Australian Senate Introduces Laws To Allow Total Internet Surveillance 212
First time accepted submitter Marquis231 writes New laws due to be passed in Australia allow intelligence agency ASIO to spy on domestic internet traffic like never before. The Sydney Morning Herald reports: "Spy agency ASIO will be given the power to monitor the entire Australian internet and journalists' ability to write about national security will be curtailed when new legislation – expected to pass in the Senate as early as Wednesday – becomes law, academics, media organisations, lawyers, the Greens party and rights groups fear."
if you're not doing anything wrong..... (Score:5, Insightful)
Australia voted... for a kick in the nuts. (Score:5, Informative)
To fill in non-Australians on what happened, a few days ago the Australian government launched a massive campaign "to fight terror" which involved 800 police across 3 states and resulted in 16 arrests. All of these people just happened to be Muslim.
The government made a big song and dance about it but what they didn't say is that 15 of the 16 were released without charge. The 16th man was held because they found a broken taser and 4 unused shotgun rounds in his house. He went to court 2 days ago and the judge with a brain released him with a misdemeanour charge (a fine, no criminal record).
So this operation has all the hallmarks of a false flag to get bad laws passed on a wave of fear based support... Lo and behold, this appears in parliament.
America will have elections before we do, we didn't learn from Canada and the UK... Please dont make the same mistakes as we did by voting in the other guy because we hate the current guys. It always ends up worse.
Re:Australia voted... for a kick in the nuts. (Score:5, Insightful)
One berk with a knife takes some swipes at a pair of police officers and twenty years of work by civil liberties activists are done because the tories are shouting and stamping their feet that we are under some sort of attack from eeeeevil terrorists.
I'm sorry, I live in northbridge, inner-city perth. The place is a stabbing range at the best of time. I bet people are stabbing at cops every other day.
Oh no, I'm terrified of brown people, here you go officer , have my rights, I'm too scared to use them!!!!!!
Pathetic.
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Re:Australia voted... for a kick in the nuts. (Score:4, Informative)
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And you can't tell them, they won't listen, Aussies think they know everything
I am Australian - and I endorse everything you say.
I'll add that there are a lot of Australians that are sick of it. Unfortunately the dumb as fuck, thick as a house brick masses are such blind, igorant, apethetic, insular and stupid cowards they just cheers the government on into making Australia a police state.
Meanwhile, any Australian who cares about the country looks on in horror. We are one despot away from a dictatorship.
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Ex-dickhead?
Doesn't sound like it. Nice irony post about being a whinging fuckwit!
Stop talking out your arse. Take the 'Aussie Pride' sticker of the back of the ute you drive and wake up you dumb ignorant anonymous gutless prick. They are right, and Australia is turning into this because useless dickhead such as you.
You are like the fucking cane toads ruining Australia. A fucking useless and ugly pest.
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Pull the knife out first. Then ask him to throw down his gun and fight like a man
When you have to shoot, shoot, don't talk.
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Greeks are mostly orthodox catholic, not muslim.
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That was the point.
Re:Australia voted... for a kick in the nuts. (Score:4, Insightful)
"Conservative" means different things in different countries. It even means different things in different US states.
In the USA, "conservative" might mean an advocate of small government and reduced government power, or it might mean a pro-life social conservative looking to restrict abortion or anything in between.
If privacy is a voter's primary concern in the US, it's probably best to vote based on the individual candidate's position than on the candidate's party.
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Reality is quite clear, conservative politics equals exploitative politics and Anti-terror laws equals anti-poor laws. These laws are all designed to protect the rich from the middle class and the poor, laws that you can protect yourself from only if you have sufficient money and laws which can be used to abused anyone who does not have enough money.
The unreality of conservative politics when they are all about conserving nothing, they don't want to conserve resources, they don't want to conserve the env
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It may mean different things, but in the US they ALL vote republican. Republicans have targeted every stupid single-issue voter in the US and done a great job of it.
"If privacy is a voter's primary concern in the US, it's probably best to vote based on the individual candidate's position than on the candidate's party."
