I'm Danish and lars kragh andersen is a bit of a grey zone. He obviously goes over the line, he tried to put GPS trackers on the cars of ministers. He "stalks" their families, and dox their children online. He gave an interview on how he'd ignore people carrying a kilo gram of weed when he was a cop because he doesn't agree with the "war on drugs".
On the flip-side, he's sort of right. I assume that putting a GPS tracker on the car of our minister of justice is illegal, but that same minister (Peter Hummelgaard) is one of the key forces behind anti-encryption here in Europe. Similarily the politicians he stalk and harras are pro Palintir getting access to all our data, so Lars Andersen is sort of giving the politicians a taste of what they want to give everyone.
He goes way too far though. Especially if he actually wants change, the way he "protests" is directly damaging his own cause, since nobody is going to sympathise with harrassing children.
I suspect next time he'll have his cameras running with backup powers though.
>He goes way too far though. Especially if he actually wants change, the way he "protests" is directly damaging his own cause, since nobody is going to sympathise with harrassing children.
I don't think this is a given. Just Stop Oil says that their tactics do make people hate them, but their research tells them that it still makes peoples opinions on the issues move in the direction that they want them to. Their position is that if they achieve what they want while gathering animosity towards their organisation, once achieved, they can disband.
This is referred to as shifting the Overton window. If voices from the extreme are not heard, the Overton window moves away from their position, so protests help their cause even if only a minority completely agree with them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
I don't think Overton implied any causality between the phases of the window, just that distinct phases exist and that forces act on the window to cause it to shrink, expand, and shift.
> but their research tells them that it still makes peoples opinions on the issues move in the direction that they want them to.
I'd really like to see that research.
Isn't Just Stop Oil funded by an oil heiress?
Teddy Roosevelt was the son of a wealthy and famous railroad baron, but he used that upbringing and status to rein in corporate monopolies and bust the oil barons' empires wide open, which started the decline of the gilded age. All that to say, being a wealthy, elite and privileged oil heiress doesn't necessarily mean this person doesn't want to end oil consumption.
(I don't know anything about her.)
If it is, would that bad? Seems like a person who might really have strong personal investment in the situation. Using the oil companies' profits to try to shrink them, seems good.
> but their research tells them
Thier "research" might be full of yes men.
I suspect their research is as rigorous and valid as their philosophy.
what do you think they should do instead of what they currently do?
They should find some other way to peacock in front of their fellow upper-class friends, because it annoys the fuck out of normal people that Tarquin and Cecily come from money and thus have the free time to throw soup on paintings or whatever publicity-seeking guff they try next.
If they want to fix the climate crisis, they should engage with normal people and find effective ways for them to save money (e.g. like https://energysavingtrust.org.uk/ do) or pressure councils and such into providing better public transport (e.g. like https://bettertransport.org.uk/ do).
People don't consume oil because they intrinsicly like consuming oil. People use private cars that consume oil because nobody else gives a shit (especially not councils) about their needs to get from A to B on time and doesn't offer suitable public transport. People don't buy into mad schemes that require £20,000 upfront and might return about £200 a year in savings, just for ideological reasons. They need cheaper things that pay off sooner, like portable solar panels they can put out in the garden when it's sunny.
Probably the best thing they could do is tell all their other ecological activists to stop being NIMBYs and stop protesting against pylons, so we can get lovely clean renewable energy, generated by turbines in the North Sea, to all the places in Britain where it's needed, especially the south east of England.
Its a know tatic to sponsor the extreme fringe to discredit a cause. Just stop oil receiving oil money?
If it’s a “well known tactic” (well known by whom?) then it’s a counter-productive one - the more the extreme is heard in the mainstream, the more rational the slightly less extreme version sounds (It’s something the right-wing tends to use extremely effectively, the left wing spends too much energy infighting)
For the first time, I see that being a problem to right-wing parties, specially in USA. Now you have neonazis gathering a community by saying you are not extreme enough, and harassing the Jewish people of your side. It's crazy when you compare that to 10 years ago, but it is what it is.
I know of Peter Hummelgaard and I am not even from Denmark. Just because his work and plans. He certainly deserves that tracker and then some...
This is interesting and all but is ultimately just an aside. Are the law enforcement actions on display here legal in Denmark? If not, surely there's prison sentences in store for anyone involved. Right?
Probably not illegal, questionable ethics. Which could have consequences, but probably not.
Regardless, this is enormously dumb. If you want to search and arrest an activist who crosses the line, you make it as boring as possible.
I think the sim cards are more important: he wrote that Nest switched to local recording mode and the police took the evidence.
> He obviously goes over the line, he tried to put GPS trackers on the cars of ministers. He "stalks" their families, and dox their children online.
I agree with you that he goes over the line, but only if these ministers are totally unrelated to the measures they are trying to impose on the population. If not, he just gives them a taste of their own medicine.
> He goes way too far though
that's what activist have to do to shake people
I have heard this claim before but I find it unconvincing. I have given up support of movements for which activists have acted cruelly or otherwise immorally. Obviously one person doesn't represent a movement, but if I only ever see immoral people leading a movement, that will form a basis for my opinion of the movement.
My observation of these activists is usually that they seek attention at any cost. They will hurt people to achieve that attention. Worse, I don't even think it's about the movement. They just want the attention personally. Others in the movement tacitly condone this behaviour.
I think the most frustrating part of this is that they claim it's to raise awareness. Who among us has not heard of global warming? Who has not heard of data privacy? The reality is that they're not getting the public support they desire because people just don't agree with their goals or beliefs, not because the public is "unaware."
You do have a valid point but mildly “hurting” (or rather inconveniencing) the justice minister of Denmark out of all places seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. I mean he’s hellbent on using 1984 as a guidebook and forcing it on everyone in the EU.
> I have heard this claim before but I find it unconvincing. I have given up support of movements for which activists have acted cruelly or otherwise immorally.
