> It is not ideal, but it is necessary when the higher-desirability options are not working.
What has worried me for years is that Americans would not resort to this level. That things are just too comfortable at home to take that brave step into the firing lines of being on the right side of justice but the wrong side of the law.
I'm relieved to see more and more Americans causing necessary trouble. I still think that overall, Americans are deeply underreacting to the times. But that only goes as far as to be my opinion. I can't speak for them and I'm not their current king.
You won't get to the kind of change you thought you would see until food runs low and the economy stalls. The American Revolution was rare in that it didn't need to happen. The Founders were just being giant assholes (j/k). While the French Revolution just a few decades later was more status quo. A lot of starvation and poverty just pushed the population over the edge.
I would have believed that before 2020, but after COVID, I fully believe that if the food ran out, half the country would say it's a fake hoax. People would be on their death beds actually starving, and deny it was happening with their last breath.
People largely weren't on their deathbeds with covid claiming it was a hoax either so I'm not sure how that's a relevant analogy. The response to Covid was far more disruptive to my life than the disease itself, which would obviously not be the case with starvation.
I disagree. You can escape a disease, even during a global pandemic. And not every person that got COVID was on a ventilator or even felt that bad. Seeing the death toll statistics and even the direct effects through a screen is not visceral for many folks.
Starvation isn't avoidable and you can't ride it out. There isn't any chance that starving to death could be less severe than getting a bad flu. Nobody can avoid not eating for an extended period of time. If there is not enough food, it will affect everyone directly.
Of course MAGA folks would be affected if the whole country starved. The question is how they would react to starving. They might just blame Hillary Clinton.
>I disagree. You can escape a disease, even during a global pandemic. And not every person that got COVID was on a ventilator or even felt that bad.
Propaganda works.
The knowledge worker class often believes their training will afford them some level of protection against it. Even then, with those warding effects, they're still susceptible. Consider further that most people in society are significantly less educated or trained in epistemological functions than they are - a large portion of society is defenseless against a liar with a megaphone.
Propaganda won't contest that starvation is occurring. It will claim that the reason for the starvation is a specific foe, internal or external e.g. It's China's fault we're starving or the immigrants have caused this food security crisis and once they're gone we'll have enough food for our own people, etc. They'll workshop and see which ones poll well, then run with the talking point that seems to perform best.
Since the government harnessing that discontent has no real desire to fix that problem, all they need to do is maintain the perception that they're the solution, while not addressing the problem itself.
>> I would have believed that before 2020, but after COVID, I fully believe that if the food ran out, half the country would say it's a fake hoax. People would be on their death beds actually starving, and deny it was happening with their last breath.
We're in a K-Shaped Economy right now and half the folks will deny there is any K and insist everything is amazing.
I had the same reaction. I thought things were getting bad before COVID, but I thought that, generally, when push came to shove, sanity would prevail.
Herman Cain denied COVID's severity right up until it killed him, and them even after he died, his team was still tweeting that "looks like COVID isn't as bad as the mainstream media made it out to be." When I saw that people were literally willing to die to "own the libs", I knew shared reality was toast.
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Are you calling Trump senile? Because you are correct.
2 of you folks died from COVID for each 1 of us.
> My comment is simply calling out the liberticide episode we attended rather quietly.
Intellectually dishonest polemics. The mandates were not "ridiculous", nor were they "ordoned non democratically by a senile" ... that doesn't even get the timeline right--Trump was President. As for whether he was senile ...
I was probably one of "you". My comment is simply calling out the liberticide episode we attended rather quietly.
> until food runs low and the economy stalls.
Well one of those is already on the fast tracking to happening (economy stalling).
Unfortunately, I don't have much faith that people will turn against the administration during any kind of major depression/food scarcity. I foresee people turning against each other for survival instead.
The American and French revolutions originated in the middle classes. The poor are often indifferent to politics because they're focused on survival. The middle classes, who own things they don't want to lose and have free time to aspire for more, are the ones who start revolutions. The poor only came in after being whipped up by the interested parties, and don't necessarily join the revolutionary side.