Stupid stupid stupid advice. First, suggesting that there's a best way to vote for stupid single-issue voters is the reason we have the quality of candidates that we do. Second, assuming th
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It may mean different things, but in the US they ALL vote republican.
No they don't. Small government conservatives tend to vote libertarian, stay at home or even vote for a democrat that values personal liberty when a social conservative is running.
Unfortunately, both parties only recognize personal liberty in narrow cases.
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That's the silliest idea I've heard in a long time. People who attend political events are the least sophisticated and least informed group possible.
Do you really think that anything of substance is gleaned at political events?
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In the USA, "conservative" might mean an advocate of small government and reduced government power
Not really. The actual libertarians call themselves libertarians. That 'conservatives' in the US like to spread a vague sense that 'government is bad' isn't the same thing - these people generally aren't actually in favour of small government. (Military interventionism, subsidies for big companies, and spying on citizens, are not policies that real libertarians advocate.)
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Re:Australia voted... for a kick in the nuts. (Score:5, Insightful)
The actual libertarians call themselves either anarchists or communists. The 'libertarians' in the US are conservatives. They believe in laws such as property laws which protect the rich against the poor, but no laws which protect the poor against the rich.
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"Gimme gimme gimme. Mine mine mine!!!" -populous
To be fair, they learned it from watching the ruling class who have already taken most of the pie and left the scraps for the hoi polloi to fight over.
Re:Australia voted... for a kick in the nuts. (Score:5, Interesting)
The Murdoch tabloids’ trademark sensationalist coverage of crime, and accompanying campaigns for draconian law-and-order politics such as harsher sentences and more police powers, has always been in the framework of self-righteous claims to be the voice of victims.
Another trademark of the Murdoch media globally is Islamophobia. From Fox news’ hysterical reaction to President Barack Obama’s Arabic middle name, to the Sydney Daily Telegraph’s current anti-Burka campaign, the Murdoch media has consistently vilified Muslims in the name of protecting Western society from terrorism.
In Australia, not only has Murdoch used his media to campaign for anti-terror laws but, in several cases after such laws have been introduced, authorities used the Murdoch media during prosecutions to spread allegations against defendants in terrorism trials. Such allegations cannot be refuted in open court, or spoken about by the accused, because of secrecy provisions in the anti-terror laws.
https://www.greenleft.org.au/n... [greenleft.org.au]
It reads like it was written yesterday, but in fact it's a story from 2011, during a previous successful push to whittle away more civil liberties, not just in Australia, but worldwide.
Until us ordinary people can recognise the war being waged against us by the Murdochs of the world, and discover the courage and weapons to fight them, we will continue to lose those few liberties we have remaining.
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So this operation has all the hallmarks of a false flag to get bad laws passed on a wave of fear based support... Lo and behold, this appears in parliament.
That...isn't what false flag means.
Almost certainly there was a real investigation going on. Someone (probably Abbott himself) just put the call down that they wanted it closed up, asked for a worst case scenario (which would've been dutifully given) and then they were told to go ahead with arrests on the basis of that.
All a colossal waste of money which I'm sure a bunch of analysts and intelligence officers were probably pretty pissed about because any actual leads they might've been following would've got
A bit more perspective (Score:4, Insightful)
Pure cooked up chest thumping security theatre.
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We have been watching these sorts of things come out of Australia for years. The labor government was at least as bad about it with their black lists and various censorship schemes. In the article also notice that the bill has the support of both the conservative government and the labor establishment. So blaming this on the conservatives seems questionable. A more accurate assessment is that the Australian government is just prone to this sort of behavior. As for as I can see there is no party, other than
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We have been watching these sorts of things come out of Australia for years. The labor government was at least as bad about it with their black lists and various censorship schemes. In the article also notice that the bill has the support of both the conservative government and the labor establishment. So blaming this on the conservatives seems questionable.
New Labor have been just another conservative party for over a decade now.
