Americans might not realise this but we see the USA in the same light as China and Russia when it comes to freedoms. We might be wrong, but thats the perception myself and many other people from outside the USA see the current state of the situation.
To think anyone would feel safe in the USA is ridiculous, the USA is one of the last places anyone should seek refuge in modern times. What scares me most is the United States influence inside Australia.
I agree, as a New Zealander living in Spain. I've been staggered over the last decade or so to hear of the USA performing:
* "extraordinary renditions" (kidnapping), sometimes of the wrong person who after months gets dumped in Albania.
* "enhanced interrogation techniques" such as waterboarding (torture)
* holding people indefinitely without charge or trial in Guantanamo Bay
* killing people remotely in foreign countries, including their own citizens based on the president's decision. Sometimes through mistaken identity or bad intel or pure human error the wrong person is killed, or the right person is killed with their children
* The "Kids for Cash Scandal" where a judge received kickbacks from a prison owner to give juveniles harsher sentences.
* And finally, spying at an enormous degree on the US population at large.
These are astonishing things and I'm even more staggered that people en masse don't get outraged by these things and demand change.
What you posted are a few negative events. What you did not post are the few million or billion positive events that happened at the same time.
What you're reading/seeing is an ever increasingly opinionated and vocal crowd that think they possess the truth and are right about everything. They want a perfect system. And a simple system. And worst of all, they don't know what they don't know (how utterly destructive their actions and changes would be). So this negativity parade continues... Where they hold a magnifying glass on the few negative events while pretending what they are seeing is the entire picture.
> "that think they possess the truth and are right about everything"
All those things I listed are well-documented. For the sake of keeping my post short I didn't post links to the appropriate Wikipedia articles nor to mainstream US online newspapers that reported the events.
powertower did not imply that anything you originally listed as incorrect, but saying that you are looking at a very small part of what the US does.
I'm pretty sure we could look at any person or government, find all their past flaws/mistakes and only list this to show that the person is 'evil'. But without looking at the bigger picture of everything they do, you aren't being fair with your judgement of that person/country.
I don't think the idea was to color the US government as "evil" - but rather that the criticism that these are "exceptions" is off base.
In all but one of the examples cited, this was acknowledged, deliberate policy of the government at many levels. Extraordinary rendition, imprisonment without charge, torture, drone strikes, all were known, approved of, and carried out with the assistance of many levels of the central government.
The only example there that can be reasonably cited as an aberration of the norm is the judge taking payoffs for heavy sentences - that's an example of one piece of the machine going rogue.
Sure, the US has done good during all this time as well, but the atrocities cited are not "exceptions", they are a core part of the American government of the past decade.
US doesn't have the resources to give every one of the hundreds of thousands of individuals interested in blowing up a chunk of Americans a full blown 8 month trial, 3 hots and a cot, and loving handjobs twice per week.
As in all things in life there's a tradeoff between "justice" and "security". Luckily for you and most of the people in this thread, you get to benefit from the actions of people who have to make that call, while looking down on them from your moral high horse in your comfortably AC'ed parents' basement.
The richest country in the world, by far, and you think we lack the resources to give fair trials and humane prison conditions to the people we accuse of crimes? You do know that innocent people get arrested sometimes, right?
> As in all things in life there's a tradeoff between "justice" and "security"
Some amount of tradeoff between freedom and security, I will grant you. But I can't see how strong security precludes us from actually bothering to properly investigate, try, and incarcerate people. That's just laziness, if not pure malice.
And who told you there are "hundreds of thousands" of people who want to blow up Americans?
But actually, even (very generously) at 100,000 brand-new prisoners for the USG to deal with it would certainly cope just fine (an increase of 4% on the current prison population). And imagine all the money which would be saved from surveillance programs if all the terrorists were dealt with!
But you do have resources to start wars in name of XYZ, bomb other countries because of ZYX, etc?
You really should know there are objective reasons why people from other countries can't stand US government/politics during last decade. If you don't understand what i'm talking about, that same politics is going after it's own citizens now, so you will find out soon.
Weighing information is the nature of judgement. Sometimes we don't know what we don't know. Sometimes we don't care what we don't know. Sometimes we don't care even though we know. It's the nature of the human machine.
This is the principal reason for the old adage "Life's Unfair".
It's just that we usually won't notice that until it's unfair to us.
We should fix these negative things as they come up instead of doing the gymnastics it takes to justify them. You never want to get caught fighting a rear guard action against the truth.
I think that's a little harsh. We don't know the reasons why he's not living in NZ or why he's in Spain. Calling that into question and using that as an excuse to dismiss his claims is just wrong.
I'm not agreeing with him and I'm not disagreeing with you. I just don't think the way you're attacking him is entirely appropriate.
He doesn't live in his own country (his fact not mine) and the one he chose (his fact not mine) has a violent history of torturing innocent animals that continues today. Yet he saw fit to criticize the US.
I removed the quote because the original source is too controversial, but how exactly do the many and real positive characteristics of a society get outweigh by a few negative and mostly overblown characteristics that are not even characteristics as much as exceptions, and in most cases are simply natural products of ANY and ALL societies (and in other cases just emerge due to the sheer number of overall events)?
That phrasing means that definitions describe the whole or major; they don't describe the minor... That is, I'm not going to describe the buildings of an entire city as derelict, when only a few are so.
But that's not how societies work. America doesn't have a school shooting problem because all human societies develop shooting problems, it has them because America specifically squeezes its youth in ways that makes them more violent.
> America doesn't have a school shooting problem because all human societies develop shooting problems, it has them because America specifically squeezes its youth in ways that makes them more violent.
That's actually a good point you're making against yourself, because I went to a public school from grades 4-12, and spent 5 years in state college. Not once was a gun fired. And most people will say the same.
What you listed are again exceptions...
America has 300MM people, 400MM guns, some crazy violent demographics, yet the "school shooting" incidence in the last 40 years can be counted on two hands. And from what I've heard, have been steadily decreasing.
Even if they were 10x the rate, they would still be exceptions to the rule.
> Yet the "school shooting" incidence in the last 40 years can be counted on two hands.
Wow, you are either not informed, not human (got like 100 fingers per hand?) or using some very narrow definition of school shooting (like children below 6 in Michigan).
I've seen that list many times before and was even going to post it myself. I'm guessing you just skimmed over it and did not read the notes.
So let me rephrase, how many school shooting can you count on your hands that you knew about? I'm guessing you won't make it pass your two hands.
I'm not going to count crime infested ghetto area school shootings that involve a 70% dropout and incarceration rate, where one student shoots another over some argument over a girl. Nor gang related violence in those same schools. They will do that in and out of school as much as anywhere else. It's not related to any particlar place or time.
I'm not going to count a depressed kid that goes into the school to commit suicide in the bathroom. Nor someone that purposely shoots someone else in the butt and gives up. Or attempts to murder one single person at school because they don't know were that other person lives and it's convinent... All those things have nothing to do with schools.
What I'm going to do is only count real school shootings that involve someone walking in and trying to kill as many people as possible. And weight that against all the non-school shooting events in relation to the the number of pupils, schools, and days. Guess what happens then?
Data should always be filtered, outliers removed, then normalized or standardized.
Enough to know that it's larger than ten. And knowledge of shootings is like the worst possible criteria. How many people you knew that died of asthma?
Why not count the crime infested ghetto? They are also result of current politics in one way or other.
I'm guessing with enough applied statistic any conclusion you wish can be reached. Also even by that statistics you'll reach a conclusion that American has a lot of school killings compared to other countries of similar wealth.
This is practically a lesson in the misuse of data. However you define the metric you're measuring, you should be comparing America to other countries. By any measure, America has more school shootings than most other countries.
The exact same comment could be a response to a description of China. The US should hold itself to a higher standard than one where comparisons are with China.
> What you posted are a few negative events. What you did not post are the few million or billion positive events that happened at the same time.
But positive and negative events don't cancel each other out. It's not arithmetic. If you have 1,000 excellent meals for every time you get poisoned, the 1,000 excellent meals really aren't relevant and they're certainly no consolation.
The point is, focusing on that 1 poisoned meal can be misleading. You might think, "How could we ever allow a poisoned meal!?", but if you are serving 900 million meals each day, it may be unavoidable. You certainly try to reduce it as much as possible, but you should not look at the 3 poisoned meals you serve out of 900 million and exclaim how the world has lost its morals and good heart, and Mankind is taken by the Devil.
And that's the problem, while people have their comforts and believe that bad things only happen to other "guilty" people, or should I say other guilty "Americans", government gets away with what ever it likes.
As an American living an America, I have to disagree with you.
First of all, if you really didn't know the U.S. government and military had some creepy capabilities, you're not living on planet earth. Anyone with a brainstem and a basic interest in security and crypto can decipher this basic truth. Many even believe they can crack RSA and similar encryption schemes.
Second of all, I don't begrudge any country their right to choose their principles and their form of government - that includes the Iranians and the rest of the Islamic world. In the U.S., we have a much stronger defense backbone than most countries. That's because we're a bigger target than most countries. You may have heard the U.S. is a major world superpower. New Zealand isn't. Neither is Spain. For a "New Zealander living in Spain" to cast this judgment on us is, as I see it, unfair. Our elected officials, elected according to our chosen system of government, voted for these measures. What more can you ask of a democratic system?
These "whistleblowers" everyone sympathizes so much with -- they broke the laws of our country. They released classified information to the public. Why not just release the nuke launch codes on Twitter while you're at it? Free speech has limitations. Si vis pacem, para bellum.
As an American, I have no problem with the NSA using large-scale statistical methods to filter my private communications out as "not related to terrorism." After all, it's not like Carrie from Homeland is chillin' at the CIA reading my texts with my girlfriend. They have neither time nor inclination for that. On the other hand, I very much do mind New York City being used for another terrorist attack. If these measures can keep me and my loved ones safe, I applaud them.
If you don't like the way we do business in this country, fine. Stay in Spain and use your own social networks and search engines and mail platforms. The beauty of the world is there's something for everyone, from Sharia law to Scandinavia.
And if you don't like the way we treat combattants in our wars -- which included, by the way, the right to appeal to the Supreme Court, and many judicial and legislative battles over the rights of non-military combattants -- don't fight the U.S. military. It's a pretty simple equation. It seems to me, the people with the most to fear here also have the most to hide.
I live in NYC. I used to be in the WTC on a weekly basis for business. I was in Rockefeller Center when anthrax was found in Rockefeller Center (that was actually kinda scary). I'm aware that 'PRISM' purportedly prevented a NYC subway bombing. This isn't to say I'm 'so brave'. It's just to give the context that I'm not removed from the situation.
With that context, I'd much rather take my chances with increased terrorist activity than give the government expanded surveillance powers.
you want to see the villain, look in the mirror. It’s the pants-wetting populace of the United States, who votes for these assholes who pass bad laws in moments of crisis, because we have to do something and because Americans, unlike every other nation in the world, have a god given right to be safe at all times from all things.
Let's say in a few years a corrupt politician manages to get himself elected president. For convenience, let's call him Dick Cheney. President Cheney expands the powers of the office, rewards his corporate friends who bought it for him and generally makes a mess of things. It doesn't look like he'll get a second term until there's another big terrorist attack. He makes his opponents look weak on security, further expands his power, starts three wars and gets re-elected easily. In his second term, he gets presidential term limits repealed, doubles the national debt and starts making journalists who ask too many questions "disappear".
