Valid points but a lot of frustrations and injustices you hear about in the USA are told by our own press because freedom of press. We are a very transparent people. This is not the case for other places.

My brother lived and worked in China for many years as a professional photographer and basically made the same points as you when we would ask him about what life is like over there. That was until he fell under suspicion at some point because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time taking pictures. He was under house arrest for over a year. They confiscated his passport but eventually let him leave because of Covid. He had zero due process. It was decided by the local police that he should be under house arrest. My family hired a lawyer but he had to present the lawyer to the police as a "concerned family friend who lives in China".

That anecdote is relatively tame compared to what some people go through in authoritarian countries. If the government targets you in one of those countries, your life is over with near zero chance of getting out of trouble.

Sure, I wasn't trying to be all "rah, rah, authoritarianism!" in my post (though several posters seem to have taken it that way, so maybe I wasn't clear enough). My point was more that our notions of freedom can sometimes be rather myopic, and miss the forest for the trees, such that we can become so un-free that even (some!) authoritarian states can feel much freer (until, as you note, you piss off the wrong people, which is obviously a huge problem—or you happen to be of the wrong ethnicity, or wrong religion, et c.—I am not trying to defend authoritarianism).

How do authoritarian states feel more free?

They have rules as well. Your list of grievances has some small issuss. Why do you think an authoritarian state would better. For example in Sir Lanka chewing gum is banned. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewing_gum_sales_ban_in_Sin...

That's a easy one because it's mentioned often but I guess my question is how do you know the US is less free than other countries? What if you are being manipulated to feel anger at the government?

You probably meant to say Singapore.

What did your embassy in China say? Did they not try to help?

Yes, they helped us find the "lawyer" and told us based on their experience that it was very likely he would spend time in a Chinese prison regardless of guilt or innocence. He got lucky in one sense because this was right before Covid hit. When everything started going a little crazy over there because Covid was spreading, they decided to let him leave for whatever reason.

There's no element of this story that couldn't have happened in the US, and no reason presented to believe that your brother wasn't involved in something shady under Chinese law, other than the fact that the situation was resolved in his favor.

> He had zero due process.

Are you saying that Chinese law wasn't followed?

Maybe but it's a lot less likely to happen AND it might make the news over here if it did happen. That was my original point.

You aren't going to see many (or any?) media stories that are critical of the government in China.

That might sound worse than US but is it? If the government here targets you, you end up with a felony record and at that point your life is effectively over as well even if you don't go to prison.

Without commenting on the other issues, but something that struck me as very odd living in the USA, was how people in California appeared fully disenfranchised during presidential elections.

Yes, as a Californian you can vote, but your vote is near guaranteed to have no effect, and as a result, neither of the sides cares to address your interests, solicit your opinion, advertise for your vote.

It struck me as really bizarre.

This is true for the vast majority of states, and the vast majority of people's interests. The political systems in this country have been shaped by -- and frankly, designed by -- by wealthy interests to make the US an oligarchy with various performances of democratic representation.

I’m not sure that’s the reason why it’s only worth campaigning in Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona and some other states during presidential elections.

Also it is the system that was designed over 100-200 years ago. The problem is the lack of meaningful reform because the people in power are there only because of the current system.

That’s the reason why is it so hard to change electoral system without some external/internal shock. And “unfortunately” US has been way too stable politically during the 20th century compared to most other countries.

California has already passed the National Popular Vote bill. https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/written-explanation

Republican controlled states don't want people's votes to count, so none of them have passed the bill.

Not the point of this thread. Popular vote has nothing to do with how responsive or attentive a government is to voter's interests. You vote for a candidate as a whole, but there are likely still issues you disagree with. Voters' interests are largely unaddressed or ignored altogether.

It is completely the point of 'voters in specific states are largely disenfranchised during presidential elections'.

> Not the point of this thread. Popular vote has nothing to do with how responsive or attentive a government is to voter's interests

Actually, it does: more specifically, degree of proportionality does, and antimajoritarianism (systems in which an absolute majority-preferred option can lose to a minority option) are an extreme case of nonproportionality. Having a powerful central executive elected by nonmajoritarian election itself weights the government to nonresponsiveness (though the US has many other factors reinforcing that.)

In other words: California has promised to disenfranchise its own voters even more than is already the case. I can already see this backfiring spectacularly with a solidly-blue state like California being on the hook to put its electors toward a Republican popular vote winner.

That's a weird way to look at it.

The many states that have agreed to this (have passed the bill) have simply accepted that the votes of the people is worth more than the feelings of the billionaires who have sponsored the Republican gerrymandering movement.

Right now, effectively, the land votes, and the people's vote is often ignored. Wisconsin is a good example, where the Republicans keep losing the vote, but yet with less than 50% of the vote, they somehow have a super-majority in the legislature.

It's not weird when it reflects the reality of the situation. It's the same reason we say voting third party is throwing your vote away. It's important to have more voices heard but in our first past the post system, voting for a candidate who can't get anywhere close to a third of the votes simply doesn't matter.

I haven't read the bill but if certain states are committing themselves to popular distribution of their electoral votes while the red states stick to all or nothing, the reality is that 40% of CA's electoral votes go red and blue candidates don't have a chance at winning.

If I'm not mistaken, the bill only goes in effect when the states that have signed it start making up the majority of the electoral college.

The bill only applies when states representing 270 electoral votes adopt it. Since 270 votes determine the winner of the EC, it doesn’t matter at all what the remaining states do. The states that sign on would be required to put their votes towards whichever candidate wins the nationwide popular vote, effectively ending the electoral college in all but name. There’s not really much to criticize here if you believe that electing presidents by popular vote is a good idea.

