You won't get to the kind of change you thought you would see until food runs low and the economy stalls. The American Revolution was rare in that it didn't need to happen. The Founders were just being giant assholes (j/k). While the French Revolution just a few decades later was more status quo. A lot of starvation and poverty just pushed the population over the edge.

The American and French revolutions originated in the middle classes. The poor are often indifferent to politics because they're focused on survival. The middle classes, who own things they don't want to lose and have free time to aspire for more, are the ones who start revolutions. The poor only came in after being whipped up by the interested parties, and don't necessarily join the revolutionary side.

Three critical differences the American Revolution had: (1) the middle class had some extremely well educated people, (2) the communication technology among the colonies was pretty fast whereas the comms between the colonies and the British rule across the Atlantic was slow, and (3) the empire tried to clamp down on the colonies ability to export to any market other than the mother country, killing lots of profit which previously made those markets strong.

(4) the British navy was busy raiding the carribean for prize money and abandoned the army in america.

I recommend the book "The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution and the Fate of the Empire"

> The American and French revolutions originated in the middle classes.

I don't know about the american revolution, but that's wrong for the french revolution. I'll link to french wikipédia pages since they are far better on the subject. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89tats_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9raux_... Here we can see the first National Assembly was half nobility and clergy. The third estate was the other half.

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiers_%C3%A9tat > Par ailleurs, les députés du tiers état aux états généraux représentaient essentiellement la bourgeoisie[2].

Which indicate that the majority of the third estate representative were bourgeois.

> Which indicate that the majority of the third estate representative were bourgeois.

The bourgeois are the middle class.

Were the middle class, but what people think of middle class today, doesn't apply to what it was back then.

> The bourgeoisie are a class of business owners, merchants and wealthy people, in general, which emerged in the Late Middle Ages, originally as a " middle class" between the peasantry and aristocracy. They are traditionally contrasted with the proletariat by their wealth, political power, and education, as well as their access to and control of cultural, social, and financial capital.

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

Today the meaning of bourgeoisie, still applies to "business owners, merchants and wealthy people", but is now seen as upper class.

Yes, the proletariat has been brainwashed and convinced that they're the middle class, while the middle classes have become the new aristocracy. The disappearance of hereditary nobility and rise of liberalism (which brings along separation of church and state, which removes the power of the clergy) made the old distinctions less useful, so we have the modern lower (proletariat), middle (skilled workers), and upper (bourgeois) classes.

> You won't get to the kind of change you thought you would see until food runs low and the economy stalls.

These are no longer impossibles.

Boy is he trying on the latter. Quite impressive just how resilient it seems to be.

It's like when management does something stupid and then engineering works overtime to keeps the system working. Of course management learns nothing and all outside observers don't even notice something went wrong.

There is a limit to how much engineers working overtime can do to offset management stupidity and when you reach the limit the bottom falls out. Of course then everybody blames the engineers...

It's being heavily supported a bubble. We'll see how resilient it is when that pops. As it is, the average person's finances and future prospects are getting worse all the time regardless of whatever the stock market is doing.

Yes, tbh I would not have thought that you could take a sledgehammer to the economy as if you're say Elon Musk buying a communications platform and yet, here we are, 1 year in and we're still hanging on.

But I wouldn't bet on another three of these.

It will pop just in time to put the blame on the liberal that wants to slightly tax the rich and improve the quality of life of working people.

> Quite impressive just how resilient it seems to be.

I watched a few analyses on this and it really comes down to faith.

I really wish it weren't kidding. The resistance against this economic downturn comes a large part due to conservative skewing financiers who believe "Trump won't let the economy crash". And that faith somehow keeps people pushing their chips in in times where they'd have probably long pulled out of Biden.

2025-6 will truly be a "vibe-cession" in so many ways.

> until food runs low and the economy stalls.

Well one of those is already on the fast tracking to happening (economy stalling).

Unfortunately, I don't have much faith that people will turn against the administration during any kind of major depression/food scarcity. I foresee people turning against each other for survival instead.

I would have believed that before 2020, but after COVID, I fully believe that if the food ran out, half the country would say it's a fake hoax. People would be on their death beds actually starving, and deny it was happening with their last breath.

People largely weren't on their deathbeds with covid claiming it was a hoax either so I'm not sure how that's a relevant analogy. The response to Covid was far more disruptive to my life than the disease itself, which would obviously not be the case with starvation.

> weren't on their deathbeds with covid claiming it was a hoax

Have you treated many patients with COVID? I’ve heard the opposite of your claim from those who have.

People with first hand experience offering counterpoints like Dr Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi did but unfortunately their videos explaining their side of the story were conveniently removed from places your YouTube -- while conveniently leaving the videos remaining to hear the kind of stories you heard.

Step back a moment and ask yourself,

“How exactly would Dr Dan Erickson know if someone else’s patient said this?”

There was massive regional differences in how different parts of the country and even different parts of the same state responded to COVID.

The issue was their extrapolation of their local keyhole perception to the entire country.

Flawed in many ways: https://www.acep.org/corona/COVID-19-alert/covid-19-articles...

Was this a yes or a no?

As the husband at the time of a military critical care nurse who worked local ED in a major US city and deployed to New York -- yes, there were absolutely people who denied they had COVID even as they were being intubated.

Most people tended to accept reality when their body started failing, but there were a non-zero number that refused to believe they were infected with coronavirus to the end.

Politicians and social media click farmers spouting lies do influence people, and not everyone starts with a basic understanding of biology and/or science.

> People largely weren't on their deathbeds with covid claiming it was a hoax

There were actually lots of people doing exactly this. Perhaps "largely" is the key word here but there were plenty of people dying of covid and refusing ventilators because they believed it was a conspiracy theory.

Apparently the virus was able to ruin cognitive function that people struggling to breathe thought they're fine. (Ok, it seems too convenient that the virus can do this...).

Nobody (OK, maybe a few very special people) is saying that COVID was a hoax. What is true - and one wasn't allowed to say - was that the measures intended to prevent COVID weren't very effective and did more harm than good.

Ah yes you say, another psycho. He probably eats ivermectin for breakfast and chases it with bleach. But I ask you, after a chlorinated burp: how come Africa didn't die out? Why was the death rate pretty much the same in Florida and California? Did the EU really need to buy enough vaccine for ten-plus years?

