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Slate Liberals - Why you should love a police state that will be used against you

Linky: https://archive.is/bqfe6 and https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/08/why-progressives-should-actually-want-more-police-surveillance.html

The whole article is smuglord and maybe-later-kiddo

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  • the way that china uses cameras, for example, if you run a stop sign, and a cop sees you do it, chances are, he's not gonna pull you over, because it was caught on camera and your plate shows where you live and they know who you are, so you can just get a ticket in the mail- i have no problem with this

    i have no faith that amerikkka would be using cameras or similar technology this way. it would 100% be weaponized against our daily lives.

    • the CCP knows everything about you, your name, face, age, money in your bank account, where you spend your time, where you have been to, etc. I don't think you could call that good use of survailance

      • your name, face, age, money in your bank account

        Every developed country has this info on it's citizenry, heck most developing countries these days do to. You're arguing basic bureaucracy is totalitarian.

        where you spend your time, where you have been to, etc.

        And most countries have some means of keeping track of this too if they suspect you're guilty of a crime. Again, describing this as some unique "evil" makes no sense, any sort of state administration does this, you have to prove it's frequently being deployed in a extremely malicious way before you can argue any state is more "authoritarian" or whatever than any other.

      • what is the practical application of that information? it's to keep society safe and functioning. in an ideal world, this wouldn't be necessary but china has 1.3 billion people and remains one of the safest nations on earth for a reason. you don't see police constantly brutalizing people there, because their network of cameras and identification means that unless something presents an immediate threat, they can typically just let the person do their shit and then catch them at home. you can't drive ten miles in america without seeing someone pulled over by police for some minor traffic violation- is that freedom, was that interaction necessary? what about the odds of that interaction escalating to the citizen being murdered by police? this isn't an issue in china because firstly the police are trained and secondly many of those interactions are entirely eliminated

        america knows all that about me too but i can still get mugged walking a mile to the gas station and i'll still see 5 homeless people along the way and multiple cops just posted up waiting to fuck with someone

        i used to be an anarchist. idealistic thinking isn't realistic.

      • “see see pee”

        shut up w ur 4chan ass profile

      • "the Joe Biden knows everything about you, your name, face, age, money in your bank account, where you spend your time, where you have been to, etc. I don't think you could call that good use of surveillance."

        America's surveillance apparatus is leagues more brutal than any Chinese system but USians don't hear about it because it's being field tested in the genocide of Palestine and hunting down migrants at the border. It's also incredibly fucked, your 9 digit SSN is basically used for anything govt. related and can basically be considered your state mandated government ID from birth. So much of American data is held up in data brokers who will literally sell your personal info (enough for anyone to impersonate you) to the government or to other companies, the 3 letter agencies literally hoard petabytes of American data they gathered after 9/11 when the US basically became what the liberal imagination thinks China is.

        China has spent decades perfecting their surveillance apparatus and yet it's not the extrajudicial murder, school shooting, prisoner capital of the world.

        • but what about the US?

          1. we're discussing China here, that's why I focused on China

          2. the US is just as bad as China, but at least you can protest those bad things in the US

          • True you can protest and be blinded by rubber bullets, run over by vigilante trucks, and be ignored by legislators. Freedom baby~

          • i'd like to introduce you to a bunch of my comrades who protested the genocide of Palestinians on college campuses

            i want you to tell them they're very free to protest in the USA and their efforts have viable effects. You might have to do it in person since some of them still can't see through the pepper spray and can't hear very well from their head injuries

          • Which country do you live in?

            If it's the US I'd suggest you focus on criticizing your own country first.

            If it's another country the US probably has far more geopolitical influencer over your country than China does, so you're still using your time better criticizing them.

      • CPC. Show some respect for the country's actual title

        • call them what you like, CPC, CCP, dictators, capitalists, communists, that doesn't make the difference at the end of the day

          • Why bother making a hexbear account when you're just going to be banned for being a liberal

            • I'm an anarcho-syndicalist, not a liberal, I oppose China, because it's a stateist dystopia

              • Syndicalism

                Kaiserreich detected, also it's liberalism regardless

              • Ogey...

                Just to ask, do you believe in countries like Vietnam, Laos, or Cuba, or even Bolivia

                If you can't, then even tho you may not a liberal, economically, or culturally, I think you are a liberal at heart, when it comes to foreign policy... aka you tow the U.S state department's line, when it comes to 'good' and 'bad' countries

                I'm afraid because of such matters, you might get banned over this

                • you might get banned over this

                  I'm new here, but I didn't do anything wrong I think, I just stated my opinion

                  If I did something wrong please enlighten me

                  • As far as I'm concerned, the community has somewhat of an anti-imperialist or 'anti-western' stance, which then extends to a concept of critical support for global south countries

                    Critical support, which is public support for an anti-imperialist, if not socialist nation-state, despite one's personal criticism of such (eg. Venezuela, a GLOBAL_SOUTH socdem state, with potential revolutionary energy; remember, it's not necessarily under one party of PSUV than it is, as a popular front)

                    (You ought to remember Chomsky did support some socialist and socdem states in the Global South, right?)