Three critical differences the American Revolution had: (1) the middle class had some extremely well educated people, (2) the communication technology among the colonies was pretty fast whereas the comms between the colonies and the British rule across the Atlantic was slow, and (3) the empire tried to clamp down on the colonies ability to export to any market other than the mother country, killing lots of profit which previously made those markets strong.
> You won't get to the kind of change you thought you would see until food runs low and the economy stalls.
These are no longer impossibles.
Boy is he trying on the latter. Quite impressive just how resilient it seems to be.
It's like when management does something stupid and then engineering works overtime to keeps the system working. Of course management learns nothing and all outside observers don't even notice something went wrong.
There is a limit to how much engineers working overtime can do to offset management stupidity and when you reach the limit the bottom falls out. Of course then everybody blames the engineers...
It's being heavily supported a bubble. We'll see how resilient it is when that pops. As it is, the average person's finances and future prospects are getting worse all the time regardless of whatever the stock market is doing.
Yes, tbh I would not have thought that you could take a sledgehammer to the economy as if you're say Elon Musk buying a communications platform and yet, here we are, 1 year in and we're still hanging on.
But I wouldn't bet on another three of these.
> The American Revolution was rare in that it didn't need to happen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proclamation_of_Rebellion
Interestingly y'all Americans pay much more tax now than you did to England back in the day. Turns out King George was right, and it was just about changing who the tax was paid to.
It's also rare to just "discover" an entire continent that is basically free for the taking since Europeans annihilated native populations through disease and technological superiority.
Much of what makes America unique is tied to this essentially once in a generation event that will never happen again on this planet, a contingent confluence of Earth's parallel geographic and biological evolution... it's fairly easy to rebel or become a superpower when other powers have to contend with peer conflicts right on their borders. A break with England was inevitable why take orders from people an ocean away in the age of sail?
That's one of the core plot points in The Mars Trilogy - Why take orders from people on another planet in the age of sub-light-speed space travel?
It's worse than that; within a few generations our linguistic and biological systems will begin to diverge under conditions with little cross-pollination and different selective pressures. We will become aliens in the sci-fi sense very rapidly if we attempt to create a foundation-like diaspora of settlements.
Back then most taxes went to Britain.
Now they go to Bezos
Where there’s an opportunity to be the 1%, folks will find a way to be the 1%
Not really a secret. The slogan was "No taxation without representation" not "no taxation."
The degree to which legislation in the US is bought by big companies and rarely reflects democratic desires we may be in another "no taxation without representation" era.
Even if the needs of the American people weren't being ignored over the wishes of corporations and the ultra-wealthy in terms of numbers alone we have less representation than ever before because the number of people who are supposed to represent us hasn't kept up with the growing population.
"There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy."
- Alfred Henry Lewis
I can only hope what people will decide make trouble about is also what I consider necessary. If we could all agreed what was necessary to make trouble about there wouldn't be nearly as much to be making trouble over. It's a very double edged sword which does not necessarily do a very good job at bringing any more clarity of what the moral path was to the country.
What confuses me is that no revolution is required. All we had to do to avoid this was to vote. Voting would still (probably) work.
Just like how all we had to do to shut down Guantanamo Bay was vote for President Obama, right? So glad that that worked out. By and large, our institutions are not democratic, in that they are not responsive to 'popular opinion'; while there are certain arenas where, for one reason or another, the will of the majority does sway the day (e.g. the influence of scandals on individual elected officials), by and large most things are decided by non-democratic factors like business interests and large donors, and the media just works to get people on-side with whatever comes out of that.
To quote a well-known study on the topic: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”
(Gilens & Page, Perspectives in Politics)
This is ahistoric. No-one ever said we had to "just vote for Obama" to close Guantanamo Bay.
Frankly, Obama _tried_ to close Guantanamo Bay. He significantly shrunk the population of inmates, but it was ultimately Congress, and the courts that prevented the closure
Obama spent a huge amount of time and political capital trying to clean up Bush's messes.
