That is getting real freaking dystopian. Sure, we would have been able to do this before, and the Soviet Union did a ton of photo editing. But doing this particular edit must have been so easy. No cost at all, no mental barrier. You would almost think 'why bother'. And before anyone says 'yeah, but the truth came out'. Well, we saw it, but how many of the particular audience of whatever that outlet was will never see the original photo and will never question the narrative they were sold?
That is what a lot of us think the real threat of "AI" is: not that it will autonomously produce bad outcomes for humanity, but because it's a tool that's indifferent to truth or falsehood it allows any kind of truth or reality based politics to be totally flooded out of the public sphere. Everyone ends up fighting in the hall of mirrors.
Yeah. The postmodernists (as I understand them) have been talking about "post truth" and "claims of truth are just assertions of power". And I've always thought that their position was insane.
Now they look more like prophets. That world is increasingly the world we live in. The question becomes, how can we stay sane in that world? How can we find enough actual truth (truth that is actually true, true in the old sense of corresponding to the reality of what is) in order to function? To function as individuals, and to function as a society? How do we deal with this?
I think the point of the postmodernists was that was always the world we live in, it's just that the Internet has made it much more visible and we can see the fraying and the contradictions. It's just that, for a fairly narrow window of time and societies, there was enough of an honor culture about being caught lying that the discourse-reality matched fairly well the actual reality. But even in the 20th century that required hiding a lot of perspectives, or only slowly and begrudgingly acknowledging them.
There's a distinction of degree but not of kind between "presenting the version of events most favourable to yourself" vs "presenting an entirely fictional version". I don't know how we get that back.
> it's just that the Internet has made it much more visible and we can see the fraying and the contradictions
I think the internet has other effects like amplifying niche ideas.
If you were a conspiracy nut before the internet, your local friends will set you straight and either the conspiracy theories fade from your mind or they remain stagnant.
With the internet on the other hand, you can find other likeminded people, people who will accept your conspiracy theories and share their own which you will eagerly consume, and down the rabbit hole all of you will go.
It’s like a bunch of anorexic teen girls encouraging each other and sharing tips on how to starve and throw up. Very quickly you will have a bunch of dead kids.
I think you capture it, but to make it clear, post-modernism existed before the Internet.
I’ve never considered the post-truth perspective as having anything to do with intentional misrepresentation, but rather relativism (which is dangerous in other ways, imho). Outright lying has been used by authoritarians, but it really seems like we need a term to describe societies controlled by blatant, obvious lies (which is where I would consider the US at the moment). People like to use fascism, Marxism, etc., but those used similar techniques, for very different ends.
I have a suggestion for the word to describe the current situation in the US:
Agitprop.
It's not just blatant, obvious lies. It's lies *designed to agitate people". I mean, the goal is "media engagement" (and secondarily, "political engagement"), but that comes downstream from getting everybody stirred up.
There are 330 million people in the US, and 1.4 billion in India. You don't need lies for agitprop - such numbers will furnish you with enough real incidents to drive whatever narrative you wish, if you're in a position to pick what gets publicity. Cherrypicking. I'm sure you can think of a few recent examples.
That’s some kind of meta-lying, too. By cherrypicking, you are implicitly saying, “these are the issues of our times, why would I else present this important issue”
I wrote up a much longer reply to this, but I can't get myself to submit it. tl;dr is there are some basic things you cannot say in public today without getting cancelled. And I'm not talking about kiddy porn or extreme Trumpisms.
Edit: Literally took 5 minutes for the first downvote, despite not mentioning a single "issue". What's that old phrase? QED?
I suspect your comment is downvoted because it's ominous and substance-free. Reasonably so, I think. Your comment is in fact a negative drag on the quality of conversation here.
Live a little. Go ahead and share your perspectives. The maximum downvote damage is -5 points. You'll survive. I'll upvote you even if I disagree. Unless they're just the standard talking points from one side or another on some contentious topic, which is too boring to upvote.
OK, here's an example: A couple of months ago they were tossing around the idea of "retaking Crimea". I believe that any effort to do that should be based on a best effort assessment of the will of the people living there, because those are the people who will be getting artillery shells in their livingroom in exchange for it. Based on my own experience with expats from there and Donbas, who still have family in the area, those people are happy being Russian again. Show me on CNN or NPR where their voices and perspectives are being shared.
Again, this is just an example, not my personal agenda. What I want to point out is that we've normalized that there are a handful of forbidden topics that you will get punched for if you approach them with anything but a pre-formed opinion that matches the status quo.
Edit: And just as a turn of the screw, I'm going to say that the COVID vaccines are pretty shit compared to ones like smallpox, polio, and rabies vaccines, which actually (and sometimes retroactively) prevent you from getting the disease you were vaccinated against. Oh heck, I'm not allowed to say that thing that we all know. I mean if you take a high level view of it, they take the edge off the problem, but they still kind of suck.
OK, I think that's a valid consideration. I don't think you'll get much pushback for prioritizing the will of the people, and their disinterest in living in a war zone. I have not read anything on NPR or CNN calling for the expansion of war in the Baltics. But they run opinion pieces too, just like most other media outlets.
I was expecting something controversial. :)
The counterargument of course is that the region was annexed by aggression, which is dangerous to legitimize. Letting the bullies win is a recipe for creating more and bigger bullies.
But sometimes there are no good answers. I don't know any trustworthy sources of information from that area (only expats and news reporting which are all various degrees of clueless and biased).
Avoiding inflicting war on a reluctant people sounds humane. Restoring national sovereignty to a conquered people sounds noble. Impeding the spread of territorial aggression and natural resource theft sounds righteous.
Personal opinion, pragmatic I think: You can't retake Crimea without obliterating Russia. You can't obliterate Russia without horrifying consequences. Don't retake Crimea, but draw a very clear and public line, and allow no concessions regarding the next Crimea (Ukraine). This turns out to be very close to the foreign policy of most of the world.
Ah, like the red lines drawn up for Assad in Syria.
And Crimea is strategic. Look at a map. Without it, the Ukraine and its ports are always under threat from the whims of Russia.
It’s probably true that you can’t crush Russia without serious consequences. Unfortunately, you can’t let it win territory without very serious consequences either.
This follows its own tragic logic now and you (we) can’t wish for a nice solution that has no consequences down the line. Letting Russia off the hook is a terrible precedent.
We were asleep when Russia took Crimea, and unprepared to react with anything more than stern words. We were not ready for Putin. He obviously saw the opportunity, took the risk, and he won.
It would be tragic to return to a world where aggressive expansionism is the norm.
But fighting back through Crimea would be tragic also. And it's not clear we would have the support of the locals. That's courting disaster even before you contemplate that the opposing leader is mercurial and nuclear.
My opinion is that we have to take the L on Crimea, but make it clear that the world is not sleeping any more, and that Ukraine is not next on the menu.
Syria is an important example. US bluster doesn't carry much weight in the world these days.
But the situation in Ukraine is very different. It astonishes me that there's political disagreement on Russia's aggression toward neighbors, but if we fail Ukraine it will be squarely the fault of one group of people, and it will be incredibly damaging to US interests in the world.
I don’t think a long fight through Crimea has to be necessary at all. The Russian troops cab withdraw over the bridge to Russia when it’s apparent they will otherwise be trapped.
Leaving Crimea to Russia is not just appeasement, it’s strategically unsound.
The Ukrainians can also dam the river to Crimea again and continually attack Russian supply lines to Crimea. Russia will be in a tight spot if the water supply to Crimea stops and the bridge explodes.
> One voter, Grigory Illarionovich, told CNN, “I’m for restoring Crimea to Russia. Returning what Khrushchev took away.”
> Another voter in Perevalnoye, Viktor Savchenko, said he would never vote for the government in Kiev. “I want us to join Russia, and live like Russians, with all their rights,” he said.
> Victoria Khudyakova said she also had voted to join Russia, which she sees as being “spiritually close” to Crimea. “For me, Russia is an opportunity for our Crimea to develop, to bloom. And I believe that it will be so,” she said.
[...]
> CNN analyst and Russian journalist Vladimir Pozner similarly stressed that Sunday’s vote was in no way staged. “When you look at the celebrations, you can’t doubt that these people really are very happy,” he said.
> DEMID KUPAYEV: (Through interpreter) I witnessed how babushkas came up and said, thank God the time has come for Crimea to return to its historic homeland.
> KIM: Kupayev says international sanctions have made finding work in commercial shipping harder. But like many Crimeans, he calls economic hardship the acceptable price of joining Russia.
Yep, 2014 and 2018. Meanwhile, for the second one, if you scroll down to the "More Stories from NPR" section:
- Two dead, 23 wounded in a Russian strike on a Ukrainian medical clinic
- Ukraine secured military aid, including advanced fighter jets, at the G-7 summit
- Zelenskyy arrives at G-7 summit in Japan as leaders ramp up pressure on Russia
- Russia attacked the hometown of Ukraine's Eurovision band just before its performance
Fair and balanced reporting, right there. The first and last bullet points aren't at all the bald-faced examples of atrocity propaganda that we've just accepted as part of our daily feed.
Next, they're going to be raping nuns on tables[1] and throwing babies out of their incubators[2].
I follow the Ukraine & Crimea goings on. I've now got two twitter accounts, one for pro Ukraine, one for pro Russia. Post something anti one on the wrong account and you soon get blocked etc. It's very polarised as you might expect in a war.
It's hard to find balanced discussion on something like the status of Crimea. Which is complicated - as you say the locals are largely Russian. Then again Russia signed an agreement recognising it as Ukrainian, then invaded and used it as a base to launch war on the rest of Ukraine which they show every intention of repeating if they can.
There's nothing controversial about saying that it'd be better if the COVID vaccines were better!
The COVID vaccines we have are measurably better than not having a COVID vaccine, and people had worse health outcomes if they believed (acted) otherwise.
Some narratives allow nuance and some do not. Public health communication is a very problematic place for nuance, and the natural nuance of science was weaponized to serve an agenda (which was sometimes blatantly dishonest) -- so avoiding nuance became a pragmatic approach to achieving better outcomes under existing circumstances.
If you felt cancelled for holding out for the complicated nuanced reality, I can sympathize with that feeling. I can also sympathize with those who believed that focusing on the nuance would, broadly, harm people!
Anything other than “trust the science” was eviscerated during the pandemic, as if “trust” had anything to do with science.
I’m hoping at this point we can agree that the efficacy and function of the available vaccines was overstated and the pressure campaign to take it may have been some of the most intense propaganda inflicted on a western nation in recent memory.
Trust is a social phenomenon. The pandemic was a huge social upheaval.
The best information available was being provided by epidemiologists and doctors and statisticians and researchers. It was messy and contradictory and confusing sometimes, especially in the beginning. Like science.
Other information was being provided by politicians and radio hosts and religious figures and somebody's uncle. It was speculative and invented and delusional and manipulated and dishonest sometimes, according to the whims of famous personalities and media outlets. Like gossip.
Given those options, "trust the science" is a pretty reasonable message.
Not "trust the science to have all the answers immediately and with complete accuracy and no amendments", because that is not science.
More like "trust the science over the gossip".
But I take your point. People don't understand science, so it's very easy for them to feel betrayed when science does its usual messy science things.
And of course there were stochastic parrots on either side.
That said, the "trust the science" parrots had better health outcomes than the "impeach fauci" parrots. This seems unlikely to be a coincidence -- and as a blunt social influence tool, it's reasonable to conclude that "trust the science" was the better choice of intense propaganda, if not as persuasive as we all would have liked.
I haven't downvoted you but I was tempted. Either submit it, submit anonymously, or don't. As it is your comment asks for attention while providing only frustration in return; it's just noise.
A lot of what enables this is centralized infrastructure. If you have your messages and browsing history and files on your own device, and you make end-to-end encrypted connections to the people you talk to, it's a lot harder to do this kind of thing. Because you have your own personal copy of the thing from when it first happened and if you remember it you can go back and verify it yourself. Then you can point that out, and anyone else can go into their own copy from however long ago and see that the fake doesn't match the original.
Social media companies notoriously blocked users from sending a story to each other in DMs a couple of years ago. It's not a stretch to go from there to deleting past messages in order to memory hole something. And the companies may not even be doing it by choice if they're being pressured by a government.
They can't do that if your data is yours and they can't read it, instead of the only copy being on their servers.
I don't think that Tucker Carlsen style BS machines have anything to do with governments censoring your private messages. You are talking about an entirely different threat model here.
"Censorship apparatus exists" is a threat regardless of what it's being used for because the apparatus doesn't care what it's being used for, and that can change overnight.
You can make a distinction between empirical truths and things (often claims) that are right and wrong. The former has no 'history'; while the latter is contextual and tied up in the practice and expression of reasons, which is to say, it is essentially historical and cultural.
That's really all that postmodern thought says really. Naturally, for a government to be right or wrong, requires that citizens be critical of it, almost actively antagonistic in their demands for reasons, evidence (be it empirical or otherwise) and clarification. Postmodern thought is a critical tool. So that's not that different than what we have right now (most of HN for instance is hyper-critical of nearly all government truth claims), only the demands on citizens are likely outpacing their resources and abilities.
Even empirical truth has a remarkable degree of social construction. Consider the notion of "force", as empirical as it gets. But then you look at relativity or even just centrifugal force. Scientific revolutions consist of reinterpreting objective facts.
It's not just "nothing is real", which is just intellectual laziness. It's noting that we always interpret the world; we can't avoid it. Ordinary interactions usually arrive at similar interpretations, but people have a remarkable way of being influenced in that judgment. And sometimes that can lead to some really bad outcomes. It's important to recognize that the potential is always there even in things that seem obvious.
I don't have any prescriptions for society as a whole but I can tell you what has worked for me.
Basically I rely on my own observations and experiences: don't trust and verify, to adapt the old saying.
Second I limit myself to trusted sources of information and if I can't find one then I just don't get information on that topic: no information is better than false information.
In practice what this means is no algorithmic news feeds, I'm still looking for a good news source for my local city (haven't found one yet, I moved recently), I think a lot about incentive structures and how that might bias an information source, I (try) to apply skepticism to what I read, I block as much noise as possible (for example I don't pay attention to surface level political news because its all noise and virtually no signal), I focus on long term trends rather than "points" in the timeline.
This is far from perfect but its what has evolved as my approach over time.
I've only thought about it superficially. I think web of trust is a better model for how humans work, but whenever someone tries to translate it to the digital world it fails.
(Lets call this approach digital villages for the sake of argument).
We have lots of examples of digital villages working - forums, subreddits, chatrooms, MUDs, etc etc. Maybe it's a case of worse is better? Or maybe everyone who implements web of trust immediately tries to jam crypto in there and turns off all the normal people? What do you think?
I tend to think the small scale worked better for more meaningful connections (high signal to noise, content to interest, less counting likes and subs, less ads) My best experiences online aren’t Big Social : it’s small forums, IRC chatrooms with high engagement, high trust scenarios like people being themselves immediately without anonymity.
I tend to think lots of social spaces have been engineered by engineers, not people. The tech has been more important than the value it can bring in a human context. (Exaggerating for emphasis here, it’s not black and white but functionally true)
Big fan of the Six Idea’s (M.J. Adler) for meaningful life that is fairly universal: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty - the ideas we judge by; and Liberty, Equality and Justice - the ideas we act on.
I feel a food online social space should strive for high marks in these areas.
There is nothing in principle which prevents us from solving this problem. We cannot predict which new knowledge will solve it. But we can say that if we don’t solve it, it will be our fault for not producing the required knowledge fast enough.
Alternatively, it could be our fault for creating a world in which that fast growth in knowledge is required. We didn't have to pursue technologies that make the centralization of power and control easier and easier.
There will always be people looking at any advancement and figuring out how to leverage it to expand their personal capability to project power. Nothing is immune to it. Even primitives of decentralization can be leveraged in a way that defacto centralization is the inevitable outcome.
You don't research things that can't be centralized. You just don't centralize. The cost there though. Is then you have to accept certain things just ain't gonna happen.
Watching Mastodon and the Fediverse expand is an experiment we can watch in real time.
Newcomers to the technology clamoring for it to be more centralized is a daily occurrence. It seems almost entropic, the push towards centralization. It seems to require constant effort to keep it decentralized.
I've always wondered if the push towards centralization is a reaction to fear of the lack of control.
True decentralization and censorship resistance requires taking the bad with the good. I'm the case of Mastodon, if I can't be censored for sharing my views on technology, politics, or sports then the person wishing to sharing illegal photographs of threats that may be illegal in some jurisdictions can't be censored either.
It raises the very interesting question of whether freedom of speech is an all our nothing concept. Very few people would support the idea of being able to say literally whatever you want, but can you really have freedom of speech at all if someone else gets to draw the bounds with which your speech much stay?
In my experience, the only person who has a right to tell me what is acceptable to say in public is myself, which is why it's absolutely essential for me to do so with integrity and discretion.
As we start to build trust economies (which really may only be the way forward), we have to start valuing integrity and discretion, or... as you say, all or nothing.
