the country through terror attacks played a role in the sustained weakness of the government as well as the withdrawal of the West?
> don't you think that destabilizing the country through terror attacks played a role in the sustained weakness of the government as well as the withdrawal of the West?
Not an expert either. I haven’t seen one make this case. What I have seen is cross-conflict studies on the success of terrorism, and that sets my baseline for Afghanistan being a special case. (Domestic terrorism works a little bit more frequently than international terrorism. But they’re both very, very bad strategies that frequently blow back.)
> The Taliban’s attacks on civilians didn’t help their cause
Umm, do you mean al-qaeda (if you are referring to 9/11). Al-qaeda and the Taliban are different groups. Neither are particularly nice, but only one did 9/11.
Terrorist is often a term used to describe freedom fighters, in order to delegitimize them. Basically this is such a common tactic that it is unsurprising that the two are sometimes conflated.
> Terrorist is often a term used to describe freedom fighters
Do you have an historical example?
Basically all of history. Terrorist is a term people use for people who use violence and intimidation to attempt to cause political change. Freedom fighter is a term used for people who use violence and intimidation to attempt to cause political change that you are sympathetic to.
Both words have identical meanings, the only difference is if you happen to agree with the people commiting the violent acts or not.
> Both words have identical meanings
Only online. The Viet Cong weren’t targeting civilians. They hit American soldiers. Targeting military and narrow political power are the hallmark of proper rebellions. Targeting civilians is how terrorism works.
The closest analog to terrorism in warfare is actually strategic air campaigns. Dresden and the London Blitz are closer to terrorism than e.g. the uprising in Bangladesh or even the Taliban toppling the Karzai regime. And lo and behold, strategic air campaigns have a history of uniting the enemy much more than undoing them.
Generally speaking, people do not use the word terrorism or freedom fighter to describe the actions of a state actor during open war.
> people do not use the word terrorism or freedom fighter to describe the actions of a state actor during open war
People also don’t use the term to relate to rebellions. It’s more an internet meme or cases where like a few people call e.g. Russia a terrorist state by analogy. Freedom fighters fighting rebellion tend to work to keep civilians on their side. When they don’t, they become terrorists and tend to lose.
No, not at all. Methods and targets/victims also matter. Using violence to achieve specific military objectives or as a response to violence is not the same as indiscriminate murder and terrorism.
> as a response to violence
Literally every terrorist group ever claims they are responding to some sort of violence or oppression.
So what? It what they are actually doing that matters.
Terrorism very much does work. The Basque and the Northern Irish terrorists / freedom fighters have gotten a so many of their demands for autonomy met that they disbanded (in one case formally, in the other almost) because they weren't needed anymore. Taliban also got the US out from Afghanistan pretty handily with mostly terrorism.
> The Basque and the Northern Irish terrorists / freedom fighters have gotten a so many of their demands for autonomy met that they disbanded
That’s certainly not how it works.
They just became highly unpopular amongst the populations they were trying to liberate (which generally preferred more peaceful solutions) and lost their support base and had to disband.
The Taliban absolutely did not terrorism the US out of Afghanistan haha
When the population was complaining that they had to go to the Taliban for help because the Americans could do nothing to help them when the local military was corrupt and abused the people.
Why do you think they left, then?
Because it was expensive and the local population did not care for the Kabul government we were protecting. It is hard to prop an unpopular government in a country of 40 million.
The US military was averaging only 12 deaths in the years before withdraw.
Most of what the taliban was doing is closer to asymmetric warfare than terrorism.
yet you fail to account for the fact that said people wouldn't wouldn't be in power did terrorism not have occurred in the first place. How many bad leaders in the west resulting directly or indirectly from terror attacks?
About as many as bad terrorist groups that began due to catastrophically bad decisions of leaders in the West. I'm sorry to break it to you - the plural you - but all the terrorists that are not traditionally domestic (local leftist/rightist extremists are everywhere, after all) - and the fact they are against the West - is simply a consequence of Western politics. Imperialism and neocollonialism are real, actual policies, and it doesn't take a genius to realize that. If such policies hit locales where it's not culturally wrong to die for a cause, it's obvious you'll get terrorists after a while. I suspect this was calculated risk until it stopped being that: the locals got their own exploding sticks and decided to use them.
It's so incredibly sad to watch: for decades, tons of people made mostly rational (from their point of view) decisions, yet each step inevitably brought us closer and closer to the current situation. Add a few cultural, social, and personal pathological cases into the mix, and what you have is basically a speedrun to 9/11.
Note that I'm not justifying terror attacks, just saying they are a very predictable consequence of decades of policy-making.
> I'm sorry to break it to you - the plural you - but all the terrorists that are not traditionally domestic (local leftist/rightist extremists are everywhere, after all) - and the fact they are against the West - is simply a consequence of Western politics.
Then why doesn't south America perform a lot of terrorist attacks? If that was the reason then you would see sub saharan africa perform way more terrorist attacks than the middle east.
No, the elephant in the room is religious zealots, they perform terrorist attacks, most other groups do not perform a lot of terrorism. A history of oppression just makes you happy the oppressors left, it doesn't make you a terrorist that go and try to make the oppressors come back like the middle east does.
no, it's nothing specific to "The West" or the decisions it has taken. The typical "They hate us because our bad policies" does not explain why every empire (western or not) has had to contend with dissenters keen on overthrowing its "yoke".
How would the Mongols, the Russians, the Egyptian empires have solved the israeli/palestine conflict? Do you know where the terms zealots and sicario come from? Did the Romans solve these terror attacks by reconsidering their "catastrophically bad policies"?
> The typical "They hate us because our bad policies" does not explain why every empire (western or not) has had to contend with dissenters
It's interesting that you actually wrote down in this sentence the very explanation you say doesn't exist. It's pretty obvious: instituting an empire is the policy others will hate you for. The fact that you can't imagine this despite spelling out the facts yourself is curious.
Not being an empire is an option, too. That won't save you in all cases, especially if you're seen as a fallen empire, another empire's lackey due to alliances and dependencies, or your culture is simply incompatible with some other culture that happens to be frequently in contact with you. But it will reduce the likelihood of a convincing narrative - one that could lead people to hijack planes and fly them into buildings - emerging.
It's not a topic that can be fully discussed in HN comments, as there are many complexities involved, but "They hate us because we decided on a policy to be an empire" is not that far from the truth, I think.
Indeed, empires do not have to exist, and the world could constitute of individual nations ruling themselves independently in democracy peace and happiness.
By historical standard, over the last 10000 years prosperity, democracy and peace have hardly been the norm, don't you think? Empires have existed all over the world however. Perhaps we should accept what is a fact of life of human societies, and try to minimise its most egregious aspects, rather than wishfulling hoping for the profound change that will never materialise.
The pilots who flew planes into buildings 25 years ago were saudis, Saudi Arabia was never part of a western Empire. They trained in Afghanistan which was never part of a western empire (Alexander the Great does not count).
They were able to strike the American empire because, contrary to the common political discourse on the left, the American empire is a rather open and benevolent hegemon by historical standard, and internal dissent is not crushed or exterminated as it would have been were the Americans behaving as the Ottomans, the Romans, the Mongols, the Spanish, USSR etc...
I am not apologizing the American empire, I am not even american nor do I like the culture that spews out of the US, especially these days, but one has to put things into historical context if we are to understand the nature of terror attacks.
> By historical standard, over the last 10000 years prosperity, democracy and peace have hardly been the norm, don't you think?
Agreed! From my own reading (not a specialist), for example, in Europe, there were only a handful of years (literally) between 3000 B.C. and ~1950 A.D. when there was actual peace on the continent. Wars, rebellions, coups, civil wars, uprisings - every single year for five thousand years there was bloodshed, the borders moved, cities perished, populations starved, and so on.
And yes, this happened both when an empire/global power existed and when none was around. And yes, the Pax Romana (and similar periods) did bring many benefits to the world. At the same time, though, all the empires always incited hatred among the groups under them: the Romans bloodily suppressed quite a few uprisings even during that "Golden Age" (which you know, since you mentioned "zealots" in a previous comment). They wouldn't need to do that were they not an empire, which is my point.
> The pilots who flew planes into buildings 25 years ago were saudis, Saudi Arabia was never part of a western Empire. They trained in Afghanistan which was never part of a western empire (Alexander the Great does not count).
The terrorists don't need to be "part of empire" to feel threatened by that empire. Putting soldiers on the ground, for any reason, half a world away, while demanding special treatment for the troops, assuming their country's jurisdiction naturally follows their citizens in other nations, and so on - just one of those is enough to be seen as an imperialist power by the locals. The USA did all of these and more throughout the world, but especially in the Middle East. They didn't have to act that way, but they did, as it's natural for empires. The violent backlash locally and terror attacks at home are just normal, expected reactions to an empire acting like one. It's also worth noting that the entire Middle East is a fallen, fractured Empire. I'm not sure how much that influenced things, but I can imagine it fueled some ambitions in countries like Saudi Arabia to build another Ottoman Empire, this time centered on Riyadh. (Just a guess - I'm not well-versed in post-Middle Age history of the Middle East.)
> They were able to strike the American empire because, contrary to the common political discourse on the left, the American empire is a rather open and benevolent hegemon by historical standard
Agreed. Though I'd say whether an empire is open and benevolent or strict and brutal doesn't influence the number of terrorist attacks. Yes, if you're benevolent, the hatred may be less prevalent - but then your security is weaker, so you can have the same number of attacks even with fewer "freedom fighters". The issue is being seen as an empire: as long as you can be cast as one, some people will hate you automatically, even if, all things considered, you're actually pretty tame and even beneficial to others.