> The many states that have agreed to this (have passed the bill) have simply accepted that the votes of the people is worth more than the feelings of the billionaires who have sponsored the Republican gerrymandering movement.

More like that the votes of people outside their state matter more than the votes of their own people. Nothing weird about that being recognized as the disenfranchisement that it is.

> Wisconsin is a good example, where the Republicans keep losing the vote, but yet with less than 50% of the vote, they somehow have a super-majority in the legislature.

The Electoral College - and this compact of states pertaining to it - has precisely zero impact on any legislative branch, federal or state. It solely pertains to presidential elections (and in turn the rest of the Executive Branch).

The solution to the problem you describe would be to address gerrymandering and other instances of geographic electoral manipulation.

Yes, it's hard to imagine that actually being executed without a ton of lawsuits. And you think people didn't accept the results of the last election, you haven't seen anything...

maybe, but according to the same Constitution that creates the existing system, this should be perfectly legal. Ultimately each state gets to send Electors for the President on its own terms.

However: several Supreme Court justices have signed on to the “independent state legislature” theory, a radical and unsupported interpretation which holds that state legislatures can’t be restricted in how they pick electors (even by their own laws and constitution.) I assume that if states actually adopted the NPV act, the court would instantly bypass it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_state_legislatur...

>Yes, as a Californian you can vote, but your vote is near guaranteed to have no effect, and as a result, neither of the sides cares to address your interests, solicit your opinion, advertise for your vote.

Isn't that partly their fault? If you're always going to vote for one party regardless of what they or the other party does, of course neither party is going to bother catering to you. It's kind of like declaring that you will always buy apple products, then complaining that apple doesn't address your grievances.

That doesn’t follow. A similar proportion of electors in swing and non swing states could have fixed voting patterns. The only difference in California is that the proportion of fixed electors for each party is further from 50%. That is, it might be the case that only 10% of electors in any state are ever prepared to change their mind, but the ones in Ohio get more say than the ones in Cali.

I think it makes perfect sense. Presumably, if one made the declaration (as many have) that for the rest of their life they’ll always and only vote Democrat, it wouldn’t be in the party’s best interest to cater to that voter’s preference, since that vote is already secured. Much better politics to focus their campaigning and policies on the more marginal voters who are undecided or may not vote at all.

I’ve heard Americans lament about this exact concept and coming from Canada I don’t know what the solution. Sometimes I think Ross Perot was the country’s last shot at anything but the present status quo.

They aren't disenfranchised. Everyone knows which way California will go so they don't spend a lot of time campaigning there. Candidates have a limited amount of time and money. So they focus on the swing states. My state also votes pretty consistently and therefore doesn't get much campaigning. I don't feel like I am disenfranchised for it.

And for everyone who is crying about the popular vote, there is a very good reason we don't do that. It was recognized from the start that if you do a strict popular vote. the more populous and wealthy areas would always call the shots and would dictate politics to the rest of the nation. At the time that meant Virginia. But it doesn't really matter who, the principle still holds. This was a compromise between populous areas and rural areas in order to get the union formed.

If you switch to a pure popular vote then the nation would be run by a handful of mega cities like NYC, LA etc. That's not democracy. The system we have prevents that while still allowing for populous areas to matter. Getting rid of the electoral college would remove one of the main compromises our federal system is built on and in my opinion would be fair grounds for any state to secede. It would be comparable to throwing away parts of the Bill of Rights.

> And for everyone who is crying about the popular vote, there is a very good reason we don't do that. It was recognized from the start that if you do a strict popular vote. the more populous and wealthy areas would always call the shots and would dictate politics to the rest of the nation. At the time that meant Virginia. But it doesn't really matter who, the principle still holds. This was a compromise between populous areas and rural areas in order to get the union formed.

The original intention was not this bloc-voting crap. The idea was that a state would select some trusted, wise, and ideally educated, locals to go get a look at the candidates and vote on their behalf, since expecting everyone in a whole country the size of the US to get any meaningful sense of the candidates, or to understand many of the relevant issues in order to make an informed choice, was obviously crazy in a time before broadcast (and still is, actually; broadcast barely even helped with the core problem of most folks—justifiably!—knowing almost nothing about the things a head of state deals with).

This broke down instantly, as electors began pre-declaring for candidates. But we kept the system, which, while a half-decent (if hopelessly poorly-implemented) idea originally, is now simply very bad—we get all the noisy, absurd national campaigning but most of us don't get a meaningful say in the election, anyway.

I’ve heard this take before and it makes no sense to me. Areas don’t dictate anything. It’s people. Why should it matter where the people live? As it stands, people who live in smaller states have more say in national politics than people who live in bigger states.

> As it stands, people who live in smaller states have more say in national politics than people who live in bigger states.

Not for presidential elections, nobody cares about Delaware or Wyoming's 3 electors. Small-population states matter for the Senate where they're way over-represented.

Not that they're not over-represented for the EC mind, but e.g. for their 0.2% of the national population Wyoming has 0.55% of the Electoral College, versus 2% of the Senate. By comparison California's 11.75% of the national population gives them 10% of the EC and... 2% of the Senate.

States which have a say (or are heard really) during presidential elections are states with large enough populations (and thus EC) that it's worth spending time and dumping money there for campaigns, yet purple enough that there's a chance to swing them.

As things stand, where every state votes as a block, the ones where the whole population lands within the 50/50 range is heavily contested. If North Dakota were 50/50 the Bismark media market would be flooded by advertising. Every electoral college vote matters.

