Americans act like their government is representative of governments. It isn't. They act like everything needs to be invented there. It doesn't. They believe that America is the greatest country in the world. It isn't.
If people in America just stopped to look around at how other countries do things they'd be doubly as well run. Most parts of Europe, Japan, Canada, and many other places are well run and have a great deal of governmental involvement. America is hobbled by its own broken political system that nobody would replicate if they were starting from scratch today.
It's essentially the PHP of government systems. Dominant, but broken.
For example you have to comply with the spirit of a law, not the exact text. Also our QC's are pretty level headed and the same goes for our police force. Nobody is overly nitpicky about things, and when they are it's sensible. At least in my experience, YMMV.
US could learn a lot if they looked outward, but I don't think that's in their nature.
[1]https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/arrests-for-offensive-...
If I were harassed and bullied I'd not feel very free, but rather anxious, threatened, depressed. I'm quite happy my government takes measures to assure a certain level of personal safety, both physical and psychological.
Who is deciding what is edgy but still funny, vs what’s over the line?
What is valid criticism of people who happen to be part of a minority group, vs what is hateful and racist?
The only reason you are ok with this, is because all of your beliefs fall within the boundaries of acceptability set by the censors. And you want to be protected from the speech of people who might think or believe differently.
There is a world of difference between these two things. To my knowledge death threats are illegal in every American state. Insulting people is generally legal, just like it should be.
1) the US government attacks people for their opinions, and so does the UK government. Same with civil asset forfeiture. And it doesn't stop there. Treatment of immigrants/asylum seekers, military actions outside of the country, protection of corrupt officials, ...
2) People who defend the US government actions, whether related to freedom of speech or forfeiture, are described as unfairly naive or pro-state by Europeans.
3) People who criticize the UK government actions, essentially the same, except much lesser known, are unfairly criticizing their "trustworthy state". Forfeiture without recourse, check. Speech attacks. And let's just not investigate what the UK government has done to immigrants, because ...
To just take one particularly vile action taken by the UK government, which I challenge defenders to defend as "just" here's one:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/may/20/child-asylum-seek...
Or how about having cops deceive members of environmental groups into sex, going so far as to father children with them, then (of course) walking away. To make matters worse, the UK government decided (again, obviously) to protect the officers from normal legal responsibility requirements.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/deceived-lovers-...
Yeah, I can see why this organization doesn't want to be criticized publicly ... that's, as they say, going to go down poorly.
I don't understand this attitude in people. The US people criticize their government. This seems like a very, very good thing. Europeans, in my experience, largely have worse governments with better reputations ... They're different in various ways, although much less so in the case of the UK.
For instance, the royal house of the Netherlands has an insanely good reputation ... as long as you don't speak to people who so much as live close to them. Then they're moral abominations who constantly abuse their position in the state for utterly banal reasons (they've -literally- ordered people arrested because their children did better on a test in school than their children). And yet, fantastic reputation. But look up articles actually about them, and you will quickly realize what monsters these people are.
To judge the quality and trustworthiness of the UK police force, I encourage you to check out the exams they have officers take before entering, and realize that many officers actually fail these tests once or twice before joining. Let's just not pretend that half these people are even smart enough to know the difference between acting trustworthy and not, because that actually requires a very, very, very basic level of intelligence that clearly is not required and in many cases not present for those joining the police force.
Sometimes you can explain this through politics. For instance, US people often have a good opinion of the NHS. The NHS ! Yes, really, that NHS. WTF ? Ok, they don't charge much, true. They do seem to get accused constantly of not doing much else either and in cases ... they deserve that criticism. But OK, the US has a problem the NHS does not impose on UK'ers. So sure let's focus on the good. (Although what baffles me a bit about UK people is that they still think that something like 20 pounds or so is a lot for complex medical procedures, enough to convince many of them not to do them)
But many, many things in Europe are incredibly bad. Very little criticism, leading to good reputations which are, in quite a few cases, rather less accurate.
The only difference is they've chosen to draw the line somewhere just offset from what you're used to. There's still a line in these here United States. And it's really not that different, is it?
Wrong.
https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-ha...
>...The only difference is they've chosen to draw the line somewhere just offset from what you're used to. There's still a line in these here United States.
It looks like the US probably has the strongest free speech protections of any country in the world - that isn't a bad thing.
