Man, for a nation founded by rebelling against a tyrant, and known for its can-do mentality, you sure have a pretty defeatists attitude when it comes to defeating authoritarians...
What do you suggest americans do? Democracy doesn't work because several powerful groups lobby to keep civil forfeiture. There's no way they can resist this. Their government can label any citizen a threat to national security and strip them of whatever rights they still have. Their dragnet surveillance allows them to monitor and stop any organized opposition. Attempting revolution is unwise since that'd probably result in the "terrorists" getting curbstomped by the US military forces.
I don't think it's due to corruption per se. Americans just have to be convinced to care about civil asset forfeiture more than they care about other things. Most people probably think of it as something that happens to other people who were probably crime-adjacent anyway (I don't agree with this line of thinking). If you got enough single-issue voters who cared about civil asset forfeiture, it would go away.
Sacrifice time at digital “salons” and non-essential economic activity.
When 40% of jobs are work from home, strike is a matter of closing a laptop.
Jumping straight to lock and load is ridiculous. SOPA blackout and teacher strikes have gotten results. Police budgets are being redirected.
Encryption is a thing; stay out of cloud services if you do not want to be snooped on. General home computing and k8s+kilo, torrents... teach people to use them in support of the effort. They’re open source; improve the UX.
To be frank, McConnell and the rest are well aware of the French Revolution. Serious discourse in that direction, a show of organization effort would unblock legislative capture.
In America it’s illegal to speak of overthrowing the government, or rising up to defend rights by force. There’s really nothing you can do. The elections are over, the citizens and what they think doesn’t matter anymore. There is absolutely nothing any one of you can do, short of a Revolution, that will change anything over the next 2-4 years.
But OTOH, IIRC people can, have, and have won in court after defending certain rights by force — eg. shooting police officers breaking into their homes without clearly identifying themselves and presenting a warrant. Eg. Kenneth Walker IIUC has not been convicted of any of the charges against him, and though the legal drama drags on, there’s precedent in his favor.
Short of having a revolution like the people who started this country, what's your suggestion for defeating authoritarians? It's difficult (more like impossible) to do on a legal basis when all branches of government are corrupted.
> An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth.
For a comment that adopts a rather condescending tone, it's odd that it displays such a lack of understanding of some basic truths. When Americans speak about their rights, they are generally speaking of negative rights, i.e. the natural rights of man which cannot be infringed upon by their government. The "freedoms" referred to above are exclusively positive rights, so named because they require positive action--in other words, these "Freedoms" are imposed by the state. Europeans who are compelled by the state to cough up half of their incomes to the state are free to refer to the resulting programs as "freedom", but this is a new formulation of freedom that has no basis in the historical meaning of freedom to which most Americans adhere.
> while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover).
This is nonsense. The taxation rate in the us is far lower than those in Democratic Socialist countries, while incomes are ~40% higher after accounting for healthcare costs.
Taxation by country: [0]
Denmark - 52% of GDP
Norway - 55% of GDP
Finland - 53% of GDP
Sweden - 50% of GDP
Iceland - 42% of GDP
>>Average - 50.5%
USA - 22% of GDP
-----
OECD data shows that Median American income is 40% higher than the oft-hailed bastions of Social Democracy:
Household Income in US dollars (2018) [3]
Denmark - $34,712
Norway - $39,555
Finland - $34,497
Sweden - $34,301
Iceland - Not reported
USA - $50,292
-----
Household Debt as % of disposable income (2015-2018): [1]
Denmark - 281%
Norway - 239%
Finland - 145%
Sweden - 189%
Iceland - Not reported
USA - 105%
-----
Household Net worth as % of net income (2014): [2]
That's just ranting on a theme. Americans value personal liberty (e.g. taxes, property, travel) while other value security (medical and financial).
So what? Which is 'freer'? That quote has made its socialist leanings obvious - government should care for us all.
And 'no substantial civic benefits'? Where does that come from? Water, power, highways, the mightiest cities on earth. Sure there are problems. But its nowhere justified in bashing American freedoms as 'not really free'. That's just 'No True Scotsman' at work?
You frame it as a preference that the average person has agency over - we Americans have chosen the ability maybe one day own property over medical and financial security because that's what we value!
We have massive physical land space, resources, and control our own currency. We spend over $800 billion a year on our military alone. We can demand more, but we have been trained not to.
Water, power, highways - all built when the government had the appetite for massive civic projects, and the top income tax rate was >70%. Now in varying states of disrepair, and cost more than ever to maintain as everything is contracted out to private entities.
There is no chance we would get the interstate highway system or the Tennessee Valley Authority if we needed to build it today. But we would not ask for it today, we would just supply endless excuses why it would be too much to ask.
Maybe it's too idealistic, but supposedly the power of the government originates from the people, so it's not asking too much that the government should serve the people.
It all hinges on whether you're willing to bet that the ranter is wrong about American's lack of knowledge about their history, the history of other nations/movements, etc.
If ranter is correct, then any mental snapshot you have of a "freer" America is extremely fragile and probably transient. Unless of course you want to be the contrarian who argues that awareness of history is somehow not part of "eternal vigilance."
If you want to argue that Americans' lack of historical knowledge is largely a myth and have some references about that, let's have the links. Hell, I'd certainly enjoy a December pick-me-up! :)
Quoting historical figures is one way to maintain freedom. The other is, a culture of resistance to infringement on personal liberty. Which America has in spades.
I wonder if the issue is that Americans are "Amusing Themselves to Death" [1]. Tristan Harris read this excerpt at the very end of his interview with Joe Rogan.
