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0 pointstoofy6mo ago0 comments

> they love the jackboot

yes, some people genuinely do, and some people don’t.

some people have absolutely no understanding of what surveillance tech is doing and where it is going.

in terms of the “ist” problem you refer to, at the end of the day, the real answer is to deny anyone that amount of power. whether it’s corporations, religions, governments, or billionaires. none of these should have enough power to sway the world to terrifying places. none of them, including govs, billionaires, or corporations.

somehow we need to achieve separation of money and state with as much vigor as we used to separate church and state.

we should be incentivizing the power from all of those groups to be dispersed as much as possible.

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potato37328426mo ago

>somehow we need to achieve separation of money and state with as much vigor as we used to separate church and state.

This used to be called "equality under the law" and laws that could not be written equally or enforced equally were not written or overturned by the courts.

mschuster916mo ago

> This used to be called "equality under the law" and laws that could not be written equally or enforced equally were not written or overturned by the courts.

The US in particular had discrimination encoded in law for a long time. It took Rosa Parks in 1955 to end "white only" areas in public transport, and it took until 1965 until racial discrimination by law was finally outlawed.

"Equality under the law" always depends on who is considered to be part of the group that enjoys said equality. Even today, many countries still have laws on the books that discriminate between ethnicity and/or country of origin and/or citizenship. Just look at us in Europe - you usually have to be a citizen of an EU country to hold public office for example, residency is not enough. Or you got border patrol clearly profiling whom to control at a border checkpoint - whites get left alone and unbothered, non-whites get the full experience of what border control is allowed to do. That's not just discrimination, it's showing citizens that happen to have non-white skin that despite them being equal citizens by law, in practice there is no equality.

potato37328426mo ago

Don't forget women. They couldn't open bank accounts until when? In any case, I should have known better than to leave open the door to race baiting.

Focusing on race or any other distinction among the peasants is categorically missing the point. This isn't about peasants vs peasants. It's about peasants and small groups of peasants vs big moneyed interests. Some small time tire shop gets fined into oblivion for letting chemicals go down their drain meanwhile Jiffy Lube does that all day and doesn't get picked on because their lawyers can craft a story about why it's fine. In the old days everyone or nobody could dump it down the drain. Some homeowner can't put up an ADU because "hurr durr wetlands" but some megacorp can buy his land and put up a solar farm in the same damn wetlands because they can put fancy stuff on fancy letterhead and put it in front of the regulators. 100yr ago either everyone could build there or nobody could.

We've given our regulatory agencies massive, massive, discretionary power and insanely broad mandates. And what winds up happening is that they pick on the small and the weak because those targets are plentiful and easy. We created dragnet surveillance to "stop terrorists" (it was a crappy argument even then) and it gets used to round up brown people or chase down and bankrupt a random business because 1/20 of their trucks had a plate that was illegible to toll readers for years on end. We told the EPA to make the water clean and they go harass farmers for digging trenches. Don't get me started on the FDA and opium. NYPD couldn't get away with stop and frisk (well, they could and did for far too long but that's not the point) but law enforcement across the country can now stop damn near anyone for any BS pretext because a technological obfuscation layer gives them pretext (much like the fake bomb detectors we were selling to the Iraqis back in the day) and the scale and division of responsibility makes it hold up in court.

If one person or a small group can't do a thing then a big group shouldn't either. And if a big group can do a thing then the small group.

If it's ok for ICE to just stop brown people then it's ok for NYPD to do stop and frisk. And if that's not ok then adjust the law.

mschuster916mo ago

> If one person or a small group can't do a thing then a big group shouldn't either. And if a big group can do a thing then the small group. If it's ok for ICE to just stop brown people then it's ok for NYPD to do stop and frisk. And if that's not ok then adjust the law.

For what it's worth I fully agree with you!

The thing is, this just isn't achievable with modern politics. The big guns will always lobby for them to be exempted in some way, and even if only by funding the enforcement agencies only so limited that they have no way of enforcing the law againt the big fish.

And on top of that you got Conservatives (or whatever tries to sell themselves under that label these days) and Wilhoit's (misattributed) law [1]:

> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_M._Wilhoit

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potato37328426mo ago

>somehow we need to achieve separation of money and state with as much vigor as we used to separate church and state.

This used to be called "equality under the law" and laws that could not be written equally or enforced equally were not written or overturned by the courts.

mschuster916mo ago

> This used to be called "equality under the law" and laws that could not be written equally or enforced equally were not written or overturned by the courts.

potato37328426mo ago

Don't forget women. They couldn't open bank accounts until when? In any case, I should have known better than to leave open the door to race baiting.

If one person or a small group can't do a thing then a big group shouldn't either. And if a big group can do a thing then the small group.

If it's ok for ICE to just stop brown people then it's ok for NYPD to do stop and frisk. And if that's not ok then adjust the law.

mschuster916mo ago

For what it's worth I fully agree with you!

And on top of that you got Conservatives (or whatever tries to sell themselves under that label these days) and Wilhoit's (misattributed) law [1]:

> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_M._Wilhoit

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