Most people aren't this particular brand of irrational.
Ghandi once said during a visit to the west, "I like your Christ, but I do not like your Christians". It is not irrational to question movements you might nominally agree with but that manifest in immoral or inconsistent ways.
> that's what activist have to do to shake people
That's also the line most terrorist groups use.
Its not exactly wrong i suppose. 9/11 did get Americans to think about the middle east a lot more.
The difference between terrorists and freedom fighters is a matter of which side of the fence you stand on. They are basically the same thing, especially these days when you get marked as terrorist for talking bad about the people in power.
> difference between terrorists and freedom fighters is a matter of which side of the fence
Oft repeated but untrue. Terrorism, empirically, doesn’t work. Non-violent protest, and armed insurrection (aimed at the state, not its population) do. Sometimes freedom fighters can benefit from terrorism. But they are distinct strategies with separate targets.
And freedom fighters are supposed to actually care about "freedom" while terrorists generally do not. I fail to see what great advancements in freedom for anyone involved have come out of the terror attacks performed over the past 25 years.
25 years? Why stop there? How about the US terror attacks on other countries civilians since at least the 1960s?
When did USA bomb a civilian house that wasn't a part of a larger operation? Terrorist attacks only target civilians, I have never seen such an attack by USA. They always try to target military or leaders.
The last time I know USA did a terror attack was japan in ww2, but everyone did terror bombing during that war, and the first world stopped doing terror bombings since then. If USA still ran that doctrine you would have Tehran and the rest of major Iranian cities leveled to the ground now, that is what it looks like when the strongest military in the world perform terror attacks.
If you ignore our proxies. Or are Israel's attacks destroying the hospitals and apartment buildings in Gaza and Lebanon "part of a larger operation"?
I guess it's okay we napalmed Vietnam and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians because it was "part of a larger operation"?
American Exceptionalism is a disease.
Yeah... what about those?
How many retaliatory terror attacks on americans performed by citizen of those countries?
What point are you trying to make? US bad? Anything more thoughtful to offer?
The US are an empire and they have behaved as an empire over the last 70 years (bombing, overthrowing governments, supporting dictators). By historical standard, they have proved less coercive than empires of proportionally comparable reach. Think of the Mongols, the Assyrians, the Japanese...
Islamists fight to be the oppressors, not to help the oppressed.
> Islamists fight to be the oppressors
Eh, the history of Islamism comes out of rebelling against secular dictators who had a habit of imprisoning their thought leaders.
or put simply, just rebelling against any attempt at modernising muslim societies. Anwar Sadat comes to mind.
The Taliban's terrorism very much did work.
Not really. The Taliban’s attacks on civilians didn’t help their cause. They found success when they started acting as a more-competent government than our fucks in Kabul. If we want to debate whether the Taliban under occupation had any success with its terrorist tactics, I guess I’d concede that one man’s terrorist is another’s guerrilla fighter. But even then, guerilla tactics rely on a sympathetic local population. So a guerrilla team bombing civilians is undermining its own cause.
I'm not exactly an expert on Afghan politics and the reason for the failure of the western backed government are surely multifaceted, but don't you think that destabilizing the country through terror attacks played a role in the sustained weakness of the government as well as the withdrawal of the West?
Terrorist is often a term used to describe freedom fighters, in order to delegitimize them. Basically this is such a common tactic that it is unsurprising that the two are sometimes conflated.
> Terrorist is often a term used to describe freedom fighters
Do you have an historical example?
Basically all of history. Terrorist is a term people use for people who use violence and intimidation to attempt to cause political change. Freedom fighter is a term used for people who use violence and intimidation to attempt to cause political change that you are sympathetic to.
Both words have identical meanings, the only difference is if you happen to agree with the people commiting the violent acts or not.
No, not at all. Methods and targets/victims also matter. Using violence to achieve specific military objectives or as a response to violence is not the same as indiscriminate murder and terrorism.
> as a response to violence
Literally every terrorist group ever claims they are responding to some sort of violence or oppression.
So what? It what they are actually doing that matters.
Terrorism very much does work. The Basque and the Northern Irish terrorists / freedom fighters have gotten a so many of their demands for autonomy met that they disbanded (in one case formally, in the other almost) because they weren't needed anymore. Taliban also got the US out from Afghanistan pretty handily with mostly terrorism.
> The Basque and the Northern Irish terrorists / freedom fighters have gotten a so many of their demands for autonomy met that they disbanded
That’s certainly not how it works.
They just became highly unpopular amongst the populations they were trying to liberate (which generally preferred more peaceful solutions) and lost their support base and had to disband.
The Taliban absolutely did not terrorism the US out of Afghanistan haha
When the population was complaining that they had to go to the Taliban for help because the Americans could do nothing to help them when the local military was corrupt and abused the people.
Why do you think they left, then?
Because it was expensive and the local population did not care for the Kabul government we were protecting. It is hard to prop an unpopular government in a country of 40 million.
The US military was averaging only 12 deaths in the years before withdraw.
Most of what the taliban was doing is closer to asymmetric warfare than terrorism.
yet you fail to account for the fact that said people wouldn't wouldn't be in power did terrorism not have occurred in the first place. How many bad leaders in the west resulting directly or indirectly from terror attacks?
About as many as bad terrorist groups that began due to catastrophically bad decisions of leaders in the West. I'm sorry to break it to you - the plural you - but all the terrorists that are not traditionally domestic (local leftist/rightist extremists are everywhere, after all) - and the fact they are against the West - is simply a consequence of Western politics. Imperialism and neocollonialism are real, actual policies, and it doesn't take a genius to realize that. If such policies hit locales where it's not culturally wrong to die for a cause, it's obvious you'll get terrorists after a while. I suspect this was calculated risk until it stopped being that: the locals got their own exploding sticks and decided to use them.
