...PROTECT IP and SOPA lay the ground for much broader forms of censorship. And, while I don't like slippery slope arguments as a rule, this is one that scares me. If you remember the first days of Internet regulation, relatively few sites were taken down because they offered pornography; anti-porn legislation was abused to take down sites discussing contraception. Without any sort of court review, I foresee many fraudulent attempts to silence political opposition. If you're clever enough, almost anything can be claimed to be a copyright violation, especially if you don't have to go before a judge to defend the claim.
here
Student_Council said:
"The United States is reaching the final stages of fully reconstituting itself as a police state."
Sensationalize much?
Student_Council said:
"The United States is reaching the final stages of fully reconstituting itself as a police state."
Sensationalize much?
"As often happens which such things, it's taking place without much notice."
Please cite historical examples of the template this is following.
GMCaesar said:
"Ben Salmon was a Catholic conscientious objector during World War I and outspoken critic of Just War theology. The Catholic Church denounced him and the The New York Times described him as a "spy suspect."
The United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population. But it has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners.
Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.
Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.
The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King's College London.
China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. (That number excludes hundreds of thousands of people held in administrative detention, most of them in China's extrajudicial system of re-education through labor, which often singles out political activists who have not committed crimes.)
jeffmarkel said:
The United States is reaching the final stages of fully reconstituting itself as a police state.
wharfrat said:
More anecdotals (all mine) supporting Jeff's thesis.
Police SWAT and homeland security units marching around NYC with machine guns.
In the town/schoolstem in which I work, police presence in the school hallways ( and classrooms!) is ubiquitous.
Friendly fascism, indeed!
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I'm not sure why the mainstream press is not covering this one - too complicated for them to explain in elementary school vocabulary, probably. Please read the linked article, and do some followup investigations if you're doubtful of single-sourced stories. There's plenty out there, just not on TV or in newspapers.
http://www.opencongress.org/articles/view/2447-Indefinite-military-detention-for-U-S-citizens-now-in-the-hands-of-a-secretive-conference-committee-