Or, to simply stop traveling to countries that refuse to play nice with the rights of foreigners. The whole idea that this sort of thing is even anywhere near acceptable behavior revolts me.
Or, to simply stop traveling to countries that refuse to play nice with the rights of foreigners. The whole idea that this sort of thing is even anywhere near acceptable behavior revolts me.
Not because I have something particular to hide, but as a gay person in a hostile world I have learned to care about my privacy.
Not a huge loss for me, not a huge loss for the US, but it accumulates.
Asia and Eastern Europe are off the list for me too. China is willing to kidnap people out of Thailand [1]; people being arrested over political tweets [2]; Russia can poison people [3], shoot them [4], or have them accused of fake crimes[5].
I really hope the U.S. never comes close to this and hope I see this trend reversed in my lifetime. But people should be aware that it can happen in a modern society and is already happening in large parts of the world.
[1] http://time.com/4371283/hong-kong-bookseller-china-detention...
[2] http://mashable.com/2016/11/26/zunar-arrested-malaysia/#AHwL...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/06/world/europe/russia-vladi...
[4] http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-unaccountable-de...
[5] http://www.dw.com/en/russian-court-finds-alexei-navalny-guil...
The US has kidnapped people from Italy, and assassinated its own child citizens. The US (and most western countries) are already close to this, it's just that most citizens felt they were immune up till now.
This kind of overreach should always be opposed, no matter who it is done to, or where, because once it is acceptable to assassinate people with missiles, kidnap opponents, or record everyone's digital life whenever information crosses the border, all it takes is the wrong sort of people to take power and all the mechanisms are in place to control and oppress entire populations.
Less humans kill other humans now than ever in the past. I wonder if the media is to blame for the fear mongering?
https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-condit...
The recent rise in nationalism after the 2008 crash is eerily similar to post 29. Globalisation has caused discontents, even if they are unjustified and the solutions proposed by demagogues are absurd and damaging, they appeal to some. Re the media, no I don't think so, humans are tribal and not very rational.
Really? Try talking to locals there not just about gays but also about refugees or even gypsies...
People aren't necessarily against refugees, per se, but more against the idea of accepting anyone who declares himself to be a refugee, without checking that he is, in fact, one. Things are made worse by a few "refugee" cases where the "refugees" preferred to move away and live as illegal immigrants in Germany than as legal refugees in Hungary or Romania (a status which includes state aid, as meager as it may be in these countries).
The third point is really complicated and it does include discrimination but also a lack of trust and respect for the others from both sides. A lot of it has to do with the difficulties of integrating a very tight-knit nomadic culture into a modern, sedentary society where property rights are clear and respected.
Well, the US can drone-kill people (including bystanders irrelevant to the primary non-tried target), abduct them from all over the world and transport them with no trial to Guantanamo, allows cops to shoot innocent people (e.g. for walking while black) at a record rate (compared to even developing world dictatorship standards) without much repercussions, and let's not get started with people forced to go to jail with BS accusations and plea deals or stuff like "three strikes" that can put people on life for ...stealing a pizza thrice.
Just because these people are not all local citizens or white, doesn't mean they are not wronged.
And all that's under Obama, so not much hope for those getting better under Trump...
Starting with "Well," suggests it somehow negates my point though.
I think "Also" would be more appropriate, which kind of acknowledges the problems in other countries I cited while also pointing out very real weaknesses in America's justice system.
This might seem pedantic, but the common reply I see to "this country does bad stuff" reduces to "well this country does bad stuff too!" It's not a productive argument because it tries to deflect attention and normalize the actions in question. Instead, we should be focusing on how to address all of these issues, because they definitely exist.
I think it's valid to see things its perspective though, because people who say "we shouldn't turn it into 'yes, but X does this too'" are often using it as an excuse to continue to point fingers only towards one side, and not even the worst acting one...