It's so incredibly sad to watch: for decades, tons of people made mostly rational (from their point of view) decisions, yet each step inevitably brought us closer and closer to the current situation. Add a few cultural, social, and personal pathological cases into the mix, and what you have is basically a speedrun to 9/11.
Note that I'm not justifying terror attacks, just saying they are a very predictable consequence of decades of policy-making.
> I'm sorry to break it to you - the plural you - but all the terrorists that are not traditionally domestic (local leftist/rightist extremists are everywhere, after all) - and the fact they are against the West - is simply a consequence of Western politics.
Then why doesn't south America perform a lot of terrorist attacks? If that was the reason then you would see sub saharan africa perform way more terrorist attacks than the middle east.
No, the elephant in the room is religious zealots, they perform terrorist attacks, most other groups do not perform a lot of terrorism. A history of oppression just makes you happy the oppressors left, it doesn't make you a terrorist that go and try to make the oppressors come back like the middle east does.
no, it's nothing specific to "The West" or the decisions it has taken. The typical "They hate us because our bad policies" does not explain why every empire (western or not) has had to contend with dissenters keen on overthrowing its "yoke".
How would the Mongols, the Russians, the Egyptian empires have solved the israeli/palestine conflict? Do you know where the terms zealots and sicario come from? Did the Romans solve these terror attacks by reconsidering their "catastrophically bad policies"?
Blockback is a "fun" podcast about this.
Two towrers falling, man of the weat warring man of the east, all seeing stones in every mans hand for the kings to see and understand through and a fiery behavioural ring, burning in the dark ready to consume all civilzation in endless war.
Not if it's detrimental to their cause. E.g. the just-stop-oil people have only garnered haters. A successful case might be Luigi Mangione.
> A successful case might be Luigi Mangione.
There have been several public opinion polls that included questions about Luigi Mangione. He’s consistently unpopular among the average population and his actions are generally unsupported. Not at all surprising for an extremist activist who literally committed murder in public.
It’s only when you visit smaller internet bubbles like Reddit where you can start to get into areas where it feels like his actions are widely supported.
A lot of activists are like this: If you go into little bubbles that align with their actions they seem popular. Zoom out and look at the population, including people they were trying to persuade and reach, and they’re not popular like they seem within the bubble.
This is also why twitter drove journalism (and perhaps even the country) off a cliff.
Naive journalists thought twitter was a "public square" that they could conveniently access from the comfort of their living room. They didn't know that it was a powerful echo chamber that resonated the best with strong views, and the space had long been a refuge for people with extreme outlier opinions.
Hence why "topics worthy of national attention" where just whatever was trending on twitter.
>A successful case might be Luigi Mangione.
Sorry, but how was that murder successful?
Did it achieve the effect that everyone is getting cheaper healthcare now?
OR, on the contrary, it only achieved that CEOs are now getting more anonymity and private security, while the plebs are getting more invasive law enforcement tracking like Palantir and Flock shoved up their ass to prevent them from doing something like that again?
Healthcare was much cheaper for several months after Luigi Mangione.
Source?
From https://www.newsweek.com/brian-thompson-muder-health-insuran...
> The fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson has prompted healthcare executives to say they will address growing frustrations among Americans struggling with access to and costs of medical care.
From https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/23/health/health-insurers-preapp...
> Months after the killing of a top health insurance executive unleashed Americans’ pent-up anger over denials of medical care, the industry announced Monday that it will take action to “streamline, simplify and reduce” the preapproval process.
However, from https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/04/health/insurers-prior-authori...
> However, multiple provider associations and patient advocacy groups interviewed by CNN say that little, if anything, has changed over the past year.
So, hard to say for sure.
> hard to say for sure
I don’t think it is. Healthcare prices are widely tracked. They’ve been rising faster than inflation for years. I have seen zero evidence that trend even temporarily abated after Luigi.
How would be the US now without Luigi Mangione? Would you have cheaper healthcare? Would Palantir or Flock disappear?
You don't understand how it works, imagine a world where 9/11 never happened.
Do you think that this alternative universe would not have the equivalent of TSA and Five Eyes?
It would. These things do not exist because $event happened, they exist because they are useful to those in power.
Look at the city of Trinidad, TX for example: Lady is arrested because of Facebook about how she heard that brown colored water coming from pipes has hospitalized people. Another guy because he is protesting the arrest. Her crime is "Felony false alarm". His crime "Disorderly conduct".
Both laws created, I am sure, to combat issues the community or state has had to deal with. But also able to be used to suppress people those in power dislike.
>How would be the US now without Luigi Mangione?
More or less the same except a family of kids would not be missing their father and grow up with the idea of wanting to get revenge on their father's murderer. An eye-for-an-eye never makes good societies which is why all civilized countries outlawed their practice.
>Would Palantir or Flock disappear?
The more elites you murders, the more of your tax dollars the elites will send to the military and law enforcement to better protect them from you and the more of your tax dollars they'll send to Palantir and Flock to spy on you. You can't win this by killing elites, they have more money, more guns than you and their guns are bigger and more powerful than yours. You win by enacting change through popular votes.
> Sorry, but how was that murder successful?
Successful in winning over the public.
Clearly not since members of the public turned him in to the police.
From what to what? Be specific.
Were there people that liked high Healthcare bills that changed their mind?
Was there a way of politicians elected to implement socialized Healthcare that I missed?
The public was already on Luigi Mangione's side in theory.
In practice however he didn't inspire further revolutionary action by the public, because they were pacified by memes. And that's why he's a failure.
Also because most people presumably aren’t really into indiscriminate irrational murder. The victim was a merely an entirely replaceable cog in an unfair system (also a human being who had a family and there is no real evidence he personally was anymore nefarious than other men in similar positions).
> how was that murder successful?
One less psychopath in charge of a US health care provider being around?
