I think this is where efforts to fight these problems fall down. They're almost all based on the assumption that the populace doesn't want this stuff to happen, but that the government pushes it through by abusing power, subverting democracy, etc.

But from what I see, this is not the case. Most Americans want this. Whether it's gun-wielding maniacs, drug dealers, or international terrorist masterminds, they feel unsafe, and want the government to help. They like heavily-armed SWAT teams available at a moment's notice. They like the government spying on every communication they can get their hands on. They like x-ray machines and body scanners in airports.

There is a sizable minority where sanity remains, but it is a minority. I think that efforts to fight these problems need to recognize this, and realize that you have to convince the people as your primary action. Fighting the government won't help, because the people will insist that these things be done, as long as the majority feels this way.

No, I don't know how....

It has nothing to do with some kind economists' "rational utilization maximization" function and everything to do with basically a "k-nearest neighbours" algorithm on their social graph for assigning beliefs.

And that is precisely why control of the media is so important.

I hear all the time..."It's for the better. It allows the government to keep track of the bad guys and if I have to be inconvenienced a few times out of the year that I travel than so be it."

Or..."All I use email for is work and talking with family. If they want to read that stuff they can, I have nothing to hide. If it helps keep me safe then I'm comfortable."

And the there's..."God forbid we have another 9/11 because too many people are worried about what the government does. There are somethings the government has to do in secrete, there are things they have to lie to us about in order to keep us safe."

I'm 23 years old and I can't tell you where this mentality came from. I know when I was growing up my father showed me how to grow my own food, hunt, use a gun in a respectful mannor and always doubt the government. He told me that violence never solved any of his problems and it's doubtful it'd solve any of mine. He said in order for anyone to be safe they must have their freedom. The freedom to do whatever it is they seek to do. The government is only there to remove that freedom. They want to stifle your ambitions and control how you live.

I know I'm not alone but I'm afraid we are outnumbered.

People comprising the government are not "just" people.

They may have personality traits that compel them to seek out high-power positions.

They may suppress their natural good intentions because where they work, "things are done that way and everybody does that". After several years of such cognitive dissonance, they may just completely change personality-wise.

&c., &c.

I don't presume to know why most people are not particularly vocal on these matters, but it's certainly not because they lack critical thought.

That doesn't make them sub-human. There is no real incentive to care a lot about politics or do all the research and thinking necessary to come to correct conclusions. It's not like your vote is going to change the outcome of the election.

But no it's not terribly self-aggrandizing to assume that most people don't have a lot of interest or education in politics. It's true.

That was the case at other times and places too. And their solution to that, was to shame citizens that only cared for what's economically beneficial.

The solution is to make active participation in politics (= active citizenship) a virtue that people want to be identified with in the same way being "in fashion", "in shape" or "rich" is one.

Of course we have the contrary. Active participation is actually discouraged -- except if you are a career politician.

Job One should really be to solve the problem that the most popular news network is also the most factually inaccurate.

Did you maybe mean George Zimmerman? That would be a more topical example of media stupidity.

Here when you attempt to talk about politics, a common reply is: "Dude, I don't care, and I like it that way, don't come with that politics bullshit toward me."

This applies even during the elections...

In fact, here vote is mandatory, because when it wasn't, less than 5% voted at all, but making vote mandatory only made the thing poisonous, people vote because they must, usually on whoever they see most on TV, or some random candidate or another, if you ask a random brazillian who he voted for as representative, most of them don't remember at all, not even the party they voted for.

Also we have plenty of proof, that all elections since electronics ballot were introduced here, were cheated, and people DON'T CARE. I show videos of people hacking our machines and showing how they can steer election to whatever way they want, and most people react with complete apathy, they feel that politics is irrelevant, that all politicians are the same, thus it does not matter if whoever wins won cheating or not, because the result is not important to them.

"It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..."

"You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"

"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like to straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."

"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."

"I did," said ford. "It is."

"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't the people get rid of the lizards?"

"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."

"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"

"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."

"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"

"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"

"What?"

"I said," said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, "have you got any gin?"

"I'll look. Tell me about the lizards."

Ford shrugged again.

"Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happened to them," he said. "They're completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone's got to say it."

But voting being mandatory, is a very alarming thing. Does not sound like democracy at all. What happens, when one does not vote?

If you stay non-voter, you cannot get hired by government, cannot ask loans from government owned banks (or from the government itself), cannot get issued a new passport, cannot get issued a new id, cannot vote, cannot study in government schools and universities, your companies cannot provide services to the government, and you are considered a draft dodger (ie: for example if you want to join a private school that requires you to have completed military service, the school would be breaking its own rules if it allow you to study there)

If you do that in three elections in a row (here we have elections every two years, thus this is 6 years) your document related to voting is revoked. (meaning that you become de facto stateless, although de jure you are still brazillian).

"government" here apply to all levels (example: the part where you cannot join government schools, apply to federal, state and city schools)

Also this applies to overseas citizens (you must to the embassy and vote there).

You can "justify" your vote, this is showing up into any random voting zone (not necessarily the one where you are registered) and explaining why you won't vote, but usually the only explanation accepted is that you are away from your zone (ie: if you are into a city where you are not registered as resident).

2001, 2005, and 2010 UK elections had less than 70% turn out. That's a scary 30% to 35% of people forced to tick a box.

I'm not sure having that many people randomly ticking a box is good for democracy, especially because it's probably not a random choice but determined things like position on the ballot paper.

It's a strange groupthink that makes anything our government does the de facto morally superior action. It's an inherent trust by the masses that turn questioners into conspiracy theorists. The irony, of course, is that mentaility among the populace is perhaps the single most destructive threat to a true democracy, which demands vigilance.

And all of this is propped up by a corporate-political state that controls a media, which works tirelessly to maintain the image while also distracting us to no end with trivialities.

I don't see any reason to believe this is true. The problem is most people don't have any contact with the police, and they're using a mental model that's about fifteen years out of date. They don't know what's happening out there. It's hard to imagine, but most normal people still get their news from television.

[…] as much as the program offers freedom and continuity, it also comes with a substantial monitoring component. The iPad keeps teachers and parents constantly informed about what children are doing, what they have learned and how they are progressing.

Better technology in education is clearly the future and, in many ways, the way to go. The mind boggles with possibilities. But, but… we need to put much more thought into it than just the implementation of another nifty feature. We also need better laws and regulations that constrain the authority of the, uhm, authorities. And a government we can trust would be nice too.

The way things stand today, this article just scared the bejesus out of me.

_______________________________________

[1] M. Evers. Radical reform: Dutch iPad schools seek to transform education. Der Spiegel, Jun 28 2013. (http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/new-ipad-schools-...)

How do you believe that social media and the like are playing into this long standing control of the media? What are the implications for the future (of both society and social media)?

Many young people coming out of school seem to have no conception of rights. To them, it's excusable for rights to be violated if they feel enough justified anger. They are unclear on the concept that rights apply to people and situations in ways they may not like.

How can we expect them to suddenly expect freedom, when they've never had it?

I don't think this is specific to young people, or to the present time. Everyone will be very noble when talking about rights in the abstract, but they quickly throw that away when it's the rights of a specific group they don't like. I was struck by it after the London riots last year, when there were loud calls for looters to be punished beyond what the judicial system normally allows. You can see the same attitude to terrorism.

For now, focus on your life, and getting yourself in a position to contribute to the movement in the future.

I saw this coming when the WTC rubble was still smoking. The government could have potentially worked to calm down the populace, but instead they amplified the fear. We've been paying the price ever since.

Does anyone else feel that perhaps a lot of what we're seeing is a case of "Those who do not know history's mistakes are doomed to repeat them"? As I look back on all of the history education I received in school (the compulsory part, not college), it occurs to me that it was largely a lot of propaganda. With the exception of black slavery, a brief mention of WWII internment camps for Japanese-Americans, and some ambivalence over the war in Vietnam, there's hardly any mention of anything the United States has done which is bad.

And unfortunately, this is all the history education the average voter has.

