https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We can fight it by electing the correct people.

But more importantly, I won't be spirited away to a black site by speaking ill about the president. Nor can the government decide it doesn't want me as CEO of my company anymore. Or prevent me from funding the opposition party.

There's an enormous difference between the West and totalitarian dystopia China.

You may be drummed out as CEO of a major corp on trumped up charges (almost any high level exec could be found guilty of this):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/10/qwest-ceo-nsa-punished...

You may be assassinated without trial or explanation anywhere in the world:

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/18/opinion/the-drone-that-ki...

You may be kidnapped in any country and tortured at a black site in Syria:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maher_Arar

You may be arbitrarily pulled off the streets and detained by unidentified paramilitary forces:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/20/trump-...

It's extremely unlikely if you are white, non-muslim and do exactly as they ask, which may give you some comfort, but the US or other Western states do engage in the things you listed too.

I agree China is a much worse state at present than the US say, but I wouldn't be too comfortable about defying the US government on something they care about - they have murdered, coerced and ruined lives too in the recent past.

True now, but that one poem will come up; First They Came (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...). If this keeps up, anyone who is more left / liberal leaning will be next, then the intellectuals, etc. It's happened before, pretty much exactly like this, it's just that the uniforms are different.

Why isn't the international community pulling on the emergency brakes? The UN was founded to prevent this exact shit. But the problem with the UN is that the perpetrators in this case all have a lot of influence there + veto powers, so it's basically powerless and useless.

Untrue. The UN was founded to prevent WWIII.

Being convinced that complete victory over their enemies is essential to defend life, liberty, independence and religious freedom, and to preserve human rights and justice in their own lands as well as in other lands, and that they are now engaged in a common struggle against savage and brutal forces seeking to subjugate the world...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_by_United_Nations

The Declaration does not name Nazism or Fascism specifically, but does describe the characteristics common to them and other authoritarian and aggressive forms of government.

Starting illegal wars and overthrowing governments to put in puppets tends to be quite atrocious, but I guess if you benefit from it, no problems then.

It's very hard to compare countries, and there are certainly major problems with civil rights in the US, but I'd rather live in the US than in China right now.

You sure about that?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/09/30...

As for Portland, that appears to be an unusual use of Federal authority, but as far as I can tell, they actually do have relatively sweeping legal authority, even if it's not often exercised (see the lawfare blog for some analysis thereof) and everyone is being processed in the regular court system. So it's not exactly the case of being "disappeared" that some reports claimed.

One article had an account of someone abducted, searched, and released, and then the authorities said they did not have records of arresting him. If there's no records, it's not the regular court system, even if it happened in the court building.

It's not clear to me what other records they would have in that case and again, this isn't exactly being "disappeared" given that they were turned over to the police for processing and then released without charges. Sounds more to me like some cops were lazy with the paperwork when they were going to release them anyhow.

The feds have wide-ranging authority to arrest people and always have, though:

https://www.lawfareblog.com/what-heck-are-federal-law-enforc...

If that happened to someone you were walking with and they left you there, wouldn't you call police and report that your friend was abducted?

Also, the government officials have claimed the people weren't arrested, and my understanding (which could easily be wrong) is being detained by law enforcement means you're not permitted to leave, not that you must go with them, so I'm out of words.

http://opb-imgserve-production.s3-website-us-west-2.amazonaw...

---

It appears that the State has largely backed away from any argument that the federal agents were not at all identifiable as law enforcement. Mr. Pettibone acknowledges that their uniforms said “Police,” Pettibone Decl. [1-1] ¶ 3, and the video shows agents wearing clothing clearly marked as “Police.”

Congress...chooses not to enforce it? You're talking about Congress, commonly known as the executive branch of the triune government, which enforces the laws?

It's at times like these I'm reminded of the saying...that fog is a sign of merging timelines.

The answer is that the Constitution give Congress abilities like impeachment specifically to give them the ability to apply pressure and "enforce" that the executive branch does what it is entrusted to do.

The exact same situation applies to police. Surely you understand that it is possible for police officers to break the law even though they are technically also the people responsible for enforcing it?

See this: https://www.wdrb.com/us-capitol-in-fog/image_571cd9fc-ca8b-1...

What you're looking at is the probability of the US Capitol being in a particular place. It's a common misconception that fog makes things look blurry, but you're seeing the effect of the average probability of it being there at all, given the many possibilities in alternate time tracks. It is blurry. Never mind what might be going on inside.

People who wander into fog often come out into a different world, but generally their memories adjust...not always though.

One antidote to hate and fear is laughter and play; see for example Dutch historian and cultural theorist Johan Huizinga, author of "Homo Ludens" (who was eventually held in detention by the Nazis): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Ludens

And playfulness and laughter can be regained: https://myshrink.com/dont-laugh-anymore/ "If your nervous system activation increases over your lifetime, chances are you'll lose your capacity for spontaneous laughter. Those folks who notice the difference in themselves might say they are "tapped out" or "I don't feel like myself". Indeed, there's some folks who've never had the ability for a good laugh to begin with. Don't despair. Just because you don't laugh anymore doesn't mean that can't be changed - it's temporary - unless you decide to do nothing about it."

I've started watching the original "The Prisoner" series again ( https://archive.org/details/The_Prisoner ) and reading comments on it. It is becoming clearer that ultimately, fifty years after that series first aired, we are all part of a global village now... For good or bad, we are part of that system -- and there is essentially no possibility of "escape" because that system in some form is everywhere.

And seeing the Prisoner series again decades later -- informed by some comments -- it is also clearer the series does not take an absolutist stand on one side or the other of the free-seeming individual or the structured-seeming community. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prisoner "A major theme of the series is individualism, as represented by Number Six, versus collectivism, as represented by Number Two and the others in the Village. McGoohan stated that the series aimed to demonstrate a balance between the two points."

From the second Prisoner episode, "The Chimes of Big Ben" which I re-watched today: https://subslikescript.com/series/The_Prisoner-61287/season-...

    Number Six: You're just as much a prisoner as I am.
    Number Two: Of course, I know too much - we're both lifers. I am an optimist. It doesn't matter who Number One is. It doesn't matter which side runs the Village. It's run by one side. But both sides are becoming identical. What has been created is an international community, a blueprint for world order. When both sides realise they're the same, they'll see this is the pattern for the future.
   Number Six: The whole earth as the Village?
   Number Two: That is my hope. What's yours?
   Number Size: To be the first man on the moon.

For example, the Starship Enterprise in Star Trek is essentially a surveillance state where the computer knows everything everyone is doing all the time -- but somehow we don't see the series through that surveillance state lens. Perhaps that is in part because of the amazing opportunities that cheap energy, matter replicators, space travel, holographic simulations, and so on make possible through widespread abundance for all Federation citizens in that (still) fictional universe? Or perhaps also it is because the surveillance is somehow behind some sort of assumed legitimate authority of access and (virtual) privacy?

