That wasn't non-sequitur, it was a perfect argument rebuffing your comment. No taxes (money taking by force) means no government, means anarchy.
No taxes (money taken by force), simply means people aren't forced to pay to support a system of governance. That doesn't imply anarchy, or necessarily any political system. All it implies is that people are free to do with their money as they please. For all we know, some brilliant person may come along and invent a workable tax-free form of democracy. The fact that you can't separate taxes from governance means you've already been brain-washed.
Society implies rules, laws, no laws means anarchy. Laws imply enforcement, non-enforced rules mean anarchy. In a complex society, more rules are needed, with the complexity, judges and law enforcement cannot be part-time volunteers, but have to be professionals. So someone has to support their lives, while they perform this duty. Either there is one wealthy person supporting this group, which would imply dictatorship or feudalism, or more wealthy people, that would be oligarchy or the cost and the selection of rules is evenly spread around everyone, whcih would be democracy. Unless the society is primitive, there is a need for taxes to preserve democracy. But I'd like to hear your non-brainwashed way to do this. You so far offered no workable alternative.:)
Lack of compassion is the exact problem of the - everybody for themselves, I'll give to charity if I want to help - crowd, they are usually well off and do not understand and relate to the plights of people who are not. It is not about advocating against violence, just violence against them. They are perfectly willing to use violence to keep people hungry, poorly educated and without adequate shelter.
Ok, that's just taking it too far. Sounds like you have some animosity towards the people you describe. Either way, I'll bite. You may very well be right. For all we know, every single person that you describe as being in the "everybody for themselves, I'll give to charity if I want to help" crowd is a mean human being, and only cares for his/her self. Ok, now... From that assumption, you have to jump to justify stealing from them, in order to fulfill your noble(and kind) goal of helping the needy/sick/poor. Whatever compassion you display for one group will become morally worthless if it is at the expense of another.
If you live in the same state, where you setup the rules (minimum wages, business taxes, trade rules, labor migration) in a way that 2/3 of people barely make living and then you enforce such rules, you perpetrate violence that keeps others hungry, sick, dumb and homeless. To me, that is sickening. The only reason, why you have the money in the first place is that you skewed the rules in your own favor. Increasing taxes is not taking the money away, it is the same form of rule making you used to create an environment in which you get the money yourself disproportionatelly compared to others.
There is enough wealth to use less than 50% GDP to have everyone, fed, sheltered, educated and healthy. It was not the case always, but since about middle of 20th century, this number got under 100% and now it is going down each year. In 21st century in 1st world countries it is now under 50%. It is immoral by any standard not to do so if there are the means to it. How you split the remaining 50%, I don't care. Feel free to make rules where one guy gets it all if you want. But as long as there are people starving, sick, homeless and poorly educated, your moral imperative is to do something about it.
It works in Scandinavia, it works mostly in Canada, so there is no way to say it is impossible to do so.
It's a matter of degree. Negatively impacted by taxation usually means: "Cannot afford a new car or bigger house." and on the other hand you've got "starving", "freezing", "dying of disease". I'll save my compassion for those who cannot afford new car until the time, everyone has basic food, shelter, education and health covered. Those are not optional, you have no choice but to address those problems and if you cannot make enough money to address them, you live your whole life as a slave. America says it has abolished slavery, but that is a load of crap, it just got transformed. And you have the audacity to equate freedom with paying less taxes.
That wasn't non-sequitur, it was a perfect argument rebuffing your comment. No taxes (money taking by force) means no government, means anarchy.
Lack of compassion is the exact problem of the - everybody for themselves, I'll give to charity if I want to help - crowd, they are usually well off and do not understand and relate to the plights of people who are not. It is not about advocating against violence, just violence against them. They are perfectly willing to use violence to keep people hungry, poorly educated and without adequate shelter.
It takes 40+ days in Oakland, just to get a police report number after a non-violent crime has been committed. The insurance people thought that I am kidding, until I mentioned the crime happened in Oakland. Oh well. This is one of the problems with property taxes paying for police. If the value of properties is not high, you don't get police, the crime goes up, the property values go further down and so on. Fun cycle.