> I am not apologizing the American empire, I am not even american nor do I like the culture that spews out of the US, especially these days, but one has to put things into historical context if we are to understand the nature of terror attacks.
If America is not attacked by terrorists because it is an empire and acts like one - then why? That's what I don't get in your argument. If the USA didn't maintain military presence across the region (ME), didn't wholeheartedly support the "Zionist regime" (which also acts like an ethnocentric empire - Aztecs come to mind as a comparison), didn't historically meddle in the region's politics by both carrot and a lot of stick, etc., would they be hated enough for people to suicide bomb them?
Apparently, 90% of the terror attacks happen in the context of local instability (a civil war, rebellion, uprising, coup, etc.). You really need something special for the foreign terrorists to be willing to travel half a world just to blow themselves up on your doorstep. If it's not the imperialist policies, then what is it? If I understand your argument correctly, it's all religious fanaticism? But then, why would those fanatics attack the US, instead of enjoying some jolly sectarian bloodshed locally, like they did for centuries? There are enough religions and sects in ME to fuel terror attacks for a few more millennia, I'd guess, and it's not like that infighting stopped completely. How come the US was added as another traditional target for "death to ..." calls? I don't think it would happen without America's heavy involvement there...
Blockback is a "fun" podcast about this.
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doxxing and/or stalking the kids (minors) of the person you disagree with is still kind of a d*ck move though
Going too far turns me against you. The more righteous your cause the more pissed off I am at you when you’re excess discredits it.
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> A successful case might be Luigi Mangione.
There have been several public opinion polls that included questions about Luigi Mangione. He’s consistently unpopular among the average population and his actions are generally unsupported. Not at all surprising for an extremist activist who literally committed murder in public.
It’s only when you visit smaller internet bubbles like Reddit where you can start to get into areas where it feels like his actions are widely supported.
A lot of activists are like this: If you go into little bubbles that align with their actions they seem popular. Zoom out and look at the population, including people they were trying to persuade and reach, and they’re not popular like they seem within the bubble.
This is also why twitter drove journalism (and perhaps even the country) off a cliff.
Naive journalists thought twitter was a "public square" that they could conveniently access from the comfort of their living room. They didn't know that it was a powerful echo chamber that resonated the best with strong views, and the space had long been a refuge for people with extreme outlier opinions.
Hence why "topics worthy of national attention" where just whatever was trending on twitter.
> He’s consistently unpopular among the average population and his actions are generally unsupported.
You're missing the story here. Any popularity of a murder in the streets is exceptional. The expected value for "What fraction of the population supports this (alleged) murderer?" is much closer to zero than the ~25% that Mangione polls at, never mind the 40-odd% that he polls with young people.
>A successful case might be Luigi Mangione.
Sorry, but how was that murder successful?
Did it achieve the effect that everyone is getting cheaper healthcare now?
OR, on the contrary, it only achieved that CEOs are now getting more anonymity and private security, while the plebs are getting more invasive law enforcement tracking like Palantir and Flock shoved up their ass to prevent them from doing something like that again?
How would be the US now without Luigi Mangione? Would you have cheaper healthcare? Would Palantir or Flock disappear?
>How would be the US now without Luigi Mangione?
More or less the same except a family of kids would not be missing their father and grow up with the idea of wanting to get revenge on their father's murderer. An eye-for-an-eye never makes good societies which is why all civilized countries outlawed their practice.
>Would Palantir or Flock disappear?
The more elites you murders, the more of your tax dollars the elites will send to the military and law enforcement to better protect them from you and the more of your tax dollars they'll send to Palantir and Flock to spy on you. You can't win this by killing elites, they have more money, more guns than you and their guns are bigger and more powerful than yours. You win by enacting change through popular votes.
You don't understand how it works, imagine a world where 9/11 never happened.
Do you think that this alternative universe would not have the equivalent of TSA and Five Eyes?
It would. These things do not exist because $event happened, they exist because they are useful to those in power.
Look at the city of Trinidad, TX for example: Lady is arrested because of Facebook about how she heard that brown colored water coming from pipes has hospitalized people. Another guy because he is protesting the arrest. Her crime is "Felony false alarm". His crime "Disorderly conduct".
Both laws created, I am sure, to combat issues the community or state has had to deal with. But also able to be used to suppress people those in power dislike.
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Whoa, you can't do this on HN, regardless of how you feel about health care policy or psychopathy.
You've been here a long time, so you ought to be familiar with why comments like this destroy what HN is supposed to be for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and re-taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. Your recent comments have veered into flamebait and guidelines breakage, and it would be good to course-correct.
> in charge of
Please, he was a middle manager with a CEO title.
>One less psychopath in charge of a US health care provider being around?
What kind of broken logic is this? What good did this do for you if the end result for you is the same or worse now? Other than feel good for vigilante vengeance than then backfires on you in the end. It's not like there's a shortage of CEOs to take his place and keep doing the same thing.
You're not in a comic book movie where if you kill the main "bad guy" then society magically fixes itself at the end, because there is no main villain here, society is broken not because of the decisions of one CEO, but because of a combination of decisions of thousands of people, factors and incentives accumulated over decades that lead to healthcare and other things sucking, and you don't fix it overnight by killing one guy, you instead just make it worse for everyone else who isn't a murderer.
You fix it by talking, campaigning, gathering people and voting, knowing that it will also take decades to undo, the same way as it took decades to get to this stage. That's the only way you enact change that will will guarantee bi-partisan buy-in and actually stick around for the long term. Policy changes implemented by populist movements under threat of violence rarely produce good outcomes that last.
If the system is rigged heavily against you, relying on it to affect change does feel like a losing strategy.
The fact that such a large part of the population supports literal murder could also be considered a political statement. One that would not have been expressed so strongly without what happened.
So much of this madness could be resolved with a simple income cap. Musk’s wealth grew by $1 million per minute over the past year. Who can seriously argue that this is fair and balanced?
Are you talking about income or actual wealth?
Your income may remain constant while your wealth rises significantly (say... because your investments are doing well, because you inherited... etc). The two are often confused when talking about (tech) billionaires.
Wealth, not income. The statistic is about net worth growth. Saying "that's wealth, not income" doesn't refute it. It just clarifies the mechanism.
> So much of this madness could be resolved with a simple income cap.
The problem (to me) is less the "wealth" of these psychopath CEOs, and more that they're literally taking advantage of the people they're supposed to be helping, for their own benefit.
The concept of an income cap might fix that in some situations, but I'm unsure how complete a fix that would be.
> What kind of broken logic is this?
It's not even slightly broken.
It's about the people responsible for destroying the lives of those they're supposed to be helping, instead abusing those people for personal gain.
Is that really something you think should keep heading in the same abusive direction it's been going for many years? :(
It seems like people are happy to dish out this rhetoric applied to others but less happy to be on the receiving end.
How do you feel volunteer groups rounding up Luigi supporters and gunning them down in the street like dogs?
There are a million reasons why we don't want to live in a society where each person tries to solve their political grievances with a gun
>There are a million reasons why we don't want to live in a society where each person tries to solve their political grievances with a gun
You and me are preaching to the quire here and wasting our time. Some on HN they just wanna see rich people get killed, as if that fixes anything that's wrong with society. By rich people, they mean everyone richer than them of course.
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My biggest wish in life would be that every champagne socialist that unironically says "America is a third world country", we just send them to an actual thirld world country like Zimbabwe, Congo, Sudan, Cuba, North Korea and import a genuine refugee from there in their place.
This way we can make two people happy at the same time(three if you include me), and the lottery of birth advantage evens out, so the world becomes more fair and less unequal.
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> You think you want that but you don't actually. IF you do sincerely want that, then I sincerely hope you get what you want, but both ways for you and only you, while the rest of us stay isolated as spectators.
Nobody wants this. This is the result of the breakdown of trust in the judicial and democratic processes. GP is just acting the zeitgeist.
Sorry the justice system is setup to protect them, not you. By putting fear in the leaders of these companies, and showing people that yes, you CAN actually stand up to their corrupt ways and beat them because in the end they are just people, even if they don't see you that way.
Historically indiscriminate extra judicial murder has never worked as a tool for addressing societal injustice, it has been tried countless times, usually it just made things worse.
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>By putting fear in the leaders of these companies
I'm sure people who control the economy, pahrma, law enforcement, military and intelligence agencies are shivering because of fear from people with glocks.
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Source?
From https://www.newsweek.com/brian-thompson-muder-health-insuran...
> The fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson has prompted healthcare executives to say they will address growing frustrations among Americans struggling with access to and costs of medical care.
From https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/23/health/health-insurers-preapp...
> Months after the killing of a top health insurance executive unleashed Americans’ pent-up anger over denials of medical care, the industry announced Monday that it will take action to “streamline, simplify and reduce” the preapproval process.
However, from https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/04/health/insurers-prior-authori...
> However, multiple provider associations and patient advocacy groups interviewed by CNN say that little, if anything, has changed over the past year.
So, hard to say for sure.
> hard to say for sure
I don’t think it is. Healthcare prices are widely tracked. They’ve been rising faster than inflation for years. I have seen zero evidence that trend even temporarily abated after Luigi.
my bad, it was actually denial rates that improved
Do you have a source for that? Curious to see if total payouts went down, or if providers became less aggressive.
> Sorry, but how was that murder successful?
Successful in winning over the public.
From what to what? Be specific.
Were there people that liked high Healthcare bills that changed their mind?
Was there a way of politicians elected to implement socialized Healthcare that I missed?
Clearly not since members of the public turned him in to the police.
The public was already on Luigi Mangione's side in theory.
In practice however he didn't inspire further revolutionary action by the public, because they were pacified by memes. And that's why he's a failure.
