Stumbled upon this in the France community when browsing Local. Needs to be shared wider.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/2694719
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/2685916
OK, c’est pas vraiment "l’image du jour". Elle correspond plus à la période troublée que nous traversons actuellement.
An important distinction is security for whom? When a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie passes some piece of security legislation, their sole concern is security for the rich elite, not the commoners. In that case, oppression of the people is not an unintended consequence of the legislation going wrong like this image suggests, we're collateral damage at best and the intended victims of the legislation at worst.
Eh, one can't really make a decent analysis using vague abstract ideals like 'liberty' and 'security'.
In some ways, security is liberating! For example, some religions have anonymous (private) confessionals and electoralism has anonymous private ballot booths to encourage freedom in voting. I don't know if I'd be as honest online if I knew people with too much time and money could track my posts back to my real identity and harass me. And without security, these privacies would be merely illusions (see: deanonymization)
And obviously, on the other hand, state security understandably sees certain personal liberties (like downloading bomb-making guides and then buying fertilizer) as a risk beyond the liberty they're willing to permit. Corporate security might see user anonymity techniques as a legitimate fraud/bot risk. I've picked diverse and good-faith examples to demonstrate, there's plenty of midground and abusive examples of both, don't worry, I know. (I left reddit many years ago partly for privacy reasons, no need to preach to the choir).
I guess my point is, security and liberties don't necessarily contradict. But if you have governments and corporations run by the owning class, they have a material interest in suppressing your liberties for their own security. To make that appealing and tolerable, they have an incentive to rebrand this as being about your security. I've been in protests that obviously wouldn't harm a fly and the police presence is consistently absurd. It's clearly not actually about any of our security, or even the security of property owners, but rather the security of the bourgeois owning class and their way of life.
That's missing the context of when this image was edited and posted online (post 2015 Charlie Hebdo attacks when the government went full authoritarian)
i came to say that we can definitely have both. thank you for explaining this thoroughly.
sure security is important. but notice how the dog has grown to be much larger than the person walking it
An individual is not able to secure oneself. ( sorry freedom loving gun owners) And more important liberties are also not appointed to oneself. Still, sure as you have shown they are vague terms. The attention should always be towards those with means to exert pressure on the two words mentioned as polorarizing. It is the point. And have we been able to even choose? Was security as a society really ever on a leash?
More accurately labeled Liberalism and Fascism
Too much security and the general public loses their human rights.
https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/03/21/police-tesla-attacks/
We reached out to Chicago Police Department to confirm whether the officers in the picture were deployed to protect the dealership on March 8 and whether any arrests were made. We await the department's reply.
Trump and Musk both commented on the attacks. Posting on X, Musk called (archived) the attacks, "insane and deeply wrong."
Trump said on Truth Social on March 20 that: "People that get caught sabotaging Teslas will stand a very good chance of going to jail for up to twenty years, and that includes the funders. WE ARE LOOKING FOR YOU!!!"
Oh yeah, Trump? Well, come near anyone to defend those fucking nazimobiles (provided there was no one in them, I'm not crazy) over people and see how long you last. This is war, doesn't matter that you're a handful of people with a shitton of money, WE WILL END YOU.
The article itself fits, thank you.
Okay, but what if I depict security as a pug?
What I'm saying is I'm having trouble with the initial premise, not necessarily the conclusion.
The pug becomes rabid and bites you. You succumb to rabies because you couldn't afford the $2000 for the rabies vaccine. Not that you have any paid sick time to take to go see the doctor anyways. You're living paycheck to paycheck and couldn't afford to fall behind at all.
An attack happens and the pug gets so worked up that it is unable to breathe properly due to generational line breeding, seizes, and dies. Libertiegh gets her purse stolen and is super bummed about the whole thing. She goes to the pound just to look and the OP image occurs.
Delegating the task of protection of our rights to someone, thereby allowing the gap, in the ability to apply force, between you and those who are supposed to protect your rights, to widen, always carries the risk of your delegates one day refusing to fulfill their end of the bargain by using their power to violate your rights instead.
But is it really the case that most of us are willing and able to protect our rights by ourselves?
No, it isn't the case that we are able to protect our rights by ourselves. I hate reality and all of humanity.
Idk why this made me remember the early L'Echo de Savanes
While this is essentially true, IMO it's become a bit of a distraction. The immediate problem we face today is technology.
In the 90s, people believed technology (i.e. the internet) would protect liberty against power (or "security"). We thought that removing the barriers to information would put our rulers in a goldfish bowl where we could keep an eye on them. It was a reasonable expectation. But it turns out to be us in the goldfish bowl.
It seems those with power simply have more time and resources available for surveillance. And now the technology is reaching a point where rulers will soon have awesome tools at their disposal, and they're sure gonna be tempted to use them.
Our problem is technology. Not sure how to put a positive spin on this. Technology itself will provide some solutions. But IMO it's more important than ever to get involved in politics. In any appropriate way.
Technology is not the problem, it is a tool. As with any other tool, it can be misused; that doesn't make the tool the source of the problem. There is nothing inherent about technology that means it must be used for evil.
The real problem is how capitalist industry uses that tool, and every other tool at their disposal, to exploit and discard humans, and the collateral social and environmental damage wrought by that system.
Capitalism is the nefarious problem with technology, not the technology itself.
There is nothing inherent about technology that means it must be used for evil.
Sure. In theory. But there are things we know about humans and their weaknesses, and these things are not going to change overnight (except perhaps in the fever dreams of some Marxists, of whom you might be one). Technology of this power did not exist before, and now it does. So technology is indeed the proximate problem.
May a thousand dinosaurs eat the french
French fries, shorly.
Climate change will consume us all, so this is true in a way.
No they'd give the dinos indigestion >:(