Not only are your teachers from Reagan era, but their information is obviously as well. RMB has not be pegged to dollar since 2005. Almost a decade. It is currently floating in 1% band around a basket of currencies composed moslty of USD, EUR, JPY, KRW and in smaller quantities the pound, rubble and others. This is not going to create any significant problems in any event, since China has almost full control over RMB trading and in the case I describe, all currencies would lose meaning temporarily, but China would be holding the basket of goods everyone wants and means of production.
Also Fed is very limited in what it can do compared to the Chinesse. For a larger currency / trade wars you would need Act of Congress. Fat chance there.
China is completely self-sufficient except for food. In case of such crash, it can pick and choose who it will get the food from, because they will have what matters, the means of production of everyday necessary consumer goods. The central planing government will help them navigate through any crises much more smoothly, because they can do things that other governments won't be able to easily. What are we exporting that they really need? Boeings? Missiles? Rockets? Movies? Professional Services? Hehe. Yeah, right. While we won't be able to even wipe our asses. I've been through one toilet paper shortage in my life, don't want to go through another:)
If the markets melt down, I would bet my money on BRIC to recover from it as the world collection of superpowers. That's unless US will go the military route I described.
1) You assume that there is some unified entity called "US" that is able to act in its best interest. Clearly not the case. 2) You assume China's won't learn about the plan and if they learn they will not act.
In fact, very likely some Congresscritter would learn about such plan before it could even be executed, use it to criticize the president in public forum. As a response, China would immediately and quietly start to get rid of US dollars en masse, probably using some sort of derivative schema, which would hide it for some time. This would happen before US could even agree on any sort of plan. As it would become apparent in a couple months that China is dumping US dollars, it would simply dump the rest of them in bulk, causing the dollar to lose all the remaining value. Now all the US allies, those who didn't dump US dollars as well, are left holding useless currency and they lost on all the debt they were owed. They will demand US to repurchase all of the US dollars dumped on market to drive the currency back up. This is not gonna happen. US will be facing a lot of angry countries demanding some sort of reparations. All the US foreign trade will cease immediatelly. The fact that US is not self-sufficient in almost any area and the US dollar being worthless will start draining the country of all its natural resources, because that is the only thing they can use to pay for what they need by now. In another 10 years, US would be a shell of a country. At this point US will use their only remaining option and declare war on China and use their military to shore themselves up economically. But at this point US has no allies and no goodwill at the UN. The result is a war of US against the rest of the world.
So good luck with your brilliant economic plan. Your advisers had to be some brilliant thinkers.
You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say, or ever said, can and will be used against you in the court of law, or at any other time at our will.
Please make the calculations like I did and redraw every federal election (president, house, senate) in the past 50 years without counting Texas. Remove its electoral votes from total and remove them from each side. Remove 2 Texas senators. Remove Texas house representatives. Then recalculate results of votes on key laws. Redo votes and nominations on Supreme Court Justices based on the above changes. Review the SC decisions based on this new composition of the court.
Look at the results. Really I urge you, look at them.
Then go and sign the damn petition for Texas to secede from Union based on your own interests.
You should read what I wrote. There is no reason to suspend habeas corpus.They got plenty to bring you in front of judge. But even that won't happen. You will simply be too intimidated by sentence in decades that you will plead down to 2-3 years. Judge will just rubber-stamp it.
You really don't understand the extent to which surveilance suspends all your other rights. Nobody is perfect. Everyone is guilty.They just pick who they prosecute.
Your 4-year old will stick around the home most of the time anyway. Get him a WiFi iPad. Lock it down, put some games on it, call through Facetime. Avoid that Android stuff, it is way too hackable and not nearly as easy to lock down. 4-year olds are crafty IT demi-gods.
You don't seem to understand the purpose of martial law. It is a very obsolete low tech technique used to control population movements at times where the humans with guns need to take a rest and your human informers are largely not around. It is to limit the human resources needed to surveil the population. Martial law is only instituted when the positive effects are outweighing the negative effects of angering and radicalizing the society on which it is applied. For example when a suitable justification can be used to placate 95% of the people it applies to.