It seemed for a brief moment like some of the other psychopaths CEOs might start changing things for the better.
But you're right, when there wasn't a wave of "finding out" for other health care CEOs they seemed to go right back to it.
> in charge of
Please, he was a middle manager with a CEO title.
>One less psychopath in charge of a US health care provider being around?
What kind of broken logic is this? What good did this do for you if the end result for you is the same or worse now? Other than feel good for vigilante vengeance than then backfires on you in the end. It's not like there's a shortage of CEOs to take his place and keep doing the same thing.
You're not in a comic book movie where if you kill the main "bad guy" then society magically fixes itself at the end, because there is no main villain here, society is broken not because of the decisions of one CEO, but because of a combination of decisions of thousands of people, factors and incentives accumulated over decades that lead to healthcare and other things sucking, and you don't fix it overnight by killing one guy, you instead just make it worse for everyone else who isn't a murderer.
You fix it by talking, campaigning, gathering people and voting, knowing that it will also take decades to undo, the same way as it took decades to get to this stage. That's the only way you enact change that will will guarantee bi-partisan buy-in and actually stick around for the long term. Policy changes implemented by populist movements under threat of violence rarely produce good outcomes that last.
> What kind of broken logic is this?
It's not even slightly broken.
It's about the people responsible for destroying the lives of those they're supposed to be helping, instead abusing those people for personal gain.
Is that really something you think should keep heading in the same abusive direction it's been going for many years? :(
It seems like people are happy to dish out this rhetoric applied to others but less happy to be on the receiving end.
How do you feel volunteer groups rounding up Luigi supporters and gunning them down in the street like dogs?
There are a million reasons why we don't want to live in a society where each person tries to solve their political grievances with a gun
>There are a million reasons why we don't want to live in a society where each person tries to solve their political grievances with a gun
You and me are preaching to the quire here and wasting our time. Some on HN they just wanna see rich people get killed, as if that fixes anything that's wrong with society. By rich people, they mean everyone richer than them of course.
>It's about the people responsible for destroying the lives of those they're supposed to be helping... instead abusing them for personal gain.
That's what the justice system is for. If you don't like the way it works, then vote to change it. Look how Luis Rossman is doing it for a good example.
But shooting people you don't like as vengeance for what you perceive is wrong, is some third world banana republic shit, and no such country where this is normalized is remotely safe or functional, look at Africa and parts of Latam.
You think you want that but you don't actually. IF you do sincerely want that, then I sincerely hope you get what you want, but both ways for you and only you, while the rest of us stay isolated as spectators.
> third world banana republic shit
Welcome to America. Are you new here? :D
My biggest wish in life would be that every champagne socialist that unironically says "America is a third world country", we just send them to an actual thirld world country like Zimbabwe, Congo, Sudan, Cuba, North Korea and import a genuine refugee from there in their place.
This way we can make two people happy at the same time(three if you include me), and the lottery of birth advantage evens out, so the world becomes more fair and less unequal.
what the justice system is for is redirecting anger by making people like you think the justice system is going to fix the things you're angry about
funny how this went from +3 to -2 score during American waking hours
Sorry the justice system is setup to protect them, not you. By putting fear in the leaders of these companies, and showing people that yes, you CAN actually stand up to their corrupt ways and beat them because in the end they are just people, even if they don't see you that way.
Historically indiscriminate extra judicial murder has never worked as a tool for addressing societal injustice, it has been tried countless times, usually it just made things worse.
>By putting fear in the leaders of these companies
I'm sure people who control the economy, pahrma, law enforcement, military and intelligence agencies are shivering because of fear from people with glocks.
> You think you want that but you don't actually. IF you do sincerely want that, then I sincerely hope you get what you want, but both ways for you and only you, while the rest of us stay isolated as spectators.
Nobody wants this. This is the result of the breakdown of trust in the judicial and democratic processes. GP is just acting the zeitgeist.
If the system is rigged heavily against you, relying on it to affect change does feel like a losing strategy.
The fact that such a large part of the population supports literal murder could also be considered a political statement. One that would not have been expressed so strongly without what happened.
So much of this madness could be resolved with a simple income cap. Musk’s wealth grew by $1 million per minute over the past year. Who can seriously argue that this is fair and balanced?
Are you talking about income or actual wealth?
Your income may remain constant while your wealth rises significantly (say... because your investments are doing well, because you inherited... etc). The two are often confused when talking about (tech) billionaires.
Wealth, not income. The statistic is about net worth growth. Saying "that's wealth, not income" doesn't refute it. It just clarifies the mechanism.
> Sorry, but how was that murder successful?
There's many anecdotes of people who managed to get lifesaving or lifechanging treatments in the panic after the CEO got murdered. Obviously, anecdotes aren't data - but it is highly likely that even though one life was lost, many were saved.
doxxing and/or stalking the kids (minors) of the person you disagree with is still kind of a d*ck move though
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I don't know about this case, so I can only speak in general.
A lot of times people that say this don't make a strong case that some theoretical more moderate protest would be effective. There is just a feeling that if they personally feel offended by the actions of the protester then it's probably a bad thing.
In reality it's often more complicated. I know some people that are involved with controversial protests, and the effectiveness of their actions is definitely something they think about. It can't be too extreme, that will put people off like you say. But often there is conversations like in this thread, "this protester goes too far, but they do have a point". This moves the Overton window in the desired direction.
The goal isn't too make you like the protester, it's to make you think about the issues.
Yes I totally agree, and there are nuances and details
But it's easy to push to one side or another
Worked for the IRA. Working for Hamas. Working for the Islamic Republic.
Cowards would have you believe otherwise, but force is sometimes the only way to get what you want.
It really doesn't matter if you come across as the villain as long as you impose great enough costs for not delivering your desired reality.