Obama only tried to close Guantanamo by moving the prisoners to the United States, which is arguably worse than having them in Guantanamo. It would mean that you could hold prisoners in the United States indefinitely without trial. What he should have done was give the prisoners fair trials or release them.
Having prisoners in the US is a lot more hassle and subject to scrutiny than keeping them tucked away on some out of bounds military prison where few have access to, which was probably the reason to put prisoners there in the first place. Anything could be done to prisoners on Guantanamo, including torture.
You're supporting the point of the person you responded to.
One vote isn't enough. Just Obama was insufficient when congress was not sufficiently aligned.
That’s the separation of powers at work, which is desirable. Congress has to (and can) do it. Obama, unlike Trump, would sometimes back down when he met the edges of executive authority. That’s how it should be.
I wanted Gitmo closed, but I don’t want it closed in a way that further expands the executive branch by once again nibbling at the edges of another branch’s authority.
At ~all times for a long period of time during Gitmos operation, there was at least one (revolving) prisoner that no nation on earth would take. I think that was the biggest challenge for someone who actually wanted to close gitmo, to close it. Not clear where you would put them that wouldn't be yet another prison.
I guess now that the US has normalized relations with the Taliban, maybe they'll end up sending them to them, not sure who else will take the last ones.
No, they refuted their strawman.
This is far too nihilist.
Obama and Biden both led to meaningful policy improvements and they were far more stable than the current admin.
They were able to slow down the inevitable trajectory, they did nothing to reverse course. Doing anything different would be too "radical" for Obama or Biden.
The trajectory in question was pretty well laid out in Bush’s Patriot act. If the Democratic Party at any point wanted to reverse course they would have opposed the initial legislation (like the general public did), and subsequently championed a policy which abandons it and corrects for the harm it caused.
That did not happen, quite the contrary in fact.
I think you vastly undersell how much of the US voters supported extreme measures in reaction to Sept 11.
There was a social panic to “protect us against terrorism” at pretty much any cost. It was easy for the party in power to demonize the resistance to the power grab and nobody except Libertarians had a coherence response.
I don‘t think it really matters how much people supported these extreme actions. This policy was clearly wrong. The general public mounted a much more significant opposition against this policy then the Democratic party did. Some members of the Democratic party did some opposition, but the party as a whole clearly did not oppose this, and therefor it was never truly on the ballots.
To be clear, I personally don‘t think stuff like this should ever be on the ballot in any democracy. Human rights are not up for election, they should simply be granted, and any policy which seeks to deny people human rights should be rejected by any of the country’s democratic institutions (such as courts, labor unions, the press, etc.)
> I don‘t think it really matters how much people supported these extreme actions. This policy was clearly wrong.
This is wrong and ignorant of how we select elected representatives. They have no incentive to do “what is right” and all of the incentives to do “what is popular”. The representatives who stood up against the Patriot Act, the surveillance state, “you’re either with us or either the terrorists”, etc were unable to hold any control in Congress.
The reason we have stereotypes of politicians as lying, greasy, corrupt used car salesmen is because their incentives align with those qualities.
I am exclusively discussing the _is_, not the _ought_ (which is where I would agree with you)
Who can I vote for that will stop flock cameras from being installed?
In many cases, the decision to install Flock cameras have been made by city councils and sheriffs' offices. So it very much depends on local candidates.
On the broader topic, I'm not sure that just voting is the way that we'll get out of this mess, but I think a large part of the problem is how our focus on wider, national issues has eroded the interest in the local. So people seem to be most disenfranchised from the level of politics where they can actually have the most influence, both by voting and direct action (protests, calls, etc).
The local government officials in charge of allowing these to be installed.
It also represents an opportunity for upstarts. If you want to get into local politics, this is a single issue that will unit voters and bring them in.
We had a city councilperson elected on the sole issue of replacing the purple street lights. She won decisively and her entire campaign was literally signs everywhere promising to fix the purple streetlights. (yes, they were fixed).
Seattle voted for Katie Wilson as mayor partly because she seemed to oppose surveillance cameras. She now seems to have changed her mind is is speaking in favor of them.
