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Has the US become the type of nation from which you have to seek asylum?

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Re: Has the US become the type of nation from which you have to seek asylum?

#121

Post by jpdoctor »

newbie12 wrote: post #12
_airh wrote: post #8

It is strange that the same country which cherishes its 'right to bear arms' on the grounds that it gives them a level of protection that the government is unable to provide is 'happy' to build the infrastructure which allows the same government to peek into their lives. On the one hand, we don't trust the government with the basics (physical security). On the other, we trust them with information we don't want our p…

The right to bear arms is also, explicitly, a protection against tyranny BY the government. Thomas Jefferson: ""When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."

> Thomas Jefferson: ""When governments fear the people, there is liberty.

Looks like false attribution according to wikiquote. (Why do people feel the need to use proof by authority anyway? Either a thing is right, or it is insightful, but attributing it to dead 18th century rebels does not bolster the case.)

________________________________

When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. Falsely attributed to Thomas Jefferson; first attributed to Jefferson in Gyeorgos C. Hatonn, It's All in the Game: Butterflies, Mind Control--The Razor's Edge‎ (1994), p. 214. A 1912 issue of The American Anti-socialist attributes the re-ordered form, "Where the people fear the government you have tyranny. Where the government fears the people you have liberty", to John Basil Barnhill.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Second_Amendment_to_the_United_...

Re: Has the US become the type of nation from which you have to seek asylum?

#122

Post by dspillett »

julianozen wrote: post #98

Serious question: Now that he's a US citizen on foreign soil, and an enemy of the state, is it now legal to call a drone strike against him?

Not quite by my understanding. He would need to be in an area officially classed as a war zone for that.

They could send them to surveil and intimidate him though, but there are less costly ways to do that which won't upset the people in the country he is currently living in nearly as much.

Re: Has the US become the type of nation from which you have to seek asylum?

#123

Post by alan_cx »

I believe that in the UK, and probably the EU, you cant extradite people, I think including Americans, if there is a chance the death penalty will be given. Not 100% sure, but I think that is the case.

So, in some ways, the US has been a place form which one can seek asylum for ages. Or at the very least, be very careful in considering extradition application. Assuming the US government bothers with the legal inconvenience and doesn't just sent the CIA in to render them.

Re: Has the US become the type of nation from which you have to seek asylum?

#124

Post by eli_gottlieb »

DannoHung wrote: post #74
epsylon wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But non-US citizens can liberally have their basic human rights denied. 12 years after 9/11. That's the land of the free for you. (Looking at how Bradley Manning was treated even shows that US citizens aren't treated much better. Being denied a lawyer and confined to solitary cells for months is not much different from torture.)

Manning was a member of the Army. You give up a significant number of rights and freedoms as a US citizen when you become a member of the armed forces. Which is not to say that it is right, but that it is legal.

At this point, American law is completely corrupt. Who gives a damn about it? What they've done to Bradley Manning isn't right, at all.

Re: Has the US become the type of nation from which you have to seek asylum?

#125

Post by xtracto »

powertower wrote: post #79
josephagoss wrote: post #2

Americans might not realise this but we see the USA in the same light as China and Russia when it comes to freedoms. We might be wrong, but thats the perception myself and many other people from outside the USA see the current state of the situation. To think anyone would feel safe in the USA is ridiculous, the USA is one of the last places anyone should seek refuge in modern times. What scares me most is the United…

> To think anyone would feel safe in the USA is ridiculous I feel perfectly safe. This whole entire issue about the government collecting meta-data is overblown IMO. And comparing it to tyranny and demanding rioting on the streets is literally self-destructive and utmost retarded. Maybe you need to compare it to a country like the Republic of Congo to get an idea of what's safe and what's not. But instead the majorit…

Good for you that you feel safe.

An American colleague of mine (doing a 2nd PhD in Liverpool while I was doing my first/only one) told me he did not create accounts in Google/Yahoo/Hot mail not because of what could happen at this time, but at what the people with that information could do in the future.

Right now, you feel perfectly safe in your comfortable chair, having all your information in Google, Facebook, and other servers. But after a small wrong turn of events (that I hope do not happen), you might find yourself in the wrong place and the wrong time, and all your innocently shared information (shared with google, microsoft, facebook, etc) will be used by your government to condemn you.

Re: Has the US become the type of nation from which you have to seek asylum?

#126

Post by brown9-2 »

buo wrote: post #82

An American that had to seek asylum from the US government was Bobby Fischer, one of the best chess players in history. His offense: playing a chess match against Boris Spassky in Yugoslavia (he also owed taxes). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Fischer#1992_Spassky_rema...

I think you left out the part where he defiantly broke the law at the time against economic activities in Yugoslavia.

Re: Has the US become the type of nation from which you have to seek asylum?

#127

Post by powertower »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #110
powertower wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you posted are a few negative events. What you did not post are the few million or billion positive events that happened at the same time. What you're reading/seeing is an ever increasingly opinionated and vocal crowd that think they possess the truth and are right about everything. They want a perfect system. And a simple system. And worst of all, they don't know what they don't know (how utterly destructive th…

"No Society Takes On the Characteristics of Its Exceptions". That's a terrible phrasing. Every society generates the characteristics of its "exceptions" through its internal contradictions.

I removed the quote because the original source is too controversial, but how exactly do the many and real positive characteristics of a society get outweigh by a few negative and mostly overblown characteristics that are not even characteristics as much as exceptions, and in most cases are simply natural products of ANY and ALL societies (and in other cases just emerge due to the sheer number of overall events)?

That phrasing means that definitions describe the whole or major; they don't describe the minor... That is, I'm not going to describe the buildings of an entire city as derelict, when only a few are so.

Re: Has the US become the type of nation from which you have to seek asylum?

#128

Post by dspillett »

> Serious question: Now that he's a US citizen on foreign soil, and an enemy of the state, is it now legal to call a drone strike against him?

Not quite by my understanding. He would need to be in an area officially classed as a war zone for that.

They could send them to surveil and intimidate him though, but there are less costly ways to do that which won't upset the people in the country he is currently living in nearly as much.

(the parent comment seems to have been deleted while I was responding, hence breaking flow as I have and replying to the top)

Re: Has the US become the type of nation from which you have to seek asylum?

#130

Post by petilon »

Anyone who knows my real name can search the internet and find out where I work, my home address, my spouse's name, my home phone number and my age. I didn't put any of this information on the internet, in fact I don't even have a facebook account. Private companies collected and aggregated this information and put it on the internet. Some of the information came from public records (for example, home address from property ownership records), but some was very private (such as my home phone number, which is not even in my name and rarely given out). This is a huge violation of privacy and I have no way of stopping it.

I am not worried about the government spying on me. I am very worried about these for-profit businesses spying on me and outing my information on the internet. Why isn't anyone writing stories about that instead?

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