(IANAL, but there exists such a thing as depraved indifference murder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depraved-heart_murder)
Well, the article discusses the origin of the idea that "shouting fire in a crowded theater" is illegal. It also points out that Brandenburg v. Ohio is the actual relevant decision.
For more context on the Brandenberg decision:
>...Charles Brandenburg, a Ku Klux Klan leader, had spoken to group members at a televised Ohio rally. He’d used inflammatory language and racial slurs. He’d called for "revengeance," which Ohio prosecutors interpreted as a call to violence. This meant, said the prosecutors, that Charles Brandenburg had broken the law.
>...Advocacy, even when it encourages law-breaking, helps the marketplace of ideas, ruled the Court. Had Brandenburg instructed followers to commit a specific crime, he’d have committed a number of offenses himself. But the First Amendment protects speech that merely advocates general, indefinite illegal action.
>With that ruling, the Court overturned the Schenck decision that had introduced "shouting fire in a crowded theater." No longer was "clear and present danger" a sufficient standard for criminalizing speech. To break the law, speech now had to incite "imminent lawless action."
>So if a court can prove that you incite imminent lawlessness by falsely shouting "fire" in a crowded theater, it can convict you. If you incite an unlawful riot, your speech is "brigaded" with illegal action, and you will have broken the law. But merely falsely shouting "fire" does not break the law, even if it risks others’ safety.
http://civil-liberties.yoexpert.com/civil-liberties-general/...
Literally shouting fire in a crowded theater in an attempt to cause a panic and perhaps kill people, would not be protected speech, but pretty much anything less would be protected speech.
https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2014/04/17/splc-report-n...
> Almost 100 people were murdered over the last five years by registered users of Stormfront, the largest racist Web forum in the world, according to a report released today by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
How did free speech carry out terrorist murders?
You can shout grammatically correct, sensible and lawful speech from the public street corner ("eat right! exercise! wash behind your ears!"), but if a cop simply tells you to move along and you refuse, you're still looking at being jailed.
I mean, extending on that statement, you probably also think sexual harassment, as long as it stays verbal, is OK to have in the name of freedom. As a guy you probably don't have to worry there anyways. People are driven into suicide through harassment.
And why don't you feel the same about the right to just shoot anyone at will? Clearly your government is strongly restricting your freedom there, but we probably don't Need to argue why this is a good thing.
But doesn't, unless you say something reprehensible that the society you live in agrees that you stepped way over the line.
All except for terrorist attacks, which are considered part and parcel of living in a big city[1] like London (but strangely not Tokyo which has 4-5m more citizens!).
[1]https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/new-york-explosion-sad...
> Part and parcel of living in a great global city is you’ve got to be prepared for these things, you’ve got to be vigilant, you’ve got to support the police doing an incredibly hard job. We must never accept terrorists being successful, we must never accept that terrorists can destroy our life or destroy the way we lead our lives.
Seems sensible to me.
Living in a city, you must be prepared for terror.
This is not how things should be.
Being prepared for these things is not the same as saying these things are unavoidable certainties. There is quite a big distinction, along the lines of having a gun for self defense Vs having a gun to shoot someone.
He is basically saying support the police in their counter terrorism work, and report anything suspicious if you see it. Pretty much what you hear over the airport tannoys every time you fly.
>but it's [terrorist attacks] what decades of incredibly poor middle Eastern foreign policy gets you.
You believe terrorist attacks are deserved as a result of what your government has done in the past?
>I'm quite happy my government takes measures to assure a certain level of personal safety, both physical and psychological.
Which is it? Your government is taking measures to assure your protection, or is actively provoking foreigners to kill you on your own soil?
Nobody deserves to get hit by a car, but if you're running across a highway then what do you expect.
> Which is it? Your government is taking measures to assure your protection, or is actively provoking foreigners to kill you on your own soil?
Why are those mutually exclusive?
I would also tack on that it's mostly the USA's foreign policy that got us here (which our government decided to jump in bed with to be fair, but yours nonetheless). It's just you have a nice Atlantic ocean to buffer you from many of the concequences.
So you support the disarming of all US citizens, because living in fear of crime isn't how things should be?
That's quite the argument!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I03IKr2TWDM
"It's part and parcel of living in a great global city..."