People start to get fed up. They realize the terrorist threat is overblown. They realize President Cheney is more of a threat to the country than any outside entity. A challenger emerges. He persuasively argues for solutions all the experts agree are wonderful. He's well-spoken, good-looking, charismatic, entirely electable. He promises to restore civil liberties, release political prisoners and end intrusive surveillance. He's expected to win in a landslide. There's just one problem: he likes Thai ladyboys. Thanks to PRISM, Cheney knows, and ensures that a friend at Fox News finds irrefutable proof. Cheney wins a third term. The opposition candidate is later found with his throat slit outside a brothel in Bangkok.
Really. I can say it easily. It's a risk I'm willing to accept and a risk I would hope every patriotic American would happily accept to preserve our liberties.
BTW, where does your logic stop?
My brother got killed by a drunk driver, but at least the government can't read my facebook messages about porn and cat pictures...
I'm sure we could cut down on drunk driving fatalities (10K / year) if we applied the NSA to the problem. Should the government search through Facebook messages and Gmail to see if people are writing stuff like 'man I drove hammered last night'?
That is a false decision as well as an unlikely result. False Positives are 1000x more likely than actual positives.
The more likely result is 100000's innocent Americans are placed on the no-fly list, thousands of innocent non-americans are waterboarded in Guantanimo, etc for each potential terrorist stopped.
Most terrorists are incompetent and would get stopped get good police work or fail because the bombs do not explode.
>After all, it's not like Carrie from Homeland is chillin' at the CIA reading my texts with my girlfriend. They have neither time nor inclination for that.
When you get accused of a federal crime and they use the handful of terabytes of all your data against you, what then? How can you possibly defend yourself against an entity with unlimited power and funding. Check out how much it costs to defend yourself from a federal charge and what the chances of winning are. If your charge is anything remotely national security related, you have zero chance. Partly because of the massive data they have on every citizen.
> I very much do mind New York City being used for another terrorist attack.
Has PRISM or any other program done this? When we do find out about foiled terrorism plots, it always has to do with FBI informants posing as arms dealers or fellow extremists, which ends with an arrest of a low-hanging fruit weirdo who may or may not be dangerous. All this infrastructure didn't stop the shoe bomber or the underwear guy. Those guys were mildly determined. How will it stop a group as organized as the 9/11 bombers?
See the comment below for example of a NYC terrorist plot foiled by PRISM.
And by the way -- why would I be accused of a FEDERAL CRIME? I didn't do anything wrong. If anything, _their collection of my data could be used to exonerate me_. Data is a two way street. It can both prove or disprove your guilt.
Be real. You and I both know that when it comes to national security, we do what we have to do. That doesn't mean we exploit those capabilities to put people in unfair situations. You let me know the first time someone gets picked up on a petty offense from PRISM-collected data. I doubt PRISM even collects data on offenses short of treason, terror plots, etc. Certainly none of that falls under the purview of the agencies involved.
By the way - you know other countries are engaged in the cyber war, right? Are you saying you don't want our government's protection against them actually _stealing_ your data and using it for god knows what purpose?
That collection of data won't exonerate you because you won't have access to it; the only data which will be used is that which is potentially bad for you. And why would you have all this faith that the govt. is only using this data in good faith? Do you remember Aaron Schwartz? He wasn't an isolated incident: its very easy for the federal government to bring charges against anyone they want at any time, especially when they have all this data about you.
As a European I wouldn't say I see the USA in the same light as China and Russia, but I definitely feel uncomfortable when I have to travel to the US for work. Given the US's recent track record with human rights and the ongoing mass surveillance, I just can't be sure some innocent comment on some website I've made at some point won't flag me and cause me to be indefinitely detained. I know it's probably not likely, but the possibility is real enough that it makes me uncomfortable. I'd rather work in countries where I know I have rights that will be strongly upheld.
When I traveled to the US first time with a new passport (Chicago, year 200X) I was taken to a police station at the airport and made to answer various questions (I'm a whiter than white male from Northern Europe). The answers were entered into what I assume is some monster database, and I was never explained why this was done or what would be done with the data. It certainly didn't make me feel like I was entering the "land of the free", rather I felt like I was entering a police state.
Did you have to take a photograph and save your 10 fingerprints and disclose all your personal and economic information to get into the USA?
I had to... because it seems for the USA, any Mexican that dares to enter the country is a potential criminal, so there I am in the huge Mexa database. Just because I needed to spend a week in the USA for work.
Whereas the 7 years I lived in Europe (UK and Germany) I did not feel as "guilty". Even with Germany's Rathaus compulsory city registrations.
I had to do the photograph and fingerprints thing, and I guess they get my personal information from my passport. I wasn't asked economic information. I'm British.
I would guess that every Mexican is treated as a potential illegal immigrant.
At various times I've been asked a lot of detail about the company I work for, also I got a lot of questions once about why I went to Turkey so often (it's a really nice place to go on holiday didn't seem an acceptable answer).
Having said that, last few times have been pretty painless. Although I must admit the idea of the fingerprinting does freak me out I'm usually in a state where I don't care when I actually get there.
That's likely because the US views themselves as unofficially being at war with Mexico. The only thing missing from the conflict is the cruise missiles.
I'm also European, I travel to the United States at least once a year and I have never spent longer than 60 seconds at the US border, and that includes scanning my fingerprints. The officers doing passport checks have only ever asked fairly reasonable questions such as how long I am staying for, what the purpose of my travel is and occasionally asking about my occupation.
However, my (US citizen) wife gets harassed here at the UK border all the time; a couple of months ago she was detained at London Heathrow Airport for several hours by the UK Border Agency for no particular reason.
The U.S. can't assume that a white male from a friendly European nation is any less likely to be a terrorist though, as that would be discriminatory against Muslims and quite a few other ethnicities.
Kind of a damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don't thing, I fear.
As a contrary anecdote, I've travelled to the US many times for business and pleasure. I've never had any feeling I was under surveillance, about to be detained tec.
I live in Scandinavia and I don't think most people here see the US in the same light as China and Russia.
But, OTOTH, I do think most people see Europe as more open than the US. It's not like it's a unique and magical "land of the free" like some people seem to believe.
My overall, fact-less impression is that the UK has already cast a pretty wide public surveillance net. They don't seem to be actually using it for enforcing anything, however. I don't think I would blink twice if it turns out they have a PRISM-like operation going on.
The vast majority of CCTV in the UK is privately owned, not networked and most of it is not watched live, or ever unless something actually happens. The police often ignores CCTV because figuring out who controls which cameras and whether or not they were working, and if so how to get the footage can be too time consuming to be worth it.
So while I can't say I like the amount of CCTV here, it's a lot less sinister than portrayed.
Now, some parts of central London is very well covered by live, monitored CCTV, though.
We have lots of identity cards: birth certificate, voter registration card, draft card (seriously, why doesn't this one upset more people? The government literally claims that it can send you to die anytime it likes between the ages of 18-25).
You certainly do not speak for everyone outside the U.S. who has asked themselves the question: "Can I name a U.S. reporter who has disappeared or been murdered for producing material critical of the government?" or "Are U.S. citizens routinely arrested and placed in re-education by labor camps for a year without a trial?"
But non-US citizens can liberally have their basic human rights denied. 12 years after 9/11. That's the land of the free for you.
(Looking at how Bradley Manning was treated even shows that US citizens aren't treated much better. Being denied a lawyer and confined to solitary cells for months is not much different from torture.)
Manning was a member of the Army. You give up a significant number of rights and freedoms as a US citizen when you become a member of the armed forces. Which is not to say that it is right, but that it is legal.
Bradley Manning was a member of the Armed Forces who released classified information to the public. What planet are you living on that his prosecution is unwarranted?
And also, Manning wasn't denied a lawyer, even in his first confinement facility.
I remember this vividly because Manning's own lawyer was the one who admitted that Manning had joked about killing himself before being placed on prevention-of-suicide status...
That said, US citizens has been sent to gitmo. They might been transferred out of there at a later time, but there is no denying that it happened. Then we have people like José Padilla who was held for several years without a trial, and only after major pressure from civil groups was he transferred to a civilian court. Being indefinite held without a trial until political pressure pushes the issues to the breaking point does not exactly paint a great picture.
The article says that "The United States Department of Defense acknowledges holding 99 American citizens captured in Afghanistan, during the 'war on terror', and one of them was held, for a time, in Guantanamo."
It continues: "But although Yasser Hamdi was born in the USA, he was raised in Saudi Arabia, and Joint Task Force Guantanamo counter-terrorism analysts did not realize he was an American."
Your original comment was: "No, people are just sent to Gitmo to be waterboarded and held indefinite without a trial. They don't even care the nationality of where you come from."
They obviously care, which is why the American citizens were either transferred out or never sent there in the first place, despite being caught fighting in Afghanistan.
And when they found out he was a US citizen (about 6 months after capture), he was transferred to military jails in Virginia and South Carolina. He was in the system for a total of 3 years, and then in exchange for renouncing his US citizenship and agreeing to travel restrictions, etc, he was released and deported to Saudi Arabia where he grew up. Note the phrasing, he wasn't 'transferred' to Saudi Arabia, he was released, and given a plane ticket home.
Hamdi was in Guantanamo for less than two months (Feb. 11 to April 5, 2002) while his legal status was sorted out. Considering he was caught in Afghanistan fighting for the Taliban, I'd put that in the "a win for the republic" column.
To be fair, nobody thinks the U.S. has reached the same level in practice against U.S. citizens than Beijing against chinese citizens or Moscow against russian reporters. U.S. citizens are still somewhat protected by the Bill of Rights (well, other than the 4th and soon the 5th).
Now when it comes to foreigners there's not much that can be said for the U.S - although the border can be somewhat thin with extraordinary renditions and withdrawal of nationality to allow for arbitrary executions.
Also, it seems that the will to deconstruct civil liberties is nowhere as strong as it is in Washington DC (except in Pyongyang), so that doesn't help. And the american people do not seem to care at all (but then again, the same is happening in Europe to a smaller extent, and the people don't care either)
So I'd say this perception is more linked to the direction you're headed to than to the place where you are right now (although that is scary in its own right too)
Journalists are starting to be arrested, protesting is becoming increasingly harder, when the police starts arresting them as soon as they seem them, on BS grounds, and as others mentioned there's Gitmo and the torture, and the CIA kidnappings.
> Are U.S. citizens routinely arrested and placed in re-education by labor camps for a year without a trial?
No. But US citizens are routinely arrested and placed in solitary confinement (widely held to be worse than a labor camp) for decades without a trial (guilt is nearly always resolved via plea bargains using the threat of even more years). And by "routinely" I mean the highest incarceration rate in the world: about 0.75% of the population.
Uh, no to "decades without trial". And, for that matter, to "solitary confinement" as a routine, since we simply don't have that number of empty jail (not prison) cells anyways.
It's funny how you mention having a jail cell with no one to bother you as worse than a labor camp though. I think those who have survived gulags or Nazi labor camps might disagree with you on that.
I didn't say people don't find solitary confinement to be a form of torture.
I did say it's still better than labor camps, especially for the types of "solitary confinement" usually being discussed, which are "cells or prison wings without other prisoners" and not "dark holes with only a slot on the door".
