It is most often used as an attempt at a defense by calling out other guilty parties. Yes, we should like to live in a world where anyone calling out a problem or injustice only does so from a place of unimpeachable moral authority. But we do not live in such a world so we are still left with the need to address problems where and when we can get the social and political will to do so. Using finger pointing as a defense has the effect of making the problem seem insurmountable and therefore sapping the will to fix it.

The more genuine admission might be to simply say, "I admit I have shit on my shoe, and it does stink; however, if you are to hold me to account for that, then I demand you also be held to account".

With that approach people have a much harder time seeing the complaint as merely a self-defense by way of finger pointing and it's much more likely to be taken seriously.

This is where many people in the US are probably at on, say, the Trump indictment. Can't really say it shouldn't happen, he has almost certainly broken a long list of laws for his whole career. But that also shouldn't be the end of it, more like "Great start getting a corrupt and lawless politician in jail! Who's next on that list? When does their indictment begin?".

One could argue about the fairness of any trial or set of trials, of course, and we should definitely do that and work out what we the people think of those trials as well as what we want to see in a fair trial.

However, if you are trying to say that what those people did was just a protest or just speech, you will need to address the actual crimes the people going to jail were charged with and convicted of. Otherwise, your argument there is not convincing at all.

It's not just free speech when you destroy property, break into government buildings, assault cops and government employees, actually invade and interrupt a session of congress, trespass in government offices, and actually try to locate the vice-president with the loudly declared intent to hang him.

Can those rights be violated? Yes, governments do bad things all the time. But that is not the same as a foreign national participating in Al-Qaeda training camps and meeting with Osama bin Laden. No nation on Earth has a strong history of giving full citizenship legal rights to foreign nationals and/or enemy combatants captured in a warzone.

Hicks was also returned to Australia to be dealt with by his own government, where presumably he then did retain his legal rights as a citizen of Australia. And at that point it would indeed be a violation on part of Australia if they did not treat him as any citizen of their nation should be treated.

All of that said, Guantanamo has still been a completely broken and messed up situation. We the people of the US owe it to ourselves and the rest of the world to hold our government accountable for that and not allow it to happen again.

It's just if you are wanting to say that the US treatment of it's citizens has been on par with China's treatment of it's citizens, your case may be better served by finding a more direct example.

You're aware that the US actually kidnapped random people because they had the misfortune of using the wrong watch type or having the same name as an alleged terrorist, right? They didn't "capture enemy combatants in a warzone".

> Note that this does not apply to US citizens. US citizens, even those accused of terrorism, still retain their legal rights under US law. That is what citizenship in any country, is.

And also murdered US citizens abroad that were alleged to have ties to terrorists, without due trial.

> Hicks was captured in Afghanistan in December 2001 by the Afghan Northern Alliance

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hicks

>He was captured in March 2002 by Pakistani forces during a raid at Faisalabad, Pakistan. He was held in Islamabad for two months before being turned over the United States forces.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghassan_al-Sharbi

As I said, they were captured as enemy combatants, in a warzone. The circumstances of Sharbi's capture are much more questionable. But from the US's perspective, an ally turned him over as a captured enemy combatant.

It's all questionable and stupid, of course. But the question of their status at the time is relevant to the question of whether the US "vanishes" it's own citizens. These two were not citizens, so what happened to them does not support the case that the US is just as bad as China on that point.

No nation on Earth has a history of treating such captives as full citizens entitled to the same legal rights as it's own people. But maybe that's what we all would want. That's a fair point to argue, separately.

However, that is not the point the person I was responding to was making. Which is part of why I say the examples they offered were ineffective as support for their point.

You may find it helpful to practice re-reading and making sure you understand the case a post is making before responding to it.

You and I clearly agree that what the US did in Guantanamo was bad. You and I also agree that the US can, has, and may yet still violate the rights of it's own citizens as well as the rights of people who are not it's citizens, even in situations where it has signed treaties with those people's nations. And the US government should definitely be held accountable whenever it does something like that.

None of that changes the observation that the US's failure to give full citizen legal rights to Ghassan al Sharbi and David Matthew Hicks, people who were not US citizens, does not make a good supporting example to the case for the US being just as bad as China about "vanishing" it's own citizens.

You are, of course, free to offer concrete examples which would better make that case. That is essentially what I was opening the door for. But here you seem to be responding more to an emotion evoked by how I said something rather than the point I was actually making.

The US locks up more people, but not for wrong-think. Instead our country does it for consuming the wrong plants at the wrong time, because our systems are still racist in various ways, and because we have somehow allowed prison to become a for-profit institution.

Those are different problems and they need to be addressed. The war on drugs must end, policing culture and policies must be corrected, the US prison system must be corrected. Other options for dealing more effectively with various social and mental health problems must be instituted.

And none of that is the same as what China is doing to their people, nor does it absolve China of the wrongs it has committed. And it doesn't take the edge off of it either. Going to China can still get you locked up for reasons you don't understand because you said the wrong thing one time and forgot you even said it.