The actual number of potentially contested states is quite low; states not in contention aren't contested.

There are many "within the constitution" ways of adjusting this -- states chose electoral college reps as chosen by nation wide popular vote, as chosen by state election ratio, etc. But as things stand, no individual state would do this by itself because an inconsistent implementation would (IE if california or texas stop sending all or nothing electoral college reps) tip the balance to one or the other party for forever.

There's some indications that the republicans won the house in this current election cycle because new york didn't aggressively gerrymander, allowing several republicans to be elected when the absolute math would have made it trivial to exclude them.

Politics is hard. It's better than mass murder, though, which is the typical alternative.

> As things stand, where every state votes as a block

Not every state. Two states (Maine and Nevada) have district voting, so they allocate one elector per congressional district (based on that district’s vote), plus two statewide. Tough they only account for 9 electors combined. And it’s still far from proportional representation.

>> Politics is hard. It's better than mass murder, though, which is the typical alternative.

Weird thing that politics does is convince you that it’s not in control of the mass murder. I promise you we have hundreds of thousands of state sanctioned or willfully negligent deaths annually in <country name of your choice>.

Modern politics isn’t about stopping the deaths, it’s just better at hiding how the sausage is made.

I believe it's a continuum between "minimal politics / lots of violence" and "effective politics / minimal violence".

The easiest way to fix this without an amendment would be to greatly increase the number of representatives and use the Maine/Nebraska method to split the electors. It's not perfect, but it would be close enough, depending on how large you make the House of Representative.

It’s not the easiest way to fix this because it makes states which adopt this lose out in the meantime:

- let say you’re a “solid” state (whether red or blue), odds are that’s on both presidential and state (governor, possibly to likely assembly), if you adopt district voting you parcel out EVs to “the other party” without that favour coming back the other way

- if you’re a purple state, then you lose out on campaign presence, money, and publicity, because instead of shifting, say, 10+ EVs getting that extra % popular votes shifts 2 EVs if they’re not in a purple district, 3 if they are

That’s why the NPVIC was designed with a threshold: when the NPVIC covers 270EVs it comes into force and everybody gets the same thing at the same time.

>>I’ve heard this take before and it makes no sense to me.

I’m assuming that’s because you’re not trying to vote in candidates who consistently support a small group of loudly aggrieved people to inflict their will on the vast majority of the country.

The electoral college wasn't created to restrict the power of large states like Virginia.

The electoral college was created because it was expected that state governments would elect the president, not citizens. In the presence of direct election of the president, it's an anachronism at best. It was never about "tyranny of the majority", and in a two-party system, trying to prevent the tyranny of the majority is just a tyranny of the minority.

If you want, weight the votes so votes in small states count more, or votes in rural areas count more. It'll still be a much more fair and equitable system than the electoral college, which effectively means that anyone outside a swing state has no representation.

Of course, doing it that way would make it much more obvious that there's no credible reason we should give 1,000 suburbanites Wyoming more voting power than 1,000 farmers in rural California, or 1,000 voters in Columbus more power than 1,000 voters in Brooklyn.

Yeah, I guess it's as black and white as you state. There's no in-between like keeping the per state allotments while still having that allotment be chosen by the people instead of adding another layer in between that is "voting for the people", which I provide in quotes because who actually believes that is happening? "voting on behalf of their supporters", at best.

Even though that gets brought up as a reason very often it is not true. Firstly the US (like many other democracies) has a two house system. The senate is designed to counter balance the power of high population states. Even if the US went to a popular vote system now it would not be governed by california and NY, because the senate gives disproportionate power to smaller states.

If you read historians opinions there are several reasons, the "big States get all the power" is typically not cited [1], however one important reason which does get cited is slavery. The southern states wanted a way to count slaves as population without actually letting them vote. The three fifth rule was the compromise [2 - 4]

[1] https://uselectionatlas.org/INFORMATION/INFORMATION/electcol...

[2] https://historyofyesterday.com/the-racist-origins-of-america... [3] https://www.npr.org/2020/10/30/929609038/how-electoral-colle... [4] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/electoral-...

> Without commenting on the other issues, but something that struck me as very odd living in the USA, was how people in California appeared fully disenfranchised during presidential elections.

That's the case of every state which is away enough from swing. Only "purple" states[0] matter during presidential elections.

Then again, swing states only get pandered to for a few months every 4 years.

[0] and Maine and Nebraska which use district voting, but at 4 and 5 electors they're to small to really matter

This is the exact opposite of my experience. It's the only place where my elected officials were actually engaged. I received regular updates from my representatives without even asking for them. They just mailed all of their constituents flyers explaining the current issues and how it affects the community. I've lived in 5 different states and never saw anything like this in any of them except California. Go figure.

You missed the word "presidential".

> I've lived in 5 different states and never saw anything like this in any of them except California.

I live in Texas, around Houston. Here we certainly do have representatives (but not members of the Senate) who send mail to constituents with information. Our Senators send emails once in a while, if you sign up for them.

But good luck ever figuring out the real information from the spam and ~~malicious dis~~incorrect information and opinions.

That's true recently. But only recently have political alignments been so rigid and predictable in the United States. California went for the Republicans from 1968–92, and before that was somewhat swingy.

More generally, any single-winner election system is prone to a "Rawlsian compromise": something that works out well for 51% of people and poorly for the other 49%. This still isn't so bad if things are changing now and then. But we've been stuck with Clintonist "preachy" Democrats and Gingrichite "edgy" Republicans for nearly my whole life.

The solid red and blue states influence what kinds of candidates can make it to the general election at all. California and the other large, blue states also have significant influence in Washington between elections.