How is force working for Hamas? The shift in general sentiment towards Israel came from Israel's blatant disregard for civilian life and from their apartheid politics being put in spotlight. Hamas are still regarded as terrorist savages by everyone sane and their Oct 7 attack served as an excuse for Israel to set them back and hunt them regardless of collateral casualties, terrorizing their compatriots
On examination of the evidence, Hamas appears to be an organization dedicated to harming Israel, not helping the Palestinian people (or improving public opinion of Hamas). In this regard, I would say that Hamas has been very effective at provoking heinous overreach by the zionists, causing severe damage to Israeli credibility. To Hamas, it seems that Palestinian deaths are the price they are willing to pay, being integral to their strategic mission and personnel supply chain.
You seem to think the conflict will be decided by the vibes and sentiments of people who don't matter.
Why would you think so? The conflict will most likely be decided by Israel (and by extension USA) having the biggest influence both globally and locally, and the biggest guns, but there is no misconception about it, so I decided not to add it.
> How is force working for Hamas?
Brilliantly. It coaxed an Israeli overreaction which has led to basically the entirety of the rest of the world turning against Israel.
> Hamas are still regarded as terrorist savages by everyone sane
Why would Hamas care? They remain firmly in control of Gaza, while their cause is winning hearts and minds globally.
Both sides always assume that people must fall on one side or the other instead of disliking both and wishing they would stop trying to make their hundreds of years religious regional conflict the world's problem
> wishing they would stop trying to make their hundreds of years religious regional conflict the world's problem
This is an entirely backwards way of portraying the situation. American evangelical Christians are by definition not based in the region.
They believe that they must supply Israel with the weapons it needs in order to bring upon apocalypse.
It’s sounds like you think it’s brilliant that more Palestinians were killed as long as it negatively affected Israel’s PR.
lol
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Noone is responsible for others' (overre)actions.
So if you think justice for Palestinian civilians is their cause, it's not them who are responsible for it winning hearts and minds globally
While there are useful idiots in any situation (especially inside the UN), the level of sympathy for them - while was never high is going down steadly
The level of general sympathy for one of those (and their level of success) is much higher than for the others
Maybe because they were actively avoiding civilian targets
And even then mostly because a lot of people were supportive of their cause even if they were against their methods
>And even then mostly because a lot of people were supportive of their cause even if they were against their methods
But IRA didn't win because those people supported their cause, IRA won despite those people being against their methods.
It was the force they used which directly led to the GFA, without the bombs and the killing the British would never have surrendered.
How can we know the IRA “won”? The country changed a hell of a lot over the course of the Troubles and by the time of the GFA in 1998 I don’t see how it is so clear that the reforms wouldn’t have also been achieved via other peaceful and democratic means.
> How can we know the IRA “won”?
In signing the GFA, the UK effectively gave up on it's sovereignty over NI. That was never going to happen through "peaceful and democratic means"
What makes it giving up sovereignty? I understand it creates the potential for separation in future but not yet. The devolution of Scotland and Wales happened peacefully a couple(?) of years later, and Scotland may also separate in future.
> What makes it giving up sovereignty? I understand it creates the potential for separation in future but not yet.
Look at where the border is, the separation has already happened to a very significant degree.
Good god!
It's difficult to make out if this is ignorance, a poor attempt at satire or simply trolling.
Which part do you disagree with?
The border is in the North Channel today, so the bit about sovereignty clearly holds up.
Are you saying the GFA would have been reached through peaceful means?
The rabbit hole goes much deeper than simply "they gave up on sovereignty"
2 out of 3 for "bombed to shit". I wouldn't call that "working".
I'm not sure if Iran's regime has the staying power, but Hamas sure doesn't seem to be in a good shape lately.
Even if every single Hamas was killed - you have a whole population totally traumatized. That's extremely fertile ground for something like Hamas to pop up again. So, a lot of sufferring but Bibi and "Hamas" (or whatever) prospers.
Hamas has been killed. Again and again and again. But people keep joining this "Hamas" resistance group against Israel so the group never seems to go away. And do you know why they join? They join because Israel killed their whole families.
> but Hamas sure doesn't seem to be in a good shape lately.
And who do you see on track to displace Hamas? After years and years of conflict and being "bombed to shit", they're as entrenched as ever while their enemy declines much faster.
Israel is getting to a point where it has no friends left in the world, where the average European youth thinks nuking Israel and turning into a glass parking lot would probably be a net positive. Jews are starting to be broadly despised again thanks to Israeli policy, something that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.
Hamas operatives lead shitty lives in the Gaza strip as they have for decades, but they certainly aren't losing control.
Over the course of a few years, Hamas managed to turn wearing a star of David in big EU cities into a dangerous political statement. And we're supposed to believe that they're not winning?
There are two actors and you're mixing up who is responsible for which outcome. I explained in more detail in another comment
There's no credit due for correctly reading your adversary?
Obviously the Israelis could have just kept their mask on, but Hamas was clearly correct in their calculation that they wouldn't.
Your arguments are self-contradictory. You say force is great, but only for Hamas - not for Israel.
A youth who thinks Israel should be genocided doesn’t care about genocide, so why hate Israel?
The hate in Europe is driven primarily by an influx of people who were hating Jews anyway, and who naively think that the hatred won’t backfire on them. Once you start promoting racism it comes for everyone.
>The hate in Europe is driven primarily by an influx of people who were hating Jews anyway
You are mistaken, the sentiments are shifting across the board.
This is probably driven to a significant degree by the Israeli national policy of tying any criticism of Israel with antisemitism, and the broad acceptance of that policy by Jewish communities globally. Because of this implicit endorsement, it is not surprising that many would struggle to separate between the actions by taken by the state of Israel and those who call themselves Jews.
You can’t blame the victims for racism. The whole point of racism is that it lumps people together based on the actions of some.
It’s the same way Islamophobia doesn’t become justified based on the actions of some Muslims.