That actually is a more risky situation for most people than making sure they are not buying or carrying around the wrong plants. That is what comments such as the one you are responding to are actually worried about. It's not a raw numbers game for the individual, it's a question of "how easy is it for me or people I know to go to jail for what should be trivial actions?"

That's just the casus belli for the arrest - the real motivation changes over time. Drug laws have been used to target and disrupt various groups from Latinos and African Americans to hippies and anti-war protestors. First it was about racism and Hearst's economic interests, then about policing wrong think, then it was about the tough on crime wave, and now it's largely about protecting several lucrative industries.

It seems that line of argument would get much deeper into how, how fairly, and on which groups, the various countries have tended to apply their laws.

For now I can fully grant that selective enforcement has and still does happen in the US. The legal system here definitely does leave that possibility open and prosecutors are elected officials, some of whom have provably gone after certain groups or individuals, hunting for a reason to put them in jail.

https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-rich...

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper’s writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.

“You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

The process of repairing the damage that was done should include large payouts for unjustly taking away years of those people's lives, if nothing else. I'm not exactly holding my breath on these points, but if we take seriously the idea that the world should become more fair and just over time, we're going to have to square with the wrongs that were committed in the name of unjust laws.

In the post you are responding to, what you see is me acknowledging that, in order to answer the specific questions: "Is the US just as bad as China on this?" or "Is what China does to it's citizens in order to suppress wrong-think being unfairly criticized in light of what the US does to it's citizens in order to suppress drug use and generally be racist about it?"; one would require good data on just how many citizens are sent to jail for what should be trivial acts of speaking their mind or consuming weird plants, and that data is unlikely to be available or good data if it exists since both countries have rather large incentives to make sure it doesn't.

Please also note that I fully granted Akiselev's point that selective enforcement happens in the US even now. There should be genuine outrage over this until it is changed. However, I understand why people can't even keep up with the sheer scale of the bullshit modern governments get up to.

"Nowadays, the penalties for being caught with cannabis are severe. Offenders run the risk of receiving the death penalty for being in possession of just five kilograms or more. Additionally, strict sentences are imposed; anything from five years imprisonment to a life sentence."

Yes and PRC wrong think 99% of time gets you an invite to the police station to "drink tea" and sign a paperwork not to do it again. Maybe occasionally a write self criticism letter. Consequences are about as trivial as it gets. It generally takes enormous repeat and public offenses that gains popular traction to get administratively punished let alone end up in jail for the simple reason that PRC doesn't have mass networks of for profit prison that incentive internment. It takes extraordinary bad luck (i.e. % of become a trending author in particularly sensitive times) and to get punished / arrested for wrong think on the same level as Americans carrying the wrong plant, which is statistically a much riskier situation due to how US racial prosecution and internment system is incentivized. Ask PRC citizen how many people they know has been formally punished, even mildly, for wrong think vs Americans who know someone jailed for drug offense and the numbers will be revealing. In both raw numbers and ease of getting fucked over "trivial" offenses, PRC wrong think is much less riskier than US drugs. Which is not to say PRC wrong think wouldn't stack up poorly compared to other "liberal" countries, rather US internment is just that messed up.

That is good to know. And genuinely new information for me. Thank you for contributing it.

And the details you offer do help calibrate something of an answer to the question you are responding to. Thank you also for being a great participant in that conversation!

> Ask PRC citizen how many people they know has been formally punished, even mildly, for wrong think vs Americans who know someone jailed for drug offense and the numbers will be revealing.

We should definitely like to have real data on that for both countries. It seems difficult to find though. In the mean time I take your seemingly first hand experience as insightful. Thanks again!

I personally do not see much difference. Holding person in prison for profit is a result of corporations buying government. It is as political as it gets. Those people in my view are just as bad scam of the Earth their political counterparts in China.

You completely ignored OP's example of Julian Assange, I guess?

Put it this way, if you can name a country that would not react in the exact same manner to the actions that the US did to Assange's actions, please let me know. I certainly can't think of any.

Wikileaks became very close to Russia in the end, anyways, not exactly a bastion of freedom and IMHO destroying any credibility Assange had. If Assange was on the "other side" and the classified stuff was from Russia, he'd probably have been "Novichoked" for what he did.

It's not terribly taxing to just say, "that's not the kind of conversation we want to have here" and go on to continue engaging with any specific points being made. And that's doable even when you suspect the post you are responding to might just be trolling. If there is an identifiable point, engage with that if you will, gently and patiently correct or ignore the rest. Kind of similar to being patient with a rowdy kid. Trolls don't get much out of it if they can't get your goat.

The sub-thread below still managed to take on a few people who just wanted to virtue signal with argumentative sniping but others showed up with good points and information, that part was good to see.

Or better still, use a password calculator app such as https://spectre.app/

This kind of approach generates your passwords for different sites based on login information and a single password only you know. No other passwords are stored on any devices or services, not even within the app on the device you are using it on.

Which enables you to have different passwords for each service and solves the problem of "too many passwords to remember" without just having to write them all down in a dozen ways that can also be compromised.