> What is true - and one wasn't allowed to say - was that the measures intended to prevent COVID weren't very effective and did more harm than good.

But yet here you are saying it. Whether it's true or not probably requires a great deal of analysis, but your self-applied "psycho" label may be accurate enough if you've managed to apply lots of cognitive biases to end up with your "truth".

I'd agree the governments overreacted in many sense, but a non BoJo/Trump-government has a duty to be overcautious rather than a flippant attitude of "So what, x% dead is acceptable". Some other rules are based on dumb science: two meters distance from each other is probably a joke, a compromise between "keep everyone at home!" (what China did when there was a breakout) and a "Keep going to the pubs!", my own theory is that if you could smell someone's cigarette smoke from 2 meters away, virus particles being exhaled from their lungs would reach you too. Later we figured out getting the virus from surfaces is very unlikely, but people were still wiping surfaces down anyway...

>Later we figured out getting the virus from surfaces is very unlikely, but people were still wiping surfaces down anyway...

I'd say that's still a good thing. Surfaces can get so dirty, so I'm glad COVID made people more aware of properly clearning their surfaces.

>how come Africa didn't die out?

Because it's an airborne virus and Africa isn't 1) as connected with the world to begin with and 2) as closely concentrated as urban areas. That's before really looking into Africa's response compared to other countries.

>Why was the death rate pretty much the same in Florida and California?

Because we didn't isolate fast enough between Trump trying to claim it being a hoax early on and desperate political attempts to keep "essential workers" running business. The locality doesn't matter for an airorne virus; just that people continue to go outside and not develop herd immunity.

>Did the EU really need to buy enough vaccine for ten-plus years?

I don't have a crystal ball into 2030. But yes, people still can catch COVID in 2026. Buying only enough for 2020-2022 would be reckless.

Any other questions?

many people i know personally who, to this day deny covid was real, they personally knew people who died or were hospitalized and ventilated. yet they still deny it was real.

one of my family members who was in a coma for over a month and in the hospital for months still denies it was covid despite multiple doctors telling him otherwise. some people live in a very real state of denial entirely separated from reality.

sadly i’m not sure the person you replied to is too far off.

Same here. The extreme politicization of the disease, plus the social isolation, plus over reliance on inflammatory social media as one's only channel to the outside world, fully broke some people's grip on reality. Permanently for some.

I disagree. You can escape a disease, even during a global pandemic. And not every person that got COVID was on a ventilator or even felt that bad. Seeing the death toll statistics and even the direct effects through a screen is not visceral for many folks.

Starvation isn't avoidable and you can't ride it out. There isn't any chance that starving to death could be less severe than getting a bad flu. Nobody can avoid not eating for an extended period of time. If there is not enough food, it will affect everyone directly.

>I disagree. You can escape a disease, even during a global pandemic. And not every person that got COVID was on a ventilator or even felt that bad.

Propaganda works.

The knowledge worker class often believes their training will afford them some level of protection against it. Even then, with those warding effects, they're still susceptible. Consider further that most people in society are significantly less educated or trained in epistemological functions than they are - a large portion of society is defenseless against a liar with a megaphone.

Propaganda won't contest that starvation is occurring. It will claim that the reason for the starvation is a specific foe, internal or external e.g. It's China's fault we're starving or the immigrants have caused this food security crisis and once they're gone we'll have enough food for our own people, etc. They'll workshop and see which ones poll well, then run with the talking point that seems to perform best.

Since the government harnessing that discontent has no real desire to fix that problem, all they need to do is maintain the perception that they're the solution, while not addressing the problem itself.

Slightly off topic, but this strategy of blaming a crisis on some other cause is pervasive. It's especially useful when you are the reason for the crisis.

For example, consider climate change. Climate change causes draughts, which causes food shortages in countries heavily dependent on their agricultural sector. This, in turn, causes famine.

A certain western power will blame that country's government for mismanaging their agricultural sector instead of pointing out the unusual and dramatic weather changes contributed to the famine. This is, of course, because the western power does not publicly admit climate change is real in order to avoid taking any responsibility for their contribution to this climate change.

>Propaganda won't contest that starvation is occurring. It will claim that the reason for the starvation is a specific foe, internal or external e.g. It's China's fault we're starving or the immigrants have caused this food security crisis and once they're gone we'll have enough food for our own people, etc. They'll workshop and see which ones poll well, then run with the talking point that seems to perform best.

I don't know if China will work. It's not halfway around the world, but that's the mentality many people have of it. They won't buy that a country on the other side if taking food from their local grocery store.

But it doesn't matter. they blame it on: everyone gets hurt. People fighting on the streets, charital servings overran, private businesses raided, governmental buildings having doors banged on (assuming the soldiers don't simply desert their duties). Then that escalates to riots and perhaps small skirmishes for remaining resources.

When you're truly hungry, nothing is beyond reproach. And I don't think America has a true famine to point to as an example. That's pretty much why it's the one thing all politicians will avoid at all cost. a famine will make a depression seem like a cloudy day.

America had a true famine; the dust bowl resulted in mass displacement, and the government took exceptional steps to create remediation programs to address the plight of those affected to maintain relations. The policies included measures that would be considered exceptional by today's standard, including the creation of a national organization to provide stock for relief organizations, buying out cattle herds above market value, other bailout measures for farmers, a massive work effort to create an erosion barrier and more. Most cultural histories indicate that these bailouts prevented widespread unrest in these communities.

You can take a look at the global hunger index; countries with less food security are certainly less stable than those that aren't, but by no means are countries like India and Pakistan undergoing constant revolution. By contrast, countries with comparatively solid food security like Egypt underwent revolution that toppled the government sparked by changes in the (comparatively affordable) price of food. Hunger itself doesn't tell the story. It's how society perceives it.

The zeitgeist matters more than whether or not everyone in society can eat, and you can change the zeitgeist with propaganda.

>When you're truly hungry, nothing is beyond reproach.

When you're truly hungry, you can't plan a revolution. Anti-government efforts are generally spearheaded by groups that are fed, connected, and have the incentive to incite rebellion. It's more Navalny and less Oliver Twist. This means that both pro and anti-government groups will be engaged in a similar recruitment effort. The two groups will have competing accounts of why the hunger is occurring, complete with different evidence regarding the magnitude of the issue, the source of the issue, etc. Hunger doesn't short circuit that process, and propaganda doesn't lose it's force because it's a more persuasive and simpler motivator than, say, discontent over tax burden shifting or some other policy point.