Should I ever go to prison I would greatly prefer the "prison wing without other prisoners", though I understand that's only a personal preference.
You may not want to wave your "people in the US aren't incarcerated unjustly" flag too hard, not to mention that prison labour is a quickly growing industry in the US.
Okay, josephagoss's comparison to China and Russia is a bit too much, but the point still stands. I've thought about moving to the US, but the lack of freedoms, even in everyday life (visiting a friend who recently moved to LA and seeing him scared of the police was very new to me (and him, when he moved there)) is a big deterrent.
> To think anyone would feel safe in the USA is ridiculous
I feel perfectly safe. This whole entire issue about the government collecting meta-data is overblown IMO. And comparing it to tyranny and demanding rioting on the streets is literally self-destructive and utmost retarded.
Maybe you need to compare it to a country like the Republic of Congo to get an idea of what's safe and what's not. But instead the majority of people here sit in their comfortable chair in front of the computer fantasizing about how much they hate the government and how much the government must hate them.
Sometimes you need to compare and contrast to the worst to get an idea of what's really going on...
Can you get up in the morning, turn on your coffee maker, shower, eat, get in your car, drive to work, ... enjoy your free time, etc? Do you know how many safe things need to happen for any of those events to work? Think about it. From the electricity to the police force to the gas prices and 100 other things.
Or just compare it to Russia, China, UK, etc. A place with at least 100MM people...
Ironically, I had all those things and chose not to live in the US anymore. I live in another first world country that has all those things but doesn't waste money and lives fighting endless wars, doesn't constantly erode my freedom and privacy, etc.
Can you get up in the morning, turn on your coffee maker, shower, eat, get in your car, drive to work, ... enjoy your free time, etc? Do you know how many safe things need to happen for any of those events to work? Think about it. From the electricity to the police force to the gas prices and 100 other things.
So, your argument is that the USA is as safe as Russia and China? I mean, I'm sure there are plenty of people in those countries that were able to accomplish those tasks today without a problem.
An American colleague of mine (doing a 2nd PhD in Liverpool while I was doing my first/only one) told me he did not create accounts in Google/Yahoo/Hot mail not because of what could happen at this time, but at what the people with that information could do in the future.
Right now, you feel perfectly safe in your comfortable chair, having all your information in Google, Facebook, and other servers. But after a small wrong turn of events (that I hope do not happen), you might find yourself in the wrong place and the wrong time, and all your innocently shared information (shared with google, microsoft, facebook, etc) will be used by your government to condemn you.
What exactly is "all this data" you're worried the government will see? What are you doing on Google and Facebook? I have this funny feeling the NSA doesn't care about your memes or JS plugins or whatever stupid crap you talk about on Facebook.
Ever been to Congo? Either one? It's fine. And this is coming from a white man who spent a week hitchhiking and walking around with zero security.
I get hassled a lot more by LE in the US on trips there than anywhere else. Hell, I made it across eurasia with a grand total of one brush with the law, which went away with a bribe.
I feel unsafe in the US. Not because of "the terrorists", but because of the jackbooted thugs that you call your government and her agencies.
> And this is coming from a white man who spent a week hitchhiking and walking around with zero security.
Survivor bias. Your experience in Congo does not in any way discredit events of genocide, rape, catabolism, and all the other crazy things happening in those parts of the world.
> but because of the jackbooted thugs that you call your government and her agencies.
Someone asked to see your ID?
For most people, living in the USA is a simple and non-violent experience as far as the government goes. You can post your outliners, but that's all they are.
1) So if you went to disney and came home safe, that's survivor bias?
2) You don't have rape in the US? Way to go!
> Someone asked to see your ID?
1) Yes, and they didn't like it ("what state is this from?" "England" "but what state?") so I spent a night in a cell.
2) At the tender age of 13 while living in Chicago, I was threatened with spending the rest of my youth in juvie... for throwing a bit of gravel at a closed window to get someone's attention. This went as far as court.
> For most people
Ah, you're William Hague, right? Nothing to fear if you've nothing to hide?
You'd be there in 1938 shuffling into a cattle car believing that your benevolent government was sending you to a holiday camp.
Oh, and finally...
But instead the majority of people here sit in their comfortable chair in front of the computer fantasizing about how bad things are outside of their glorious america, having never left their home city, never mind state.
I can't even begin to comprehend how bad your sources of information are if you think the levels of freedom in the U.S. and China are more closely comparable than those of the U.S. and Australia.
it's more about the perception than actual levels of freedom,
the US is a country that tortures, detains people from all over the world indefinitely without trial in an offshore location, bails out bankers while promoting austerity for everyone else, spies on people worldwide, starts wars all over the world, uses remotely controlled killing machines
and most of that isn't even new, the veil of the american dream has been ripped apart.
what is most depressing is that in the next election cycle, the american people will just run back to the republicans instead of finally giving up on the charade that are political parties
>"bails out bankers while promoting austerity for everyone else"
How does that work exactly? Do banks operate in a vacuum in the economy?
It's my understanding that social program spending (and hence the deficit) over the recession was at all time highs. "Main Street" got its share of the bail out, as it should have.
Social program spending goes up when unemployment goes up, because unemployed/underemployed people are the ones who need unemployment insurance, food stamps, etc. When you suddenly have a lot of unemployed/underemployed people, you'll have a spike in spending for those programs. But that doesn't mean any of those people are getting more than they used to.
Yep. Australia has no interest in conflict w/ the US. Australia even has a poor record of standing up for its own citizens when persecuted abroad. They are a tiny nation with a vast amount of land and a big reliance on sea-trade. Not to mention they are a "western" resource-rich country surrounded by billions of people in surrounding Asian countries.
As an Australian, I'd say that comparing them to China and Russia is too far, but the general feeling is that the US is far less free than Australia, NZ or most European countries.
For example, the fact that you call yourself the land of the free whilst having the largest number of people in prison both by number and proportion of the population, the whole Guantanamo Bay thing, and the constant electronic surveillance, the crazy overreach of the TSA (I couldn't believe it when I had to take off my shoes and jacket at an airport when I passed through the US a few years ago - crazy!) etc.
I live in Sweden and while most people here are pretty critical to US, most people also realize that they are not in the same league as China and Russia.
Have to agree on this. USA has lost it's appeal for me for quite some time now. For me the countries that I'd like to live in the most are Switzerland, Canada, Australia (I don't know about the US influence there much though), maybe Germany or other similar Western European state, but certainly not US. I live in Eastern Europe btw.
I live in Eastern Europe too and I remember the times when the US was really perceived as "land of free" here. I believe that now we have way more freedom than the Americans. I personally feel uncomfortable enough to avoid travelling to the US which is a shame because I had spent months over there before 9/11 and shortly after and I had great times.
we see the USA in the same light as China and Russia
when it comes to freedoms
I think I understand where it is coming from. Perception is there, and perception is important. There is however a big difference between China and Russia on one hand and USA on the other: the openness of the US society is, among other things, manifested in noticing and magnifying dirty spots.
Other countries with Western European cultural traditions or influences (this includes Australia and NZ but also Japan and Israel, for example) are on the same "other hand". One reason the focus is often on the USA is how it positions itself in the ideological space, as a pinnacle of liberty and freedoms and so on. Personally, while I avoid ideologies and ideologues as much as I can, I think there is a positive side to it, which is precisely the level of scrutiny typical for the US.
I agree with you, but I'd also like to point out that, despite the ridiculous censorship and corruption in China and Russia, it's not like the DPRK where everyone is mind-controlled (exaggeration) and there's no real dissidence. I might even say that the "culture of dissidence" in Russia and China is more healthy than the typical Westerner is aware of (simple language barriers, etc), and has improved over time.
On the other hand, yes, the USA is much better right now. However, one can say that the important distinction is that, while China in particular seems to have improved over the last 20 years, the USA has gotten worse (w.r.t. freedoms). But of course, this is up for debate.
> There is however a big difference between China and Russia on one hand and USA on the other: the openness of the US society is, among other things, manifested in noticing and magnifying dirty spots.
True, but that just means that the people are more (but far from completely) able to be aware of what is being done to them and more free to talk about it. It doesn't change the spirit behind the government agency's actions, and even then "able to be more aware" covers a lot of ground as things like the recent revelations are only heresay (and ignored by most) until good evidence somehow becomes public knowledge.
Let's be fair, you don't speak on behalf of your whole country, nor the "many other people from outside the USA" so I can only take your comment "we see the USA in the same light as China and Russia" with a fine grain of salt...as should others. I say this on top of the fact that I'm someone who lives in London, where I interact with Aussies, Brits, Kiwis, Americans, and Europeans (amongst many others) on a daily basis. I haven't had an even seen an inkling of what you're describing, but again, you and I are just one and two data points.
To think anyone would feel safe in the USA is ridiculous
I'm not sure what your background is, but for 99% of the population of the world, the US is a comparatively very safe place to live.
I don't consider the U.S. as the same as China or Russia (or North Korea, etc) but I don't consider them in the same league as any European country either.
Having said that, I think the U.S. is more of a danger outside its borders than China/Russia/N. Korea.
I haven't travelled to the U.S. in the last 10yrs, despite wanting to for conferences or meetings or a wedding, because I consider it to be a hostile environment.
I don't think the USA is comparable to the worst offenders unless you are looking at a list of bullet points instead of the big picture. But it is hard not to feel the USA is heading down the wrong path. As allies we are compelled by our national interests to follow down the same rabbit hole to some extent and to me it feels our country is morally compromised pushing for data retention laws comparable to Prism when we have no demonstrated domestic need for such things. However Aussies, Swedes, New Zealanders, many small countries rely heavily on the US for our security and there really isn't much option but to tough it out and hope the US turns it around from within.
The fact that we're having this conversation proves how wrong you are.
If you honestly see the world this way, you might take the time learn more about China's internet. A good starting point are the 9 articles in the economist's special report:
In China, the government is predictable and the streets are safe. In the US, the government is the enemy of the people and young school children are massacred while in public school for no reason.
It is strange that the same country which cherishes its 'right to bear arms' on the grounds that it gives them a level of protection that the government is unable to provide is 'happy' to build the infrastructure which allows the same government to peek into their lives.
On the one hand, we don't trust the government with the basics (physical security). On the other, we trust them with information we don't want our parents to see (facebook profiles, etc). ...strange.
Edit: When I say 'the country' I mean the people in aggregate. Obviously, some people are outraged about this issue, just as some people were outraged when a gunman killed 30 children. Techies seem to be particularly concerned about this issue but, on the whole, most people are indifferent.
The right to bear arms is also, explicitly, a protection against tyranny BY the government. Thomas Jefferson: ""When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."
So is the 4th amendment, and look how much that one is abused. In the end the Constitution really is "just a piece of paper", if not the government, not the judges, not the media, and ultimately not even the people respect it, live by it, and try to protect it as soon as it's endangered by people trying to accumulate too much power. Where are all the street protests?!
I also fail to understand people who so viciously defend the 2nd amendment "because of potential tyranny", but don't try to defend the 1st and 4th amendments with the same aggressiveness, when in fact those amendments are the first line of defense against that encroaching tyranny, and if they fail, it's the first clue the country is slipping into tyranny. Would you rather wait until the very last moment, until people can't take it anymore but to rise up against the government with violence and starting a massacre, all just to remove the government? Or would you try to fix things while you still can do it peacefully, by protecting the 1st and 4th amendments, so it doesn't have to come to "using the 2nd amendment right to defend against the government with guns"?