We turned over seats on our city council for the first time in decades and the new, "liberal" council members voted with the rest, unanimously, to install more Flock cameras.
Badger your city council, work with like-minded residents in a way that can credibly threaten their re-elections, find and support privacy-conscious candidates who won't sign-onto Flock's agenda, create ads based on council meetings when councilors support surveillance in a way most voters will reject. Put their quotes on billboard with their picture, etc
Ok, you do all that work at home and manage to block flock in your area. It doesn’t matter because the next city over where you work installed them so you get tracked anyway.
Then 2 years later a new city council gets elected and they install flock cameras in your city too. You can never get rid of them because it already passed and nobody wants to relitigate the same thing every couple of years.
Local politics does not work here.
> You can never get rid of them because it already passed and nobody wants to relitigate the same thing every couple of years.
Those who care about their privacy should relitigate at every opportunity. "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance"; if you're not willing to fight for it, you will lose it, and deservedly so. Those who give up in advance are beyond fucked, because they'll have to take whatever is sent their way.
Our city voted out the cameras so the feds just installed flock cameras on every bit of federal property in and near town, plus they're at private places like hardware stores.
Opponents too can escalate to the next rung: perhaps a county-level retail tax on all retailers hosting ALPRs.
Either that or getting creative with well-directed, statically charged aerosolized oil droplets.
Not sure if you are aware but we rarely directly get to vote on these things. You vote for a representative and hope they vote in a way that serves your interests. But now, we have omnibus bills. And it's 50/50 loaded with things we want and things we don't. The same bill that funds Pre-K will also have a section to fund a kitten shredding machine. But if you vote against it all voters will hear is how you don't want to fund education.
I do not live in the USA, but my understanding of those omnibus bills is that they are government blackmail of its people.
I remember being horrified the first time I heard this was legal in the USA.
How can the US citizens accept such a brutal denying of good governance is beyond me.
The omnibus bills aren’t blackmail, as much as a symptom of the failure of Congress to be able to do what it is supposed to: debate.
There is 1 funding bill per year which only requires a 50% vote instead of a 60% / 67% to pass that all other spending bills require.
Every member with a goal tries to attach it to the big annual funding bill. The bill becomes so large that nobody likes the bill as a whole, but everybody has something in it they will defend.
And the old filtering process (committees which recommend the content of bills) are dominated by majority party leadership. This is maybe the closest symptom to blackmail.
It wouldn’t have mattered because the Horowitz Foundation donated them to avoid governance and regulations.
IIRC FDR pioneered the contemporary use of this to ram through progressive legislation, in particular social security by essentially packaging it up so the needy would get nothing in other programs if social security wasn't passed.
Though I wouldn't be surprised if the idea goes back to Roman times.
I don't think that's all we (assuming you're USA) had to do or need to do going forward. Voting is "necessary but not sufficient" as the quote goes.
Your voting system is shit. It results in a two party state. If one party fails to present a coherent offering and the other one is infiltrated by nut jobs then the system breaks down. After all, if it was such a good system, why didn’t you impose it on Germany and Japan when you won WW2? (This comment is politically neutral; who the incoherents and the nut jobs are are left to the reader’s discretion)
Unfortunately, studies undertaken by MIT over a decade ago show that when it comes to law writing and passing, voters have no statistically measurable input at the federal level. (Since citizens united)
It’s all just identity politics. I will say that Trump has proven the exception to this rule, enacting a whole lot of policy that circumvents the law and has real effects. (And is likely mostly unconstitutional if actually put to the test)
So while locally, voting can be powerful, it’s mostly bread and circuses at the federal level since regulatory capture is bipartisan.
It shouldn't be a surprise that a willingness to violate the law works quickly when congress is unwilling to do anything to stop it. The ability for the law and constitution to be ignored when all three branches of government collude to do exactly that is a huge weakness in the system
I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.
Seconded. Democracy is the only transcendental political system: you can have any ideology you want (so be careful or you'll be voting only once). To survive, it depends on civic spirit - i.e. participation. Democracy always collapses into authoritarianism eventually. Then (if you want it bad enough), you have to claw it back, slowly and painfully. All just as Plato foresaw.