See also on the issue of surveillance and power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society "The Transparent Society (1998) is a non-fiction book by the science-fiction author David Brin in which he forecasts social transparency and some degree of erosion of privacy, as it is overtaken by low-cost surveillance, communication and database technology, and proposes new institutions and practices that he believes would provide benefits that would more than compensate for lost privacy."

The recent unrest in the USA is emerging not from surveillance by the police of the citizenry but (via cell phones) from surveillance by the citizenry of the police (and what some specific police officers did to George Floyd).

A related touchstone by Manuel De Landa: "Meshworks, Hierachies, and Interfaces": http://netbase.org/delanda/meshwork.htm "To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice to save us."

Theodore Sturgeon's 1956 short story "The Skills of Xanadu"(which inspired Ted Nelson to work on hypertext, and in a way eventually led to the World Wide Web) also has an interesting take on privacy in a world where people are surrounded with networked technology. Audio: https://archive.org/details/pra-BB3830.08 Text: https://archive.org/stream/galaxymagazine-1956-07/Galaxy_195...

I suggest the only justified criterion of authority and rule of law emerges from a high-performance liquid democracy built on infrastructures owned by the people. Those in power have little egoistic reason to enable that thing to evolve. Spontaneous mass cooperation that radically leverages webs of epistemic trust toward maximizing the utility of the those at the bottom appears to be our only hope; I do not predict it.

As your point implies, authority is given by the people. The same point is made in the US Declaration of Independence about "consent of the governed": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consent_of_the_governed

As is shown (fictionally) in Voyage from Yesteryear, if many people stop obeying like with a general strike (at least until full automation) or just by walking away to new opportunities in a different part of the system, then authority comes under pressure to respond (hopefully positively) or it will eventually will collapse. A similar point is made in the chapter on the "Ghands" in the 1962 sci-fi novel the The Great Explosion" by Eric Frank Russell who live by the adage "Freedom can say "I won't"".

The same has been true throughout human history as explained in Daniel Quinn's "Beyond Civilization: Humanity's Next Great Adventure" where he shows how centralized governance has collapsed many times in human history as whatever problems emerged in it (often from external pressures like droughts or plagues leading to systemic stress) caused most people to just walk away back to the wilderness to live off the land. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Civilization

For good or bad, walking away is not much of an option these days given large populations, global surveillance, and also WMDs like nukes and plagues and so on that could be unleashed accidentally or on purpose if power centers collapse.

Collapse of power centers in modern times is also often problematical regarding what comes next -- when most people can't walk away -- is usually the next-best organized group taking over. For example, students in Iran could eventually overthrow the US-installed Sha -- but then better-organized religious hardliners took over in the resulting power vacuum (which is probably not what most Iranian students had in mind for their future). Or, as other examples, the USA could relatively easily overthrow Saddam Hussein in Iraq or Muammar Gaddafi in Libya -- but the resulting power vacuums have created politician and humanitarian disasters which have been very costly to the USA (especially in Iraq, costing trillions of dollars to US taxpayers -- although as a bunch of defense companies have made billions that may have been part of why it went forward despite many people pointing out what was likely to happen: https://www.wanttoknow.info/warisaracket ).

Related humor: "Monty Python: What have the Romans ever done for us?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djZkTnJnLR0

Of course, power centers also tend to actively disrupt any possible other power centers. See the "Old Guy" Cybertank novels for some graphic sci-fi accounts of that in one.

Or for the real world, see for example Noam Chomsky's "The Threat of a Good Example": http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/ChomOdon_Example.h... "No country is exempt from U.S. intervention, no matter how unimportant. In fact, it's the weakest, poorest countries that often arouse the greatest hysteria. ... As far as American business is concerned, Nicaragua could disappear and nobody would notice. The same is true of El Salvador. But both have been subjected to murderous assaults by the US, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and many billions of dollars. There's a reason for that. The weaker and poorer a country is, the more dangerous it is as an example. If a tiny, poor country like Grenada can succeed in bringing about a better life for its people, some other place that has more resources will ask, "why not us?" "

As you say, people in power have little reason to embrace change -- since their power derives from the status quo. Related on "Orthodoxy" by G. K. Chesteron: https://www.ccel.org/ccel/chesterton/orthodoxy.x.html "We have remarked that one reason offered for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow better. But the only real reason for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow worse. The corruption in things is not only the best argument for being progressive; it is also the only argument against being conservative. The conservative theory would really be quite sweeping and unanswerable if it were not for this one fact. But all conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post. But this which is true even of inanimate things is in a quite special and terrible sense true of all human things. An almost unnatural vigilance is really required of the citizen because of the horrible rapidity with which human institutions grow old. It is the custom in passing romance and journalism to talk of men suffering under old tyrannies. But, as a fact, men have almost always suffered under new tyrannies; under tyrannies that had been public liberties hardly twenty years before. ..."

Classically, people have "organized" via a certain sort of social process, such as documented in "Politics the Wellstone Way: How to Elect Progressive Candidates and Win on Issues": https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/234876.Politics_the_Well...

One can wonder how effective such classical organizing is anymore given tightly controlled (by money) major broadcast media. And even if that was somehow circumvented, then as with Bernie Sanders (twice), the establishment has other ways of preserving itself like by convincing candidates to drop out of the race.

Then there are other possible ways of disrupting such organizations vulnerable to things like, say, small plane crashes involving key organizers. Wellstone died in a small plane crash, which of course might have just been an accident despite suggestions to the contrary: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/10/well-o29.html "Wellstone’s death comes almost two years to the day after a similar plane crash killed another Democratic Senate hopeful locked in a tight election contest, Missouri Governor Mel Carnahan, on October 16, 2000. The American media duly noted the “eerie coincidence,” as though it was a statistical oddity, rather than suggesting a pattern. One might say, paraphrasing Oscar Wilde, that to lose one senator is a misfortune, but to lose two senators, the same way, is positively suspicious."

Another idea other than "organizing" that fits with what you wrote on spontaneous mass cooperation is "quorum sensing": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorum_sensing "In biology, quorum sensing is the ability to detect and to respond to cell population density by gene regulation. As one example, quorum sensing (QS) enables bacteria to restrict the expression of specific genes to the high cell densities at which the resulting phenotypes will be most beneficial. Many species of bacteria use quorum sensing to coordinate gene expression according to the density of their local population. In a similar fashion, some social insects use quorum sensing to determine where to nest. Also, quorum sensing might be useful for cancer cell communications too. In addition to its function in biological systems, quorum sensing has several useful applications for computing and robotics. In general, quorum sensing can function as a decision-making process in any decentralized system in which the components have: (a) a means of assessing the number of other components they interact with and (b) a standard response once a threshold number of components is detected."

