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Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

Is it a silver lining? I think it's clear that whoever runs any government is free to do whatever they want with total impunity. Dissatisfied citizens complaining on Twitter is not gonna remove any "pro-corpo anti-citizen" politician from power. And if they take it to the streets, they'll just copy the UK's playbook.

Power corrupts, and the more steps removed politicians are from whomever put them in power, the safer they are.

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There's a fair chance that discordant voices in the Parliament will grow increasingly stronger, party affiliations notwithstanding. It wouldn't be the first time that the Parliament has asserted its power over the Commission.

> And if they take it to the streets, they'll just copy the UK's playbook.

What is the UK's playbook in this case?

Call all the dissidents terrorists and arrest/deport them under terrorism law

If it becomes big enough, they can't "deport" everyone. The only silver lining in the US right now is that it is way too big (and too stupid) to pull off this sad excuse of a blitzkrieg on its citizens.

Sure they can. Look how efficiently Germany did it.

I won't say they didn't try their darnedest. But estimations at the very highest but the count at 10 million (this is a very generous number) and Germany had a population of 80 million at the time. 12% is scary, but still something you can overcome.

I really hope I'm not proven wrong, but something of that scale is nearly impossible to pull off in optics with the amount of recording we can do now. The equivalent in America is about 40m Americans being "deported". That's the entire Californian population and then some.

Recording makes it easier because you can get people on your side by making it look heroic and cool - for example, see Is-real. It's famously impossible to make an anti-war movie because explosions and machine guns look cool on-screen.

If it’s a playbook, it’s not used effectively.

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