This post is propaganda for the idea that whenever you think that immigrants are causing a problem, you're actually incorrect and are being manipulated by some conspiracy.

No, the post made its point pretty clearly:

> Consider further that most people in society are significantly less educated or trained in epistemological functions than [knowledge workers] are - a large portion of society is defenseless against a liar with a megaphone.

The only thing I'd add is polarization adding impetus to never seeing someone on my side as a liar, whatever they claim.

When democracy becomes a team sport, its collective intelligence lessens: perhaps the biggest hole in the US founder's future vision.

But then again, "voter" had a very different definition in their time. And I don't think you can fault them for not enshrining anti-party ranked choice et al.

Of course MAGA folks would be affected if the whole country starved. The question is how they would react to starving. They might just blame Hillary Clinton.

I had the same reaction. I thought things were getting bad before COVID, but I thought that, generally, when push came to shove, sanity would prevail.

Herman Cain denied COVID's severity right up until it killed him, and them even after he died, his team was still tweeting that "looks like COVID isn't as bad as the mainstream media made it out to be." When I saw that people were literally willing to die to "own the libs", I knew shared reality was toast.

Could also say that over half the population finding such ridiculous mandates justifiable: lockdowns and demands that employers enforce vaccination compliance for all employees, ordoned non democratically by a senile; in a country with constitutional rights likely meant we would not see activists engaging in vandalism anytime soon.

2 of you folks died from COVID for each 1 of us.

> My comment is simply calling out the liberticide episode we attended rather quietly.

Intellectually dishonest polemics. The mandates were not "ridiculous", nor were they "ordoned non democratically by a senile" ... that doesn't even get the timeline right--Trump was President. As for whether he was senile ...

I was probably one of "you". My comment is simply calling out the liberticide episode we attended rather quietly.

After 2025, I don't think y'all get to say it's libertcide to wear a mask, sorry.

Are you calling Trump senile? Because you are correct.

>> I would have believed that before 2020, but after COVID, I fully believe that if the food ran out, half the country would say it's a fake hoax. People would be on their death beds actually starving, and deny it was happening with their last breath.

We're in a K-Shaped Economy right now and half the folks will deny there is any K and insist everything is amazing.

> The American Revolution was rare in that it didn't need to happen.

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

Interestingly y'all Americans pay much more tax now than you did to England back in the day. Turns out King George was right, and it was just about changing who the tax was paid to.

It's also rare to just "discover" an entire continent that is basically free for the taking since Europeans annihilated native populations through disease and technological superiority.

Much of what makes America unique is tied to this essentially once in a generation event that will never happen again on this planet, a contingent confluence of Earth's parallel geographic and biological evolution... it's fairly easy to rebel or become a superpower when other powers have to contend with peer conflicts right on their borders. A break with England was inevitable why take orders from people an ocean away in the age of sail?

That's one of the core plot points in The Mars Trilogy - Why take orders from people on another planet in the age of sub-light-speed space travel?

It's worse than that; within a few generations our linguistic and biological systems will begin to diverge under conditions with little cross-pollination and different selective pressures. We will become aliens in the sci-fi sense very rapidly if we attempt to create a foundation-like diaspora of settlements.

This sounds like lysenkoism.

I think the skepticism warrants more work than that. Darwin's finches are an entry-level concept to learn when learning about biochemistry and genetics. Separate planets would act to separate groups into distinct genetic populations which would then have different selection pressures put upon them. Even without selection pressure, genetic drift in both populations would result in differences compounding over time.

Humans aren't the endpoint of evolution. Something will come after us, and if we're spread out on a ton of planets, there would need to be explicit counteracting forces (genetic modification, tremendous volumes of interstellar human travel, etc.) to make sure whatever comes after us is uniform among our interstellar backyard.

Most genetic drift happens during 'bottleneck' periods where >80% of the population dies due to selective pressure.

No, most genetic drift that ends up being reflected in wildtype populations happens during those periods, because small errors taking up a sizable percentile of the allelic distribution is easier when there are less alleles.

When it comes to neutral mutations, we can literally see constant variance creation in plenty of non-coding areas of DNA over time.

Drift occurs at a fairly consistent rate that reflects the intrinsic error rate of the particular replication machinery that a given organism uses. You can measure the statistical error rate of different ribosomal complexes.

Different planets are going to have different selection pressures. They'll have different conflicts. Different crises. Different cultures. Different reproductive preferences. Imagining that these populations will converge on the same wildtype by sheer chance is lunacy.

That was explored in Stephenson's Seveneves

Back then most taxes went to Britain.

Now they go to Bezos

Where there’s an opportunity to be the 1%, folks will find a way to be the 1%

What's the difference? Render unto Caesar, right?

Not really a secret. The slogan was "No taxation without representation" not "no taxation."

The degree to which legislation in the US is bought by big companies and rarely reflects democratic desires we may be in another "no taxation without representation" era.

Even if the needs of the American people weren't being ignored over the wishes of corporations and the ultra-wealthy in terms of numbers alone we have less representation than ever before because the number of people who are supposed to represent us hasn't kept up with the growing population.

America ended in 1861 when the era of political bargains transitioned to the era of the government and the subjects.

with 20/20 hindsight it would have been a whole lot better to throw a Constitutional Convention rather than have a civil war.

It had already intentionally been forgotten how well that worked the first time.

But without a war you'd be expected to preserve the republic and then how could you concentrate power for yourself.

Throw a constitutional conventions so that the slave owners could get their votes in (not the slaves, of course, though the owners should get to vote FOR them).

I understand that the civil war was about a lot of things, but the precipitating issue was slavery. Slavers should be obliterated by war if they aren't willing to give up their slaves unconditionally.

I know what you mean but there were so many other possible outcomes that would have resulted in banishment of slavery from North America just as well.

If the southern agricultural states didn't want to be with the free states in the Union any more anyway, it might have been the only opportunity to withdraw without a war.

Individually, without a confederacy, which instead quickly amounted to a large vengeful adversary where there didn't have to be.