I think this has something to do with Jefferson's "the cornerstone of democracy rests on the foundation of an educated electorate", and maybe, just maybe why they insisted on educating it. I wish they'd have made it a constitutional right, along with the right to free speech.
(edit: Bing chat says, "It is true that some of the founding fathers, such as Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin, were strong advocates of public education and believed that it was essential for a democratic society. However, they did not explicitly include it in the Constitution, perhaps because they faced opposition from other delegates who favored state sovereignty or feared federal interference. Or maybe they thought that it was implied by the preamble, which states that one of the purposes of the Constitution is to “promote the general welfare” of the people. In any case, the lack of a clear constitutional right to an education has left room for debate and controversy over the years, and has resulted in significant disparities and inequalities in the quality and accessibility of education across the nation."
Oof, the idea that the edit includes a quote from an AI attempting to understand and explain the founding fathers' opinions on public education really cuts to the core of my worries about AI research.
Eventually, some thing that we cannot control (e.g. Giant meteor, pandemic, etc) will come to destroy us.
If it does, it will be our fault for not progressing fast enough in terms of knowledge.
There is no world in which we could, or would want to limit our growth in terms of scientific knowledge. Not to mention the fact that to do so would mean ceding full totalitarian control.
Are you really arguing that we should have no boundries on progress for fear of a rogue asteroid destroying us all? Shouldn't we consider the risks of what we may accidentally break or purposely misuse along the way? Scientific knowledge comes with risks, both in how the tools can be used as well as errogant or misguided belief that we know enough to understand all meaningful implications of wielding said knowledge.
Even the concept of progress as a goal seems misguided and risky. We shouldn't assume something is better simply because it isn't what we had before. "Not worse than what we had before" is a great goal but one that requires effort and focus, it isn't a given law of the universe that all change is good simply because it's change.
That's somewhat ironic since "postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourse characterized by skepticism toward the 'grand narratives' of modernism."[1]
So I mean, postmodernism is a pretty "diverse" field, and while there are some who would claim to be full relativists, they aren't usually taken very seriously.
What someone like Herbert Marcuse would claim is that there is something like a "definite negation," or Jacques Derrida would call a "trace;" that is, there, sitting behind every signifier (of de Saussure's structural linguistics) its negation of another signifier that defines its position in an ordered chain or a symbolic network. They would not argue that things are relative; rather, social life is regulated by these vast signifying networks that one becomes "subjectivated" in (begins to understand oneself as a subject), where one's "agency" also stands at the limits of this intelligibility: as they say, everything you "decide" is already pre-conscious; every notion of what is "possible," is limited by what is already "intelligible," i.e. what operates in the social-symbolic function as it, like an algorithm, constantly moves and exchanges its various symbolic orderings in what we call the "economy." To be a true agent means to do something which radically restructures this network and radically redefines all its terms: Foucault's "fearless speech," Badiou's "Event." The latter thinker actually explicitly rejects relativism (and is in some ways a platonist--actually many so-called "postmodern" thinkers, Whitehead among them, are considered platonists.)
The position you claim is from "post-modernism":
>"claims of truth are just assertions of power"
finds its origins in Nietzsche, who famously claimed that truth, morality, beauty, etc. were invented by the weak because they feared the powerful and they were jealous of the fact that they couldn't kill their enemies, eat fully, and have sex all the time (Master Morality, which was just doing whatever you wanted). So they rose up, took over, and invented these categories and systems of valuation in order to justify a new regime of power where nobody was able to do what they wanted, and everything was regulated by vast systems of control justified by these metaphysical notions (he refers to this as "Christian Morality.") He claims that Christian morality, after centuries of struggle, has finally won out in the Bourgeois revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries, but now "God" has been subordinated to "Science" while retaining all the metaphysical baggage of christianity "truth, beauty, morality," etc. This is from Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, the argument from which was expanded in Foucault's Discipline and Punishment (the most widely read book from what most people would call "postmodernism").
>truth that is actually true, true in the old sense of corresponding to the reality of what is
The so-called "correspondence theory of truth" is considered a fallacy of the layman in academic philosophy. Truth has always been, in logic, a category: a value, specifically a boolean value. One can make claims about the structure and order of logic and the relation of that to psychological, social-processes (as Frege, Husserl, and many other "anti-psychologists" of the 19th and 20th centuries did); but to claim that language, a signifying act, somehow directly corresponds to the physical objects that it categorizes, can't really be valid: as Shakespeare said "a rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet." There is no reason why the words we use have any correspondence to experience--even if there is surely some reason why words can evoke experiences, emotions, like when one hears the name of a past-lover. But that can be attributed to what the "postmodernists" claim: the name evokes an entire symbolic structure and brings it to the surface of consciousness.
> The so-called "correspondence theory of truth" is considered a fallacy of the layman in academic philosophy. Truth has always been, in logic, a category: a value, specifically a boolean value.
Perenially underappreciated in online discussions.
> The so-called "correspondence theory of truth" is considered a fallacy of the layman in academic philosophy.
So in your understanding of academic philosophy, how do you account for the critical difference between the two statements below?
“Earth is flat.”
“Earth is a spheroid.”
I don’t see what is fallacious about accepting the second statement as corresponding to facts and dismissing the former for not corresponding. If it’s merely a matter of semantics regarding the words “correspondence” and “truth”, an alternative verbalisation of the critical distinction between those two statements must nonetheless be available; and it should be prioritised in discourse.
Technical solution to a social problem. It's not that it's impossible to tell the difference between real and fake, it's that there's no consequences for posting fakes.
(A "solution" which requires end users to authenticate everything themselves is going to have the same level of adoption as pgp, i.e. near zero)
I explicitly acknowledge analog hole in my other comments in this thread and suggest advanced sensors (as used in existing biometric authentication) and LIDAR as potential solution. Nevertheless, I think this system can be very useful even without those countermeasures and even if it can still be bypassed with effort. Additionally, if the signatures are securely time-stamped it makes proving which photo is genuine straightforward.
I like a green checkmark next to a photo better than giving more power to whoever you think should be the one determining and enforcing those consequences.
The consequences I mean are those of the public: proving that the ruling party forged images isn't going to get people to change their votes. You can build the green checkmark, but you can't get people to care about it.
I see this as completely different issues. Whether AI exists or not this is and was a problem. I’m proposing technical solution because AI fakes are a technical problem. And yeah if people get used to green checkmark you can’t just pump fakes willy nilly, you actually have to put some effort, as before AI. I guess the problem I want to solve is having to live in a world where you have to assume absolutely everything is 100% fake all the time. Because this just puts everyone in their respective truth bubbles even more. Any objectivity we can return to the world is a good thing, IMO.
First you have to solve the collect action problem of getting everyone to care about the green checkmark, then you have to solve the new technical problem of just making photographs of high-quality altered images.
I fully acknowledge the second issue, and have offered some potential solutions in my other comments, but I think this can have tremendous impact even if you don’t solve the second issue in first draft.
I take an authentic image with a camera, crop out the part of it that it's not aligned with my goals, put a reference to the authentic image. How do you get the authentic image to compare it with my edit?
And how do you solve the problem of a powerful entity telling you that the cropped image is authentic, or there will be consequences? People know what's going on, they bend for fear of breaking. No technology is changing that.
You have to provide authentic image with your image for it to validate, just as you have to supply any intermediate certificates in TLS. If you want to crop to hide information you have to do this while taking the photo in the camera app.
Powerful entity can tell you to install their root certificate just like it happens in China. This is a different problem.
If browsers require authenticated images as suggested, then CSS will probably grow the ability to apply a masking layer to crop, filter, transform the image.
Advertisers are going to want to postprocess images and have the green check.
Well I don’t think all images would have to be signed, just photos for which you want to prove authenticity. Probably social media and dating apps seem like a good target. Maybe some advertising, sure. I bet McDonalds wouldn’t mind green checkmark since they go through all that effort to fake food in real life.
You could of course fake green checkmark in CSS but this is already an issue with faking other browser UI elements, including address bar–it’s a known problem.
One way to solve this is having a browser picker, that is a button you click in trusted area of browser UI that lets you inspect any image on the page. Similar thing is possible with smartphone UI, you go to app overview/carousel and long press on an image in app, this launches photo inspection portal.
I think you’re missing the point, this is not a technology to create politically neutral photos. The way you take a photo and even the way you edit it later will all be your choice. It’s also your choice what to take photos of or not in the first place. All this does is it proves the photo was created by
(1) a trusted application
(2) using a builtin device camera
(3) of a device running attested trusted operating system
(4) and any subsequent edits reference such photo’s original hash.
Hopefully stronger assertions could come in the future. This is just to combat digital forgeries and synthetically generated images. It also does nothing against real-world forgeries like actors wearing costumes or makeup.
Just to provide some context : The reason people believe this particular doctored (or AI enhanced) image "could be true" is because this "toolkit approach" has been employed by the Left Wing in India. The Right Wing in India regularly points it out on Twitter. So if both sides are slinging mud, its race to the bottom for the getting lowest common denominator on their side. I sometimes wish why can't we unbundle these left vs right issues and decide stuff case by case. Hence I support TruthGPT by Elon.
> I sometimes wish why can't we unbundle these left vs right issues and decide stuff case by case.
That's the opposite of what we should do. If you do case by case then people will always find reasons why it's no big deal if "their" side did it while it's really bad when the other side did it.
No, we need to universally condemn this. No matter who did it and when and how. This is lying and propaganda, and it's bad even if I agree with the ends. But the means are to be condemned by everybody.
Kind of the dual to "I disagree with what you are saying but I'll fight for your right to say it." It's now "I agree with what you are trying to achieve but I'll fight against the way in which you are trying to achieve it."
You can't unbundle a person or partially punish a person. The people in power won't agree to such a situation. These mistakes happen collectively within the institution. I think the only way out would be to start with a moral clean slate for everyone like the debt cancellation e.g. Biblical Jublee [0] [1]
Playing whack-a-mole with technologies that have fundamental risks baked into the system itself seems like a losing game. We're inventing new technologies simply because we can, ignoring and papering over the social impact, then chasing even more complex solutions to the new problems created.
Geez. Techies trying to come up with tech solutions to fundamentally non-tech problems. The photogtapher can just zoom in or get closer to the object to crop the image before it's even taken.
Oh you now want a 360 degree shot to prove this didn't happen? Well then they stand behind a tree or a car or some other object to hide parts of the scene behind. etc. etc. There is no technical solution to this problem.
How will this protect (the first "workaround" that popped into my head) against modifying/AI generating an image, printing it on high-quality printer and taking a photo of that image in good (or maybe bad?) lighting?
You can harden against it using stereo cameras (3D) and different type of cameras, e.g. IR, verify with for example LIDAR, since some new premium smartphones are getting it already, this will tell you if you’re looking at a projection. Also see what smartphones are already doing for face authentication tech. Now, that said, you can never defend against it 100%. The most obvious is you can always fallback to just hiring actors/makeup/etc. If someone is determined enough (major actor) they can probably still produce fake pictures and authenticate them, but it would be significantly harder, and basically impossible for majority of people.
Not at all. I'm not sure what I said that makes you think that.
What I say, though, is that we don't know (either individually or as a society) how to operate in this new environment. It's making it hard to stay sane as an individual, and to stay functioning as a society.
Maybe we don't know how do operate in this environment, because we don't really know how to collectively operate in any environment?
Humanity is, after all, crawling out of at least the last 3000 years of recorded history of rulers telling everyone else how to live, like it or not.
We've only really been doing this democracy thing semi-successfully for a handful of centuries.
In the overall scheme of things, we're still pretty new at not being ordered around by people stronger than us. It's a hard habit to break on both sides.
I have read your comment as we just have to accept this new environment and just ‘cope’ with it, whereas my feeling is we don’t have to accept it at all. I don’t want to cope with AI and question if what I see everyday is in fact real. Instead, anything produced by AI should have an asterisk next to it. But this is impossible to enforce, so verifying what’s real by default is the next best thing.
The risk, danger and shallowness of perpetrating lies supported by fake images does not stop at politics.
Think fake instagram accounts with images, coercing and shaming victims for personal revenge. Shady companies selling fake stories supported by fake pictures of "satisfied" users. Influencers and celebrities making themselves look younger, prettier, fuller.
you see anyone who wants to spin a web of lies, AI as a tool makes it easier, possible and in som cases unavoidable.
100%. And the thing I've personally found quite shocking is how the past 5-10 years or so have shown that even when the truth does come out, there are enough "mirrors" as you put it so that people can question anything and believe whatever they want to believe, facts be damned.
A couple weeks ago when the Patriot Front had a white supremacist rally and march in front of the Washington Monument (now of the "red bike guy" fame), many prominent right wing Twitter talking heads tweeted that it must be a left wing conspiracy to make conservatives look bad and that the marchers were federal agents, despite 0 evidence of this, and indeed despite plenty of evidence that they were just actual Patriot Front members. It was difficult for me to tell if they actually believed that fairy tale, or of they felt that it didn't really matter because they knew if they shouted "fake news" loud enough they could get enough like minded people to upvote it.
It was difficult for me to tell if they actually believed that fairy tale, or of they felt that it didn't really matter because they knew if they shouted "fake news" loud enough they could get enough like minded people to upvote it.
It's a tactic to call everything a false flag, even your own ops. It requires virtually zero time, effort, or education to get everyone on your side doing it. Liberals fall for this trick frequently because they are obsessed with being seen to have to correct answer, so they invest for more effort in debunking than the liars did in making their claim.
> Liberals fall for this trick frequently because they are obsessed with being seen to have to correct answer, so they invest for more effort in debunking than the liars did in making their claim.
Excuse me while my eyes roll into the back of my head.
Whether "liberal" or "conservative", some of us still care that facts matter. And honestly I would never have worried so much about calling out so much bullshit in the past until I saw so many of my fellow (voting) citizens actually believe this BS and take it to dangerous extremes. For example, when QAnon first came out, I just smiled a bit and laughed - "This doesn't even reach the level of bad fan fiction" I thought. Yet, lo and behold, significant swaths of the US population believe this, and I find that frightening.
Sorry for not expressing my point more clearly. It's not that nobody should ever engage in debunking, but that deliberately bullshit statements are often introduced on social media to steal the time of well-meaning debunkers.
I realized Qanon was going to be a problem from when it first appeared, but that's because I've spent about 20 years paying close attention to mis- and disinformation and political influence groups. What I'm pointing out here is that the time costs of lying vs debunking favor liars, especially when aggregated across communities.
haha. they don't get all this delishus Kool aid that is to die for!
I know my good good friend Conservative Fearless Leader will never let me go to jail or die of preventable disease or banish my rites when I want defending.
oops... too late. at least I didn't need to be right.
The Dallas shopping center shooting was the first time in my life I couldn’t tell the difference between online truth and lies. I’m very good as finding out the truth vs lies but this time I couldn’t. Usually disinformation is easy to spot but this time it came out so fast that I had no idea what was real vs fake. It’s a scary time to be living in when you have no idea what is real anymore.
Personally after I was involved with some "news" that was then reported completely wrong (not by malice, but pure incompetence) I've stopped believing anything I read or hear in the media. This was 25 years ago and the trend has only increased. Yes, there is quite a bit of fakery, but 99% of "bad news" is a result of the:
1. No expectation by the public credible sources are quoted when news are reported.
2. Reporters not knowing their arse from their elbow.
2. Their editor/writers"trying to spice it up a little".
3. The speakers making bloody mistake after mistake when reading from a teleprompter in the most important stuff.
4. Other media picking it up and adding their own spin.
It's like "Chinese whisper". I can't count the number of times my partner tells me when I come home "have you heard, there is this horribly stupid law that is coming into effect next month". Then I check, and it's not a law, but a proposal, it hasn't been even accepted to be discussed yet and the details are completely different too.
I understand, not many smart people these days go into "traditional news reporting". It's a pity, because good news reporting is a prerequisite of a well functioning democratic society
It will only get worse, as revenue from traditional news drops they'll be more and more dssperate to make money the only way they can, by increasing the emotional load of the stuff they report. Everything has to be extreme, outraging, horrible etc.
> I can't count the number of times my partner tells me when I come home "have you heard, there is this horribly stupid law that is coming into effect next month". Then I check, and it's not a law, but a proposal, it hasn't been even accepted to be discussed yet and the details are completely different too.
It's certainly not the only source of error, but I find that the answer to my first question ("What, where did you read about that?") is almost always "Facebook".
It's become a running joke in my household. It turns out though that some people read news as entertainment, and don't really care if it's particularly true. This is probably fine, but it breaks down when the evoked response is outrage instead of a laugh.
Arguably there are epistemological reasons why this has always been the case; we don’t know much of anything - we’re limited in time and space. Acceptance of this and trying to use your best judgement is the key here.
All tools are indifferent to truth. There's no such solution as "make tools that are inclined to truth", it would be even worse because everyone has their own definition of truth when they need it. What we as a humanity need is a tool to keep tabs on trust. You doctor the photo once - all your further photos are considered doctored from now on.
It's like that in general, with authority-based and cargo-cult based thinking.