Or maybe it all comes down to who has more money to raise the awareness about it. NRA is a powerful lobby. ACLU and EFF less so.
I'm going to interpret that question literally. A key thing you have to keep in mind is that in almost all of the US outside of a few very large cities, the "street" is not a useful public place. People don't gather and interact on streets in the US. They are merely channels for cars. Protesting on the streets would be as useful in most cities in the US as wandering around next to a shipping lane on the open ocean. The only people "there" are driving vehicles at full speed.
That of course raises the question of where Americans do congregate together. Churches are the answer for many, although I believe those are dwindling. Some go to bars. Neither of those is a particularly good venue for dissent.
One unfortunate consequence of the US being so car-centric is that we've destroyed public space, and consequently made public assembly much harder.
I really appreciate this viewpoint, because I was trying to understand the apparent disconnect between my American and European friends on the suggestion of protesting, and now I do think the function of public space has much to do with it (also overall size of the country).
You bring up a good point. Maybe the best form of protest these days is not to take to the streets but rather take to the highways. Blocking a interstate highway going into/out of a large city might get more attention.
This would be remarkably effective at getting attention, but I'm not sure how beneficial to a cause it would be.
If the purpose is to disrupt travel or commerce, it would most likely achieve it's goal almost immediately. If the purpose is to bring attention to some other issue and the disruption of the highway system is unrelated (or only tangentially related), then the attention would have to be weighed against the negative impression it creates for the many affected.
I don't have the relevant experience in this area to know under what circumstances protests that negatively impact average people succeed in their goals.
This would be a bad idea, tacically and economically. In a protest, at least in the U.S., you can take measures to protect your identity and not carry any documentation, along with the ability to flee on foot in any direction. You also have no tangible assets on you that the government can seize.
In a vehicle protest you forfeit anonymity (lincense plates), ability to split since road-blocks can easily stop you, and most importantly your vehicle might be impounded.
OH it would work. And it's nearly impossible for you to get into trouble. If all the protesters just drove in a circle such as getting on the highway at a specific ramp and getting off at a specific ramp just to get back on. They would create a massive bottle neck not only for those 2 ramps but for the roads that connect to them. There's no law that says you can't joy ride or that you must avoid congested traffic. A group of only 100 people could very easily find a bottle neck on their local highway and exploit it.
In some places, "Disrupting the flow of traffic" is illegal. For example, driving at 55 mph on the highway is legal. However, driving next to someone, both going 55 mpg, would be illegal, as it disrupts the flow of traffic.
Don't take this the wrong way, but I don't care if you're protesting to support feeding starving kids, if you actually block traffic on a highway I will vote against your pet issue 100% of the time.
You point out an additional problem with protests: the methods that don't piss people off are ineffective at getting attention, and the methods that get attention just piss people off.
Hence the protest signage posted in the fences of bridge overpasses of divided carriageways (I don't want to involve myself in an east coast/west coast debate on terms)
Most cities in the US don't have squares or city centers. Even ones that do exist are often empty, or inhabited more by the homeless than anyone else.
I believe the culture is improving here, but for a long time, cars were such important symbol of wealth that being a pedestrian gained a small but real social stigma. Large cities that were already thriving and had very affluent people who didn't drive bucked the trend, but in your average city in the US, if you're on a street and not driving, you look poor, mentally unstable, or homeless.
This is so sad and true. I've driven all over the US and there's such a lack of community and culture when compared to other places (Canada and other car cultures are the same though). Lots of town without a center, where everyone knows each other but lives a mile away from each other. It' like individuality taken to an extreme.
The 4th amendment is strong as it has ever been, and the 1st is much stronger.[1] Are police knocking down your door without a warrant? If not that's the 4th amendment working as intended.
What we have here is a system:
1) Clearly designed to pass a 4th amendment analysis;
2) Enabled to to pass such scrutiny be the unprecedented access Americans give corporations to the details of their private lives.
For what its worth I think the NSA programs are bad ideas, in an administration that has had a lot of them.[2] But not every bad idea is unconstitutional, that is to say not every bad idea can be fixed in court rather than in Congress.
[1] In light of this story, who is still mad at the Supreme Court for holding that Congress couldn't shut down the speech of corporations (like the ACLU?)
[2] Menacing over the Supreme Court justices during the state of the union probably being the worst.
The Court today arms the police with a way routinely to dishonor the Fourth Amendment ’s warrant requirement in drug cases. In lieu of presenting their evidence to a neutral magistrate, police officers may now knock, listen, then break the door down, nevermind that they had ample time to obtain a warrant. I dissent from the Court’s reduction of the Fourth Amendment ’s force.
You're haggling over the definition of "reasonable", probably based on your views of the drug laws. Do you think that in 1800, the framers would have considered it an unreasonable search to enter a home they could hear being burglarized? No. That's why the 4th uses the wiggle word "unreasonable."
I'd bet the reason you think Kentucky is different is that you think drugs are a non crime. I do too, but lots of people do. I grew up in "just say no" suburbia. My mom and lots like her (see the reddit meme: scumbag suburban mom) thinks drugs are the worst thing ever.
In any case, Kentucky is an affirmation of the very simple principle that a warrant is not required. For better or worse, the framers did not give us a 4th amendment that admitted no compromises. They gave us one that asked us to analyze whether a search was "reasonable", asking us to reach compromises.
>You're haggling over the definition of "reasonable", probably based on your views of the drug laws.
I'm not haggling over anything. You asked "Are police knocking down your door without a warrant?" I provided the answer, additionally evidencing that the debate over the 4th amendment is not as static as you seemed to be implying.
>Do you think that in 1800, the framers would have considered it an unreasonable search to enter a home they could hear being burglarized? No.
Do you think that in 1800 the framers would have considered hearing the sound of a flushing toilet or people moving to be exigent circumstances?
>I'd bet the reason you think Kentucky is different is that you think drugs are a non crime.
I am not somebody who obsesses over drug law[1]. My reasons for disagreeing with the ruling are better expressed by Ginsburg which is why I provided the link to her dissent, which I recommend you read.
[1] although it's pretty clear that many current drug laws in the US are broken and highly destructive to society. Personally I don't and have never used any illegal drugs so I have no 'skin in the game' so to speak and fear of getting (legitimately) busted by the police over drugs is not a concern I have. So if you are picturing some pothead who spends all day reading the High Times and proselytising about the benefits of weed that isn't me
I hate to use the slippery slope argument but once you allow police to enter a residence with evidence as simple as something they might have heard through the door then there's no need to ever worry over warrants at all. How do you even prove what they heard or if they heard something in the first place?
If the officer witnesses someone break into the residence then sure, but just hearing something? That doesn't pass the smell test to me, regardless of whether it was about drugs or not.
What are the sounds of a house being burglarized anyway? The homeowner could just be moving stuff around in the living room when the cops bust down the door without knocking. That's property damage that the homeowner is likely stuck with and in some cases it ends badly with someone getting shot.
This whole no-knock attitude that's been in place for decades is a sad joke.
Slippery slope reasoning is completely incompatible with 4th amendment interpretation, because the 4th amendment is all about what is "reasonable" (or rather, what is "unreasonable.") It's about compromising the legitimate needs of the police with the legitimate privacy interests of the people. You can't make compromises when your retort to everything becomes: "but if we keep going in this direction..."
That's the whole point to 'reasonable' though. It allows the effect of the law to change without changing the law itself.
This has worked against the government as often as it's worked for the government. And on the whole it has been instrumental in driving social change for the better.
The same Supreme Court that voted that equality could exist with "sepatate-but-equal" facilities later voted that separate-but-equal was not reasonable and full integration was required instead.
This drives "strict Constitutionalists" batty but I find it's one of the key benefits of our system of government.
Not sure I follow why this is a valid retort... grandparent comment was not arguing against the flexibility of "reasonable," but rather the direction the interpretation is being taken in. I agree that creating future-proofed laws with wiggle room can be beneficial, but that does not mean we have no need to be vigilant against that same wiggle room being used against us.
The problem with "reasonableness" is that there's no single definition of what's reasonable, so you'll get different courts giving different verdicts in similar cases. Instead, couldn't we define things very strictly, but require them to be revised every n years with the current needs and expectations of society?
Dude, I can't even get my computer program to not crash on malformed MP3 files, and the computer program + computer does exactly what I tell it to do.
There's no way to get a legal code that is both very exact and useful in the face of humans who have to implement it.
And even if we could, I don't think revising it every n years is good policy. We should change the law when it's broken, but more importantly changes to the law must necessarily lag several election cycles behind the needs and expectations of society. A court can actually make the change quicker if need be.
And even if we could, I don't think revising it every n years is good policy. We should change the law when it's broken, but more importantly changes to the law must necessarily lag several election cycles behind the needs and expectations of society. A court can actually make the change quicker if need be.
Sure, there needs to be a low pass filter of some kind to prevent wild oscillations in the law due to delayed feedback, but we're getting oscillations now in the form of party swapping every 4-8 years. There must be some way to make the law less like a moving average filter and more like an adaptive Kalman filter so it can react quickly when necessary without throwing out the entire USC every election (though I have, in the past, proposed rewriting the entire body of laws from scratch once per generation, with a generational opt-in-based transition from the old set to the new set). Courts should be a last measure, IMO, due to the insane costs of facing one, rather than an integral process of deciding what the law actually is.
An interpretation of the word "reasonable" is literally all discussions of the 4th Amendment have ever come down to, you can't pretend like someone with a narrower scope or "reasonableness" is just haggling over semantics and nitpicking tiny details.
My point is that he's arguing about precisely where the line should be drawn, not offering an example of the police engaging in clearly unreasonable conduct. You can't claim that the 4th amendment has fallen by the wayside just because you disagree about precisely where the courts have drawn the lines in edge cases. You need some stronger evidence than that.
"anything but google" this: "indiana no knock search without warrant"
I'm serious about "anything but google"
"anything but google" this too if you don't believe me: "google search providing different results to different people"
> Are police knocking down your door without a warrant? If not that's the 4th amendment working as intended.
Damn right they are. Exigent circumstances. [1]
Police routinely coerce people into consenting to searches during traffic stops when there is no RAS. If there's a K9 unit around it's even easier; look at how often they just happen to trigger when there's no contraband at all [2]. Does a 56% false positive rate sound reasonable?
And, once they've gained access they've got wide leeway to seize whatever they want in the name of the war on drugs. At that point the owner must pay a bond to contest the seizure, and then has the burden of proving that they were not party to the crime. Note that no warrant is required for property seizure, merely probable cause [3].
There were groups who have protested who had no serious arrests to report. There were some groups that had a heavy amount of arrests. If one were to look at all the groups protesting recently with an objective eye I'm sure examples can be found that show why one group had such results.
If I were to bet on the most significant predictor of arrests during a protest, my money would be on size. The fewer people present in a protest, the more likely that it will be left alone and no arrests will be made. The more people there are, the more likely that those in charge will try to "contain it" through actions that lead to altercations and arrests. I'd say that it's pretty much impossible to have a Tiananmen Square size protest in the US (or any other country with sufficiently advanced surveillance systems for that matter)
That may be in the case in some situations, but I can recall several major, i.e. large, protests that resulted in very few arrests or problems with the police. In fact, some of them were a quite pleasant crowd if the reports were to be believed.