>Seems sensible to me.
You keep using that word...
The occasional terrorist attack seems better than starting a world war that invited retaliatory firebombing and nuclear bombing.
USA is taking its turn at feeling the consequences of colonial imperialism.
Wasn't London bombed too? What's your point? Terrorist attacks are better than world wars?
We've reached peak Poe's law.
Not everyone values free speech quite as highly as the USA. It's important, sure, but it's not live or die. There are limits and spreading vile hate speech is one of them.
I also like the complete focus on the free speech aspect, completely ignoring the "we actually deal with racists here" aspect. How narrow minded.
[0] “As we have seen, during the days of slavery and later segregation, laws suppressing free speech were often aimed at abolitionists and civil rights advocates, not at slave owners or Jim Crow advocates. This reflected social and political power in local states and communities where attitudes towards race were very different than today.“ https://www.hoover.org/research/harm-hate-speech-laws
The government cannot just arbitrarily expand hate speech to include something which is patently not hate speech. The courts would not uphold it, neither would the judiciary or the public at large.
As someone who values free speech, even one fine is abhorrent.
Everyone values speech they like. Valuing Free Speech means valuing the speech you don't like, too.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/05/29...
> It’s illegal in Britain to report the details of some trials before they conclude
> Robinson was convicted of breaking that law last year
> He showed up with his cameraman again Friday — this time outside a restricted child-sex-abuse trial at Leeds Crown Court, for what he inaccurately announced was the verdict.
So not only was he not arrested for broadcasting generally (rather for breaking a law forbidding reporting on of trials before they conclude) but this trial was also not "public".
The other day, I saw a bizarre talk on Youtube about this case by a UK and Canadian activist sitting together in the same room. At one point, the UK citizen stops talking and the Canadian takes over to tell some information. Then the UK person continues. Why? Because he could be arrested if he said it himself so he needed someone who wasn't going to the UK to say it for him.
He had a previous suspended sentence for filming inside a court a couple of months earlier. He then thought "hey, you know what's a good idea? Disobeying a judge's direct no-reporting order (to maintain the integrity of the trial) literally right outside the freaking courthouse.
I consider not giving him a slap on the wrist pretty sensible.
Restrictions on what can be reported while a trial is happening are common, and not unusual in England. It should be obvious that you cannot, before someone has been convicted, call them a Muslim Paedophiles or Muslim child rapists, and you can't threaten to go round their house.
After being convicted for contempt of court, and given a very clear warning not to do the samething again he does exactly the same thing again.
For a good summary of the Yaxley Lennon situation there's this from a barrister: https://thesecretbarrister.com/2018/05/25/what-has-happened-...
Here's what the judge says (but please do read the entire document):
---begin ---
The sentence, therefore, that I pass upon you, taking into account all of those matters that have been placed before me and your admissions entered via Mr. Kovalevsky, is one of three months' imprisonment which will be suspended for a period of 18 months. That will be suspended. There will be no conditions that need to be attached to that suspended sentence, but you should be under no illusions that if you commit any further offence of any kind, and that would include, I would have thought a further contempt of court by similar actions, then that sentence of three months would be activated, and that would be on top of anything else that you were given by any other court. In short, Mr. Yaxley-Lennon, turn up at another court, refer to people as "Muslim paedophiles, Muslim rapists" and so on and so forth while trials are ongoing and before there has been a finding by a jury that that is what they are, and you will find yourself inside. Do you understand? Thank you very much.
MR. KOVALEVSKY: Your Honour, may we extend our thanks for the patience with which you have heard us this afternoon.
JUDGE NORTON: I am very sorry that we have gone on so late. Thank you very much for bearing with this rather lengthy case. Thank you both very much indeed for your help. Finally, can I just say this to Mr. -- I don't know whether it is Robertson or Robson who has just left the court, or indeed to anybody in the public gallery: I hope they have heard what I have said. There are real risks in publication and there are real risks in what is put online, and I hope that everybody will respect the judgment of this court and will not be tempted to do anything which might frankly, unwittingly or otherwise, either impede this trial or might land Mr. Yaxley-Lennon, or indeed themselves, in even more trouble.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-43478925
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/school-calle...
I would check where you are getting your facts from.