Anyone who does do that is already a bigot, and would do the same to any other group, regardless of what they do.
A culture that normalizes hatred of Jews (or Israelis) as a group, will very quickly devolve into one where other minorities are hated as well. Because the youth, as gullible as they are, can still detect when a system of values is inconsistent.
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A youth who hates Israel thinks genociding genociders is okay
The final victory of Islamic Republic was after they did NOT used force against west, but when America and Israel started idiotic war, bragged about using force and then promptly lost.
This was quite literally the case of "actions backfire" situation.
Attacking families is firmly across the line and looks like crazy man's personal vendetta. Who can vouch he won't go further and ie won't kidnap a kid to achieve his goals.
No wonder he gets raided, at one point it becomes a topic about protecting one's family, left or right, moral or crook doesn't matter anymore.
Its not activist anymore in any meaningful sense, just a fanatic.
> crazy man's personal vendetta. Who can vouch he won't go further and ie won't kidnap a kid to achieve his goals.
You just committed exactly the kind of escalation that you condemn when it's about him.
So what if someone can vouch for him? What's that worth? "Vouching" is worthless in any circumstance I can think of, and nobody can give you guarantees about anything. I can't vouch that you won't do exactly the same, or that you weren't the masked police who raced to the breakers so he's not filmed while breaking the law (innocent people have nothing to hide, right?), or that you're not one of the politicians pushing for oppressive laws for your personal benefit.
Jeez, you grabbed a single word from an expression that even non-native speakers like me know very well how to interpret and went a bit too deep into your self-made projections and on-purpose incorrect interpretations.
Just to be clear - there is no actual vouching, there never was, nor any plans for that. Fanatics are unpredictable, it doesn't matter in which area, their decisions are primarily emotional. He certainly behaved as one. Rest are details.
Or do you consider family stalking as a correct sane approach that actually achieves the goal effectively?
I don’t think he goes too far at all.
If politicians are attempting to undermine your children’s right to privacy forever, and yet these same politicians don’t like when this is being done to their own children…it shows either an astonishing level of hypocrisy and/or stupidity.
Europe is filled with these types of authoritarian urbanites, who make decisions from an elitist “i know what’s best for you” attitude while eating 6 course dinners. This is the same class of European leaders who steered the regions entire energy/economic/social policy so bad that the whole European model of the last few decades is in slow collapse and fiscally unsustainable. Yet ironically, the most common phrase you’ll hear while eating these 6 course dinners is “sustainability.”
These people are some of the worst hypocrites on pretty much every topic imaginable and need to be called out for it.
This is what I meant by the grey zone. I personally think it goes too far, but I agree with the point you make here. Where it becomes problematic is that the method does not get the point across to any audience which doesn't already agree with them.
Compare this to Jesper Graugaard, who is know locally as the "Chromebook-dad". He's been campaigning against big tech in our schools for like a decade, and after 6 years we recently had a ruling forbidding our cities from using Google services without proper data ownership agreements. He's obviously not the only party behind this, but he's a massive force in the agenda against non-EU tech in our schools. He does it through reform and political campaigning.
Jesper has wide public support, Lars is not viewed favourable. This story hasn't even hit our news, I've only heard about it here on HN.
Out of curiosity, what is Jesper's strategy?
This doesn't tell me much about how he campaigns By contrast, I've got a much clearer idea of Lars and his strategies by a description of his actionsI think you and I disagree. I don’t think Jesper is focused on the right issues.
Big tech (private companies who largely just care about profits) and foreign governments (the Americans for example), are way lower on my “things Europe should be worried” about list. They’re there of course, but lower.
Private companies don’t have the ability to ruin your life in the same way your own government does. They just want your money. And the US government is truly a disinterested party. 99% of Americans couldn’t place Denmark on a map (I’m not kidding). When push comes to shove, they fundamentally do not care what happens here.
The real threat is our own governments, who we have given the legal authority to enact all the negative outcomes that will come from totalitarian erosions of privacy and over regulation of individuals. Building up this scary “foreign boogieman” and stoking this moral panic is what is enabling the authoritarian action.
Pointing fingers at Big Tech and the US is a giant distraction tactic so you don’t look at the terrible things our own domestic politicians have done and the fact they have zero plans to do the hard things needed to get us out of this mess. It's just champagne and smiling over dinner, while the old eat the young, the government eats the private sector, and endless legislation eats away your opportunity to do anything more exciting than build powerpoints at a braindead consulting firm.
> Private companies don’t have the ability to ruin your life in the same way your own government does. They just want your money.
And what happens when your money is gone? What happens when the government has no money anymore because the super rich took it all? Your life turns to shit real fast when you can't afford housing, healthcare and food.
I get when you are in an authoritarian country, or one on the path to becoming so like the US, that the government looks to be the most dangerous actor. But in the west that is still free, its the corps that I worry about the most.
Private companies want your money but they don’t take it. You give it to them in exchange for something.
It feels like I'm force to pay tax which then evaporates into the pockets of private companies like Palantir, though... I mean, you arguably can't even fully participate in the society you pay taxes to help run if you don't have a Google or Apple spycube.
That's the government taking your money and deciding how to apply it. It isn't a private company taking your money.
You’re fundamentally worried about the wrong thing.
It’s an extremely common bias on the left just as the anti-government bias on the right.
Both public and private entities are capable of abusing power.
Only one group however is legally entitled to take 50% of your money regardless of the quality of their product, by holding a gun to your head. They can even take more via the phantom tax of inflation using deficit spending (as is happening now all over Europe). This group is the one you should fear more if looking at it from first principles.
The current runaway deficits across Europe and rising political unrest prove this.
The only thing companies can do to “take” your money is offer you a service that’s better than all alternatives that you chose to buy voluntarily.
If you think that’s the bigger authoritarian risk something is wrong with your mental model of how the world works.