The federal government does far too many things, and that's really the problem. The constitution spelled out what the government was allowed to do and that limitation died in the progressive era.

Can you provide an example of something the federal government is doing that should be up to the states?

Yes well the progressive era was truly terrible. Food safety, environmental protection, monopolies etc. are really not something the Federal government should have any right to intervene in. After all the states had no issues handling all the before.. obviously…

A lot of good things happened (could add womens suffrage too) but there was also supreme court endorsement of eugenics (Buck v Bell 1927).

Then Woodrow Wilson’s Espionage Act during WW1. In Schenck v US and Debs v US, the supreme court upheld convictions (first for the crime of distributing literature arguing the draft was illegal, and second just for hinting that the US shouldnt have joined the war).

Well Wilson wasn’t a progressive.

But yeah allowing the Federal government to have more power is definitely a double-edged sword

You might be interested to learn about Washington, DC, a region which is literally disenfranchised despite having more residents than two states. Residents can vote for president but have no voting representation in the House or Senate.

You have elections.. but which party can you vote for if you want a stop to Middle East wars?

The US did end one foreign war quite recently. It was pretty messy, since it was definitely not a victory, and cratered the president's approval ratings. It turns out there is almost no political constituency for visibly losing a war.

Additionally, the US' kinetic operations in the Middle East have shrunk substantially as the drone strikes have been substantially curtailed, again under the same president that recently extracted the US from a long-running foreign war. He got no credit for that either; it turns out nobody in the US really cares very much, and even the people who generally disapprove of US foreign military involvements don't seem excited to give credit to the current guy.

The US has always ping-ponged between loving foreign wars and hating foreign wars. Not having a reliably anti-war party is not great, but that's at least as much the fault of the voters.

They ended the occupation of Afghanistan abruptly in order to redirect resources to a certain other conflict, more critical to US elite interests.

Which conflict would that be? I'm not aware of any wars that started in 2020/early 2021, when the US was preparing to withdraw from Afghanistan.

It's possible US intelligence agencies were aware Russia was preparing to escalate their invasion of Ukraine in early 2021, so I assume that's what's being alluded to. Preparations and plans were most likely starting in Russia by then, that's true (even limited mobilization is a pretty big undertaking—it's hard to hide supply-dump preparation and heavy equipment movement and shifting soldier concentrations). Though IIRC the US government didn't start saying that publicly until late 2021/early 2022.

If they knew about it in late 2020, that info must not have made it to the upper levels of the military, given how much crying and foot-dragging they engaged in when Trump tried for his (IIRC) 90-day withdrawal. One wonders how ready our military actually is if they act like moving low-thousands troops of and some equipment out of—not into!—a theater in which we control the airspace, within in a couple months, is a crazy thing to ask of them. It may have been a bad idea to withdraw that fast, sure, but some of their spokespeople they had on the circuits whining about how hard it was weren't saying it was a bad idea, but that it literally couldn't be done. Sure, Jan. Certainly, if The Shadowy Figures That Control Everything (riffing on the vibe of GP's post) had already decided we needed to shift to Ukraine, that was still a closely-kept secret in late 2020.

And I'm not as sure as GP that Biden's following through on the withdrawal was because of Ukraine, but I'd also not rule it out as extremely-unlikely—the timeline is such that it's possible.

Oh, this one's easy. Trump's withdrawal is as much of a clusterf*ck as Biden's, it sours American appetites for more military adventure, scuttling a Ukraine campaign.

Another fun exercise is to ponder how much - if any - influence Trump's supposed ties with Russia have on these hypotheticals. There was some other issue, recently, whose details have since slipped my mind, that made me think, "Oh, this 100% makes sense if you assume that Trump is being told to do Thing by a party who is trying to weaken America's position ahead of a resumption/escalation of 2014's hostilities." I believe it was something that Democrats uncharacteristically reversed course on, which, again, would lend credence to the notion that this was something of a clandestine pitched battle from the start. I wouldn't rule it out. Not from a Secret Society Ruling The World standpoint, more like Leaders In A Desperate Position Pulling Out All The Stops.

God I love policy-wonk shit. I got to get back into reading this stuff semi-regularly, it's a blast. Thanks for the link.

Yeah it’s fun to watch it fail as the empire collapses.

Remember Code Pink that was so active protesting the Iraq and Afghanistan wars? They are protesting the war in Ukraine, but notice how the media is not giving them hardly any attention now. These grassroots activist movements are just as much provoked into activity as they are genuine organicly driven.

LOL, literally an example I thought of after my post. How much of the population dislikes foreign adventurism? That's a semi-common position across the aisle, among actual voters! Hell, Trump ran on it and it worked for him (once, anyway)! But typically this position has almost zero representation in our legislature, because our electoral system is really, really bad.

The Iraq war was overwhelmingly popular with the US electorate when it started. It had far more approval than almost any other policy at the time.

The US was overwhelmingly propagandized toward, but all you had to do to find resistance was to open the funny pages:

https://www.gocomics.com/boondocks/2003/01/15 https://www.gocomics.com/boondocks/2003/01/09

(I HIGHLY suggest reading at least a few weeks forward, starting from the second link.)

I'm sure Doonesbury got in on it, too. Eventually. After the Napster arc.

As backwards as it sounds my time in near-autocratic 3rd world I've felt the most free. Worst case scenario the police can be bribed for a crisp $20. As long as someone isn't doing some horrible shit (like real violence) a lot can be overlooked.