Ultimately, if systems of power refuse to negotiate new terms for support by the governed when circumstances change, either they will be successful at suppressing dissent by whatever means or they won't. But if centers of power are going to fail, the longer they fight change, often the worse the failure, and the less the existing power may have a say in the new order (for good or bad).

Still, in the past, some power centers (typically organized around control of a key resource like water) have lasted for thousands of years (such as the Egyptian Empire) -- so people in power can always hope they will be part of the next Ancient Egypt. As G. William Domhoff writes regarding "four main organizational networks -- ideological, economic, military, and political -- as the building blocks for power structures": https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/theory/four_networks.html "Before civilizations emerged, there may have been "inverted power structures" in which the rank-and-file could discipline would-be dominators through gossip, scorn, shunning, and if need be, assassination (Boehm, 1999). Only where river flooding allowed the possibility of alluvial agriculture, in conjunction with close proximity to geographical areas that encouraged different but complementary networks, did the "caging" of populations make possible the development of the fixed power structures of domination and exploitation that have characterized all civilizations. The strong egalitarian tendencies that characterized pre-historic social groups were submerged when power seekers could build on a religious, economic, military, or political base to gain control of others."

I've been hopeful for a Universal Basic Income eventually to soften the worst extremes of the USA's current economic system for many people (as part of a healthy mix of subsistence, gift, exchange, and planned activities in society). But given that the obvious solution was not tried on an even temporary basis for the pandemic despite multiple congress people endorsing monthly payments for the duration, it seems like the USA is still not quite there yet -- even if closer than ever, given increased public awareness of the idea. For example Kamala Harris: https://twitter.com/KamalaHarris/status/1271151635549556736 "Roughly 44M Americans have filed for unemployment over the past 12 weeks. That’s why @BernieSanders, @EdMarkey & I introduced a bill to give $2,000 monthly payments to people throughout this crisis. Bills didn’t stop just because we’re in the middle of a pandemic."

Rashida Tlaib, AOC, and other Congressional representatives have similar ideas. Instead of those ideas, the USA quickly threw trillions of dollars at wealthy people: https://prospect.org/coronavirus/unsanitized-bailouts-tradit...

G. William Domhoff has some other interesting thing to on his website, stuff sometimes many years old, like: https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/change/science_why.html "Based on these findings, it seems likely that everyday people don't opt for social change in good part because they don't see any plausible way to accomplish their goals, and haven't heard any plans from anyone else that make sense to them. But why don't they just say "the hell with it" and head to the barricades? Why aren't they "fed up?" The answer is not in their false consciousness or a mere resigned acquiescence, as many leftists seem to believe, but in a very different set of factors. On the one hand, for all the injustices average Americans experience and perceive, there are many positive aspects to everyday life that make a regular day-to-day existence more attractive than a general strike or a commitment to building a revolutionary party. They have loved ones they like to be with, they have hobbies and sports they enjoy, and they have forms of entertainment they like to watch. In fact, many of them also report in surveys that they enjoy their jobs even though the jobs don't pay enough or have decent benefits. (And as of late 2005, 93% of individuals earning over $50,000 a year describe themselves as "doing well.") They also understand that they have some hard-won democratic rights and freedoms inherited from the past that are much more than people in many other countries have. They don't want to see those positive aspects messed up. On a less positive note, many ordinary white workers have priorities that they put ahead of economic issues. As all voting and field studies show, a large number of average white Americans do many things based on their skin color. They often vote Republican, for example, especially in the South. They protest against affirmative action programs. They live in segregated neighborhoods. White Americans also often vote their religion -- that is, the fundamentalist Protestants and conservative Catholics who vote Republican are members of non-college-educated blue-collar and white-collar families. In terms of their economic situation, and their need for unions, they should be for the Democrats, but many of them aren't. It is these alternative issues, both positive and negative, rooted in their own lives and experiences, not a false consciousness created by the capitalists' ideological hegemony, that explain why most Americans don't rebel -- or even vote their pocketbook -- most of the time. In short, the theorists of consciousness may be serious thinkers, and they work at a level that is very attractive to most leftists, but they are wrong when it comes to understanding why positive social change does not happen. They have misconstrued the problem, which has to do with structures of power and life circumstances and the compelling nature of everyday life, not the chains of consciousness. They have misunderstood everyday people, and in effect blamed them for the failures of the left, even though at the theoretical level it seems like they are blaming the overwhelming powers of the dominant class or power elite. They have made the people the problem instead of considering the possibility that what the left offers does not make any sense to most people."

Outrage and destruction resulting from unhappiness and stress is one thing; coherent collective action to some positive ends is another. Destruction is relatively easy compared to making things better. It's OK to be angry or sad as recent protesters in the USA must be feeling, but as Mr. Fred Rogers sings, "What do you do with the Mad that you feel?" And as Domhoff suggests, that can be a difficult question about how to change things to make them better for more people without making things worse for lots more other people.

If you ever drive south a few hours, and would be up for meeting for dinner, coffee, a beer, whatever, let me know. It would be my honor to meet you offline too.

I would like to know your dreams, your wild speculations, and your gut feelings about what the post-scarcity world should look like and how it might come to be.

Communism doesn’t work. We have already found a better system. Do not introduce regressions.

The people protesting have been exceeding clear about what they are arguing for precisely. Holding police accountable is not some fringe political opinion and in fact the right, according to its own professed beliefs, should be natural allies in this movement. The further this continues the more evidence we have that these concerns about police in the United States acting with impunity are legitimate.

What is clear however, is that a significant portion of the people who have claimed themselves champions of freedom and states' rights always held the caveat that it be in the service of a particular group of people. It is interesting how people who in every other circumstance hold individual liberty as central to their beliefs now place law and order at the center of their arguments at the expense of individual liberty. Where in the Constitution are our rights subject to conditions on behavior? Fucking nowhere. The second amendment itself grants the people the right to violence against a tyrannical government so why then would "not destroying statues" in any way be considered some kind of pre-requisite for legitimite protest?

No, it grants them the right to keep and bear arms, it does not grant them the right to use them against the federal or state government, and in fact the Constitution specifically empowers the federal government to act against any who would do so.

Now, the Declaration of Independence appeals to a separate and independent of any human law right to rebel uncertain conditions, but the Second Amendment does not.

It is at least as true to say that the Constitution was written by people who didn't view that as something that was or should be a legal right, and who were willing to violently repress others who tried to do it, both before and after their own Revolution.

Who believes this? Some people believe in a separate and pre-existing right to rebel, and some may not, at least legally, but I'm not aware that anyone believes the 2nd amendment grants the right. People commonly claim that the motivation for the 2nd amendment is to make rebellion possible, but that's not the same thing as granting the right.

I presume they changed the name to CHOP because someone told them that creating an "autonomous zone" sounded a lot like insurrection, which is also the kind of thing that feds normally involve themselves with, but it's not like the feds need that as an excuse given that they already have plenty of authority to enforce the law whether or not Portland wishes to do so.

