5 ms·

As someone living in an ex-soviet controlled state, I find it very offensive that you think the state won't ever use the data against a little cog. They do. We

As someone living in an ex-soviet controlled state, I find it very offensive that you think the state won't ever use the data against a little cog. They do. We even have a museum about the terror commited against the everyday tiny little cogs.

phobosanomaly 6y ago
I'm sorry that you're offended. I'm talking about the United States in 2020, not the former Soviet Bloc. Our threat vector is local police, not the state surveillance apparatus. Don't know if you happened to catch it on the news, but we burned down a bunch of stuff, and millions of us marched in the streets over it this past summer.
- xyzzyz 6y ago
  > but we burned down a bunch of stuff, and millions of us marched in the streets over it this past summer. Sounds more like you are the threat vector, with the whole burning things down thing and stuff.
  - phobosanomaly 6y ago
    Ah, well, fair enough. It's 'we' as in 'we' rowdy Americans getting out and exercising the First Amendment, with a minority of protestors committing some property crimes along the way. A common sentiment among those who committed those property crimes was 'no one listened to us before we started burning buildings,' and in this sense I have a sympathy for their claims. I don't believe that the 2020 protests will ultimately be found to have been on the wrong side of history. My grandfather, as an old old man, still referred to MLK as the 'bane of the south.' In his time, the civil unrest of the Civil Rights movement was an unforgivable disruption to the lives of ordinary white folks, and...well, we all know 50 years later that this was such a trivial complaint in the face of the great progress made in healing a society still dealing with the ripple effects of a most monstrous institution, which our nation firmly embraced without hesitation upon its founding. We are still grappling with the fact that when my father was a boy African Americans had to enter through the 'colored' entrance, and the song 'Strange Fruit' was disturbingly still relevant. Remember Emmett Till was lynched in 1955. That's not that long ago. The wounds are still raw. The vast majority of protestors were peaceful, and the point of the protests was that law enforcement should no longer be able to commit violence with impunity against those without a voice. Many, including myself, have expressed sorrow at the damage done to small businesses over the course of the civil actions. But, it's good to see a robust and healthy willingness of the citizenry to turn out in order to oppose just the kind of targeting of the little guy that our friend from the former Soviet Bloc is concerned about.
    - throwaways885 6y ago
      Sorry but the first amendment does not cover burning things down. Talk, hold signs, sure, but not violence. You and your comrades are dangerous. People would not have been condemning BLM if it wasn't for the burning.
      - phobosanomaly 6y ago
        It's important to understand that a majority of the violence was initiated by folks that were seeking to take advantage of the protests to carry out violence: "Rather, the [Department of Homeland Security] bulletin said that “the greatest threat of lethal violence continues to emanate from lone offenders with racially or ethnically motivated violent extremist ideologies and [domestic violent extremists] with personalized ideologies,” specifically pointing to boogaloo-related groups as likely to be “instigating violence” at the protests." https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/06/22/who-caused-violence-protests-its-not-antifa/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/06/22/who-cause... Does that change your reasoning about the situation at all? An overwhelming majority of peaceful protestors turned out to protest police violence and racial inequality, and a very, very small minority carried out the bulk of meaningful violence. Does that invalidate the movement? How am I in particular dangerous? No need to clutch at pearls comrade. Feel free to be unafraid. No one bears you any ill-will, unless you're a public servant who has murdered someone with impunity recently.
        throwaways885 6y ago
        I agree with you on your first point, but in a previous comment you openly associated with the people [burning stuff down]. > No one bears you any ill-will, unless you're a public servant who has murdered someone with impunity recently. The situation is a lot more nuanced than this and I'm sure you know it. Yes the police is over militarised, yes there's a huge problem with urban killings, but you also don't get to solve those problems with violence. Consider the black business owners who suffered greatly from the BLM riots.