It really bothers me that so few people in the modern West understand just how lucky they are. If you didn't have the control you already have over your government, you'd be fighting for it.
"All we had to do to avoid this was to vote."
Every time I hear this I cringe, whether this subject or any other. The people did vote and this is what they got - not necessarily what they specifically voted for. Different people hold things in different importance. Flock security cameras (or similar) generally don't even get noticed by the people voting on taxes, guns, abortions, etc.
Besides, establishment Democrats aren’t exactly for the common man, they’re just not as cartoonishly evil as the Republicans. Democrats would likely still be in favor of Flock cameras.
The age old tactic of vilification. It's easy to overlook all the nuances on all sides; it's a whole spectrum with plenty of overlap.
My hope in the US is that folks at least take the time to evaluate their options and/or candidates; voting a straight ticket just because someone calls themselves something can lead to undesirable outcomes.
Not to mention that most of the most upending, consequential changes and events in America were not only not voted on, but were wildly opposed by the populace, yet were imposed anyways and today, after decades of government “education”, people vigorously support and defend those tyrannical impositions.
The US is a semi-democracy, notably due to its hyper-polarized two party system that completely forbids (in the 2020s) any crossing of party lines for compromise.
The single biggest improvement to American society would be to implement multi-member districts for legislature, OR to implement STAR voting - any kind of system that promotes the existence of more parties, more political candidates, to break the two party cycle.
Far too many people fail to vote or research candidates due to how shitty our democracy is. Far too few candidates exist as a blend of values, and we are stuck with "every liberal policy" vs. "every conservative policy".
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To that end, it seems the cities that are banning Flock for proper privacy reasons are all in liberal states and cities. Conservative/moderate areas seem a lot less engaged on the topic. "That's just how it goes, of course government is going to tread on us, what can be done about it".
I think more people would bother with voting if they felt their vote mattered, but between the two party system (where both options suck), the gerrymandered distracting, and other voter suppression tactics people have been conditioned to feel powerless over the outcome of elections.
I'm entirely unsurprised if the majority of places taking a stand against flock cameras are liberal. From what I've seen conservatives tend to fetishize police and punishment. There's a lot of boot-licking going on for a group of people who posture as being rebels and anti-government, but I think there's also an assumption that only (or mainly) "others" will be targeted and punished. To the extent that it's true, I sure wouldn't expect it to stay that way.
Voting doesn't work as well when there's billions of dollars being spent to influence the votes to make billionaires richer, while the working class that could vote against it is too busy working 3 part time jobs just to survive.
This is why I'm in favor of sortition instead of voting.
The majority of random people don't have combination of desire, corruption, sophistication, and political experience to pull off this kind of bribery.
Virtually every elected politician does.
~Everything about the election process selects for the worst kinds of people.
There is a lot of truth in this but I'm not convinced sortition is going to work either.
But what you could do is vote with a string attached and a penalty for being recalled that is going to make people think twice about running for office if their aim is to pull some kind of stunt. The 'you give me four years unconditionally' thing doesn't seem to work at all.
I've been mulling over a system where there's a legislative body composed of citizens picked through sortition and another legislative body that's elected like normal legislative bodies of today.
The twist on that body however is that voting is mandatory and ballots have a non of the above option on them. If a super majority (say 60-75%) vote none of the above the election is a do-over with all the people on the ballot being uneligable to run for that seat for say 5-10 years.
I like the idea, but I worry about choosing random members of the public when so many people are unprepared for it. Any kind of government made up of "the people" requires that those people be literate, educated, and informed. With things the way they are today I'd worry that your secondary elected legislative body would end up doing everything and you'd either end up with a figurehead who'd be out of their depth and ineffectual or one being used/manipulated.
I could also envision an endless cycle of elections with 75%+ of the population voting "none of the above" because of issues like "Not my personal favorite candidate" or "eats the wrong mustard" or "I hate the idea of government"
Nice one, that might actually work. But it will be hard to explain to the electorate.