>(I actually also think folks here overestimate how hard it is to get guns

Yeah I often imagine myself in the scenario of what to do if I ended up in Schengen or something and without arms. I calculated it would take me about 2 weeks to print an FGC-9 and source the various ammo components (by doing things like using primers from nail gun ammo etc this can be done all from unregulated sources).

You should try to live there as an average local person with average income and without "connections". "Crisp $20" in some countries might be quite a lot.

Also: I've seen this many times, foreigners from rich countries get completely different treatment.

Absolutely.

I'm aware of my privilege, but since I have it does it not make sense to use it for my maximum liberty? At the end of the day I have to act with the resources I have, not the resources someone else has.

What are we talking about here? You can power trip (literally and figuratively) as much as you are able. Some countries are good for that. That doesn't make those countries "freer" as parent comment suggests.

I'm not interested in power-tripping, I'm interested in the people power tripping having the least interest in putting me in jail. Maybe that's because the judicial system allows freedom, maybe it's because the police are lazy or understaffed, maybe it's because they want my money. I'm a pragmatic man.

As for freedom, it's going to be relative. Each person has unique resources and abilities that dictate where they will find the most freedom. You don't have to victimize others to improve your own freedom.

I got downvoted and maybe I misunderstood your response. I read: "I'm aware of my privilege, but since I have it does it not make sense to use it for my maximum liberty? At the end of the day I have to act with the resources I have, not the resources someone else has." as I will go to those countries and since 20$ is a crisp change for me I will do whatever I want and pay my way out of it.

> As backwards as it sounds my time in near-autocratic 3rd world I've felt the most free. Worst case scenario the police can be bribed for a crisp $20. As long as someone isn't doing some horrible shit (like real violence) a lot can be overlooked.

In the US, flashing a PBA card[0] or the fire department/ambulance alternative will get you out of most of what police consider ‘low-level’ infractions(ie. Covering a license plate, speeding, etc…).

Or in less corrupt cases(like the ones I unfortunately have used mine for), it gets the cops to leave you alone or listen to you when you get profiled for no good reason.

I guess it’s technically not a bribe since no money is exchanging hands, but last I checked, each PBA card raises ~$150/year for the police union.

[0] https://www.the-sun.com/news/4212777/what-is-a-pba-card/

so basically you get treated like rich person in the US.

And what would you do with that gun? Commit crimes? Even simple possession of it would be a crime. You would not be able to use it to defend yourself without getting prosecuted yourself.

It's not that it's impossible for me to manufacture an illegal gun for myself. What's the point of doing that? I'm not a criminal. I don't plan to overthrow the government or anything like that. Why risk getting a criminal record for no gain?

I'm not pulling out a gun anywhere populated unless the choice is that or I end up dead. In which case prison is an upgrade. I would consider european jail a great chance to read up on the classics while I enjoy not being dead.

Even where I live now (constitutional carry state, extremely lax on guns) pulling from the holster without a threat is gonna get you tossed in prison. Nobody knows you have it until you do that.

Why not go the legal route and get a gun permit? Seems to be a much better option if you believe that you need a gun for self defence.

Totally, if that's an option that would be a rational choice. For instance, if I ended up in Poland I would buy a black powder revolver and carry that (legal) and if I ended up in Czech Republic or Austria I think the permit is very easy. The pure hypothetical is ending up someplace where it isn't practical to get the permit.

In practice I just live in a place that does not even require a permit.

Did your old account get banned, man? I forget the name but you posted a lot of great comments.

"Better to burn out than fade away" --Neil Young

> what to do if I ended up in Schengen or something and without arms

I don't mean to be rude, but this phrasing makes you sound like an addict trying to work out if you can smoke banana peel to get high. You can just .. not have a gun for a bit on holiday? Rather than engaging in illegal activities? Heck, several countries have tourist hunting industries! (The tourists do the hunting, not hunting the tourists)

You don’t sound backward. People on the west have been sold on the idea of freedom because they can criticize their politicians. Many third-world “authoritarian” countries have more freedom than the US, however, the general population doesn’t like a ridiculed leader.

Turkey is a much freer country than the US. If the people of Turkey were to enjoy seeing their leader (Erdogan now) being ridiculed, this guy will be showing in circus shows.

The difference, of course, is that in the US you could start a campaign to change all those things.

This man literally is doing the exact same thing the comment above is describing. Incredible.

Could you though? I mean in theory it’s possible but the barriers are basically insurmountable for creating a viable 3rd party. It’s like trying to remove Putin by voting him out.

>Could you though?

Highly unlikely in one election cycle. The parties control both houses, the presidency, the states and the locals almost completely.

Step one is stop voting for incumbents and seriously consider voting out incumbents unless they are really, really good; exceptional. The longer someone stays in power, the more power they get, the more deals they make, the less accountable they feel. It's good to get fresh blood and a fresh outlook every term too. Really the bottom line is we expect change, but we keep voting the same people in and those people serve for decades. It's almost an insanity.

Once the existing political parties are weakened by turnover, you can start placing third party people in there. Now is a good time too, the mainstream media's credibility is on it's heels and has less influence over elections than traditionally.

> Now is a good time too, the mainstream media's credibility is on it's heels and has less influence over elections than traditionally.

Most of the ground the mainstream media has lost is to absolutely whacko q-anon and alt-right podcasters and video bloggers and alt-news, which is not a great environment for third-party people, unless the third-party that you're trying to start is a christo-fascist movement.

I would hope there's a large subsection of the population that has lost trust in the traditional news sources and the credibility of their opinions on candidates, but also doesn't buy into the wacky fringe stuff.

