If the DDR had this sort of technology, would the Berlin wall still be standing? And, if so, would that be a good thing?
More people DID vote for Hillary. Fat lot of good it's doing us.
I feel like people don't realize the corruption is pretty equal between both candidates/parties, they just toss a few pandering policies here and there to get people angry, or spin things differently.
...That's a negative? Also I didn't think that Obama spent every day at work, at least not from what the news reported.
So what? Even if one accepts the unimaginative premise that all politicians are equally corrupt, there are very clear differences in the policies they enact, so it is a rational decision to make discerning choices between them; the implied suggestion that it's all a wash is very obviously incorrect.
Without delving into the subjective can of worms that underpins "what really matters in the world", none of what you said refutes the fact that it is still rational to make choices since those choices have consequences that matter to citizens. There are other things going on in the world besides whatever it is you believe "really matters", but you're free to abstain from the political process until the time comes when nations stop fighting wars.
Oligarchic forces aren’t just tipping the scales in one direction.
This is a strong indictment of political science education in this country.
First of all, you need to understand that the policy preferences of the voting constituency in any given national election are not strongly correlated to policy results. This is shown convincingly in Benjamin Ginsberg's book, "Do Elections Matter?" I strongly recommend this book - after reading it, you will never again try to explain away an act of government with the same tired logic of, "we get the government we vote for."
It is a difficult-to-deny fact that, in the USA, the government frequently and quietly advances policies which do not appear to be derived from any kind electoral mandate, nor are favored by a substantial portion of the electorate.
But there's a much stronger argument here, and it's about this completely incorrect assertion of yours:
> This is a democracy.
While it's true that, in the modern international parlance, the USA is a democratic state, it is not a democracy in the way that you have used that word here - and our founding documents (and the federalist papers) go out of their way to distinguish our form of government from a democracy as such.
The difference is this: Even if 100% of the voting public votes for a measure that abolishes the freedom to assemble, the government has no authority and no legal standing to trample any individual's rights. This is the essence of a republic: the powers of the government are limited and enumerated and do not change by dint of a given election.
The police presence and tactics at any large assembly in the country since about 1970 has unambiguously been an affront to this right, and the refusal of the courts to recognize this represents one of the most visible abdications of legal reason in modern constitutional law (not the most, but one of the most).
If the government wants to bring sonic cannons and rubber bullets and kettling to protests, it needs to first go through the legal process of amending the constitution to remove the freedom to assemble from the 1st amendment.
Polls and votes and candidates are entirely orthogonal to this matter.
Also, American preferences don't reflect policy. I did a video on a paper/publication that goes over this:
http://fightthefuture.org/videos/does-voting-make-a-differen...
Maine recently voted for ranked voting, and there are groups like Represent.us that are working to enact anti-corruption legislation at the local and state levels; knowing that anything at the Federal level simply won't pass today. We need new officials elected at the lower echelons under anti-corruption rules and for those rules to then propagate up. It's a very uphill battle considering the amount of power and money to prevent it from happening.
This is a tangent, but IRV is horribly broken: it throws your vote away for you, by ignoring all your preferences other than the top choice until it decides that your top choice no longer matters. If you vote A > B > C, IRC ignores that you prefer B over C until it eliminates A. That can cause C to win. That is not a theoretical concern; it's something that you would expect to happen when third parties become more popular.
This is a powerful force for centrism, an important feature of stable democracies - compare australia’s Relatively centrist governmnents and political parties (despite what the stagnation we see at present) VS the vast and expanding gulf between us parties
I absolutely agree that our voting systems are part of the problem; first-past-the-post is broken.
This isn't democracy.
https://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/hillary-clinto...
Before the election she was a Senator, a Secretary of State, a First Lady and about 20 times the Most Admired Woman in America. Her unpopularity was manufactured. It says more about the electorate than the woman.
So it was only after the spokesperson for the Berlin Communist Party announced they would allow free crossing of the wall that people began crossing (en-masse).
Parent Post implied that had the DDR had these sonic weapons the Berlin Wall would not have fallen... as if The DDR would not have had the willingness to put a stop to it if they wanted to. What happened is they announced publicly that they had a change of heart and would let people cross. And so people did.
If you're leading a country as a stong[man] and you want to retain control, it is imperative you use strong tactics --anything less is seen as a weakness by (good or bad) adversaries, and rightly so.
It’s a difficult comparison to North Korea because the regime is not in that situation. The situation is more nuanced than that. I elaborated on possible motivations for using nonlethal force earlier... In the case of North Korea, they also might prefer to not kill citizens who they use for labor.
I wasn’t intending to discuss specific events or political situations, though. I meant to merely touch on the political dynamics of non-lethal crowd control.
It is not clear that if a similar number of people had been organized in another way, the wall would not have fallen.
On Feb 15 2003 a demo against the impending second war in Iraq was so ridiculously larger than anyone (police and organisers included - it was at least a million people) expected that I personally [long story] caused Waterloo Bridge to be closed at about 2pm. The senior police on the day were so understaffed relative to the crowd size that not only did I close a major traffic artery but we volunteers with some previous experience also got called out by the Metropolitan Police on TV for thanks.
Still was a very strange feeling to, after years earlier spending many similar days being condescended at by untrained idiot coppers, suddenly being drafted by their bosses into making major crowd-control strategic decisions when the situation had become incredibly dangerous mostly because those same police had utterly misgauged the turnout().
( On that day having left the org in question some years previously I didn't believe it was going to be that big either. And had turned down their request to help. Then I was in a bank in town a few days before surrounded by ordinary regular nonpolitical people and everybody in the queue joined in a discussion about which tube station they needed to be at for Saturday. Both I and the org were wrong about how big it was going to be by a factor of between 2 and 5.)
It sounds like that depends on the police and protesters being at least nominally willing to cooperate, however grudgingly. That's not always the case. If the police and the local government think that the protesters have no right to be there at all and the only thing preventing open violence is the fear of bad publicity, it's a lot more of a powder keg.
If the protest is about police violence, for example. Have a friendly advance chat with the police about where, when, and how many, and you'll likely show up to find your venue packed with concrete barricades and cops in riot gear to "preserve public safety". You need to get a critical mass of protesters in place with cameras on them before the cops can get fully organized, or they'll shut you down before you can begin.
I was between jobs and had gone to the shops on Oxford Street, noting a commotion and went to have a look. I then noticed that police lines were forming loosely around me, and decided that I needed to be behind them quickly. Very much the right decision. A little later I was looking at a completely deserted Regent Street (unthinkable given how busy it is normally), chatting to the only other bystander. He was a rightwinger's caricature of a "liberal elite"; an English lecturer at a polytechnic dressed in a red corduroy suit. We discussed Marxism. It seemed appropriate under the circumstances.