Also because most people presumably aren’t really into indiscriminate irrational murder. The victim was a merely an entirely replaceable cog in an unfair system (also a human being who had a family and there is no real evidence he personally was anymore nefarious than other men in similar positions).
>Also because most people presumably aren’t really into indiscriminate irrational murder
It was murder, but it was neither indiscriminate nor irrational. Certainly not in a culture that enshrines the right to shoot people as its second most sacred Constitutional principle.
> Sorry, but how was that murder successful?
There's many anecdotes of people who managed to get lifesaving or lifechanging treatments in the panic after the CEO got murdered. Obviously, anecdotes aren't data - but it is highly likely that even though one life was lost, many were saved.
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I don't know about this case, so I can only speak in general.
A lot of times people that say this don't make a strong case that some theoretical more moderate protest would be effective. There is just a feeling that if they personally feel offended by the actions of the protester then it's probably a bad thing.
In reality it's often more complicated. I know some people that are involved with controversial protests, and the effectiveness of their actions is definitely something they think about. It can't be too extreme, that will put people off like you say. But often there is conversations like in this thread, "this protester goes too far, but they do have a point". This moves the Overton window in the desired direction.
The goal isn't too make you like the protester, it's to make you think about the issues.
Yes I totally agree, and there are nuances and details
But it's easy to push to one side or another
Worked for the IRA. Working for Hamas. Working for the Islamic Republic.
Cowards would have you believe otherwise, but force is sometimes the only way to get what you want.
It really doesn't matter if you come across as the villain as long as you impose great enough costs for not delivering your desired reality.
The level of general sympathy for one of those (and their level of success) is much higher than for the others
Maybe because they were actively avoiding civilian targets
And even then mostly because a lot of people were supportive of their cause even if they were against their methods
>And even then mostly because a lot of people were supportive of their cause even if they were against their methods
But IRA didn't win because those people supported their cause, IRA won despite those people being against their methods.
It was the force they used which directly led to the GFA, without the bombs and the killing the British would never have surrendered.
How can we know the IRA “won”? The country changed a hell of a lot over the course of the Troubles and by the time of the GFA in 1998 I don’t see how it is so clear that the reforms wouldn’t have also been achieved via other peaceful and democratic means.
> How can we know the IRA “won”?
In signing the GFA, the UK effectively gave up on it's sovereignty over NI. That was never going to happen through "peaceful and democratic means"
What makes it giving up sovereignty? I understand it creates the potential for separation in future but not yet. The devolution of Scotland and Wales happened peacefully a couple(?) of years later, and Scotland may also separate in future.
> What makes it giving up sovereignty? I understand it creates the potential for separation in future but not yet.
Look at where the border is, the separation has already happened to a very significant degree.
Good god!
It's difficult to make out if this is ignorance, a poor attempt at satire or simply trolling.
Which part do you disagree with?
The border is in the North Channel today, so the bit about sovereignty clearly holds up.
Are you saying the GFA would have been reached through peaceful means?
The rabbit hole goes much deeper than simply "they gave up on sovereignty"
How is force working for Hamas? The shift in general sentiment towards Israel came from Israel's blatant disregard for civilian life and from their apartheid politics being put in spotlight. Hamas are still regarded as terrorist savages by everyone sane and their Oct 7 attack served as an excuse for Israel to set them back and hunt them regardless of collateral casualties, terrorizing their compatriots
On examination of the evidence, Hamas appears to be an organization dedicated to harming Israel, not helping the Palestinian people (or improving public opinion of Hamas). In this regard, I would say that Hamas has been very effective at provoking heinous overreach by the zionists, causing severe damage to Israeli credibility. To Hamas, it seems that Palestinian deaths are the price they are willing to pay, being integral to their strategic mission and personnel supply chain.
You seem to think the conflict will be decided by the vibes and sentiments of people who don't matter.
Why would you think so? The conflict will most likely be decided by Israel (and by extension USA) having the biggest influence both globally and locally, and the biggest guns, but there is no misconception about it, so I decided not to add it.
> How is force working for Hamas?
Brilliantly. It coaxed an Israeli overreaction which has led to basically the entirety of the rest of the world turning against Israel.
> Hamas are still regarded as terrorist savages by everyone sane
Why would Hamas care? They remain firmly in control of Gaza, while their cause is winning hearts and minds globally.
It’s sounds like you think it’s brilliant that more Palestinians were killed as long as it negatively affected Israel’s PR.
lol
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Both sides always assume that people must fall on one side or the other instead of disliking both and wishing they would stop trying to make their hundreds of years religious regional conflict the world's problem
> wishing they would stop trying to make their hundreds of years religious regional conflict the world's problem
This is an entirely backwards way of portraying the situation. American evangelical Christians are by definition not based in the region.
They believe that they must supply Israel with the weapons it needs in order to bring upon apocalypse.
You don't believe in anything according to your posting history, except the most egregious thing
I want anyone who believes they are superior to others because of their origins to be put to death.
Coincidentally, that’s a core belief of “the chosen people”.
But don’t try to dismiss me as some kind of an antisemite, I don’t think the Germans were sufficiently punished for their crimes either.
I know it’s not a pleasant subject, but it is possible to reason about these things https://www.popehat.com/p/we-should-talk-about-the-morality-...
Noone is responsible for others' (overre)actions.
So if you think justice for Palestinian civilians is their cause, it's not them who are responsible for it winning hearts and minds globally
While there are useful idiots in any situation (especially inside the UN), the level of sympathy for them - while was never high is going down steadly
The final victory of Islamic Republic was after they did NOT used force against west, but when America and Israel started idiotic war, bragged about using force and then promptly lost.
This was quite literally the case of "actions backfire" situation.
2 out of 3 for "bombed to shit". I wouldn't call that "working".
I'm not sure if Iran's regime has the staying power, but Hamas sure doesn't seem to be in a good shape lately.
Even if every single Hamas was killed - you have a whole population totally traumatized. That's extremely fertile ground for something like Hamas to pop up again. So, a lot of sufferring but Bibi and "Hamas" (or whatever) prospers.
Hamas has been killed. Again and again and again. But people keep joining this "Hamas" resistance group against Israel so the group never seems to go away. And do you know why they join? They join because Israel killed their whole families.
> but Hamas sure doesn't seem to be in a good shape lately.
And who do you see on track to displace Hamas? After years and years of conflict and being "bombed to shit", they're as entrenched as ever while their enemy declines much faster.
Israel is getting to a point where it has no friends left in the world, where the average European youth thinks nuking Israel and turning into a glass parking lot would probably be a net positive. Jews are starting to be broadly despised again thanks to Israeli policy, something that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.
Hamas operatives lead shitty lives in the Gaza strip as they have for decades, but they certainly aren't losing control.
Over the course of a few years, Hamas managed to turn wearing a star of David in big EU cities into a dangerous political statement. And we're supposed to believe that they're not winning?
Your arguments are self-contradictory. You say force is great, but only for Hamas - not for Israel.
A youth who thinks Israel should be genocided doesn’t care about genocide, so why hate Israel?
The hate in Europe is driven primarily by an influx of people who were hating Jews anyway, and who naively think that the hatred won’t backfire on them. Once you start promoting racism it comes for everyone.
>The hate in Europe is driven primarily by an influx of people who were hating Jews anyway
You are mistaken, the sentiments are shifting across the board.
This is probably driven to a significant degree by the Israeli national policy of tying any criticism of Israel with antisemitism, and the broad acceptance of that policy by Jewish communities globally. Because of this implicit endorsement, it is not surprising that many would struggle to separate between the actions by taken by the state of Israel and those who call themselves Jews.
You can’t blame the victims for racism. The whole point of racism is that it lumps people together based on the actions of some.
It’s the same way Islamophobia doesn’t become justified based on the actions of some Muslims.
Anyone who does do that is already a bigot, and would do the same to any other group, regardless of what they do.
A culture that normalizes hatred of Jews (or Israelis) as a group, will very quickly devolve into one where other minorities are hated as well. Because the youth, as gullible as they are, can still detect when a system of values is inconsistent.
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A youth who hates Israel thinks genociding genociders is okay
There are two actors and you're mixing up who is responsible for which outcome. I explained in more detail in another comment
There's no credit due for correctly reading your adversary?
Obviously the Israelis could have just kept their mask on, but Hamas was clearly correct in their calculation that they wouldn't.
Attacking families is firmly across the line and looks like crazy man's personal vendetta. Who can vouch he won't go further and ie won't kidnap a kid to achieve his goals.
No wonder he gets raided, at one point it becomes a topic about protecting one's family, left or right, moral or crook doesn't matter anymore.
Its not activist anymore in any meaningful sense, just a fanatic.
> crazy man's personal vendetta. Who can vouch he won't go further and ie won't kidnap a kid to achieve his goals.
You just committed exactly the kind of escalation that you condemn when it's about him.
So what if someone can vouch for him? What's that worth? "Vouching" is worthless in any circumstance I can think of, and nobody can give you guarantees about anything. I can't vouch that you won't do exactly the same, or that you weren't the masked police who raced to the breakers so he's not filmed while breaking the law (innocent people have nothing to hide, right?), or that you're not one of the politicians pushing for oppressive laws for your personal benefit.
Jeez, you grabbed a single word from an expression that even non-native speakers like me know very well how to interpret and went a bit too deep into your self-made projections and on-purpose incorrect interpretations.
Just to be clear - there is no actual vouching, there never was, nor any plans for that. Fanatics are unpredictable, it doesn't matter in which area, their decisions are primarily emotional. He certainly behaved as one. Rest are details.
Or do you consider family stalking as a correct sane approach that actually achieves the goal effectively?