                    My question is a litmus test

                    If you can't sympathize with even one existing socialist state like Cuba, against America, who has committing economic blockades against such countries, then welp...

                    You can choose lemmy.ml, lemm.ee, midwest.social or any other social media to find other like-minded leftists, who don't necessarily focus on such topics...

          • Lmfao imagine equating communists with capitalists and dictators and saying it doesn't make a difference, are you a lib?

          • posting this here for those who might click on these links and read

            Many westerners come to socialism not out of necessity, but out of disillusionment. We are raised with the idea that Liberal Democracy is the best system of political expression humanity has devised. When confronted with the reality of its shortcomings, rather than narrowly discard liberalism or electoralism, the western anti-capitalist tends to draw sweeping conclusions about the inadequacy of all existing systems. Curiously, though it would at first seem that such denunciations are more principled and severe, they are in fact more compatible with existing and widespread beliefs about the supremacy of the western system. That is to say, when a Marxist-Leninist asserts the superiority of existing socialist experiments, they are directly challenging the idea that westerners are at the forefront of political development. By contrast, the assertions from anarchists and social democrats that we need to build a more utopian future out of our current apex are compatible not only with each other, as discussed earlier, but also do not really offend bourgeois society at large. They in fact end up not sounding too different from the arch-imperialist Winston Churchill holding forth on how ours is the worst system, except for all the others which have been tried. Western chauvinists, consciously or unconsciously, struggle with the idea that they should study and humbly take lessons from the imperial periphery. [15] It is much easier for the chauvinist, psychologically, to position oneself as at the very front of a new vanguard.

            from https://redsails.org/why-marxism/

            The result of this grim state of affairs is that the oppressed classes understandably become deeply cynical about the entire notion of “politics.” Or, to put it in terms of political tendency, regardless of who they vote for at the booth, they begin to become dyed-in-the-wool Libertarians; “incompetence of government” becomes their main transcendental political truth. This becomes especially apparent when they discuss the choking and overthrow of the government of other peoples, in Venezuela and Syria and Korea. Normally, disillusionment with one’s government would lead to demands for better government, or different government, but Westerners are so ingrained with the idea that theirs is the best government, that instead they reject the very idea of good governance altogether. And so the masses learn to passively embrace the encroachment of private corporations over all aspects of the economy and indeed life in general.

            from https://redsails.org/brainwashing/

            Now consider these excerpts from the aforementioned Guardian article:

            For a reliable benchmark about the power of the party in China, you only need to listen to wealthy entrepreneurs hold forth on politics. These otherwise all-powerful CEOs go to abject lengths to praise the party. To take a few companies listed in a single article in the South China Morning Post, Richard Liu of e-commerce group JD.com predicted communism would be realised in his generation and all commercial entities would be nationalised. Xu Jiayin of Evergrande Group, one of China’s largest property developers, said that everything the company possessed was given by the party and he was proud to be the party secretary of his company. Liang Wengen of Sany Heavy Industry, which builds earthmovers, went even further, saying his life belonged to the party. [14]

            Just as the lack of dignity of American workers isn’t merely superficial, but symptomatic, the same is true of the lack of dignity of Chinese capitalists. The periodic execution of corrupt capitalists and the humiliation of Jack Ma matter. Chauvinistic “Left” intellectuals may dismiss them as performative, but Western capitalists accustomed to impunity understand the threat loud and clear. The dignity or indignity experienced by different classes testifies more to the class character of a state than musings about its leaders’ sincerity.

            from https://redsails.org/china-has-billionaires/

            • Don't despair when the lib you're talking to ignores your well thought out response. Instead, look at the people lurking and reading the thread and not commenting, and what they see. They see you provide thoughtful and insightful statements backed up with evidence, only for the lib to either ignore it entirely or just dismiss it with a handwave (and obviously not even reading it). Even if someone agrees with the lib and not you, it still isn't a good look for their "team" to be so smugly and proudly ignorant.

              • the last three or four weeks have been fucking ghastly. we are ruled by demons

                • Truly, and it's mind blowing to see people run defence for them, insisting that those that oppose them are the real demons, while claiming that they oppose the powers that be are "just as bad" despite never actually willing to commit to their own claims about what they would do if they were living in the exact situation they claim to despise.

              • Don't despair when the lib you're talking to ignores your well thought out response.

                Said lib has taken to posting about those mean hexbear tankies all over the anti-communist parts of Lemmy (and also for some reason lemmy.ml's anarchism comm). This was never about good faith discussion and all about getting in a pissing contest here then whining about it elsewhere.

                • Yeah, they show up every now and then so they can whine about "censorship" or mean evilbad tankies. It's so pathetic.

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