Look at how the "Wuhan lab leak theory" was flagged and buried, how it took Jon Stewart to voice it and take a lot of heat before anyone paid any attention, and now it's mainstream and the Federal government is supposedly officially investigating it. https://nypost.com/2023/02/28/jon-stewart-recalls-outrage-af...
On HN, the orthodoxy was that you shall not talk about everyday causes of depression or ADD. But then in 2022 we had this meta analysis that found no evidence supporting the serotonin theory and SSRIs: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/07/220720080145.h...
So yes.. right now the thing is to hate on Web3 and to do strawmen like "how will it fix AI". It won't fix AI, it's just that Web3 may be roughly a zero-sum game for society, or at least not nearly as negative-sum as AI.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
As much as you're entirely right that HN's readership decides what succeeds or not, pretty much every example you've furnished is defined clearly as "off topic" submissions. The Wuhan lab leak theory, regardless of how we view it in hindsight, was paraded as a sensational event up and down party lines. It never had a chance on this site, like Donald Trump drama or "Ask HN: What did you think of Kardashians last night?". Maybe it is relevant - but framing it sensationally is like toxic waste to this site's readers.
> the orthodoxy was that you shall not talk about everyday causes of depression or ADD
> So now we have a lot of taboos to talk about overdiagnosis of ADHD and gender dysphoria, talking about the DSM V criteria
They're not taboo. They're just not appropriate conversation topics for a hacking/finance website. The few times that it has become a big discussion topic has been through the lens of engineering lifestyles and personal experience. Even that is arguably too sappy for a non-Reddit website.
> Now it's OK to talk about it
> So yes.. right now the thing is to hate on Web3
Very subtle foreshadowing - you almost make it sound like Web3 has a second chance or something.
Truth is, like I said at the beginning - HN chooses what they want to hear. Most websites that give their users any degree of control over their experience let this happen (see Twitter, where users block the verified users). If you demand engagement on a topic nobody cares about, it stands to reason that you'll feel repeatedly disappointed by this website.
I think it absolutely is relevant, given that the conversation itself was about changing narratives, as a meta point.
> you almost make it sound like Web3 has a second chance or something.
This thread itself, is one of the rare ones where bringing up web3 actually is relevant, yes. It is reasonable for him to make that argument, because the topic is literally about how to authenticate things when you have an opposing central authority.
> If you demand engagement on a topic nobody cares about
His point wasn't about engagement. Instead his point was about how unpopular opinions are being proved correct, and that people were way to quick to dismiss ideas.
His point was that people should be able to look ahead, into the future, instead of immediately dismissing things out of hand, just because the thing isn't directly effecting the world right now.
IE, if you were downvoting/disagreeing with opinions about how AI is going to make it hard to authenticate information online, then you were wrong and were way to quick to dismiss an opinion out of hand.
I mean, it's a stretch. I could use that stretching metaphor as an excuse to talk about taffy for 4 paragraphs, but it doesn't contribute anything meaningful to the conversation. Scrounging up discussion about Web3 on an Indian government exposé is off-topic, and readers will flag it. It's equally substantial as those "this is good for Bitcoin" posts that get flagged under every article about a government treasury.
> the topic is literally about how to authenticate things when you have an opposing central authority.
If so, his flagged post didn't reflect it. It was a vapid comment that made no attempt to reconcile either topic.
> his point was about how unpopular opinions are being proved correct
If you want to argue that the Blockchain could have prevented this from happening, then by all means - write that comment. But that's not what his flagged post was. It detracted from the conversation and quite literally read as flamebait.
> if you were downvoting/disagreeing with opinions about how AI is going to make it hard to authenticate information online, then you were wrong
Spoilers: it has been hard to authenticate information online for as long as the internet has been around. In fact, the most significant events are corroborated with real life occurrences that challenge these lies. These women can attest that they did not do this in the photo. If government officials insist that the version with them smiling is the true master copy, then you're the fool for believing them.
I'm baffled that this is even being used as a platform to discuss Web3, a collection of technologies mostly reputed for... being manipulated and exploited by bad actors that cannot be incentivized to stop.
Somehow AI fans can’t seem to understand how scale changes things.
Bombs have been around for a long time. What if everyone could have many, cheaply and easily? Why, since nothing happens with N of them, then 20,000 x N is just a little more of the same. And so what if the bots are now able to hold conversations and pass the Turing test 24x7 at scale? We have been able to hire humans to do that.
Except… no. That’s not how it works and you know it. Allowing anyone to deploy swarms of bots with superhuman memory, strategy, coordination, and now the ability to do many tasks with acceptable or good results at scale, is a game-changer and the question is whether it will make society better off.
The same questions asked of Web3’s downsides should be asked of AI. Not upsides, downsides. The fact that the guy in charge of safety at OpenAI says he thinks there’s a 20% chance of human extinction and you choose to shrug it off and focus on some other part — is the issue.
This isn’t just an academic discussion. It is like the people who profit off of coal and other things, regardless of their emissions or effect on people or climate. It matters and should be regulated.
> Scrounging up discussion about Web3 on an Indian government exposé is off-topic
It really isn't. Because it is one of the normally very rare use cases for web 3 stuff, and the topic is directly about a case where such a thing would be needed.
> it has been hard to authenticate information online
That's nice and all. But the claim was that people were previously dismissing opinions about AI that are now mainstream.
So yes, you'd be wrong if you were outright dismissing these opinions about AI before, which are now popular.
And it is useful and interesting to point out how previous opinions that were dismissed out of hand, are now mainstream, using this situation as an example.
> Because it is one of the normally very rare use cases for web 3 stuff
> a case where such a thing would be needed.
So... suggest a solution. What is your magical Blockchain panacea for this situation? To plug all digital cameras into an online ledger and hash every image? I'd love to hear a non-pipe-dream based idea for this.
> But the claim was that people were previously dismissing opinions about AI that are now mainstream.
This could be said about just about everything. I still dismiss the flying car, even though I was "proved wrong" in the 60s and 70s when some coked up engineers built one. I still dismiss cryptocurrency, even though many coins will outlive me. There is no world in my lifetime where cryptocurrency obsoletes the IMF. Betting against the powers that be is like playing chicken against a shotgun.
I am not sure if you read the rest of the comments and suggestions in this whole post, but multiple people did, over multiple discussion threads.
Feel free to go back and read them.
Also, it is still interesting and useful to suggest part of the solution, without writing dozens of pages on the exact specific details of it. Even just recommending crypto, is interesting enough, due to the fact that real usecases for crypto are so rare.
> This could be said about just about everything.
Ok, well in this case, related to AI, lots of people were wrong. And those people who were wrong, should figure out what mistake they made, to be so wrong, and why they were so quick to incorrectly dismiss these arguments.
I suspect they’re referring to using blockchain as a system of cryptographically-verified facts and shared reality to counteract the AI risk you mention.
It was flagged because it's a taboo on HN to say anything good about Web3, or even that Web3 is not as bad as something else, like AI that will destroy our trust in anything digital.
The point was that Web3 was mildly zero-sum for society, while AI is shaping up to be massively negative-sum, as more people get access to it. It's like giving bombs to everybody and hoping no one will use them in bad ways. At least with nuclear bombs we knew who was enriching the plutonium. Here, everyone has access to weapons, to be used as they please.
The key to when things go bad is swarms. When HN is overrun with swarms of bots a few years from now, you'll remember reading this. Web3 by contrast is just an immutable ledger, its worst applications are convincing people to voluntarily put some money into a buggy smart contract.
Also the truth came out here, but I wonder if the truth will get out on Indian Twitter given that the Indian government is one of the most prolific issuers of Twitter takedowns, and the odds of them being approved has supposedly spiked from about 50% under the old leadership to about 99% since Elon took over. Previously governments had to expect some pushback against over-reaching takedown requests, but the new policy of rubber stamping nearly any request without a second thought means it's open season for them to censor anything inconvenient.
Exactly. Even when a major TV channels was busting fake news in my country, people just switched to other govt-sponsored (bribed?) channel to hear what they wanted to hear. It became a common meme to say that major TV channel has an agenda (and either silence or whataboustism ensues once people are questioned about the actual fake news).
People will always switch to the brand of media that shows the truth that validates their existing beliefs. Today, there are a handful of "belief buckets" to choose from. In the USA, you have conservative news channels and mainstream news channels. You can pick your favorite source of truth, but they come as a package deal. If you strongly believe X is factual, you'll tune in to the channel that presents X as factual. That channel will also present Y and Z as factual, so you may slowly start believing Y and Z, too.
The obvious end state of this all will be news channels customized per-person. It's already starting with the custom-tailored Facebook/Twitter feeds. If you personally believe A, Y, and C, but not X, B, or Z, your news reports will be customized to show A, Y, and C as factual and ridicule X, B, and Z. Someone else will get presented an entirely different set of facts. Once the algorithm knows your beliefs, AI can produce an unlimited number of articles confirming those beliefs, complete with photos, videos, sources, fact checks, official reports and references.
I kind of knew that. But I didn’t realize how bad it was until the last few years.
The WSJ, Forbes and the National Review were what I considered reliably conservative sites that I use to be able to quote to conservative friends. Once they turned against Trump, they became part of the untrusted “mainstream media”.
Then when FoxNews called the 2020 election fairly, then they became sellouts and people started flocking to NewsMax. Whatever I thought of FoxNews over the years, I always thought their election night coverage was straight down the line.
RedState kicked out all of their neverTrumpers because they were losing readers.
Then conservatives started criticizing NewsMax when they would slightly push back against the “election was stolen” claims.
The truth came out too late anyway. The fact that it's been fact checked doesn't matter. People wo want to believe in a certain agenda have already got the misinformation they need, and it's not like they're seeking out other sources to fact check their information. They're not even the target audience of people who are fact checking this misinformation so the damage is already done.
This phase won't last long in the grand scheme of things. We've had about 150 years in which people have been conditioned to trust anything that they see in a photograph, but it's always been possible to fake it and for the last 30 years it's been getting dramatically easier. AI just brings us full circle back to the era of woodcuts—just because you see a photorealistic image or hear an audio recording does not mean it's real.
We're likely going to see a few cases like this that take off while people are adapting, but this naivete won't last forever. There will always be a few gullible people, but, just like with Photoshop, we'll get to the point where most people understand what's possible and adapt their reactions accordingly.
The era of easy to reproduce but hard to fake media is actually the historical outlier.
Before that media was written text and everyone knows anyone can make up anything they want in that domain. Before that most people were illiterate so it didn’t matter much. Media wasn’t even much of a thing.
We are headed for the post-media era when any arbitrary piece of media depicting anything can be created for little or no money by anyone with a computer. Nothing can be believed unless you were there or hear it from a known reliable source that was there.
There’s going to be an ugly transition period when we have tons of people who haven’t gotten this memo yet. These people are going to be manipulated en masse with tremendous effectiveness. The push to deplatform misinformation is largely an attempt to stop this, but I think it’s futile. People just have to learn that media is dead and they can’t trust anything anymore.
Hunter Thompson was ahead of his time. The only journalism worth doing in this future is individual gonzo journalism where you go and experience and tell the tale directly to your audience. That of course is vulnerable to spin by the teller, but so are all tales. It’s the best we have. Hopefully honest tellers of first hand tales will exist and get the reputation for honesty they deserve.
> People just have to learn that media is dead and they can’t trust anything anymore.
That is easy enough. What is difficult is to teach people they cannot just trust the people who tell them what they want to hear.
> Hopefully honest tellers of first hand tales will exist and get the reputation for honesty they deserve.
The odds of that are basically zero. There is no reliable way for people to know whether someone's tales are first hand or not, nor whether they are honest or not. If people stop consuming mainstream media and turn to gonzo journalism, powerful interests will manipulate information channels to direct eyeballs to the journalists they buy. The audience will not notice.
> Before that media was written text and everyone knows anyone can make up anything they want in that domain.
From what I gather, Julius Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico was pretty much fanfiction (had somebody write?) about himself. This problem may be older than I thought.
Anyone doing history knows that all the sources are biased. You have to corroborate evidence and adjust for knowing the context in which the work was produced to determine how reliable it is.
Sure. But there was an era that lasted around 100 years when a photo alone was pretty reliable. Photos and especially videos were at least hard to fake. That era is over. Absolutely anything can be faked cheaply and easily.
Photography has always been less reliable than many people thought it was, even without considering photo doctoring. Like statistics, the frame you choose in a photo can completely alter the story it's telling. It might be that entering an era where complete fabrication is easy will make people more resistant to the subtler tricks that have worked well hitherto.
Bill Watterson had a series of strips about this in Calvin and Hobbes in 1992 [0].
> CALVIN: This is what I like about photography. People think cameras always tell the truth.
> CALVIN: They think the camera is a dispassionate machine that records only facts. But really, cameras lie all the time! Select the facts and you manipulate the truth!
> CALVIN: For example, I've cleared off this corner of my bed. Take a picture of me here, but crop out all the mess around me, so it looks like I keep my room tidy.
> HOBBES: Is this even legal?
> CALVIN: Wait, let me comb my hair and put on a tie.
Really early photography was so poor compared to modern HD images that obvious fakes fooled "serious" people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies vs Arthur Conan Doyle, for example. But yes, it required more effort, and the effort reduction for fakes offered by AI is extremely powerful.
Won’t the same apply to public online conversations (social media, forums)? Anyone can be a bot, and thus I think something like conversing digitally with only those whom you exchanged keys with their phone via bluetooth or NFC irl will be more and more common? I know no solution besides web of trust architecture + irl exchanged keys.
Just wait until POWs start denouncing their former armies, or KIAs magically return home, or Ukrainian children in Russian families start magically saying how much better it is, etc etc. The demoralizing effect of watching a loved one do this would be immense.
I think the primary issue is that, while internet users usually question the authenticity of photos (as a normal practice), they tend to subconsciously trust what they see in videos.
It will require a significant mental shift to now question practically every single piece of audiovisual content.
I used to think this problem would solve itself, in that once people were fooled a few times, they'd stop being so easy to fool. The Trump era shut down that quaint idealistic notion. Turns out a lot of people -- maybe all of us to some extent -- actively enjoy being fooled. It makes for a communal experience that we'd otherwise miss out on, or something.
I'd hope that people don't like in a world where they believe they have to question the authenticity of everything they see. Why would they keep using the internet at all? And what psychological impact does that have when you view the world assuming everything may be a lie?
The truth comes out but the pro fascist people will have the ammo to keep lying about and repeating the lie. A percentage of the rest will believe it. They keep chipping away like that
I am hoping that AI tooling like this becomes even more widespread (Google Photos is doing that) that more people will finally understand that they cannot trust everything they see online. I hope.
Indeed. Its not like everything is lost. The majority of the population (anecdotal) jump the gun when it comes to believing a random forwarded message. Just that needs to change to "let me do my research first". That is all.
That is not an improvement, because it turns "online" (which is basically everything everywhere - all news media, TV, newspapers) into a politically useless wasteland.
"Online" is already a useless, trustless wasteland and has been since at least 2014. If this causes people to finally see it then maybe we can collectively build something better.
I know hundreds of people have already seen this, but maybe at least some people will see this: these edits were most probably made with a 6 year old face editing app. They are not caused by Stable Diffusion, Dall-E, or any other recent AI "stuff".
"Is there something dystopian about India or Soviet Union that is unlike the Global North?"
Actually, I would place the soviet union in the global north (you cannot go much further north, than russia is). And the difference is the extent, what they did to rewrite history. The famous removal of Trotzki out of revolution pictures, after he was not with the main party anymore. Stuff like this, did not happen in the west. Lots of other manipulation and misinformation, sure, but not blatantly rewriting history.
Yup, it's not unique to the Soviet union, the Soviet union is just a particularly salient example. I wouldn't have anything like Trotsky being edited out at hand for the us.
What is the closest example to Trotsky for the US that you have at hand? Otherwise I don’t understand the differences between Fred Hampton, Allende, Lumumba, Bhutto vs Trotsky.
What about stolen land. Along with the death, destruction that ensues. Would stolen land that is “edited out” in the US or caused because of the US come close?
East and west is effectively deprecated with the current world order. We use Global North/South sometimes now. The reason we have this terminology is because of the colonization, imperialism, elitism, and racism set forth by the Global North. The point isn’t to find the perfect terminology. It’s bigger with a ton of history and material conditions attached to it.
That’s not why the term Global North exists. A historical analysis of modern history shows why Slavs are not included in the Global North.
Some one said the west cares about social rights and freedom vs Soviets or Indian people. Both societies were better with many forms of expression including gender and sexuality.
This is a good example of history being rewritten for the Global North as the vanguards of social justice and liberal freedom. IE India has been better with trans people and Soviets with gay people.
The Trotsky stuff is a big deal in the context of socialist states. Not the Global North. I fail to see the difference of the extent with some victims of COINTELPRO or the rewritten history of figures like Ho Chi, Ernesto Guevara, Cuba (Castros), Allende, Lumumba, Mao, Sankara, Kabil, Bhutto, Tito, and so on.
"The reason we have this terminology is because of the colonization, imperialism, elitism, and racism set forth by the Global North"
"historical analysis of modern history shows why Slavs are not included in the Global North."
Then please show me this analysis?