However, I wouldn't consider my public history education to be "largely a lot of propaganda". I did take the advanced (AP) history courses at a public high school in Texas, and I might have just been lucky and great teachers, but my teachers discussed:

-British/US troops infecting Native Americans with smallpox by giving them infected blankets -Trail of Tears and how Andrew Jackson was generally pretty horrible to Native Americans -Wounded Knee Massacre, and in general how much we (as Americans) screwed over the native people -a little bit about eugenics in the US -Watergate scandal -showed us a documentary about how Walmart achieves such low prices by brutal business practices (and has hurt many American companies by moving production to China)

in addition to your points above. I don't feel like my history education (solely from public school) was "largely a lot of propaganda".

Think about what meaningful questions are left unanswered. Why is it that any serious examination of the US' covert wars across the world is skipped entirely? Why is the entire era 1945-1991 painted in communist vs capitalist terms? The US participation in WW2 is reduced to "we saved europe and asia from hitler and japanese imperialism".

The overarching theme is of American moral superiority, unassailable founding principles, and a government by the people, for the people.

None of those are true, and I am thankful we live in an age when access to the writings of accurate historians is just a click away for those who care enough to discover.

The only major stuff I think I missed out on was the history of US involvement in Iran (of which I later learned in College history classes). But global covert actions (and not-so-covert: ie Vietnam War) during the Cold War era was definitely taught to me in general. High School History may have missed a few countries, but I hardly think it was propaganda from my perspective at least.

-----------------

The closest thing to "propaganda" I can think of was the Civil War saga frankly. Abraham Lincoln is considered an extreme hero up here in the North, who prevented our country from falling apart. Later in college, I learned that Southerners have a different perspective... even today. Extremely interesting to me.

Also, a friend of mine from Hawaii told me the Hawaiian perspective on the Annexation of Hawaii. Apparently... there is a bit of controversy on that subject in Hawaii that wasn't taught to me.

Anecdote time:

1) I remember reading about what US did to the Native Americans, but I remember it being rather dry reading. It was presented more as a series of facts rather than, "this was an evil thing that we shouldn't do again." "Oh yea, by the way, all of the women and children were slaughtered. Moving on..."

2) We never discussed anything more recent than maybe WW2 in history. The only exception here is that in high school you could choose, Pre- or Post-Civil War US History. I ended up choosing pre-Civil War.

3) One of my history teachers in 7th or 8th grade would add some flavor to the texts. Things like disagreeing with the book's assertions that Ben Franklin modelled the Contintental Congress after Native American political organization. His assertion was that the Native Americans were seen as inferior, so even if there was influence from them, it wasn't conscious, or openly admitted to.

Professional historians already found out that slavery here is not a black and white issue, but also found that the republican government made law that schools were to teach anti-monarchy propaganda, even if it meant using half-truths about how slavery worked here.

Here, schools are obliged to teach that who abolished slavery was Princess Isabel, like if she was some sort of heroine and the emperor had nothing to do with it, also all the other anti-slavery laws he passed, are usually dismissed (for example, one of the laws the emperor passed was prohibiting the slavery of children of slaves, schools here dismiss that law by saying that it is so impratical that noone would obey anyway, without even giving proof if people obeyed or not).

Also, several of the things done in the first years of the republic were for example rename streets and parks that had any relation to the monarchy or slavery (even if it had to do with slavery abolition)...

During the school I (and everyone else I asked) was taught that Emperor Pedro I independence was shit because he did not abolished slavery with it, and thus if existed non-free people the country was not free at all and still a pawn of Portugal (as with one thing had to do with the other), and all school books give much emphasis on how slavery was not abolished during the independence... I even saw one book that teach (Wrongly) that during US independence they abolished slavery, as a sort of "proof" of how true republics are inherently better because they get rid of slavery.

Also, NONE of the history books mention slave demograhics, and only teach about plantation slavery (that was really akin to US slavery), I don't found a single school book that mentions other forms of slavery (like voluntary indentured servitude), or urban slavery (that in Brazil was the majority, despite most of the free population living in rural areas), or that only 1% of the slaves were actually chained into the infamous "Senzalas" (plantation slave barracks) that he books teach so much about (all history books explain of all evils of the "Senzalas").

