08-14-2020, 10:34 AM
(08-14-2020, 07:23 AM)downtown3 Wrote: Every country is a police state now, but only countries that
disobey the globalists are called dictatorships.
OK... if you take a trip to Wal*Mart to do a little shopping you will notice that video cameras are everywhere, often hidden. Filch something? You will be detected. Cameras will be directed at people's faces to detect tell-tale signs of dishonest behavior (most often shoplifting) in facial expressions. Cameras are above the self-serve checkout counters whereat someone might be tempted to pay for some highly-visible grocery items but hide some items with high price-to-volume rations (let us say beauty products, patent medicines, or certain video items). So buy a jug of milk, some boxes of cereal, and maybe some bread honestly but keep the latest edition of a series of Game of Thrones in the basket that you eventually take to the car and put the 'liberated' video in your trunk or passenger compartment... then some security guard will be following you. Although most people spend little time in a parking lot unless they have forgotten where they parked their cars, Wal*Mart really has the parking lot covered. Someone looking into parked cars for keys in the ignition? Vandalism? An attempted drug deal? Fighting? Or of course taking pilfered items to one's car?
Every Wal*Mart is effectively a police state. Then again, I don't want anyone stealing or vandalizing my car, and I don't want to be where drug deals and fights happen. Shoplifters aren't my friends.
OK, we generally recognize that surveillance is the norm in business to deter or detect illegal behavior by employees or customers. If the government is using my postings on the Web to keep me from getting a job or cause me to lose a job after I disparage Donald Judas Iscariot Trump... then that is inexcusable. Terrorist threats are of course inexcusable, but I would not ask for any undue consequences (such as prison time or harassment on the job, or loss of a professional license or liquor license for this:
Yes, it is repugnant, but certainly not criminal.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.