> He obviously goes over the line, he tried to put GPS trackers on the cars of ministers. He "stalks" their families, and dox their children online.
I agree with you that he goes over the line, but only if these ministers are totally unrelated to the measures they are trying to impose on the population. If not, he just gives them a taste of their own medicine.
> he'd ignore people carrying a kilo gram of weed
This is an unequivocally reasonable approach. The prohibition of cannabis is a grotesque charade.
I personally would like the police to come down hard on unauthorised and unregulated chemists. Not a fan of dealers being tax exempt, either, given the negative externalities their services provide.
Why fuss over "unregulated" chemists when the vast majority of harms come directly from officially licensed and regulated industry? I don't think cannabis dealers have ever poisoned entire towns or ecosystems. The facade of regulated safety must be more important.
Why fuss over anyone committing lesser harm when there is something worse happening somewhere else?
It's not whataboutism. It's poking at the idea that "regulation" doesn't enshrine and enable harms. But by all means, inject lawyers into all aspects of human life. That will surely improve things.
When I go to a bar, I appreciate not having to order 'one alcohol, please', and getting a clear bottle of odourless mystery liquid.
I don't have time to be an expert in every subject. I appreciate using the collective power of society to put stamps of approval on things, so I can use language with an element of trust.
If I want to smoke, I want to know what I'm smoking, and don't want to waste time trying to work out the exact chemical composition. I'm not sure why anybody wouldn't want that control over their bodies.
I quite like the idea of words actually having meanings which are enforced, and not being vague concepts coined on the street by people who don't have me or my community at heart.
A kilo of weed is clearly a dealer, and part of organised crime. The same people are deeply involved in forced sex work and people trafficking, extortion, illegal weapons, etc. There is a clear difference between end users and small time dealers and the distributors.
So prosecute them for those other things, no? Instead of helping criminals grow their business by banning non-harmful stuff and giving them monetary growth opprotunities.
Crime benefits from network effects even more than regular businesses, you have to attack them via every opportunity.
However you are putting words in my mouth, in a typical American style of prosecution-->banning. It is quite possible to legalise and regulate marijuana. American halfway legalisation creates an industry which funds OC and can't be prosecuted. Canadian legalisation creates a revenue source for the provincial governments while providing vertical integration and control, and the volume of illegal weed has plummeted.
I expect he’ll be justified and vindicated in history if we end up in a global totalitarian prison planet scenario that seems to become more possible as the tech reaches that capability. “For the safety of the children” ofcourse.
What kind of history will a totalitarian prison planet write, I wonder.
1984 will be banned as being too inspirational, perhaps?
1984 is not inspirational, it's cautionary. The main character has already lost from the first page of the book.
I tend to disagree. 1984 seems the playbook for the majority of politicians. For them, it's inspirational.
Maybe we should begin asking, "whose children, specifically?"
> He gave an interview on how he'd ignore people carrying a kilo gram of weed when he was a cop because he doesn't agree with the "war on drugs".
This is about as far from "over the line" as I can imagine.
but all he does is things the politicians thinks are perfectly okay to do to the "plebs" they are supposed to represent.
when they do it, its A-OKAY, but if he does even 1/10, its the worst catastrophy in the world.
I'm confused reading this. How in the world is GPS-tracking someone's car supposed to show hypocrisy with respect to encryption?
Because this someone wants to know location of everyone in the country while his own location should be of course private and protected.
I still don't understand what that has to do with encryption. Are these two separate policy proposals, one for GPS tracking and one for encryption, that this person is supporting?
Think about why do governments want to ban encryption? Because they want to know everything about you all the time. Collecting information on someone such as their location is of the same order.
It may be of the same order, but it is a different thing. No one, not even techies like here on HN, are going to see his actions as valid.
He has to use a different method because obviously he does not have a backdoor into the prime minister's phone. The fact that "obviously wrong" invasive methods have to be used (now) to imitate something that the prime minister want to apply to every citizen (except himself and his buddies) in the future can be seen as part of the point.
Yes, but that also means he both goes too far (for people like me who might sympathize with him) and loses the connection with the original issue, creating his own communication problem. Yes, it is good and necessary to show politicians what they are doing to the citizens they are supposed to represent, but that does not justify all means.
It’s not fundamentally different than indiscriminately scanning everyone’s private communication (what the Danish government is trying to accomplish on the EU level)
I think we'll keep disagreeing on what "fundamentally different" means. Agreed that the Danish gov't proposals are reprehensible and deserve counteraction.
> Think about why do governments want to ban encryption? Because they want to know everything about you all the time.
Or, say, because they want a judicial warrant to be sufficient for obtaining someone's information without their consent?
> Collecting information on someone such as their location is of the same order.
Huh? This sounds crazy.
It's not that complicated. Minister wants to remove citizens privacy. Protester invades privacy of minister in response. On the one hand I agree that gps-tracking is not exactly the same as analyzing people's messages, on the other hand one can often infer whereabouts through messaging services indirectly or even directly such as when people share their gps location with one another (a feature that e.g. whatsapp has).
Anyway, apparently this Peter Hummelgaard has said:
"I indisputably believe that surveillance creates an increased sense of security ... and given that the prerequisite for freedom is security, yes, I believe that more surveillance equates to more freedom"
so I think you will find it easier to understand these kinds of protest actions if you consider them in the context of privacy vs. surveillance more broadly conceived.
(source for quote https://mastodon.social/@chatcontrol/115314954743042414 -> https://www.dr.dk/lyd/special-radio/prompt/prompt-2025/egois...)
> It's not that complicated. Minister wants to remove citizens privacy. Protester invades privacy of minister in response.
"It's not that complicated"... indeed?
Privacy was a thing long before encryption even existed. So were stalking, wiretapping, etc. That whole time, judicial warrants had always been legally and practically adequate for obtaining and reviewing evidence that was physically accessible. (And for arresting stalkers and wiretappers.)
Encryption changed all that. It effectively undermined the ability of warrants to do their job.
Regardless of how you feel about the above, surely you agree that none of that is factually incorrect, right? Plaintext + privacy were simultaneously a thing for a long time, right?
So, whatever you feel, doesn't it feel a little disingenuous to suggest that the two are necessarily tied together? And to smear someone as hypocritical because they believe in both? Did the guy ever advocate for exposing everyone's real-time location?
Look, I don't even know the guy. And I'm not even trying to defend anything here on its merits. I'm just trying to set the record straight as to what the facts and the logical implications are(n't). Do you(/him/etc.) want an honest debate? Where you can actually win with people coming to support your ideas on their merits? Or do you want to take the craziest logical leaps and lose all your potential supporters in the process?
>That whole time, judicial warrants had always been legally and practically adequate for obtaining and reviewing evidence that was physically accessible.
Certainly not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrecy_of_correspondence
You're telling me that in Denmark they can't open your letters even with a judicial order?
The Danish constitution also mentions privacy, in the form of paragraph 72 that stipulates that the confiscation and examination of letters and other papers; as well the interception of postal-, telegraph- and telephone communication cannot be done without a judicial order.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_law_in_Denmark
> So were stalking, wiretapping, etc. That whole time, judicial warrants had
Those things were costly and didn’t scale very well. Which is why it was more tolerable.
Without encryption and with legally required backdoors the authorities can just “wiretap” everyone just in case they might commit a crime. That is what the Danish government wants to do by pushing ChatControl in the EU. There is absolutely nothing crazy about that and they are perfectly transparent about what they are doing. Most sensible people believe that that’s a too high cost.
Encryption is used to remain private in ones comings and goings and communication.
It’s not the same as gps, but it’s similar. If you can decrypt someone’s communications, you can more easily determine their location.
Hmmm, in context he was(?) tracking a public ministers car.
I'm Australian and I'm all for peeling back and making transparent all the comings and goings of public officials (within reason) - they deserve a good return, a hefty return even, for dedicated public service .. and they deserve to know that there's a hammer waiting for any betrayal of public trust, shady financial dealings (while in office), etc.
As a "known in advance covenant" that's not altogether unreasonable, raises the bar for would be Trumpesque grifters, and allows for privacy for those not seeking access to public offices, trust, and cookie jars.
Lol that's bullshit. There is a difference between "accessible to law enforcement in a official criminal investigation overseen by a judge" and "public to everyone".
What these weirdo hacktivists don't understand is that the voting public wants to live in a society.
"You take my privacy, I take yours" would be the thought process here. Not complicated.
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> Who cares about weed?
Danes.
Why? Seems stupid. Just let people weed.
Pretending to be a moral person to harass others is way more important than being a moral person. Jesus in the gospel has no kind words for such people but many "christian" societies haven't yet decided to follow that part.
People who dont pretend it has zero negative consequences as well. I understand the medicinal uses, most people arent even doing that, but we are overlooking so many things. I think someone should fund serious studies that look at all the benefits and negatives, sadly we dont live in a perfect world.
We are overlooking even more things about perfectly legal alcohol.
I can count on one hand the number of times I drink alcohol every few years, and I agree. Let's fund detailed studies on the effects (good and bad) for everything. Whataboutism shouldn't be a reason to just let something that could have long-term negative consequences on the mind be blindly advertised as safe. My argument isn't about legality, moreso educating the public about consequences, we do this with cigarettes, and I assume eventually we have to extend vaping to have similar messaging as well.
Legal marijuana in the states is insanely tweaked and modified in terms of THC in order to comply legally, even people I know who have smoked their whole lives feel uncomfortable touching the stuff because its just not even organic anymore.
I think we're overlooking too many things.
Its not a whataboutism, its the current line in the sand for comparison. If Alcohol does x and is legal with restrictions, then its only sensible for comparable products that do x to become legal with restrictions.
There have been plenty of studies.