Did I mention that his entire video is still on Youtube? Still sitting their "jeopardizing" the case and it hasn't been taken down. Not only that, but anybody else outside the UK could repeat the same things and publish them anywhere on the internet without a problem. The UK no-talking-about-the-trial-in-public law completely fails without draconian China-scale internet censorship.
He threatened witnesses; he called defendants before they were convicted "muslim child rapists"; his actions nearly caused the collapse of the trial.
He used "alleged" as all media does for people who haven't been convicted.
Here are public details of the trials already published in the UK. It includes the names, charges, and effectively the description "child rapists". How does this not risk collapsing the trial but when Tommy Robinson said it, it did? Is it simply because he said they were Muslim while the newspaper only listed their obviously Muslim-sounding names?
https://www.examiner.co.uk/news/trial-dates-set-29-people-13...
Furthermore, he had already received a suspended sentence for doing the same thing. He wasn't immediately jailed without warning.
Also a chunk of those 13 months was from the previous suspended sentence for doing pretty much the same thing.
So yeah, I would definitely check where you get your facts from.
The judge quite sensibly didn't want that case, sure to get lots of attention, to rub off on his ongoing court case which has existing reporting restrictions.
I'm also sure America could teach us a lot about gag orders though. Stick national security infront of it and then all freedom goes out the window?
After he was sentenced and in jail.
Love the coarse metric of British "sensibility"! Sounds like we need a "sensibility spectrum" to measure this all against. Would really love to stack my freedom and property against that sturdy and immutable post of justice!
... As he should be, for breaking a court order in the most ridiculous manner. Twice.
> Would really love to stack my freedom and property against that sturdy and immutable post of justice!
You are aware that you're commenting on a post about how a citizens freedom and property where taken without any due process? And how that happens a lot? And how it's legal?
I feel like you're just looking to be triggered by something, and this man breaking two court orders gets you going, so we might as well end it here.
Your government currently arrests people for criticizing the government online, covers up child-rape gangs, arrests people for reporting on those cover ups, and mandates whether citizens should receive health care or die, regardless of whether they have the money to pay for it in a foreign country.
Your government took 1984 and used it as a blueprint. Your government see you as an actual human, they see you as their property.
Citation needed - I have _never_ heard of this happening.
> covers up child-rape gangs
Mostly local government and the police, not central government (who organised an inquiry into it).
> mandates whether citizens should receive health care or die
For the NHS, _maybe_, and even then it is only limiting care on the very fringes. Nothing is stopping you going private.
> regardless of whether they have the money to pay for it in a foreign country
I assume you are referring to Ashya King, a child whom was moved from the country against medical advice (which is completely different to _you_ deciding to decline treatment--the decision is being made by the parents on behalf on the child). Furthermore, when the case was decided by the high court, it was ruled that the parents _did_ have the right to pursue that line of treatment:
> Having considered the evidence, I concluded that there was no reason to stand in the way of the parents’ proposal. In some cases, this court is faced with a dispute between medical authorities and parents who are insisting on a wholly unreasonable course of treatment, or withholding consent to an essential therapy for their child – for example, a blood transfusion. This is manifestly not such a case. The course of treatment proposed by Mr and Mrs King is entirely reasonable. [...] Both courses are reasonable and it is the parents who bear the heavy responsibility of making the decision. It is no business of this court, or any other public authority, to interfere with their decision.
https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/judg...
I don't see how that supports the notion that the government can mandate your treatment.
> Citation needed - I have _never_ heard of this happening.
A British teenager was arrested and charged for posting on Facebook that UK soldiers should go to hell.[0]
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/libertycentral/201...
Furthermore, his final sentence is "Azhar Ahmed must do 240 hours of community service"[1]. Whilst I disagree with him being charged at all, that doesn't seem _grossly_ disproportionate.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/oct/09/community-sentenc...
Is it? It just seems redundant to me. Redundancy may be offensive, but it shouldn't be illegal!
I suggest you visit sometime and expand your world view.
No, this is incorrect.
Alfie Evans was going to die. There was no treatment available for him. No-one, not even foreign doctors, were offering treatment other than end of life care.
Alfie is a human, and has human rights, and the paramountcy principle used in English courts mean that his rights are more important to the courts than the parents' rights. Everything has to be done in his best interest, and it wasn't in his best interest to take him abroad to die.