As for as I can see there is no party, other than the greens, who are really
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You mean like that wanna-be 17 year old terrorist who stabbed two officers and ended up getting shot for his trouble? [smh.com.au] Seems to me that they did the right thing in that case after all, but let's look at europe. France has no-go zones, norway has them, sweden has them. Of course we can't forget the rape jihad either, and it's even hitting the courts where the defendants are claiming it's "part of their religious duty to do so." I believe you had one in Australia a few months back, might have been last yea
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"Americans please take note, this is what happens when you elect conservatives."
You missed the part where the Labour party supports the draft law.
Re:Australia voted... for a kick in the nuts. (Score:5, Insightful)
What new laws are needed to arrest and convict a man that stabs a police officer? Even if its only attempted stabbing? Where is the hole that needs to be plugged with universal surveillance?
Re:Australia voted... for a kick in the nuts. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to mention, how would totalitarian Internet surveillance help that situation even slightly (let alone help so Goddamned incredibly well to even begin to come close to "justifying" the loss of liberty!)?
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Re:Australia voted... for a kick in the nuts. (Score:4, Insightful)
The goal is to "catch" people before they commit a crime, i.e. when they are only thinking about it and no-one has been hurt yet. Therefore thought needs to be criminalized.
Re:Australia voted... for a kick in the nuts. (Score:5, Funny)
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Like Australia?
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The goal is to "catch" people before they commit a crime
I'm pretty sure i read about that somewhere else...
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Sounds like you were engaged in some sort of seditious activity.
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Please educate yourself about Islam (from first principles).
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And Denmark, and Norway, and Germany, and... many, many more.
Nostalgic for a nice set of chains, are they? (Score:3)
Allowing the security services to *monitor* the whole country looks like a panicky move and leaves the door wide open to abuse.
Curtailing the freedom of speech of journalists and bloggers, as in :
Re:Nostalgic for a nice set of chains, are they? (Score:4, Interesting)
Or simply an overreaction? I really wonder.
Allowing the security services to *monitor* the whole country looks like a panicky move and leaves the door wide open to abuse.
Curtailing the freedom of speech of journalists and bloggers, as in :
veers into police-state territory, given the vague way in which it's phrased. I think that the balance between on the one hand safeguarding the effectiveness of anti-terrorism measures and on preventing miscreants from benefiting from bloggers and journalists and a general gag-order on the other has been upset.
Oh that's not what it's about. See, Australia's policy on boat-arrival asylum seekers was recently all categorized (and its funding transferred) to the defense department, so the whole thing is now a military operation with a budget put out of sight behind general defense spending (which you can increase effectively without limit or consideration).
Which makes everything about it "operational security". Like you know, the number of boats that arrived, how many sank, where the people are being taken...
their secrecy is a bigger problem than our privacy (Score:3)
The real danger is the secrecy with which these privacy-violators operate. Even if they were miraculously staffed with Spock-like analysts pure of all malevolence, they would drive the country off a cliff by avoiding the corrective of public accountability.
Suppose Australia outlawed all clothing and curtains, put every square centimeter under public surveillance with open online access, published all bank statements online, restricted the use of passwords only to verify authority for transactions, and recor
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If you have nothing to fear you should try and avoid being searched, it just a waste of police resources.
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Now that the Democrats have pretty much turned into Republicans who else is there? If you think our two main parties are bad have you ever looked at our third parties? At voting time we pretty much get to chose between plain self-serving evil and batshit crazy evil.
Someone explain please (Score:2)
What is it with governments and wanting to spy on every citizen, just because the technology might allow for it? So much for them being our democratically elected representatives. That's apparently only when they need themselves some votes. Once they got them, they turn around and basically become enemies of the citizenry. Every. Last. One. Of. Them.
But why? It can't be just the lobbyist money.
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There are plenty of conspiracy theories that might answer some of that question. Good luck figuring out if any of them are truthful. The rest is emergent social behavior that comes from bureaucratic lordship.
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To the political class it becomes addictive. Reading embassy communications in the 1920's, WW2 Enigma. Australian staff became aware of a huge effort to listen to the world and wanted in after WW2.
Australia was warned by some of it's top military people not to sell out to the US and UK given Australia's role in WW2 (full exploitation of crypto in Australia, troops under the control of the UK) but the political leaders joined the 5 eyes.
