Re:Does China’s digital police state have echoes in the West?
by pjc50 on Wednesday June 06, 2018 @12:08PM
(#17248275)
The contours of the state's relationship with the citizen vary, not just on which country you're in but who you are.
The US takes an extremely textualist approach to rights. Other countries take more outcome-based approaches rooted in a human rights context, which pretty much post-dates WW2 and the need to avert its atrocities. The UK is kind of stuck in the middle; we don't have a foundational text to focus argument on like the US Constitution, but nor have we faced up to the worst incidents of our past. This makes discussions about what freedom means in the UK frequently degenerate into incoherency as people talk past each other.
Theoretically the UK is a lot less free in some ways; practically you're a lot less likely to be shot by the police, and the justice system maintains a strong focus on fairness. I'm a big fan of Amartya Sen's calling it "capability": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_approach - how relevant is a freedom to do something that you're not practically able to achieve in your circumstances?
The US takes an extremely textualist approach to rights. Other countries take more outcome-based approaches rooted in a human rights context, which pretty much post-dates WW2 and the need to avert its atrocities. The UK is kind of stuck in the middle; we don't have a foundational text to focus argument on like the US Constitution, but nor have we faced up to the worst incidents of our past. This makes discussions about what freedom means in the UK frequently degenerate into incoherency as people talk past each other.
Theoretically the UK is a lot less free in some ways; practically you're a lot less likely to be shot by the police, and the justice system maintains a strong focus on fairness. I'm a big fan of Amartya Sen's calling it "capability": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_approach - how relevant is a freedom to do something that you're not practically able to achieve in your circumstances?