The parents had excellent top tier legal advice provided for free. They went through seven legal firms because they weren't being told what they wanted. They eventually got sucked into the Christian Legal Center - an organisation whose advice was so piss-poor they face regulation.
https://nearlylegal.co.uk/2018/04/on-the-naughty-step-the-qu...
Here's a useful blog post about what actually happened: http://www.transparencyproject.org.uk/alfie-evans-best-inter...
(This is written by a mix of people, some of them represent children and families against the state.)
Note that an important difference between the US and UK law is that in the UK the doctors propose a plan, and if the parents disagree the doctors need to go to court to get permission. This is reversed in the US. The doctors propose a plan, and if the parents disagree it is they who need to go to court to stop the doctors.
It sparked 5+ inquiries, including a parliamentary one, numerous reforms and national outrage. I hope we learn from those mistakes.
I never said England was perfect, and I'm not sure why this invalidates any of the points I've made.
I could pick a few things that have happened in America that have not triggered universal outrage and a senate hearing. Like weekly school shootings.
Get a clue, man. Denying this kind of thing doesn't help anyone, even minority groups you might fear getting tarred by association. If you can ignore the rape of thousands of children because the political ramifications of it make you uncomfortable, you're part of the problem.
You have a very funny definition of "ignore".
> If you can ignore the rape of thousands of children because the political ramifications of it make you uncomfortable, you're part of the problem.
If everyone who disagrees with your framing "ignores child rape", you're part of the problem.
One big problem with this approach is that it basically pretends that the American citizenry is interchangeable with those of the countries you mentioned. It's not. Identity politics problems, legacies of slavery and of the colonial / revolutionary mindset are still big issues.
The people of Detroit and of Baltimore and of other ruined American cities are not the same as the people of Norway or of Japan. The solutions that work in high-intelligence, high-trust, coherent communities with strong traditions of work ethic won't work in every environment.
You want to use PHP as a metaphor? I'll use NFSv3/NIS. They're simple to run and work great on a small network where you trust everyone completely. The moment there's a malicious party at work they become hopeless and you need to either put in incredible amounts of work to try to lock them down, or switch to a much more restrictive, secure-by-default option.
>small network
The population of the EU is 741.4 million, the area is 1,707,642 sq miles. There are quite a few things that are prevalent in the EU, and are nonexistent in the US (public healthcare and higher education, for starters; throw public transportation into the mix, and have a party).
Don't pretend the EU is Norway.
I also remember online lots of grandstanding about the US's questionable policies around imigrants as compared to Europe. I haven't really heard them in a bit.
But what are you talking about? What could the US learn from Canada on asset forfeiture? Canada does it too! How to do it better?
And as a Canadian, saying the gov't run their is better is purely laughable.
So does the UK, Australia, NZ, and many other countries. But somehow only the US has wannabe-military police rambo types doing it, to stock up their SWAT vans, machine guns and other gizmos. That does not exactly inspire confidence.
Hey look, Aussie SWAT.
I'm in the bay area, maybe it's just a special kind of broken that you don't see in other places in the USA, but things like flint, michigan also exist in the USA.
Of course, the US government has a role in the other attractive attributes the US has, but I personally think that role is exaggerated. I think the US would still be an economically dominant world power if it had the government of, say, Germany.
You are very first-world centric, then. While I am no interventionist, you are discounting the role the US Military has worldwide on trade, peacekeeping, and other vital roles it actually does a good job at when it's not fucking things up (which is often).
>> I think the US would still be an economically dominant world power if it had the government of, say, Germany.
Including the racial makeup of Germany and the immigration policies?
Germany has a population 25% as large as America, and a GDP 18% of America's. So maybe if you ignored history, geography, a potential nonlinear relationship between population and economic domination¹ you could claim this discrepancy is solely due to racial differences between the populations of America and Germany. But I'm pretty damn skeptical of that.
1: for instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winner-take-all_market
Uh, no. Just that it is vastly different and that it is a relevant data point.
There are about ~700,000 Americans living in Canada, and also about ~700,000 Canadians living in the U.S. (see links below)
However, the U.S. population is more than 8x that of Canada. That means that on a proportional basis, Canadians are about 8x more likely to move to the U.S. than Americans are to move to Canada.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emigration_from_the_United_Sta...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_Stat...