People overdose on legal stimulants and drugs all the time (caffeine, alcohol, OTC drugs...).
Nothing points to THC being at all worse than many other legal stimulants.
I once OD'd on caffeine and the hospital staff didnt believe me. They just filled me with saline and kept asking if it was meth until I stopped convulsing.
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World is not black and white. Most people would probably prefer to live in a world with low-power petty-crime rings and ability to be free and safe apart from having their wallet stolen once in a while rather than with e.g. Russian-like state mafia country with enormous amount of power and ability to target everyone at every time for their families interests. When you have a destroyed social ladder and everything can be taken at any moment under few people control immediately because they just want it.
That's apart from the fact that in the palantir case you also invite foreign intelligence and CIA to your home.
Sarcasm tag missing or is this serious?
They're probably not being sarcastic. Wrong, and ppssibly evil, but not sarcastic. There are some weirdly big Palantir fans on HN. No clue what drives them, but I'm guessing they're not keen students of history.
It falls under the "social outreach" line item I believe
...or Tolkien.
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Like leather-boot-head-stomping justice?
Dura lex sed lex
Sure, especially when patricians themselves are exempt from their laws and it's only a ToS for plebs.
Benn Jordan did a video recently where he showed Flock cameras, which were hackable, pointing at children's playgrounds. Who is stalking the children?
Cool. Britain has been doing this for a while.
So why do you think increasing surveillance will decrease the stalking of children?
Palantir is a child stalker tool.
Very charitable to call it a “grey zone” to stalk and dox children of politicians you dislike.
Isn't the point that those politicians want to do precisely that to others?
Stalk their children? What policy are you referring to?
Chat Control? The Denmark is the primary supporter of universal stalking across the EU.
Upthread:
> that same minister (Peter Hummelgaard) is one of the key forces behind anti-encryption here in Europe
Lars is good at exposing the hypocrisy of the Danish government. In a former case he, sent the exact same threatening text to a prosecutor as that prosecutor had received a police report from a third party about, and that the prosecutor refused to pursue. Lars got jail time for that. Rules for thee but not for me.
> Rules for thee but not for me
This pretty accurately describes lots of stuff going on here in Germany as well and well the state of most of our "liberal democracies".
> exposing the hypocrisy of the Danish government
Does that change anything?
Does he have any power to change anything? Or does he have only power to expose the abusers and corrupted?
Only taking action because you can change corrupt ways doesn’t actually change anything because the average person has no power to do so. And the proper channels are gummed up to not change anything.
What Lars does is possibly inform or change perspective of those unfamiliar with their nation/world-state.
> possibly inform
I'm not sure about that. People on HN are generally well in the know, while laymen don't event understand the substance of the matter in question.
I imagine Lars reaches beyond HN to other uninformed circles. HN doesn't have users representing every social group out there in the world.
Or alternatively, 2 wrongs don't make a right.
Even if the text message was exactly the same, there are plenty of valid reasons why one might be prosecutable and the other might not be.
You are correct that two wrongs don't make a right, but I think that it is obvious that the threat was not real, only symbolic. Therefore it wasn't "wrong". Meanwhile the original, not prosecuted threat message, was real. It's clear that it shows both vindictiveness and unwillingness to protect certain people.
Sure. If you accept that we give up on equality before the law, one might be prosecutable and the other not.
Some of us prefer not to give up on that though.
You dont have to give up equality under the law, you just have to accept that there is a lot more that goes into a prosecution than the act. Were witnesses cooperative and credible, what was the intent, what was context.
I dont know the specifics of this case. Maybe there was a miscarriage of justice. But just the fact the acts are the same doesn't show that. There is a lot more factors to consider.
Your obfuscation carries no argumentative weight, as the uncertainty your obfuscation attempts to introduce might as well be used in the reverse: maybe the guy who made the original threat (that was not prosecuted) had a criminal record involving violent crimes whereas Lars' text obviously should be taken in the political, non-violent, activist context that is his modus operandi.
Correct
> might as well be used in the reverse
I don't think they would reject that. In fact, you are arguing their point: It's the context that matters, not just the act. Without knowing the context it's not valid to presume a particular scenario.
Not sure how that's "obfuscation".
It's obfuscation because you're leaving out that this is an openly political fight of an in-power leftist politician against an "extreme-right" party (of course, they're well to the left of the US democrat party).
The underlying problem is that a LOT of public servants are very scared what will happen if the party who keeps getting threatened gets elected, which is a real possibility. So, they're using all sorts of underhanded tactics to try to prevent it. In a way, it's a fight about public servants trying to keep their job safe. It's political because they all owe their jobs to a particular coalition that's been in power for ages and ages.
Oh and it's a fight about muslim immigration and the influence of that in and on society. So ...
That's why it's obfuscation. You're leaving important things out.
> what was the intent, what was context.
The intent and context are obviously better for the one who's clearly sending the "threat" as a political statement against selective enforcement.
> I dont know the specifics of this case. Maybe there was a miscarriage of justice. But just the fact the acts are the same doesn't show that. There is a lot more factors to consider
... and you're willing to give the benefit of doubt to those with power here. You are aware you're making that implicit statement, right?
> The intent and context are obviously better for the one who's clearly sending the "threat" as a political statement against selective enforcement.
That is far from obvious.
In general i think that attempting to alter the course of justice via a threat is much worse than a simple threat. Any situation where officers of the court are afraid to impartially do their duties to coercion is a fundamental threat to society and should be dealt with harshly.
> ... and you're willing to give the benefit of doubt to those with power here.
I'm basing my view on the arguments presented in this thread.
So far what has been presented is that the prosecutor did something very normal that happens all the time for very reasonable reasons. Its possible that in this case it happened due to inappropriate reasons, idk, but so far nobody has even presented a theory for why the action was corrupt instead of normal.
In general i think it is the job of the person arguing that misconduct occured to present evidence that it actually happened. Otherwise things descend into witch hunts as it is very difficult to prove a negative.
Indeed, that’s why selective prosecution is an effective weapon. The consequences are asymmetric and demonstrating selectivity is impossible without exposing oneself to the downside. It’s definitely a stable incumbent regime tactic.
"anarcho-tyranny"
Pretty tricky by the cops to turn off power directly and to steal his cameras. Shows that if you are concerned something like this would happen to you that you need to invest in more resilient solutions. Probably something with batteries and also hidden.
They did this to Afroman, too. Though, in his case, they didn't lead with the panel and the result is the infamous video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0bNy7XO-SCI0 It makes you wonder how much of an effect this incident has had on protocols.
But, yeah, depending on your threat matrix, you might want to consider hidden trail cams with their own cell service.
Next step would be to cut the cells too.
Trail cams (and other hidden cams) often have local SD backup. Better break out the “broom,” rip open the walls, and steal every electronic device just in case.
Hm what if he burries some storage server (with UPS) in the yard to which this is streamed. They are never going to find it. Especially if the networking is wireless, but even tracking down where ethernet (copper or fiber) goes is hard.
> When the two civilian dressed masked men entered the apparentment
I think this is very irresponsible. What would happen if the owner was armed and harmed the police thinking that they were criminals?
This is a very... US comment to make.
There have been cases in the US where homeowners shot cops dead who were in the process of unexpectedly raiding their home, because the homeowner had no idea they were cops and not home invasion robbers; and in some cases have been acquitted of murder charges by juries for this.
I'd personally like to see the laws protecting this strengthened, to make sure that cops aren't charging unannounced into peoples' homes and then charging the homeowner with murder when they react with reasonable gun violence in self-defense.
My thought on this is that it's basically not legal to protect your home/family with force because of this. It's impossible to know if someone breaking in is a cop or not, and at 3AM with glass breaking and a group of people claiming to be cops, but aren't, how are you supposed to know? You basically never can. So either you risk going to prison for the rest of your life when it's actually a cop, or you do absolutely nothing and let your family get harmed/your home burgled.
I would much prefer a society where all homeowners and cops don't carry guns and cops were fired for illegal raids.
> cops were fired for illegal raids.
This kind of pro-cop propaganda placing them above the law is disgusting.
Cops should go to prison for illegal raids. Some behaviour needs to be severely punished.
This kind of betrayal of trust is one of the most severe crimes one can commit against society, the punishments should be equally severe.
Some people want world peace and denuclearization. Each country is currently as it finds itself and takes a great deal of leadership and buy-in to change.
Me too, but I bet the cops did carry.
That’s not the real world. Criminals will always find a way to get guns no matter the amount of gun control you impose, so I’d rather have law abiding citizens be armed as well
It is the real world in many places. "Criminals" are not a homogenous group. Petty criminals will not usually be making the effort to get a gun if getting a gun is inconvenient. Some high level criminals will find ways to get guns but the number of criminals with guns will be much lower with gun controls.
Also if getting a gun is dangerous. Why escalate a petty theft into a murder?
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It’s not your real world, lots of other countries have so little gun violence that a shooting makes the national news when it happens and thats maybe once or twice a year.
It must be nice getting to live in an area that doesn't have entire subcultures dedicated to guns and crime.
There are countries in the EU which have pretty lax gun laws and firefighters are fairly accessible they still have fairly low levels of gun crime. Just having access to weapons doesn’t mean that people will start killing each other for no reason, there are many other more important factors.
I'd say there is no country in the world that proves this point of view is a success in any metric.
"You can never ban all guns, so don't bother banning any guns. It makes no sense to reduce gun violence if you cannot eliminate it completely."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy
> Criminals will always find a way to get guns [...]
In that case, how about the cops can just shoot anyone with a gun who's not a cop?