How do you think the russian empire worked before the revolution? (or after)
Or how it became an empire in the first place?
"Ernesto Guevara"
And how exactly was for example the history rewritten for the worse regarding this person?
He is mostly regarded a hero with lots of merchandise to buy everywhere on the west. If his history was rewritten, then by socialists who dreamed of the clean, heroic revolution and closed their eyes to the bloddy, murderous work he did. (Not saying that those who hunted him down were any better)
And Castro did not allow his underlings to leave the country at free will. Among other stuff.
Or how did the indian empire(s) worked before the britains came? (would you enjoy being born in a low caste?) Or china. Or the Zulu. Or the aztecs, etc. etc.
Or read a bit about Haile Selassi.
It seems you are making a artificial line and claiming all or most of the evil came from the north. How is that helpful?
Making the world more simpler by creating us vs them?
> Verified account @wokeflix_ tweeted the same image in a meme
> Verified account @randomsena tweeted the same image
> Another verified account, @RealAtulsay, tweeted the same image
Isn't "Verified" on Twitter just a subscription now, meaning it's just that these people have given Twitter money? Why it matters (in a journalistic sense) who has paid Twitter or not? And why are only some of the verified accounts mentioned as verified accounts, while others are verified but not mentioned as verified?
Also, twitter shows the comments from "verified" handles on the top of other comments. Government sponsored trolls have unlimited flow of money to buy verified status and dominate the general public accounts.
This is how BJP government uses public money to run troll campaigns on social media against opposition leaders. [1]
Possibly hundreds or thousands of persons or "journalists" are getting funds from government to abuse the opposition leaders.
> Also, twitter shows the comments from "verified" handles on the top of other comments.
This is the exact main problem with paid Verification. Blue tweets surface to the top, disproportionate to the attention they actually receive, meaning you're more likely to see them. You're effectively paying for attention.
The problem isn’t money, it’s unique phone numbers and credit card numbers. Over time there is much easier ways to detect and mass ban platform manipulation accounts.
I’m sure the government of India can make as many numbers and cards as they want, but the problem is still that Twitter can know who issued both and a lot of information about them, including if they’re burner numbers. It still helps tremendously
That’s the promise. Whether they do anything with it is questionable.
https://imgur.com/a/6blpTqF shows my recent advertiser blocks from about 10 mins of browsing. Clearly inauthentic accounts, some paying the $1k gold check fees.
Sounds more like regular ToS that gives Twitter the right to cancel paid services, not a magic method to fix the issue. I know a ton of verified politicians that lied weekly on Twitter pre Musk. It's an unsolvable issue.
If you're running an article on how Elon is changing twitter into a disinformation machine, the fact that they're verifying deceptive accounts would be relevant.
If you're running an article on how the India ruling party used AI to paint protestors in a false light, it isn't relevant. Worse bringing attention to it like this could give less-informed readers the false impression that "verified" actually meant something like "verified by the government".
I think that's their point. It's a way of subtly pointing out that verification on Twitter is now useless, and shouldn't be trusted any more than claims from any other user. Even less, I guess, since it's not a equal distribution of people paying for verification, they all skew pretty hard to one side.
"Verified" is now an anti-signal. It's more likely than not to indicate that the poster is a crank who's paying money to have their opinions disseminated.
It was at least a reliable signal that the person is who they say they are. They are shifting away from actual verification towards attempting to sell status, which rarely works.
I suspect there is considerable overlap in a Venn diagram of those who never hear about the image being manipulated and those who still think a blue tick is reserved for human-verified accounts.
I have seen so many pro-Russian bot accounts with blue verified symbol. These accounts also get priority on their replies, which are positioned at the start of the tweet conversation compared to non-blue / non paying twitter handles, giving them a bigger amplification.
Whenever I see blue tick accounts now, I notice most of them have <1000 followers and have no authority in the subject matter and I ignore most of them. I have noticed a lot of right-wing handles, all having the blue tick and getting priority on spreading their misinformation as it was in this case.
Elon has broken the verified system on purpose to fit his new anti-government / anti-"woke" agenda.
Yea. the moment Elon started charging for the blue tick, it became useless and I wouldn't pay for it anymore unless I really want to use the extra goodies that it provides which I don't need personally.
The media we ignore still can have a huge impact on society, on elections, on basic human civility. Ignoring Fox News hasn’t made it any less damaging.
yeah verified only means you either gave your credit card name/number to them or someone gave them a stolen one. It's basically useless. However in this case I'm more apt to believe the government is manipulating photos than randos on twitter given the recent drive towards religious and ethnic minority discrimination by the Indian government.
Such a weird comment. Yes, what is wrong with emptying the label of any meaning and letting any misinformation trash account buy it for a few bucks? You might be terminally online but then not everyone is.
Isn’t Verified a feature to (supposedly) attest someone identity instead of attesting the trueness of their tweets?
For my understanding the purpose was to help newcomers to distinguish @realDonaldTrump with @veryRealTrump. It is supposed to prevent impersonating, but that’s just a shift of trust from your own judgement to the Twitter chosen fraud algorithm or whatever method they choose. Can’t see how 10$ add more credibility.
I am amazed that the title is allowed to stand despite the original title and the content.
The origin of the image is unclear. Sure, one can speculate that "India ruling party's IT cell" is behind the morphed image. This is what this comment section is for. But without hard proof the title is as much of an propaganda as are the morphed image.
Are we going to tag everything a Democrat does as "US ruling party's" doing?
Do you think it is possible for one side to doctor images and make it viral by planting it in the opposition's filter bubble (possibly by your embedded twitter agents) only to be easily outed like Alan Sokal did. We live in interesting times.
HN has an inherent bias against India and Indians.
Just open any of the H1B related posts and you will see how open minded the liberal tech worker of USA is about India and Indians.
Of course, they are all for immigration just the H1B brings up debate about 'Quality of Work. Hypocrites.
I think the American Narrow Minded view of the World is due to they growing up in a 2 party system that only looks at things as Black and White ( Not the race ), as Right and Wrong ( that's better ).
They are basically fed what they are supposed to think by CNNs, NYTs, Guardians etc etc
Like Uncle Soros they believe they understand India better than Indians.
Uncle Soros wants to bring 'Democracy' to World's largest Democracy, because 1 Billion Indians don't know what they should vote for - They need a White Man to tell them that. .
In their own Country they created False Accusations against their President - Published in all 'respected' mainstream Newspapers.
United States of Gaslighting is where they are at.
Let's see if @dang is open minded enough to do something about the title after 400 upvotes are already made.
This has devolved into a political discussion unfit for HN. The OP's submission history[1] is almost entirely political, and promoting a specific viewpoint.
While I believe it's ok to discuss politics on HN, my view is that accounts that exist solely for political propaganda should be discouraged.
My point was that submitters who only submit political articles (in line with their biases) are detrimental to the site. Such articles attract more politically charged engagement, and over time draw in people who care more about politics than tech.
The article btw is of questionable newsworthiness; and is a link to a propoganda blog. It's not really an accredited news organization.
Why? “This community” worked extremely hard to bring this technology to fruition, and got handsomely rewarded for doing so. The “success” already happened. At least Mr. Altman had the decency to wait until his product had been released before getting up on his moral high horse about the risks of what he’d built, whereas poor Google did the hard work of firing all their AI ethicists and making their priorities clear a while ago, only for them to get scooped on their own technology.
Also the post has been editorialised. Sure parties have IT cells doing all kind of things to build narratives, but I am not so sure if there are basis for the inference in this case.
Even if political, I personally expect better on HN.
I think this is relevant to HN because this is technology that many of us are working on and having an real life example of misuse should make us pause and think how to address the issue.
It might be great or not, the title is NOT correct and is blaming the government without having any proofs. Posts like these should not even be allowed here. This is actually propaganda.
I’m wondering if someone can comment on the cultural aspect here. It seems like adding the smiles was intended to discredit the protesters, by somehow suggesting the protest was insincere. But I feel like you could interpret this the other way too: even in the face of brutal treatment, they maintain a positive and peaceful attitude and don’t let their opponents break their spirits.
“Turn the other cheek” and “love your enemy” are very old philosophies, after all. So is there something different about this situation or about Indian politics in general that makes this a damaging attack?
> I’m wondering if someone can comment on the cultural aspect here. It seems like adding the smiles was intended to discredit the protesters, by somehow suggesting the protest was insincere.
This was to paint them as insincere and implying that protestors are on the payroll of <insert boogeyman here>.
It's just "they're laughing at you". This is actually interesting to me: possibly the thing that is most annoying to most people, though not all, in most societies is to be suckered. Maybe the next highest is hypocrisy.
I wonder if these are universal or if different societies have different "greatest sin". Like, does Japan, unbeknownst to me, have shamelessness as its?
Obviously not, that’s not what I’m trying to suggest. Only that it seemed to me — as a non-Indian western observer - like an odd way to discredit them.
As an NRI, I continue to be disappointed by the country I called home for most of my life.
Between the politics and the pollution in Delhi, I fear I can never really return home.
The last time I was home, I was struggling every day to breathe because Delhi has crazy air in the winter. While high school friends were telling me about how they don’t believe in equal rights, justifying any means to achieving a Hindu country. This is just one more nail in the coffin of a potentially great, secular country that once dared to v̵o̵t̵e̵ place a g̵r̵e̵a̵t̵ scientist as president. How far we’ve fallen since.
I’m just heartbroken over what my country has become.
Edit: for the countless fans of India that will show up to tell me how to feel about the country, please don’t. I really don’t care to hear the latest talking point on why Infrastructure is worth human rights abuses or whatever lets you sleep at night. My opinion is my own and you can please pound sand. You are part of what makes me mourn my country.
It is a conundrum, because the same NRIs oppose bills that would solve India's problems.
The ban on crop burning (main cause of Delhi's pollution) was central to the farm bill. But protesting farmers (widely supported in the west) opposed it, and the bill died despite having democratic approval (both national opinion and sufficient votes)
> dared to vote a great scientist to president
We do not vote for Presidents in India. The president was selected by the ruling party (The same BJP as Modi) to be the ceremonial president. The same one that has now elected a tribal woman to President, to signify secular allegiances.
> believe in equal rights
If we are to use leaders as a yardstick to measure equality opportunities and rights, then the incompetent ~6th generation heir of the Nehru/Gandhi family leading the opposition is hardly a good look.
> disappointed by the country I called home for most of my life
As a fellow NRI, this is counter to what I hear from my fellow Indians. There is a ton of optimism around jobs, infrastructure growth and economic policies that are finally opening up the nation, as India embraces the US after decades spent close to the Russia.
> potentially great, secular country
Even as a big supporter of liberal (as in valuing liberty, low authoritarianism) democracies, the evidence for free-democracies industrializing is exactly zero. Every big nation that has successfully escaped poverty has done so through suffocatingly authoritarian means (SK, Japan, Taiwan, Chile, China, Thailand, Malaysia). Every single one of them only transitioned to a proper liberal democracy (if at all) AFTER industrialization had been achieved.
I corrected the means by which the president is chosen (it’s a vote by the electoral college so it wasn’t completely incorrect to say vote though). Thanks for mentioning that.
I don’t think I agree with your other points. But I do hope your optimism pans out because right now things feel bleak.
I'm sorry, I don't understand why the other commenter thinks they are write and you are wrong? We live in a representative democracy. The Prime Minister is elected by proving a majority in the Lok Sabha, and the President is elected by electoral college, that doesn't mean that the President isn't elected? You are absolutely right to say that the President is elected.
The reality on ground is different from what you read in the press or even online. We see the work being done. When work wasn't being done (recent example of Karnataka), people voted BJP out. The alternative (Congress) came to power promising loads of freebies. Now voters on the ground are pissed off (plenty of videos where people are not willing to pay electricity bills or public transport fares because Congress said it'll make all of that free but never did so till date). So this hyperbole on BJP being "evil" is largely overblown and it is quite persistent in the Hacker News circles. Ultimately the voter decides based on whether the Party in power delivers or not. BJP has been doing great work on the infrastructure/development front as well as attracting investment. That is visible on the ground. What BJP is lacking severely is in State level leadership/politics which needs to be fixed. Congress on the other hand has given up its National ambitions and pursuing weaknesses it sees in BJP's state level politics. This is vibrancy of democracy. Nothing to feel "bleak" about unless you are drowning yourself in anti-India Western media reports and thinking that is the truth. Maybe you need to ask yourself if you are also part of a misinformation bubble yourself without even realizing it?
I absolutely hate the way fellow Indians will just try and deflect negative stories about India as western propaganda.
You do a disservice to your country by following that tired playbook.
Did you ever stop to consider that I am actually well informed and genuinely disappointed with my country.
Criticism of the country and party doesn’t mean I’m simply misinformed. I was critical of things when I lived there, I consume my news directly from Indian news sites.
Maybe you need to ask yourself why you feel the need to assume it’s western propaganda?
Sadly this is the line that the BJP and their followers have taken. Any criticism from outside India is "western propaganda". Any criticism from within India is "anti-nationalism", "pakistani" or "tukde-tukde gang".
Because we see the same actors coming out of the woodworks every time an issue breaks out. I mean, is the Opposition so bereft of people that it has to project the same faces every time? Some of these actors play multiple roles. Sometimes they don the hat of psephologists, sometimes lawyers, sometimes politicians, sometimes journalists and sometimes even give lectures on religion and philosophy. Such multi-talented actors cannot be so easily switched out every time right? Which is why Opposition has such a tough time winning General Elections in India. We see through this BS.
I won't name names but I am pretty sure you have already guessed who I am talking about. Even in these wrestlers protests we clearly see who is the puppet master who is controlling the marionette. The same puppet master active during farmer protests. The same puppet master active during CAA protests. That face is pretty much constant.
Right now let us just accept this basic fact that there is no one, in the Opposition at least, who is a serious contender to Modi at the National Level. Or even Yogi or any of the other BJP leaders. This is sad truth for Opposition parties that it has to accept first before it can work on finding the right candidate for the job. But doing that is easier said than done. When the Opposition is fragmented and bickering amongst itself, there is no way it can put on a United front. It tried it multiple times and failed miserably every single time. And being just anti-Modi/anti-BJP won't win votes. You need to present a viable alternative that is actually capable of taking on not just Modi but also be able to represent India on an International level. I don't find anyone in the Opposition fit enough for that position. Sorry.
The sheer amount of hubris in your post is astounding.
So any opinion other than your own is propaganda fed by the west, but the only true reality is the one you agree with that paints India in a flattering light.
Using “the world happiness index” as some kind of gotcha propaganda is hilarious, when we’re discussing actual issues like arresting protestors. Just ridiculous.
I won’t be replying again to you because I don’t think you are capable of accepting that other people disagree with your world view. It’s unhealthy and I really think you need to leave your own bubble.
Yeah the same Western media that fed the world the news that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction, Libya needs to be attacked to install democracy, justified sanctions on most energy producers who were not much in favor of the USD such as Iran, Venezuela, Libya, Russia.
Some day you will realize the Western media is a propaganda tool wielded by the powerful arms and other lobbies to paint their targets and give the Western governments pretext to begin interfering in the matters of a non-pliable foreign government.
Not OP (and not a fan of his whataboutism plus you don't deserve to be downvoted) but I think the issue is that India is so large and diverse that commentators can be right and wrong at the exact same time when painting a brush with the term "India".
When social and political norms can vary within individual states, let alone the entire country, it causes people to feel reporting about very negative or very positive news is propaganda one way or the other.
A lot of this is then further inflamed by IT Cells from parties across the board, especially because most NRIs are getting news about India via the internet plus social media.
Add to that the fact that most Western media isn't biased (I've worked with them), but might write articles using a broad brush that pisses other NRIs off and then we all devolve into regionalist or casteist bickering.
Eg. When the Unnao tragedy happened (which was horrible), it was reported in some western media that it was in India and broad brushed as an Indian issue. A number of Tamil and Malayali friends too offense to that and began saying "oh, it's actually Uttar Pradesh. Bhaiyyas are always like that" and regionalist shit like that, which obviously pissed off the UP+Bihari wale in my office.
On the side, you can see propagandists like Agnihotri inflaming Hindu-Muslim tensions by bringing up the Kerala Story as if every single Malayali Muslim is a future Jihadi and inflaming Hindi-Southern tensions by making a number of idiots assume Malayalis are a 5th column, which is an extremely horrible broad brushed assertation
And finally, a lot of people say that BJP voters are illiterate and illiteracy is pushing back India. As someone with family from small town India who has known illiterate people, they are smart as you and I. Just because they didn't get the opportunity to learn to read+write doesn't mean they can't think rationally and logically. So for NRIs from lower middle and working class (as a lot of NRIs increasingly are now), it feels very classist and insulting.
Basically, what I'm getting at is that we use our prior experiences and background to understand a country, but when you are dealing with a country as large and diverse as India it automatically falls apart.
> Add to that the fact that most Western media isn't biased (I've worked with them)
Have you forgotten the New York Times job ad for South Asia Business Correspondent for India?