It would have been a tough decision for each state to make, under non-emergency conditions, whether or not they wanted to remain with the country that possessed Wall Street or not.

After all it was Wall Street companies who were often financing the plantations to begin with, before stock traders escalated to funding the slave trade once its human cargo became more lucrative than most.

As it turned out, besides all the death & destruction suffered by all states, Washington itself went into such deep debt to Wall Street in order to fully vanquish the Confederate States, that it set the stage for untenable "permanent" debt where the lenders never got paid back real well for so many decades.

Wall Street has possessed Washington ever since.

Otherwise there would never have been a FED as we know it.

Slavery destroyed the roman republic just like it destroyed the American republic. Slavery and republican government are fundamentally incompatible because it devalues the labor and vote of the citizen. Instead of ending slavery the civil war simply made everyone a slave to the government. No longer did the government need to compromise, they could simply do whatever they wished by force.

Today millions of new wage slaves flood into the country to further devalue the citizens labor and vote.

Good observation.

Think about how it was in a state like North Carolina in the 1850's where they were building textile mills which could add great value to the cotton before it was shipped.

This was enough of a threat to Northern manufacturing without their factories having to compete with unpaid labor. They were not happy campers, they had always been making way more money per ton of cotton in the well-established Northern textile mills than the plantations had ever been. And banking it just in case.

In the factory it would be a lot higher-skilled labor than down on the farm, it was still unpaid but never without cost. A dollar would go a long way back then but everything was still relative. Imagine that $10000 was the annual cost of having the labor in a factory without any wages. Accommodations, family support, infrastructure and things like that are what makes this total.

1859 rolls around and the guy in the green visor adds it up and shakes his head, "sheesh it's $11000 this year, when is it going to end?"

War comes & goes eventually, slaves are freed like they should/could have been the whole time, the dust settles and after a year of actually paying wages for the first time to laborers, the guy in the green visor about drops out of his seat because his total labor cost is now $15000. All he can say is "when is it going to end?" Where have we heard that before?

Same thing with the guy in the bank in New York whose employer had been raking it in from all their investments in Southern companies. It just wasn't the same and never was going to be that way again.

At least not exactly.

I don't understand the point you're trying to make.

It is convoluted but very few people recognize this as well as you do, regardless of how obvious it is:

>war simply made everyone a slave

The same thing in my message, from almost the reverse point of view, how the way some factory-working slaves were turned into employees by the same war in the 19th century.

What's the difference anyway?

The difference between wage slave and fully-owned has been based mainly on freedom-of-movement and payment for labor, which have always been big enough to destroy a republic.

But not big enough for any difference in tasks or financial considerations to be the major thing for something like a government or corporation.

In some ways not much more modern than the Romans.

For the elites, they have always benefited most from a majority of subjects whose wages, if wages were involved, were not that much more significant than zero when it comes to the bottom line.

> "Instead of ending slavery the civil war simply made everyone a slave to the government."

Look, I hate the elites as much as anyone and bemoan their outsized power over regular citizens, but to compare literal chattel slavery to the post-civil war U.S. is wild. Actual, real life, slavery was a deeply integrated part of their culture. Our democracy has a ton of problems, to be sure, but I find it very hard to blame that on the civil war.

We need to change it to 'no representation without taxation' and ban lobbyists for any industry/company/interest that doesn't pay an equal percentage of their income as the average 'taxed on labor' American.

No, lobbying should be banned even if they pay tax. The only way corporations should have access to representation is by having their role formally defined by an amendment to the Constitution. As in, this government is formed by citizens who have these rights, and corporations that have these rights. Make it official and open, not the subversive manipulation where we act like they aren't there.

Do you feel represented?

The US also got its own stock market.

"There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy."

- Alfred Henry Lewis

What confuses me is that no revolution is required. All we had to do to avoid this was to vote. Voting would still (probably) work.

Just like how all we had to do to shut down Guantanamo Bay was vote for President Obama, right? So glad that that worked out. By and large, our institutions are not democratic, in that they are not responsive to 'popular opinion'; while there are certain arenas where, for one reason or another, the will of the majority does sway the day (e.g. the influence of scandals on individual elected officials), by and large most things are decided by non-democratic factors like business interests and large donors, and the media just works to get people on-side with whatever comes out of that.

To quote a well-known study on the topic: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

(Gilens & Page, Perspectives in Politics)

This is ahistoric. No-one ever said we had to "just vote for Obama" to close Guantanamo Bay.

Frankly, Obama _tried_ to close Guantanamo Bay. He significantly shrunk the population of inmates, but it was ultimately Congress, and the courts that prevented the closure

Obama spent a huge amount of time and political capital trying to clean up Bush's messes.

Obama only tried to close Guantanamo by moving the prisoners to the United States, which is arguably worse than having them in Guantanamo. It would mean that you could hold prisoners in the United States indefinitely without trial. What he should have done was give the prisoners fair trials or release them.

Having prisoners in the US is a lot more hassle and subject to scrutiny than keeping them tucked away on some out of bounds military prison where few have access to, which was probably the reason to put prisoners there in the first place. Anything could be done to prisoners on Guantanamo, including torture.

You're supporting the point of the person you responded to.

One vote isn't enough. Just Obama was insufficient when congress was not sufficiently aligned.

But I have no power to vote for anyone but the president, two senators and one representative.

What he’s saying is that you need to vote with a consistent message. Voting for Bush, then voting for Obama, then voting for Trump is unlikely to make any lasting change

That’s the separation of powers at work, which is desirable. Congress has to (and can) do it. Obama, unlike Trump, would sometimes back down when he met the edges of executive authority. That’s how it should be.

I wanted Gitmo closed, but I don’t want it closed in a way that further expands the executive branch by once again nibbling at the edges of another branch’s authority.

At ~all times for a long period of time during Gitmos operation, there was at least one (revolving) prisoner that no nation on earth would take. I think that was the biggest challenge for someone who actually wanted to close gitmo, to close it. Not clear where you would put them that wouldn't be yet another prison.

I guess now that the US has normalized relations with the Taliban, maybe they'll end up sending them to them, not sure who else will take the last ones.

If we didn’t want them then why did we capture them?

A lot of them were captured for things like simply having an F91W watch and also being proximal or familial to a terrorist. They were initially wanted but then once 'cleared' the problem became once accused as a terrorist no country on earth wanted to take them even if they were cleared as likely innocent.

