Comment by V__
19 hours ago
I will always be baffled by the dichotomy of "the US has the most freedom" and "no democratic country spies more on its citizens".
19 hours ago
I will always be baffled by the dichotomy of "the US has the most freedom" and "no democratic country spies more on its citizens".
The US doesn't have the most freedom. There's precisely zero evidence that people in the US are the most free, except for the fact that its government tells them they are. But North Korea tells its people that even harder.
They don’t know that they’re not free. The good thing about a real dictatorship is that you know exactly what the rules are.
You don’t know what the rules are in a dictatorship either. Laws and regulations exist but they get selectively enforced based on a lot of factors. Take repressions in the early Soviet Union. There’s just a bureaucratic top down edict that this many “enemies of the people” must be found, so they are found.
Make a joke about immigrants on twitter in the UK and you get arrested. Meanwhile there are more heat deaths in Europe than gun deaths in America. Most of Europe can't be called a free country anymore.
> Meanwhile there are more heat deaths in Europe than gun deaths in America.
You suggesting that in the name of freedom - everyone must have air conditioning and cool their homes to 60F?
>Meanwhile there are more heat deaths in Europe than gun deaths in America.
This is a weird metric of freedom. It seems more like a reflexive, zeitgeist based response than any actual freedom metric.
In my experience the country with the most freedom is Canada. I have never seen anything like it. It's just so easy to do business there. Even if it wasn't that the laws enable it (they do) but even the way people operate. Being able to have a discussion with a customer without 12 rounds of a solicitor trying to insert dumb loopholes into a contract, costing the potential customer more in billable hours to their solicitor than the cost of the contract.
The USA is just junk. States that want to be Feds, Feds that want to be States, and when you cut through all the red tape you still have to deal with Litigious, ignorant Americans. Oh and if you want to import or export something just forget it.
"Oh but we have guns" is basically the exception that proves the rule, in a country where people get detained for such crimes as "Being beloved childrens author Mem Fox" or "Said naughty things on reddit" or "Working while waiting for Immigration to sort their status out".
But guns right. Guns. Woohoo freedom yeehaw guns.
What did they tweet, exactly?
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It's mostly corporations that are the most free to do as they please here.
The evidence is our humor. We can make fun of our leaders without being thrown into prison or worse unlike say China or North Korea. Try posting a Winnie the Pooh meme in China and see how fast it gets censored.
well i am chinese, we do cannot post Winnie the Pooh meme(with ugly xi image), the origin carton figure is fine.(we also have a show about it in shanghai disney i think)
what troubles me is why 'humor' is the most important thing? shouldn't be the action/output of the gov? i mean, you vote someone, he promise something, he cannot do it, he breaks the law, then nothing happens, you make fun of him. then after 4 yeras, you select another person. and go on. Biden didn't get punised for what he has not achieved. So will Trump.
how does that improve your life? how can people live like this? how is that 'democray'? its very hard for our people to understand.
our neighbor counties like Mongoel and Philippines, they have a system like USA, and the popeople can make fun of their leaders all the time, i can see that from reddit. but they basiclly live in a shit hole, with a small populartion and vast resources, and they are poor than average chinese. i never understand the deulusion of them.
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I disagree. The US has the 1st and 2nd amendments, which gives us protection from tyranny in the government, and which lets us criticize the government without repercussion. No other country grants its citizens those rights, and you can see the effects of that worldwide, where despite it all, we still have our free speech!
How does the 2nd amendment protect you? Are you allowed automatic weapons, grenades? You're not even allowed swords. And if you call for violence, which is what the 2nd amendment might enable, you won't find protection via the 1st amendment.
See citizens and ICE.
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Whatever one may think of gun control, it's clear the 2nd Amendment is on a much poorer footing.
In a number of states, you need to take a safety course before you're allowed to purchase a gun.
Compare that with the 1st amendment. If they passed laws saying "You can say whatever you want in public, but only after you've taken this course that informs you on what is acceptable and unacceptable to say in public", would you say there is free speech?
Or "You are free to practice any religion, but only after you've taken a course that ..."?