The rest is histor
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Once upon a time, we had governments that consisted of the "elite" - nobility, usually, but once we figured out this whole "election" thing, the elite became the guys we elected.
What these various "elites" have had in common throughout history is that they feel themselves to be entitled to tell the rest of us what to do.
And since, in general, they controlled law enforcement and the military (not always d
Not the government's fault. (Score:5, Insightful)
I find this interesting. Both major governments have now supported internet filtering or some invasive monitoring in the past. Recently we've had a government decide to go and join the fight in a war we have nothing to do with because ... well America is doing it. Terrorist threats have come immediately after the announcement and then I was absolutely gob smacked to see our prime-minister (probably the current joke of the world) quote word for word the previous joke of the world (Bush) and say the threats are not because of our actions but because "they hate our freedoms".
Now G20 is nearly upon us and our local city is building giant walls around airports, closing down half the city, and welding bins at the train station shut (no joke) because they pose a threat as a potential place to stash a bomb.
And how do our people react?
A statistically significant jump in the prime minister's approval rating [newspoll.com.au]
People get the government they deserve. Hey Canada, you guys still taking Aussies immigrants? I gotta get out of here. Because ... you know, ... terrorists and stuff.
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Normally I'd advocate going to New Zealand, which is sort of australias version of canada.Younger, more progressive and with the benefit of hindsight from watching its hillbilly neighbor.
Buuuuuut no, the kiwis just voted their conservatives back in too, so we're screwed.
The antipodes are the meth laboratory of democracy.
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Hey Canada, you guys still taking Aussies immigrants? I gotta get out of here. Because ... you know, ... terrorists and stuff.
I'm afraid it's too late.
Harper seems politically aligned with Abbott, but is not stupid. And not-stupid evil is the worst kind - it's effective in reaching its goals.
Stupid evil, like Doug Ford, is so utterly incompetent that they accomplish nothing and at worst piss people off, waste time, waste some money.
PM Harper has devastated science. For example, publicly paid scientists - if still employed - need permission from the Prime Minister's Office to speak on their research! Even on the topic of 20,000 y
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I've read the Quran. I've also read the Bible. The Quran isn't much worse. Both have their vile spots.
(And how should that word be spelled. I've always spelled it Koran. "qu" should be pronounced about like "cw", since that's the french spelling of Old English words: "cwen" vs. "queen". I suspect that the better spelling would be something like "Q'ran", but perhaps it depends on which country you are transliterating from.)
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Re:There is no political solution. (Score:5, Insightful)
It would be nice if that were the case. Unfortunately it's hard to see how it can be. The technology industry has a poor track record of deploying truly strong end to end privacy protections, partly because the physics of how computers work mean that outsourcing things to big powerful third parties that can be easily subverted is very common. E.g. my mobile phone can search gigabytes of email from the last decade in a split second and rank it by importance, despite having nowhere near enough computing capacity to really do that itself, only because it's relying on the Gmail servers to help it out.
That same phone can receive calls only because the mobile network knows where it is. How do you build a mobile phone that is invulnerable to government monitoring of its location? It doesn't seem technically possible. The only solution is to ensure that anonymous SIM cards are easily obtained and used, but many countries have made those illegal as part of the war on drugs.
This trend towards outsourcing, specialisation and sharing of data to obtain useful features is ideal for governments who can then go ahead and silently obtain access to people's information without those people knowing about it. I do not see it reversing any time soon. The best we're going to achieve in the near term future is encryption of links between devices and datacenters, but this doesn't help when politicians are simply voting themselves the power to go reach in to those datacenters.
Ultimately the only long term solutions here can be political, and I fear we will need a far longer and larger history of abuses to become visible before the majority will really shift on this. The problem is a large age skew. Older people skew heavily authoritarian, if you believe the opinion polls, and are much more likely to support this kind of spying. Perhaps they associate it with the cold war. Perhaps the old adage "a libertarian is a republican who wasn't mugged yet" has some truth to it. Whatever the cause, the 1960's baby boom means that demographically, older people can outvote younger people as a block, and for this reason there aren't really any fiscally conservative, economically trusted AND individual rights-respecting parties in the main English speaking countries. People get to pick between borrow-and-spend socialists with an authoritarian bent, and fiscal conservatives with an authoritarian bent, so surprise surprise we end up with people in power who are authoritarians.