> Where in the Constitution are our rights subject to conditions on behavior?

In the 13th amendment:

"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

(emphasis added)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_Stat...

https://heavy.com/news/2020/06/portland-autonomous-zone-decl...

What was the root cause of the protests? Have the people responsible for those root causes attempted to alleviate the root cause, or attempted to heap on more of the same?

Also: those are still Americans you're talking about, whether or not you agree with them. The whole point of our government is that those in power should be held to a higher standard, so the "so be it" argument is pretty stupid. Why don't the people in power do better? And for all this heat being thrown at the local politicians, aren't they the ones with their finger most on the pulse of their constituencies? Have you considered the protestors aren't behaving as badly as they're made out to be? Logic like yours makes me sick. You probably would have been OK with crucifying Jesus... "He should have followed the law!"

https://komonews.com/news/local/demonstrators-gather-in-down...

"First they came for the rioters.", although I disagree with OPs sentiment.

And my comment was not about who they're targeting first, but about how that kind of logic is a slippery slope.

The reality is that most people lack empathy for those they do not know, and only become engaged when it affects them personally. It’s good to keep that in mind when taking dangerous stances like the above.

I see the come up all the time and I can think is, maybe the HN crowd isn't as special an intelligent as it thinks it is. I enjoy it here, but let's not get too full of ourselves.

BLM is a scape goat. The real issue is that poor are struggling in portland to feed themselves and COVID has caused them to not be able to afford rent, food and shelter. This is a civil unrest, BLM is an excuse.

What we should do is support these people financially, provide them shelter, get them gov jobs, and keep societal order.

At this rate, cities are getting destroyed and we are just on the sidelines debating about BLM/police.

I will give you that China is still a lot worse. But that's like praising someone for not being Ted Bundy.

I'm not saying yout wrong, just that Nacchio is not a good example.

I'm not sure what part of identifying the jurors, finding pressure points, and covertly applying pressure you think would be beyond the capabilities of the NSA if they wanted to do it. Or doing the same to Nacchio and/or is counsel, to affect the case that got to the jury.

Not (even a little bit) suggesting that is what happened, just that suggesting it is plausible for the NSA to be able to influence that kind of outcome is not even a tiny stretch.

How do you explain?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STAR_voting

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Inters...

IRV has worldwide use – probably most heavily used in Australia, but also for some elections in Ireland, India, Papua New Guinea, and the United States (elections in Maine; also some local elections in a number of states).

IRV also has a long history – Australia has been using it at the federal level for over a century now (and at the state level for even longer than that).

By contrast, STAR doesn't appear to be used anywhere of any significance. There is a movement in Oregon to get it adopted, but thus far the movement hasn't had success. According to Wikipedia, the only people using it are Multnomah County Democratic Party for internal elections.

And that's unsurprising given how new it is – it was invented in 2014. Why prefer a system which was only invented six years ago, to a system which has over a century of significant real world use?

If the goal is to prevent the two-party system, Australia has basically turned into that with two major parties i.e. Labor and Liberal with smaller parties choosing sides, and being negligible.

Although, IRV would generally be better than the current American system in a number of ways, but not necessarily something that would break the two-party hegemony.

I think minor parties and independents have played a far more important role in Australia's political history than your statements about "smaller parties choosing sides" and "being negligible" gives them credit. Consider for example, the 1999 decision of the Australian Democrats to support Howard's GST, or the role that the Democratic Labor Party (DLP) arguably played in helping to lock Labor out of the federal government between 1949 and 1972. (Although the Democrats role in supporting the GST was in the Senate, which uses STV not IRV.)

In the results of the 2010 federal election, Labor and the Liberal-National Coalition had 74 seats each, both two short of a majority. Labor managed to form government with the support of four of the six unaligned (independent or minor party) MPs. Two of the independents who supported Labor (Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor) came from a conservative political background, and they could have easily chosen to support the Liberal-National Coalition instead.

Even in strongly multi-party systems like Italy, Spain, Israel, etc, you still tend to end up with two broad coalitions anchored by the major parties of the Left and Right, plus a bunch of centrist parties that may switch between those two coalitions depending on what is on offer after each election. (And also sometimes a far-left / far-right fringe that gets locked out of government, but hopes for the day when the mainstream left/right are desperate enough to turn to them for support.)

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_on_Presidential_Deb...

You can be phone banking within 30 minutes.

Can you point to any candidate let alone party (that stands a snowballs chance in hell of being elected) that has "reduce surveillance" anywhere in their manifestos?

The last 70 years of Democrat and Republican rule would suggest not.

Every year for a long time there has been a senator named Paul who has complained about this stuff nonstop. Nobody has listened because it is not a partisan issue. If this were a partisan issue we'd have billions of dollars behind it on both sides and the pendulum would eventually swing one way or the other.

"China knows they are being spied" -> Not sure govt public admitting spying and censorship is a good thing at all. It sets a vert bad example for the rest of the country to follow.

If it's OK for the central govt to do those shitty business (arguably backed by those so called national security rationals, whole another topic). Then how about local govt to use the same toolkits? How about powerful corporations, how about celebrities? Since the central govt sets a bad example, everyone else who's holding power are tend to think this is just OK. IMHO, that is what's causing much bigger damages.

My point isn’t that we are powerless, but that our secretly surveillance state is baked into the system, probably far beyond repair since we’ve long already chosen security over freedom.

Can we? I don't see anyone on either side [0] of the isle doing much of anything about this.

> But more importantly, I won't be spirited away to a black site by speaking ill about the president.

No, but you can be if you're in Portland any time soon.

[0] Why TF are we stuck with TWO?

We have hundreds of parties.

We have have had at most two viable parties nationally, and in each state—though not always the same two—since the founding (with brief moments of only 1 nationally, and a lot more of only one in particular states) because of our FPTP election system for Congress and most state executive and legislative offices, and our even-more-hostile-to-minor-parties Presidential election system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo

1. US domestic surveillance is different than China’s because Americans can change things by electing different politicians.

2. Americans cannot actually in practice change things by electing different politicians.

3. If you don’t like it, you can leave.

This is a very poor argument.

i also remember how this made the pundits on the Left very upset and reconfirmed in their minds that Bush and the Neocons who hijacked America were open Tyrants who eventually embrace stripping American dissidents of their citizenship and deporting them.

so when you say we are free to leave, it reminds me of that.

why should i leave the place where i was born and abandon my people after i conclude "there is no political solution"? that is PRECISELY the moment to stand and FIGHT. it's what George Washington and Jefferson and Madison and Franklin etc would do if they were us today.

i dont want to roll the life dice and pick another lesser country to escape to. what do we do when there is no political solution because the entire edifice of govt from Federal down to local is rotten and hopelessly unfixable?

we seize territory from that tyrannical govt and create a new country with a new govt, that's what we do.

that's also what the people in China ought to be doing too.