There are about 700,000 U.K. citizens living in the U.S., and only about 160,000 U.S. citizens living in the U.K. The populations are about 63 million and 320 million, respectively. On a proportional basis, one would expect to see 5x more Americans living in the U.K., but in fact, there are 4x more U.K. citizens living in the U.S.
Similar ratios apply for other countries. Germany has 1/4 the population of the U.S., but there are 5 times as many Germans living in the U.S. as there are Americans living in Germany.
Voting with your feet never lies.
Granted, that doesn't say anything positive about the immigration policy of Germany when 30 year old children can get in and I don't stand a chance. Oh well.
Most people killed by a government are killed not by police forces, but rather by armies, navies and air forces. And if you live in or near the US you have a lower chance of being killed in a war than if you live in or near Europe because although the US starts more small wars, it starts fewer big wars, and most people killed in war are killed in big wars.
Europe has started fewer wars and killed fewer people since 1945 than the US has, and this is a sign that Europe is safer for the average resident or neighbor than the US is, but that sign is more than cancelled out by Europe's record (and Japan's record) before 1945.
Over the centuries, most prolonged rivalries and most expensive arms races between European nations ended in a war. In contrast, the intense prolonged rivalry and extremely expensive arms race between the US and the USSR did not end in a war -- at least not a war in which the most lethal available weapons were used or in which civilians were targeted to the extent that civilians were targeted by European and Japanese governments during WW II. Surely, the USSR's government deserves some of the credit for that surprisingly good outcome, but so does the US government.
And if you want to claim that the US did not have to participate in the intense prolonged rivalry and extremely expensive arms race -- if you want to argue that the fact that it did is a sign that the US is badly governed, you have to face the fact that if it had not participated, all of Europe would've been overrun by the USSR. There was far less political will in Western Europe to prepare for yet another war than would've been necessary to resist an invasion from the USSR if the US hadn't paid for most of the preparations.
I do not conclude from this analysis that the US government is better than most governments -- only that it is not clear to me that it is definitely worse. And I think it is a mistake to draw a boundary at 1945 and claim that anything that happened before then was too long ago to have any bearing on the question of which of today's governments are better.
Maybe Americans just aren’t very good at government. This is not so crazy a concept. When I was in Tokyo I marveled at how people would walk several blocks to get to a cross walk. Here in DC, people jay walk like it’s going out of style. That’s when it hit me that it’s no surprise Metro is a disaster while Tokyo’s trains work great.
What this does show is that we shouldn't expect government approaches which at least somewhat function in other countries to work well in the U.S.
The Tube is mostly great, but there are issues; the public generally doesn't see them (but I guess you've never been in London at rush hour?). The UK rail network however is a disaster. Privatization has made things worse - organizational chaos because of too many overlapping responsibilities between all the companies / not enough coordination. And the profit motive of course screws up things for what ought to be treated as a public utility. The latest disaster (the re-timetabling of GTR's services) was badly planned, managed, and executed. It's not "government" in general - my opinion is Americans in general are a lot more organized than the British in a fundamental sense.
Europe is one a model of exactly how to run things - but at a certain cost to passengers. There is enough buffer space left in the timetable to deal with possible delays or problems, and so services are relatively infrequent, but on the whole punctual. Thus passengers have to adjust their lives for that. The UK however does not do that - buffer space is eaten up to stick freight trains in whenever possible and any issues with them (plus issues with passenger trains) cascade. And UK passengers have always had train services available at the drop of a hat (metaphorically) - the social cost to move over to the EU style of doing things would make a lot of people very unhappy. The GTR disaster is an example of how socially disruptive changes are, especially when badly managed.
Japan is of course super organized, so they have train services down to the very second. The UK only labels trains as 'late' if they arrive more than 3 minutes late...
As for NYC, yeah, they have a lot of issues. Old tracks, underfunded, but mostly bad management decisions in trying to solve one problem and it snowballs - the NY Times have had some good articles on exactly what is going wrong. It is like no one has been paying attention to all the OR research in this area, but that seems to be normal - the gap between theory and what's actually is done in industry is quite large.
In Maryland it’s 5 minutes for commuter trains. For Amtrak it’s 15 minutes for an inter-city train, and up to hours for long haul trains.
It takes a great country for that to happen.