Since you say Western media isn't biased and that you have worked with them, I would like to see at least one huff piece published by Western media on Modi/BJP. Surely there has to be at least one article to counter all the anti-Modi/anti-BJP articles we keep seeing propping up in the Western media. If you can't find even one piece that can counter-balance the mainstream narrative about India and its ruling political party then it isn't actually "unbiased". The tilt towards one side of the political spectrum is pretty obvious to all those who have been seeing Western media play its game.
> so large and diverse that commentators can be right and wrong at the exact same time when painting a brush with the term "India"
Yeah and since when has Western media ever understood this nuance? The bias is deep seated and pretty obvious to observers like me who fall on the other side of the political spectrum.
> Have you forgotten the New York Times job ad for South Asia Business Correspondent for India?
The NYT is not the primary source of truth for policymakers in the United States.
I agree there are a number of issues with the NYT's Delhi office, and a lot of that stems from bad pay.
The media ecosystem in the US works the same way as how the media works pin India. I haven't seen very nuanced discussions about American institutions in the Dainik Jagran, Hindustan Times, or WION either.
> Yeah and since when has Western media ever understood this nuance?
In the Media that is actually consumed and read and used by policymakers like when I was on the Hill, as well as in the educational programs that bring future Americans into the Foreign Service.
> The NYT is not the primary source of truth for policymakers in the United States.
I don't have any issue with most current policymakers in US (for the past decade at the very least). Surprisingly most US lawmakers have their own individual views on India (unaffected/not influenced by Western media) and have a good working relationship with the GoI (including Modi and more specifically Jaishankar). This includes policymakers from both sides of the political spectrum (Republicans as well as the Democrats). Thank God for that. Else if they actually believed half the articles that came out of papers like NYT or Washington Post, they would have a totally warped understanding of India. And a really negative one at that. Policymakers pre-Bush era got most things about India wrong (and paid a price for it too with WTC bombings, 9/11 and finding Osama Bin Laden hiding close to their Ally's military complex). US Policymakers have changed their outlook and very few actually hold on to the anti-India stance that they once had. That's welcome.
My issue is with the common citizens getting a warped view of India. That's all.
> In the Media that is actually consumed and read and used by policymakers like when I was on the Hill, as well as in the educational programs that bring future Americans into the Foreign Service.
That's good to know. But Western Media still has a lot to catch up vis-a-vis being unbiased. They still heavily tilt towards parties that are non-BJP. That is fine if that is their intended outlook. But at least let it not pretend to be unbiased then.
> The media ecosystem in the US works the same way as how the media works pin India. I haven't seen very nuanced discussions about American institutions in the Dainik Jagran, Hindustan Times, or WION either.
Yes I agree with you that Indian media is biased too. Most of the media outlets are pro-Modi/pro-BJP. And in a way it should also be seen as a counter to Western media outlets and continuous disinformation/propaganda that kept coming from there. Let us not forget that people who work in Media organizations also have their own individual biases and they typically hire people who subscribe to their biases. It is not always necessarily a money thing (where the ruling party pays a media organization to speak in its favour). Many a times it is purely for ideological reasons.
Much the same as NYT or WP. The only problem is when NYT/WP is that it proclaims itself to be unbiased. That's when I go "Come on man I know you aren't. Quit the pretence".
Also Indian media typically is reactionary. We don't particularly have nuanced discussions about the West because first and foremost we don't have our own statistics bureau that can create all sorts of indexes that the West creates out of thin air. Some of the Western Indexes are based on factual research but most of them aren't. And we just typically counter them in a reactionary manner. We do not invest efforts into actually coming up with actual statistics or at least indulge in counter-propaganda. That appetite simply does not exist. Many of these Western statistics, stories and news articles go unrebutted.
Like I gave an example of World Happiness Index. Let us take World Press Freedom Index. India ranks below Afghanistan in World Press Freedom Index. 11 spots behind Afghanistan. This is a total joke. Is the West actually trying to say that Taliban, which is ruling Afghanistan now, has more Press Freedom than India? You see how these nonsensical statistics go unchallenged? Because what would you even counter these with? It is that ridiculous! Surely if everything was so bad in India we wouldn't be a thriving and one of the fastest growing economies in the World today. We would all be on the streets rioting (like what happened in Sri Lanka) and storming Modi's residence. Most of it is hyperbole.
> The sheer amount of hubris in your post is astounding.
Good to know you consider the World Happiness Index 2023 as hubris. We can finally agree on something.
> I won’t be replying again to you because I don’t think you are capable of accepting that other people disagree with your world view
Funny how you believe "I don’t think you are capable of accepting that other people disagree with your world view" and in the text rejected my valid argument which you had absolutely zero counter for.
Either accept that the World Happiness Index is a fabrication of the West or rebut with facts as to why India ranks below Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Myanmar. You got stumped with just this easiest piece of fact that you couldn't even counter. Tells me everything I need to know.
> when we’re discussing actual issues like arresting protestors
Cry me a river. The West is so pristine it doesn't arrest protesters at all. Nor do Government agencies kill people randomly. Nor does it indulge in assassinations both within its own soil or in countries that it has no jurisdiction over. Nor does the West bomb other nations to bits. Nor does it arrest farmers and confiscate their properties and bank accounts. The West is epitome of truth, fairness and justice. While puny Indians back home, which you incidentally rejected because of the deep seated hatred, are the horrible ones who do not have capacity to discern truth from fiction and do not understand how a Democracy functions.
>> The West is so pristine it doesn't arrest protesters at all. Nor do Government agencies kill people randomly. Nor does it indulge in assassinations...
Yeah and what is wrong with whataboutery? I have no issues with sprinkling some whataboutery to expose the West for the ridiculous expectations it has from a developing country like India while at the same time indulging in worse acts itself. I mean at least don't effing preach if you can't show yourself to be a good example/role model. That's the least you can do.
> rabid amount of hate will get you nowhere in life and will always keep you in a negative mood and disappointed
Wat.
Honestly, this attitude—equating moderate criticism with “rabid hate”— causes me to pause every time I get excited about India. There are democratic trade-offs in development. India has made them decently historically, and well recently. But the way you tank that balance is with blind jingoism.
> Honestly, this attitude—equating moderate criticism with “rabid hate”
I was responding to this comment: "I absolutely hate the way fellow Indians will just try and deflect negative stories about India as western propaganda."
Nice try trying to change the tone of his sentence (which was "I absolutely hate") to "moderate criticism". There is nothing "moderate" about "absolutely hating" something/someone. I was just responding to that "extreme" emotion he was projecting. Such extreme emotions might win you the mob but it won't change facts.
> causes me to pause every time I get excited about India
Okay. And? What difference would it make to India's growth trajectory if you lose your excitement? Is it going to make any dent?
> But the way you tank that balance is with blind jingoism.
Lol. As an Indian the only content I get to consume majority of the times, from Western media/press, is how shitty India is. And this has nothing to do with BJP/Modi but has to do with how India has always been projected in the Western media. Take literally any media clip of India showcased on Western news channels and you will have at least 1 clip of Mumbai slum (which is the smallest portion of Mumbai, a part of Maharashtra state in India) projected as India itself. It is like Indian channels showing Skid Row as USA. So if you feel some sort of "jingoism" coming from me it is purely a response to the nonsense I always see on Western media whenever India is talked about. As it almost always projects and enhances stereotypes already existing about India and Indians. And lets not forget the most common tropes: poverty, illiteracy, drinking water, sanitation, slums, education, electricity etc. No matter how much India improves and solves these issues (many of which are close to 100%) it still wouldn't satisfy West's craving for denigrating India just for kicks.
So if I feel defensive about it, don't construe it as jingoism for the sake of it. I actually feel the difference in standard of living after being born here and lived for 34 years. I presume I have more experience about how much India has changed compared to Westerners or even NRIs who abandoned India for greener pastures and sit in the West and pontificate. Sorry if I sound jingoistic but I don't really care. Especially when the West doesn't really care about how India is denigrated repeatedly in their Media.
And if anyone has even a mild amount of criticism of the West, they get banned/cancelled in the West or worse bombed out of existence (Iraq/Syria/Libya). So much for tolerance to free speech and human rights.
> nothing "moderate" about "absolutely hating" something/someone
Fair enough. “I hate” in American English is a complaining—not raging—tone, though I grant it’s ambiguous and concede it shouldn’t be used.
> What difference would it make to India's growth trajectory if you lose your excitement?
Not much. Generally speaking, “fuck you, I’m beautiful” cultures that turn insecurity into a national sport have a common path.
India’s elites are savvy enough to build trade and diplomatic relationships, learn from others’ successes and failures and show outward strength. But I’ve seen this dismissive attitude towards criticism of any kind in my own family, and it’s paused at least my investing in India. (The only other places I see this, ironically, is in the U.K., Russia and rural American south.)
> I presume I have more experience about how much India has changed compared to Westerners or even NRIs who abandoned India for greener pastures and sit in the West and pontificate
Right. This attitude. It’s limiting in its rejection of unexpected sources of information. Again, it’s not common. Particularly among the elite and worldly. But as in America, when this attitude spreads, it diminishes prospects.
And why is this so important? If you don't invest someone else will. The World is huge. There are plenty of players who are willing to invest in India's growth: both within borders of India as well as people from outside India. No dearth of those who believe in India's future.
> Generally speaking, “fuck you, I’m beautiful” cultures that turn insecurity into a national sport have a common path.
You know who excels at this the most? The West. Its penchant for "installing democracy" in various countries, by force, and then leaving it completely destabilized and destroyed is something we have seen happen time and time again. Which is why you see trends of de-dollarization and non-alignment picking up rapidly. If India doesn't toe the Western line of thought we are targeted, either with sanctions (like in the 90s after reciprocal nuclear tests) or pompous pontifications on democracy/human rights in 2020s (because the West no longer can simultaneously sanction as well as invest in India's growth can it?). You see we Indians know how to survive and thrive even in the worst of conditions. The 90s are a good reminder for all of us as to how reliable the West is. If we go further back into the 70s we had to face off a Western Alliance which sent ships to nuke us out of existence because we chose to side with Democracy against an evil Dictatorship which the West was mollycoddling with. If you don't know what I am talking about read up on the USS Enterprise and the 7th fleet (Task Force 74). [1]
So yeah it applies more to the West compared to ancient cultures rooted in tradition like India.
> (The only other places I see this, ironically, is in the U.K., Russia and rural American south.)
So you are saying you don't see the West indulging in this but only U.K., Russia and rural American south? No wonder why the West is failing the past decade. Do you not even see the strong anti-West sentiment in the air as well as the de-dollarization that is gathering rapid speed/progress? If I were in your position I wouldn't be bothered about investing in India being an issue but be more worried about protecting my investments in the West considering the crazy geopolitical decisions the West has been taking lately. It has eroded a lot of confidence/trust other countries had towards the West. To the point where we are building alternate infrastructure to settle trade (which is currently dominated by the West with its SWIFT infrastructure). Not a good outlook for the West at the very least. Western hegemony will end. It is no longer a question of "if" but "when".
> India’s elites are savvy enough to build trade and diplomatic relationships, learn from others’ successes and failures and show outward strength
We don't need to learn from others' successes and failures. We have plenty of our own successes and failures if we just bother to look back into our rich Ancient history (which many Westernized Indians lack basic knowledge in). And most Indian elites/diplomats/businessmen have given examples from India's Ancient history as their source of strength. Have linked an example of the same from India's best EAM that we have ever had until now [2].
> limiting in its rejection of unexpected sources of information
Please. Do not try to simplify this issue as an issue of rejecting "unexpected sources of information". The Western media has been playing this playbook for decades now. Most articles you see about India or the Indian Government (irrespective of who is in power) is mostly anti-India. Even positive news (like a successful rocket launch by ISRO) is sprinkled with at least some amount of negativity. The usual trope being poverty. There is no two ways about it. None of this is "unexpected". Rather Indians would find it "unexpected" if the West does not use any of the usual stereotypes associated with Indians and broadcasts news as is. We are so used to the denigration that many have become immune to it over time. We just expect to see at least one b-roll of Mumbai slum, of a heavily crowded marketplace, people hanging from trains and if not for these then definitely one of monkeys hopping buildings stealing food. Pick any news story about India from any Western publication, watch the story and tell me you don't see at least one of these typical racial stereotypes.
>> Take the World Happiness Index 2023 which ranked India lower than Pakistan ...
May be World Happiness Index 2023 data is bit flawed. But I don't think that means whole world is sharing propaganda against India.
>> Heck we get 100Mbps-1Gbps unlimited internet connectivity anywhere in India at the lowest rates possible in the entire World.
How is it an achievement of Government while this was done by private companies like Reliance at the cost of public owned BSNL? Government actually let the loss of public tax payers money by giving favourable treatment to private companies.
Modi and his fans always talk about low prices of internet in India, while its a failure of government to control Reliance where Reliance is using money raised from state bank to give dirt cheap internet connection to public and killing the competition. They have already started raising the prices now that several competitors are gone. [1]
Reliance raises money from public banks, Reliance uses that money to get tower network of public owned BSNL, Reliance gets priority over BSNL to launch 4G, Reliance is in profit while BSNL is in loss, Government employee phone connections are transferred from BSNL to private entity Reliance. [2] [3] [4]
>> I don't need some stupid organization in the West to tell me I am more unhappy than these countries.
Why care about other stupid organizations while you have "Whatsapp university" to keep us informed. [5]
> May be World Happiness Index 2023 data is bit flawed. But I don't think that means whole world is sharing propaganda against India.
Okay then lets take the World Press Freedom Index 2023. India is behind Afghanistan by 9 points in Press Freedom. Explain how Taliban ruled Afghanistan grants more Press Freedom than Democratic India.
> How is it an achievement of Government while this was done by private companies like Reliance at the cost of public owned BSNL? Government actually let the loss of public tax payers money by giving favourable treatment to private companies.
What nonsense. It is exact opposite of what you are saying. BSNL was always a loss making company that never innovated and was kept stagnant for decades. We all saw how shabby the 2G rollout was. And who subsidized BSNL? It was us, the tax payers. They never turned a profit even once. Even now they are "expected" to turn a profit in 2026-27.
What you are advocating for is maximum Government. That almost always ends in disaster. What you should be aiming for is minimum Government. We, the People, have granted Government powers through the Constitution. The reason we did that is because somethings are best managed by the Government than either free markets or people themselves: building infrastructure, security, law and order, healthcare, protecting borders. Anything beyond this is not mandate of the Government. Government has no business being in business. The more private players are encouraged the better for growth of an country/economy. The less Government intervention the better.
Reliance bought the licenses for 4G through an auction. And it was bought in 2010 (during Congress ruled UPA era). So your ridiculous accusation of "giving favourable treatment to private companies" applies to Congress more than anyone else. Either ways, I don't find anything wrong in it as it was a fair auction that did not go the ways of 2G scam. The auction happened during the Congress regime. Reliance won. But Congress failed to setup the infrastructure needed for Reliance to build the network. This is where the Government is needed to intervene and help out by building infrastructure. PPP partnerships are forged for this reason only. Government builds basic infrastructure (like connecting roads, electricity lines, plumbing etc), Private Companies build plants, machinery and in this case installing antennas and laying of fibre optic cables. It takes two to tango. Congress was missing in the picture as it was busy with corruption. It is only when BJP came to power that this project was fast tracked.
> where Reliance is using money raised from state bank to give dirt cheap internet connection to public and killing the competition
Lol you are talking as if Reliance had underdogs as competitors. Airtel, Vodafone, Idea etc are all billion dollar companies. They could have easily taken on Reliance. In fact they were quite content with their dominence in the sector and refused to innovate. It is not Reliance's fault if the competition was caught sleeping at the wheels.
> They have already started raising the prices now that several competitors are gone.
Welcome to Capitalism 101. This is how it works everywhere. Not just in India.
> How is it an achievement of Government while this was done by private companies like Reliance
Did I say it is achievement of the Government anywhere? I talked about positive changes that are happening in India and the infrastructure developmental projects that are shaping such outcomes. For Reliance to lay their antennas and fibre optic cables it requires Government to support through infrastructure development. By making connecting roads/highways and digging necessary lines for fibre optic cables to be laid. This is the work of the Government: infrastructure. The Government did not setup the network. I never said that anywhere.
> Reliance raises money from public banks, Reliance uses that money to get tower network of public owned BSNL, Reliance gets priority over BSNL to launch 4G, Reliance is in profit while BSNL is in loss, Government employee phone connections are transferred from BSNL to private entity Reliance.
Dude how different is it from the West? Even in the West you have Verizon, AT&T etc. Does the US have something equivalent to BSNL? Nope it doesn't. In fact I want Modi to shut down BSNL. It is a big drain on tax payer money. Just like US doesn't have any state owned telecom companies, India shouldn't have one either. Especially one which is stagnant and unable to innovate. We can use the tax payer money for other better causes.
> Why care about other stupid organizations while you have "Whatsapp university" to keep us informed. [5]
When you have no proper rebuttal this is the crap you come up with. This is why Opposition can never win the General Election in India. You guys suck at this. Most of your information is hollow at best. No proper study. Just a bunch of links from media stories. If you had known that Reliance won the 4G auction during UPA regime you wouldn't have even made this point.