If you think that Jesper isn't attacking the right issues, but Lars does, then you should definitely hope that Lars switches to Jesper's more popular approach.
Unless you think there can never be a democratic consensus in favor of privacy, therefore the only way is for a small vanguard of privacy activists to impose their will on the hostile majority and establish a totalitarian privacy dictatorship. Then it wouldn't matter so much whether you look good in the court of popular opinion or not.
You can not “democratically” decide to abolish certain inalienable personal liberties and still pretend you are a democracy. That’s just mob rule or worse.
> totalitarian privacy dictatorship
That’s an illogical concept. What does that even mean?
You're turning things on their heads. Currently there's some modicum of privacy. Politicians are trying to force removal of this on everyone.
> 99% of Americans couldn’t place Denmark on a map (I’m not kidding)
sixty one percent of statistics are fabricated on the spot?
Even if you don't think he goes too far ethically, you can probably agree that it's reasonable for the police to intervene once he's interfering with the cars of government ministers.
The police definitely need to intervene, but I'd like to think that playing tit-for-tat with the government is a valid protest, and that this won't result in a loss of freedom.
I guess they need to ascertain whether he's operating organically, or at the behest of another nation, and whether he's scouting out ministers for something bigger in the future.
Though, the irony in all this, is that it all could've been avoided if the government weren't acting at the behest of another nation, and scouting out what they can get away with on their authoritarian warpath. Maybe the police are arresting the wrong people.
By the same standard it would be reasonable to intervene when politicians are indiscriminately interfering with personal communications devices of everyone without any judicial oversight?
Will the police intervene and arrest the ministers when the laws the ministers are enacting result in the same outcome for me?
Of course not. There is paperwork and letterhead involved so it is legitimate.
never - the courts must make decisions
> He gave an interview on how he'd ignore people carrying a kilo gram of weed when he was a cop because he doesn't agree with the "war on drugs".
This is about as far from "over the line" as I can imagine.
I expect he’ll be justified and vindicated in history if we end up in a global totalitarian prison planet scenario that seems to become more possible as the tech reaches that capability. “For the safety of the children” ofcourse.
What kind of history will a totalitarian prison planet write, I wonder.
1984 will be banned as being too inspirational, perhaps?
1984 is not inspirational, it's cautionary. The main character has already lost from the first page of the book.
I tend to disagree. 1984 seems the playbook for the majority of politicians. For them, it's inspirational.
Maybe we should begin asking, "whose children, specifically?"
> he'd ignore people carrying a kilo gram of weed
This is an unequivocally reasonable approach. The prohibition of cannabis is a grotesque charade.
I personally would like the police to come down hard on unauthorised and unregulated chemists. Not a fan of dealers being tax exempt, either, given the negative externalities their services provide.
Why fuss over "unregulated" chemists when the vast majority of harms come directly from officially licensed and regulated industry? I don't think cannabis dealers have ever poisoned entire towns or ecosystems. The facade of regulated safety must be more important.
Why fuss over anyone committing lesser harm when there is something worse happening somewhere else?
A kilo of weed is clearly a dealer, and part of organised crime. The same people are deeply involved in forced sex work and people trafficking, extortion, illegal weapons, etc. There is a clear difference between end users and small time dealers and the distributors.
So prosecute them for those other things, no? Instead of helping criminals grow their business by banning non-harmful stuff and giving them monetary growth opprotunities.
I'm confused reading this. How in the world is GPS-tracking someone's car supposed to show hypocrisy with respect to encryption?
Because this someone wants to know location of everyone in the country while his own location should be of course private and protected.
I still don't understand what that has to do with encryption. Are these two separate policy proposals, one for GPS tracking and one for encryption, that this person is supporting?
Think about why do governments want to ban encryption? Because they want to know everything about you all the time. Collecting information on someone such as their location is of the same order.
It may be of the same order, but it is a different thing. No one, not even techies like here on HN, are going to see his actions as valid.
He has to use a different method because obviously he does not have a backdoor into the prime minister's phone. The fact that "obviously wrong" invasive methods have to be used (now) to imitate something that the prime minister want to apply to every citizen (except himself and his buddies) in the future can be seen as part of the point.
Yes, but that also means he both goes too far (for people like me who might sympathize with him) and loses the connection with the original issue, creating his own communication problem. Yes, it is good and necessary to show politicians what they are doing to the citizens they are supposed to represent, but that does not justify all means.
It’s not fundamentally different than indiscriminately scanning everyone’s private communication (what the Danish government is trying to accomplish on the EU level)
I think we'll keep disagreeing on what "fundamentally different" means. Agreed that the Danish gov't proposals are reprehensible and deserve counteraction.
> Think about why do governments want to ban encryption? Because they want to know everything about you all the time.
Or, say, because they want a judicial warrant to be sufficient for obtaining someone's information without their consent?
> Collecting information on someone such as their location is of the same order.
Huh? This sounds crazy.
It's not that complicated. Minister wants to remove citizens privacy. Protester invades privacy of minister in response. On the one hand I agree that gps-tracking is not exactly the same as analyzing people's messages, on the other hand one can often infer whereabouts through messaging services indirectly or even directly such as when people share their gps location with one another (a feature that e.g. whatsapp has).
Anyway, apparently this Peter Hummelgaard has said:
"I indisputably believe that surveillance creates an increased sense of security ... and given that the prerequisite for freedom is security, yes, I believe that more surveillance equates to more freedom"
so I think you will find it easier to understand these kinds of protest actions if you consider them in the context of privacy vs. surveillance more broadly conceived.
(source for quote https://mastodon.social/@chatcontrol/115314954743042414 -> https://www.dr.dk/lyd/special-radio/prompt/prompt-2025/egois...)
> It's not that complicated. Minister wants to remove citizens privacy. Protester invades privacy of minister in response.
"It's not that complicated"... indeed?