Obviously it was also politically infeasible to admit them into the general US.

What a nightmare.

They should stand trial in a US court, and if they’re acquitted, they should be set free, like anyone else. That’s a pretty fundamental principle of the rule of law.

If they’re indeed innocent and can’t be deported because nobody will take them, then they have to be allowed to stay in the US. That’s unfortunate but not really their fault given that the US brought them into its jurisdiction against their will in the first place.

It seems transparently unfair to capture someone and then keep them forever because nobody else wants them.

Plenty of countries that are well-run democracies don’t have separation of powers between the legislature and the executive — the UK is one of many examples.

Separation between the executive and the judiciary is important, but separation from the legislature doesn’t really seem to be.

Even among countries that do have such a separation, the US is unique in making it so difficult for the legislature to pass anything, which IMO is the most serious flaw in its system. The permanent deadlock is what creates such a temptation for the executive to circumvent the rule of law and try to seize power wherever it can.

Historically it hasn't generally been this difficult to pass anything.

All wannabe dictators complain about not having enough power to save the country. I am not referring specifically to the US.

No, they refuted their strawman.

This is far too nihilist.

Obama and Biden both led to meaningful policy improvements and they were far more stable than the current admin.

They were able to slow down the inevitable trajectory, they did nothing to reverse course. Doing anything different would be too "radical" for Obama or Biden.

The trajectory in question was pretty well laid out in Bush’s Patriot act. If the Democratic Party at any point wanted to reverse course they would have opposed the initial legislation (like the general public did), and subsequently championed a policy which abandons it and corrects for the harm it caused.

That did not happen, quite the contrary in fact.

I think you vastly undersell how much of the US voters supported extreme measures in reaction to Sept 11.

There was a social panic to “protect us against terrorism” at pretty much any cost. It was easy for the party in power to demonize the resistance to the power grab and nobody except Libertarians had a coherence response.

I don‘t think it really matters how much people supported these extreme actions. This policy was clearly wrong. The general public mounted a much more significant opposition against this policy then the Democratic party did. Some members of the Democratic party did some opposition, but the party as a whole clearly did not oppose this, and therefor it was never truly on the ballots.

To be clear, I personally don‘t think stuff like this should ever be on the ballot in any democracy. Human rights are not up for election, they should simply be granted, and any policy which seeks to deny people human rights should be rejected by any of the country’s democratic institutions (such as courts, labor unions, the press, etc.)

> I don‘t think it really matters how much people supported these extreme actions. This policy was clearly wrong.

This is wrong and ignorant of how we select elected representatives. They have no incentive to do “what is right” and all of the incentives to do “what is popular”. The representatives who stood up against the Patriot Act, the surveillance state, “you’re either with us or either the terrorists”, etc were unable to hold any control in Congress.

The reason we have stereotypes of politicians as lying, greasy, corrupt used car salesmen is because their incentives align with those qualities.

I am exclusively discussing the _is_, not the _ought_ (which is where I would agree with you)

I was stating an opinion, not a fact, and I was interpreting history according to that opinion. That is I am arguing for a certain historical framework from which I judge historical moments.

I also don‘t think mine is a widely unpopular opinion either. That scholars of democracy and human rights agree that a democracy should not be able to vote them selves into a dictatorship, that human rights are worth something more than what can be ousted by a popular demand. So I don’t think this is an unreasonable historical framework, from which I judge the actors of this history of.

If politicians did what was popular, the USA would have a public health system a long time ago. They just pretend and do things they're paid to support, that's it.

Not closing Guantanamo is, unfortunately, an example of democracy working. Public support for closing it has never been anything close to a majority. Obama got elected despite, not because, of that promise. Congress blocking his attempts to do so was a reflection of the will of the people, even if perhaps coincidentally.

Who can I vote for that will stop flock cameras from being installed?

In many cases, the decision to install Flock cameras have been made by city councils and sheriffs' offices. So it very much depends on local candidates.

On the broader topic, I'm not sure that just voting is the way that we'll get out of this mess, but I think a large part of the problem is how our focus on wider, national issues has eroded the interest in the local. So people seem to be most disenfranchised from the level of politics where they can actually have the most influence, both by voting and direct action (protests, calls, etc).

We turned over seats on our city council for the first time in decades and the new, "liberal" council members voted with the rest, unanimously, to install more Flock cameras.

The local government officials in charge of allowing these to be installed.

It also represents an opportunity for upstarts. If you want to get into local politics, this is a single issue that will unit voters and bring them in.

We had a city councilperson elected on the sole issue of replacing the purple street lights. She won decisively and her entire campaign was literally signs everywhere promising to fix the purple streetlights. (yes, they were fixed).

Seattle voted for Katie Wilson as mayor partly because she seemed to oppose surveillance cameras. She now seems to have changed her mind is is speaking in favor of them.

According to [1] Seattle doesn’t use Flock and Wilson hasn’t taken a stand either way, even on the campaign trail.

[1]: https://www.theburnerseattle.com/post/mayor-elect-wilson-won...

Badger your city council, work with like-minded residents in a way that can credibly threaten their re-elections, find and support privacy-conscious candidates who won't sign-onto Flock's agenda, create ads based on council meetings when councilors support surveillance in a way most voters will reject. Put their quotes on billboard with their picture, etc

Ok, you do all that work at home and manage to block flock in your area. It doesn’t matter because the next city over where you work installed them so you get tracked anyway.

Then 2 years later a new city council gets elected and they install flock cameras in your city too. You can never get rid of them because it already passed and nobody wants to relitigate the same thing every couple of years.

Local politics does not work here.

> You can never get rid of them because it already passed and nobody wants to relitigate the same thing every couple of years.

Those who care about their privacy should relitigate at every opportunity. "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance"; if you're not willing to fight for it, you will lose it, and deservedly so. Those who give up in advance are beyond fucked, because they'll have to take whatever is sent their way.

Our city voted out the cameras so the feds just installed flock cameras on every bit of federal property in and near town, plus they're at private places like hardware stores.

Opponents too can escalate to the next rung: perhaps a county-level retail tax on all retailers hosting ALPRs.

Either that or getting creative with well-directed, statically charged aerosolized oil droplets.