No STV for congress/senate

No AV for president

Imagine you could rank you votes

1) Cruz

2) Bush (J)

3) McCain

4) Johnson

5) Sanders

6) Trump

7) Clinton (H)

In theory - the reality is very different. In both the US and UK you effectively have only 2 political parties, and have done since forever. In both the US and UK, the foreign policies, stance on mass surveillance, and support for the defence and security services, are the same.

Ask yourself when the last time was that the US/UK weren't cosied up Saudi Arabia, or the last time when the US wasn't bombing other countries to hell in the name of freedom or stoppi g the boogeyman de-jour (with allies like the UK in tow, of course). It's been the same since forever, and I don't see how our political system will ever offer a way out, a way to become better nations.

The spying is supported by both major parties.

back in 2003, after Bush's President's Surveillance Program (NSA STELLARWIND) had been up and running for 2 years, hoovering up all domestic phone calls, emails and web traffic, the whole program was so secret that you could count on your hands who outside of NSA knew it was happening.

guess who was the 9th person outside of NSA and the WH who was "read into the program" and told about NSA STELLARWIND?

House Minority leader Nancy Pelosi, that's who.

guess who was the 14th person read in?

Deputy AG James Comey.

guess who was the 17th person read in?

DOJ Criminal Division chief Chris Wray, who is now FBI Director.

every single Democrat leader who has been in DC for their entire career LOVES mass domestic surveillance. they have known about it all along and they never once blew the whistle or tried to stop it or simply resign their jobs in silent protest. they all went along with it, "just doing my job."

voting new people into office isnt going to work.

No, you can't. Because the people you're allowed to elect are all complicit in the creation and maintenance of these systems.

Can you? There are a few problems: firstly, the primaries are controlled by the parties, so you have a very limited menu to choose from when it comes to the actual elections. Secondly, the media is no longer independent. If you are not aligned with the status quo, you will get no exposure, or only very negative exposure. Finally, politicians consistently do the opposite of what they promise on such matters. Take Obama: a lot of people believed that he was the way to fight, that he was the "correct person". He promised to encourage whistle-blowing, and then he did the opposite. This is not a partisan observation, I pick this example because it is the most recent disappointment on such matters.

> But more importantly, I won't be spirited away to a black site by speaking ill about the president.

It is happening right now in Oregon.

> Nor can the government decide it doesn't want me as CEO of my company anymore.

Are you sure?

> Or prevent me from funding the opposition party.

Try funding a radical party and see what happens.

> There's an enormous difference between the West and totalitarian dystopia China.

I agree that there is, but it is scary to see that the difference is becoming smaller and most people seem ok with that. I worry that the future will not be a place worth living in.

You could at least log in with a different account before posting this.

How exactly does that happen when the two key entities have direct ties the the rest of the (surveillance) system? Those two enties control who gets to run, who is on the ballot. For example, look at Biden. He didn't win. The DNC put their thumb on the scale for him.

Any perception of being able to fight is an illusion, it's a ruse. As for the difference between East and West, that's true. That doesn't mean we're not in danger. Just because you can't see doesn't mean it's not there.

Cause the patriot act has been reconducted for 3 generations of presidents since 9/11, including obama, along with legalized mass surveillance, torture and deny of habeas corpus.

It is true what you say, but officially it isn't permitted to spy on citizens through the western world. If that is scrapped, I would prefer honesty.

Do you have some examples of what he's done?

It is happening in Oregon.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/07/18/call-kidnapping-...

When I was a child, the US wouldn't open admit to torture. It didn't have publicly known programs to ship prisoners to other jurisdictions so the U.S. rules of conduct could be bypassed. It didn't have a (publicly known) prison filled with non-U.S. people that were denied a civil trial. It didn't have a president that actively preached for or against public companies outside of criminal matters. When I was a child, a president openly violating ethics concerns WAS a matter of that president getting removed - with such certainty they'd step down to avoid the inevitable result.

I'm totally willing to believe that an aberrant behavior doesn't have to become the norm, but I won't believe that should be expected. I've been told all my life to expect that dramatic reactions and concerns are overstated and not the case, that we should all be calm and expect things to work out well, but if I look at the actual events of my life, I see the opposite lessons being taught: Unless we react strongly, clearly, and persistently, progress will not happen and things will slide for the worse.

It's not the lesson I want to learn, it's not a lesson I am comfortable with, but it does appear to be what I've seen in the last few decades.

JFK - lying about the missile gap with Russia to get elected

Johnson - lying about his intentions in Vietnam

Nixon - too many to list

If anything, I'd say there is more transparency around unethical behavior by elected officials.

And that's what worries me - note in my post above I was careful to talk about "public". Before there was a veil of deniability, the idea that at least a pretense of innocence had to be maintained.

Now it feels like there is little care to hide it. Sure, many of us are outraged, but that outrage has done nothing to translate into stopping the actions.

When even pretence is no longer a concern, there's no limit really.

Yes, and it's because there are more watchdogs and reporting than ever before, and "the internet does not forget"

And politicians using inordinate behaviours as political currency and more people to condone the same absurdities

Go back a little more and you've got Mexicans at the border branded as dirty, forced to take bleach showers and have their clothes fumigated using Zyklon-B, inspiring the Germans to use it to mass-execute Jews. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1917_Bath_riots ).

Go back a little more and you've got slavery and states trying to segregate from the US to maintain the system.

Go back a little more and you've got immigrants genociding the native population using biological agents, bullets, and mass rape to conquer the land as their own.

The US has NEVER had the moral high ground; their best claim to fame is helping to liberate Europe from the Nazis, but other than that they've absolutely shit.

But no, let's focus on the Karens who claim oppression because they need to wear a mask in Walmart instead.

I recall the racially loaded term "Vanilla ISIS" being used.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/29/fbi-co...

Today it would be impossible to ignore something that big, it would show up on social media.

To people arguing these are "arrests", well funny the arrested are just let go when they ask for a lawyer. It's an intimidation tactic. The rubberhosing and disappearing will come too, when that's deemed an acceptable intimidation tactic.

It's going to backfire in cities with popular support for the protests: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onmsFzEtK7U

> anyways the federal agents are not pulling out random genuine protestors (how would that make sense?). they are pulling out the violent ones.

You are assuming that the federal agents are interested in the well-being of protestors. There is no proof of that. Much more likely, the federal agents have 2 goals: stop and deligitimize the protests, and protect federal or local property from the looting.

The first goal is best achieved by detaining and threatening non-violent protestors, especially their leaders, and journalists friendly to the cause. Violent protestors are already giving the protests a bad name, so they are helping the government's cause. Of course, some violent protestors also need to be stopped, to fulfill their second goal.

Proving whether that person participated in the riot is a matter for the courts, all that's needed for an arrest is reasonable suspicion.