I haven't even included UPI in this which has been an absolute game changer. Anyone with 2 brain cells to rub together would know how transformational UPI has been to India and growth of India in the past few years. But yeah we should neglect all that because the West said so. Sure there are problems in India just like there are problems in every other country in the World. But when it comes to India, the problems are amplified to an unwarranted degree in the West. Maybe because we don't toe the Western line when it comes to many things (like staying non-aligned or not signing the non-proliferation treaty) and the West just doesn't like it. Has been holding a grudge since the 90s when India conducted reciprocal nuclear tests (after China conducted its own nuclear tests). Bill Clinton saw it fit to sanction Democratic India but not Authoritarian CCP. It is not something new. And pre-90s was even worse with the West supporting Dictatorial Islamic Republic of Pakistan against Democratic India.
>> I haven't even included UPI in this which has been an absolute game changer.
Wasn't the work on UPI started in 2009 and the vision statement was prepared in 2012, 2 years before Modi/BJP came to power?
>> In April 2009, National Payment Corporation of India (NPCI) was formed to integrate all the payment mechanisms in India and make them uniform for all retail payments. RBI in 2012 released a vision statement for a period of four years that indicated commitment towards building a safe, efficient, accessible, inclusive, interoperable and authorized payment and settlement system in India. UPI was officially launched in 2016 for public use. [1]
There were plenty of projects that were announced before BJP came to power and was never implemented. Congress was elected twice to implement these very things. Instead they spent all their time indulging in communal nonsense and high ticket corruption. To just put it into perspective: The Finance Minister P Chidambaram (during UPA era) castigated Modi for launching Digital India when he said it makes no sense considering India is not connected with Internet to the last village [1]. And that it will be a failure. The entire Opposition made fun of it in 2017.
So no matter if you have great ideas, if you do not even believe in those ideas let alone execute on them it is as good as dead ideas.
We would have progressed rapidly had UPA not indulged in corruption and working tirelessly to convict Modi in the Gujarat riots cases and instead focused its efforts on doing some actual developmental work, many of those ideas rightfully was thought of in its time (which i'll give credit for). But they lacked big time on execution. Modi had a proven track record in Gujarat which helped him beat Congress in 2014 elections. He just has brought most of Congress's plans to fruition which Congress doesn't like for obvious reasons.
UPA losing power is its own doing more than BJP's coming to power. Heck even Modi keeps taunting Congress in the Parliament saying that most of the policies that Congress opposes today was all their own plans that they never brought to life. That's the reason the Opposition is unable to counter BJP. BJP is just doing exactly what the Opposition promised in its manifesto when it came to development but never delivered.
> Wasn't the work on UPI started in 2009 and the vision statement was prepared in 2012
Is this[1] or is this not P. Chidambaram, Indian Finance Minister during the Congress-led UPA regime, criticizing the government's digital payment plans? You think such a pessimistic guy or his government would have done anything to make UPI a success except in a half-hearted fashion?
There is a saying: success has many fathers while failure is an orphan. No wonder when UPI has turned out to be a resounding success, people either turn up to claim credit or to run down the success of the current government.
The fact that they are elected by electoral college does not make them non-democratic or non-elected. We live in a representative democracy.
> As a fellow NRI, this is counter to what I hear from my fellow Indians. There is a ton of optimism around jobs, infrastructure growth and economic policies that are finally opening up the nation
One wouldn't rely on anecdotal evidence to justify policy. For example my own experience is the opposite of yours. I hear complains about unemployment, lack of safety for women, cost of living crisis, lack of safety of Muslims.
> Every big nation that has successfully escaped poverty has done so through suffocatingly authoritarian means
Just because others failed doesn't mean we should too. Keep in Mind that the Republic of India has survived until now, and people at it's inception said it wouldn't.
Wow! Most of what you mentioned is plain wrong. Not sure if you are mistaken or lying knowingly.
>> The ban on crop burning (main cause of Delhi's pollution) was central to the farm bill.
Crop burning is already outlawed in India and enforced with fines. Why you need to make a new law for something which is already illegal? Below was the actual central idea of the farm bill:
"The laws would have deregulated a system of government-run wholesale markets, allowing farmers to sell directly to food processors, but farmers feared that this would result in the end of government-guaranteed price floors, thereby reducing the prices they would receive for their crops."[1]
>> We do not vote for Presidents in India.
Again, wrong. The 2022 Indian presidential election was held on 18 July 2022 to elect the president of India. The election was the 16th presidential election in India since the Partition. [2]
>> incompetent ~6th generation heir of the Nehru/Gandhi family
Source please?
>> There is a ton of optimism around jobs, infrastructure growth and economic policies
Source please? You must be living in an alternate world.
>> Every single one of them only transitioned to a proper liberal democracy
So, China is a "proper liberal democracy" as per you? Also can you please share a source to support your claims?
Stubble burning was long banned but it's still being practiced and contributes to Delhi's pollution. In fact, one of the demands of the farm protests was to release those who were arrested for stubble burning[1].
> Again, wrong. The 2022 Indian presidential election was held on 18 July 2022 to elect the president of India.
It's not a general election. Only MPs and MLAs get to vote for the president.
> Source please? You must be living in an alternate world.
There are indeed concerns on job growth but infrastructure growth and economic policies have caught pace in the last decade. There's a reason why Meta, Google and Aramco want to pour money into the country.
Looks like you are trying to respond to be without understanding the topic first and your above comment does not relate.
My reply was to this comment which said:
1. "The ban on crop burning (main cause of Delhi's pollution) was central to the farm bill"
2. "We do not vote for Presidents in India. The president was selected by the ruling party"
Can you please let me know how any of above 2 statements are correct?
Also, to your other comment:
>> There's a reason why Meta, Google and Aramco want to pour money into the country.
Companies like Meta, Google and Aramco invest and try to invest in all the counties for their own growth. This is also to target the huge population of India. These companies also invested in China, that does not make China any better. Can you please share a source for "infrastructure growth and economic policies have caught pace"?
> "We do not vote for Presidents in India. The president was selected by the ruling party"
The President of India is voted by electoral college. We live in a representative democracy. Just because the President is voted by electoral college doesn't mean they are not elected. Keep in mind that the Prime Minister of India is also not directly elected, they are chosen by the Lok Sabha.
Banning doesn't take care of the problem completely unless there is a mechanism to take stubble away from the farmers. If there is no mechanism, people will burn it to get rid.
That he is incompetent ? I mean, even the most ardent congress fan won't deny that Rahul Gandhi is incompetent at best and a BJP plant at worst. He oversaw the downfall of the freest of wins in world politics anywhere.
>> He oversaw the downfall of the freest of wins in world politics anywhere.
BJP under Modi-Shah lost 8 states, 218 by-elections in last two years [1]
Karnataka and Himachal Pradesh are the two states where the BJP has lost to Congress in the last six months. The BJP lost deposits in 38.4% of the seats it contested in Southern Karnataka. [2] [3]
Modi was the face of election campaign and spent whole centre government money and machinery to campaign. Modi speaks a script written by someone else by using a teleprompter and has never given an open & live unscripted press conference in last 8 years ([4] [5] [6]). By your logic, are you trying to say Modi is also incompetent?
>> The exact line you quoted, literally ends with an "if at all" in brackets right after.
Got it. So you are hoping some day China will transition to democracy AFTER industrialization had been achieved, and you think India might need to convert to an authoritarian state in order to successfully escaped poverty? Is my understanding correct?
Also, you haven's still answered my 2 questions:
1. How is "The ban on crop burning (main cause of Delhi's pollution) was central to the farm bill."?
2. What do you mean about this: "We do not vote for Presidents in India. The president was selected by the ruling party"?
> The ban on crop burning (main cause of Delhi's pollution) was central to the farm bill. But protesting farmers (widely supported in the west) opposed it, and the bill died despite having democratic approval (both national opinion and sufficient votes)
Funny you are being downvoted because you are speaking the truth. I have already said in another comment that people like the current party because they actually get shit done in various areas like infrastructure etc which was hugely neglected for decades. We all know that but some people wouldn't want to accept.
May be you are on same page with the parent poster. But I answered to the parent comment mentioning most of the claims are wrong.
Btw, selling government assets to private companies, or getting the new roads constructed and charging tolls on them does not exactly considered as a government achievement.
For non Indians, NRI = Non Resident Indian i.e. an Indian who lives outside India. In case someone wondered.
It is easy to shit on the party in office which is BJP right now but show me a country that can have hundreds of languages, all religions and still survive for centuries as one country. Europe couldn't do it. They broke into EU (for better or worse). There are flaws but India is a complex country of various cultures and you have to understand the nuances.
Congress party ruled India for decades after Independence in 1947 and all they could do was to keep India as a 3rd world country while other similar countries progressed economically. Fun fact: Until the early 1980s, India and China were same econonically when COngress ruled India for decades. And talk about authoritarianism ? Who was the one who declared emergency in 1974 and suspended all "civil rights". That was Indira Gandhi from Congress, the so called "secular" party.
My point is that there is no saint and people in india like BJP because they are at least doing some work in various areas including infrastructure, economy and areas that have been neglected for decades. So yea, people wanted change and they got change with Modi as a strong leader.
Source: Also an NRI who is a naturalized US Citizen and I see a lot of positives among all the negatives that Media loves to portray.
Is "Congress party also bad!" still a primary defence of Mr. Modi who is in power for about 10 years now?
I think NRIs are praising Modi because he is helping with the fall of Rupee as compared to other currencies so NRIs get maximum return when they send home USD.
Will you be able to share some examples of "at least doing some work in various areas"?
1. I see BJP government as expert in data manipulator and creating smoke screens through their network of social media cell and mainstream TV channels. [1]
2. As per Govt data, over 80 crore people in India currently depend upon government for free food. [2]
3. Modi government manipulated the GDP calculation method to show higher GDP growth. [3]
4. Modi government changed the calculation method to measure the length of highways. Going by lane km, the total length of highways constructed during 2017-18 fiscal comes to 34,378 km as against 9829 km if counted linearly. [4]
Ok I will bite. I travel to India once or twice a year for both pleasure and business. I can only tell you what I feel and see. I see incredible infrastructure changes even though India still has long way to go compared to other developed or even developing nations. Tons of airports being built and improved. Many highways being built and even completed in last few years.
"changed the calculation method to measure the length of highways."
Do I think Modi Govt doesn't manipulate some data ? Oh you bet they do. But I see real progress regardless and you cannot just throw some stats to change my mind. I see progress and I commend it and welcome it. Most people who live there don't care that Govt is manipulating how they measure the length of highways. They see that highways are being built. Congress didn't do shit for decades when my parents grew up in real shit 3rd world infrastructure. We are much better off in last decade or so.
I will agree with you that India has a long way to go but change is happening no matter how slow.
As per govt, out of 140 crore Indians, 80 crore rely on government for free food. That is 57% of Indians need government help for free food. [1]
If You Earn Rs 25,000 (USD 300) Per Month, You're Among India's Top 10% Income Earners [2]
>> I travel to India once or twice a year for both pleasure and business. I can only tell you what I feel and see.
You may be able to travel to India and got 1 USD converted to INR 80, then may be its a win for you, but not for other Indians. I am not sure, but you might have been able to afford somewhat better way to travel/stay/eat than most of the Indians can. So what you feel and see might not be closer to reality for most of Indians.
>> I see incredible infrastructure changes...
So if a few private companies own most of India's infra, and building shopping malls, or if few politically connected builders building high rise buildings, or if roads/flyovers being built by private companies for which public will pay toll through their noses for years to come, then in my humble opinion, this is is not real development that you should give credit to the government. This is indeed the failure of the government.
>> Tons of airports being built and improved.
Government did sell a number of already built airports to Adani. Now Adani may make it a shiny new airpot and start charging fees for everything in airport but I don't see it as an achievement of Government. [3]
The government changed the highway measuring methodology in 2018 [1].
Under new methodology, highway stretch built = Number of lanes * kilometer stretch.
This is actually the international standard. However, when the current government compares itself with prior government, it compares apples with oranges: new methodology numbers versus old methodology numbers.
Indian highway engineers still can't figure out how to design exists and have consistent road markings/safety signs. Let them come up with a standard or enforce the already existing one first.
Very rare to see slip lanes even in normal roads of Tier 1 cities.
The rupee is falling until it doesn’t and reverses course. The rupee falls because of numerous reasons primary among them being increased imports of oil and gas due to high growth. Increased exports have just started showing up in the numbers as India exported $750bn in exports for the first time ever. With the work on solar (go read about the progress of international solar alliance and the work done in Gujarat etc), hydrogen, EVs, flex petrol, etc the demand for oil and gas will only go down in 5 years.
India’s economy is getting a push as is clearly visible from some indisputable numbers like the digital transactions, sales of cars, homeowners count, etc. It’s just that all sources of income are not yet formalized in the huge country that is India so there is some extrapolation that needs to be done.
The Guinness book has recognized the Indian govt’s work for the most kilometers of roads constructed in a day and the new methodology is in use in other countries like the US as per the Minister, then it means the foreigners must be okay with manipulated numbers.
> It is easy to shit on the party in office which is BJP right now but show me a country that can have hundreds of languages, all religions and still survive for centuries as one country. Europe couldn't do it. They broke into EU (for better or worse).
I have no idea what you’re referring to here. Europe has never been one country, and will likely never be. Having smaller countries isn’t something bad, nobody would consider multiple Europeans countries to be a failure, or the result of a broken Europe. Even proponents of a United States of Europe (I am one) don’t see having multiple European countries as a failure.
The Balkans, Africa & the sub-continent are proven examples of the kind of blood that's shed during partition, secession and civil wars.
If you're a proponent of the balkanization of India, then you're by default a proponent of of the biggest as-of-yet-unrealized genocide of the 21st century.
India became 'India' in 1947. Before that (and even now) it was exactly like Europe ... many languages and cultures and food very very different from each other (ask a Naga what he has in common with Tamilians or Kashmiris), a large shared Hindu ethos similar to how Christianity was a common factor for Europe) and lots of warring kings with their own territories. There was no "Indian" identity.
About Congress ... no defence about their fuckups. But don't be so dismissive about what they accomplished. I say this as no fan of Indira Gandhi.
Remember that India had become free after 200 years of enslavement and harm to our self-image, from being one of the world's richest areas to the poorest, and millions of lives had been torn asunder under partition.
In Congress's era, esp. Jawaharlal Nehru's time, we got a beautiful constitution, the premier institutions and facilities (TIFR, IISc, IITs, FTII, BARC, AIIMS), developed a massive power infrastructure with hydel and nuclear, became a nuclear strong power, developed an in-house rocket and satellite program etc. It had a strong court system; recall that Indra Gandhi was thrown out by the Allahabad supreme court on electoral fixing.
Manmohan Singh was (and is) a learned economist who righted many of IG's fuckups. He led the 1991 reforms. A large large portion of the projects that Modi has lent his beaming face to were fully funded and started in the Manmohan era (Chandrayaan, Mangalyaan, Atal tunnel, UPI, Aadhar, so many airports and highways). The Modi govt has been successful in rebranding all of them in his image, but don't be fooled.
I can give you a huge laundry list of things that are terrible under Modi. The COVID response, the complete takeover of august institutions by deranged Hindus, the complete submission of the media, the complete takeover of massive projects by a few crony friends (a profitable and well-run Mumbai airport was taken over by Adani, who literally had zero experience in running airports, with no formal publicly transparent process). The "PM Cares" fund, which every single govt employee and every corporate was FORCED to hand over money too, apparently is not a fund of the govt; there is no transparency about how much money has been collected, let alone spent where. I could go on about how every minority (Dalits, Muslims, tribals) have been rogered.
All I see is a lot of whataboutism to justify some truly heinous actions that have been committed in the past several years.
Yeah, Indira Gandhi wasn’t great either. Congress has its flaws.
None of that justifies the actions of today. Yes, the BJP has done some good things, but that’s true of many heinous authoritarians in the past as well.
No number of good things simply wash their hands of the bad stuff along the way.
I'm an NRI/US citizen, have worked/traveled in the country extensively, and have shared my thoughts on HN many times regarding my country of origin. There is a prevalent "Indian apologist" mentality both inside and outside the country, which applauds anyone spinning the "happy people living with less" or "beautiful ancient culture" montage and shouting down anyone trying to put the preponderance of societal problems into perspective.
No it’s just the Indian voter telling the West/white guy to shut up and mind one’s own business. He knows problems exist and have always existed but they are being magnified more to demean the leadership that is trying to solve more problems per unit time. Regime change is what the West excels at.
We are looking at a ruling government who uses AI to demean olympic winning athlete to protect a serial molester.
Somehow even after all this heinous acts I can see bunch of so called educated techies defending that ruling class. Is the hate for "other" religion so strong?
I agree. And unfortunately, I think we have reached an inflection point in India from which we cannot go back to the way things were just about 12-15 years ago.
Journalism will have to go back to trusting individual creators. If Joe Bloggs signs an image then at least I know Joe Bloggs asserts that image was correct. If that's a trustworthy person (someone I find trustworthy), that's one way.