Nah thats a cheap excuse. Amorality of current gov was out there in plain sight, even before 2016 and definitely after. It was extremely hard for common folks to avoid it, some active acting would be required.
Then it boils down to morals, how flexible people are with them - this is weakness of character. Ability to ignore malevolent behavior if it suits me is more a ballpark of amoral sociopaths than good-hearted guy who simply doesn't have 2 hours a day to ponder philosophies of modern politics and regional historical details half around the globe. No amount of ads (which are so far trivial to avoid with reasonable lifestyle) change what a moral person considers moral.
And it couldn't have been easier this time, its not some left vs right view on things, just simple morality - lying, cheating, stealing, potential pedophilia, not hard to say of one is OK with that or not.
Sure I could eat a salad for 5$, but no I'll get a crappy burger for same amount because I like salty greasy stuff. Gee doctor why do I have bad heart, how could have I known? Must have been those evil mega corporations and their genius marketing.
The amorality was not in plain sight, if your only source of news is Fox News or Breitbart or Twitter.
The other day in Kansas City some lady set fire to a warehouse that was being sought for purchase by ICE. They are on video and quite nonchalant.
On the contrary I think Americans are reacting about the same as any other set of people would react. There are always going to be people who, as long as their personal lives are stable, they are not going to do anything to put that stability at risk. America is also huge enough that even if one part of the country is having a crisis, millions of fellow citizens will not hear of it or have any 2nd, 3rd or 4th hand connection to the matter.
But also if a small portion of Americans disparately plan to do stuff like sabotage surveillance camera, it's still newsworthy.
The only people whose lives are stable in this economy are the ultra wealthy. Even those who we would normally consider "middle class" are a couple of medical emergencies away from financial ruin. Whole classes of jobs are disappearing.
Let’s be clear though - it’s not that Americans are clinging to some deep stability that brings them comfort or relaxation, it’s that they’re on the edge already. The vast vast majority of people are barely able to afford the basics of life, while we’re bombarded with an ever more shameless wealthy elite’s privileges.
Politics is like water boiling - it’s just going to be little bubbles at first but all of a sudden it will start to really rumble.
Is that really the case? It seems to me that the vast majority in the US can fairly easily afford a fair bit of material luxury, mostly because material luxuries have become incredibly cheap (by historical standards).
The trouble is at least in the high population areas (AFAICT) a huge swath of "average" people seem to be stuck living life on a paycheck-to-paycheck basis, renting, no prospect of property ownership, minimal to zero retirement savings, no realistic way to afford children, etc. Not abnormal by historic or global standards but very abnormal when compared to the past ~150 years of US history.
"Among the 37 percent of adults who would not have covered a $400 expense completely with cash or its equivalent, most would pay some other way, although some said that they would be unable to pay the expense at all. For those who could cover the expenses another way, the most common approach was to use a credit card and then carry a balance, and many indicated they would use multiple approaches. However, 13 percent of all adults said they would be unable to pay the expense by any means (table 21), unchanged from 2022 and 2023 but up from 11 percent in 2021"
https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2025-economic-we...
An informative data point. To provide some context regarding my earlier comment, a brand new full size memory foam mattress can be had for less than $200 shipped in the continental US. A computer capable of playing modern AAA video games can be had for less than $400. Material luxuries in the modern day are cheap to an almost absurd degree.
I think maybe we need a new CPI metric for HCOL areas that takes the form of a ratio. Something along the lines of midrange laptops per studio apartment month.
I wouldn't call these material luxuries, just like big screen TVs are no longer a luxury. Being able to visit a doctor or a dentist on the other hand...
By "luxury" I mean approximately "anything beyond bare survival". My point is that the vast majority of material possessions have become absurdly cheap by historic standards. However that doesn't preclude severe societal dysfunction (housing, children, retirement, or as you note doctors and dentists).
Thank you for clarifying. It is true that many of such possessions have become incredibly cheap (and therefore affordable) especially when it comes to media consumption and other forms of escapism, but they do very little to address our fundamental needs (physical safety & health, financial security, emotional stability).