Now ask yourself, why would they ever again need to institute martial law, when they can perfectly track and control your movements, spending, associations, through electronic means. Martial law would have only its negative effects and serve none of the positive ones, which are now 1000% more effectively served by total information awareness programs.
Your guns are absolutely meaningless, because nobody will come at you with force. They will come during day, with arrest warrant, since there are enough laws on books for everyone to break one here or there, and enough surveilance for them to know about it. Your guns will be absolutely useless, because they pick you one by one with the direct approval of your neighbors and convict you with some randomly selected 12 non-peers of yours, who will have only carefully selected and filtered 10% of the information about you.
You naive gun guys make me laugh so hard sometimes.
Actually, I agree here. It was time, they could do it and so they did it. Apple is known to make the architecture changes early to have all the advantages firmly baked in before they really need the jump. Doing this lets you move at much faster pace, because you don't need to wait for architecture bumps when you really need them.
As an added bonus, everyone will now talk about 64 bit, their marketing will have a field day with the competition, the competition's marketing team will push for the feature, regardless whether they need it and so they will have Google, Samsung and Microsoft scrambling for a while doing something silly, instead of doing something useful:)
Czech model is even better. You don't need to pass everyone through a generic high school. There is a mandatory K9 education for everyone, then you split to Gymnasium (University prep), Industrial school (Technical College prep with practical skills), Nursing and Economic schools (Nurses and Secretaries) and Vocational schools (2-4 years, specific manual job prep). Any 4 year school ends in state exam and you can use that to enter a University or Technical College, but you might not make it with extra year of prep when coming from one of the vocational schools.
Also, thanks to spliting the Nerds to Gymnasiums (this is so ironic) and the Jocks to Vocational schools, you got almost zero bullying at the K9-K13 level.
Also, the first year of univeristy, college, is generally rolled into the last year of the K13, so the Bachelor degree is 3 years and Masters degree 5 years total. But that makes it easier to switch to a different field in case you find the choice does not fit you in a year or two.
I think that they accounted for everything except for... a redneck with a gun. At this thickness and with the territory this is supposed to go through, I think it will be eactly 2 weeks before the tube becomes a practice target.
1) There was a big difference between the USSR and the Satelites (Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia). I was not talking about USSR, but the better off satelites. There were also the worse off like Romania, etc...
2) During 30's and 50's shit happened. But not during the 80's. I was talking specifically about 80's. I cannot say about any other period.
3) You got me there on the Stalin and gulags, so yeah, you had one narrow case in history where it was still worse than US is today. Yay! Big whoop!
4) Staasi, KGB, or other state police orgs in the satelites were pretty crafty, but even so, the surveilence pales compared to US now. It is many orders of magnitude worse in US by the amount of people covered and the amount of data collected. I give you it was not for lack of trying, but still, the end result was better back then.
BTW I think you guys still drink the US cool-aid. You can oppress people much more effectively without saying that is what you do:
- You can keep claiming that there is a freedom of movement, you don't require passports to move to another town, you let people cross borders freely, but look at the reality? If your economic and social policies prevent them from doing so anyway, what is the difference? 96% of Americans didn't have passport. Most of the poor never leave the state or even town they are born in.
- You can say all you want that you have due process, but as long as the cop can plant 5 grams of meth and get you mandatory 5 year prison sentence if he things you are guilty of whatever else he things you did or just doesn't like you. If he really doesn't like you 50g of meth or half pound of crack will get you mandatory 10 years. If you are an immigrant, there is a 5 year mandatory for lying to immigration officer. I encourage you to try to get through US immigration process without a signle thing that could be constructed as a lie. Really google Mandatory Minimum Sentencing.
- Don't get me started on the so called 'Department of Corrections'
- Same with politics. At least the communists had the guts to stand up and say. We rule here, deal with it. In US you have this false choice, where both parties are in 100% agreement and on the opposite side from you on every single important issue. Really, lets have few more years of political discussion on gay marriage instead of any real topic.
You can keep eating up the propaganda, but no matter how many times they repeat something. If you actually compare the end result, it's horrifying. Even if I would not be right on 2-3 of those 9 points or it would be a wash... think about it. Just the fact I can effectively compare those two gives me chills.
