

Bill Would Legitimize White House Secrecy and Clear the Way for Anti-User Deals - DiabloD3
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/fasttrack-bill-legitimize-white-house-secrecy-and-clear-way-anti-user

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joelrunyon
Is anyone else almost impressed with how good Congress seems to be at talking
any sort of actual citizen-friendly bills to death while miraculously
coordinating itself to pass terrible laws that protect them with bipartisan
support?

If it wasn't so sad, I'd be impressed.

~~~
shoo
I've just finished reading Chomsky's "How the World Works". I'll quote a
relevant section about the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The
behaviour, in my opinion, seems roughly consistent with what we are seeing
now:

    
    
        In 1974, the Trade Act was passed by Congress. One of its
        provisions was that the Labor Advisory Committee -- which
        is based in the unions -- had to have input and analysis
        on any trade-related issue. Obviously that committee had
        to report on NAFTA, which was an executive agreement
        signed by the president.
    
        The Labor Advisory Committee was notified in mid-August 1992
        that their report was due on September 8, 1992. However, they
        weren't given a text of the agreement until about 24 hours
        before the report was due. That meant they couldn't even
        convene, and they obviously couldn't write a serious report
        in time.
    
        Now these are conservative labor leaders, not the kind of
        guys who criticize the government much. But they wrote a
        very acid report. They said that, to the extent that we can
        look at this in the few hours given to us, it looks like it's
        going to be a disaster for working people, for the
        environment, for Mexicans -- and a great boon for investors.
    
        The committee pointed out that although treaty advocates
        said it won't hurt many American workers, maybe just
        unskilled workers, their definition of "unskilled worker"
        would include 70% of the workforce. The committee also
        pointed out that property rights were being protected all
        over the place, but workers' rights were scarcely mentioned.
        The committee then bitterly condemned the utter contempt for
        democracy that was demonstrated by not giving the committee
        the complete text ahead of time.
    
    

On a related note, if anyone is interested in reading more about the Investor-
State Dispute Settlement provisions of these "Free Trade" agreements, there's
an interesting perspective from Chief Justice RS French, from the High Court
of Australia:

[http://www.hcourt.gov.au/assets/publications/speeches/curren...](http://www.hcourt.gov.au/assets/publications/speeches/current-
justices/frenchcj/frenchcj09jul14.pdf)

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dmitrygr
Sadly, this just formalizes what has been the norm for a while now.

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mcovey
I am sick of Bill. We need to vote him out of office.

------
Biteracy
I feel the legal language we are using for ultimately basic sharing and
stealing, is being explained poorly psychotechnologically.

Forms of speech and trade are parallels that lay users can speak to the fact
too, if we stop covering our own secret terms of service by example, we can
lead transparent community audits.

Common users know their bits of speech are being compromised but are suffering
to realize empathy from social issues explained as technical difficulties by
privileged discourse.

If we begin to talk deeply about the age-old problem of ownership and
accountability, with the respect for granularity so present in our best open
source research and development intelligence initiatives' commitments, we can
cognitively reframe to help cope and deal with pro-user people power.

Right now we pretend objectification is rooted abstractly, when we find hidden
language of trauma is visible but pain metadata too great to define, we forget
that tracking and auditing empowerment is realistic, only if we social
structure realistening and sharing to every bit of systemic secrefice.

~~~
cbd1984
I'm almost convinced this is a Markov-chain bot or similar stochastic process.

~~~
zaroth
Indeed: [http://biteracy.com/](http://biteracy.com/)

~~~
Biteracy
([https://www.facebook.com/search/str/%23biteracy/keywords_top](https://www.facebook.com/search/str/%23biteracy/keywords_top)
(I am not biteracy.com)

You can ask me to talk with camera, keyboard, or voice, I am easily background
checked, I am at
[https://matrix.org/beta/#/room/#Biteracy:matrix.org](https://matrix.org/beta/#/room/#Biteracy:matrix.org)
/
[http://web.archive.org/*/https://news.ycombinator.com/user?i...](http://web.archive.org/*/https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pain))

~~~
cbd1984
(Bots can ape humans by playing out scripts.)

~~~
Biteracy
((Standard grammar reps can ape sense.)) )

Why reattach to attacking who is writing it before asking anything about what
I actually worded? That is the literacy problem.

Judgemental life script doctors? How do we know self-determinate order if we
are telling people why their words form before asking logically for sense?

"The robots are already here, and they're called [social structures and
empathic dictation]. Be very very scared. Don't ask when it will happen. It's
already happened." —Tim Berners-Lee

~~~
zaroth
Are you writing in a different language and then translating to English? The
point is the text makes no sense coming from a human.

~~~
Biteracy
Bitcism. Linguism/Linguicism is the real language abuse.

(Other audit history change logging of this comment at
[http://web.archive.org/save/https://news.ycombinator.com/ite...](http://web.archive.org/save/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9392449)
/
[http://www.webcitation.org/query?id=1429308900036808&date=%4...](http://www.webcitation.org/query?id=1429308900036808&date=%400&fromform=1)
/ [https://archive.today/q514R](https://archive.today/q514R))

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zaroth
Just when you thought you could count on the Republicans to stonewall...

~~~
zaroth
The one benefit of having executive and legislative branches at odds is at
least nothing gets done, and nothing these days seems a heck of a lot better
than whatever 'something' they do come up with.

I totally understand the downvotes. But wow is it frustrating that _this_ is
the one piece of $&%! our representatives actually _agree_ on?

~~~
deciplex
> But wow is it frustrating that this is the one piece of $&%! our
> representatives actually agree on?

Do you think it's a coincidence?

But, it seems like it's Republicans siding with Obama _against_ Congressional
Democrats. I'm not so naive as to not think of, or discount, electioneering as
the reason for that, however.