Should keep things pretty simple, and the majority of the population in the US would be a bunch safer. :D
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A German police officer was fatally shot in 2010 after failing to identify himself when his manipulation on the door had alerted the known-armed subject of a planned search. The shooter was (eventually) acquitted. Though the circumstances were rather unusual, the court noted that in that specific case, the inability to ascertain the nature & extent of the threat within available time made acting this way based on his assumptions excusable.
https://www.bundesgerichtshof.de/SharedDocs/Entscheidungen/D...
I'm fully European, would not wonder for a second before plunging a knife into an intruder if I happened to have one near me.
Really? 'Oh, someone I don't know! stab'? What if the person is plain-clothes law enforcement? Or a special needs person who somehow managed to wander into the wrong house? Or your sibling's new partner they want to introduce to you?
Anyway, unless you actually have stabbed someone before you don't know whether you got what it takes until you're actually in a situation where you find out.
They broke down the door.
>Anyway, unless you actually have stabbed someone before you don't know whether you got what it takes until you're actually in a situation where you find out.
A guy tried to rob me, I fractured his skull with my iphone before I even realized what was going on. You don't just freeze when someone suddenly attacks you, you'll try to swing at them with whatever you have at hand.
At home? I might just have been cooking, or carving a sunday roast. Who knows? But if someone suddenly smashed through my door, I'm pretty sure that whatever object happens to be in my hand would be heading towards the intruder long before I've had time to think about what's going on.
I've never lived in the US. Spent the majority of my adult life in Europe, and the country I currently live in (Australia) has very strict gun laws.
That being said, if I were a police officer I wouldn't rule out the possibility.
No it is not. Europeans can have guns, and there was a recent case in Belgium where such a thing happened.
I’m pretty sure you’re not allowed to use your legal firearms against people in Denmark. Even in a home intrusion event.
You can if there's a direct threat to your life (i.e. you can see that the intruder is also armed).
But you can't use it against someone for just entering your premises illegally. It needs to be a clear and present danger.
Not if you can back away
So yes if you can't back away.
In the EU the answer is always "it's unclear". Yes you can, but you also can't.
ECHR necessarily guarantees the right to shoot some intruders in some situations, but it's kind of impossible to know which situations those are except after the fact.
I'd say it is. Yes there are people that own guns or hunting rifles. Most still don't think about guns or shooting first. Guns are supposed to be locked in a safe etc. All that does obviously not apply to a criminal who does not follow the law.
> Most still don't think about guns or shooting first.
You base this on what? I know plenty of gun owners where I live, and most would pull open their safe the moment they hear something during the night. I'm willing to bet most gun safes are located in the bedroom.
This was in Denmark
You can own guns in Denmark as well.
Yes and no.
Weapons are normal here too.
Shooting intruders isn’t though. They’d basically have to attack you first for lethal force to be legal.
> They’d basically have to attack you first for lethal force to be legal.
They just violently entered his home in an effort to attack him, dressed in a way designed to intimidate. These cops were deliberately cosplaying as some sort of a hit squad, they obviously wanted him to believe that they were going to kill him.
It's not like the cops just accidentally went out dressed like that.
This is Denmark, not some Brasilian favela. That type of violent crime extremely rare in Scandinavia. But cops wearing civilian clothes while conducting a raid is fairly normal. Especially when they want to preserve evidence which might be quickly destroyed if the suspect sees them coming.
> This is Denmark, not some Brasilian favela
Yet they're dressed exactly like a hit squad in a Brazilian favela!
>Especially when they want to preserve evidence which might be quickly destroyed if the suspect sees them coming.
Somehow cops elsewhere manage this just fine in appropriate attire.
They're also dressed exactly like a group of random middle aged men.
Naturally, getting raided is scary as fuck. And them being plain clothed certainly doesn't make it less so. But based on the part of the video which he chose to shared I don't see why one would suspect anyone other than the police. Had they been out to kill him it would have been easier to just go in blasting instead of yelling while using a battering ram.
Hit squads are truly exotic here. Plain clothes police raids are not, although the norm is for them to be uniformed. I have no idea on why they chose to be plain clothed instead of uniformed on this occasion, but I can't see why we would attribute it to "cosplaying as some sort of a hit squad". Another possibility, which I believe is somewhat common, is that they can take him away without making him look like a criminal in the eyes of his neighbors.
Where in Europe are you from? I get the impression that you are used to a very different kind of society.
How is the first guy in dressed again?
This is not the law here in Sweden, at least.
We don't have precedent in the way that common law countries do, and the judgements in actual cases point in slightly different directions-- in one case a court felt that the failure to fire a warning shot made it not self-defence, in another fighting people trying to get into an apartment with a knife was deemed acceptable.
Generally though, if someone is breaking into your apartment while you're there, possibly trying to get at you, there's no limit, as long as you're actually trying to defend yourself (so no executing someone who you've clearly disabled, etc.).
If people are breaking into your apartment and you fire a warning shot, then proceed to shoot the attackers, no one will complain.
I am Swedish, and it’s very true that ”it depends”.
This guy for example was convicted of murder because he got his gun out without even trying to contact the police directly or indirectly. So even if he pulled the trigger under reasonable circumstances (a know violent offender was trying to take his rifle) he was found guilty because he should not have gone for the gun without considering alternatives like locking the door or fleeing.
I can’t see him being anywhere near guaranteed to claim self defense even if he had fired a warning shot first.
https://svenskjakt.se/start/nyhet/skot-inkraktare-med-algstu...
Yes. I am Swedish too.
Notice again the lack of warning shots. The courts really want you to do one.
If a masked person, that doesn't first identify themselves clearly as the police (which is difficult since, well, they are masked) breaks into my house, that's a lethal attack for sure.
What are you going to do after they enter the house (if they aren't indeed the police and you trust they won't kill or rape your family)?
While this is still bad, If you watch the video, the officers announce themselves and enter with empty hands... it's very different from videos of "raids" by US police that I've seen.
> What would happen if the owner was armed
Might as well talk about unicorns as we are imaging this scenario in Denmark.
You can own multiple guns and store them at your residence in Denmark. I know a couple of people who do so, admittedly both ex-military.
This isn't limited to shotguns or bolt action rifles for hunting. You can own up to six handguns.
You do need to be licensed however, and given Andersen's history he probably wouldn't be permitted.
You can. But ammunition and the guns have to be stored in separate safes. And it's essentially impossible to get off with a self defense claim if you have time to gather your legal guns
It would still (in most cases, your response have to be proportional to the threat) be a crime to use them against a intruder.
You should also add that most private guns owned in Denmark are typically for hunting, not self defence.
>What would happen if the owner was armed and harmed the police thinking that they were criminals?
A hefty prison sentence for illegal handling of firearms and attempted homicide would be my guess.
I was thinking of the police officers. Why risk your life for such a petty crime?
The activist is well known. They likely knew he would answer the door, yet they still broke it down. In the U.S., you'd probably shoot some dog in that situation, if one was available.
The entire scene is probably not meant as effective policing, but as punitive theater. This also explains why they disabled the cameras, as the theater was not intended for content reuse.
Given that, I'd assume they knew he wouldn't shoot them or do anything even remotely like that.
This is Denmark not America, there is literally no risk to their life.
Just because Denmark doesn't have the same gun laws, culture around using guns for self-defense, or prevalence of guns as the US does, it doesn't mean that Danish police face no risk when they raid someone's home. Anytime the cops raid someone's home, regardless of whether or not is it a legitimate raid of a legitimate criminal, it's a violent act and there's risk that the cops will be hurt or killed.
Since 1945 12 cops have been killed in the line of duty (excluding traffic accidents), mostly when responding to a violent crime (trying to stop bank robberies lead to 6 of those fatalities).
That’s such an American mentality. Here’s a short clip which might broaden your mind on possible ways to view how and when police should be using violence.
https://www.reddit.com/r/BeAmazed/comments/1c0e24s/american_...
Do you have any danish stats to back up your claim?
I think the gun proliferation situation in Denmark is probably different than the US
First time murder is typically gives around 12 years in Denmark.
Sentences are not added up. So yes, trying to shot a police officer will definitely get you decent sentence -- it's not hefty by American standards.
This is Denmark, nobody except gang members is armed
Well, and the police.
Yes, gang members.
Rofl
There are supposedly ~10 civilian owned firearms per 100 people in Denmark. I doubt there are that many gang members there?
Privacy advocate with Google-nest cameras inside his home?
Maybe he wanted to make sure a lot of copies of the evidence were floating around. Surveillance capitalism is like a free unlimited backup service you can't restore from.
Yeah, he seems confused to me. Well meaning, but not so consistent.
What is good is that he is a wrench, that throws itself in the works repeatedly. This is a healthy thing to have.
I was on a consultant-assignment at a company that got raided by the police in the EU. The police was extremely careful not to scan any data that where stored on US-servers. The company used Google for mail and file storage, so all computers had to be taken offline before they could scan them.
While I don't doubt they have a way of getting permission to access that data, I don't think they will put in the effort unless you're a relally big fish.
> The police was extremely careful not to scan any data that where stored on US-servers
This seems exactly backwards to what I'd expect, I wonder what the official rationale is.
On device recording, so at least the illusion of privacy.
How did he get the videos out of the cameras that were seized if the recording was also not uploaded? Can Nest cameras upload/stream to private servers? (never had one so I have no idea)
Lol, yes.
He describe himself as an anarcho capitalist so I guess, ideologically, it is government surveillance that he is concerned with and that the free market will sort out the rest.
Hilarious take, why ban it by accountable governments but not unaccountable companies (which can then sell to accountable governments anyway)
Where did you see anarcho capitalist? I only saw "libertarian" (which is not the same thing).
A Danish privacy activist (not a protected title) using Google Nest.
On a second thought (addendum), ...