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That is a wonderfully naive understanding of the world.
You should ask Alex Pretti how he was able to criticize to criticize the government without repercussion.
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You can't possibly be this naive.
Can you name a single western democracy where the citizens are prohibited from criticizing their government?
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>The US has the 1st and 2nd amendments, which gives us protection from tyranny in the government
Lmao. Jim Tyranny has had what? 3 cracks at him? Hardly protection.
So free in Europe you guys don't even have a legitimate tech industry. Anyone who wants to build comes to the US.
Ignoring your weird correlation between freedom and tech. Not gonna google European tech before you comment?
freedom is when tech industry, I guess. I didn't know that until bus. I looked up freedom in the dictionary and it said tech industry.
So, free if you're a VC?
Funny how China leads in most tech areas now.
Turns out letting monopoly capital control your government policy leads to short term gains at the expense of long term viability. Maybe the VCs can make some money off government surveillance and defense contracts before being completely eclipsed?
https://www.aspi.org.au/news/aspis-critical-technology-track...
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Not exactly a democratic country, but came across these instructions what to do in China when police has detected a VPN in your household, or you have posted something
https://x.com/hongguabg/status/2114213232454082869?s=20
We have some flexibility with freedom left, and let’s keep it that way.
If the US state regime would benefit from blocking VPNs, they'd do it in a heartbeat. They just don't need to yet.
That link you just posted is blocked for me because I don't have an X account. Here's an unblocker redirector - suspiciously like a HTTP VPN: https://xxcancel.com/hongguabg/status/2114213232454082869?s=...
The process that's described (appear cooperative but deny everything) is the same thing you should do in the US if the police come to your door and accuse you of drug possession. Every country does this violation of freedom, they just use different excuses.
> The process that's described (appear cooperative but deny everything)
...how did you come to this conclusion?
>> 但你确实做过的，而且白纸黑字的放在你面前，那就不要抵赖。
If it's something you did, and they put it in front of you in black and white, don't deny it.
> 去了之后，态度好一点，姿态低一点，开口说：“领导，不好意思，给你添麻烦了。”
Is 领导 not an incredibly subservient way to address someone? How do people normally address police officers in China?
Already answered here:
https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/43535/do-other-...
closing as duplicate. (/joke)
> "the US has the most freedom"
This is an example of a thought-stopping cliche. It is a slogan to prevent the listener from thinking. Or at the least, to divert the listener's thoughts back to a more politically acceptable (to the speaker) rightthink.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rightthink
"The US has the most freedom. Don't look into that fact. Just trust us"
"A" marketing for a "B" product usually wins over "B" marketing of an "A" product.
FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) Section 702
> Section 702 only permits the targeting of non-United States persons who are reasonably believed to be located outside the United States. United States persons and anyone in the United States may not be targeted under Section 702.
https://www.intel.gov/foreign-intelligence-surveillance-act/...
Under the Israel-US agreement for surveillance, that section was circumvented, as the NSA and other agencies are feeding raw unminimized tappings directly to the ELINT/SIGINT agencies and getting relayed back. [1]
This was also true for Five Eyes/EU sharing too, even though with this year's legislation some EU countries have offered Israel a direct access to INT feeds.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/sep/11/ns...
Wow. Does the US have this type of agreement with any other country?
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i would give the article a quick (re-?)skim for context of V__'s comment, as the article repeatedly talks about spying on american citizens
When you stop judging systems by their design intent and instead by their outcomes, it makes perfect sense. Democracies inexorably diffuse responsibility until its component entities are distant enough from punishment that hiding power levers becomes an easy advantage to grab for, whether the justification is internal or external conflict. All that's needed is for the necessary overseers to be rubber stamps.
Democracies that are real democracy also exists and they don't have systemic corruption such as hiding behind complexity or interpretations or misinterpretations, or repeatedly pushing to pass draconian laws. Number of real democratic sovereign countries can be easily counted in one hand and may be it can extend upto two hands. Countries with monarch who has any power are not exactly democratic, uk for example even though it has democracy like parliament. Transparency and real oversight by citizens is required in a democracy. What if representatives make draconian laws? People need to be able to veto it. What if representatives refuse to make a law people want? They need to be able to make it directly. Systems can be designed to make these happen regardless of the size of the country or its population count.