The UK has the same bullshit FPTP system as the USA, but they have more successful 3rd parties. The SNP dominates in Scotland. LibDems were even able to participate in a govt coalition. And both Conservatives and Labour are completely irrelevant in Northern Ireland - which has completely different parties than the rest of the UK.

So what prevents parties similar to the SNP and LibDems to get elected in the USA?

People do, and they fail. Often, bad policies and laws stick around even when most people don't like them. I will live my whole life seeing few or none of those issues solved, no matter what I personally do—that's just a fact. I could, today, devote the rest of my life to this, and if I moved the needle at all on even one of them it'd be a miracle.

We have a uniquely-bad electoral system, which is why so much of this day-to-day stuff ends up so insanely dysfunctional compared to most other developed democracies, and we've had mass-media special interest propaganda running rampant in a way it doesn't elsewhere, since the 80s (loss of the fairness doctrine—which, admitted ickiness aside, did seem to keep things on the rails a bit—and deregulation of media outlet ownership leading to unprecedented, extreme levels of consolidation; hard to tell which of those is most responsible, since they both happened around the same time) and that propaganda's able to be unusually effective in part because of our bad electoral system.

The result is that as long as factions in favor of these shitty things can stay under one of the two big tents, they get the tacit support of all the rest of the factions under those tents, even if most of them don't like that first group of factions. "Of course civil forfeiture's bullshit, obviously it is... but I can't vote for a pro-choicer/communist/whatever!" et c. (and, yes, the effect is on "both sides"—it's why we hear a ton of noise from "no abortion ever!" and "zero restrictions until the baby takes its first breath!" while the majority of voters, who just want more-or-less what Roe guaranteed, get little attention)

So, our freedom to vote is even, arguably, quite a bit less-free than for a fair proportion of our peers, since our ability, in practice, to express our actual desires through the electoral process is much more curtailed than in most of them—though, obviously, that part doesn't apply to authoritarians states.

How did that work out for communists in the US in the 20th century?

They scared business owners enough that some of them started planning a fascist coup :-/

OTOH they also scared them enough that we got The New Deal. So. Mixed bag?

If you go beyond the level of shouting on a street corner and start building real power, you will be dragged through the mud by the combined force of corporate media smears and social media discourse swarm influence operations. If you go further you will be murdered by the state. Ask Fred Hampton and others.

> We have elections... but

two parties. (Still better then one.)

America has a lot of quirks and problems, but in not many other countries can you flagrantly criticize/insult the government/leaders/policy without repercussion. USA has arguably the greatest freedom of speech protections on earth which is one liberty that is not worth trading for the freedom to drink wine more easily when picnicking in certain places - hence why people are not flocking to authoritarian states that "feel freer" than USA.

> America has a lot of quirks and problems, but in not many other countries can you flagrantly criticize/insult the government/leaders without repercussion.

This is possible in most of the developed world. You don't have to have the peculiarities of the American concept of "freedom" to have this one. Someone in Norway gets to enjoy both healthcare and being able to make mean comments about the Prime Minister.

Isn't a woman in Norway facing jail time for saying that trans men can't be lesbians? Doesn't sound very much like free speech.

No, not that statement on its own, and no one's seen jail time in Norway for hate speech alone. The post specifically targeted an individual for harassment.

And, again, these tend to be matter of perspective; balancing the right of free speech against the right to be free of discrimination. Each country is picking in these scenarios where rights conflict; I tend to prefer Norway's selections.

Not what she said and not the core reason she's being investigated.

But I heard Alex Jones say something different ...

Not so. UK, Germany, and indeed most of the EU have significant speech restrictions accompanied by censorship or jail time if you violate them.

I'm not super familiar with Norway's speech protections, but it has a smaller population than the US state of Maryland, so it seems to be the exception more than the rule or at least not an easily scalable solution to America's problems. Saying "[Insert Scandinavian country proves it's possible]" is like saying "Look at how well Hacker News is moderated! Facebook and Twitter should take notes on how to do it right and fix the moderation issues with their services."

They have very specific speech restrictions around things like Holocaust denial, not "flagrantly criticizing the government". I'll happily give up freedom to publicly be a neo-Nazi if it gives me freedom from "out of network" healthcare bills.

Neither society is 100% free; that's the point, really. The trade-offs like this that the American system has selected seem insane.

America is like a union of 50 countries, yet the things you chose to criticize were for the most part not federal level restrictions, but rather cherry-picked quirks of individual states.

> They have very specific speech restrictions around things like Holocaust denial, not "flagrantly criticizing the government".

Germany, maybe. In UK a scottish man was arrested for tweeting "The only good brit soldier is a deed one, burn auld fella, buuuurrn." about the late Tom Moore. Apparently being arrested for offensive tweets is not uncommon in the UK. Lots of arrested around the time of the queen's death for making fun of the monarchy/dead queen.

That happens in the US, too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novak_v._City_of_Parma

> Novak v. City of Parma, No. 21-3290, is a 2022 decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit granting qualified immunity to the city of Parma, Ohio, and its officials for prosecuting Anthony Novak over a Facebook page parodying the Parma Police Department's page. As of December 2022, the case is pending certiorari before the Supreme Court of the United States.

> cherry-picked quirks of individual states

Civil forfeiture? Healthcare? Incarceration? Paid leave? These are each widespread national problems in the US.

Googling ‘arrested for tweeting uk’ brings up some daily mail stories which are quoted in brietbart and other similar websites. Can you find a link to a reliable source? E.g Telegraph, Guardian, Times, Financial Times.

Also in the UK being arrested doesn’t equate to being punished, legally the police have to arrest you before you can be questioned.