---
Now if you live in parts of California, New England, couple other places, if you are in the upper middle class, making more than 75k a year for family, you know how to keep your head down and live within the system, life is very decent. Much better than it is or was for so many people in so many places. Maybe it's not Scandinavia good, but its very decent. And if that is your experience, you can think... yeah baby, American dream. Well, keep dreaming, pray you don't wake up.
5) If you work two jobs and on the weekends, you cannot even take a sick day, much less vacation, what good is it to you that you theoretically can? Back then we had more time to do with as we pleased and more actual options to do stuff, even though there was restriction on travel west of iron curtain.
6) Seriously, the technology was not there. They might have followed you around, but only handful of people had their phones / homes bugged. The government actually restricted surveilance to only about 0.01% of population.
7) This is hard to compare, a matter of opinion mostly. But for most rural america, the infrastructure is in aweful state. The police services, the social services, the medical stuff. Public transport is aweful. No really, I am in awe on how awful it is!
8) Every state in present or history has and had lower incarceration rates that present day US.
9) The number of laws in US that would send me to jail for high mandatory sentences for just living my life is enormous. Prosecutors can just pick and choose who they want to put in jail. Everybody is guilty of something. At least in there you were clearly a political prisoner and when the revolution came, you could count on your record to get striken down. Not here in US. Everyone pretends it is all legal.
The amount of ways they could absolutely obliterate my life at their slightest whim are uncountable. We're in a time where you become an instant "child molester" or you just disappear or your finances go all permanently wonky, or you get "investigated" and now your neighbors and employer and coworkers all wonder what you've been up to that has raised the interest of The Man.
This is to a dot the same justification my father gave me for joining and staying in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia back in 1985. I was taught early on in my adolescence not to stick the head out, mind my own business and ignore the governemt abuses of power.
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That wasn't non-sequitur, it was a perfect argument rebuffing your comment. No taxes (money taking by force) means no government, means anarchy.
No taxes (money taken by force), simply means people aren't forced to pay to support a system of governance. That doesn't imply anarchy, or necessarily any political system. All it implies is that people are free to do with their money as they please. For all we know, some brilliant person may come along and invent a workable tax-free form of democracy. The fact that you can't separate taxes from governance means you've already been brain-washed.
Society implies rules, laws, no laws means anarchy. Laws imply enforcement, non-enforced rules mean anarchy. In a complex society, more rules are needed, with the complexity, judges and law enforcement cannot be part-time volunteers, but have to be professionals. So someone has to support their lives, while they perform this duty. Either there is one wealthy person supporting this group, which would imply dictatorship or feudalism, or more wealthy people, that would be oligarchy or the cost and the selection of rules is evenly spread around everyone, whcih would be democracy. Unless the society is primitive, there is a need for taxes to preserve democracy. But I'd like to hear your non-brainwashed way to do this. You so far offered no workable alternative. :)
Lack of compassion is the exact problem of the - everybody for themselves, I'll give to charity if I want to help - crowd, they are usually well off and do not understand and relate to the plights of people who are not. It is not about advocating against violence, just violence against them. They are perfectly willing to use violence to keep people hungry, poorly educated and without adequate shelter.
Ok, that's just taking it too far. Sounds like you have some animosity towards the people you describe. Either way, I'll bite. You may very well be right. For all we know, every single person that you describe as being in the "everybody for themselves, I'll give to charity if I want to help" crowd is a mean human being, and only cares for his/her self. Ok, now... From that assumption, you have to jump to justify stealing from them, in order to fulfill your noble(and kind) goal of helping the needy/sick/poor. Whatever compassion you display for one group will become morally worthless if it is at the expense of another.
If you live in the same state, where you setup the rules (minimum wages, business taxes, trade rules, labor migration) in a way that 2/3 of people barely make living and then you enforce such rules, you perpetrate violence that keeps others hungry, sick, dumb and homeless. To me, that is sickening. The only reason, why you have the money in the first place is that you skewed the rules in your own favor. Increasing taxes is not taking the money away, it is the same form of rule making you used to create an environment in which you get the money yourself disproportionatelly compared to others.
