161–170 of 321 posts
We need a public watch list of companies who fire, or in any way discipline, employees on this watch list.
Easier, and similarly effective: Next time you are working with that person you know well in HR, innocently ask if they've heard of this, and raise the obvious concern.
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Getting rid of social security or making our healthcare system even worse won't do anything to shrink the FBI. A stronger welfare state is compatible with considerably less out-of-control police than we have in the United States; witness anywhere in northern Europe. If you don't want people to laugh at your principles, maybe don't immediately turn a conversation about the security state to an argument that you should…
For the life of me, I can't find any mention of social security, health care, or taxes in GP's comment.
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I've watched a lot of these protests-turned-riot and you don't see innocent people on the sidelines being hauled away. You hardly see any of the violent and destructive agitators being hauled away. I don't think the scenario you're describing is realistic whatsoever.
You've watched a lot of them, but you've never seen or heard of "kettling"? Odd. I have seen it and experienced it. (I'm also curious what instances of protests-turned-riot you're referring to. The US hasn't had many riots, in any meaningful sense, recently. Do you mean someone smashing a window?)
There's the riot at NYU where more violent agitators showed up to prevent Gavin McInnes from speaking, where he was attacked with pepper spray.
On the night at Berkeley, a woman wearing a Trump hat was pepper sprayed while giving an interview for a news network.
These are the facts.
Call it what you want, but this is violence and destruction with the intent to silence people with an opposing point of view. It's not civil disobedience or protesting and more like terrorism.
As for your other question about whether or not I've heard of kettling, I have. The fact that it exists does not convince me that innocent bystanders need to fear that. In instances where you may have seen that, such as the inauguration of the president, charges were brought against some of those individuals. Which suggests the goal wasn't to arrest bystanders.
By the way, I don't know if you watched that one live or after it took place but there was a ton of chaos. People were throwing objects like glass bottles at the police in riot gear. Again, many of the people were dressed in all black with masks on. If you want a very real problem to attack, that's one to focus on.
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> let rich & corporations get loose This belief only causes the state to grow. It inflates politicians to the point where they are worth buying, so they are bought. They then make laws that hurt their competition and help their corporation. They make laws that make it extremely difficult to ever start a business to compete to begin with. So the corporations get bigger, and have more to buy the politicians with. And t…
So instead Koch brothers are just completely unchecked? No thanks. What we have is broken, but to remove the state is to allow the US to become a 3rd world country where the mega rich get richer, federal parks land is auctioned off, and pollution remains unchecked. We have enough examples of failed states world wide to understand that rivers turning pink is what happens when you don't have laws for the people.
But that still happens anyways...?
Beautiful - Go to protest against Trump (or even to document it [1]) - get arrested and charged with "Rioting", "Disturbing the Peace" or my most favorite "Resisting Arrest[2]" - get an Arrest Record - Get fired immediately thanks to RAP BACK - Charges get dropped. Rinse and repeat. Welcome Absolute Fascism. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/jan/24/journalists-ch... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_con…
We've already lost when an arrest is equivalent to a conviction. Although, in some ways, we've been here for a while. Maybe less-so for individuals but for corporations, whom the law generally treats with a degree of "individual" rights (IANAL), it's long been that an indictment is worse than a conviction. After an indictment, clients turn away -> revenue flees -> shutters. What's scary is an indictment is, in theory…
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Shrink the state = let rich & corporations get loose. You want to replace kind of power that you got influence on and some expectations about public information access with totally "private" power that you got no control about. That is special kind of stupid. Thank you but no thank you.
> let rich & corporations get loose This belief only causes the state to grow. It inflates politicians to the point where they are worth buying, so they are bought. They then make laws that hurt their competition and help their corporation. They make laws that make it extremely difficult to ever start a business to compete to begin with. So the corporations get bigger, and have more to buy the politicians with. And t…
The growth of government is a direct response to constant abuses at the hands of smaller local government, corporations, and wealthy individuals.
I have never heard a proposal for "shrink the state" that manages to address that underlying truth. If there isn't an existing avenue to achieve power then power-hungry people will create one. We had the closest thing to a libertopia ever in the 1870-1929 USA. It was a disaster, resulting in multiple financial panics, thousands of deaths from tainted food, huge private interventions to seize control of entire countries, etc. Small towns were often run like a personal fiefdom with disregard for the law; if you were the target the sheriff would just lock you up and the judge might hand down a sentence with barely a show trial. In many ways the growth of the federal government has been a huge boon to cleaning up local politics and did-entangling wealthy influence.
Not to mention that scale matters. No pollution regulation only works when there are relatively few factories doing the polluting. Without the EPA we'd have the poisoned waters and dangerous air that China has.
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Getting rid of social security or making our healthcare system even worse won't do anything to shrink the FBI. A stronger welfare state is compatible with considerably less out-of-control police than we have in the United States; witness anywhere in northern Europe. If you don't want people to laugh at your principles, maybe don't immediately turn a conversation about the security state to an argument that you should…
For the life of me, I can't find any mention of social security, health care, or taxes in GP's comment.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There is a group who have proposed a solution to this problem for decades: Shrink the state. And what group is that exactly? It sure as hell isn't either of the two major US parties and their assorted enablers.
Ron Paul has been arguing for this for his entire political career.
There is a group who have proposed a solution to this problem for decades: Shrink the state. Until people stop believing that any effort to do so will result in everyone literally dying in the street, the state will grow. Until people's first impulse towards someone doing something they don't like ceases to be "there ought to be a law", the state will grow. Until people stop demanding that laws must affect the entire…
Maybe there should be readings of the 2nd amendment more like "the ability to form militias/bear arms" ~ "the ability to create governments within government". Like less dystopic versions of burbclaves from Snow Crash, although that spells out some problems from the get-go, I guess.
edit: I mean, we could reconfigure the military to be a peace/engineer's/etc. corps type of merito/techno/plutocratic institution, by the people for the people, composed of ordinary people but with a true pledge for the protection of individuals' life and with an efficient structure for the innovation of ordinary life, outside of wasteful stockholder-politics/investor corporatism.