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Comment by AlecSchueler | Hacker News Reader

So they feel that it's ok because there is no expectation of privacy in public places? Could I really choose someone and follow them every time they left their home? Or is there also an element of it being indiscriminate at play? This is so ridiculous and outrageous to me.

I'm a European myself but it sounds like everything America was set up on the hope of avoiding. What about all those people who advocate gun rights? Why aren't they up on arms, either metaphorically or even literally, about this?

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Guns rights advocates are less likely to live in cities, so this doesn't affect them. Besides, the people in cities are the ones who commonly vote to take away gun rights, so it could be a case of "this is what they get for continually voting to take rights away".

I disagree with your first part (gun rights advocates live everywhere, even if they're not as vocal), but I do agree with your second part (you reap what you sow).

This is an effect of slowly giving up rights over the years.

Which rights have been given up, specifically? Clearly not gun rights.

The 4th.

Given up? Perhaps not. Greatly restricted? Definitely.

Well, seeing as how the second amendment says "shall not be infringed", it could be argued that any law restricting arms ownership is in violation. In fact, you'll find many folks with that opinion.

> What about all those people who advocate gun rights? Why aren't they up on arms, either metaphorically or even literally, about this?

They probably are, but militias planning anti-government behavior don't tend to post to social media, and such groups tend to get banned or shadowbanned by social media anyway.

What about all those people who advocate gun rights? Why aren't they up on arms, either metaphorically or even literally, about this?

They are largely suburban and rural whites. Police overreach largely impacts suburban and urban minorities. They aren't necessarily racist, they just don't see the impact.

The political right has always (at least in my 30 years of paying attention) had a strong authoritarian tilt as well.

I don’t think it is fair to spin privacy into a left right issue here. Both parties have a pretty terrible track record. The program is self imposed, so if urban voters don’t want the program, they can vote to stop it. Literally not the jurisdiction of the rural folk

Absolutely, I was responding to the question about gun-rights advocates often supporting surveillance. That group in particular is largely rural/suburban/white, while those impacted by police/government surveillance are largely urban.

I would argue that most surveillance supporters are middle and upper class urbanites, and specifically want to surveile lower class urbanites.

Regarding the gun owners, my intuition is that they would be more privacy minded than the average American, but I didn't find any information on a quick search.

Sadly, most of the gun rights supporters in the US seem to fall in the partisan camp that unwaveringly supports the police and the military, no matter how many civil and human rights those organizations seem to infringe. (It's confusing to me, too.)

(An aside: Posting a similar wonder as you just did recently got me permbanned from Twitter after 12 years of daily use and ~10k followers. You're apparently not even allowed ask questions about guns and cops in the same sentence over there, even if it's not your own guns you're asking about. No response whatsoever to support/appeal inquiries. It's toast.)

The other team, they make noises about human rights and equal protection, but have no practical means to induce the police to comply, due to decades of having voted in those states to deny themselves even optional/opt-in access to the types of weapons the police carry in every single police vehicle just meters from them on a daily basis.

Meaningful nonviolent physical resistance in most of the more populated places in the US is thus now totally infeasible, as we have learned in places like Ferguson or New York City as the police are significantly better armed than any group that they wish to subdue, legally or illegally. (For a long time I thought this was a new development until eventually learning about Kent State when I was in my mid 20s.)

For example, during the 2008 RNC in New York just before W's second term, the NYPD were able to illegally imprison several thousand peaceful political protesters for a whole weekend in temporary concentration camps with total impunity due to this physical power imbalance, which resulted a few years later in an amazing $800M civil rights violation settlement (paid for out of tax money, of course; none of the police who orchestrated the illegal mass kidnapping suffered any negative consequences).

At higher levels, both "sides" are fully in agreement about the total commitment to continuous war and widespread illegal domestic surveillance. It seems that there are absolutely zero available political choices for "no widespread unchecked surveillance, no forever war" in the US any longer.

...and so the problem continues unabated.

Do you have a record of the original tweet by any chance?

I do not. I'd share it from memory but I think it may perhaps be offtopic for HN and I'm tired of being banned from services I use every day as a result of growing arbitrary political censorship online.

I'm happy to send it to you personally; shoot me a mail.

If I ever get any sort of confirmation from Twitter that that's what caused the suspension, I am going to print some shirts for myself that say "Banned from Twitter for wondering why the Americans no longer shoot at the concentration camp guards."

That sounds like you're inciting violence which is an easy way to get banned. I know it's not your intention but it's clear why Twitter decided to ban if that's accurate

I think you should probably refrain from making assumptions (accusations?) like that without having the actual content in question to evaluate. You could easily be totally incorrect. Language is tricky.

Asking questions or wondering about why domestic terrorism and/or anti-government actions are or are not occurring during large developing political events involving militaries and unprecedented economic hardships is not “inciting violence”, it is a discussion of the political situation in a country.

It’s censorship of peaceful, political discussion.

Turns out, I wasn’t even entirely off base. The very thing I was asking about is a real phenomenon:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Tacoma_attack

I still think your experience is so far outside other people's interaction with these services, that i can only guess you made some kind of threat to hurt someone. Maybe you didn't perceive it that way. Asking if the us military did something potentially bad seems ordinary. If you can't remember what you posted and you don't want to try to recreate your comment, then no one has any information to evaluate whether it was an over-reaction. Do you get that?

I was considering being done replying to this thread two replies ago, but I find it necessary in light of these (baseless) accusations to post a final time.

For the record, to be absolutely unambiguous: I did not threaten anyone.

"sounds like" and "if that's accurate"

Twitter rarely bans people for literally no reason, and it's typically safe to assume something happened to trigger it, even if unintentional.

I agree, I could be totally wrong. Hence my hedging language

There’s a misrepresentation here that comes from the easy mental mistake that all ‘those’ people think the same thing.

Yes, there are lots of gun owners whose beliefs are pro authoritarian.

There are also lots of gun owners who are more anti-establishment.

We don’t have two or three monolithic groups in this country, although it seems many people would like to portray it that way for whatever reason.

We have an insanely diverse patchwork of non-exclusive groupings and categories with a wild array of beliefs, customs, and behaviors.

> For example, during the 2008 RNC in New York just before W's second term

You might want to fact check your data there. W’s second term started several years before 2008.

Oops, you're right. It was 2004, not 2008.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Republican_National_Conve...

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