Here in rural Michigan its bipartisan against flock. Sheriff rolled it out on Monday and ended the 90 day trial on Friday. Next weeks road commissioner meeting revoked the permit for em on the right of way.
Which is to say our cops are pro-flock but they've gotten too much heat from them from a largely uneducated public.
Meanwhile I've recently seen a rural Tennessee sheriff drop their contract when they found they were lied to about the data sharing.
(because you always have to explain the joke on this site, everyone was warned about these fascists before and during their rise to power, and this site supports them because the obvious reason https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-026-02862-9)
Reddit-tier comment, says the guy whos never had his face smashed into the hood of a car by a sheriff deputy. We got something in the US and it often wears robes and badges, but it's not law written by legislatures.
you get downvoted because to most people we don't care if its tyranny.gov or tyranny.com. "don't give powers to the government" just means they buy them from corporations. see: cellphone location data.
the solution is not to have the power exist at all, anywhere.
>the solution is not to have the power exist at all, anywhere.
This is nonsensical. The power always exists, it's just your fellow human beings doing things, to you, around you, with you, without you.
You cannot do anything to not have that power. It doesn't matter if your neighbors are lynching you because the evil dictatorial police state said to, or because the rough consensus of a mob of lunatics want your food.
You as a human lack power. Humans working together have far more power. Sometimes, you can use the combined power of some humans working together to empower other humans. That's what laws are. That's what a State can do.
That's why corporations can have power even though they are not part of government. Being able to direct 1000 humans to do something is what power is.
You cannot eliminate that power. It's a fundamental part of reality. It's the entire reason animals evolved to be social at all, to take advantage of that power.
Its like you need a list of laws rules and enforcement "we" people have built to stop "them" (corporations/governments/groups of lobbyists) from working together.
I'll point to the gun rules, where gun owners prevented the state from building gun registries, forced gun sale records to be kept on gun store premises, and then largely purchased from small independent gun stores. They ensured the background check was on the person and not the gun. All intentionally with the understanding that someone somewhere was going to attempt to grab the power of who had what guns.
You can avoid giving any single person or group too much power. It does take effort.
Your thesis that the solution is to "not to have the power exist at all, anywhere" and your insistence here that "you need a list of laws rules and enforcement "we" people have built to stop "them"" are at odds. "We" did not build those laws nor do "we" enforce them. The government wrote those laws and the government enforces them with its monopoly on violence. You cannot have a set of laws which anyone respects or enforces without a source of power capable of doing so, and in the US that source of power is not "we the people," regardless of what your civics classes might have taught you.
>All intentionally with the understanding that someone somewhere was going to attempt to grab the power of who had what guns.
And so it became impossible to do anything effective to prevent gun violence and mass shootings and "that someone somewhere" proceeded to centralize power anyway because the gun owners don't actually care as long as no one touches their guns.
Meanwhile the rest of the Western world has democratic governments which actually function and don't have mass shootings.
Many of the same people that want to attempt to reduce mass shootings by directly undermining the obvious literal intent of the second amendment almost without exception want to expand the government for their own ends. It wasn't "someone somewhere" - it was very specific political movements that had often had heavy endorsement from the government itself. You can't honestly say gun owners haven't cared as long as no one touches their guns - that's just dishonest and plainly historically illiterate.
do you really not understand the monopoly on violence that governments have that corporations in large part completely lack? are you being purposefully obtuse?
wana see private security for a pharmaceutical beat a guy on a bike for taking a shortcut through their parking lot? oh right, no bodycams there.
cops protect property. rich people got a sweet deal right now as our taxes pay for them. but rest assured if we did manage to defund the police, you'd see private security replace them. then maybe you'd understand who has power without the obfuscation of "libertarian" bs.
You are just making the case for a leviathan which is clearly cited in much of the "libertarian bs" you disparage - but I assume it's an area of political science you don't actually read. The government IS this leviathan and that is its justified role. You need to have something above corporations that has the ability to actually enforce contracts. That doesn't mean it needs to be the worlds largest employer - or generally distort every market signal critical to its citizens lives. Government that can fulfill it's justified role(s), and a totalitarian government are different things.
I think this runs into a basic issue that all large software systems that enforce the law contribute to locking down a society because laws tend to need be broken to be changed.
That a system can be avoided offends the investor who want their products to be ubiquitous.
The system that is not perfectly enforced offends the engineer who dislikes broken things.
Yet both are required if we as a society are to grow. I think the thing that it might be good to learn is when to say "I've done/had enough."
I think I could collect enough weight of books on "civil disobedience" at my local library that I could crush you underneath them, even if you didn't bother reading them.
I'm sure you could. But it would in no way demonstrate that laws generally need civil disobedience to be changed. Laws are changed all the time, as bills, as legal precedent, and as regulations.
Because that line of "enjoying your existence" making no mention of the monumental harm we cause to every biome on the planet is exactly the kind of selfishness that the button pushers would like to eradicate.
Causing harm to biomes is not the same thing as causing net harm to animals inside biomes. The base rate of harm done to animals inside biomes is immense and horrific.
You're doing crazy gymnastics right now. Eliminating biomes drives animals to extinction. In what world could you argue that doesn't deserve even a little moral consideration?
I'm not going to argue with someone who works this hard to be a contrarian.
It's not gymnastics, you just have no background on this topic.
Species are not moral subjects. Individuals are.
Killing an individual animal that could live a worthwhile life for longer is an individually bad act. Insofar as this happens in the process of species going extinct, that's bad. But it's also the default state of nature. Does replacing a forest with a city cause net harm to non-human animals? That's not clear. It might even be net good.
Does that mean we should destroy wilderness on purpose to prevent wild animal suffering? Not yet, we don't have the technology to mitigate knock-on effects, and it should be done a way that does not harm individuals. But I can't get behind viewing biome destruction as some kind of atrocity against the animals within them, at least not as a whole. (Some species have better lives than others).
I've noticed a big split in viewpoint between people who don't live in the US.
Its like those who live in the states have a incentive to act like everything going on is ok, while those outside are increasingly having statements like yours. "How do you not see this power 13 years past Snowden"
I've not given up trying to point out how dangerous the US govs powers are in the hands of an ever less capable and more fascist government, ie posting here on HN, but the odds to convince people are low.
I spend significant time in the US, Canada, and Europe, and nobody I talk to seems to think that what's going on is OK.
Both Canada and Europe are undertaking major projects to reduce their interdependence with America, and public sentiment on America has changed rapidly since the current administration assumed power. Europeans have always distrusted American tech, and Canadians have started trying to break away as well.
The Americans I spend time with are also unhappy with the direction things are going, but most of them still use Google Chrome and buy everything on Amazon. They seem to be less willing to accept a little bit of inconvience to take a moral stand.
I almost forgot that Canada and India are on such poor terms. I wonder what the numbers would be if India hadn't assassinated Nijjar on Canadian soil in 2023.
This is just one more thing in a time of all the things. When all this backlash comes to roost at techs door this site I expect will be shocked. How could the average American confuse the rich VCs with the moloch worshiping pedophiles and the fascist government populists?
When the giant finally wakes in America it won't be reasonable or well targeted. I'm reminded that violence in gang neighborhoods is modeled as a contaigen. Have we ever seen a violence "pandemic"?
Which I guess is why Zuck has been building compounds.
Which is to say our cops are pro-flock but they've gotten too much heat from them from a largely uneducated public.
Meanwhile I've recently seen a rural Tennessee sheriff drop their contract when they found they were lied to about the data sharing.
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