There is enough wealth to use less than 50% GDP to have everyone, fed, sheltered, educated and healthy. It was not the case always, but since about middle of 20th century, this number got under 100% and now it is going down each year. In 21st century in 1st world countries it is now under 50%. It is immoral by any standard not to do so if there are the means to it. How you split the remaining 50%, I don't care. Feel free to make rules where one guy gets it all if you want. But as long as there are people starving, sick, homeless and poorly educated, your moral imperative is to do something about it.
It works in Scandinavia, it works mostly in Canada, so there is no way to say it is impossible to do so.
It's a matter of degree. Negatively impacted by taxation usually means: "Cannot afford a new car or bigger house." and on the other hand you've got "starving", "freezing", "dying of disease". I'll save my compassion for those who cannot afford new car until the time, everyone has basic food, shelter, education and health covered. Those are not optional, you have no choice but to address those problems and if you cannot make enough money to address them, you live your whole life as a slave. America says it has abolished slavery, but that is a load of crap, it just got transformed. And you have the audacity to equate freedom with paying less taxes.
That wasn't non-sequitur, it was a perfect argument rebuffing your comment. No taxes (money taking by force) means no government, means anarchy.
Lack of compassion is the exact problem of the - everybody for themselves, I'll give to charity if I want to help - crowd, they are usually well off and do not understand and relate to the plights of people who are not. It is not about advocating against violence, just violence against them. They are perfectly willing to use violence to keep people hungry, poorly educated and without adequate shelter.
So you mean like unix pipe. Where you have those wonderful transformations like sed, grep, cut, sort, etc ? Youngsters.
Modded Funny? Where is the +1. Scary mod?
It takes 40+ days in Oakland, just to get a police report number after a non-violent crime has been committed. The insurance people thought that I am kidding, until I mentioned the crime happened in Oakland. Oh well. This is one of the problems with property taxes paying for police. If the value of properties is not high, you don't get police, the crime goes up, the property values go further down and so on. Fun cycle.
Not only are your teachers from Reagan era, but their information is obviously as well. RMB has not be pegged to dollar since 2005. Almost a decade. It is currently floating in 1% band around a basket of currencies composed moslty of USD, EUR, JPY, KRW and in smaller quantities the pound, rubble and others. This is not going to create any significant problems in any event, since China has almost full control over RMB trading and in the case I describe, all currencies would lose meaning temporarily, but China would be holding the basket of goods everyone wants and means of production.
Also Fed is very limited in what it can do compared to the Chinesse. For a larger currency / trade wars you would need Act of Congress. Fat chance there.
China is completely self-sufficient except for food. In case of such crash, it can pick and choose who it will get the food from, because they will have what matters, the means of production of everyday necessary consumer goods. The central planing government will help them navigate through any crises much more smoothly, because they can do things that other governments won't be able to easily. What are we exporting that they really need? Boeings? Missiles? Rockets? Movies? Professional Services? Hehe. Yeah, right. While we won't be able to even wipe our asses. I've been through one toilet paper shortage in my life, don't want to go through another :)
If the markets melt down, I would bet my money on BRIC to recover from it as the world collection of superpowers. That's unless US will go the military route I described.
1) You assume that there is some unified entity called "US" that is able to act in its best interest. Clearly not the case.
2) You assume China's won't learn about the plan and if they learn they will not act.
In fact, very likely some Congresscritter would learn about such plan before it could even be executed, use it to criticize the president in public forum. As a response, China would immediately and quietly start to get rid of US dollars en masse, probably using some sort of derivative schema, which would hide it for some time. This would happen before US could even agree on any sort of plan. As it would become apparent in a couple months that China is dumping US dollars, it would simply dump the rest of them in bulk, causing the dollar to lose all the remaining value. Now all the US allies, those who didn't dump US dollars as well, are left holding useless currency and they lost on all the debt they were owed. They will demand US to repurchase all of the US dollars dumped on market to drive the currency back up. This is not gonna happen. US will be facing a lot of angry countries demanding some sort of reparations. All the US foreign trade will cease immediatelly. The fact that US is not self-sufficient in almost any area and the US dollar being worthless will start draining the country of all its natural resources, because that is the only thing they can use to pay for what they need by now. In another 10 years, US would be a shell of a country. At this point US will use their only remaining option and declare war on China and use their military to shore themselves up economically. But at this point US has no allies and no goodwill at the UN. The result is a war of US against the rest of the world.