        deleted 6y ago
- randomchars 6y ago
  > I'm sorry that you're offended. No no, I'm sorry, it was not the best choise of words. It's more that I'm perplexed by your naivety. You freely admin that the police is the enemy of the people, the very police that's supposed to protect people. Now what makes you think that the organizations whose goal is to protect the state, and not the people would be any more benevolent?
  - phobosanomaly 6y ago
    Because organizations like the CIA have almost complete impunity to do whatever they want outside of the borders of the United States. Why worry about some guy who lives in a shitty apartment in the San Fernando Valley and works at 7/11 when you can use all the toys in the arsenal to disappear clerics in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan without anyone saying as much as a word. They get to play with Predator Drones. JSOC drops kill/capture teams out of HH-60 Pave Hawks with satellite and drone overwatch in Afghanistan. They can run snatch-and-grabs on the streets of Italy. Nobody even knows all of the off-the-books operations they're running in the horn of Africa. The domestic United States is pretty boring by comparison. What, are they going to hassle the 7/11 guy? Why would they even bother? Congress would throw an absolute fit if they caught wind of it. It's not because they can't. It's because they believe their own bullshit and get to do way too much cool Rambo/James Bond stuff outside of the United States. Regarding the police. They're not exactly the enemy of the people. Our relationship with the cops is sort of complicated in this country. It's more that they're an institution with a lot of freedom and discretion, relatively poor training, low entrance standards, they have guns (and we have a lot of guns too), and they're loosely operated by a checkerboard of local and state agencies, rather than being a monolithic state entity. A lot of the calls our police go on are mental health-related, and it burns a lot of cops out. Add that to poor de-escalation procedures and training, historical emphasis on policing of drug-related crimes in a way that that disproportionately affects minority communities, and well, there's trouble brewing. If you ever get a chance (I know it's a cliche), but watch 'The Wire.' It's an HBO TV show that is pretty entertaining and does sort of go into a lot of the subtleties and problems of institutional policing in America. I got a little sidetracked there, but in answer to 'what makes you think that the organizations whose goal is to protect the state, and not the people would be any more benevolent?' I say because it's more boring and congress would throw a fit. And I wouldn't say it's because they're benevolent per-se, but there is a LOT of believe-your-own-bullshit patriotic sentiment in this country that is hard to understate. We have an almost fetishistic worship of our military, and the notion that they 'fight for our freedom' and 'protect' us. That also carries over into the intelligence community to a great degree. But, with the ongoing efforts to overturn the most recent presidential election, and the President's usage of federal resources in the summer protests, I have to say a lot of us are having to rethink a lot of stuff.
Dobby2020 6y ago
These KGB-stories museums are the core of the post-soviet-post-modern-neo-liberal identity that is one and only one existential reason for most of such countries. A holy churches of new-old faith which suddenly obsolete under the facts that the whole world is actually a huge Goolag or its far-close derivatives.
- siliconmountain 6y ago
  I read your message a few times, but your concatenation of concepts and words for no apparent reason makes this entirely not understandable. If you're going to make things up, at least explain yourself.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - ChrisRR 6y ago
    I noticed the same thing on one of their now flagged comments. It's like there's some list of words and metaphors that conspiracy theorists love to employ If they're trying to make a legitimate point, then it's been completely lost in all the waffle in the rest of the sentence.
- Dobby2020 6y ago
  In very simple words, it doesn't matter what color of the discourse-wrapper the shit of the reality is packed as it doesn't change the taste at all.