Sadly, you just generally don't hear much of them in the news.
One of those adjectives has an almost oposite meaning to the other two.
Please, don't just throw "bad" words in a setence if you are trying to make a point. Understand what you are saying, and if you don't completely grasp the meaning of a word, either look it up, or not use it.
The way you wrote it, you sound like a South America neofacist (and yes, I just made up a label). And I'm quite sure you are not proposing creating a facist government hidden behind populist policiy, thus you should not speack like one.
It only sounds contradictory. In actual fact, neoliberal regimes everywhere have been "libertarian" only in their business laws, and authoritarian in nearly everything else. The US is becoming rather like Pinochet's Chile: money can do what it wants, everyone else has orders to follow.
I don't disagree with you on the importance of the 1st and 4th amendments.
I think the ACLU and EFF will indeed become stronger. I don't know of any 2nd amendment supporters who are also not strong 1st and 4th supporters, the issue comes down to how their voice is heard. Also I don't know any of them who who wouldn't rather change things peacefully, it is a much better solution.
I'd guess that there are plenty of 2nd amendment supporters who would be happy to ban flag-burning...
There are indeed, and I know more than a few of them. They post on the same gun forums I do. What you see among the "pro gun" crowd is a pretty clearly ideological divide between Libertarians and traditional Conservatives. The Libertarians take the 1A, 4A, 5A, etc. just as seriously as the 2A, whereas the more traditional Conservatives tend - in my experience - to be a bit more narrowly focused. It's unfortunate, but real.
That said, I take it as encouraging that I feel like I'm seeing more libertarian thought and less of the "yee-haw, let's kill that fag" kind of stuff on one of the NC centric gun forums I post on. And lots of people take a fairly moderate approach, offering up strong defenses of the 2A, without doing the full-on "captain redneck" thing.
On a semi-related note... it's kinda sad how prevalent stereotyping - and making broad assumptions based on those stereotypes - is. For example, many people seem to assume that most active 2A advocates are, indeed, "redneck" types: from the South, with CSA flag stickers on their trucks, a Bible in their hip pocket, and a mouthful of chewing tobacco. But, while those people exist, most of the pro gun folks I know are actually well educated, level-headed, reasonable and rational.
> many people seem to assume that most active 2A advocates
What's a 2A advocate? I don't think there's any substantial opposition to the 2nd amendment itself. The main discussion surrounding 2A tends to come up any time any sort of restrictions surrounding gun control are raised. Then the crowd of people who view any sort of gun control (background checks!!) as an attack on the 2nd amendment start coming out of the woodwork.
I believe that's the crowd that gets stereotyped and I don't believe they're representative of the majority of gun owners.
Most of your stereotyped gun owners do not have a categorical opposition to gun control laws. For example, most are not particularly upset with the ban on new machine guns that has been in place for many years. Rather most of the opposition that you see is against pointless laws that target particular cosmetic features of some guns ("assault weapon" laws) or actually overreaching gun laws that pop up in particular cities in particular states.
There is little focus on the national laws that are already in place, laws that particular states have or are trying to have are what get the attention of the gun lobbyists.
Can you explain to me why it makes sense to ban machine guns? If I take a rifle that can shoot as rapidly as I can pull the trigger, and modify it to waste bullets as fast as possible, is it in any significant way more dangerous? Why is the second banned solely based on firing mechanism?
I don't think there's any substantial opposition to the 2nd amendment itself.
Your experiences may differ from mine, but when I get into debates about gun-control / 2A issues, I find it to be very commonplace for people to insist that the 2A is useless, outdated, and state that it should be repealed. Believe it or not, there is a not-insignificant number of people out there who are for total civilian disarmament.
And then there are the bulk of people who seem to be more or less ambivalent, or apathetic about it all. They aren't out to attack the 2A, but they aren't interested in going to any great length to fight for it either.
What's a 2A advocate?
In my book, somebody who identifies "gun rights" as an issue of specific importance to them, and takes some specific action: donating to the NRA/GOA/2AF/JPFO/etc., voting, campaigning, running for office, or something of that nature, with an intent to defend gun rights.
Well, it is an attack to restrict firearms ownership. Remember the original purpose of the 2ed was to arm the citizenry against tyrrany. So if government can restrict your access or avaiability of firearms (especially those said government actively uses in its military) they are restricting your ability to arm yourselves against them.
It doesn't hurt that the framers didn't conceptualize nuclear weapons or ICBMs, though. Back in 1800, it was perfectly reasonable to expect if the US military could have a mortar, a citizen could. Though I'm more of the opinion if you wouldn't trust your neighbor with some destructive tool than you shouldn't trust the US military with it.
Unfortunately, there are significant amounts of people on both sides of any debate, much less this one, with either blinders on or have selective vision.
As a strict constructionist, I affirm the right of anyone to burn any flag, anyone to "protest" at a funeral, as well as PRISM being unconstitutional. Further, I believe that there is not an explicit "right to privacy" and therefore there is not a right to privacy. Them's my blinders!
Further, I believe that there is not an explicit "right to privacy" and therefore there is not a right to privacy.
So are you saying that a "right" has to be explicitly spelled out in the BoR in order to be a right? If that's what you mean, then how the heck does a "strict constructionist" get that to jibe with the 9th Amendment?
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people
>So are you saying that a "right" has to be explicitly spelled out in the BoR in order to be a right?
This is why Madison thought the Bill of Rights was a mistake. The rest of the document was written as a list of delineated powers - "this is what the federal government can do". That's much, much more restrictive than "this is what the federal government can't do". He thought the BoR would lead people into thinking the federal government is allowed to do anything it isn't prohibited from doing.
I think history has born him out, too. I'd much rather see courts asking the question "is this on the list of things the federal government can do?" rather than "does it pass muster on 2A or 4A grounds?" Of course if that were the case 2/3 the federal government would go away. Not a bad thing, IMO.
Not really; strict constitutionalists can still say that the government should never infringe on amendments 1...8,10, and if it can intrude even less (ie. add more rights) then that's great. In fact, I think that was the whole point of writing the constitution that way.
I'd guess there are plenty of 2nd amendment supporters, on cultural grounds, would have no problem with flag-burning. They may not like it and publicly disagree with it, but they wouldn't stop it.
Many as in raw # or as in percentage? To be honest I haven't met many of those, all the ones I know are more libertarians then conservatives so they don't take strong issue with the ACLU or EFF.
I just did some searching to try to find what percentage of the Republican Party identifies as libertarian as opposed to conservative, and I didn't have much luck. But, considering the party's platforms on gay marriage and immigration, I think the percentage of libertarians is small.
Threatening to take up arms is a way to pressure for political concessions as an end-run around representative democracy, when you aren't getting what you want (for example, when the populace elects the 'wrong' President).
I would suppose it's possible for the populace to threaten to take up arms when the representative democracy isn't so representative anymore. An opposing viewpoint doesn't always fit so cleanly within a partisan view.
It takes awhile for a protest movement to actually mobilize, particularly if you're trying to bring in more than the professional protest group everyone ignores without a second thought.
We won't know for a month or two whether this has legs or not.
When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.
It's pretty clear from the last couple of days that the balance in the US is pretty firmly tipped towards tyranny by that definition. Certainly I doubt anyone in the government is at all worried about the people being able to do anything about this scandal. There have been several comments on here and elsewhere from people who are thinking twice about publicly supporting Snowden, or are at least aware that that support is probably logged somewhere and might have repercussions in the future. This would have been ridiculous paranoia not that long ago.
That's not a definition of tyranny, it's a hypothesis about tyranny. But it's foolish. Pointing a shotgun at random government workers like the census taker or sending ricin to the President are not doing anything to improve our politics.
I think some politicians (supporters of this policy) are very worried about this, in that it could turn their base against them, and be vote out of office. We will have to wait and see how public sentiment turns.
> Thomas Jefferson: ""When governments fear the people, there is liberty.
Looks like false attribution according to wikiquote. (Why do people feel the need to use proof by authority anyway? Either a thing is right, or it is insightful, but attributing it to dead 18th century rebels does not bolster the case.)
________________________________
When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.
Falsely attributed to Thomas Jefferson; first attributed to Jefferson in Gyeorgos C. Hatonn, It's All in the Game: Butterflies, Mind Control--The Razor's Edge (1994), p. 214. A 1912 issue of The American Anti-socialist attributes the re-ordered form, "Where the people fear the government you have tyranny. Where the government fears the people you have liberty", to John Basil Barnhill.
> Why do people feel the need to use proof by authority anyway? Either a thing is right, or it is insightful, but attributing it to dead 18th rebels does not bolster the case.
There's at least one completely made up Orwell quote that gets kicked around quite a bit by conservatives. ("rough men") That one is weird: you'd think those people would be happy to NOT quote Orwell if they knew anything about his politics.
I assume it's less about argument from authority and more about just a lack of eloquence or confidence on the part of the person relying on quotations to make their point.
> I assume it's less about argument from authority and more about just a lack of eloquence or confidence on the part of the person relying on quotations to make their point.
That's probably right. Hell, it's part of the reason that Hallmark greeting cards will always have a viable business model.
I really don't mind it when it's just meant to amuse people or send a nice message. When people try to engage in a battle of ideas and they rely so directly on borrowed wisdom, it can make for a boring time.
Agreed. I also doubt that we'll ever see: John Basil Barnhill: ""When governments fear the people, there is liberty., since poor John Basil had the misfortune of not being as well known as Thomas Jefferson.
When Thomas Jefferson was alive it was feasible for the people to protect themselves from tyranny by fighting the government because the technology available to "normal" people was the same as available to the military.
Today it would be impossible. Even the police are 10000x better equipped than any group of civilian can be. And then there's the military...
Besides that, I'm skeptical there will ever be an issue where enough people are angry enough to start a revolt against the government. Right now people are outraged because the government is massively violating our rights, but nobody's talking about an armed revolution.
Back then having to bear arms against your government was a much more likely scenario than it is now. Of course it would lead to something like the civil war. The democratic system is supposed to prevent that anyways.
However in modern times we've moved quite a bit away from the possibility of armed rebellions. It's something that happens in less developed countries like Iraq.
The world Jefferson lived in is infinitely different from ours. There is absolutely no chance that the government of the US will turn tyrannical. none. zero. if you think there is you're nuts.
There is all sorts of talk in this comment section about how people would fight the US military and stuff like that. There people are in la-la land. I'm not going to elaborate on this but: I think it's closely tied with the American obsession with the apocalypse (see zombie/post-apocalyptic movies)
People have very very different expectations from the government now than they did even 50 years ago. No first world country (even ones that don't cherish liberty as much as us) in the past 50 years has turned to tyranny. There are studies about how past a certain GDP tyranny becomes unsustainable - and we're well past that point.
I do what to clarify that I'm not against the second amendment at all. But the argument that it's to fight the government is absolutely absurd.
It's somewhat fortunate that the actual military is, if anything, the least likely threat. Almost all of the veterans I've known would take the people's side. So if it came down to it, I could see large amounts of the military refusing orders or defecting.
The main risk is probably paramilitaries like the ATF or your local SWAT team. One of the neat ways the Second Amendment is self-enforcing is that, if you sent those guys house to house to confiscate people's firearms, they'd get shot at.