People in America are not generally ready to accept the immigration policies of Western Europe, nor do we have the luxury of a military power that we can free-ride off of. Your comparison is simplistic and wrong.
Sure. So what's the solution in this particular case? Should we go full corporate and privatize border control and customs? The government has a monopoly on violence and law enforcement. Do you think privatizing this outside of government is a good idea? Do you really think this power would be less abused?
Don't pick a bad example to dismiss the whole idea of government. At least in theory people can vote out the government, or specific laws/regulations* but they can't vote out money.
*) Before dismissing my point, that only works in democracy, not oligarchy, which we have in the US. And if you're wondering how we've reached oligarchy, I may be simplifying things but it has a lot to do with the 'big government is bad' idea which has been floated around within the last century by the people hoarding most money.
Reasonable limitations in this case might include a requirement that property seized temporarily be the subject of a criminal investigation, with a short, strict time limit for either filing charges or seeking an extension from a judge, who should be expected not to grant it without exceptional circumstances. Forfeiture of property could require a felony conviction, and if the felon isn't the owner of the property, additional proof that the owner knew it was being used illegally.
I have no illusions here: these restrictions would sometimes prevent the government from taking the assets of real criminals. That seems like a reasonable trade. The sort of criminal behaviors that civil asset forfeiture might be effective against are not such a significant threat to the stability of the USA as to justify taking the property of innocents with less legal protection than they would have in the criminal justice system.
If you agree this is a bad result, and the situation has affected lots of people, then you agree that the government is capable of doing wrong.
So you should agree that expansions of government power should be treated extremely skeptically and with serious concern.
I do not “dismiss the idea of government” and I opened my post by saying so. I’m saying that we should try and limit the government’s power by default and try not to elect and empower lawmakers who believe otherwise.
No, actually it comes from English common law, and has been around a long, long time.
It has been abused in recent decades (using the drug war as an excuse), but it's far from a new thing.
Even what you describe, limiting the power of government, is a governmental solution. You simply have to elect people who want to make the system better rather than those who want to tear it down. It's easy to say government doesn't work and do nothing.
I've seen far too much unethical and down right illegal behavior by management from inside companies, especially when dealing with privatized government functions, to ever trust them to do anything that they arent forced to (essentially at gun point). While, as an immigrant, I have an extreme distrust of American law enforcement, I would rather them than any private corporation.
I say this as someone who has been on the receiving end of civil asset forfeiture. My grandparents refused to take a bunch of cash that I had brought them in case the economic situation in Russia got worse and was taken for $20k and some priceless family heirlooms on the way back through LAX. It took a year and more money in legal fees than was confiscated just so I could get back some sentimental artefacts.
Nearly everyone I speak with about civil forfeiture thinks it's a bad idea with terrible incentives, so let's just enact some common sense and fix this one little thing, eh?
The government indeed is authoritarian and people should recognise it - but at least due to historical factors the citizenry have some control over it and how it functions. For a private corporation the general public has no voice at all. You can vote in presidents and senators, you can't vote in CEOs or executives.
The more power you give to private corporations, the less power the citizenry has.
A good analogy would be prisons: government run prisons and the penal system in the US are horrific, designed to be racist and exploit the poor. But then you look at how private prisons are run and realise that they are even worse: they have a profit motive to lock up citizens.
You are advocating a Laissez-faire approach[0]. This is not the only view on government intervention. There are various other approaches such as developmental state[1].
I recall reading an posted to HN that discussed the success of the developmental state In the east. Cannot seem to find it now.
"People should not be afraid of their governments; governments should be afraid of their people"
How about we work to improve it instead?
Well, unless the citizenry controls the government. This is the case in some political systems, e.g. democracy.
The government is all powerful. They can destroy any business, destroy any life, and seize all assets and livelihood if they desire to, even in America. But at least in America it is possible to sue the government and maybe rectify the situation, but you have to be wealthy or get a powerful ally like the Washington Post on your side.
If it upsets you that the US government is able to hurt an immigrant like is discussed in this article, then you should take a very skeptical view of government actions and also people who advocate giving the government more power. After all, many people who loved Obama's expansion of executive authority now recoil as the enemy party's control of the government reverses his non-congressional approved decisions.
The more power you give to the government, the less power the citizenry has.