Can you explain how exactly the U.S. has yet to "come close to" your list? Your post created the very "us vs them" separation you now claim to disagree with. The child post was fairly clearly just answering that statement
And while we're talking deflection, you are the one who took a thread about the US border and its impact on travellers and made it about civil rights abuses by the rest of the world. Yes, they are all important; no, it is usually not possible to solve them all at once.
Show me a similar incident to the Chinese booksellers thing in America. Or anyone being killed because they represented the political opposition. Miles away.
But that's not even my point. My point is: read the links listed; I'm not traveling to those countries; I hope the world becomes less crazy. That's all!
> And while we're talking deflection, you are the one who took a thread about the US border and its impact on travellers and made it about civil rights abuses by the rest of the world
Huh? I posted some links above. People should read them and make up their own mind, in addition to the OP. It's not a "one or the other" kind of thing, not sure why it would be.
It's not pedantic if you care about being rational. This act is a common logical fallacy called the "tu quoque fallacy": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque
Why is this a fallacy?
Suppose country A is accused of doing something bad. It's logically irrelevant to that question whether some other country B also has done something bad.
To see it more clearly, take the same fallacy on an individual level. Person A is accused of murdering someone. Is it a valid defense to say "Well, my neighbor Person B also murdered someone, therefore it's OK that I did"? No, of course not. It's totally irrelevant whether someone else -- even the accuser -- has also murdered someone.
Yet making this fallacious counter-accusation is often effective in terms of emotional (i.e. irrational) manipulation of the audience, particularly when they are predisposed against B in some way.
Even if I've never posted anything on FB that they'd find objectionable, it's possible someone I know from the US posted privately ('close friends only', for example) "Man I wish someone would put a bullet in Trump's head", feeling as though it was a safe place to vent. Suddenly they're getting investigated by the secret service, and possibly deported, because I gave up my Facebook login because "I have nothing to hide".
This is ridiculously insidious. For every one person whose Facebook info they get, they get to collect previously inaccessible data on potentially hundreds of people, none of whom agreed to share their data with the government, or even knew that it was happening. With one Facebook login the government can start building profiles on hundreds of people, and with each successive login that net expands.
I do believe that immigration services look at your account exclusively for their goals of evaluating immigration. They ask you to unlock your account because for them it's objectively simpler to ask that information from you than to get it from the other government agencies that have that information but won't disclose it because formally they shouldn't have it. There's no "the government", it is an amalgamation of many organizations that have conflicting goals and don't coordinate, so it's reasonable to expect that "the government" has some information and at the same time "the government" (i.e. other parts of it) don't have it and need to request it from you or do without.
s/foreigners/citizens/
i.e. everyone.
I'm a Canadian Citizen. When I enter Canada from abroad, they claim the same rights as the US CBP.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/alain-philippon-cb...
The USA has a long history of being nasty to Canadians on the suspicion of them going there to work. Similar things happening to US visitors to Brazil and several other places.
Having a Dutch passport this never was a problem for me when returning to Canada, even though I was actually working there.
If you enter on a tourist visa (or visa waiver, whose conditions are usually the same as tourist visa) they want to be sure you aren't committing visa fraud and planning to work. That's what causes the grilling.
So yeah, a while ago the US started requiring electronic fingerprints from Brazilian visitors (and everyone else I think?) so that's why Brazil started requiring that from US visitors.
It's fun (in a semi-vengeful way) to submit, say, Americans to the same level of scrutiny they apply to Brazilians. But it also means you're creating artificial barriers against making the country a more popular tourism destination. People in some countries are just not used to having to go throw all these hops to get to visit a country, just because they don't have to; when they learn that they have to go to a consulate in person, in select cities, stand in line for hours, go through an interview, and pay about $150 or so for the right to visit the country, they're quick to change their mind and just pick some other destination that is either easier or that allows you to do all of that online.
The country is basically making it difficult for people to bring you money.
This policy hurts Brazil more than it hurts anyone else.
To me it's more about an ineffective, vain attempt to show power than anything else.
Going back to the US (even as a non-citizen!) I usually just got a "Welcome home!".
