Hmm I stated in my first sentence people don't want a police state, don't want border controls, don't want to get checked up at the airport, don't want to get a drivers licence, don't want to open their bags for a security guard at a shop and so on but their are good reasons why you can't have that freedom.  We will see what happens but if between now and lets say 2028 in DC the crime rate went down, the homeless rate is down, murder rate goes down, drug addicts went down, and the number of teens only getting a probabtion for serious offenses went down....Is that a bad thing or not?  

@SanAndreasX  How is it talking shit? If I want to talk shit then I talk about how I don't understand how any country would accept Gerrymandering.  If you are in office and you believe that your policies are great why do you feel the need to Gerrymandering.

It's already down







This has nothing to do with out of control crime rates...

Only the homelessness rate went up for the first time in 17 years after a steady decline. A police state isn't going to change that. This is:
https://www.dcfpi.org/all/bringing-it-all-home-how-dc-can-become-the-first-major-city-to-end-chronic-homelessness-and-provide-higher-quality-services/

I did not ask about other people, I asked if you wanted a police state.  How much freedom are you willing to give up for security. How much does those items you list effect you the most and how much are YOU willing to give up for those problems to be fixed by more military intervention.  Interesting enough, I was in Columbia not to long ago.  Do you know that on every corner there is a military guard with a dog sometimes but crime is still rampant there why do you believe that is the case.  Because soldiers do not solve problems instead the problems just find ways around those measures.

Also the if you noticed what Trump and his administration says, they are not fixing the homeless problem, they are just relocating them somewhere else so no one sees them.  As to crime going down, it already was going down but putting more soldiers really doesn't solve crime as much as being a band aide.  Understanding why those crimes happen and fixing at the source probably would be a more productive solution as it will ensure the next generation also doesn't need to go down that route.  Also, soldiers do not fix drug addiction or primary most of the stuff you listed since that is not their job.

No, it was about a police state. There is no level of crime anywhere in the United States where I would support the kind of takeover that Trump is supporting in DC. It's easy for you to talk about it safely over there in Belgium.  I believe strongly in the words "Those who would give up essential liberty for a little temporary safety, deserve neither." And such people almost always get neither. 

They also only appreciate a heavy-handed police presence on OTHER people. When they find themselves at the wrong end of a policeman's Sig Sauer, they aren't quite so happy about it. I doubt you'd be all that appreciative of being harassed by people in military fatigues on the streets of Antwerp.

And as for gerrymandering, it's Texas and Florida that are indulging in an illegal midterm redistricting to eliminate Democratic seats. California is merely responding in kind.

The thing about the whole "right vs left" situation in the US, is that it's all a myth. It's actually stupid vs wise. What the US needs to learn is that stupidity is nor just a failing of wisdom, but a moral failing, and poison to democracy.

You'd have to be fucking stupid to believe what Trump campaigned on was going to make America great. Not everyone on the MAGA side is stupid, some of them are literally just exploiting the stupidity of their cult... it earns them wealth. Then there are those who are both stupid and exploiting the stupidity of others (like Trump and Marjory Taylor-Green).

If I may define what I mean by stupidity: it's this group think, this cult-like credulity toward demagogues who are bent on hurting others. These stupid people believe they know some kind of "secret language" that the demagogue is using, Trump in this case. It's just basic mind tricks, "give them 2+2 not 4, and it will make stupid people think they're smart by getting the answer."

Also selective listening, they see all the stuff Trump campaigned on that they didn't like and wrote it off as "he's being sarcastic! You just have to know why he's saying it." Again, a hallmark of stupidity. And this is why, when Trump announces X, so many of those stupid people are shouting, "Hey! This isn't what I voted for!" even though they very much voted for Trump who campaigned on X. Another type of stupidity we're seeing a lot of is that they actually did vote for X, but were too stupid to think about the negative consequences of what they were voting on.

So, to get back to my point, what the US has to do is figure out a way to drive these fucking stupid morons back into being a lunatic fringe movement. This fucking shit isn't just taking apart the US, it's harming the rest of the world. If the US isn't capable of that, perhaps the country has run its course and it's time for the US to split up. Let the MAGA states form their own confederacy. At least when the war against MAGA starts, it'll be a short and campaign through the Confederacy of MAGAland instead of World War 3. The American refugees who fled MAGAland can then get their properties back, and more.

What do you think this is about? 

Trump is asking Texas to gerrymander the state further. They were proposing an 80% Republican representation in a state that's about 55% Republican. 

A few blue states were threatening to gerrymander in response if Texas were to do that. 

Democrats are generally not in favor of Gerrymandering, so what are you talking about? 

Social media is truly a disease if it comes to how people perceive information. It's the same in Germany. We have much less homicides as 20-30 years ago but our Nazi party is gaining more and more votes and many of them come from people who think we live in a country where you can't walk 5 meters without fear anymore.