I was going to say almost exactly that, only instead of the ATF (who have very little in the way of tactical response capabilities), the DHS is the biggest threat on the whole.
Firstly, they are not bound by Posse Comitatus, but even moreso than that, they've been gearing up for awhile to have extremely tactical response capacity, including live-fire drills in and over major cities, purchase of armored urban vehicles, and massive ammunition purchases. At last count, DHS has approximately five bullets for every single American in the US borders. Only slightly scarier is that they've been purchasing 'hesitate no more' targets to train on designed to desensitize them to the killing of 'normal people', including pregnant women, children, etc. Also, the ammo they've been buying are illegal to use extra-nationally due to the Geneva convention.
Yes (this isn't meant to be sarcastic, but necessary because I had to move this post from where it was to where it is, and HN keeps marking it dead).
The DHS is not bound by Posse Comitatus[1].
The DHS has been buying massive amounts of ammo[2][3][4], and most recently, the House has voted to get justification on the quantity of hollow points it is purchasing[5].
It looks like the claim that they're buying large quantities of urban armored vehicles is wrong[4], though they do acknowledge that they possess them, though my Google-fu is on the fritz getting a source for that since all searches for "DHS armored vehicles" returns the wrong conspiracy theory.
The DHS was using 'no more hesitation' targets that look like citizens[6][7]. Of note, link 7 implies that the manufacturer took them off the site, but the manufacturer never claimed that they were no longer for sale, or that they were no longer being sold directly to DHS, even when asked that question directly. I have no direct knowledge either way.
The ammo they've been buying is hollow-point[2][3], and hollow point ammo is illegal per Geneva convention (is actually wrong, it's illegal based on the Hague convention, the point stands true either way... Hague just predates Geneva)[8]
I think that's all of it. Let me know if I missed anything.
Thanks. I'm not being snarky or anything either. Just genuinely curious and would like to learn more on the topic. That said, I just looked at your first source and it doesn't support the conclusion that the DHS is exempt from the Posse Comitatus Act. It says that the US Coast Guard is exempt, and that the US Coast Guard operates under the DHS. But it does not follow from those statements that the DHS is exempt.
I could be wrong, or they could be bound by some other statute, but as I understand it, DHS is not exempt because it is neither a division of the Department of Defense, nor is it an "armed service" like the Marines.
The Coast Guard is not bound by Posse Comitatus despite being an 'armed force' because they are members of DHS, and not DoD.
The ATF and FBI are not bound by Posse Comitatus also, as they aren't armed forces (though both probably have some degree of armament; I know the ATF was playing around with getting a few armored cars the last time I was there, and they already had some 'surveillance' trucks based on ambulances), and that is why FBI, DHS and ATF are able to engage local police in an assistive fashion (or take over a case).
The Wikipedia page isn't very clear in either direction regarding DHS. Based on the description of the Posse Comitatus Act, it sounds like your interpretation would be correct. It says that Posse Comitatus (PCA) limits the federal government's powers to use federal military personnel for domestic law enforcement.
My interpretation of that is that it applies to military forces. The Coast Guard is a military force. DHS, I believe, is not. The reason the Coast Guard is exempt from PCA is not due to it being under DHS. (That's a side issue.) It's because the Coast Guard is charged with a law enforcement mission. It says that right in the Wikipedia article.
And that makes sense too. PCA says "don't use military for law enforcement." US Coast Guard has a law enforcement mission, so it must have an exemption in order to fulfil that mission. Likewise, ATF and FBI are law enforcement agencies (not military forces). So it makes sense that it doesn't apply to them as well.
The big question is whether DHS is a military force or not. I don't think they are. I could be wrong.
If they're not a military force, I don't see the problem with them not being bound by the PCA. The PCA is specifically for military forces.
Regarding the rest of your sources, [2,3,5] seem to confirm that DHS is buying a lot of ammo. But I don't see anything nefarious there. Note that [2] is an editorial (an opinion piece).
None of the sources mention that DHS is purchasing hollow-point bullets. The Snopes page [4] mentions that the SSA is purchasing hollow-point bullets, but not DHS. I wouldn't really have a problem with it if DHS was purchasing hollow-point bullets. The reason hollow-point bullets are banned in international warfare is because they increase the likelihood that a combatant is killed rather than just maimed. A full-metal jacket bullet will maim a combatant so that he is unable to continue fighting, but with a lower chance of killing him. Police forces tend to use hollow-point bullets because they reduce the risk to innocent bystanders (less chance of going through walls or ricocheting). Different tools for different jobs.
Regarding the "hestitate no more" targets, the sources [6,7] don't support the claim that DHS is using them. The first source [6], is an opinion piece. First, let's apply Betteridge's Law [] to the headline. The answer is probably, "No, 'DHS [is probably not] training with practice targets featuring children, pregnant woman [sic].'" Looking at the content of [6], all it really says is DHS buys targets from Law Enforcement Targets, Inc, and Law Enforcement Targets, Inc released a product line that features targets that display children, pregnant women, etc. It doesn't follow from those two statements that DHS is purchasing exactly* those products. They could be purchasing a different product line from the same company. The second source [7], just states that Law Enforcement Targets, Inc makes "hesitate no more" targets. It doesn't mention DHS. In fact, a quote from the company says that the product was designed based on requests from police forces.
One point that you didn't provide any sources for is the DHS practising "live-fire drills in and over major cities." Does "over" major cities imply they have military aircraft? I'm not sure what you meant by that.
I'm not saying that you're wrong, but the particular sources that you've chosen don't support your conclusions. DHS isn't my favorite government agency either, but I see no conspiracy here.
I'm not necessarily suggesting that there is a conspiracy, but if you were looking for one with DHS, it isn't a big leap to imagine that they're gearing up for militaristic style operations despite their otherwise-stated LE mission. There have allegedly been statements made that they were gearing up for civil unrest and the possibility of martial law, but none of those statements were sources I consider credible, so I have done my best to mentally sequester them, and also did not posit them as evidence.
Regarding the purchases as being hollow point, that's probably not as 'newsworthy' an item for traditional news agencies, but the actual solicitation from DHS[1] illustrates that the majority of their purchases were hollow point, in 9mm and .40S&W. This was also covered by Forbes[2] and Foxnews[3]. That said, I also don't have a big problem with them being hollow point vs. FMJ as HPs are better in urban environments. Regardless, that does mean that they're dedicated to use in urban environments. The quantity itself might not be alarming to you, but considering that's the same amount of ammo used by the military each year, it seems excessive. I know that Breitbart insisted that the total doesn't account for what they might expend in training, but I've never known any LE or military agency to train with hollow point.
Regarding the "No More Hesitation" targets, the Examiner[4] linked those purchases to DHS, but the only other source I can find that says so definitively is Infowars, which I don't necessarily consider credible without corroboration.
One minor correction, at least from what I saw, is that you say it was requested from _police_ forces, but what I read indicated _law enforcement_ sources, of which DHS is. In one of their (now deleted) Facebook comments, LETargets acknowledged that DHS was their single largest customer, though I agree that is not definitive.
I'll have to come back to the live fire drills because it seems like those are being attributed to the 'military', but I know I saw something that collated that to DHS training, but I can't find it at the moment. This post has sat in my window overnight, so I'm just going to submit it for now.
As with all things, it varies, but hollow points and sabot rounds tend to be popular due to their better record on overpenetration.
Frangible rounds provide a far lower likelihood than an errant shot will punch through the wall and kill whatever's on the other side of it (which is why they're also the preferred rounds for home defense and such too).
I've always thought the 2nd amendment wasn't necessarily totally aimed at the federal level of government, but at the state and local levels as well. One could say that it is almost aimed entirely at the state and local levels.
When the Constitution was written, the US didn't normally have a permanent standing army. It allowed for a navy, but an army was only intended for times of war and monies for it to be used for two years at a time. Of course, that changed over time.
The permanent military of several branches is a modern idea.
I agree with you, despite history, I would imagine there would be a serious morale problem if the military were ordered to open war against civilians. The Civil War comes to mind, many in the military left the North to fight for the South to defend their home states.
It's also somewhat aimed at foreign invasions. "The security of a free state" goes both ways--a free state securing itself, and securing the freedom of the state.
The Japanese were pretty worried about landing on the West Coast because they'd have to fight through miles of woods, filled with Americans who knew the land, carrying hunting rifles.
But, how does owning a gun provide protection against the US military?
I don't understand why people keep asking this question, and variations of it, or offering up the argument "the 2A is useless for allowing rebellion since you can't defeat the US military".
Bands of rebels armed with mostly light weapons have caused superpowers all sorts of issues: See Afghanistan, from the Soviet era through today.
And if a full fledged rebellion did break out in the US, here are a few points to consider:
1. It's likely that at least some military units would side with the rebels. So you're already not talking about a case of just "you and your AR-15 versus tanks and F-16's".
2. Nukes are effectively "off the table" since there wouldn't be much point in nuking your own country, as there wouldn't be anything left to rule.
3. A hypothetical rebellion would not be limited to just AR-15's and what-not... factor in IEDs and various kinds of improved weapons.
4. And factor in stolen / captured military weapons.
5. And factor in military weapons provided, illicitly, to the rebels by the manufacturers, distributors, foreign groups, and gosh knows who else.
6. The population of the US is somewhere north of 300 million people, right? And a significant portion of the population own firearms. How many members are in the standing US military? According to Wikipedia, there are 1,429,995 active duty members of the US armed forces. IF a rebellion had sufficient popular support, consider, as they say, that quantity has a quality all it's own.
Anyway, the point is to say that it's not as simple as "you and a gun versus the US military" if you look at the big picture. I mean, sure, if it's just you and you take on a tank with an AR-15, they're just going to run you over, game over. But if an actual, massed rebellion, with lots of popular support were to break out, those guns do matter.
If you've got the popular support you're eluding to you'd be fine with baseball bats and molotov cocktails. You'd also be fine to steal the guns and other weapons of military/police forces as you have victorious encounters. You wouldn't actually need the guns in the first place.
It is much harder to start a revolution with steak knives than hunting rifles. I mean, consider why you don't actively participate in violent revolution right now (assuming you are dissenting against your government for some reason). Usually, it is because of the risk of injury and death.
You do reduce it when you bring a gun to a tank / plane / automatic weapons fight, rather than a knife. It isn't meant to provide all the armaments you need, but it leaves you a starting point.
You're making a couple of unfortunate assumptions.
An already economically-weakened ConUS can expect the following:
A domestic military with hardware that is failing left and right.
A domestic military that has no ammunition because the "domestic security forces" bought it all.
A domestic military that has no fuel.
Foreign Fighters that are well stocked and equipped with advanced weaponry.
The real "rulers" don't consider this to be their own country. They are citizens of the world. ConUS contains several million nuisances that would be best killed in an expedient manner, such as by plague or nuclear attack.
In that kind of environment, it is less likely that having an AR or an AK in the attic will help the typical USian.
In a way, it doesn't. There's really no way to arm yourself in a fashion to survive sustained attack from the U.S. military in this day and age.
But that's one of the reasons the military are sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution as the primary goal, not simply to obey orders. They even throw in the surreal weasel words "against all enemies, foreign and domestic" as a way of really punching that point home.
So it's not really possible to meet the full intent of the 2nd Amendment any longer but at the same time there are other safeguards.
But it did lead to an insanely long battle that continued well after the official war was over in not one but two countries. The governments had given up fighting, but the civilians with guns kept US forces under constant attack for ten years.