Germany criminalizes opposition to war: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/02/01/qqln-f01.html

Any reporting on this from a reputable source?

Googling Heinrich Bücker doesn't turn up much other than "World Socialist Web Site", and it appears Germany permits opposition to war just fine; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xa0PevmD6EI

Well technically (assuming your article is accurate) they are criminalizing supporting the war. Which is what that person is doing...

Ten thousand or so Canadians who lost access to their bank accounts for criticizing their government would like to have a chat with you.

> for criticizing their government

No. Here's a protip which applies to every country across the globe: if you're donating money to people doing things your government decided is illegal with the express purpose of enabling continued illegal acts, you're gonna have a bad time.

It was dozens of Canadians, it was a transaction freeze by certain banks for a few days, and it was because there was a suspicion of contributing to terrorist organizations. It was not an action by the government and the freeze was lifted quite quickly once the facts were established.

99.8% of Canadians would like to have a word with you to explain why funding organizations with the public and express raison d'etre of overthrowing the government might get you a finger waggling.

You are so right. In America you can lead protests and bring to light uncomfortable truths about the government and they can't do anything about it. They do tend to find you dead in your car a few months later... but I'm sure that's just a coincidence though. The important thing is that there are laws that are there to protect you, unlike other countries which aren't as free as the USA.

Go look at the extent of anti-BDS legislation and how appeals courts have upheld it in spite of 40 year old precedents to the contrary then talk about “free speech”.

> hence why people are not flocking to authoritarian states that "feel freer" than USA

People are flocking to all kinds of places you are apparently not aware of:

> Saudi Arabia is among the top five immigrant destination countries around the world, currently hosting 5.3 million international migrants in its borders

That's just one example even though this one is probably not the "feel freer" type. There are others.

Folks in the US are aware of this, it’s all they ever talk about.

I think a lot of folks in US over-romanticize those "feel freer" authoritarian countries. In some cases like this it might be better but I don't think systematic cases of: "inconvenient" people disappearing, being at complete mercy of local oligarch/overlord, inability to leave your country are such rampant in US as in those countries. Usually people who write something like this never lived in an authoritarian country as a local but were there on a 2 weeks trip or heard it from someone who was on a trip or someone who moved to US (why moving if it is such a great place to live?).

I'm not claiming authoritarian states are sunshine and roses, just that freedom is a lot more complex and fuzzier than is sometimes appreciated, and that in some regards we're noticeably less free than some (some!) of those states, despite their being authoritarian. I'm not saying we should switch to being authoritarian in the name of freedom—most other liberal democracies also manage to be freer on several of these issues than we are, though, sure, some are less-free by other measures (but, on balance, I think we're pretty far on the less-free-as-felt-day-to-day-by-most-people side, as liberal democracies go).

I'll bite. I lived in an authoritarian country.

People occasionally did disappear (usually temporarily).

A lot of things were worse, but a lot were better. You're definitely not going to be arrested or harassed for letting your kids walk alone. Not sure how good their record is for actual child abuse (bad cases would make the news, so there was some enforcement).

While they could prevent you from leaving the country, they didn't have no fly lists, and I believe many more were impacted from the latter than prevented from leaving that country.

No one is disputing things can get really bad in those countries. It's more about probabilities. One thing that becomes very clear in the US if you poke around: It's ridiculously easy to end up with felony charges, and I know plenty who faced them (some convicted). The number of people I knew in the authoritarian country who had a criminal record? Miniscule. Raising my kid here, the chances of him getting a criminal record is significantly higher here than there and is a source of worry.

And typically no one has to worry whether they'll find an apartment due to some crime they committed a decade ago.

And sorry, but no. No local oligarch/overlord. That's orthogonal to authoritarian governments (and is often more about ineffective governments).

> someone who moved to US (why moving if it is such a great place to live?).

Classic false dichotomy.

I'll bite too. I grew up and lived for ~25 years in an authoritarian country that was in comparison to others at that time relatively nice. It is now on its way to transform into true democracy.

> It's more about probabilities.

I totally agree.

>People occasionally did disappear (usually temporarily).

As long as its not me - it is ok. Do I read it correctly?

Let me ask a set of questions and I am curious what you'd pick.

>While they could prevent you from leaving the country, they didn't have no fly lists

What would you take: a higher chance to get on no fly list but still be able to drive to Mexico or Canada and fly from there or leave by boat or lower chance to not being able to leave the country at all for quite some time (potentially ever)?

>It's ridiculously easy to end up with felony charges...

What would you take: a higher chance to get felony charges or a lower chance to be in a wrong place and wrong time (killed for fun) with someone who paid their way out criminal justice (that's my explanation of a part of low criminal record)?

>And typically no one has to worry whether they'll find an apartment due to some crime they committed a decade ago.

The country were I lived a bit earlier would tell you were you can live. What would you take: a higher chance to have problems with apartments search or not being legally allowed to move cities without power tripping local bureaucrat giving you permission?

>And sorry, but no. No local oligarch/overlord. That's orthogonal to authoritarian governments (and is often more about ineffective governments).

That is how it works, you need to have loyal people in local places. You can call it however you want: mayor of the city, ruling party local political leader, etc.

Edit: formatting.

> As long as its not me - it is ok. Do I read it correctly?

To me this is a non-distinction. That reasoning applies in the US as well. As long as the cops are stopping the guys who don't look like me and beating/killing them and not me, it is OK, right?

> What would you take: a higher chance to get on no fly list but still be able to drive to Mexico or Canada and fly from there or leave by boat or lower chance to not being able to leave the country at all for quite some time (potentially ever)?

