[phobosanomaly]

People are buried in enough crippling debt that keeps them from leading a life that has enough breathing room to pontificate about the implications of a the government reading their web-browsing history.

If you're worried about paying rent, and whether you have enough in the bank to replace the bald tires on your '97 Civic, are you really going to riot in the streets over the government collecting some data that they will never use against a tiny cog in the machine such as yourself?

[vorpalhex]

> People are buried in enough crippling debt...

I'm assuming you're speaking about college debt specifically, but people holding student loan debt are typically:

+ Higher class

+ Opted into taking the debt

+ Have enough income to not qualify for debt relief

+ 20% of that debt is held by people with graduate or doctoral degrees

It would take somewhere on the lines of $1 trillion dollars to cancel that debt (so that's money that can't be used for increasing healthcare, public utilities, issuing new student loans, etc). Oh and college prices would probably increase as a result - why worry about taking a loan if there's a chance the government is going to cancel it?

[phobosanomaly]

Why worry about giving people healthcare if they're just going to use it as an excuse to smoke, and drink, and eat chocolate bars all day?

Why worry about providing people with public utilities if they're just going to use it to waste electricity playing video games and leaving the living room lights on?

I understand your cynicism, but I believe we are trapped in a local minimum where people are stuck having taken out loans for an education their parents led them to believe would help them, but which turned out to be not so useful from an employment perspective.

I choose to believe that education from good, public institutions should be encouraged as much as possible, in as many different fields as people have interest in for the overall benefit and competitiveness of the country. But I don't believe that it should trap people in debt situations that then hamstring their ability to use that education in a creative, and entrepreneurial way.

We have to move everybody that is stuck now past the sticking point, and then, as you pointed out, find ways to eliminate people from getting stuck in the first place.

I kept it cheap by going to community college and transferring to a state school. Let's get that more normalized because I paid the same amount for my first two years of college what I then paid for one quarter at the university.

There are better ways of doing things, and there are institutions in place to facilitate a better way. We just have to move past this and tweak the system a bit.

[HexagonalKitten]

I'd be all for university debt cancellation if it was in the form of universities not getting paid. Because as you say, they provided a shitty product. And as a parent poster said, if they get paid they'll just keep or raise rates so this is the best way to correct the root problem as well.

But I'm against debt cancellation if it just means that we get to pay for their shitty schooling, and we both know this is what they're pushing for. Increasing the tax burden on those who didn't get loans and didn't go to fancy schools.

Why shouldn't they just be allowed to go bankrupt? Then people who made bad loans would suffer. And they wouldn't be able to buy TVs and other crap on credit for a few years which for this specific demographic, might be a lesson.

[phobosanomaly]

If it was that easy, everyone would do it.

[vorpalhex]

The issue isn't _really_ the students. Sure if suddenly all college students made aggressive financial choices we'd be better off, but really it's the more expensive universities themselves.

They know what kinds and amounts of student loans are available and they raise their prices based on that. If they can sell getting even more expensive student loans (knowing they have no risk and that you can't exactly get a refund on a degree..) then they'll keep raising prices.

And if all of these costs were resulting in the greatest workers ever who were geniuses in mathematics, maybe it'd be worth it right. Except generally it's not, these costs are going to administrators and fluff instead of things that help students or improve their outcomes.

[phobosanomaly]

I think it depends heavily on the system. For example, the Cal State system (largest public university system in the world) is pretty darn affordable if you're paying in-state tuition and commuting from home. Cal State San Bernardino doesn't have a whole lot of fluff. Just a bare-bones commuter school that gets the job done. Excellent value.

The UCs go up in price, but they're also literally world-class research institutions.

Let's focus on funneling more people through a community college/Cal State type system where they're graduating with a reasonable education that helps contribute to a well-educated and intelligent society, while not saddling people with monumental amounts of debt. And if they choose to continue their education and become specialists, they can go to grad school at a larger research university. I'm pretty sure that's what the CC/Cal State/UC system was originally intended to be. We've just sort of strayed from that path.

[randomchars]

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.

[Dobby2020]

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]

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.

[ChrisRR]

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]

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]

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.

[randomchars]

> 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]

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.

[michaelt]

> The domestic United States is pretty boring by comparison. What, are they going to hassle the 7/11 guy? Why would they even bother?

Because a tough, macho president, who is also a rules-breaking maverick, decides he wants every protester who was anywhere near that burned-down police station locked up.

> Congress would throw an absolute fit if they caught wind of it.

You've got a very different impression of them to me, then.

[phobosanomaly]

"Prosecutors declined to pursue many of the cases because they concluded the protesters were exercising their basic civil rights."

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/19/us/protests-lawsuits-arre...

'Ten days after leaving the White House with President Trump and walking with him across a park that had been forcibly cleared of protesters, the nation's most senior military officer is calling that excursion "a mistake."'

https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racia...

Despite the fact that the GOP will stand behind the president no matter what he does (even attempting a coup it seems), there is a younger generation (even within the GOP) who is a bit more grounded (e.g. Jeff Flake), and in ten years Mitch McConnell will be nothing more than a footnote in history.

If the courts keep throwing out Rudy's embarassingly-constructed cases, that fellow you're referring to is gone in a month, which is a pretty big difference from a puppet regime in the former Soviet Bloc.

Our country has been through a lot, but she has some life in her yet. Bear in mind that the younger generations have a very different political ideology than that of their parents. We are currently witnessing the death-throes of the political dominance of my parent's generation. They will slowly fade away and be replaced with a more forward-thinking and fresh approach to the same tired old problems. Glass half-full.

[Clubber]

Police have been harassing people for decades in the US. To assign it exclusively to Trump ignores this history and it also assumes it will go away in January. We just elected the guy who unapologetically wrote the crime bill and California's "top cop." Based on their resume, It will probably get worse under their leadership.

[officeplant]

>Regarding the police. They're not exactly the enemy of the people.

Given that policing in the US was founded to protect wealthy merchant types (later evolved into slave beating union busting monsters), they've always been the enemy of the people.

[phobosanomaly]

You're absolutely right. The institution of policing has for several hundred years been a team of enforcers for use by the ruling classes. It has historically been used to maintain social, economic, and racial disenfranchisement.

And there are plenty of cops who should absolutely not have a modicum of the power they now have. But, in 2020, it's important to recognize that 'police' are not a monolithic state entity, and there are plenty of good, kind officers who truly make an effort to 'protect and serve.' Let's get the bad ones the hell out of there, take some of the pressure off of the good ones so they're not acting as community mental health counselors, and maybe work to disarm folks on both sides so they don't have to enter every situation wondering if someone is going to murk them through a tinted window on a traffic stop.

It's a complicated situation that demands empathy and nuance on all sides.

[xyzzyz]

> 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]

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]

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]

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-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.