So good luck with your brilliant economic plan. Your advisers had to be some brilliant thinkers.
You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say, or ever said, can and will be used against you in the court of law, or at any other time at our will.
Please make the calculations like I did and redraw every federal election (president, house, senate) in the past 50 years without counting Texas. Remove its electoral votes from total and remove them from each side. Remove 2 Texas senators. Remove Texas house representatives. Then recalculate results of votes on key laws. Redo votes and nominations on Supreme Court Justices based on the above changes. Review the SC decisions based on this new composition of the court.
Look at the results. Really I urge you, look at them.
Then go and sign the damn petition for Texas to secede from Union based on your own interests.
You should read what I wrote. There is no reason to suspend habeas corpus.They got plenty to bring you in front of judge. But even that won't happen. You will simply be too intimidated by sentence in decades that you will plead down to 2-3 years. Judge will just rubber-stamp it.
You really don't understand the extent to which surveilance suspends all your other rights. Nobody is perfect. Everyone is guilty.They just pick who they prosecute.
Your 4-year old will stick around the home most of the time anyway. Get him a WiFi iPad. Lock it down, put some games on it, call through Facetime.
Avoid that Android stuff, it is way too hackable and not nearly as easy to lock down. 4-year olds are crafty IT demi-gods.
You don't seem to understand the purpose of martial law. It is a very obsolete low tech technique used to control population movements at times where the humans with guns need to take a rest and your human informers are largely not around. It is to limit the human resources needed to surveil the population. Martial law is only instituted when the positive effects are outweighing the negative effects of angering and radicalizing the society on which it is applied. For example when a suitable justification can be used to placate 95% of the people it applies to.
Now ask yourself, why would they ever again need to institute martial law, when they can perfectly track and control your movements, spending, associations, through electronic means. Martial law would have only its negative effects and serve none of the positive ones, which are now 1000% more effectively served by total information awareness programs.
Your guns are absolutely meaningless, because nobody will come at you with force. They will come during day, with arrest warrant, since there are enough laws on books for everyone to break one here or there, and enough surveilance for them to know about it. Your guns will be absolutely useless, because they pick you one by one with the direct approval of your neighbors and convict you with some randomly selected 12 non-peers of yours, who will have only carefully selected and filtered 10% of the information about you.
You naive gun guys make me laugh so hard sometimes.
and nobody was at all suspicious? Right!
No.
Working for NSA is like working for SD6 :)
Actually, I agree here. It was time, they could do it and so they did it. Apple is known to make the architecture changes early to have all the advantages firmly baked in before they really need the jump. Doing this lets you move at much faster pace, because you don't need to wait for architecture bumps when you really need them.
As an added bonus, everyone will now talk about 64 bit, their marketing will have a field day with the competition, the competition's marketing team will push for the feature, regardless whether they need it and so they will have Google, Samsung and Microsoft scrambling for a while doing something silly, instead of doing something useful :)
I'm so disappointed, this was not first used on the researcher's girlfriend to give himself a better handjob :)
Czech model is even better. You don't need to pass everyone through a generic high school. There is a mandatory K9 education for everyone, then you split to Gymnasium (University prep), Industrial school (Technical College prep with practical skills), Nursing and Economic schools (Nurses and Secretaries) and Vocational schools (2-4 years, specific manual job prep). Any 4 year school ends in state exam and you can use that to enter a University or Technical College, but you might not make it with extra year of prep when coming from one of the vocational schools.
Also, thanks to spliting the Nerds to Gymnasiums (this is so ironic) and the Jocks to Vocational schools, you got almost zero bullying at the K9-K13 level.