Also, not one single book mention who broughts the slaves here in first place (it was not white people... the brazillian first generation slaves were almost all war prisioners or imprisoned criminals that africans came here to sell... Yes, they came here, many people believe portuguese bought the slaves at Africa, this of course happened, but was not the normal course of action, black slavers came to Brazil in portuguese ships, bringing the slaves they wanted to sell here).

Also most school books here don't talk at all about Pedro II technology achievements for example (even in Campinas where I lived most of my life, people don't know that most of public colleges there were made by decree of Pedro II, neither they know that Campinas was the second city in the world to have a telephone system, that Pedro II in person brought there after visiting Mr. Bell in the US during his vacation).

What the were YOU doing in school? Mine was mostly a public education, so... plenty of "US mistakes" taught throughout US history from my perspective. Plenty of good and bad in history.

Middle School was mostly basic stuff, borderline propaganda from my memory. (But LA Riots were in fact covered in Middle School, perhaps because they were more "current events" rather than "history" at that point in time). But High School was filled with "TRUTH", in depth analysis and so forth. It was quite eye opening from my perspective. My High School US History class didn't cover "modern US History" however, and stopped in the late 50s. "Modern US History" was an elective at my high school... so my knowledge past the 50s becomes a bit incomplete.

The school cop even ensured a visit to many classes, to describe the rights of citizens in the state. Along the lines of: "In this state, you have the right to know a Cop's identity. If he refuses, take down the number on his car. Here's the police number where you can complain about this stuff". Very specific advice on how to cooperate, and if necessary, complain, about cops.

I know this was unusual and probably specific to the school cop who was assigned to my school. He was African American "and proud of it", to describe his attitude. (may have contributed to his emphasis on teaching citizens rights).

The only time I really got to study about the rest of the world was in a semester-long class that was optional! My AP History class was the closest thing that delved into the negative aspects of US history. I really didn't start questioning things until I read Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel" shortly after graduating college.

Few believe that it will happen to them.

Humans are really good at denial, rationalization and ignoring the plight of people they do not directly care about.

It's a damning combination.

Part of the reason we find ourselves here is because the government has lied and kept what it isn't lying about in secrecy. A fundamental aspect of the Declaration of Independence is "...Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." You cannot assume consent regarding government powers that have been built upon secrecy and lies. Likewise, complacency is not consent.

One of the most insidious and pernicious lies has been the implication that perfect safety is not only possible, but desirable. Note that this lie is being told by omission: US citizens are not being told that the government will make them perfectly safe, but that whatever the citizens find out about what is being done is being done for "national security" or to keep "the nation" safe.

The current uproar about government spying on its citizens, not to mention spying outside of "terrorist" suspicions, is evidence that spying programs conflict with the implication that safety is what is being provided by these programs.

But how many people will actually go out of their way to look for those perspectives? The down side of having a thousand voices speak is that you can easily listen to twenty you agree with, and ignore two hundred opponents. I know I do that a lot of the time.

[1] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/439668500/liberty-is-ris...

Oh please. Compared to what you find on the Internet, FOX looks like a paragon of bias-free and rational reporting. Look no further than the recent rash of conspiracy theorists on HN.

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."

A lot of these same Americans are betting on football and in NCAA pools, play poker, drank when they were underage and likely have underage kids who drink now.

So if you want them to wake up, it must be driven home over, and over and over, and over again, that these are the kinds of activities that could result in a SWAT team breaking down their doors, and maybe them or their good friends getting shot.

I think the main obstacle will be an unwillingness to comprehend that things have really gotten this bad.

IMO, it really started in earnest on 9/11. It's like people are in this strange state of psychological terror without realizing it. I swear, we've never recovered on the whole and it feels like something on the PTSD "spectrum".

Of course this fear has been fanned and used to justify an egregious power grab, costly wars, and untold billions in profits for the security-military-industrial complex, and so much more. See The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein.

Is it a coincidence that fear is so very profitable or that people are willing to give up their freedom to quell it?

When do we shake off this fear and say "enough!"?

The media is also not helping at all, and making the problem worse, because they are usually on the government's side when it comes to such issues.