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No. The only possible (not probable) long term solution is technical...but the technical method involved is AI. And yes wit will be centralized, fur the reasons you gave.
What *could* happen is that an AI could take charge of handling communications. But it couldn't start there, it would probably need to start with handling business records (perhaps at AT&T) and branch out from there to handling users calls. Your information would not be secure from the AI, but the AI would, as it was designed to han
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I'd argue that it might be able possible to build peer-to-peer systems instead of centralized ones that use our desktops (because making phones part of the peer-to-peer network is a drain on battery power) and end-to-end encryption, but it would be very hard and there's very little funding or interest in it.
Freenet?
Re:There is no political solution. (Score:5, Interesting)
Its not an engineering problem. The engineering's been done. We know how to lock shit down very well if we try. The problem is we don't try.
Its really a social problem. Facebook is to your privacy what a post-it note is to your password. And people love them some Facebook (or Twitter or Snapchat or whatever the popular site is this year.)
Until a majority of users start either using privacy measures on a technical level or pushing for privacy protection on a political level, all of the engineering in the world does a big wad of fuck all because nobody's willing (or allowed) to actually use it.
Apple (and Google shortly after) recently decided to lock down their phones out of the box. This is the kind of political push we need -- they're willing to stand up to the government's requests for privacy invasion and at the same time, not significantly impacting day-to-day use of their devices by regular users who only barely know what they've heard on the news regarding the political side of the story and know nothing of the technical side.
Of course who knows how long it will be before some government somewhere decides that this isn't cool and forces Apple/Google to either turn off the default encryption or provide a back door (which is worse really.. hackers are smart and if there's a back door they'll find it eventually -- exposing everyone instead of just those who don't know/care enough to turn on the encryption manually.) China for example doesn't seem like the kind of country that would take "well we can't actually do that" as a valid answer more than once (if that.)
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Yep, and you can expect just as much protection against anyone who cares to look.
We're doing what?! (Score:2)
Holy screwballs, we're ALREADY monitoring everything everywhere without telling anyone about secret courts with secret decisions?!
Quick, let's legislate after the fact to make it all legal!
I'm afraid that I... (Score:3)
I voted for the current government. Why? Because of the fiasco with the previous government changing leaders every 10 minutes and some proposed legislation (by the current opposition) I didn't -- and don't -- agree with.
The problem from my point of view is that I voted to try and make the best of a bad situation. Unfortunately, both major parties seem to have the same policy ideas! So, shit, they may as well be the same party. How can we elect leaders when they all seem to have the same ideas (well, once elected)? So, as mentioned I am part of the problem (because I gave them my vote) but what is the solution?
Anyone would think that we're a country led by the USA rather than a Commonwealth country of Britain. It's stupid. And this all started with the Free Trade Agreement. Personally I'm sick of the USA sticking their nose up other people's arses, but I'm out of ideas on what to do about it.
Tails - The amnesic, incognito, live system (Score:3)
Just putting this out there for fellow Aussies. Fire this up in a VM and you're good to go.
https://tails.boum.org/ [boum.org]
Yes, I know it's not perfect and possibly contains bugs, but against the proposed Aus Govt surveillance, it's a very quick and easy workaround.
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And, even without Tempora, the old story of "a boat anchor severed the fibre cable" is usually sufficient explanation for downtime when a tap is made...
Pit them against each other. (Score:2)
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I would say the world is going more lefty, with governments consolidating their power bases and censoring/silencing criticism. It's the left that wants to grow the size of government and have it spy on/manipulate as much of peoples' lives as it can. It does this under the guise of benevolence, of 'caring' about the plight of some group, real or imagined, varying by context. The right wants smaller government and more liberty for the individual. When judging politicians, if they support growing governmen
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That's a very US-centric view of the terms "left" and "right." Broadly speaking, the left tends to be more liberal (power to the people) while the right tends to be more conservative (power to those already in power.)