Also, the first year of univeristy, college, is generally rolled into the last year of the K13, so the Bachelor degree is 3 years and Masters degree 5 years total. But that makes it easier to switch to a different field in case you find the choice does not fit you in a year or two.
https://www.google.com/search?q=vertical+messenger+bag&tbm=isch
I think that they accounted for everything except for ... a redneck with a gun. At this thickness and with the territory this is supposed to go through, I think it will be eactly 2 weeks before the tube becomes a practice target.
1) There was a big difference between the USSR and the Satelites (Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia). I was not talking about USSR, but the better off satelites. There were also the worse off like Romania, etc...
2) During 30's and 50's shit happened. But not during the 80's. I was talking specifically about 80's. I cannot say about any other period.
3) You got me there on the Stalin and gulags, so yeah, you had one narrow case in history where it was still worse than US is today. Yay! Big whoop!
4) Staasi, KGB, or other state police orgs in the satelites were pretty crafty, but even so, the surveilence pales compared to US now. It is many orders of magnitude worse in US by the amount of people covered and the amount of data collected. I give you it was not for lack of trying, but still, the end result was better back then.
BTW I think you guys still drink the US cool-aid. You can oppress people much more effectively without saying that is what you do:
- You can keep claiming that there is a freedom of movement, you don't require passports to move to another town, you let people cross borders freely, but look at the reality? If your economic and social policies prevent them from doing so anyway, what is the difference? 96% of Americans didn't have passport. Most of the poor never leave the state or even town they are born in.
- You can say all you want that you have due process, but as long as the cop can plant 5 grams of meth and get you mandatory 5 year prison sentence if he things you are guilty of whatever else he things you did or just doesn't like you. If he really doesn't like you 50g of meth or half pound of crack will get you mandatory 10 years. If you are an immigrant, there is a 5 year mandatory for lying to immigration officer. I encourage you to try to get through US immigration process without a signle thing that could be constructed as a lie. Really google Mandatory Minimum Sentencing.
- Don't get me started on the so called 'Department of Corrections'
- Same with politics. At least the communists had the guts to stand up and say. We rule here, deal with it. In US you have this false choice, where both parties are in 100% agreement and on the opposite side from you on every single important issue. Really, lets have few more years of political discussion on gay marriage instead of any real topic.
You can keep eating up the propaganda, but no matter how many times they repeat something. If you actually compare the end result, it's horrifying.
Even if I would not be right on 2-3 of those 9 points or it would be a wash... think about it. Just the fact I can effectively compare those two gives me chills.
---
Now if you live in parts of California, New England, couple other places, if you are in the upper middle class, making more than 75k a year for family, you know how to keep your head down and live within the system, life is very decent. Much better than it is or was for so many people in so many places. Maybe it's not Scandinavia good, but its very decent. And if that is your experience, you can think... yeah baby, American dream. Well, keep dreaming, pray you don't wake up.
I lived there then, I live here now.
5) If you work two jobs and on the weekends, you cannot even take a sick day, much less vacation, what good is it to you that you theoretically can? Back then we had more time to do with as we pleased and more actual options to do stuff, even though there was restriction on travel west of iron curtain.
6) Seriously, the technology was not there. They might have followed you around, but only handful of people had their phones / homes bugged. The government actually restricted surveilance to only about 0.01% of population.
7) This is hard to compare, a matter of opinion mostly. But for most rural america, the infrastructure is in aweful state. The police services, the social services, the medical stuff. Public transport is aweful. No really, I am in awe on how awful it is!
8) Every state in present or history has and had lower incarceration rates that present day US.
9) The number of laws in US that would send me to jail for high mandatory sentences for just living my life is enormous. Prosecutors can just pick and choose who they want to put in jail. Everybody is guilty of something. At least in there you were clearly a political prisoner and when the revolution came, you could count on your record to get striken down. Not here in US. Everyone pretends it is all legal.
The amount of ways they could absolutely obliterate my life at their slightest whim are uncountable. We're in a time where you become an instant "child molester" or you just disappear or your finances go all permanently wonky, or you get "investigated" and now your neighbors and employer and coworkers all wonder what you've been up to that has raised the interest of The Man.
This is to a dot the same justification my father gave me for joining and staying in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia back in 1985. I was taught early on in my adolescence not to stick the head out, mind my own business and ignore the governemt abuses of power.