I don't know if you are a native speaker, but the word kidnap might not be the one you should be using. "Kidnap" has strong connotations, and while sime people will happily use that property of the word to create feelings I don't think it is appropriate here.

kidnap: abduct (someone) and hold them captive, typically to obtain a ransom.

There's a lot to be said about police, federal agents, TSA etc, but lets keep this serious.

It's not about accepting it, it's been knowingly used for decades in different countries around the world. Why would the US be immune to it?

And 'waiting for the details to come out in a few weeks' is never justified. If the government has just cause, they should ideally show it before they do seemingly illegal actions, especially in the current climate; at the very least, once the governor of the state is suing to get federal agents to stop, any evidence of a just cause should be immediately made public.

Since neither has happened, people should act now, not later. Any data that comes to light weeks from now is going to be rightfully suspected of being manufactured anyway.

Given how distorted and contextless the politically relevant information we get is, waiting a few weeks for the details is almost always the right choice. This situation may be an exception but I doubt it.

And it's just as bullshit when China says it and when the Feds say it. There is no justification for black-bagging people. When that happens, it is almost always for political reasons. If it wasn't, then they could use normal legal channels instead of violating the law.

By the way, civil disobedience is always illegal. That's what the "disobediance" means.

By the way, in Oregon, Federal agents are not allowed to carry out such actions without registering beforehand with the State. So this was literally an illegal arrest made by agents of a completely unrelated agency being used in order to do what Donald Trump wants instead of following the process of the law.

China's crackdown on dissidents is very similar, they also use the tactic where they push peaceful protests into riots and then use that as an excuse to arrest everyone.

That’s not a defense of the current situation; we should be putting more limits on what federal agents can do (like requiring them to identify themselves during an arrest).

[1] https://www.lawfareblog.com/what-heck-are-federal-law-enforc...

When I'll see the warrant signed by a federal judge against these people for a federal crime with probable cause, then maybe. But so far, no one was served with a warrant.

Again, that's not to say this isn't a bad situation. I'm explicitly advocating for changing the laws that allow this to be even possibly legal in the first place.

[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/07/23/us/u...

Does the United States have problems? Yes. Are those problems on the same level as China? No.

For the sake of argument, stipulate the US is not right now on the same level as some despotic states. What is going to tell us that we've arrived, next week or next year, if anonymous security forces can grab people off the street with no accountability? What sounds the alarm, that the feds are not doing things correctly, or that someone is pretending to be the feds, who kidnap people?

However, the US has absolutely huge issues that are much worse than anything comparable in China. Such as, I don't know, fabricating intelligence and feeding it to propaga- I mean corporate media in order to justify a war to kill over a million innocents.

The US is not better than China as far as human rights. There are some things that the Chinese do much worse than America, such as due process, in general - not in extreme cases, where both don't hesitate to extraordinarily rendition you into a black site. However, China also doesn't have the habit of turning a few million innocents into pink mist every decade or so, so there's really no argument of moral superiority you can make here. US problems are certainly on the same level as China.

And as far as detention, the direction the US is going certainly isn't the right one, either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Territorial_disputes_...

If you want to limit the ability of superpowers to kill millions with impunity, then really the best solution is to have a bipolar world.

I’d suggest you look at some local reporting from people like https://mobile.twitter.com/tuckwoodstock

The actual charges given to people after a “riot” are usually unrelated (jaywalking, illegal lodging, etc.) and are mostly dropped before this goes through the courts.

I haven’t looked at the figures but I would be very surprised to find the percentage of protestors arrested for the Black Lives Matter cause that are guilty of rioting is more then a single percent. To reword: I claim (though I don’t know the figure) that less then 1% of people arrested during a “riot” are found guilty of rioting.

Civil disobedience is always unlawful, the clue is in the name. Also violence against property (protesters) is not the same as violence against people (police) though they are often deliberately conflated.

It's sometimes moral to break the law, that's how law gets changed; civil disobedience is good trouble, necessary trouble.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/07/20/christopher...

Not really sure what else to say, even if he had done something to provoke a response aside from shouting(you can read the multiple articles for details) he wasn't resisting arrest, was stationary and the federal agent broke his hand in two places[1].

I can't think of any situation where beating the shit out of someone who's standing still and not reacting is an appropriate response. Much less from someone who is expected to uphold the law and supposedly trained to deal with stressful situations.

[1] https://twitter.com/Tazerface16/status/1284849286237151232

federal agent broke his hand in two places

That's a key point, and my concern is that some reports suggest that some of the arrests are being made in a manner that's "off the record", no paperwork done, officially never happened. If that's true, then there's no transparency, no due process, no accountability.

Really? I saw it covered relentlessly until it was shut down.

> If the US Marshall are arresting people with either warrants or holding them with evidence/charges, I'm totally okay with that.

That is not what is being contested. There is video evidence of am incident where "masked federal agents in camouflage gear, with no badges identifying who they work for, arrested a man without telling him what he was being charged with or reading him his Miranda rights. They put him in an unmarked van and drove away." [0]

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/evangerstmann/2020/07/18/federa...

The person arrested can challenge that if there is no probably cause (with the right attorney, there is money to be had there) but most don't because ... there's usually probably cause.

What is the requirement in your mind and legally to identify as LEO? The feds in Portland allegedly have the word POLICE on their shirts and that's it. Is that sufficient? Would you follow orders from someone in tacticool gear with the word POLICE on it?

Um, yes? That's literally the law. A police officer only has to identify AS an officer. They don't have to identify which branch (police, FBI, etc.) "Police" is enough. Ask any defense attorney.

> It is of unclear legality whether a federal agent can arrest a someone for violating state law

State law? They're literally destroying federal buildings. The federal agents are not enforcing ANY state laws. They are only enforcing federal laws:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EgMijMhS_U

Some have almost surely tried to vandalize federal buildings and others who've been arrested have protested peacefully, and still others have only violated state law. None have taken drastic action that would actually destroy a building. I don't care for hyperbole on such serious topics.

All that said I scrolled through your comments. I think at best we won't have a productive conversation on this topic, so I won't invest my time further in it.

It's illegal.

I saw a bumper sticker on a large diesel pickup truck the other day: "I identify as a Prius." If I say I "identify" as a policeman, is that good enough in your book?

1. Cops pull over people and arrest them all the time using unmarked cars - why is it an issue now?

2. The cops are identified as such (that's the badge on the shoulder). Undercover cops can arrest people too - why is it any issue?

3. These people are being arrested and released - doesn't sound like kidnapping to me. Sounds like law enforcement doing their job.

But hey, the never let the truth get in the way of your political goals, right?

People are arrested and released because they haven't committed a crime. Arresting people who haven't done anything wrong is not the job of the police.

The Portland Police are arresting people for disturbing the peace. So are the federal police, the only difference is the people they are arresting are being release because the Portland DA chooses not to press charges.

It's all political. I don't know about you, but I'd be more concerned about the Portland justice system being perverted just to stick it to Trump.