Of course how those views end up being delineated changes greatly from country to country and across time. In the current US, the government is the only significant entity that even claims to be "for the people" so its unsurprising that the left down there is in favor of larger government. T
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I live in the US. Expect me to have a US centric view. I'd expect Australians to have an Australian perspective on politics even when judging the US as well as other countries. Same for Canadians in Canada. That's normal and natural.
I disagree with your definitions, even from a global perspective. Historically, leftists (of any flavor) want to centralize power in the state under the guise of doing 'The Peoples'' bidding, and rightists prefer smaller governments and traditional values. Even the 'revolu
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Yes, well the devil's in the details. My definition of 'fair' is not the same as the left's. Mine is keep what you earn (or at least 90% of it or so), and allow the meritocracy to operate more naturally. Theirs boils down to insistence on equal outcome, everywhere, even at the cost of liberty and bonafide justice. They go so far as to manufacture evidence and coerce institutions to get involved with it (a new one that comes to mind is itsonus.org and college campuses). We are not borg drones, we are a
Re:Don't complain... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, well the devil's in the details. My definition of 'fair' is not the same as the left's. Mine is keep what you earn (or at least 90% of it or so), and allow the meritocracy to operate more naturally.
Right. So you favour increasingly concentrated wealth, the power it wields, and the inevitable corruption it breeds.
Theirs boils down to insistence on equal outcome, everywhere, even at the cost of liberty and bonafide justice.
Completely false.
The "insistence" is on equal opportunities.
The comical fantasy promulgated by the Right, however, is that everyone born into a western democracy inherently has equal opportunities. That the black child born to a drug addicted single mother has the same opportunities in life as the white child born to two high-earning professionals, because both were born in America. Undoubtedly, they will be able to trot out a couple of cherry-picked examples of such disadvantaged children who have, against all odds, escaped their demographic destiny. They might even produce some similar cherry-picked examples of rich white kids whose parents abandoned them after one too many low-level drug charges or car crashes and have sunk into desperate poverty.
But it's just ideological bullshit. Statistics, data and history show the truth. Wealth breeds increasingly more wealth and poverty more poverty, in feedback loops. The best society springs from both of those ends of the scale being curtailed to build a strong middle class. The period of human history with the greatest increase in wealth, productivity and living standards were the few decades post-WW2 - with its high taxes, strong regulations and comprehensive welfare systems - before Thatcher, Reagan and their acolytes' neoliberal cancer started destroying western democracies from within in the name of greed, selfishness, and free-market fundamentalism.
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They do not have the same equal opportunity TO SUCCEED, nobody does.
They have the same equal opportunity TO TRY to succeed and not be discriminated against by the government, be treated equally under law. Your society destroyed that concept.
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"Traditional" - only as in pre-Magna Carta authoritarian Royalty if you don't keep an eye on them with a justice system that they cannot easily dismantle. It's not really traditional values, it's about ripping up the things that protect values of others that they do not like. People who call themselves "moderate" are far more conservative than the reactionaries that hide behind the title "Conservative". The most extreme utter bastards that wa
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Historically, leftists (of any flavor) want to centralize power in the state under the guise of doing 'The Peoples'' bidding, and rightists prefer smaller governments and traditional values.
You sound like the people who say "historically, marriage was one man and one woman".
Ie: You're cherry-picking a very specific point in time to call "historically".
In reality, "historically" - that is to say, where the terms originated - the Right is the side of concentrated, inherited power - monarchies and serfs - and
Re:Don't complain... (Score:5, Informative)
I would say the world is going more lefty, with governments consolidating their power bases and censoring/silencing criticism. It's the left that wants to grow the size of government and have it spy on/manipulate as much of peoples' lives as it can. It does this under the guise of benevolence, of 'caring' about the plight of some group, real or imagined, varying by context. The right wants smaller government and more liberty for the individual. [...]