True luxuries (not having to worry, not having to waste time) are increasingly out of reach for most people.
You mean like South Korea? Thailand? Peru? Nepal?
Who is the arbiter of "necessarily trouble"? You? Only people that politically agree with you?
>You? Only people that politically agree with you?
the next sentence after they mention "necessary trouble" is literally:
"But that only goes as far as to be my opinion."
they are just stating their opinion.
everyone decides when the time for "necessary trouble" is individually, based on their accumulated experience, opinion, etc. no arbiter required, just a critical mass of people with aligning opinions.
Who was the arbiter of the trouble necessary for gay rights? Who was the arbiter of the trouble necessary for civil rights? Who was the arbiter of the trouble necessary for womens' rights? Who was the arbiter of the trouble necessary for the rights of handicapped people? Indigenous people? Immigrants?
American society was created for the benefit of straight white Christian men alone. Every right held by any other group, every ounce of political power, every bit of basic human dignity, has had to be taken by force of "necessary trouble." There is no "arbiter." How could there be? An arbiter presupposes an objective moral ideal and a just society, neither of which we have.
> I still think that overall, Americans are deeply underreacting to the times.
To put things in perspective, the whole humankind, as in 99.99% of population, is utterly underreacting.
> What has worried me for years is that Americans would not resort to this level.
They'll stop once the police (or ICE, more likely) start dishing out horrific punishments for it.
That would be an incredibly risky escalation, and it would be a stupid ultimatum to issue.
The people, or even states, could escalate in response. The worst case is escalating to violence; ICE isn’t trained, equipped, or numerous to deal with deploying into a violently hostile area. The army could, but then we’re in full blown civil war.
A more realistic middle ground is that it pushes people or states into nonviolent non-compliance by eg refusing to pay federal taxes. Frankly if California and New York alone stopped paying federal taxes the system would probably crumble.
Yeah because that works out really well in history!
That's not how the political reality of exacting mostly voluntary compliance from the masses works.
I agree. The amount of cameras and tracking has gotten out of control. If America actually becomes an "authoritarian" country (seems almost likely) I imagine all these Flock pics with other data mining techniques will be used to send Communist Progressives to reeducation camp.
America is an authoritarian country for decades now.
It first dawned on me when i visited NYC some 30 years ago. I stepped over some arbitrary yellow line I wasn't supposed to - the uniformed cop that noticed that went from 0 to 100 in 0.1 second and behaved as if I just pulled a gun. Zero time to reflect and assume I might have made a legitimate mistake. Since then I've visited U.S. >150 times, and in my experience it was always thus in the U.S. - the law enforcement is on hair trigger and the populace has seemingly grown used to it and considers this behaviour normal. Geez.
(Go live in any northern european country for comparison. Any interaction with law enforcement is almost certainly going to be pleasant, cordial, and uniformed police typically does not rely on threats of violance for authority).
America is not NYC. NYC is proud of its police-state apparatus. Most of the rest of the country is very different.
NYC police seem insane lmao. For some reason various precinct accounts have made it into my social media feed, and the last time I saw the they were bragging about stealing some old ladies less lethal defense weapon.
> The amount of cameras and tracking has gotten out of control.
The UK looks at the use of cameras and feels threatened for its Nanny State title. We Yanks have laughed at that name while the water around us slowly came to a boil.
Some cities and/or states have banned the use of cameras at stop lights to issue tickets. Not really sure what caused that to happen, except the cynic in me thinks some politician received a ticket in the mail from one of the cameras.
General strike! Close the ports, close the airports, steal dozers and park them on railroad tracks, teachers on the streets in front of their schools to protect their students, blockade the grocery distribution centers, so that the shelves go bare, just stop everything, everywhere.
When it hurts the billionaires, they will tell their politicians to invoke the 25th.
It's the only way, we've lost our democracy, but we still have economic power.
Get out there and be the change you want to see, king
I don't get the sarcasm here.. Instead of sniping with snark (see HN rules, please) post your better take.