Given that I personally have known a number of people on the no fly list (which increases my chance of getting on it), but no one in that country who was prevented from leaving, I'll take the latter.

As I said, it's about probabilities.

> What would you take: a higher chance to get felony charges or a lower chance to be in a wrong place and wrong time (killed for fun) with someone who paid their way out criminal justice (that's my explanation of a part of low criminal record)?

In the country I lived in, paying your way out of criminal justice was not something that happened much - I'm not sure if it happens more in the US or not.

Remember: My country is not your country. And do not make the mistake of conflating authoritarian with corruption - these are separate vectors.

And speaking of killing, the homicide rate is much higher in the US (more than triple that country). And if I'm getting killed, I really don't care about the murderer's back story. There's not much to choose here - the US is clearly worse.

Don't conflate authoritarian with high crime.

> The country were I lived a bit earlier would tell you were you can live. What would you take: a higher chance to have problems with apartments search or not being legally allowed to move cities without power tripping local bureaucrat giving you permission?

My country could have had the same problem under certain circumstances. Yet I know more people in the US who have trouble finding apartments for prior crimes (or credit issues, or whatever) than I know people who had trouble moving cities. I can easily see identity theft really screwing up my credit history leading to this problem. Not a concern there. So yes, I would prefer the other country.

> That is how it works, you need to have loyal people in local places. You can call it however you want: mayor of the city, ruling party local political leader, etc.

Maybe in your country, but that's not how it worked in the one I lived in. As long as you yourself were not a threat to the top level staff (president, etc), the judiciary was relatively effective and didn't care about local oligarchs. And we just didn't have any overlords.

We have elections... but offering water to a voter standing in line to vote on a hot sunny day may get you arrested in some states (like Georgia).

That law is prefaced with "No person shall solicit votes in any manner"... clearly making it more about stopping political influence at the polls by giving things away. Also it only applies within 150 feet of the building anyway.

The 2nd will also happily get you killed during a no-knock raid (that, for bonus points, was for the wrong house), or a traffic stop, or a cop hallucinating that he saw you reaching for a nonexistent gun on your waistband.

I've, further, got some strong suspicions that a look at history and whatever limited and noisy data are available, is more likely to support the notion that our kind of gun laws are at least as much a risk to the maintenance of liberal democracy, as a protector of it. Yet, that's a common justification for why we mustn't question the 2nd. AFAIK they've contributed at least as often to imposing oppression as to resisting oppression, on the local scale in the US. Then there's revolutions in other countries, where they seem at least as often to aid overthrowing a democracy as to play a pivotal role in defending it (though, from what I can tell, they hardly matter in either case—foreign aid and gaining the support of elements of the military are usually far, far more effective in actually forcing an outcome).

That's in addition to the hard-to-quantify harm to freedom from having to worry about terrified, trigger-happy cops.

Got half a mind to research it and write a book about whatever I find....

"But at least we have the 2nd, to protect our freedom. Seems to be working great. (I actually also think folks here overestimate how hard it is to get guns in some countries with effective gun control—it doesn't have to mean "no guns", and often doesn't)"

We have elections... but everyone is so terrified of the LOLWTF numbers of guns in society that we never leave the house

The other part of authoritarianism that’s less popular to talk about is that, in many ways, it works very well. In many parts of the “free” US, you can’t leave a visible bag in your vehicle for more than a few minutes because you’ll return to a smashed window. In places where that kind of petty crime is dealt with harshly, it’s almost non-existent. As trite as it sounds, Mussolini made the trains run on time.

So authoritarianism often gets a lot of the small stuff right at the cost of the big stuff while freedom often means sacrificing a lot of those small things to get the big stuff right. Having a society where you’ve got the best of both worlds is a really hard balance to strike.

And while it’s really easy to say that the big stuff is more important, the subjective feeling of freedom can be more affected by the small stuff because it’s much more a part of daily life. I don’t need to criticize my government on a daily basis, I only need to do that at critical moments. But I have to park my car multiple times a day, and needing to keep it safe becomes a front-of-mind concern that makes me feel less free.

> The other part of authoritarianism that’s less popular to talk about is that, in many ways, it works very well. In many parts of the “free” US, you can’t leave a visible bag in your vehicle for more than a few minutes because you’ll return to a smashed window. In places where that kind of petty crime is dealt with harshly, it’s almost non-existent. As trite as it sounds, Mussolini made the trains run on time.

Actually that semi quote is typically used in relation to the Spanish civil war and it's an old lady saying "the anarchists were certainly a weird bunch, but they did make the trains run on time).

Also the correlation between harsh punishment and lower crime rates is dubious at best. The US has harsher penalties than most other Western democracies, but higher crime rates. This applies in particular to murder, where the rates are higher despite the death penalty. To add some anecdotal evidence, the only place I was ever pickpocketed was in Shanghai (where punishment is extremely harsh) and I have visited places like Nigeria which has a much less functioning law enforcement system.

You can also get the same outcome (i.e. not smashed windows) without an authorization government. I'm not even sure these are meaningfully related, there are many countries which are both less authoritarian (in certain ways at least) than the US and also have less crime.

>We have elections... but, this article.

>We have elections... but civil forfeiture.

We have elections... but once in a while a shadowy organization within the government assassinates the President if he becomes too much of a threat to the establishment, allegedly.

You don't like some park regulation vote for someone who will change it. If no one running is willing to do that then you can run for office. If no one votes for you that sucks.

Democracy isn't about getting what you want. This reminds me of people who say "not my president " or "I didn't vote for that"

> We have elections... but

Maybe the real enemy of the American people is ... the American electorate?