Most of those countries have not been democracies for very long. The United States used to have many of those checks and balances, all of which were systematically ripped out by the relentless political machine. Give it another century, and even with proportional voting or citizen's veto's, things will still probably end up in a similar state.
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Why are you baffled?
passport wise, probably true or close to true.
9th place
https://www.passportindex.org/de/byRank.php
I bet you that China, Russia and the UK rank higher
>China, Russia
both notorious for bragging about being the most free country on earth
Are China and Russia democracies?
In China the social contract is different.
You give up some rights for internal stability and in theory better social benefits.
In America, our social contract allows 10 guilty men to go free rather than imprisoning one innocent.
That's the myth anyway. Back in reality America is rapidly marching towards authoritarian capitalism.
Jump outs , black sites, indefinite detention.
>Naturally the common people don't want war . . . but after all it is the leaders of a country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or parliament or a communist dictatorship. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.
-Hermann Goering
Thus we're always at War. War on Drugs. War on Illegal Immigration. War on Crime. War on you.
So what we've already deported multiple born in the US citizens. This is war!
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Freedom isn't really about whether your country is a democracy or not. Dictatorships can be free (for a while) and democracies can be unfree (Hitler was elected).
nah the UK spies pretty hard on its citizens.
CSIS and ASIS in Canada and Australia have far more powers than anything the CIA could ever do.
I owned more guns, got paid more, and had more vacation while working for a US company than I ever did in the Oz or Glorious Canukistan
The difference is willingness to act on said spying. Luckily, despite the massive surveillance capabilities the U.S. "Intelligence" Community has, they don't seem to really mess with regular citizens all that much. This gives some credence to the "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about" point of view, but only if you can guarantee you have nothing to hide (which can change drastically depending on who is in power, hence why I don't believe in this - the classic example being that hiding one's religion in and around Germany in the 1930s and early 40s was not seen as important until it was really important).
China and Russia (and to some extent, the UK now) will absolutely act on the spying they do. Or just act and say they had a good reason. China and Russia are dictatorships. One of them has a very competent and hard-working population which succeeds in spite of the dictator, the other is a gas station with nukes that survives solely because of said nukes.
> they don't seem to really mess with regular citizens all that much.
Except they do. The NSA has been handing over intel over a decade ago:
> A former federal agent in the northeastern United States who received such tips from SOD described the process. “You’d be told only, ‘Be at a certain truck stop at a certain time and look for a certain vehicle.’ And so we’d alert the state police to find an excuse to stop that vehicle, and then have a drug dog search it,” the agent said. [1]
Sure these were criminals, but who knows how many “undesirables” were prosecuted or targeted for some crime anybody commits?
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/us-drug-agency-g...
Your position only makes sense if you think that the groups the US gov operates against aren't "regular citizens".
The US gov is acting on intel against its citiczens all the time, regular or not.
Personally, I don't like the right wing groups it's infiltrated, but I still think that is a reasonable example.
For me, more pressingly, there are current investigations going on in Minnesota from the US gov's "Puppetmaster" operation that actively infiltrated and monitored a highly diverse set of anti-ICE groups.
Historically this is nothing new; the US has been infiltrating "anti-government" groups for decades. AIM, the panthers, ELF, ALF, labor unions, MOVE, etc are all easy examples of domestic groups that the US gov has broken at some point or other.
Your position only work if you classify folks such as the Minnesota 15 as "terrorists" or some such. Which, hey, folks like the US Gov try to do. But at that point the point is kind of tautological: if you have "something to hide" then you are a legit target of government sanctioning.
That's not very satisfying to me, but plenty of folks in the US find it to be a just-fine principle.
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Well your assumption is that they are not using it; they weren't able to use it all before.. Times are changing; Now they can use and use it a lot.. military Ai infrastructure that is to connected political arm will read and process everything and they can target their apposition... its just matter of time. Absolute power = absolute corruption.