1) Publishing PII like phone number of a high profile person in your society is causing them harm since they obviously put effort into not having such out in the open. (e.g. I can find anyone's phone number in my country via leaks. No big deal... but I shouldn't publish such. I shouldn't possess such data either.)
2) SSN is a different category of PII. Publishing this of anyone is an invitation of harm, even more so of a high profile person in your society.
It is akin to inviting people to DDoS a website, or blocking them physically access to exit their house. That kind of thing. Except that on the internet, anyone can abuse this. Even people (including criminals) in foreign countries, residing in hazardous jurisdictions (e.g. Russia).
Either way, what's the point of publishing such information? When German activists published the fingerprint of a German minister, they were making a point. They got the fingerprint via a glass of wine, but the interesting point is that a fingerprint cannot be revoked. It isn't used to authenticate a password, but a user(name). It should therefore not be used as single factor.
i guess they weren't trying to get his computer in a powered up state.
If cops are supposedly worried about cameras and believe turning the power off stops it, then put a UPS on the DVR (if present) and each camera.
Whatever Lars may be, the fact that a lawful arrest could not be filmed sucks. I can find other reasons behind needing to cut the circuit breakers during an arrest of a hacker in an effort to secure evidence.
Peter Hummelgaard on the other hand, can just fuck right off. Former head of the ministry of justice seriously argued that the mass surveillance initiatives he led were right because he "felt" it...
Calling yourself a "privacy advocate" while gloating that you posted PII is quite something
I guess it's like castle doctrine for the information space. Something like "your right to privacy stops when you openly try to undermine mine...".
I see it as a morally valid approach. Politicians are well within their power to not be corrupt and value the US/bigcorp/oligarch x over the people they vowed to represent.
I bet he lives in Amager because his door looks very similar to mine when I was living in there.
Twitter is even the place for this kind of news? What does people keep there?
I shouldn't have clicked on his profile. Sorry for him for being raided by the police, but I didn't expect a "Privacy Activist" to be so focused on openly disliking muslims and migrants. I'm not logged in so maybe that says more about the twitter algo, but a lot of what I saw was posts and reposts hating on these groups of people.
remigration, monkey comparisons, generally some awful stuff. yikes. Just focus on privacy, dude.
Nobody in Denmark actually thinks of Lars Andersen as any sort of serious privacy activist. He is a drug-addled moron who just happens to dabble in those things. He's an idiot and contributes nothing of value to society.
People didn't blink when Comey posted a photo of 8647 and got indicted for threatening the president, imagine if he posted Trumps SSN.
> The prefece to the story is, that I in a kind of roundabout and (I think) humorous way published "my two favorite numbers" by spelling out a 10 diget and a 8 diget number with letters. I didn't tell what they ment, but they where prime minister Mette Frederiksen's social security and phone number
Umm, so was he arrested for doxing the prime minister? Is there more to the story than that?
As someone who cares about privacy, arresting people who dox other people seems like a good thing. Obviously i want that to apply to everyone not just the rich and famous, but still at the end of the day i have trouble objecting to someone getting arrested for doxing people.
That same prime minister supports the warrant-less use of medical records in police work and the ban of encryption through chat control. She wants to prevent the Danish population from having privacy, but demands it herself. Sorry, but that's not the Western way.
Just because you disagree with someone does not make it ok to dox them.
That's a bit simplified, isn't it? He's pointing out precisely that "doxing" the entire population of Denmark shouldn't be acceptable to her, and that she's literally not accepting herself being "doxxed." If it was about, I dunno, pizza toppings or school budgeting, then obviously the actions would have been different.
> That's a bit simplified, isn't it?
No, i dont think it is.
> He's pointing out precisely that "doxing" the entire population of Denmark shouldn't be acceptable to her
Denmark is a democracy, that is a decision for the electroate to make during an election. In general we give governments rights and abilities that normal people do not have. Where the line should be is up to the voters to decide.
> and that she's literally not accepting herself being "doxxed."
Not really equivalent. I'm pretty sure the Danish survelience plans, whatever you think of them, intend to have some sort of controls against misuse. (Im not saying that makes them good or ok, just that they aren't equivalent to doxing people)
The lifes of powerful people must be transparent.
Having their business transparent makes sense but by restricting people's personal lives like this would disincentivize good people from rising to power, which is not what we want.
Good, I don't want people rising to unlimited, uncheckable power and creating oppressive hierarchies in general.
It won't prevent bad people from rising to power. After all, i'm pretty sure Putin doesn't have this problem. He just throws people who do this sort of thing out the window. The only politicians that have something to fear from this type of activism is the non evil ones.
People that want to be powerful for personal gain will be filtered. People that legimitely want to give their all for their country will be encouraged.
The most powerful people are those who are billionaires
Is it "just disagreeing with them" or is it taking away privacy _from those publicly renouncing the right to privacy_, with goal of protecting the right to privacy of everyone else, who didn't renounce it, by pointing out the hipocrisy and that it actually is important, even to those who claim otherwise trying to take it from others?
Actually it does, and much more.
Politicians these days are expected to have harder and harder skin. I've seen lots of stories in the news lately of (in particular young) politicians from scandinavia who dropped out of politics due to harassment, anonymous threats etc. And even more people who never get into politics, because of hearing about such stories. I sure as hell would not get into politics today.
I fear for what our political system will look like when only those who have become completely numb to such threats remain. What kinds people are they, those who can live with hundreds of daily hate messages and death threats, doxing of oneself and family members, having to live with security guards and secret addresses? What are we losing by allowing this kind of "freedom of speech"?
If your morals consist of eye-for-an-eye retribution, then maybe his actions make sense. But I do not believe that that gives us a better society.
> If your morals consist of eye-for-an-eye retribution
It’s still preferable to doing nothing when that politician is publicly declaring their support of indiscriminately violating inherent personal freedoms on an unlimited scale.
This politician dropping out of politics would be a good thing? That's the point?
> Obviously i want that to apply to everyone not just the rich and famous
Do you really want armed and masked police to break down the doors of people who dox others, disable their cameras, and arrest them while refusing to tell them the charges? Because without these details this would have been a non-story.
Most of the time i would want the arrests to proceed in a more civil manner unless the situation warranted otherwise, but ultimately yes, i think doxing/harrasment is a crime and people who commit it should be arrested and tried.
Both sides are not looking too pretty here.
I think what is much more important, is that it exposes the shortcomings of the Danish SSN system.
It was introduced in 1968, when Denmark was a high-trust society. It was used as a sort of password and key for looking up your information. If you wanted to create a bank account, you told them your SSN. If you wanted to buy a car, you told them your SSN. If you had any contact with the authorities, you told them your SSN. And so on.
The usage has changed, but not that much. So today, when trust in Danish society is not as high, the system falls short. Identity theft. Privacy. Scamming. They have to be detected and stopped by other means.
The proper path forwards would be to radically change the system (or the society).
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The tone of the post sounds like smear since it entirely dismisses his advocacy of personal liberty with claims that havn't been published in Danish media as far as I know.
It would be interesting if you could elaborate on the claims that be was a corrupt police officer and drug dealer.
My understanding of his own account is that he left the force when he wasn't comfortable arresting people over weed and that he saw systematic abuse of power that he didn't want to partake in. Is there more to the story?
His recent activism has been focusing on contrasting the privacy people in power demand with their work to deny the broad population privacy.
> you could elaborate on the claims that be was a corrupt police officer and drug dealer.
This is public record. It’s entirely published he’s charged and received a prison sentence for the crime, the investigation into corruption started but needed early when he handed in his resignation. which is just proof that he was a corrupt cop in a corrupt system. I mean no drug dealer who gets charged is going to get off by going “ok I’ll quit then”.
> My understanding of his own account is that he left the force when he wasn't comfortable arresting people over weed
This flips the script. He public made statements that he would carry drugs on the job, and felt I’d should be legal, and that he wouldn’t enforce the drug law. The investigation that followed he handed in his resignation. And the corrupt Danish police force being what it is, dropped the investigation.
His “activism” has since consisted of amongst other things starting to sell drugs and then claiming that its activism when he got charged with prison for it. To be clear, he didn’t stage the public sale of a symbolic amount to get arrested and protest through civil disobedience. He straight up went breaking bad and started a drug peddling operation.
>And the corrupt Danish police force being what it is, dropped the investigation.
How is that corruption? If the issue was that he was saying he wasn't gonna do his job, and then he quit his job, wouldn't that just rectify the situation?
He was saying that he broke the law routinely and they decided to end the investigation. That’s corruption, police should be investigated for routinely failing to do their job just the same as when they break the law or abuse their office.
> felt I’d should be legal, and that he wouldn’t enforce the drug law
If that’s true then by definition its not corruption but a completely different crime.
I get the impression that you have (or claim to have) information that isn't publicly available and think he is disingenuous or imormal as a person.
Do you also disagree with the causes he is promoting or only the person and/or methods?
Some of his ideas, like full anarcho capitalism, I would need to be convinced before being onboard with. But opposing mass surveillance and promoting government accountability seems odd to vigorously oppose.
I don’t have any non public information. This is all public record, he was found guilty and charged with jail on multiple occasions. He pops up in the news periodically for having broken yet another law and i charged and convicted for it.
And “being opposed to mass surveillance” and literally stalking kids of the prime minister to attempt to expose the PET (equivalent to FBI) exposed secret location her family is staying at are not the same.
Obviously every drug dealer is going to “be of the ideology that dealing drugs should be legal” but that doesn’t make dealing drugs activism. Same as abusing the office of being a cop. It doesn’t matter if you believe it should be legal for cops to beat up protestors, that doesn’t make a cop breaking the law to beat up protestors an act of activism.