Of course how well that scales is another matter, but if Joe Bloggs loses my trust then I remove him from my "trusted sources" list.
The chain of integrity will be there, defined by more than just a byline. I may trust say Steve Rosenburg to tell me the truth if he posts a picture of something in Moscow, but if he misleads me then he loses that trust.
Ultimately it's of no difference to trusting what someone writes or says. I might trust a story with a byline on www.cnn.com, that's one thing. I won't however trust a screen capture of something implying it was shown on CNN.
Of course the main stream view for the last 15 years is to believe that journalists are always lying to you and always wrong, which is fine, you just have to accept that if you want to "do your own research" on say what's happening in Turkey with the election, you need to go to Turkey, spend a few years there getting to know and trust many different sources with many different world views.
India is a fine specimen for anyone wanting to observe 1930s-40s first hand.
A far right party with a popular/charismatic leader is using religion as a basis to all the problems India faces. We have extra-legal forces acting as vigilantes against people of a community. They have a very strong support in the majority. Media is in totality controlled by ruling party and social media is saturated with noise and false discourse. No other nation will speak against them because of geo-politics and honestly same religion is hated almost everywhere. Though lot more pragmatic and not a globe-capturing maniac, but rest of the world is complimenting for that.
I believe we are on a strong path to revisit that event in late 30s though hopeful against it as now 6 million and 2 nukes are rookie numbers.
The world has gotten well along with dictatorships like China, Saudi Arabia, and Russia (till they directly threatened the West). I am sure they can work with an authoritarian India.
I would also like to share examples on how Modi Government Jails every honest opposition leader who does development work for general public and gets popular.
2 leaders of Aam Aadmi Party (a primary opponent to PM Modi) are lodged in Jail for months without trial. Same judge appointment by Modi government somehow gets all the cases related to Aam Aadmi Party and orders to extend the judicial custody month after month.
Satyendra Jain, the man behind world famous Delhi Mohalla Clinic (Neighbourhood Clinic) is in jail awaiting trial since May 2022 on allegations of money laundering. [1] [2] [3]
Manish Sisodia, the man behind public education revolution in New Delhi is in jail awaiting trial since Feb 2023 on allegations of corruption in creating Delhi Excise Policy. [4] [5] [6]
All the leaders you mentioned have accumulated and hoarded cash which was disclosed in IT raids. There is an ongoing investigation on how they sold liquor licenses for cash. They are jailed as per court orders after investigation.
BJP in India does not fight elections based on any development agendas like education/healthcare or social security.
They pretends to the majority Hindu public that "Hindus are in danger from Muslims" and only BJP can protect them. They also project themselves as true nationalists and anyone having anti-government views is declared a "Pakistani" or anti-national.
As terrible as the government is, i want the foreigners here to understand that op also has his own agenda, this above reply shows their intentions. All indian political parties are low quality trash in their own ways.
I am playing a role that any well functioning journalist should play. Question the government and point out any wrong doings. Isn't is a core aspect of democracy? Do you see anything wrong in that?
>> All indian political parties are low quality trash in their own ways.
Agree. But the one having power currently is the focus. Be it any party.
You are not a journalist, you are a hack. You are not presenting a balanced opinion.
You are biased and presenting a distorted view which you know is an easy sell here.
From your posts you seem like a Typical Indian Redditor / Twitter activist.
Who believes they have great potential in life, have nothing to show for it.
So come here to sh!t on your country to get validation of Western people.
Few HN karma points to make yourself feel like you have some value in this world.
The typical Slave Mentality liberal that exists in India and Pakistan.
A sad gift of the colonialism.
You should work for Al jazeera, BBC, NYT etc
They like to keep pets like you to parrot their talking points.
When the entire Left bootlickers like Al Jazeera, CNN, NYT were criticizing the Indian Govt in 2020 onwards - They laid the foundation for growth.
When your America is going broke and again increasing it's Debt Ceiling to pay for the survival of the populace, India is the fastest growing Economy in the world.
A Billion Indians can decide who to vote for.
Don't need some entitles White guys and their brown lackeys in BBC, Al Jazeera to come and tell us how to lead their lives.
If your White Intellectuals had any capability your entire Western Economies wouldn't be in doldrums.
The wisest thing Western Economists are capable of is increasing the Debt Ceiling repeatedly and printing money.
Then bribe the dumb populace with welfare to vote for the same govt again.
It has lots of religions and cultures, yeah. But there is a dominant one. And like the US is a Christian nation de-facto, India is a Hindu nation de-facto.
The bigger driving thing is that the party in power has two massive things in their favour: widespread economic growth and prosperity.
While India mostly runs through coalition politics, there are two broad bands: the nationalist religious-fundamentalist market-economics band and the high-regulation nominally-secular band.
It's quite nuanced, but ultimately, India has raised 400 million out of poverty in the last 20 years, electrified vastly, and built rail and road infrastructure at a crucial moment in their demographic transition.
The resulting goodwill is of the "it's about the economy, stupid" sense but also a national feeling that perhaps the "others" were, after all, "holding us back" because the current opposition presided over a period of administration over many decades where setting up businesses required paying off the right guy, etc.
To make it worse, the opposition coalition head is a dynastic scion who is not very smart.
So, the shift to the right is natural because the right is the only one giving them anything.
India’s promise of secularism has always been fragile.
The current party, the BJP, has strong roots in Hindu nationalism. It’s basically taken over a decade but they’ve successfully distorted the promise enshrined in our national anthem of an India for all.
There is no "necessarily" about it, but it's obviously how history ended up unfolding. The big cultural-media-pop conflict in the west this very moment is centered around acceptance of diversity regarding gay and trans folks.
People are bad with labels; diversity is associated with liberalism, which often gets conflated with a whole spectrum of other positions from social-democrat to actual Marxists (who tend not to be all that pro-diversity, depending on how "tankie" they are)
Here's the definition of Hindutva according to the Supreme Court, if anyone's curious
“Hindutva is understood as a way of life of state of mind and is not to be equated with or understood as religious Hindu fundamentalism…it is a fallacy and error of law to proceed on the assumption…that the use of words Hindutva or Hinduism per se depicts an attitude hostile to all persons practicing any religion other than the Hindu religion.”
> it's imperative people know what the actual definition
This reminds me of the hacker/cracker and crypto qua -currency/-tography debates. Or, more pointedly, the Daughters of the Confederacy.
Legal definitions aren’t “actual definitions.” Nobody likes a term they’ve adopted to be coöpted. But it happens, and it’s happened with hindutva in English.
World has moved towards authoritarian governments. Haven't seen a good reason why this push but there seems to be correlated to the amount information people have access to(eg: social networks, digital media etc).
> What's with India and the shift towards the right?
Successful republics appear to waver between stable liberalism and dynamic authoritarianism. We were relatively authoritarian in the Pinkerton and New Deal eras. Modi is delivering on a proven enthnonationalism liberal-economic playbook. It’s hard to argue against fattening pocketbooks and rising living standards.
How will we verify photos and videos without dissolving in to endless speculation? I’m genuinely asking as this is something I’ve been worried about for a while.
The only thing I can think of is storing a hash or “phash” with a trusted third party that can then be used to later verify which image is the original. For video, store the hash/phash of the frames with timestamps. But would that even work? How do you back-verify that something was captured at a specific time when the device was offline during capture?
You can't. All photos may be fake or manipulated. You can't trust a photo. You need to decide if you trust those who are vouching for a particular photo.
Imagine for example that you’re a high-ranking politician. You have staff and PR departments and the whole entourage. You take photos regularly and you want those photos to be public to keep building your brand. It’s just a fact that the public won’t fully trust you if there’s a smear campaign, but you have the originals of everything and that’s very powerful if the public can validate them as original.
I’m sure we already have the technology needed to build the tools do that validation, I just don’t know what the winning choices are yet.
No, that would not work. You can apply a filter and immediately after compute a hash. For now, the fake pictures are rather easy to spot to a trained eye.
>> For video, store the hash/phash of the frames with timestamps. But would that even work?
That would not work, because how do you prove that hash has been computed before video manipulation? Already, the imaging chips do some processing, so you never get the true raw image from the CMOS sensor.
Yes, I agree. I don’t think that method could be used if the manipulator was the person taking the photo or the one doing the initial processing. I’m (personally) less concerned about the true raw image vs lossy compression (i.e. JPG), and more concerned with things like the OP where an existing image was changed to show detainees smiling and that image was then used to manipulate the public.
The way it is now, it could easily have turned in to a “he said, she said” situation with each side claiming that their pic is the real one and the other’s was manipulated. In a case like that we could (theoretically) look back in the record to see which hash was recorded first.
>> For video, store the hash/phash of the frames with timestamps. But would that even work?
That would not work, because how do you prove that hash has been computed before video manipulation? Already, the imaging chips do some processing, so you never get the original raw image from the CMOS sensor.
I don’t think that’s going to be enough. How do you verify that it’s them who is responding, or that they are not being coerced? (before anyone comments, yes I know I’m taking this to the extreme, but if we handle the extreme cases we handle the easier ones too)
The sad thing is they will probably win again in 2024. The damage that 15 years of BJP has done to the social fabric of India, and the undermining of the core founding principles of the republic will last for generations. It's hard to imagine it going away :(
Unfortunately BJP has compromised most of the pillars of democracy. Almost all the mainstream "journalist" openly support the BJP Government. You will find them insulting and fighting with opposition leaders in TV debates everyday. They will hold special TV shows to justify all the actions of government. They will show BJP as winning in most of the elections right till the last moment.
The judges of courts are getting post retirement posts from the government. For example, Ranjan Gogoi, served as Chief Justice of India and gave many decisions in favour of ruling party and he got nominated to Rajaya Sabha by president after his retirement. [1] He was also accused of sexual harassment, and the lady was found to be a target of snooping by BJP government through her mobile phone by using pegasus spyware. [2]
While Congress and other parties have many faults, they’re still a damn sight better than the party that is trying to degrade human rights for non-Hindus.
Sometimes you just need to hold your nose and vote for the best option, even if they’re flawed. The road to a better tomorrow is paved with compromises that get us there.
>While Congress and other parties have many faults, they’re still a damn sight better
This is clearly an inflammatory opinion with no substantial backing provided, I'd love to hear your reasoning for coming to this conclusion. Indian politics isn't as black and white as you're making it out to be.
> It's not like other parties have any morals in the first place.
This is the line of thinking that has led to the BJPs success. The fact that people have been convinced that the opposition is not a viable alternative is a shame.
While it's true that the opposition has many faults, no other party has undermined the core founding principles of the republic the way the BJP has, except for perhaps Indira Gandhi.
We are used to a time when constitutional rights were suspended and state governments were dismissed on the whim. Regardless of what happens to BJP, India will continue to move ahead.
Most Indians were never secular. Before, they hadn’t got a voice or representation. BJP came into power by tapping into the latent sentiment in majority of Indians.
It's much like how Trump was elected.
If you think that majority of Indians were ever secular, I think that you never left the bubble of upper middle class, city based society.
Hindus are, generally much more advanced than Muslim in terms of education, finances, etc. and couldn’t be bothered to cause communal violence because they have much more to lose. And the ones that are left behind, didn't have a uniting force. BJP/RSS has accomplished that.
The people lynching Muslim for eating beef are very rural, very uneducated Hindus with much less to lose. And the rest of them openly support them.
I will say, 80-95% of Hindus were never ever secular. BJP is creating new zealots now, but they didn't need to do so to come to power.
BJP is also hard at work at creating a single, homogeneous Hindu and Indian identity, where something more of a cultural sphere existed, to create fanatics to their cause. They're re-engineering Indian society in a way that we've seen end up in tears for everyone in the past, in other places.
I'm not Indian, but I heard that there is also a rift between south Indians (Tamil) and the northerners. Are Tamils Hindu as well? Where do they play into this?
The problem with all civil rights movements is, any ground gained can be easily removed later. Technology like this is almost the perfect tool for doing so. Buckle up it's not going to be pretty.
India, under its current leadership of Modi's Hindutva government is a near-term threat to its minorities, opposition and dissenting voices. If it goes unchecked, it won't be long before a global threat emerges. Modi himself is one of the propagators of fake news and hate speech. He dog-whistles his social media army to systematically spread communal division and consolidate Hindu votes. Most of the mainstream media is already under his cronies like Adani. The most recent one to fall is NDTV, which used to be an independent voice. If there is one country to watch out for the misuse of AI for political gains, it would be India especially with elections happening in the next year.
The 1st step in turning a seemingly democratic country in a dictatorship is to control the media. Not the 1st time it happens, but this time it is way more serious.
Of course the new dictatorship needs to be soft enough to be palatable for other EU members and NATO allies, therefore I don't expect black shirt patrols with batons attacking people unfriendly to the regime down the street or at their home, at least not in a systematic way like a century ago, yet things are going to suck badly over here if nobody stops those bastards in power ASAP.
Hold your horses, this is false equivalence. India is no where near China or Russia, Turkey may be closest thing but that is also kind of false. State governments in India are powerful and that complicates many things.
India is very much like Turkey, though perhaps no where as close to China or Russia.
State governments in India are not powerful, and they never have been! The constitution of India grants much more power to the Central Government than it does to the State Governments. The BJP government has pushed the boundary of federalism again and again. Here are some concrete examples:
1. Denial of statehood to Jammu and Kashmir.
2. Using the Centre-appointed governor to take down the Govt. of Maharashtra.
3. Constant pushback on policies and appointments made by the Govt. of Delhi.
>> State governments in India are not powerful, and they never have been!
Time to time center was able to disrupt state governments but the states have enormous latitude on taxation, duties and policies. For much of India's existence each state is its own parallel system. The whole GST is trying to harmonize the taxing in India across States and that came what 75 years after Independence.
Exactly this, The ruling party has literally lost elections in Karnataka, they're very far from exerting unilateral influence on the entire country, much less becoming a dictatorship
1. BJP still control most of the mainstream media.
2. BJP has in past offered plum post retirement positions to judges after they delivered some controversial decisions in favour of BJP.
3. BJP has full control on Election commission, and the electronic voting machines. Despite multiple reposts of voting machines found in cars of BJP candidates, or videos of faulty machines showing votes in favour of BJP, and despite calls for letting opposition parties inspect machines, Election commission has never let them inspect the machines.
4. A large number of bigots are in various positions in various administrative services and in recent years they have started showing their hate in open.
Wait. It's shared here as a matter of fact, is it proven that it was done by some 'IT Cell' of the ruling party? It's HN, not Reddit, Twitter, Facebook or Whatsapp. I'm not denying their existence, but unless it's official or proven information please don't share it here.
1) First of all, state shouldn't involve in any type of religious activities let alone giving priority to one particular religion. It's written in the Constitution and it's the base for any modern society(Especially US's First Amendment). You should foresee the consequences of this. What if a muslim PM get elected in the long future and he invites all Islamic priests?
2) Yes, you have mentioned some of the things that India did on secular grounds. But that doesn't refute the present context. Still wrong doings are happening. Instead of focusing on those, should we remember all the past events and be silent?
3) Islam invades Hindus, then let's Hindus mob-lynch Muslims. Always stuck in who slaughters who. No progress towards right secular habits.
> It is only in "secular" India that organized religious conversions were allowed that led to Christians going from less that 1% of the population 100 years ago to 90% today in some states
But all that happened before India was even fully independent so how is it relevant? Are you saying Christian should be forcibly converted back to Hinduism?
I'd partly disagree, there are reports of forced conversions to Islam in Kashmir, and women being raped and murdered on refusing to do so long after independence, as recent as 2021.
> Secularism in modern India is a synonym for Hinduphobia ...
1. Secularism is a constitutional principle enshrined in fundamental rights in the Indian constitution. The fundamental *Right to Equality* in the Indian constitution already implies this. Although, the word *secular* was added explicitly to the constitution through the 42nd Amendment (in 1976), it has been implictly read in through various Supreme Court rulings. The dishonest equivalence of secularism with Hinduphobia is by those who want to attack the Right to Equality.
2. The comment mentions polygamy permitted under Muslim personal law. Marriages in India are governed by personal laws. There was a time when inter-religion/inter-caste marriages were illegal. Polygamy among Hindus was legal until 1956 when the Hindu Marriage Act (a personal law) was amended to outlaw polygamy. There is a landmark case currently underway on the equality of marriage sought by LGBTQ+ individuals to bring same-sex marriage the same legal protections as marriage between a man and a woman. This is an evolving legal area. The courts are quite conscious of the fact that not everyone, including Hindus want personal laws to be overturned (as it also impacts succession, property rights etc.,). There will be broad based support for overturning some anachronistic personal laws due to intersectionality (eg: Hindu gay men wanting to marry or Muslim women wanting triple-Talaq (divorce) law overtuned).
> It is only in "secular" India that organized religious conversions were allowed (emphasis added) ...
3. It is right there in the constitution. Article 25 (1) states that: *Subject to public order, morality and health and to the other provisions of this Part, all persons are equally entitled to freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess, practise and propagate religion*
4. The word *propagate religion* includes religious conversions. So, proselytizing is covered by the constituion. The law also says *forcible conversions* are illegal since it infringes on right to freely practice one's religion. Of course, the fascists will equate all proselytizing with forcible conversions.
