I think the point isn't "now it's time for someone to forge papers" but "there are plenty of ways to help and other people with more energy can take them up"

From raising awareness, convincing governments, running for office, donating money and/or labor...just volunteering on a crisis line is a huge help.

In the context of the original article, and the current world, it appears that far fewer are willing to bring personal risk than in the past.

My guess - and it is a guess - is rather than signing an online petition, forwarding a meme, or attending a demo, in the past direct action, civil disobedience, underground networks and activism was more often used. I suspect that in today's world many of those would be viewed as terrorism or at the very least imprisonable.

> in today's world many of those would be viewed as terrorism

I’m involved in local politics. The problem is a low give-a-shit factor. Older Americans will reliably show up to vote, stop to sign petitions (real ones, not online ones), donate to candidates and show up for town halls and protests. Young, well-educated, technically-savvy urbanites are a predictably anodyne bunch. (To be fair, I’m those things.)

The risk isn’t higher. The cost just is. When activism competes with brunch, Instagram time, and the necessity of a high-paying job to settle student loans, it’s a tougher sell.

I used to go to the planning board meetings for my neighborhood. They were at 4:00 on weekdays - I wonder why I was the only one under 60 there?

Even then it was only because I was trying to bootstrap a startup and setting my own hours.

Also, "When activism competes with brunch, Instagram time, and the necessity of a high-paying job to settle student loans, " -

good points, but remember also that those old people largely could have one person working (and actually getting of at 5 with no bullshit emails/slack/other crap to follow them home) and the other doing childcare/household work/civic things, instead of 2 people working 8-6:00, rushing to childcare, and getting home tired as dogs.

I take a bit of an issue with the tech crowd claiming that a single income family is infeasible. Single parents get by all the time. People in tech make well above the median income in most cases. It's absolutely possible to live a nice middle class life on a single tech income. It's just not possible to keep up with the spending of a dual income family. All about priorities.

Ok, but I'm not just talking about people in tech.

My partner and I are, in fact, a single income household. I make somewhere around the 95th percentile of incomes in my country and I work fully remote, meaning even more effective wealth (we bought a house in a low COL area - one without a housing cartel.)

But I am extremely fortunate.

> People in tech make well above the median income in most cases.

But have to live/work at places where the costs of living are enormous.

As war1025 noted, this is not true. People in tech are the most likely to have access to remote work that pays very well. I bring in the only income while my wife stays home with our two boys (6 and 3). I live in Pittsburgh, PA and worked remotely for a startup based out of SF until they ran out of money late last year and picked up a job in downtown Pittsburgh pretty quickly after that. I wouldn't say we're swimming in money but we are comfortable and don't have to check our balance for most purchases.

They don't have to do anything. There are tech jobs everywhere. Maybe you can't work for one of the big corps and make ridiculous money, but you can still make great money for hardly any effort anywhere the regional economy isn't crap.

> They were at 4:00 on weekdays

I am involved with the Manhattan community board that oversees, amongst other areas, Times Square. Meetings are at 6 or 7 on Thursdays. Public input is sought and listened to—on accession, meetings are shifted to the weekend.

No difference in the make-up of the turnout. A lot of the population self-selects out of the political process.

> When activism competes with brunch, Instagram time, and the necessity of a high-paying job to settle student loans, it’s a tougher sell.

Brunch and instagram aren't the problem.

Working two jobs to barely afford rent is.

American politics is generally focused on meaningless issues for most people. For an older example, the keystone pipeline was going to have zero impact on 99.999% of Americans yet it somehow became a “Major” issue.

That crap sucks up the attention so much that when issues that have real impact show up they get lost in the noise.

A thing I got a real kick out of with the Bakken (thought it was Keystone, but looked it up and it wasn't) pipeline, is that it was a big news event, and several people I knew were all worked up about it. The pipeline literally went within 5 miles of our city though, and no one cared about those portions. They cared about the parts that were hot in the news.

There are still a couple semi trailers parked in fields with big "Stop Eminent Domain Abuse" signs painted on them though. So I guess at least the farmers whose land it cut through cared locally.

Acitvists have always been attacked as "terrorists". Look at the brutal repression of the Civil Rights movement, where imprison was one of msnycworries when faced with a murderous police force and general public.

Really interesting discussion. I would add a guess that living a long life has become so normalized and expected that risk taking behaviour has become more eschewed.

This downplays a significant problem. The man in the story didn't set out to be a forger; it was an opportunity he discovered by chance, based on previous knowledge and talents.

Matching up people with jobs is hard enough with paid work. Doing a better job at matching people with volunteer opportunities that suit them would be a huge win.

Figuring out where best to donate money is relatively easy in comparison; GiveWell does a good job of that.

I'd say it's actually very hard to find effective charities. Most charities don't evaluate the outcomes versus the cost of their work, regardless of their earnest desire to be helpful. While Charity Navigator and GiveWell can weed out some of the truly bad orgs, the orgs trying to do the right thing and being ineffective is probably a larger problem than anyone realizes. You want to make a huge impact on people's lives? Solve food transportation, early cancer diagnosis, or basic medical care. Those are easily the most impactful and least sexy parts of making lives better.

GiveWell and Charity Navigator are pretty much the opposite. GiveWell has a small list of very thoroughly investigated charities, while Charity Navigator has a big list but doesn't say much of anything about their effectiveness.

True, although it's still the case that the really effective, immediate ways to help can get you arrested. Plenty of places are criminalising helping refugees.

https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-europe-migrants-greece-mar...

In the article you cited it is not about helping refugees, but about the WAY they were helping refugees.

Of course you can argue that the laws violated are stupid or inhumane. But in a democratic country like Greece you’ll have a hard time. The laws are generally a result of balancing different interests, here refugees fleeing from a very unpleasant life in Turkey and there EU tax payers having to pay for their integration for the next few years.