After a bit of A/B testing, it seems to have been "older woman traveling alone with a fancy watch" that was flagging her. Without the watch, the problems went away.
Why are you here? A wedding. Where are you staying? 2400 Motel out on Kingsway. Oh, a site of known criminal activity.
I rolled my eyes. The bride chose it because it was an X-Files filming location.
If you enter on a tourist visa (or visa waiver, whose conditions are usually the same as tourist visa) they want to be sure you aren't committing visa fraud and planning to work. That's what causes the grilling.
See linked page for advice from actual lawyers.
https://bccla.org/2016/08/what-happens-if-you-dont-provide-y...
Which countries would those be? As far as I know, every country (or quasi-country, such as the EU) asserts the right to carry out a full inspection of anything crossing its border.
In fact it sounds more like they generally target specific individuals based on their politics or whatever red flag gets thrown on them from the system. That's certainly dangerous in a way, but in essence harmless to the vast majority of us.
Do you know how that one ended?
Not to make light of this issue, it's a serious matter, but don't be ridiculous.
The post I was replying to was basically a vague reference to creeping fascism/nazism, and then implying that the same is happening in the US and that we're on the brink of descending into nazism. It's stupid sophomoric comparison to make.
Yea we should fight back against this type of legal harassment. Sure it's similar to how nazis once operated. But what does that comparison really provide in this situation other than throwing FUD onto it. Do you really think the US is about to rise into the Fourth Reich? I mean seriously... even if you feel like Trump is the antichrist, this policy undoubtedly came into effect during the Bush/Obama years when laptops and cell phones became ubiquitous.
In the 1960s you could decide that you'd done enough and move to a new city across the country and get a fairly fresh start. Now any trivial interaction with "the system" would get you red flagged at every subsequent interaction.
The cops "randomly" stop an acquaintance of mine fairly regularly and give him much more crap ever since one of his kids got a misdemeanor speeding ticket (threshold is 20-over which is typical traffic speed in some places) in that vehicle with those plates.
>think the US is about to rise into the Fourth Reich?
Not literally but people have diverse sets of political beliefs. It's not a stretch to imagine individual groups that are for/against something being persecuted. Imagine how civil rights activists or the pro-socialist hippies would be treated today.
Obama prosecuted more journalists and whistle blowers than any president in history.
And we're not talking about turning into Nazi Germany. We're talking about why government crimes against their own people, especially for political speech, should never be allowed to happen because they can result in worse outcomes than you would expect.
And Germany didn't turn up Nazi overnight. It's always a slippery slope to prosecute people for political purposes. What happens in Canada with it misuse of human rights tribunal and what happens in many other western countries where the social climate currently is that everyone considers to be okay to suppress free speech because someones feelings are hurt. It is not a human right to be able to silence uncomfortable opinions, yet it is exactly what we see in these phenomenon of social justice warriors only there is no justice there to be made. This entitlement and the need to control of others is actually what scares me the most. You see it everywhere, people in uniforms and people in academia specially social sciences.
Read history outside of school, might learn a thing or two.
The same could be said about the proportion of innocent people who would be jailed without the presumption of innocence. Yet I still support the presumption of innocence, even though I personally have never needed it. It makes me feel safer and allows me to trust and cooperate with the authorities.
They can ask you to unlock the phone and show the IMEI number when suspicious of theft, but that's about it.
Source: friend of mine worked there.
Always know where the manufacturer printed the IMEI, so you don't have to unlock the phone in front of police.
The only vendor that actively prevents the usage of stolen phones is Apple, because the owner can remote-lock it even if the phone gets wiped via iCloud.
The ideal way would be if network operators cooperated by maintaining a list of "supposedly stolen" IMEI codes and alerted police if a matching phone tries to log in into the network.
This is going to hurt America quite a bit by the time it has run its course.
This is also very rare at the US border, as it says in the article. Most countries in the world are far more aggressive about searching you, and even actively demanding bribes to let you in.
The free flow of immigrants has its risks and unless these activists stop poisoning the well then things will continue to be unpleasant.