Exactly. This is not a local politics problem.

Your mayor and city council and maybe local judges and sheriff.

"All we had to do to avoid this was to vote."

Every time I hear this I cringe, whether this subject or any other. The people did vote and this is what they got - not necessarily what they specifically voted for. Different people hold things in different importance. Flock security cameras (or similar) generally don't even get noticed by the people voting on taxes, guns, abortions, etc.

Besides, establishment Democrats aren’t exactly for the common man, they’re just not as cartoonishly evil as the Republicans. Democrats would likely still be in favor of Flock cameras.

The age old tactic of vilification. It's easy to overlook all the nuances on all sides; it's a whole spectrum with plenty of overlap.

My hope in the US is that folks at least take the time to evaluate their options and/or candidates; voting a straight ticket just because someone calls themselves something can lead to undesirable outcomes.

Not to mention that most of the most upending, consequential changes and events in America were not only not voted on, but were wildly opposed by the populace, yet were imposed anyways and today, after decades of government “education”, people vigorously support and defend those tyrannical impositions.

I don't think that's all we (assuming you're USA) had to do or need to do going forward. Voting is "necessary but not sufficient" as the quote goes.

Voting doesn't work as well when there's billions of dollars being spent to influence the votes to make billionaires richer, while the working class that could vote against it is too busy working 3 part time jobs just to survive.

This is why I'm in favor of sortition instead of voting.

The majority of random people don't have combination of desire, corruption, sophistication, and political experience to pull off this kind of bribery.

Virtually every elected politician does.

~Everything about the election process selects for the worst kinds of people.

There is a lot of truth in this but I'm not convinced sortition is going to work either.

But what you could do is vote with a string attached and a penalty for being recalled that is going to make people think twice about running for office if their aim is to pull some kind of stunt. The 'you give me four years unconditionally' thing doesn't seem to work at all.

I've been mulling over a system where there's a legislative body composed of citizens picked through sortition and another legislative body that's elected like normal legislative bodies of today.

The twist on that body however is that voting is mandatory and ballots have a non of the above option on them. If a super majority (say 60-75%) vote none of the above the election is a do-over with all the people on the ballot being uneligable to run for that seat for say 5-10 years.

I like the idea, but I worry about choosing random members of the public when so many people are unprepared for it. Any kind of government made up of "the people" requires that those people be literate, educated, and informed. With things the way they are today I'd worry that your secondary elected legislative body would end up doing everything and you'd either end up with a figurehead who'd be out of their depth and ineffectual or one being used/manipulated.

I could also envision an endless cycle of elections with 75%+ of the population voting "none of the above" because of issues like "Not my personal favorite candidate" or "eats the wrong mustard" or "I hate the idea of government"

Nice one, that might actually work. But it will be hard to explain to the electorate.

That's super-interesting experiment, but I wouldn't start it in such a large country as USA. Why won't humanity test it on a smaller scale?

In Belgium (Ostbelgien) the German-speaking community has a permanent sortition-based Citizens’ Council wired into the parliamentary process; In Ireland they've already run national, randomly selected Citizens’ Assemblies on high-stakes constitutional topics.

These are basically production prototypes - maybe we should ask ourselves why they don't push it further?

Nah thats a cheap excuse. Amorality of current gov was out there in plain sight, even before 2016 and definitely after. It was extremely hard for common folks to avoid it, some active acting would be required.

Then it boils down to morals, how flexible people are with them - this is weakness of character. Ability to ignore malevolent behavior if it suits me is more a ballpark of amoral sociopaths than good-hearted guy who simply doesn't have 2 hours a day to ponder philosophies of modern politics and regional historical details half around the globe. No amount of ads (which are so far trivial to avoid with reasonable lifestyle) change what a moral person considers moral.

And it couldn't have been easier this time, its not some left vs right view on things, just simple morality - lying, cheating, stealing, potential pedophilia, not hard to say of one is OK with that or not.

Sure I could eat a salad for 5$, but no I'll get a crappy burger for same amount because I like salty greasy stuff. Gee doctor why do I have bad heart, how could have I known? Must have been those evil mega corporations and their genius marketing.

The amorality was not in plain sight, if your only source of news is Fox News or Breitbart or Twitter.

Seconded. Democracy is the only transcendental political system: you can have any ideology you want (so be careful or you'll be voting only once). To survive, it depends on civic spirit - i.e. participation. Democracy always collapses into authoritarianism eventually. Then (if you want it bad enough), you have to claw it back, slowly and painfully. All just as Plato foresaw.

It really bothers me that so few people in the modern West understand just how lucky they are. If you didn't have the control you already have over your government, you'd be fighting for it.

The US is a semi-democracy, notably due to its hyper-polarized two party system that completely forbids (in the 2020s) any crossing of party lines for compromise.

The single biggest improvement to American society would be to implement multi-member districts for legislature, OR to implement STAR voting - any kind of system that promotes the existence of more parties, more political candidates, to break the two party cycle.

Far too many people fail to vote or research candidates due to how shitty our democracy is. Far too few candidates exist as a blend of values, and we are stuck with "every liberal policy" vs. "every conservative policy".

---

To that end, it seems the cities that are banning Flock for proper privacy reasons are all in liberal states and cities. Conservative/moderate areas seem a lot less engaged on the topic. "That's just how it goes, of course government is going to tread on us, what can be done about it".

I think more people would bother with voting if they felt their vote mattered, but between the two party system (where both options suck), the gerrymandered distracting, and other voter suppression tactics people have been conditioned to feel powerless over the outcome of elections.

I'm entirely unsurprised if the majority of places taking a stand against flock cameras are liberal. From what I've seen conservatives tend to fetishize police and punishment. There's a lot of boot-licking going on for a group of people who posture as being rebels and anti-government, but I think there's also an assumption that only (or mainly) "others" will be targeted and punished. To the extent that it's true, I sure wouldn't expect it to stay that way.

This argument was viable 20 years ago, but we are way, way beyond “both options suck” at this point. It’s more like “one option sucks and the other option is absolutely catastrophic — also, the second option may be the last choice you ever get”.

Not sure if you are aware but we rarely directly get to vote on these things. You vote for a representative and hope they vote in a way that serves your interests. But now, we have omnibus bills. And it's 50/50 loaded with things we want and things we don't. The same bill that funds Pre-K will also have a section to fund a kitten shredding machine. But if you vote against it all voters will hear is how you don't want to fund education.