You can disagree and if caught happily pay the price (after all, why not go to jail for some time to save a few humans).

Every generation thought the same.

I want to use the word crypto-fascism, but apparently there's already a definition for that. Maybe techno-totalitarianism?

There's a disturbing trend of governments applying technology to bureaucracy to better track and control people. For example, there's no document you can easily forge to get past the face recognition and fingerprint reader at the US border.

Under a tyrannical government, these technologies could kill millions of people, but under a normal regime they provide minimal benefit to society, like maybe they catch people overstaying their visa or whatever.

Strange times.

I would make a similar argument about gun control: Gun control can be used to great effect by tyrants, but offers minimal benefits at best under a normal regime.

For those who think gun control provides a large benefit, consider that murder has already become a minor problem in the US -- around 1/20 of what it was during colonial america. Suicide is much more common (and not easily reduced with gun control). Gun control is usually badly written (e.g. restricting rifles, which account for a tiny fraction of murders) and clumsily implemented and poorly enforced, and surely won't bring murders to zero.

Compare to a situation like Venezuela, where the military is literally blocking food aid from hungry people. I wonder how long that would last with civilian gun ownership?

Venezuela has a ban on personal gun ownership for many people, however many/most people still own guns because the murder rate is very high due to the insane poverty that's gripped the country. One of the leading candidates is talking about removing gun restrictions. The problem isn't that the populace doesn't have guns. Guns do not solve political issues. The US couldn't solve Vietnam's issues despite winning on the battlefield in most incursions. Guns don't solve any problems in nearly any case. Boots on the ground solves problems and lots of them. Basically there's no way individual people can fight against an armed military with modern weapons and transport.

I've heard that theory before, that individuals gain no political power by owning guns, and I'm not convinced. Tyrants are never apathetic about who has weapons and who doesn't.

Also, the details matter a lot. What percentage of civilians? Absolute numbers? Pistols or rifles? How are loyalty lines drawn geographically?

There are also all kinds of other political games the people in power play other than direct military confrontation. Leaving you unprotected (e.g. strict gun control and long police response times) amongst criminals is one way to make your rights useless.

US is one of the few countries I’ve been to that doesn’t check any papers at all on your way out (not to say they can’t start doing that).

That is relatively new, though. As far as I remember, in the "old days" as a foreigner you got those cardboard slips stapled into your passport which were removed again when you left the country. Today they just do this electronically and keep track of who is in the country by receiving your passport information from the airlines. (You can even check your arrival and departure history online: https://i94.cbp.dhs.gov/I94/#/history-search)

That link didn't work for me. It said no records found, but I’ve left the USA several times in the past 12 months. Weird.

The US stopped doing it around 2014. They also stopped doing it in JFK before they stopped doing it in LAX; so when I flew in one side of the country and out the other I had to argue with the clerk....

Edit: I see wikipedia mentions the move to electronic record keeping instead of adding it to your passport: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_I-94#Automation_at_sea_an...

Are you a U.S. permanent resident or U.S. citizen?

It only works for foreigners, I believe, as U.S. residents don't need I-94 forms (the old cardboard slips). I'm also not sure if it works for Canadians, as Canadians can also travel to the U.S. more easily.

Even though CBP doesn't check any papers, airline agents swipe your passport or record your passport details. And these details are sent out to CBP.

Canada doesn't either. We just have big signs warning people not to try to bring pot with them because it's probably illegal wherever you're going.

The only ways to leave Canada are by air or to the US, and in either case your departure will be shared with the Canadian government by either the airline or the US government. Among other things, it prevents residency fraud (claiming benefits like healthcare or old age pension while actually living abroad).

Countries that lack strong bilateral cooperation with their only land neighbour have to use other methods, like exit controls.

No ships?

Mexico didn't check me on the way out. Then again, it probably depends on the port of egress.

I would imagine it saves the government money and saves lawful visitors time. Many borders have a manual processing line when the automated system fails or there are further questions.

It is not a coincidence that people increasingly call the moderates (GOP and Democrats) in the US “corporatists”, which is a shortening of “corporate fascists”.

From what I can tell, if you are a republican corporatist, you are sometimes called a neocon. If you are democratic, then the term is neoliberal.

I might be missing some subtle distinction between the terms, but I think these definitions are basically accurate.

'Neocon' is a label applied to a group of formerly-liberal foreign policy hawks, who moved to the right in the 1960s and subsequently. They were some of the strongest voices for military intervention in foreign countries during and after the Cold War, and are considered part of the conservative movement. Think Paul Wolfowitz and colleagues.

Neoliberalism is focused on economics, not military policy, and advocates free movement of goods, capital, and (sometimes) labour to build a global interconnected capitalism. It's probably the 'consensus' position amongst policy elites in most Western countries, though is suffering blowback from varying groups including economic nationalists (who dislike its open, cosmopolitan, nature and lack of concern for the nation) from the left (who dislike its promotion of the interests of capital over the needs of workers) and from localists (who dislike its homogenising qualities and dismissal of the value of 'place').

I think most people just mean by corporatists 'beholden to corporate interests' rather than specifically 'corporate fascists'; in either case they probably don't mean the original meaning of corporatism, which was control of the economy via negotiation between organised interest groups representing sectors of the people (farmers, businesspeople, industrial workers, etc.) This was prominent in Italian fascism in the 30s and had echoes in various other parts of the 20th Century such as the institutionalisation of trades union bargaining in some social democratic countries from the forties onwards.

Corporatism was about corporations taking over the government at least as far back as 1925 in America.

Surely forgery is not the only thing any of us can do about getting people out of dire situations (or preventing the dire situations from existing in the first place)?