Privacy was a thing long before encryption even existed. So were stalking, wiretapping, etc. That whole time, judicial warrants had always been legally and practically adequate for obtaining and reviewing evidence that was physically accessible. (And for arresting stalkers and wiretappers.)
Encryption changed all that. It effectively undermined the ability of warrants to do their job.
Regardless of how you feel about the above, surely you agree that none of that is factually incorrect, right? Plaintext + privacy were simultaneously a thing for a long time, right?
So, whatever you feel, doesn't it feel a little disingenuous to suggest that the two are necessarily tied together? And to smear someone as hypocritical because they believe in both? Did the guy ever advocate for exposing everyone's real-time location?
Look, I don't even know the guy. And I'm not even trying to defend anything here on its merits. I'm just trying to set the record straight as to what the facts and the logical implications are(n't). Do you(/him/etc.) want an honest debate? Where you can actually win with people coming to support your ideas on their merits? Or do you want to take the craziest logical leaps and lose all your potential supporters in the process?
> So were stalking, wiretapping, etc. That whole time, judicial warrants had
Those things were costly and didn’t scale very well. Which is why it was more tolerable.
Without encryption and with legally required backdoors the authorities can just “wiretap” everyone just in case they might commit a crime. That is what the Danish government wants to do by pushing ChatControl in the EU. There is absolutely nothing crazy about that and they are perfectly transparent about what they are doing. Most sensible people believe that that’s a too high cost.
>That whole time, judicial warrants had always been legally and practically adequate for obtaining and reviewing evidence that was physically accessible.
Certainly not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrecy_of_correspondence
You're telling me that in Denmark they can't open your letters even with a judicial order?
The Danish constitution also mentions privacy, in the form of paragraph 72 that stipulates that the confiscation and examination of letters and other papers; as well the interception of postal-, telegraph- and telephone communication cannot be done without a judicial order.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_law_in_Denmark
Encryption is used to remain private in ones comings and goings and communication.
It’s not the same as gps, but it’s similar. If you can decrypt someone’s communications, you can more easily determine their location.
Hmmm, in context he was(?) tracking a public ministers car.
I'm Australian and I'm all for peeling back and making transparent all the comings and goings of public officials (within reason) - they deserve a good return, a hefty return even, for dedicated public service .. and they deserve to know that there's a hammer waiting for any betrayal of public trust, shady financial dealings (while in office), etc.
As a "known in advance covenant" that's not altogether unreasonable, raises the bar for would be Trumpesque grifters, and allows for privacy for those not seeking access to public offices, trust, and cookie jars.
Lol that's bullshit. There is a difference between "accessible to law enforcement in a official criminal investigation overseen by a judge" and "public to everyone".
What these weirdo hacktivists don't understand is that the voting public wants to live in a society.
"You take my privacy, I take yours" would be the thought process here. Not complicated.
but all he does is things the politicians thinks are perfectly okay to do to the "plebs" they are supposed to represent.
when they do it, its A-OKAY, but if he does even 1/10, its the worst catastrophy in the world.
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World is not black and white. Most people would probably prefer to live in a world with low-power petty-crime rings and ability to be free and safe apart from having their wallet stolen once in a while rather than with e.g. Russian-like state mafia country with enormous amount of power and ability to target everyone at every time for their families interests. When you have a destroyed social ladder and everything can be taken at any moment under few people control immediately because they just want it.
That's apart from the fact that in the palantir case you also invite foreign intelligence and CIA to your home.
Sarcasm tag missing or is this serious?
They're probably not being sarcastic. Wrong, and ppssibly evil, but not sarcastic. There are some weirdly big Palantir fans on HN. No clue what drives them, but I'm guessing they're not keen students of history.
It falls under the "social outreach" line item I believe
...or Tolkien.
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Like leather-boot-head-stomping justice?
Dura lex sed lex
Sure, especially when patricians themselves are exempt from their laws and it's only a ToS for plebs.
Benn Jordan did a video recently where he showed Flock cameras, which were hackable, pointing at children's playgrounds. Who is stalking the children?
Cool. Britain has been doing this for a while.
So why do you think increasing surveillance will decrease the stalking of children?
Palantir is a child stalker tool.
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> Who cares about weed?
Danes.
Why? Seems stupid. Just let people weed.
Pretending to be a moral person to harass others is way more important than being a moral person. Jesus in the gospel has no kind words for such people but many "christian" societies haven't yet decided to follow that part.
People who dont pretend it has zero negative consequences as well. I understand the medicinal uses, most people arent even doing that, but we are overlooking so many things. I think someone should fund serious studies that look at all the benefits and negatives, sadly we dont live in a perfect world.
We are overlooking even more things about perfectly legal alcohol.
I can count on one hand the number of times I drink alcohol every few years, and I agree. Let's fund detailed studies on the effects (good and bad) for everything. Whataboutism shouldn't be a reason to just let something that could have long-term negative consequences on the mind be blindly advertised as safe. My argument isn't about legality, moreso educating the public about consequences, we do this with cigarettes, and I assume eventually we have to extend vaping to have similar messaging as well.
Legal marijuana in the states is insanely tweaked and modified in terms of THC in order to comply legally, even people I know who have smoked their whole lives feel uncomfortable touching the stuff because its just not even organic anymore.
I think we're overlooking too many things.
There have been plenty of studies.
People overdose on legal stimulants and drugs all the time (caffeine, alcohol, OTC drugs...).
Nothing points to THC being at all worse than many other legal stimulants.
Very charitable to call it a “grey zone” to stalk and dox children of politicians you dislike.
Isn't the point that those politicians want to do precisely that to others?
Stalk their children? What policy are you referring to?
Chat Control? The Denmark is the primary supporter of universal stalking across the EU.
Upthread:
> that same minister (Peter Hummelgaard) is one of the key forces behind anti-encryption here in Europe