phobosanomaly 6y ago

I'm sorry that you're offended. I'm talking about the United States in 2020, not the former Soviet Bloc. Our threat vector is local police, not the state surveillance apparatus. Don't know if you happened to catch it on the news, but we burned down a bunch of stuff, and millions of us marched in the streets over it this past summer.

xyzzyz 6y ago
> but we burned down a bunch of stuff, and millions of us marched in the streets over it this past summer. Sounds more like you are the threat vector, with the whole burning things down thing and stuff.
- phobosanomaly 6y ago
  Ah, well, fair enough. It's 'we' as in 'we' rowdy Americans getting out and exercising the First Amendment, with a minority of protestors committing some property crimes along the way. A common sentiment among those who committed those property crimes was 'no one listened to us before we started burning buildings,' and in this sense I have a sympathy for their claims. I don't believe that the 2020 protests will ultimately be found to have been on the wrong side of history. My grandfather, as an old old man, still referred to MLK as the 'bane of the south.' In his time, the civil unrest of the Civil Rights movement was an unforgivable disruption to the lives of ordinary white folks, and...well, we all know 50 years later that this was such a trivial complaint in the face of the great progress made in healing a society still dealing with the ripple effects of a most monstrous institution, which our nation firmly embraced without hesitation upon its founding. We are still grappling with the fact that when my father was a boy African Americans had to enter through the 'colored' entrance, and the song 'Strange Fruit' was disturbingly still relevant. Remember Emmett Till was lynched in 1955. That's not that long ago. The wounds are still raw. The vast majority of protestors were peaceful, and the point of the protests was that law enforcement should no longer be able to commit violence with impunity against those without a voice. Many, including myself, have expressed sorrow at the damage done to small businesses over the course of the civil actions. But, it's good to see a robust and healthy willingness of the citizenry to turn out in order to oppose just the kind of targeting of the little guy that our friend from the former Soviet Bloc is concerned about.
  - throwaways885 6y ago
    Sorry but the first amendment does not cover burning things down. Talk, hold signs, sure, but not violence. You and your comrades are dangerous. People would not have been condemning BLM if it wasn't for the burning.
    - phobosanomaly 6y ago
      It's important to understand that a majority of the violence was initiated by folks that were seeking to take advantage of the protests to carry out violence: "Rather, the [Department of Homeland Security] bulletin said that “the greatest threat of lethal violence continues to emanate from lone offenders with racially or ethnically motivated violent extremist ideologies and [domestic violent extremists] with personalized ideologies,” specifically pointing to boogaloo-related groups as likely to be “instigating violence” at the protests." https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/06/22/who-caused-violence-protests-its-not-antifa/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/06/22/who-cause... Does that change your reasoning about the situation at all? An overwhelming majority of peaceful protestors turned out to protest police violence and racial inequality, and a very, very small minority carried out the bulk of meaningful violence. Does that invalidate the movement? How am I in particular dangerous? No need to clutch at pearls comrade. Feel free to be unafraid. No one bears you any ill-will, unless you're a public servant who has murdered someone with impunity recently.
      - throwaways885 6y ago
        I agree with you on your first point, but in a previous comment you openly associated with the people [burning stuff down]. > No one bears you any ill-will, unless you're a public servant who has murdered someone with impunity recently. The situation is a lot more nuanced than this and I'm sure you know it. Yes the police is over militarised, yes there's a huge problem with urban killings, but you also don't get to solve those problems with violence. Consider the black business owners who suffered greatly from the BLM riots.
        deleted 6y ago
randomchars 6y ago
> I'm sorry that you're offended. No no, I'm sorry, it was not the best choise of words. It's more that I'm perplexed by your naivety. You freely admin that the police is the enemy of the people, the very police that's supposed to protect people. Now what makes you think that the organizations whose goal is to protect the state, and not the people would be any more benevolent?
- phobosanomaly 6y ago
  Because organizations like the CIA have almost complete impunity to do whatever they want outside of the borders of the United States. Why worry about some guy who lives in a shitty apartment in the San Fernando Valley and works at 7/11 when you can use all the toys in the arsenal to disappear clerics in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan without anyone saying as much as a word. They get to play with Predator Drones. JSOC drops kill/capture teams out of HH-60 Pave Hawks with satellite and drone overwatch in Afghanistan. They can run snatch-and-grabs on the streets of Italy. Nobody even knows all of the off-the-books operations they're running in the horn of Africa. The domestic United States is pretty boring by comparison. What, are they going to hassle the 7/11 guy? Why would they even bother? Congress would throw an absolute fit if they caught wind of it. It's not because they can't. It's because they believe their own bullshit and get to do way too much cool Rambo/James Bond stuff outside of the United States. Regarding the police. They're not exactly the enemy of the people. Our relationship with the cops is sort of complicated in this country. It's more that they're an institution with a lot of freedom and discretion, relatively poor training, low entrance standards, they have guns (and we have a lot of guns too), and they're loosely operated by a checkerboard of local and state agencies, rather than being a monolithic state entity. A lot of the calls our police go on are mental health-related, and it burns a lot of cops out. Add that to poor de-escalation procedures and training, historical emphasis on policing of drug-related crimes in a way that that disproportionately affects minority communities, and well, there's trouble brewing. If you ever get a chance (I know it's a cliche), but watch 'The Wire.' It's an HBO TV show that is pretty entertaining and does sort of go into a lot of the subtleties and problems of institutional policing in America. I got a little sidetracked there, but in answer to 'what makes you think that the organizations whose goal is to protect the state, and not the people would be any more benevolent?' I say because it's more boring and congress would throw a fit. And I wouldn't say it's because they're benevolent per-se, but there is a LOT of believe-your-own-bullshit patriotic sentiment in this country that is hard to understate. We have an almost fetishistic worship of our military, and the notion that they 'fight for our freedom' and 'protect' us. That also carries over into the intelligence community to a great degree. But, with the ongoing efforts to overturn the most recent presidential election, and the President's usage of federal resources in the summer protests, I have to say a lot of us are having to rethink a lot of stuff.

Dobby2020 6y ago

These KGB-stories museums are the core of the post-soviet-post-modern-neo-liberal identity that is one and only one existential reason for most of such countries. A holy churches of new-old faith which suddenly obsolete under the facts that the whole world is actually a huge Goolag or its far-close derivatives.

siliconmountain 6y ago
I read your message a few times, but your concatenation of concepts and words for no apparent reason makes this entirely not understandable. If you're going to make things up, at least explain yourself.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ChrisRR 6y ago
  I noticed the same thing on one of their now flagged comments. It's like there's some list of words and metaphors that conspiracy theorists love to employ If they're trying to make a legitimate point, then it's been completely lost in all the waffle in the rest of the sentence.
Dobby2020 6y ago
In very simple words, it doesn't matter what color of the discourse-wrapper the shit of the reality is packed as it doesn't change the taste at all.