I do not live in the USA, but my understanding of those omnibus bills is that they are government blackmail of its people.

I remember being horrified the first time I heard this was legal in the USA.

How can the US citizens accept such a brutal denying of good governance is beyond me.

The omnibus bills aren’t blackmail, as much as a symptom of the failure of Congress to be able to do what it is supposed to: debate.

There is 1 funding bill per year which only requires a 50% vote instead of a 60% / 67% to pass that all other spending bills require.

Every member with a goal tries to attach it to the big annual funding bill. The bill becomes so large that nobody likes the bill as a whole, but everybody has something in it they will defend.

And the old filtering process (committees which recommend the content of bills) are dominated by majority party leadership. This is maybe the closest symptom to blackmail.

I‘m not (yet) a citizen of the USA, but I’ve lived there for a while. As I understand it, there is hardly any political opposition in this country. I would actually describe it as a controlled opposition. A lot of people here tend to think the only role of the opposition is to run the right candidate and win the next election. As such, there is no real resistance when the majority government oversteps their boundaries.

To make matters worse, labor unions are equally politically inactive, and most often their only political moves are endorsing candidates. When they do voice support for or opposition against bills, those bills are often stuff related to their industry, and seldom do they actually oppose an over reaching government by threatening general strikes etc.

The press here is also very right leaning. All the big media are owned by capitalist conglomerates and as such most people never hear real challenges to the capitalist power structure. As long as the government class acts favorable to the capitalist interest, then the press has aligning interest, and is thus heavily incentivized to never challenge the government to much.

> To make matters worse, labor unions are equally politically inactive, and most often their only political moves are endorsing candidates.

This isn’t true, UAW almost got Biden to transfer wealth directly from taxpayers to them via the union made EV credit bonus, laundered through government motors

It wouldn’t have mattered because the Horowitz Foundation donated them to avoid governance and regulations.

IIRC FDR pioneered the contemporary use of this to ram through progressive legislation, in particular social security by essentially packaging it up so the needy would get nothing in other programs if social security wasn't passed.

Though I wouldn't be surprised if the idea goes back to Roman times.

Unfortunately, studies undertaken by MIT over a decade ago show that when it comes to law writing and passing, voters have no statistically measurable input at the federal level. (Since citizens united)

It’s all just identity politics. I will say that Trump has proven the exception to this rule, enacting a whole lot of policy that circumvents the law and has real effects. (And is likely mostly unconstitutional if actually put to the test)

So while locally, voting can be powerful, it’s mostly bread and circuses at the federal level since regulatory capture is bipartisan.

It shouldn't be a surprise that a willingness to violate the law works quickly when congress is unwilling to do anything to stop it. The ability for the law and constitution to be ignored when all three branches of government collude to do exactly that is a huge weakness in the system

I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.

Your voting system is shit. It results in a two party state. If one party fails to present a coherent offering and the other one is infiltrated by nut jobs then the system breaks down. After all, if it was such a good system, why didn’t you impose it on Germany and Japan when you won WW2? (This comment is politically neutral; who the incoherents and the nut jobs are are left to the reader’s discretion)

"...Are left to the reader's discretion" has an unintended right discretion bias. I would say down-to-earth "... Are up to your discretion"

I agree. The amount of cameras and tracking has gotten out of control. If America actually becomes an "authoritarian" country (seems almost likely) I imagine all these Flock pics with other data mining techniques will be used to send Communist Progressives to reeducation camp.

> The amount of cameras and tracking has gotten out of control.

The UK looks at the use of cameras and feels threatened for its Nanny State title. We Yanks have laughed at that name while the water around us slowly came to a boil.

Some cities and/or states have banned the use of cameras at stop lights to issue tickets. Not really sure what caused that to happen, except the cynic in me thinks some politician received a ticket in the mail from one of the cameras.

America is an authoritarian country for decades now.

It first dawned on me when i visited NYC some 30 years ago. I stepped over some arbitrary yellow line I wasn't supposed to - the uniformed cop that noticed that went from 0 to 100 in 0.1 second and behaved as if I just pulled a gun. Zero time to reflect and assume I might have made a legitimate mistake. Since then I've visited U.S. >150 times, and in my experience it was always thus in the U.S. - the law enforcement is on hair trigger and the populace has seemingly grown used to it and considers this behaviour normal. Geez.

(Go live in any northern european country for comparison. Any interaction with law enforcement is almost certainly going to be pleasant, cordial, and uniformed police typically does not rely on threats of violance for authority).

America is not NYC. NYC is proud of its police-state apparatus. Most of the rest of the country is very different.

NYC police seem insane lmao. For some reason various precinct accounts have made it into my social media feed, and the last time I saw the they were bragging about stealing some old ladies less lethal defense weapon.

I know, I've been to many places, and met lots of fantastic, friendly people. But the attitude towards police - the dead seriousness of any and all interactions - no wrong moves, or else - is frankly frightening.

On the contrary I think Americans are reacting about the same as any other set of people would react. There are always going to be people who, as long as their personal lives are stable, they are not going to do anything to put that stability at risk. America is also huge enough that even if one part of the country is having a crisis, millions of fellow citizens will not hear of it or have any 2nd, 3rd or 4th hand connection to the matter.

But also if a small portion of Americans disparately plan to do stuff like sabotage surveillance camera, it's still newsworthy.

Let’s be clear though - it’s not that Americans are clinging to some deep stability that brings them comfort or relaxation, it’s that they’re on the edge already. The vast vast majority of people are barely able to afford the basics of life, while we’re bombarded with an ever more shameless wealthy elite’s privileges.

Politics is like water boiling - it’s just going to be little bubbles at first but all of a sudden it will start to really rumble.

Is that really the case? It seems to me that the vast majority in the US can fairly easily afford a fair bit of material luxury, mostly because material luxuries have become incredibly cheap (by historical standards).

The trouble is at least in the high population areas (AFAICT) a huge swath of "average" people seem to be stuck living life on a paycheck-to-paycheck basis, renting, no prospect of property ownership, minimal to zero retirement savings, no realistic way to afford children, etc. Not abnormal by historic or global standards but very abnormal when compared to the past ~150 years of US history.

