- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Unnecessary and deeply concerning bow to the new “king”
Update: position got backed up by an official Proton post on Mastodon, it’s an official Proton statement now. https://mastodon.social/@protonprivacy/113833073219145503
Update 2, plot-twist: they removed this response from Mastodon - seems they realize it exploded into their face!
I’m having a lot of trouble parsing any of this.
In what sense does the election being over render it not a matter of picking? Slater’s selection is a nomination, you could select one person at the expense of another, to better or worse ends, so in any ordinary english language sense, there is indeed a pick.
By contrast, Lori Chavez-DeRemer was selected for labor secretary, which has been celebrated by people who are normally Trump critics. Because there are such things as better or worse picks.
Again: what? Trump gets to appoint the DoJ’s Attorney General, Deputy Attorney General, Associate Attorney General, Solicitor General, 93 DoJ Attorneys, heads of a bunch of individual departments in the DoJ which each have hundreds of staff, and will likely appoint hundreds of new judges. Not only can Trump do something, his actions will be the single most dominating force determining the trajectory of anti-trust environment.
What’s more, as a commenter above noted, Lina Kahn is a perfect example of how influential these appointments can be, as we’ve seen some of the most ambitious anti-trust action in decades.
They’re probably not even right, in the first instance, that big tech will be better restrained. The elephant in the room rendering this whole line of thinking preposterous, is Lina Khan’s extremely aggressive record on this won’t be matched even by a “good” Trump appointee, and in fact has been vehemently opposed by R’s through her whole tenure.
Right, but that’s the point. Nobody would credit Trump as a champion of human rights, which reveals why it’s so short-sighted to uphold him or R’s as leading lights on a topic such as privacy, which falls under the umbrella of a subject matter that we’re all agreeing he doesn’t care about.
It’s precisely because of the absence of consistent commitments on every other front that also belongs in the same category, that of human rights writ large, that it’s silly to celebrate the one exception to an otherwise negative record. And it’s hard to take statements seriously that treat that totality as if it embodies a pure commitment to virtues of an ideal, free and open internet.
Maybe I was too cryptic. The election being over means that we are not choosing trump for antitrust policy (or better, what he says he will do) and ignore the human rights violation. He is already going to be president, and those human rights violation will anyway happen. So why can’t we talk about the antitrust bit in isolation? It’s a separate area AND, we are not in election campaign, nobody will vote Trump because of his antitrust posture today, at the expense of the human rights.
With regards to the pick itself, I have no opinion. But I didn’t read a single piece that criticized the pick itself (which appeared to be OK?), almost every critique just highlighted that this pick happens in a specific context of shitty policies (project 2025 etc.). Which again, true, but in my opinion is forcing to expand the context. Once again, we are not in election campaign, nobody is proposing to be a single-issue voter on antitrust.
Sorry, I think my sentence was not clear. What I mean is that he can do “nothing”, " something good" (better) or “something bad” (worse). If his actions (or words) for now fall into the “something good” - this is anyway fully independent from all the “something bad” that he will surely do in many other areas, why can’t be discussed independently? Why it’s not possible to talk about this single issue? The rest is going to happen independently from what he does in the antitrust area, so isn’t still a net positive if here he does “something good”?
But this also didn’t happen, and it’s also not logically true anyway. You could be a champion for privacy and at the same time - say - enact completely terrible policy on prisoners conditions (human rights). So in general it’s an absolutely arbitrary statement that gravitate towards a platitude. Specifically anyway, he has not been praised to be a champion for privacy, the benefit to privacy is indirect, and stems from a (possible) harder posture on tech monopolies. It was not even said that Trump does it for privacy as the end goal. Fully indirect effect. In fact, it’s also possible that trump might be harsher on monopolies and indirectly benefiting privacy of people by providing a fairer market where privacy companies can thrive, and at the same time a point some idiot that wants to backdoor encryption anywhere in some other position (another user mentioned this - which is a very good argument).
I disagree with this based on the above (nobody said oh look what good champion of human rights Trump is because he will do something that indirectly may benefit privacy for everyone). In fact, I believe a few reasons of a previous record IN THIS AREA were cited by the guy (and later by the proton account). how good or solid examples I don’t know, but it was not all based just on a tweet with some propaganda.