The guy is just a sleezebag who cries “activism” every time he faces consequences for breaking the law in this illegal activism or when he’s harassing politicians. That’s not actual activism and he’s not supporting any cause he’s just acting like an idiot doing what he’s doing.
Lars was a corrupt cop? Are you just using "corrupt" to mean "someone I don't like"?
I don’t care if you think drugs should be legalized, or even if you do drugs in your free time. If you are a cop doing drugs while on duty and decide to take it on yourself to not enforce the law against drug dealers you are corrupt, because you have decided to subjugate the law you are forced with enforcing. Now it’s true that he wasn’t officially charged with taking kickbacks from the drug dealers he would let operate but in my optics that is entirely due to them letting him hand in a resignation to stop the investigation, propably to protect his fellow cops who would have been named and shamed for also doing drugs on the job. But to be clear, deciding to protect drug dealers in your job as a cop is. It activism it’s corruption.
Claiming it’s about ideology defies the point. He spent years as a cop letting drug dealers deal drugs and then came out saying the only reason he was breaking the law was because he didn’t believe in it. That’s not ideology that’s corruption. If he had decided to stop being a cop to not enforce a law he didn’t like that’s different. But that’s not what happened. He quit hen his illegal enterprise got caught. Cops do not get to enforce the law selectively based on what laws they like and dislike and get off just by claiming “ideology”.
This is the slave mindset that is letting politicians all over the world erode our rights. More and more and more. Every country is now passing deep anti-privacy, anti-VPN, anti-encryption and age-verification laws. The law is not written by us, its written by people who are only barely accountable to us once every couple of years. Authoritarianism is rising very sharply all over the world, corruption amongst the elites is high, they are increasingly unaligned and unafraid of common people. There's a million tricks to pass laws that citizens don't really want, including skipping public debates, secret amendments, or just relying on plain old propaganda and ignorance/inaction by the majority. The only actual power we have is in action and organization. Following the laws that they write with barely any input from us off a cliff is not right or noble, its death.
I think you’ve got his fake activism mixed up. When he was a cop he wasn’t claiming to be a privacy advocates his stick then was that cops should be allowed to do cocain while on the job and that if a cop though selling drugs was ok they should be free to not uphold the law whenever they felt like it.
His fake stance on privacy came later when he faced consequences for doxing politicians and using the public Facebook pages of politics to advertise his drug peddling enterprise.
Could you supply some ressources that make your framing plausible? That would be a valuable service to the community, as this discussion seems to be highly polarized. (from the ratio of downvoted comments to all comments). Reading through this discussion and not having heared of this before it's hard to tell what's genuine and what's not.
Corruption is defined as "the abuse of entrusted power for private (usually financial) gain". Lars' case falls under the category of conscientious objection, as he's ideologically motivated. Pretty disgusting to frame that as corruption.
One could read this persons activism as a narrative of "lesson learned" in this regard. Well you want the law applied to everyone equally? Well, actually.. you're right. In the sense as it seems to be the case that there is a motive in this persons action of make them experience being subjected to the legal/social order they promote.
No that's not what corruption means
I think the nazis tried the whole "obeying orders" thing and it didn't work for them.
Do you think this defence should have been considered valid for them?
Scenario: cop does cocain on the job and allows friends to sell drugs without enforcing the law.
Me: that’s kind of fucked up and not activism.
You: So you support Hitler!?!
What security concerns? Of a person telling people where you live?
Are the homes of Danish prime ministers secret?
Usually it is not a secret, but currently the prime minister and her family live at a secret address.
I think some context is being lost in a literal translation.
I think they mean secret as in unlisted where their records aren't accessible in public government databases. The same protection you would get if you were stalked for example.
No, it’s not just unlisted number and address. PET (Danish equivalent of FBI) by administrative decision has had her move out of her Copenhagen apartment and to an undisclosed location due to security concerns. Her and her family are literally under protection due to security concerns and this guy is stalking her kids trying to dox her.
What security concerns? Why would the Danish PM fear for her life just because her address is known? I know where my PM lives.
I get that it's a secret location now, but I don't understand in context if this activist is the trigger of the situation. An if so how can this be considered a threat.
Stalking falls under the broad category of harassment in my eastern european country. I feel as if this would be a non issue given an official police warning. At most.
Regardless of intent, this does reveal that certain people are protected by warrantless arrests while the general public is not.
Did his arrest not have a warrant? I'm not familiar how these things work in Denmark, but is there any reason to believe there was no warrant?
Presumably if they had one they would have told him the charges, but I am not sure how the danish law works so perhaps my assumption is incorrect.
At the same time, i would presume if his arrest was this irregular and illegal he would be taking it to actual court instead ofthe court of public opinion.
Are these exclusive opportunities? I'm not familiar with danish law.
Not exclusive, but in general its a bad idea to post on social media if you plan to take it up in court, as its very easy to accidentally say something that shoots yourself in the foot.
I suppose. I don't think that matters much in places with functioning legal systems.
It's the other way around.
In a functioning legal system it matters what you said or didn't. In a non-functioning legal system they will just convict you regardless of what was said or done.
> She currently lives at a secret address due to security concerns.
Oh so she cares about her own privacy? Curious then that she seems to be such an ardent advocate for Chat Control and for the erosion of encryption.
Politicians are such a disgusting, hypocritical bunch of "people", more people should be "doxxing" these weasels. Maybe eventually we'll find one of them that has 2 braincells to put together to comprehend their hypocrisy, but I guess there's little chance of that.
> Oh so she cares about her own privacy?
She didn’t choose to make that move. PET (the equivalent of FBI) made the decision to protect her address. I’m sure she much prefer the time back when she was living at her own place and her address was freely available to the public without any issues.
There is no hypocrisy here. As for releasing social security numbers of people, she’s against it no matter who’s doing the doxing and who the target is. But yes, obviously the government knows hos government issued ID corresponds to who. That’s pretty obvious. But that doesn’t mean everyone in the country has to have access to it. Your doctor also has access to your medical journal, that doesn’t give you the right to publish the medical journal of your doctor on Facebook if you get angry at him for giving you a bad diagnosis.
> There is no hypocrisy here.
Pretty much every single politician calling for Chat Control wants to carve out protections for themselves to be excluded from it. This is quite literally as hypocritical as it can possibly get, they want the gov't to have the ability to spy on you and every single conversation you have, but they've carved out a nice little enclave for them and their corrupt donors that excludes them from this same scrutiny. 'Cause everyone knows the average Joe needs to have their private messages out in the open, and not the corrupt pedophile politicians.
PET is holding her hostage? They took her in the middle of the night to the new address and told her that if she reveals it to anyone that they will kill her dog?
She is taking the recommendation of PET to move to a secure location and conceal her address.
I have no real clue who any of these people are but I can see the glaring hypocrisy from here.
Highly doubt that is the only reason he got this treatment. Need to go through his tweets to figure out what is his deal.
The guy constantly does crazy shit so sure, but this comes days after he announced he was stalking her children, so it’s very likely connected
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Another authoritarian govt
Because no one has mentioned it here: Lars Andersen is also a right-wing extremist who regularly posts racist content on social media. His privacy/free speech activism seems to be (at least partly) motivated by this.
I think this is useful context for evaluating his judgment.
An example would've been nice.
All too often people throw around the racist buzzword without ever actually providing evidence. It's as if we're expected to just blindly trust and follow that somebody is now excommunicated from modern society.
Sure thing. If you view his X profile without logging in, nearly all his top posts demonstrate what I mean: advocating for remigration (i.e. ethnic cleansing), comparing Muslims to monkeys, supporting far-right figures like Tommy Robinson and Rasmus Paludan, sharing YouTube comments with racial slurs...
https://x.com/LarsAnders1620/status/1885254465160118655, first one that comes up when I view X (not signed in). I don't think this is enough (as OP declared) to authoritatively place him in 'right wing extremist' but probably racist. I don't speak danish, but someone that could would be able to make a more complete judgement because most, if not all posts of his, are in Danish.
Simp much
The archetype of the whining activist. Getting himself in idiotic trouble so he could benefit from the status of a victim and ensuing drama
If the goal was to maximize attention to the event (in order to use it to steer attention towards the cause) then it was quite successful, no? After all, we're talking about it here. Mostly about him and the details of the event, but some sub-threads are about the cause too.
So, success?
Success in what exactly? There a very strong political movement in Denmark towards protecting privacy rights, then there’s this nutjob who just got out of jail for bribes, harassment, death threats against politicians and immediately he starts stalking the kids of the prime minister.
He’s not doing anything for the cause he claims to fight for. He’s doesn’t want a right to privacy he wants to be allowed to continue to sell drugs “in private” from the government. And he thinks freedom of speech should cover his freedom to harass and threaten politicians which it doesn’t and shouldn’t.
> Success in what exactly? There a very strong political movement in Denmark towards protecting privacy rights
Doesn't seem to be working.
By what metric? The fact that he got arrested for stalking the prime ministers children and releasing private information speaks toward protecting privacy not an issue if lacking privacy.
You can’t just declare “I am an anti violence activist” then go out and beat up politicians and declare that the system has a problem with violence when you get arrested.
This is the equivalent of what he’s done. He claims to support privacy laws so he violated the privacy of someone who is currently protected by the PET (equivalent of FBI) due to safety concerns and he proudly proclaimed that he did so by stalking her children. He’s not a political activist he’s a drug dealer who’s hell bent on getting revenge on politicians because he just spent 8 months in jail after being convicted on counts of death threats harassment and illegal possession of arms and drugs.
> By what metric?
By the metric of Denmark being the leading force being Chat Control, Palantir driven panopticon and worse.
*winning
Sorry, you made a silly typo that made you look bad. I fixed it.