The constitution can say whatever it wants. The only thing that matters is what actually happens on the ground. Successive governments have adopted Hinduphobic positions and laws while claiming to be secular. Why are only Hindu temples under the control of various state governments? Why don't governments take similar control of cathedrals, churches and mosques?
There is example after example proving my position. All you have is some words in a document that are belied by the actions of those meant to observe it.
> Right to Equality
Religious minorities can run their own schools where they can teach their children their way of life? Can Hindus do this qua Hindus? Again, words in a document that contradict other words in the same document.
> Hindu Marriage Act (a personal law) was amended to outlaw polygamy
Why were Muslims not given the same benefits or punished in the same manner (whichever way you want to look at it)? How can you be secular and equal if two men or two women are treated differently before the law for the exact same action? This is a joke masquerading as justice.
> Of course, the fascists will equate all proselytizing with forcible conversions.
You can believe that Christianity is so superior to local religious practices that an entire state almost completely adopted the religion voluntarily in 3-4 generations. Given the history of Christian missionaries in India, South America and other parts of the world and the tactics they adopted, this is a simplistic argument/position.
There is literature available from Missionaries, in their own words, as to their opinions about Indian religious traditions and the people practicing them. Arun Shourie has written a couple of books on the subject.[1][2]
An individual here or there converting to a different faith is one thing. When religions conversions are used to shift demography, this has national security implications. Separatist movements grew in Kashmir and Nagaland. The partition of India was done on Muslim vs. non-Muslim lines where Muslim-majority provinces became Pakistan. Onlygodists will always be in conflict with Manygodists because their worldviews are fundamentally different.
Organized conversions must be banned. If the constitution has to be amended to do it, so be it.
[1] Missionaries in India: Continuities, Changes, Dilemmas
[2] Harvesting Our Souls: Missionaries, Their Design, Their Claims
> Why are only Hindu temples under the control of various state governments?
That is because historically, a lot of the land (farm and non-farm) came under the Hindu temples when the temples were under the administration of kings. The British East India Company took over the administration which then transferred to the provinces (prior to independence) and then the states post-independence. Different states then passed laws. For eg: See https://hrce.tn.gov.in/hrcehome/hrce_about.php for Tamilnadu state's Hindu religious and charitable endowments department.
> Religious minorities can run their own schools where they can teach their children their way of life? Can Hindus do this qua Hindus?
Ofcourse they do. I studied in a school ran by a Hindu trust and we had students from all religions. There was morning devotional prayers (Hindu hymns), friday bhajans (singing religious hymns) etc., and everyone attended. Stop spreading this hate about us vs them.
> When religions conversions are used to shift demography, this has national security implications
Ah, the national security bogeyman! Why don't you try shifting the demography of the armed forces to address that? I think men and women in defence forces from all religious backgrounds would have something to say about that.
A "secular" state will treat all places of prayer and worship the same. If it controls only Hindu temples but not churches and mosques, it is not "secular."
> Ofcourse they do.
The constitution and the RTE act treat minority and non-minority institutions differently. Everything from the funding structure, to what can be taught, to how the teachers are appointed, to whether religious education can be imparted differs. Hindu institutions can do certain things but under restrictions that are not applicable to minorities. Again, this second-class treatment is considered to be "secular."
> Stop spreading this hate about us vs them.
I am not the Onlygodist here. It is Onlygodism that creates us vs them.
> national security bogeyman
So the insurgency in Kashmir and Nagaland does not have religious characteristics and is purely secular in nature? The partition of India was done on a purely secular basis?
> Hindu institutions can do certain things but under restrictions that are not applicable to minorities. Again, this second-class treatment is considered to be "secular.
An argument can be made than Hindu institutions are already dominant and without certain laws curtailing what they can do/giving special privileges to minorities balances this out to some degree.
And analogy with company law/regulation could be made. Different rules generally apply to monopolies and corporations controlling majority of their respective markets than to smaller companies to prevent them from abusing their position.
I would be happy if the constitution openly stated that Hindus must remain second-class citizens in the eyes of the law and that minorities will be first-class citizens. This is hardly any different from zimmi/dhimmi status accorded to non-Muslims under Islamic rule.
> Hindu institutions are already dominant
If you apply this logic at state or district levels, the so-called minorities are in a majority in many districts and states. It then follows that churches in Nagaland and mosques in Kashmir should be under state control and Hindus should be accorded minority status in those states.
> analogy with company law/regulation
Companies do not exist freely in nature. They are a creation of the State and exist at the pleasure of the State. One cannot treat individuals like that and then talk about equality and secularism.
What kind of nonsense is that? Just because Christians are dominant in the West, does it mean that their secular govts should control Christian institutions in their countries?
I assumed state control of Hindu institutions actually gives them advantages over other sects? (like state funding etc.)
> does it mean that their secular govts should control Christian institutions in their countries?
Well… that was the main reason why the reformation happened and that was the case in many countries for a long time. Clearly it gave these state run churches a massive advantage over other denominations (of course European countries have moved away from this in last 100-200 years).
I thought it worked similarly in India as well (i.e. your argument is that India is not truly secular because the state is still supporting Hindu institutions more than Christian/Muslim ones?) Of course I don’t really know anything about organizational structure of Hinduism? I assume it’s extremely decentralized compared to most Christian churches, which would mean ensuring funding without government support would be more complicated?
Ever wondered why these "laws" were not repealed or even questioned by the ruling party in the last 9 years, even with an overwhelming majority in parliament?
For the same reason that the Republicans continue believing, in the face of overwhelming evidence, that they have a chance with black voters.
No matter what the BJP tries, they will never get more than 10-15% of the Muslim vote. Hindus accept laws contrary to their interests. Muslims come out on the streets and arm twist their political beneficiaries into reversing judgements and acts that they perceive to be against their interests.[1]
There are ways of engaging with communities in democracy, rather than creating laws which one group ( majority ) think is right. which is not a great suite of the current ruling party, to be honest. Farmer laws, demonetization etc are some of examples.
BTW, If a party cannot do what is required for the country, they probably are not right for ruling the country.
It is relevant because the PM is touting the new parliament building as ushering Indian into a new age of democracy, calling the building a temple of democracy; while dissenting voices outside are being stifled as the wrestlers are being arrested.
The news is accurate, but not particularly newsworthy. This was posted by an unofficial, loosely defined group of accounts called the "IT cell" - not very different from MAGA folks or far-left account clusters. The linked news source (alt news) is an opposition news source/blog.
Mohammed Zubair and Pratik Sinha are Indian journalists and the co-founders of Alt News, an Indian non-profit fact-checking website. They were nominated for the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize. They have fact checked the claims from all political parties. [1]
>> Zubair was arrested and incarcerated by the Delhi Police for a month. His detention raised further concerns about the state of India's press freedom under Narendra Modi's premiership and was widely criticized by journalistic bodies, human rights organizations and the political opposition who allege that the arrest was an act of revenge against his role in Alt News' work of combating disinformation.[1]
The intriguing part of such stuff is how the impact of these things is both short and long, such asymmetry of the individual vs the state. At the (population) scale of India, this is particularly heinous.
In the near term, it is designed to mislead the public perception. In the long term, it both creates a chilling effect of what consequences protesting may have… and will anyone remember that these pictures were manipulated “for effect” decades from now? Will they fuel other echo chambers?
I very much doubt the public understands the precipice (and precedents) that these malicious actions lead us all down.
Deep fakes were always a huge concern for me in AI. That's just one way AI can be weaponized, and this example is very clear on the damage caused. Thankfully Twitter quickly corrects the issue, but sadly only because it became viral. Sadly, Twitter won't be able to correct all of the little cases of AI misuse that don't go viral.
To give more context to outsiders these are olympic medal winning athletes protesting against a serial molester who happens to be part of ruling government. To discredit these athletes ruling government's "IT Cell" is using AI to show they are not sincere enough even after police brutally stopped their protest.
No media entity reported on this gross in justice as all of them have already sold their soul.
Every time I think Modi's RW government can't go any lower they prove me wrong. World should be worried that soon to be third largest economy is going to ruled by a political force who are inspired by Nazi. These are some of the quotes from Golwalkar who was the brain behind the current militia Golwalkar https://twitter.com/jaskaransandhu_/status/10569508194997534...
How do we know that the non-smiling images are not the fakes? part of an operation to foment discontent with the ruling party by making a false accusation of dystopian manipulation of photographic evidence?
No, I don't think it likely. It's just we live in a world where this kind of stuff is just so easy to do now.
The article includes a video showing they were able to use FaceApp on the non-smiling photo to reproduce the smiling photo exactly.
They also include analysis comparing the smiling photo to other existing photos of those people smiling and note that in the smiling photo some people are depicted with dimples that the person doesn't actually have.
Regardless of the title or whatever, I noticed the same way how this was conducted (creating a fake image, then a group is used to spread such news, then the sabotage/attack starts), same approach been used in different political tweets, in India, Saudi, Tukey, and even in US, the only difference is in English speaking ones it was quickly to find they were fake and in return who spread it had a credibility issue later, it doesn’t seem to be the case in a non-english ones for some reason. And that approach happened before Musk takeover and after, is it something had to do with the user base mentality or tech literacy, or the way how twitter works, or maybe something else, but I never saw such “swarm” behavior except in Twitter.
> I mean rsa 2048 can be currently broken in 104 days
Only if one has a sufficiently-large fault-tolerant quantum computer with 10,000 qubits and 2.23 trillion quantum gates [0]. Which is currently an unachivium.
With this whole AI push, there have been pretty serious advancements in technology. I wouldn't doubt in 5 to 10 years will have a vastly different threat landscape. Nation states can afford supercomputers, so can some private corporations.
That doesn't seem too unbelievable. Maybe a sufficiently large LLM will be able to find a flaw in the algorithms or logic behind some encryption schemes which even our greatest monkey brains overlooked.
No, they cannot. LLMs are LANGUAGE models, not KNOWLDEGE models. They do not "know" what algorithms mean any more than they know what everything else they "talk about" mean.
What they are more than capable of is to produce really convincing hype, which claims that LLMs can do anything and everything.
Some skepticism is healthy, but I think you have a misconception about what an LLM is. Neural networks use machine learning to automagically find connections between data. Handwriting recognition is an example of this, as it's trivial to build a model that can recognize the differences between characters/digits, whereas writing an algorithm to do that effectively would be very difficult. You can train a model on sample data, and it will "learn" the patterns that make up a '7', 'G', 'O', etc with the same or better accuracy than a person.
Language models are more or less the same thing, except they're trained on human language. Since human language is an encoding of human thought processes, then the model learns the patterns of human thought which are embedded in text, and can both generate and recognize them.
This is why LLMs can "understand" and answer complicated questions that don't exist in their training set, and do things like debug code. Even though it never saw that exact question, it recognizes the high level/abstract concepts that make up the question (since those abstract concepts exist in various different forms in the training set).
So giving an LLM a textual description of an algorithm, and having it detect logical errors in it, is not that unbelievable. Whether current models are good enough to do it well is the question to ask.
I think you're accidentally making a jump in meta-levels:
The equivalent of an existing handwriting recognizer for e.g. RSA wouldn't be a model that tells you how to crack RSA, it'd be a model that _does_ crack it (maybe by returning a probability distribution over the plaintext that's better than uniform). That feels pretty unlikely to me personally, but maybe that's doable, who knows.
For the standard of "the LLM tells us how to crack RSA," it feels like the equivalent for handwriting recognition would be the LLM outputting a description of a novel algorithm for handwriting recognition (and probably one that isn't just an existing one with some hyperparameters tweaked).
My understanding of the weaknesses of current LLMs is that they're actually pretty bad at that, since they tend to regurgitating existing content when they're able to.
> The equivalent of an existing handwriting recognizer for e.g. RSA wouldn't be a model that tells you how to crack RSA, it'd be a model that _does_ crack it (maybe by returning a probability distribution over the plaintext that's better than uniform). That feels pretty unlikely to me personally, but maybe that's doable, who knows.
Well, my point was based on the assumption that there is a flaw/backdoor in RSA, but nobody has discovered it yet. So you'd just need a model that can take a textual description of the algorithm as input, and spit out a list of logical errors/flaws.
I'm not saying there is a flaw or backdoor, but if there were, then a LLM would potentially be able to find it, while a team of human experts could miss it.
A model that receives an RSA encrypted payload and outputs the decrypted version would of course be impossible unless the above assumption is true... or you give it access to some compute power so it can either try to brute-force it, or try to track down and hack the servers with the keys :P
> So you'd just need a model that can take a textual description of the algorithm as input, and spit out a list of logical errors/flaws.
Right, I'm saying that this is the thing that's dissimilar from handwriting recognition -- the nearer equivalent would an LLM creating a textual description of a novel approach to handwriting recognition, which as far as I'm aware, is beyond current models.
Most people think information is transmitted from source to receiver. This is actually wrong.
What happens is the information is creatively formed in the mind of the receiver, by the receiver, in all cases.
In other words, people form an explanation for the observation in their minds and judge it compared to other competing explanations.
So instead of the post-truth, doom-and-gloom world that you fear, another possible outcome is that people get better at forming or identifying good explanatory knowledge. In other words, the bar for what you call truth actually goes up and people get smarter.
An example of this happening would be door-to-door sales people. They basically no longer exist. Because people learned not to answer the door when a random person knocks.
The old explanation “someone I want to talk to is here to see me” got replaced with a new better explanation of “some time wasting stranger is probably at the door.”
That is an optimistic view, which I appreciate. The only issue I have is that I think we will need to mobilize as a culture to embrace it, in order for it to succeed.
I don't think it is as simple as replacing one explanation with another (like your door-to-door salesman example) because it is such an open-ended problem. I think it is more like completing the Enlightenment as conceived by Kant and others.
I think we could do it (i.e., philosophy classes beginning in elementary school, etc), but it would be tough to convince people to participate. It is hard, mind-bending, solitary work that is inherently alienating, which most people avoid.
Additionally, there is also the inherent contradiction in developing your own independent mind by order of the government or teachers, as well as a host of other paradoxes.
Maybe the best route is to try to make philosophy popular? Use social behavior for people to be attracted to it for the wrong reasons, but hope that a sizeable part of the population end up taking it seriously? And that sizeable chunk is enough to influence the group?
I have no idea, but I like your comment and hope there is a silver-lining that we become deeper and more thoughtful people.
Need a source on RSA 2048 being breakable. QC like that is still quite far off and it can’t be conventionally breakable unless there has been some kind of mathematical breakthrough.
I'm not sure what encrypted data produced today would be relevant in 40 years time? Thinking about how some cases can't be prosecuted since it's been too long since the offence
AI-assisted media manipulation will have an interesting effect on evidence becoming subject to reasonable doubt. Ten years ago, showing a video in court was damning evidence. I expect it to become less so.
There is no mention of the ruling party (why not simply say BJP?) or IT cell in the news. It seems you are here on Hacker News with only political motivations from your comments and submissions.
We really need counter research to the commercial AI. Ability to identify or protect against AI modifications is a must have today, or well even yesterday.
Misleading title, it says the ruling partys IT cell used AI, but no evidence they created it. The article says the image was shared then later deleted by some government ministers. Also altnews.in is zoobear who is known to have edited a clip of Nupur Sharma making remarks against the Islamic prophet and sharing them out of context which put her life at risk.
Who fact checks the fact checkers and titles like this?
If we consider this to be true, then this is a reprehensible act.
To prevent this, it is necessary to have a completed legislation for AI (Artificial Intelligence)
But that threat does come from a Democrat Party voter right ?
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HN has an inherent bias against India and Indians.
Just open any of the H1B related posts and you will see how open minded the liberal tech worker of USA is about India and Indians.
Of course, they are all for immigration just the H1B brings up debate about 'Quality of Work'. Hypocrites.
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I think the American Narrow Minded view of the World is due to they growing up in a 2 party system that only looks at things as Black and White ( Not the race ), as Right and Wrong ( that's better ).
They are basically fed what they are supposed to think by CNNs, NYTs, Guardians etc etc
Like Uncle Soros they believe they understand India better than Indians.
Uncle Soros wants to bring 'Democracy' to World's largest Democracy, because 1 Billion Indians don't know what they should vote for - They need a White Man to tell them that. .
In their own Country they created False Accusations against their President - Published in all 'respected' mainstream Newspapers.
United States of Gaslighting is where they are at.
Let's see if @dang is open minded enough to do something about the title after 400 upvotes are already made.
Pointing out the population size of India to suggest it's the measure to use when judging quality of a democracy has yet to be used in context of India behaving like a democracy.
This account has been constantly submitting anti ruling party articles to demean India. Nothing in the article or proof otherwise which indicates that this was done by the rulling party. A lot of other articles submitted by this "throwaway" account are also questionable.
I have backed everything with sources in my posts? Can you point out if anything is not correct? Or do you have a general issue when something is said against ruling party?
If you really care about reputation of India, how about advising someone in BJP to prevent this type of things from happening at first place?