It is hard for me to look at, say, Steubenville[1] (to take just the most publicized of several examples that I've seen in the news lately) and understand how anyone can suggest that accused rapists aren't given a presumption of innocence in our society. The blame heaped on rape victims is often tremendous, even when everyone knows that it happened.

(In the Steubenville case, there were widely shared photos documenting what happened to the young woman in question and at least one video of a guy at the same party laughing about what his friends had done to her, and most of the local community evidently still strongly sided with her rapists.)

[1] http://sports.yahoo.com/news/highschool--steubenville-high-s...

If you look at the wider picture of media coverage, quite the opposite. Reddit started the witch trial pretty much instantly, with some of the most upvoted comments being for life in prison or worse.

Look at the backlash when CNN referred to the accused as boys with a formerly promising future whose lives were now ruined. God forbid you show an ounce of sympathy for accused rapists, because it's impossible to be sympathetic to the victim and not want anyone to go through the hell that the rest of their collective life is going to be.

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

It turned out, however, that each person in the room had either been wrongly accused of a crime or knew someone that had been railroaded by the system. They knew that the prosecution wasn't perfect. My sample size is 6 people, myself included, and we are all fairly educated.

Regarding the media, everyone in the room agreed that the Nancy Graces of the world are actively harming our society...

Granted it's just one anecdote about one jury on one case in North Carolina, but this jury was not prejudiced against the "criminal" from the start. And, if anything, by the end, most of us were biased against the State for being (or appearing to be) some combination of: incompetent (the investigator from the Sheriff's department), abusive / a plain dick ( the prosecutor), and/or dishonest (the cop who had his car broken into).

Her in Norway its can sometime take 10-20 minutes just to get thru to the police if you have an emergency at night. I hope the local SWAT time at least is out chasing real cals and real criminals instead of shutting security guards and raiding the local veterans clubs for some $5 dollar poker fee.

The reality is that crime is falling in the United States and has been for a while (Freakanomics has a decent piece about the relationship of crime and the availability of abortion, with a time lag in the former that showed a correlation with the latter) and I think this paramilitarization is an attempt to fill up budgets and give reasons so that they aren't reduced in the future.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/oakland-sc...

- Obama has a secret "kill list" and has bragged about killing Americans without due process of law.

- We have widespread surveillance of our phones and email.

- The FBI admits that drones are now being used for domestic surveillance.

- The activist Supreme Court is continuing to gut our laws and give Big Business everything they want.

- The TSA is groping and nude scanning everyone, they've never caught a single terrorist, but are expanding beyond airports.

- Half of the inmates at Guantanamo have been cleared for release but are still detained a decade after incarceration.

- Half of America is in poverty.

- The Obama administration is trying to gut the Freedom of Information Act by denying certain doesn't even exist.

- The Supreme Court and various politicians are finding more ways of restricting the right to vote.

But people won't shut the fuck up about Kim and Kanye's baby.

It's 1984 meets Brave New World.

- Continued unconstitutional wars again "terrorism"

- Continued imperialism

- Whistleblower vilification

- Implicit taxation through unbridled govt debt

On Facebook, some friends are even afraid to "like" these stories now.

Most friends just ignore my posts. I can't tell whether they're apathetic, or whether they're suppressing it in fear. Or whether Facebook is throttling my posts using their "spam" algorithm. Maybe I've been throttled by my friends.

Most friends on Facebook post about how ugly or pretty something is, about the food they consume, or they're pushing some agenda of their own, as everybody has them nowadays.

Then you start wondering whether you're just being paranoid. Of course in normal pre-media life, such an inconsistent state of existence would be impossible. Can you imagine everybody around you being happy with ice-cream cones after being abused by yet another "lawful" breach of your liberty by the SWAT team, joined by some "celebrity"?

So it's easy to ignore the signs and live on earning your paycheck. Every day is exactly the same. You can't stay here, keep on moving on.

Dude, how do you even watch sports right now? There's so much work to do.

Yet days go on, everybody is chasing a paycheck or chasing a paper pyramid scheme. Or chasing fame, or chasing tail, anything to help take their minds off the now-ordinary horrid reality.