[1]https://www.mcso.us/PAID/Home/Booking/1506008/1517573

People arrested for disturbing the peace in the US won’t disappear or end up in a re-education camp where their organs may be harvested.[2] Hong Kongers are certainly fighting for the right to remain under common law, there’s a clear difference in theory and practice.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_(law)

[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-china-rights-idUS...

I don't think people are trying to stick it to Trump. People have been angry about police brutality and police killing black civilians for a long time. The LA riots were 30 years ago, and things haven't really changed that much since then - there are still cases of the police killing people with far too much regularity. This is a political issue, but it's one that crosses party boundaries. People are only really angry about Trump because he's in office at the moment; if it was a different president they'd be angry at him.

In effect, he's arguing that rioting has been decriminalised in Portland without any popular vote and without any explicit decision ever having been made. If that's true it's unsurprising the police keep arresting people and they keep being released. The issue there wouldn't be the police. If Portland wants riots to be legal when the rioters support leftist causes, they should explicitly adjust the local laws to allow it.

That said, the link they provide states the guy was released "on own recognizance" which basically means he promised to turn up in court at a future date, albeit with no bail money paid. So it doesn't say charges were dropped.

Well, the entire context. The first is that they are barely marked, you mention this in point #2, but a badge that just says "police" with no further identification or badge number is basically anonymity. How do you report abuse in this situation?

In addition to this, you have a historical precedent where right wing groups have gone on patrols through the streets of Portland to beat up non-binary folks and where they've stopped to beat up people for flicking them off when they drive through with a trump flag. I gotta ask, who is stupid enough to not entertain the thought this is just another escalation? Especially in the moment.

Thirdly they're actively telling people that, if they're followed, they'll shoot them. That's pretty low in the accountability standards.

> 3. These people are being arrested and released - doesn't sound like kidnapping to me. Sounds like law enforcement doing their job.

Kidnapping doesn't entail being kept indefinitely, it means being whisked off the street at the threat of violence into a stranger's vehicle.

Every other time in history, this has been bad, but this is the one outlier, right? That's pretty convenient.

Going all the way back to May 29th, protesting has morphed into rioting on a nightly basis. Rioters have fired guns and hit bystanders. "The rioters and looters shattered store windows and tagged buildings with graffiti that police say stretched for 20 blocks." "Demonstrators broke into and started a fire inside the Multnomah County Justice Center, home to hundreds of inmates." "Other protesters set fires throughout downtown, torching dumpsters, trash cans, cars and pallets." -- That was all May 29th.

Here is timeline of the first 12 days. It's much the same every night. [1]

I believe it's Day 50+ now.

[1] - https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/protests/protests-in-...

What's your point?

Wishing there was evidence of something is different than there actually being evidence of something.

Riiiiight.

Can we? Please explain how that would work... Your faith in democracy is admirable, although misplaced.

The reason the right has been so successful is because these policies have been made divisive in an ongoing culture war.

This is weakening the US as a whole.

To fix it, first dismantle the structures that are fueling the culture war. And the only way to do this is to co-op the middle.

The thing that is conducive to a surveillance state is the centralization of power and information. In some cases this is a strong federal government, but Facebook is as big a problem as Sabre is as big a problem as Amazon etc.

But democracy is not more prone to the development of centralized power than any other system.

The issue today is large corporations as well. When Take Two can send private investigators to intimidate a youtuber at his home there is no way to have people's rights be secure.

>That being said, the experiment is on-going so we can’t definitively say Democracy is the best system

Whoever said this? It's directly contradicting Churchill's quote, so not really part of a response to what I said.

The US, with all its flaws, is miles ahead of the human rights and privacy violations that China is committing on a daily basis.

Trump started doing that in Portland last week.

Earlier today, he said he plans to expand the program to New York, Chicago, Oakland, Detroit, and a bunch of cities with in blue states.

Apparently, the Chicago PD’s leadership is welcoming it because the mayor “makes them fight with kid gloves” and this will let them ignore state and local regulations.

They also say they’re planning to bypass the state courts because federal courts have harsher sentencing guidelines.

[1] https://restoreprivacy.com/5-eyes-9-eyes-14-eyes/

The key bias here is normalisation of deviance, both on an individual and regime level.

This is one of the rare cases when China has been brought up in the opposite direction.

We’re constantly told China is a threat, and that’s probably a reasonable bit of advice.

We’re not constantly told our own governments are a threat, and that forms the basis of propaganda and misinformation.

The experience in the 21st century has thankfully been a little bit milder but (1) we're only 20 years in and (2) if you are going to be persecuted it is still far more likely to be by a local government than a foreign government.

> We’re not constantly told our own governments are ...

When I read these statements, I can't help to substitute these nouns with "a used car salesperson".

Of course a used car salesperson will talk up the cars on their lot and won't go out of their way to point out the defects or bad value. That's exactly why we should look for sources other than the salesperson and their allies. Look for data supplied by neutral third parties who have a slight adversarial stance. Also look for data from strong adversaries and evaluate the likelihood of truth versus pure propaganda.

On the contrary I'd say a very notable feature the US culture is the adversarial view people have of the government. It's practically part of every major party's platform.

That has not been my experience living in America. Not even remotely.

Also, specifically about astroturfing: "[T]he overwhelming majority of the insinuations and accusations [of astroturfing] that people come up with about it lead to precisely nothing when we investigate. It's like flipping a coin and having it come up tails a thousand times in a row: you start to look for simpler explanations, and there are clear, simple explanations for why this might be." [2]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23835613

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23837456

I'm not saying that to pick an argument—it's just the factual situation. Meanwhile, there's enormous evidence that people imagine things based on what they believe they see in internet threads. That's why the site guidelines ask you not to post such insinuations unless you have something objective to go on. The appearance of a comment getting upvoted doesn't count—that's simply an indication that people have different views.

In addition to the links Confiks posted, I suggest https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... And there are hundreds of past explanations, going back many years, at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Why does anything critical of china get met with downvotes rather than responses? - I've pointed this out before.

Why, if I try to argue with pro-china people does a pattern of rebuffing or denial occur followed by, when pushed into a corner, posting some nebululosty with little meaningful content followed by them going quiet?

If this is not government sponsored shilling, there are a bunch of people who are quite willing to behave against HN rules but don't get banned in a hurry - should I be flagging these more or something?

I have no problem with people being pro-china, it's a question of honesty.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

This shows that these perceptions are not objective. That's the main point. Why such perceptions routinely arise, and why people are so intensely convinced of them, is an interesting question but a secondary one.

I just don't see, or at least recognise, this type of behaviour elsewhere. See a post on guns or free speech and the flames that erupt amongst USAians, they have a very different character to the ones about china.

> This shows that these perceptions are not objective

Inevitably, but that does not in itself eliminate their being actual differences, and these being of a nature different from other flames ie. being backed not by ultranationalistic citizens of some country, but by a concerted centralised interference.