A lot of the guns in circulation in Iraq were liberated from the army and police, or acquired through corrupt channels, originally provided by the coalition forces themselves.
You credit a well armed populace as being the key here, but it doesn't hold up to scrutiny. They could've started with zero guns and simply acquired them as necessary.
Remember, a hostile government might shoot an unarmed individual in a conflict, but they will always shoot an armed one.
Doesn't that just illustrate that their odds would have been better had they started with arms instead of acquiring them as they went though?
This is somewhat similar to another argument I've had - there were some armed Jews in Germany who were able to leverage that firepower to hold off the SS and, eventually, escape. It certainly didn't stop the Nazis from committing the Holocaust, and communication / coordination are key to mounting a successful offense that the Jews didn't necessarily have time to mount, but while there were lots of Jews that died (some of them which might have even been armed), there were some that escaped (some of which were not armed); regardless, guns were demonstrably beneficial to those who fended off the SS.
As pertaining to the US Military, they have proven over and over that guerrilla warfare is not their strong suit, and especially so on foreign soil. Vietnam, Middle East, etc., have all shown that to be true. Also, as was mentioned earlier, many, if not most of the existing armed forces would have a very hard time mounting all out martial law against its citizenry. That isn't meant to imply that the situation couldn't be framed as such that it appeared to be necessary, but that also doesn't hold for long.
It's disrupting supply lines that does the real damage. Fuel trucks in Iraq were an extremely popular target for this reason.
You seem to think having piles of guns to start with puts you at an advantage. It doesn't. If anything, having piles of guns is a liability. In Libya they would just raid police stations and military depots and get all the guns they could ever want. I'm sure the same thing is going on in Syria.
Even in a place like Japan where firearms are heavily restricted, it would be only hours after some hypothetical civil war broke out before the resistance was armed.
Guns are an important tool in fighting, but there's billions of them in circulation around the world. If people want guns, they will get them. The amount of initiative lost in not having guns in the first few hours of a struggle is negligible. This kind of unrest takes years to resolve.
An advantage of an armed population is a large number of people skilled in the use of arms. Most people cannot reliably hit a person-sized target at several hundred meters the first time they pick up a rifle. Make that target a trained soldier who's moving and shooting back and the disadvantage grows much larger.
How does owning a gun provide protection against meteors? It doesn't; the question itself is invalid.
If you think the US military will deploy against even one million Americans on American ground, for the sake of shredding the US Constitution, well...you may as well believe orange is violet.
The US military has already said, as have the multitudes of its members under its control, that it will not be marching on the US civilian population. They would throw down their arms and join the other side, that of their friends and families, long before they'd betray everything they'd sworn an oath to.
Now, you might find one or two people, with a handful of soldiers who, for the thirty seconds it would take before they'd be executed (not even court martial-ed) with such an intent. And they'd be buried in a common grave, stripped of name and rank, for their actions.
Look up the Battle of Athens. In a nutshell, some veterans returned home from fighting the war to find out that their local government had become oppressive - levying insane fees on speeding tickets, committing false arrests, taking bribes, etc.
On top of all that, the local Sheriff had rigged the ballot box to ensure that they stayed in power, denied some the right to vote, and overthrew poll-watchers through force.
The returned veterans recognized all of the above as tyranny, had put forth honest people for the election, and insisted that the election was done fairly be surrounding the Sheriff's office where the ballots where and mounting an armed resistance to ensure that tyranny wasn't done.
Governments have to be kept in check. They're granted great power and people who have power tend to abuse it. My understanding is that the founding fathers were realists and recognised this very early on.
Having guns does little to hold government in chech. A well educated, well informed, and politically active populace on the other hand is a strait jacket. Which is why free assembly and free speech are so important.
Look at what happens to every group of well-educated, well-informed, politically active people when they go up against an authority. Look at the Prague Spring (speaking of holding the government in Czech), at Occupy Oakland, and what's happened in Turkey most recently. Free speech and free assembly merely mean that you can call the jackbooted thugs names as they crack open the heads of you and your friends.
Further, consider that the trends in education, mass media, and overall American culture have very nearly destroyed the ability to field a group of people meeting any of the three criteria for your 'strait jacket'. We've done such a bangup job of driving social networks and short action-reward loops in our advertising and communication that we have a populace with such a low attention span that it's hard to stay angry long enough to cause trouble.
On the other hand, the 2nd amendment speaks for itself. At the risk of being particularly cynical, I imagine that it is far, far easier to find a hundred thugs who can be talked into taking potshots at the Man than it is to find one who can carefully and consistently explain why the government is doing wrong, what the exact nature of the wrong is, and how to fix it.
We cherish the 2nd precisely because, at the end of the day, you get a lot further with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone.
If you don't believe me, ask the men in Washington.
What? It's easier to find inbred retards who want to shoot at "the Man" than actually maintaining an educated populace, so therefore we "cherish" the 2a?
No, parent was saying that it easier for an educated subset of the populace to shoot at the Man than to educate her "inbred, retard" (to use your phrase) peers.
I am suggesting that while the 1st and 4th amendments are very important, they alone are insufficient against jackbooted thugs; moreover, they appeal and are useful only to the relative intellectual elite of a country--if them.
The 2nd amendment, by contrast, expands the availability of force to the common man, and in so doing allows even the dullest and slowest hooligan to contribute to the process of political reform. Indeed, should the Man come calling, I would rather have a dozen armed rednecks and coon-asses standing with me than a few score of the best-spoken orators of our time.
It's unfortunate that things seem to be suggesting that this sort of calculus is becoming reasonable again.
I agree a well educated and informed society is the best deterrent to keeping governments serving the best interest of the people. Yet recent events have shown that we are not that well informed by our media and government on purpose.
Guns are not a deterrent in as much as a means to allow the people to defend themselves against an abusive government when and if needed.
When you say 'the people,' which people do you mean? Because it doesn't serve everyone's interests to threaten civil war in the US - only certain people's interests. These people don't represent all people, listen to what they say closely, but are rather prioritizing their own interests so far above others that they maintain a right to threaten and kill people they disagree with.
>These people don't represent all people, listen to what they say closely, but are rather prioritizing their own interests so far above others that they maintain a right to threaten and kill people they disagree with.
Seriously HN, this is the top comment? Using a political controversy as an opportunity to dismiss some unrelated political topic is about as low brow as you can get and contributes nothing to mature discussion.
A lot of cypherpunk type people (who are generally pro 2a/guns to a great degree) believe anonymous and secure communication through cryptography is more of a 2A issue than a 1A or 4A issue.
A "CALEA 3", key escrow requirement, ban on the Internet, etc would cross my red line. Banning all guns would, too, although unclear exactly where the line is (a total handgun ban probably wouldn't be enough). Obviously legal and political challenges first.
Interestingly enough though, that 'right to bear arms' actually gives zero protection from the government as theorized- even if the gov't is acting in a corrupt manner.
If this guy was in Texas holed up with a small armory, the FBI would still bust in there and arrest him. If he tried to use that small armory (and wasn't killed) it wouldn't have just been him 'exercising his right' of course.
While the right to bear arms doesn't give one person the natural ability to resist overwhelming force, it does make imposing tyranny on larger numbers of people rather expensive for the tyrants.
Let's say the government wants to send my family to a death camp - perhaps for a racial, ethnic, or religious affiliation. (Historically, this does happen from time to time, even in countries that were 'liberal democracies' in the recent past.)
The government would absolutely be able to do so - I've got no fantasies about my ability to resist a government agency. However, I could certainly try to make it expensive for them, and I might succeed. If enough people are similarly inclined to make things expensive for them, the price may grow to be too high for the government to pay.
What we really have in this country is literally a "right to bear arms". You have no right to fire or wield or use your arms.
I can think of no situation where you could fire upon an agent of the government that would not end badly for you, unless there was a total dissolution of Federal and probably State government. Even acting in self defense, even against a corrupt agent of the government, I can't imagine it ending any way but badly for you. You can't shoot the government a little to make a small change. Either you completely overthrow the government, so that there is no one left to hang you, or you go to jail in the best case, and be executed lawfully or gunned down in the street in the worst case.
Well, in Texas (and other states), there's Castle Doctrine, that would have allowed him the right to fire, wield and use his arms with lethal intent if in fact those FBI agents didn't have a warrant, which provides some protection that the agents would at least have to prove to a judge that there was reasonable cause to arrest him.
Of course, they likely would have had a warrant, and if not, might possibly have gotten one from the FISA court (I'm not sure on the process there) which pretty much always issues a warrant, so it still wouldn't have been great for him.
I don't believe there are any laws against shooting federal agents actually, though I could well be wrong, but in the absence of a verifiable warrant, there's no guarantee that they are federal agents. Even if they are federal agents, that doesn't give them any right to enter your home without your consent, absent a warrant.
I don't otherwise disagree with the synopsis you've put forth, I'm just saying that our right to bear doesn't prohibit us from ever firing in the event that there is clear justification. People storming your home is such a justification, no matter what uniforms they're wearing.
Fun fact: Timothy McVeigh was convicted of the murder of 8 federal agents who were in the Federal Building. They didn't bother to charge him with the other 160 counts of murder, because those weren't federal crimes.
Thanks for the correction, however it should also be noted that it uses the term 'murder', which by definition is different from homicide in that murder is unlawful, where homicide is not necessarily.
If I kill someone attacking me, I have committed homicide, but not necessarily murder. If I kill someone ala McVeigh, I have murdered them.
Since it is a federal charge, it's very likely that the 'intent' would be determined in a federal court, which does exist outside of state jurisdiction and is bound to uphold federal laws, but it isn't quite open and shut.
Still, your point stands, which is to say that he's almost certainly screwed.
Yeah, the definition of "murder" is tricky. Reading http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1111 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder it looks like the sticking point is "malice aforethought". I'm not remotely close enough to a lawyer, to be able to guess which way the court would fall on that in this hypothetical situation.
I'm not up on my history as much as I should be, but I think some of the influence there conceptually is from the "right to overthrow the government", and the idea that many of the new governments at the time were only lasting a short period of time and then would need revised.
It is strange that the same country which cherishes its 'right to bear arms' on the grounds that it gives them a level of protection that the government is unable to provide is 'happy' to build the infrastructure which allows the same government to peek into their lives.
I think part of the issue is that this kind of electronic surveillance, and the corresponding awareness of the issue, is relatively new (compared to, say, the firearms issue). I mean, I don't think a lot of people were thinking about the government capturing emails and cellphone records, 100 years ago (or probably 50 years ago, or 20 years ago, or maybe even 10 years ago). But 200+ years ago, private firearms ownership was already a big deal.
There's another plausible explanation for what you have observed re: outrage.
Indifferent isn't the right word, it is outright drooling ignorance. That, and some of them may still not use any electronic means of communication, but those are pretty well dying off. The limit of their outrage would be to Echelon.
Encryption and modems. Oh, and anything to slow down those NLP MR jobs, like screwing with spelling and word boundaries. (Yes, immature and and likely ultimately futile)
Both laws are based on fear.
Fear after 9/11 brought you (and many other western countries) those laws. Now your only chance is to turn the fear around so people fear the tools that have been brought in to fight their fear of terrorists. What is actually happening in some media and on the net.
I'm not sure if this will work out as a long time strategy...