Some see the problems and can't help but feel that something is wrong, that something is unjust in this world. They're searching for a real purpose, as they stumble with potential solutions that have been tried and have failed.

While we ignore the children.

> I really don't think anyone is the US gov't has malice or ill will or a truly evil side.

Of course it depends on what you call "truly evil", but I believe that in any sufficiently large government (not just US) exist a significant number of sociopaths. It's just that, sociopaths exist, smart sociopaths also exist, and those are qualities that make it easy to find their way into politics. (and on an even more cynical note, a combination of qualities of particularly evil + intelligent + sociopathic, sounds like an even more likely profile to find itself in a position of power)

You have the America you paid for.

the more direct problem that there is no a preponderance of ex-soldiers, weapons, and an entire industrial base massively expanded and looking for civilian roles now everyone can see wars winding down and this kind of thing will be more prevalent.

All the forces mentioned in the article (including "militarisation" are conspiring in a self-reinforcing system)

It's hard to see how to move away ("what you think our boys in blue should not have body armour? APCs?")

That's so daft I don't know where to start. There's no such thing as an overreaction in war.

>the more direct problem that there is no a preponderance of ex-soldiers, weapons, and an entire industrial base massively expanded and looking for civilian roles now everyone can see wars winding down and this kind of thing will be more prevalent.

All these things were true to a much greater extent at the end of the Vietnam war and again at the end of the cold war.

There is when we (a) don't know who the enemies are and (b) live in a post-Geneva world where the international consensus is that yes, there are lines that can never be crossed.

b) We didn't gas or nuke them. In terms of the amount of conventional firepower you can bring to bear on enemy combatants... there's no limit.

Oh, it goes much, much farther than that.

The US Supreme Court has ruled (see Raich) that the federal government is justified in sending an armed raid into a terminally ill old lady's home because she allegedly was growing six marijuana plants under her doctor's supervision & approval for her sole personal use in accordance with state law. The "justified" rationale? Her home-grown state-legal personal-use herbs decreased demand in illegal inter-state commerce, therefor affected inter-state commerce, therefor was subject to federal regulation. I kid you not.

(Consequential tangent: if the court had not ruled that way, a pending related case (Stewart) would have permitted felons to home-build their own machine-guns. The court was faced with bizarre rulings whichever way they went with Raich.)

This is false. The related case would have left machine-gun building a matter of State law. Pure-Federalism is not the only possible form of governance, and it's not the US Constitution's approved form.

We were talking about federal laws and courts. I assume that in a short blog post I'm not expected to address the proliferation of overlapping jursidictional priorities and conflicts. But since you insist on taking the discussion where it wasn't going...

Fact is, majority of US states do permit machinegun ownership, so long as it complies with federal law; thus if federal law permits felons building machineguns (so long as it remains in-state), majority of states would not prohibit it. Now that the discussion has clarified that the remaining prohibitions would occur in a minority of more than four dozen states, and that the federal government would have at least had no say in the matter (as opposed to compulsive legalization in all encompassed jurisdictions), and that the discussion had not been addressing state laws (or if it did, it was that the applicable state ALLOWED the activity), that for most practical purposes the one-sentence summary of the horribly verbose & convoluted verdict in question and its consequences was sufficiently accurate?

(Pardon me. I'm getting increasingly irritated by exchanges that amount to: "X." "X? You're WRONG because you didn't address minor tangential issues Y, Z, P, D, and Q in comprehensive detail, all of which had little to do with the discussion at hand.")

There is hope, but it's going to take more hard work than most people believe to make things significantly better.

Australia has it's own issues on that front, look up Labor's recent proposal of data retention for electronic records or the infamous great firewall of Australia.

And as far as government's with regulatory zeal go, you've hit the motherload.

It's a lovely country (I've spent the last three years in Sydney and really and truly loved it) but don't kid yourself about the level of government intrusion in every. last. bloody. thing. It's maddening.

As I said, Australia isn't perfect by far. But at least the government isn't ignoring its core, founding principles like the US government has been doing the last couple decades.

I did mention nanny state in my original comment. To each their own. :)