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Comment by yourepowerless | Hacker News Reader

Simply untrue.

Airports. No fly lists. Mass surveillance. Free speech zones, civil forfeiture, national security letters. Millions of Americans have a security clearance, the government has created a two tier system of those inside and everyone else. Big media is tightly controlled in America, and after TPP and other international treaties the internet will also be even more tightly controlled. Civil liberties have been extensively erroded since 9-11, how can anyone besides a shill or the ignorant not know such basic facts?

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How are free speech zones a "restriction on [...] expression"? Surely they are the very definition on the LACK of restrictions on expression, the physical embodiement of the freedom of expression...!

The OP was using a shorthand expression for the oppression zones surrounding free speech zones. Free speech zones are areas where normal rights apply, implying that their immediate vicinities are special areas where free speech is curtailed. The zones themselves aren't oppressive, but indicate that oppression exists at their borders, and the free speech zones themselves are used to justify the oppression zones.

OK, I get that one could make that inference. And, having read more about them [1] I think I picked the wrong thing to rebut, as they are probably one of the better examples of "restrictions on expression." The others, I still contend, not so much.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone

"You may speak freely, but men with guns will escort you to a cage where you may do so in a place nobody can hear you"

Unfortunately your text largely uses the rhetoric of conspiracy theorists. You even use the word "shill". I don't think reasoned debate is possible with you, because your opinions are so extreme.

The person you're responding to stated very few opinions (essentially "things will get even worse") and some well-known facts. The tone and style of rhetoric is a little heavy but there is absolutely nothing extreme about any of the statements there. An extremist would be someone who chooses to plug their ears and shout and refuse to acknowledge these simple factual statements about American society/government.

Facts were stated, but not the salient one: what proportion of the population experience those things, which is what the comment's parent was talking about. You could have a secret court that decides to kill one person per year, but one person out of a nation of 300M does not a police state make.

TL;DR: A sense of proportion is missing from the factoids.

Well, the fact that the killings are secret means that all we know is that there are nonzero of them since we know there is at least one; if you choose to believe the number is tiny then that's fine but don't act like it's known. That's the very problem behind secret laws/courts/killings; we don't know the scale, we can't. If we interrogate people in court about it to try and find out they will lie under oath and say it's their duty to lie.

And of all the many, many issues brought up you cherry picked the only one which only effects a (likely) small number of Americans so honestly I'm inclined to give that to you since you've let the other 10 or so very serious charges stand. Hooray, you've established that given what's public knowledge it's reasonable to believe we probably don't secretly execute -that many- american citizens without a trial, if that's what 'defending the establishment' looks like then consider the establishment defended.

I think police state is a little much but honestly it's an amorphous term with no meaning other than as a rhetorical tool to evoke some horrible regimes from history. I don't think we are as bad as them, but in particular the post we are talking about is factual and hardly extremist. We don't have to be in Stalin's Russia for there to be some serious problems.

...?

I wasn't literally saying that the said secret courts were matching a quota of one per year. It was an intentionally extreme example to highlight the concept of proportionality.

And seriously, you chide me for playing funny buggers with numbers, then characterise a list of 11 things as 'many, many'? Not to mention that you're implying that the rest of the items are frequently encountered - how many people actually run into no-fly list problems, or have been corralled into a free speech zone?

Finally, I couldn't give a fuck about the Americanness of the victims. I'm not American myself. I think it's a stain on the general American character that so often in discussion about human rights, that whether or not a victim is a US citizen is a salient issue. Why is it less of a moral crime for an unaccountable court to decide to kill a foreigner they don't like? Why is it less of a crime for a tourist to be put on a no-fly list or have their speech curtailed?

You completely misread me if you think I'm of the opinion that the US doesn't have problems. It has serious problems, and a double-helping of them. It also has a lot of awesome aspects. Authoritarianism is on the rise, but the US as it currently stands is not a police state. There is so much hyperbole in US political discourse; everything is polarised and taken to extremes. Someone is a democrat|republican? Now we know everything there is to know about that individual, and they clearly support everything that one party (of only two) does!

The comment I'm arguing against is a typical sky-is-falling polarised position, and doesn't have the shades of gray that the real world does. In police states, people have their movement limited, are afraid to speak out against the government (hardly the case in the US) for fear of prison or similar, and are even afraid of talking to their neighbours due to widespread citizen informant networks. The US is a long way from that - but again, you don't have to be a police state in order to have problems.

Anyone who has ever thought about protesting has been effected by free speech zones -- they have effectively killed protesting. Anyone who has made a public (or not so public) statement critical of the government has been effected by no fly lists -- the threat of a secret list that government officials place you on without justification that seriously damages your life that it is impossible to be removed from is enough to have a chilling effect on every citizen.

And for certain middle-eastern racial groups the no-fly list is actually a pretty widespread concern that effects a lot of people.

10 is not a large number when you are discussing people. It is a huge number when you are discussing serious issues that are independent, each of which requires a response. It is so many most people cannot keep track of them all at once without pen and paper.

And if you are concerned with non-americans (as you should be) every statement in that list is much, much worse from your perspective.

I think the sky is falling, but it's falling slowly. A better analogy is a lobster in a pot of hot but not yet boiling water. If your lobster friend turns to you and says "this water we are in is boiling" do you respond "I took a temperature measurement and technically it's not boiling yet compared to these previous measurements, stop being hysterical" or do you say "you're right, we really need to get worried about this water temperature situation RIGHT NOW" and try to stop it?

Now that sounds quite weak argument: Where exactly goes the line? A quite small minority of DDR or Soviet (speaking of post-Stalin timeframe) 'citizens' actually were jailed or killed. I'd bet that also a very small percent of Chinese population is killed outside the judicial system today, or even within the judicial system's framework of courts and executions, even if they give death sentences very liberally.

It's a question of principle. Either the government and its agencies are held accountable, or they are not. Arbitrary and extra-judicial use of power is still arbitrary and extra-judicial use of power, even if the wielder of that power chooses to use it discreetly. The government is not restricted by the constitution if they can just choose what parts of it they pay lipservice to as they please, even if they do that only seldom and to people who don't matter or "don't deserve our sympathy".

edit. Edited for tone.

It's only a weak argument because you've strawmanned it. I didn't say that the only thing that makes a police state is state killings. My point was about proportion, not mere absolute existence. You wouldn't say that Norway (0.7 murders/100k pop) is the same as Honduras (~90/100k, from memory) in terms of personal safety, simply because murders exist in an absolute sense in Norway.

> Either the government and its agencies are held accountable, or they are not.

Such philosophical absolutes are useless in the actual human experience. You chide me for weak arguments, yet you hold the modern US state and Hitler/Stalin/Mao/Pot's states as morally equal, since they all have extrajudicially killed at least one person and proportionality does not matter. Clearly this is not the case - the world is shades of gray, not black and white absolutes. Some grays are darker than others.

No fly lists are a conspiracy theory? You have got to be a troll.

That post listed a lot of things other than no fly lists...

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