May I ask which country you are from? When I look at the political spectrum here in Germany, then it is the 'right' wing who simultaneously wants to a) eliminate social services, b) massively grow 'the government' wherever law enforcement and the military are involved and c) put everyone and everything under complete surveillance. It is the left end of the spectrum who wants a leaner government in most departments and strong protections and safeguards for privacy.
Right and left does not (exclusively and universally) mean what you think it does.
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No, it is not.
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There's a "Left" in the US?
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I am from the US (I am sure you guessed by now). Here in the states, it is the left (democrat) that wants to grow the size of the state, increase taxes, and reward voters with handouts and 'social justice' witch hunts for protected castes. The 'right' that is typically talked about are the republicans (usually called neo-conservative), who want less regulations (but not necessarily a smaller government) and tax breaks for business owners (but not so much of either for the working class). The libertarian
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There is a small-government strain of the American right, and especially a lot of small-government rhetoric, but in terms of actual policies, the Republican Party generally expands the size of government (and faster than the Democratic Party does, though they also do). The three post-WW2 presidents who expanded government the most are: Nixon (R), LBJ (D), and Reagan (R).
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Yet it was the right that actually grew the size of the state instead of just wanting to do so.
I suppose education has been cut a massive amount since the early 1980s which explains to extent why advertising trumps reason.
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oh and btw, I don't think your post was objectionable, that's why I replied to it.
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Depends on what part of the government. People on the (American) left tend to be in favor of social spending but against military/police/prison spending; people on the right tend to be in favor of military/police/prison spending but against social spending. With various quirks and exceptions on either side, e.g. rural conservatives are in favor of farm subsidies (a kind of social spending) while some "national security democrats" are in favor of the War On Terror and military/police spending.
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I would say the world is going more lefty, with governments consolidating their power bases and censoring/silencing criticism. It's the left that wants to grow the size of government and have it spy on/manipulate as much of peoples' lives as it can.
The left-right axis is orthogonal to the authoritarian-libertarian axis. There are as many right-wing authoritarians as left wing authoritarians, as many left wing libertarians as right wing libertarians.
Re:Don't complain... (Score:4, Insightful)
The world is going neither "right" nor "left", it's going more authoritarian on an orthogonal axis.
No, the authoritarian left (e.g. US Democratic Party) wants to manipulate people through government. The authoritarian right (e.g. US Republican Party) wants to manipulate people through privatized industry. Neither is interested in leaving people alone.
There are those, on both the left and right, who actually do want smaller government and more liberty for the individual, but they are not in power in either major US political party.
Indeed; the only hope is to vote independent, libertarian or green.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe we should encourage kids to read stuff written before 1950 when "left" and "socialist" were turned into meaningless curse words instead of a description of something :(
The above bit appears to be "the world is moving toward badness" instead of any sort of m
Re:Don't complain... (Score:4, Insightful)
The corporatist oligarchy that funds and promotes both parties is hardly invisible, except to the willfully blind.
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Typical response from someone who thinks anyone to the right of a typical swedish politician must be a war mongering nationalist. This seems to come from a lot of europeans who've unfortunately fallen for their own propaganda artists like we have, here, in the states. I laugh when I hear stuff like this because it sounds just as dogmatic and demented as the tripe I get from leftists in my own country. To me, they differ only in style and local cultural issues. Their ideology is essentially the same. Oh
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See, this is why the whole "right wing"/"left wing" rhetoric is a dangerous false dichotomy. Authoritarianism can come equally easily from either side of the aisle; when it comes from the so-called "right" we label it fascism or NAZI-ism; when it comes from the so-called "left" we name it "socialism" or "communism."
However, the "left" and "right" don't have to be authoritarian! Anti-authoritarians on the "right" are called "liber
Re:Great (Score:5, Informative)
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Silly little man, they don't have countrymen. They have SUBJECTS. They're only doing what's best for us, we're just too stupid and small minded to understand it.
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Don't have them in Aus (Score:2)
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Eh, such things are done in the USA, and then the NSA and Obama lie about it. Then, they pass a law saying they can't do it except when they decide there is need.