People aren't happy about this. Most don't even know about it. The one's that do know about it can't do anything. There simply aren't enough politically active people in this country and far less young ones. Don't confuse what the media says with what people actually feel or want.
Sure, guns protect life and provide a great equalizer to those who may not have physical strength.
IOW, give anyone who can legally sign a contract and wants one a gun, no matter where they live (notice, this also deals with mental instability). That provides a level playing field when it comes to physical force.
As to abortions, once they have a working brain stem, they kind of are human beings that can feel pain.
Not exactly. A lot of people voted for Obama because he promised more transparency. He appears to be breaking his promises. If he was smart, which he hasn't seemed lately, he would use this crisis to try to regain some credibility.
He is the president of the United States. He is smart. A lot of background characters love it when you question the intellect of your leaders because you see intended aggression and depravity as incompetance and stupidity. Never blame a goverments wrongs on incompetance, blame them on those responsible and expect them to have a functional brain, because to get into the positions they have, they do have working brains, and know exactly what they are doing.
I think many countries well outside the oecd perimeter would happily grant refugee status for dissidents. The obvious example is Assange. Disgusting how the US has gone from a soft terrorist state (signature drone strikes) to a surveillence state. The national narrative of freedom and liberty has become farcicle
I'll never understand the opposition to a single, global, government entity. It seems like the most logical plan.
Otherwise, you get multiple countries playing the zero-sum game of gaining at the expense of other countries. Exactly what we have now. You know, like exploiting the resources of poor countries so we can have cheap gasoline. Good system?
Absolute power corrupts absolutely, so you're guaranteed to have a 100% fail, a worse outcome than your zero-sum game, which merely fails most of the time.
What's most likely is an oligopoly of multinational corps really being in charge, with a thin veneer of democracy as a marketing message to keep the population under control. "You're not really feudal serfs because you get to vote for your overseer, among two candidates selected by the plantation owner who only differ in minor, yet rabble rousing irrelevancies" Or rephrased, the American system, but worldwide. It may not be a good system, but its a stable system.
We already have it, to some extent. Is there any real ideological/moral/ethical difference between the neo-cons and the taliban other than minor stuff like selection of holy book (said by a former -R who more or less got kicked out by the extremist fundamentalist neos)?
I think part of the aversion to a one government world is that it makes it impossible to vote with your feet. With the current model, if things get really bad in your country, you can always leave and find a different government.
Anyone who knows my real name can search the internet and find out where I work, my home address, my spouse's name, my home phone number and my age. I didn't put any of this information on the internet, in fact I don't even have a facebook account. Private companies collected and aggregated this information and put it on the internet. Some of the information came from public records (for example, home address from property ownership records), but some was very private (such as my home phone number, which is not even in my name and rarely given out). This is a huge violation of privacy and I have no way of stopping it.
I am not worried about the government spying on me. I am very worried about these for-profit businesses spying on me and outing my information on the internet. Why isn't anyone writing stories about that instead?
To be complete, there are other historical cases of other countries granting asylum to US citizen, or people who didn't want to be US citizens.
Bobby Fischer was granted asylum by Iceland. Assata Shakur and roughly 100 other Americans have been granted asylum in Cuba. Norwood Peter DuBerg and family were granted asylum by Switzerland. Chere Lyn Tomayko was granted asylum by Costa Rica. Holly Collins was granted asylum by the Netherlands. Various people were granted asylum by the Soviet Union, but I can find no names.
As a libertarian, this travesty has given me some hope that my liberal friends will be somewhat more sketpical of the government as benevolent provider. For years and years I have seen people online belittle libertarians as crackpots and "tin foil hat conspiracy theorists". One wonders when the average joe will stop and come to terms with the fact that these "crackpots" were far more insightful about the nature of the state than they were.
Sadly, I think the answer is they will never come to terms with it.
The issue is with BAD government, not all government. America has a bad government because the government has been co-opted by a corporate elite.
Government should be a meritocracy where the smartest minds in the country elect representatives from their field of expertise. So instead of having the dumb public elect one or two figurehead politicians, you have well-educated people electing top minds in their own field, who represent the scientifically and intellectually validated viewpoint of those well-educated people.
Cronyism, nepotism and super-rich corporate privilege are what has destroyed the American government.
Libertarianism would also seek to destroy the American government, reverting to a state of anarchy where the super-rich corporatists simply rule everyone by virtue of their superior wealth, manpower, and organization.
An American that had to seek asylum from the US government was Bobby Fischer, one of the best chess players in history. His offense: playing a chess match against Boris Spassky in Yugoslavia (he also owed taxes).
Sorry -- I didn't mean to be unclear about that. The point I wanted to make is that, while he violated a UN embargo, it was just a chess match, and nevertheless he was relentlessly persecuted and had to seek asylum.
> Bradley Manning, a soldier who released classified documents to WikiLeaks in 2010, has had a very different experience. Manning was held for three years without trial, including 11 months when he was held in de facto solitary confinement. During some of this period, he was forced to sleep naked at night, allegedly as a way to prevent him from committing suicide. The United Nations’ special rapporteur on torture has condemned this as “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in violation of Article 16 of the convention against torture.”
I don't know all that much about the case, but why include suicide-prevention as an abuse? I'd probably want to kill myself in his situation, but I think it's humane to actually try to prevent someone from doing it.
And wasn't Manning's leak much more dangerous since it named foreign informants of hostile governments and terrorist organizations? Why lump that in the same category as Snowden letting Americans know how they are being spied on?
> Serious question: Now that he's a US citizen on foreign soil, and an enemy of the state, is it now legal to call a drone strike against him?
Not quite by my understanding. He would need to be in an area officially classed as a war zone for that.
They could send them to surveil and intimidate him though, but there are less costly ways to do that which won't upset the people in the country he is currently living in nearly as much.
(the parent comment seems to have been deleted while I was responding, hence breaking flow as I have and replying to the top)
The drones currently unofficially over china are not carrying weapons so couldn't "take him out" as the OP I was responding to was talking about. Of course their might be something else the US are doing that we don't know about...
Wow. This is the first time I've encountered an exception to Betteridge's law. The article makes a pretty strong argument that the answer to the headline is "yes".
I believe that in the UK, and probably the EU, you cant extradite people, I think including Americans, if there is a chance the death penalty will be given. Not 100% sure, but I think that is the case.
So, in some ways, the US has been a place form which one can seek asylum for ages. Or at the very least, be very careful in considering extradition application. Assuming the US government bothers with the legal inconvenience and doesn't just sent the CIA in to render them.
>I believe that in the UK, and probably the EU, you cant extradite people, I think including Americans, if there is a chance the death penalty will be given. Not 100% sure, but I think that is the case.
That is also the case even in Mexico. To think that in a country (my country) where deaths by beheading, bar mass shootouts and rampant corruption still stands on a 'higher moral ground' that the USA really amazes me.
Many people have sought asylum from the U.S. over the years. Does no one else remember the Vietnam draft-dodgers who departed to Canada? The communist sympathizers or agents who defected to USSR?
That said, I disagree with the notion that because the U.S. implementation of personal freedoms is not perfect, then we are as bad as any other country. Freedom is not measured binarily.
People seem to speak in favor of guns (outside of stuff like hunting, sports, etc, which is not really relevant here) for two reasons:
1. Self defense against common criminals
2. Safeguard against tyranni
I would like to add a third reason:
3. Because I am a free man. Because I am sovereign. Because I hold inalienable rights. Because I harm no one by keeping arms.
I think the first and second arguments hold some weight[1] but really to me this is a freedom issue. I really don't think I NEED to provide a reason why I should be allowed to own a gun, same as I don't need to provide a reason why I am allowed to exist. It's very simple: no one - be it my neighbor or more abstract entities - has the right to infringe on my right to life and liberty. Part of that right to exist is the right to keep instruments of self-defense.
Now, there are a tons of gray zones (eg I don't think individuals have the right to build nuclear weapons in their back yard) but for guns it's very simple. No need to throw out the baby with the bathwater here.
Can we really trust individuals to own guns? I'd say it's the opposite: the government is WAY less mature and responsible than individuals. The occasional misbehaving individual is a fart in the wind compared to the systematic, egregious misconduct of pretty much every government ever. Seriously, look at the track record of governments in the 20th century - not exactly a rosy picture. And if you look at history, it's always the nobility and such that are allowed to bear arms, and the unfree classes that are deprived.
I do believe in a minimal state, though, so I'm not an anarchist.
I am born and raised in Scandinavia btw, so I guess I'm a bit of an odd duck as pro-gun and libertarian :)
Posting as throwaway because this is somewhat controversial and I see no reason to incur negative social status in my social circles over something that is purely an academic issue in Sweden anyway (ie there is no pro-gun movement whatsoever here and anyone who espouses those kinds of views is insta-pigeonholed as a radical kook).
Anyway, I felt I needed to vent a little bit. I expect to be downvoted into oblivion. But, hey, at least provide a counter-argument, will ya? :)
[1] But I think some people are overestimating guns as a tyranny deterrent. The US military allowed each Iraqi household to have one Kalashnikov, for instance. That should tell you something.
Considering the changes this Administration made regarding who it can 'legally' target with drones, would being outside of this country, asylum or not, be safe?
Which countries large enough to not allow our use of their airspace don't have extradition treaties? Russia?
There is no absolutely liberty and absolutely privacy, isn't it? if the government didn't collection people's information, the hackers from other countries will do so. which one do you prefer?
I think this is really hyperbolic. The fact is that Snowden violated the conditions of his Top Secret security clearance, which is a crime that is subject to criminal prosecution.
Now, I'd argue the leak that Snowden made was much more acceptable than, if he had revealed the identities of CIA spies to foreign countries and caused them to be killed.
Nevertheless, we are a nation guided by rule of law, and it would be unreasonable to expect that Snowden wouldn't be prosecuted. Just because he did something which many people consider was a good thing, does not mean that he didn't do something illegal.
Not quite by my understanding. He would need to be in an area officially classed as a war zone for that.
They could send them to surveil and intimidate him though, but there are less costly ways to do that which won't upset the people in the country he is currently living in nearly as much.
The problem is Ellsburg released evidence of government officials doing something illegal which meant he was shielded. The NSA story, which is not even fully known yet, though classified is apparently legal and has congressional as well as judicial oversight. The IRS and reporter wire taps are far more likely to take down the presidency.
No it's not. Laws function by intention, too. He didn't make it public to aid the "enemy" (who is the enemy anyway? the world?). He did it to protect America. I think he also swore an oath to protect America against enemies both domestic and abroad. And he also swore to defend the Constitution - not the president.
When the enemy is 'terrorism', anything you make public is giving information to the enemy.
That is why the expression is so important and why Obama (and Bush in his time) keeps saying that the US is 'at war'. Because that allows them to subvert the law.
Honestly: I am not defending the Administration, on the contrary. I am just explaining why they are going to try to persecute him for treason if (when) they find him.
I think leaking some of this stuff is one of the most patriotic things you can do, given the subject matter and the government overreach it was meant to expose.
In fact, I wish this happened more often. The population as a whole shows a lot of apathy until something like this happens to stir the coals. Unfortunately, it's going to take a lot more than just this to bring about major change.
To think anyone would feel safe in the USA is ridiculous, the USA is one of the last places anyone should seek refuge in modern times. What scares me most is the United States influence inside Australia.