481–490 of 534 posts
Why were those installed in the first place?
Cameras on the street is another matter altogether. Should not be allowed unless the citizens of the town vote to allow it.
I think it's nuts how nobody seemed to care about this mass surveillance tool until it fell into the hands of the red party. "Just keep electing the blue party" is not a convincing security posture.
so, yeah, the stakes are different now. and if the "blue party" was the one pulling this shit I'd be just as mad
I think it's nuts how nobody seemed to care about this mass surveillance tool until it fell into the hands of the red party. "Just keep electing the blue party" is not a convincing security posture.
License plate readers are hardly mass surveillance. Why is no one in democratic countries complaining about mass surveillance? And I mean real cameras (not license plate readers) recording 24/7? I'm talking about UK, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, etc.
LPRs are absolutely mass surveillance when used without proper legal restraints
the legal restraints are the big difference between regular police, who operate without very specific boundaries to protect individual rights -- and ICE, who can do whatever they want with impunity. That's what separates "police" from "Gestapo".
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Boy is he trying on the latter. Quite impressive just how resilient it seems to be.
Yes, tbh I would not have thought that you could take a sledgehammer to the economy as if you're say Elon Musk buying a communications platform and yet, here we are, 1 year in and we're still hanging on. But I wouldn't bet on another three of these.
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and for good measure get rid of the tracking device in your pocket that you willingly use all day to send your location to facebook, X, tiktok, etc.
> and for good measure get rid of the tracking device in your pocket that you willingly use all day to send your location to facebook, X, tiktok, etc. I don't have facebook, X, or tiktok installed on my phone.
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>I disagree. You can escape a disease, even during a global pandemic. And not every person that got COVID was on a ventilator or even felt that bad. Propaganda works. The knowledge worker class often believes their training will afford them some level of protection against it. Even then, with those warding effects, they're still susceptible. Consider further that most people in society are significantly less educated…
>Propaganda won't contest that starvation is occurring. It will claim that the reason for the starvation is a specific foe, internal or external e.g. It's China's fault we're starving or the immigrants have caused this food security crisis and once they're gone we'll have enough food for our own people, etc. They'll workshop and see which ones poll well, then run with the talking point that seems to perform best. I d…
You can take a look at the global hunger index; countries with less food security are certainly less stable than those that aren't, but by no means are countries like India and Pakistan undergoing constant revolution. By contrast, countries with comparatively solid food security like Egypt underwent revolution that toppled the government sparked by changes in the (comparatively affordable) price of food. Hunger itself doesn't tell the story. It's how society perceives it.
The zeitgeist matters more than whether or not everyone in society can eat, and you can change the zeitgeist with propaganda.
>When you're truly hungry, nothing is beyond reproach.
When you're truly hungry, you can't plan a revolution. Anti-government efforts are generally spearheaded by groups that are fed, connected, and have the incentive to incite rebellion. It's more Navalny and less Oliver Twist. This means that both pro and anti-government groups will be engaged in a similar recruitment effort. The two groups will have competing accounts of why the hunger is occurring, complete with different evidence regarding the magnitude of the issue, the source of the issue, etc. Hunger doesn't short circuit that process, and propaganda doesn't lose it's force because it's a more persuasive and simpler motivator than, say, discontent over tax burden shifting or some other policy point.
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It's worse than that; within a few generations our linguistic and biological systems will begin to diverge under conditions with little cross-pollination and different selective pressures. We will become aliens in the sci-fi sense very rapidly if we attempt to create a foundation-like diaspora of settlements.
This sounds like lysenkoism.
Humans aren't the endpoint of evolution. Something will come after us, and if we're spread out on a ton of planets, there would need to be explicit counteracting forces (genetic modification, tremendous volumes of interstellar human travel, etc.) to make sure whatever comes after us is uniform among our interstellar backyard.
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So one one hand we have Nazi ideas[1] being platformed by the ruling political party which has barely disguised its support for ethnically cleansing the country of all non-white people[2]. And on the other hand we have radical democratic socialist candidates proposing stabilized rent[3]. What am I missing here? 1. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/04/republican-part... 2. https://www.esiweb.org/newsletter/100…
The main cases I've seen against people on the left (non-exclusive) are: - Lots of them in Epstein files - Mass importations of unchecked non-citizens - Trying harder to look cool to Europe vs helping Americans - Overregulation (things like California Coastal Commission) - Massive fraud (LA -> SF bullet train, tens of billions for "homelessness" that don't go towards homeless at all, building permits, etc) - Antifa b…
The equivalent actions on the left that you posed, increasing non-white representation in media, a) is not government policy and b) is fair assuming proportional representation for the existing 1 out of 3 non-white Americans. And the actual Biden policy allowing what you call "non-citizens" to enter the US is simply the international treaty for asylum seekers; these are all people going through the immigration system.
Regarding my sources, ESIWeb is a European think-tank that rigorously and objectively evaluates claims. The Atlantic and The Guardian are respected for their journalism world-wide. These aren't op-eds; I have been following this story for a while and choose my sources carefully.
There are a few other dubious items on your list--e.g., "Antifa" which doesn't represent mainstream Democrats, isn't an organization, and hasn't been linked to "burning down businesses". Epstein? At least a dozen people in this administration are implicated, with Trump being one of the principal pedophiles. "Massive corruption"? The list would be too long for this message if we got into the Trump administration.
Kind of weird all of those people weren't all up in arms about it before the whole ice thing, why would you be mad that they're tracking somebody else but not mad that they have been slurping up data about your movements and habits this whole time, then monetizing said data by selling it to industries like insurance companies etc.
how is it weird for you exactly? we didn't have masked gestapo thugs before.
The way to avoid masked gestapo thugs is to ensure that not even your preferred leaders are able to create them.
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I disagree. You can escape a disease, even during a global pandemic. And not every person that got COVID was on a ventilator or even felt that bad. Seeing the death toll statistics and even the direct effects through a screen is not visceral for many folks. Starvation isn't avoidable and you can't ride it out. There isn't any chance that starving to death could be less severe than getting a bad flu. Nobody can avoid…
>I disagree. You can escape a disease, even during a global pandemic. And not every person that got COVID was on a ventilator or even felt that bad. Propaganda works. The knowledge worker class often believes their training will afford them some level of protection against it. Even then, with those warding effects, they're still susceptible. Consider further that most people in society are significantly less educated…