We have one of the lowest homicide rates of the planet but hey, guys like Elon Musk and obviously our Nazi party always tell us how Germany went downhill so it has to be true! And when I tell those people that they read the damn news 150 times a day and watch 500 videos a day but in the past they just checked a newspaper in the morning and watched the news on TV at 8pm so that this is the reason why it sounds much worse to them they are just too stupid to get it. 

When I was a child (between 6-9 years old) I was the whole day alone with my bike in the village I lived then. Some friends lived 7km away and I went alone to them on my bike and nobody gave a shit. Nowadays nobody even in that village which probably never had something bad happening the last 50 years will let their kid walk alone to the school even if it's just 500 meters away. 

This is just insanity nowadays. 

Yep same here. I grew up in the 80s in a city of 150k, basically lived on the street. Parents didn't even want their kids inside, messing up the house lol. We always played wherever we liked, including construction sites, train tracks, ponds, hitching a ride on a tractor. We cycled to a lake nearby to swim or to the forest to build underground forts. (bit older 12+ by the time we started cycling out of town on our own)

The only directive was, come home for dinner of call if you're having dinner at a friend's house. Which was very common. My wife's brother was so cheeky growing up he called around to see what his friends were having for dinner then go to the one that sounded the best lol.


Maybe another difference is in 'framing'. We were warned about white vans and flashers (never saw one). And to this day, white vans still look suspicious lol. But then it all changed into "stranger danger". And what do you know, now we have whole xenophobic generations walking around...

Plus now they say "stranger danger" is by far the least worrisome for kids.
https://theheartfulparent.com/news/updating-your-safety-tools-making-stranger-danger-a-phrase-of-the-past/


And yep, the news was at 8pm plus a news paper in the morning. No hysterics, small comment section in the paper, that was it. People didn't worry about what happened anywhere in the country all the time. Plus you talked to neighbors, not echo chambers.

MAGA Pundit Says ETHNICALLY CLEANSE Washington DC

Acceptable levels of authoritarianism by the populace is often a function of fear within the population. I bet if studies were done on historical data they would see this. The value of the actual threat relative to the value we (as a society) assigned to it  over a domain of time is often irrelevant to stupid people (sorry to use this word again). Those who are wise, understand society is being manipulated through fear. We've seen it before. And I don’t mean just Nazi Germany, it’s been in the tyrant’s playbook dating back to at least the Greco-Tyrants of the archaic era.

And when I say "manipulation" - it might not even be a deliberate cabal forcing society into a direction, but rather the result of a loss of intestinal fortitude/balls as  a function of a loss of connection to reality... and people unable to perceive the meaning of data.

How did this happen? We (as a society) have been shifting over to the grasps of technology from real world interactions (Social/real world connection → TV, video games, Internet) - particularly our new cyber-reality dominated by social media... where there are no physical threats, just information threats. People (as a whole) are far more terrified of the physical threats than in the past, so while a murder rate of 3 per 100,000 was perceived as small and nearly inconsequential in 1995, a murder rate of less than 1 per 100,000 is now perceived as totally unacceptable.

As a note, I'm just borrowing numbers to demonstrate a point. I'm sure the actual values will be different if the data is scrutinized.

The only alternative to manipulation by fear is ignorance/loss of common sense. Common sense would tell most of us that, even if that 3 in 100,000 sounds high, that the vast majority of that 3 will never apply to us. Think of it as the X factor, which includes homeless people, criminal associates, people with violent/abusive family members, and 3-X becomes a much smaller number. Whereas people today, if it's not the result of media manipulation, are simply too ignorant to understand the X-factor, and that X to them will always be 0. So, in 1995, because we were almost all spending 85-100% of our day in the real world, we got a good sense of that X-value, and it might be 2.9 or even 2.99, so then it's more like 1 in a million or 1 in 10 million chance we'll get murdered. But people who think that X-factor is 0, will think, even if the rate is lower, that 1-X=1, so they see it as 1 in 100,000... or 10 to 100 times higher than the perception of someone in the 1990s. Because yes, we almost universally considered society safer, except for the lunatic fringe. Now that lunatic fringe is mainstream thought.

Do what Dietrich Bonhoeffer did far too late, and call them out on their stupidity. Shame them for their stupidity. Ostracize them for their stupidity. Because stupid people in large groups (and they're always in groups) are more dangerous to society than authentic evil on its own; because, stupid people don't recognize their own evil behaviour if it alleviates their irrational fears. In effect, these groups of stupid people are the vessel for delivering evil to the world. Nazism was indeed evil, but it would have never been anything more than a bunch of angry losers if it weren't for the vast swaths of stupidity that took over much of Europe when the economic system collapsed during the rise of the radio. Stupidity is the garden which allows evil to manifest on massive scales.