That would not be a password, that would be something you share. An actual password must be possible to verify without it being stored on any device. On the service side, it's the same as for certificates, as you describe. The service can't store the password because that would invalidate it's usefulness as a way to prove someone is who they say they are. This is why we store a cryptographically secure hash code instead. It is also why the password hash code must be generated on the user's end, not on the service side. You never want to "transmit" passwords in plain text because transmission across the internet is an act of making copies of the data transmitted in the memory and storage of all the devices it transmits across. The moment you send a password across the internet, it is compromised.

So as the service, you don't know the password, you only know that the hash code you received matches the one for that user, and you are reasonably certain that there is no known way for someone to generate that hash code without knowing the real password. Therefore the person trying to login in must be who they say they are.

Passwords and private keys only work as authentication if no one else knows it, has possession of it, or can get access to it. If there is a flaw in any one of those aspects, then the system doesn't actually prove a person is who they claim to be. It only proves that a person is someone who knows, possesses, or has access to that thing. That might still count as evidence that they are authentic, but more will still be needed to actually prove they are authentic.

Just make a corporation which all of your people are members of, give voting powers to all members to decide what stuff the corporation buys as well as how members get to use the things. Can even go as far as setting up an HOA or a town where the company is the landlord for everyone or has right of first refusal in every property in that area. Once you have enough people to make some stuff on your own, the company call sell that stuff and that's the only touch point you all have to have with the capitalist economy. With time the members you have, the more stuff you can make yourselves, and the less stuff you company has to sell or buy. Eventually you're totally self-sufficient, don't make transactions, and therefore don't really pay taxes either.

They usually don't go for it because they are not really bothered that they can't live the way they want to so much as they are bothered that other people might still live under capitalism.

So just start now, incrementally, and see how far you can get before anyone stops you. You would ultimately be exiting the existing economy, but that's what you presumably wanted; to build a different kind of economy that you think will be more fair and equitable. And every single step you can take in that direction proves out whether your way is actually better.

All along the way, you have your collective company acting as a buffer against the capitalist system around you. You can't really exit totally without giving up modern life, so don't try to do that, as you point out, such a move wouldn't really be a desirable or viable way to get this job done. The next best move seems to me to be to just exit incrementally, as much as you like, one step at a time.

Why not do that?

It's somewhat similar to what Amish people do, and they do quite well at it in terms of sustainably living as they wish even though no one else around them does. They pull that off by trading the things they do want to make for the things the surrounding society has that they actually want.

It's totally possible to do a socialist version of that where everyone lives in modern houses with modern conveniences, share whatever stuff you all actually want to be building yourselves, but when you have to buy or vote on something, do so through the company and as a block. Mormons have largely gotten away with block voting over the decades, and still do, so we also have existing evidence that that works too.

The details are, of course, up to whoever is trying this out, but the overall thing I'm pointing to, that I don't think anyone has given a real go at, is that using a company as a buffer against capitalism. No one has to live without, but individuals in the community also don't have to go play the capitalist game every day just to get what they want or need.

To me, it could look like a bunch of people join a company through an app or something and receive voting shares they keep as long as they are participating.

Members would contribute various kinds of property and only members can vote on who gets to use what, for how long, and what, if anything gets sold to fund the company. At least initially, it would probably also have to be funded by members working regular jobs and contributing cash to the company but pretty shortly afterwards the idea would be to have the business making money on it's own by selling things the members make and want to sell.

The cash would then be used to buy anything the members vote to buy. Which then becomes part of the property pool people can vote on using.

As long as the members are geographically distributed, the company would also need to pay for shipping stuff around when it's time to change who is using what.

If it is profitable enough, then it might be able to provide most or all of what the members need to live their best lives. Short of that, it may at least be able to create a micro version of UBI or something.

There are a lot more details to work out than those of course. I do actually want to see if this approach can do something to help people live they way they want to. However, it's hard to imagine any communists or socialists wanting to join such a company if it is run by someone with a capitalist mindset. Even if that person's motives are pure and clear. Naturally, even if I was administrating such a system, I wouldn't allow myself voting powers in it but I suspect still that wouldn't be enough.

How many do you know? As far as I can tell, in the US you could fit all of these folks in a single medium size stadium. And it probably wouldn't be full.

IRL I know two or three people who like to lean this direction from time to time, but even those people seem to be just ranting against the remaining issues present under the version of capitalism we have now rather than truly wanting a completely different system.

>"Customers might see that as “a bit of a cheat,”

Because it is a cheat.

There is exactly zero chance this doesn't get bypassed and unlocked for free with the quickness. Better still though, just don't buy stuff from people willing nickel and dime you like that.

Pay real money for real things that you actually own. You will be happier this way.

That's a big claim. There are comparable third-party unlocks to get the performance upgrade for a Tesla, but nobody is doing it for free. They still want about half what Tesla charges. The difference being that Tesla will still warranty the car if you buy it from them.

The reason I think it will happen fairly quickly in cases like this is that hackers also tend to be more "challenge accepted" as culture whenever the offending restrictive software is particularly obviously stupid or egregious.