So again, how do we determine this, or disprove it, in an empirical way?

I always found that dubious.

but then i did some research into Starwood hotels.

when Snowden ran to HK in May/June 2013, he stayed at the Mira hotel, paying with his personal credit card.

guess who owns Mira?

Mira is a Starwood hotel.

i guess that ROYALCONCIERGE program didnt work too well LOL.

i now no longer fear NSA and the FVEYs the same way i did back in 2013.

NSA/FVEYs are not 1984 meets Skynet. NSA is the Cyber DMV. govt clerks punching a clock and squabbling with each other over internal turf wars. they are morons, just with a bigger budget and an invisibility cloak of TOP SECRET.

NSA/FVEYs have already crippled themselves by their spectacular success. they hacked everyone, they exfiltrated all data on Earth, but what good is it? they couldnt even find Snowden in their own hotel spy program?

i bet more sand falls through the cracks in NSA's hands than any finite number of grains they do manage to catch. there simply is no way to scale putting a human eyeball on every piece of SIGINT. the more SIGINT you collect, the more blind you become.

these days i am NSA's #1 cheerleader. i fervently hope they intercept and wiretap and collect everything. because one day poetic justice will knock NSA on their asses and blindside their hubris and they will never see it coming.

First mover advantage matters.

But now first movers are watching their lunch get eaten by new comers who can move with more agility and know the lay of the land.

Same bit of typical history-repetition.

https://papersplease.org/wp/2013/09/29/how-the-nsa-obtains-a...

For all we know, all major hotel chains could just be forced to comply with secret injunctions from FISA, and it would still be totally legal, and totally cool.

At most there is Guantanamo and black sites abroad. And at least for Guantanamo the prisoners have a modicum of rights (see Boumedine, though I concede that the current scotus majority is limiting it as much as possible.)

[1]https://www.npr.org/2019/04/10/711850056/fake-documents-a-gr...

That's the point.

The NY Times and Washington Post routinely rail against our prison population and sentencing laws. Morally they're right, our sentences are too long. They never substantiate the premise that a large share of people in prison were wrongly convincted. In fact, to date, nobody has ever proven such an outlandish thing: because it's not true. The critics don't even attempt to prove that premise (at worst they'll point to a few select prominent cases). The problem with the US incarceration rate isn't that the US wrongly puts millions of people into prison, it's that the US puts people into prison with sentences that are too long.

"Shouldn't have been" is a value judgment; by my values, anyone in prison for a non-violent drug "offense" should not be there.

Just did a quick search, and for federal crimes, looks like the drug-related prison population is a whopping 46% of the total, at just under 70k inmates. Not sure what the violent vs. non-violent breakdown is, but even if the violent ones are 75% of those, 17k people () is still a lot. If we assume that the federal prison population is composed similarly to all the state prisons, that's 250k inmates for non-violent drug crimes.

Yes, I know I made some guesses and assumptions around those numbers, and if anyone has some better figures, I'd be happy to correct myself, but there's 250k people should not be in prison in the US, based on my values.

That's basically the opposite of how it's meant to work.

There are prisoners there that have never been even charged. They are being tortured, tapes and records are being destroyed. These people have no rights.

No, instead we have mass incarceration that is rife with corruption and mechanical to the point where prosecutors don't care if people are guilty, they just pile on whatever charges they can so they can pad their resume.

We literally have the world's largest prison population, millions of people in prison. We have private prisons and literally have had judges SELL KIDS to them.

At most? LMAO.

There is a huge difference between free Western democracies, and totalitarian China, just ask the people of Hong Kong.

It's also worth noting that if you execute a criminal after a non-fair trial and send his parents the bill for the bullet, it saves some space in the jails, plus has somewhat of a deterrent effect on crime.

The US puts people in prison for too long for violent crimes due to minimum sentencing laws. That's the reason the prison population is so high (although it has been rapidly declining for the past decade), not because it's randomly putting a million people into prison. The US gets an immense amount of flak for its mandatory minimum sentencing laws and rightfully so.

As one example, everyone knows the US has a high murder rate compared to other affluent nations for example (typically five or higher per 100k). If you have half a million murders every 30 years, it stands to reason you're going to have a lot of people in prison just from that one category and all of its intertwined consequences and related crime.

China has zero human rights, the government can do anything it wants to, to anyone, at any time, with or without a reason. That's not an exaggeration, it's how their system works de facto. They don't apologize for that and they flex that power routinely. Their government is all-powerful, it assumes all rights by default (anything you're allowed to have is a privilege they're granting to you, and they may revoke it at any time).

Referencing US incarceration numbers isn't enough. You have to demonstrate to a very high degree that the people in prison didn't commit the crimes in question, such as armed robbery, rape, murder, and so on. You need to show that a very large percentage of those people didn't commit the crimes they're in prison for (and no, it's not good enough to reference a few cases, you have to show that it applies to hundreds of thousands of instances). The majority of people in prison in the US are there for violent crimes.

Zero difference ? Except that you don't have a totalitarian power on top for which laws are meaningless pieces of paper. Look at HK and ask them under which regime they would prefer to live in.

And if you ask minorities that go to jail for years for non-violent crime, or marijuana possession they would likely say something else.

I wouldn't argue that we should ignore or accept constant surveillance in our daily lives, but I would argue that I'd rather not have my travel rights revoked for expressing opinions against the state.

Your own source makes it clear that this system works/worked by intercepting emails.

> "then GCHQ sends teams ahead of time to [...] assassinate them"

Unless Snowden buried the lede quite spectacularly, I think this is not true.

Do you have a primary source for what you're alluding to?

Being able to hack into systems to hunt down individuals of interest to the state, is something totally different than everyone, everywhere, at all times surveyed, by everyone, even their neighbours, and then putting people in 'internment camps' because of their ethnicity.

This is all tricky stuff, it all needs context.

"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email [email protected] and we'll look at the data."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23839602

"I'm merely saying that the overwhelming majority of the insinuations and accusations that people come up with about it lead to precisely nothing when we investigate. It's like flipping a coin and having it come up tails a thousand times in a row: you start to look for simpler explanations, and there are clear, simple explanations for why this might be."

then last year winter 2019, after the DOJ OIG reported that every FISA warrant submitted by FBI dating back to 2013 was riddled with multiple legal errors that should have invalidated those warrants, Rod Rosenstein once again was summoned to explain himself to Congress.

Rosenstein told Congress the reason he signed the 4 FISA warrants extending NSA/FBI/CIA surveillance of Carter Page was because he didnt read the warrants, he just trusted DOJ and FBI and blindly signed away.

that is how America ends up just like China. we dont even question the system.

What kind of warrant does the CCP have to get before they surveil someone? Since you think their system is equivalent, please explain why you think CCP warrants receive an equivalent amount of scrutiny.