"Among the 37 percent of adults who would not have covered a $400 expense completely with cash or its equivalent, most would pay some other way, although some said that they would be unable to pay the expense at all. For those who could cover the expenses another way, the most common approach was to use a credit card and then carry a balance, and many indicated they would use multiple approaches. However, 13 percent of all adults said they would be unable to pay the expense by any means (table 21), unchanged from 2022 and 2023 but up from 11 percent in 2021"

https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2025-economic-we...

An informative data point. To provide some context regarding my earlier comment, a brand new full size memory foam mattress can be had for less than $200 shipped in the continental US. A computer capable of playing modern AAA video games can be had for less than $400. Material luxuries in the modern day are cheap to an almost absurd degree.

I think maybe we need a new CPI metric for HCOL areas that takes the form of a ratio. Something along the lines of midrange laptops per studio apartment month.

I wouldn't call these material luxuries, just like big screen TVs are no longer a luxury. Being able to visit a doctor or a dentist on the other hand...

By "luxury" I mean approximately "anything beyond bare survival". My point is that the vast majority of material possessions have become absurdly cheap by historic standards. However that doesn't preclude severe societal dysfunction (housing, children, retirement, or as you note doctors and dentists).

Thank you for clarifying. It is true that many of such possessions have become incredibly cheap (and therefore affordable) especially when it comes to media consumption and other forms of escapism, but they do very little to address our fundamental needs (physical safety & health, financial security, emotional stability).

True luxuries (not having to worry, not having to waste time) are increasingly out of reach for most people.

Stuff is cheap, but basic security is expensive. Everyone pints to the stuff, but income vs rent and asset prices has only gone up and up!

Buying housing is utterly unaffordable for a very, very large percentage of young people even educated professionals in in-demand fields. Covering expenses is awful. That famous Emirati quote of “my father had a camel, I have a Land Rover, my son will have a Lamborghini, his son will have a Land Rover, his son will have a camel” - our parents had the Lamborghinis. The majority of my generation (milllenials) are worse off than their parents. Very few have kids because they can’t afford to have them. There are exceptions everywhere but if you just listen or see the culture it is a given that our future is fucked unless something radical changes - income inequality is the highest it’s EVER BEEN. Higher than the time of the French Revolution. Higher than the “Gilded age”.

It’s foolish to think that people are okay or that nothing will come politically of this. Go look out the window in any major city, the stark differences are there for anyone’s eyes to see.

You mean like South Korea? Thailand? Peru? Nepal?

The only people whose lives are stable in this economy are the ultra wealthy. Even those who we would normally consider "middle class" are a couple of medical emergencies away from financial ruin. Whole classes of jobs are disappearing.

Get out there and be the change you want to see, king

I don't get the sarcasm here.. Instead of sniping with snark (see HN rules, please) post your better take.

Is it not literally true that he is calling for action from the populace without doing it? You all can only lift a finger to downvote a literal call to action lmao

> What has worried me for years is that Americans would not resort to this level.

They'll stop once the police (or ICE, more likely) start dishing out horrific punishments for it.

That would be an incredibly risky escalation, and it would be a stupid ultimatum to issue.

The people, or even states, could escalate in response. The worst case is escalating to violence; ICE isn’t trained, equipped, or numerous to deal with deploying into a violently hostile area. The army could, but then we’re in full blown civil war.

A more realistic middle ground is that it pushes people or states into nonviolent non-compliance by eg refusing to pay federal taxes. Frankly if California and New York alone stopped paying federal taxes the system would probably crumble.

ICE isn't trained for anything, they're just proud boys in tacticool gear. But the point of them is not to be effective, it's to cause headlines.

That's not how the political reality of exacting mostly voluntary compliance from the masses works.

Yeah because that works out really well in history!

General strike! Close the ports, close the airports, steal dozers and park them on railroad tracks, teachers on the streets in front of their schools to protect their students, blockade the grocery distribution centers, so that the shelves go bare, just stop everything, everywhere.

When it hurts the billionaires, they will tell their politicians to invoke the 25th.

It's the only way, we've lost our democracy, but we still have economic power.

Disrupting basic functions of the economy will hurt ordinary people a lot more than it will hurt billionaires.

Also under these conditions of food distribution and transportation being actively disrupted, why would anyone be at school? Huge numbers of American schools are unsafe and unpleasant places for kids to be in ordinary times, and a massive disruption to ordinary life is not going to make that situation any better.

Who is the arbiter of "necessarily trouble"? You? Only people that politically agree with you?

>You? Only people that politically agree with you?

the next sentence after they mention "necessary trouble" is literally:

"But that only goes as far as to be my opinion."

they are just stating their opinion.

everyone decides when the time for "necessary trouble" is individually, based on their accumulated experience, opinion, etc. no arbiter required, just a critical mass of people with aligning opinions.

Who was the arbiter of the trouble necessary for gay rights? Who was the arbiter of the trouble necessary for civil rights? Who was the arbiter of the trouble necessary for womens' rights? Who was the arbiter of the trouble necessary for the rights of handicapped people? Indigenous people? Immigrants?

American society was created for the benefit of straight white Christian men alone. Every right held by any other group, every ounce of political power, every bit of basic human dignity, has had to be taken by force of "necessary trouble." There is no "arbiter." How could there be? An arbiter presupposes an objective moral ideal and a just society, neither of which we have.

The other day in Kansas City some lady set fire to a warehouse that was being sought for purchase by ICE. They are on video and quite nonchalant.

> I still think that overall, Americans are deeply underreacting to the times.

To put things in perspective, the whole humankind, as in 99.99% of population, is utterly underreacting.

I can only hope what people will decide make trouble about is also what I consider necessary. If we could all agreed what was necessary to make trouble about there wouldn't be nearly as much to be making trouble over. It's a very double edged sword which does not necessarily do a very good job at bringing any more clarity of what the moral path was to the country.

Mass unemployment would/will be the catalyst to mass uprising. All of the fuel is in place (ICE, Epstein, rising costs of everything, unaffordable housing, general lack of hope and faith in the government, etc.) High unemployment numbers will be the spark that sets it all ablaze.

Right? The French know how to riot.

You're fortunate if you live in a community where cameras in public spaces is in the top 20 concerns.