Here's one for the sift: Because I sent an email from an address I had used as an alias on this site to my ex-wife's mother trying to track down my ex and children who, in violation of divorce decree, left the state without notifying me....
My ex-mother-in-law (crazy, paranoid academic) lied and said she felt threatened by my inquiry, made some shit up in a police report in King County, Washington and slapped me with a restraining order. For a fucking email, in which I neither threatened them or anyone they knew.

I am arrested for something completely unrelated 5 years later, charged with threatening the lives of policemen (fucking rant about how small their dicks were and their mommy-issues form the back of the cop car) the State of Texas is charging me with felony obstruction, and some intern in the DA's office preparing for the state's case, goes online, finds my alias and LOW AND BEHOLD-The state has in their hands my dossier from Videosift from every time the user had typed ANYTHING derogatory concerning police in general.

Big brother is up your ass and you people without balls and more common sense than myself....ain't got a fucking clue.

Thanks again Lucky, for eliminating those comments on said behalf, even though they have the hard-copy, which, I am told by my atty., would be of no effect either way to peruse
.-Freedom of speech is utter fucking bullshit in the United States of Now-Thanks to all the ineffectual pseudo-intellectual ass-sniffers who thinks republicans or democrats are any sort of concern or problem OR that your participation in their government machine can do anything but enslave you further. Play a losing game and you wake up in chains.

I'm kinna with the Dark Knight Joker at this juncture...Surprise me again with some motherfucking "change", eh??
*Freedom in the form of boots stamping on a human face forever, America.

The problem is with grouping people into "drunk drivers" - as if they are a monolith.
You wouldn't say "black people commit more crimes, so black people are harmful" ... that would be considered racist - because it characterizes all the individuals of a group as the same as the worst individuals of the group.
But people who drink and drive don't get that measure of consideration. Across the board they are treated as if they had done harm, whether or not they actually did.


Simple matter really.

Drunk drivers that do harm, do harm.
Sober drivers that do harm, do harm.
Drunk drivers that don't do harm, don't do harm.
Sober drivers that don't do harm, don't do harm.

The harm is in the harm, not in the drunk.


Jail, etc. is real harm to a person's life.
Lost time, lost payments (leading to lost house/car), lost relationships, etc.
If they didn't do any harm themselves, then the punishment is not justified.

Sober drivers get a hand-wave for the harm they cause, as if not drinking or not being on a cell phone makes you unaccountable for your actions.


Drinking is fundamentally a personal matter. It involves only ones's self.
Running into another person/property and damaging them/it involves other people (ergo society), so society has moral domain to intervene to help the victim(s).

There's a certain perversion to persecuting people who behave in a disliked manner (and did no harm and had no victim), and then neglecting the plight of victims when whoever harmed them hadn't been behaving in a disliked manner.

We are all individuals, morally responsible for our individual actions.
We should be accountable for our real actions.
Not theoretical "actions that could have been, had things gone differently".


I'm not a fan of people driving drunk, but I would never harm someone for doing it without doing any harm themselves, just because I don't like it.

I'm also not a fan of people failing at their obligation to maintain control of their vehicle, and injuring/maiming/crippling/killing people, and then not being held accountable for the damage they caused because "it was an accident".
Why should the victim be accountable for paying for the damages? They didn't do the damage.

Instead of playing big brother and approving/disapproving of personal behavior, we should be focused on helping victims get justice.
"IMO"

-scheherazade

No, We wish it wasn't up for discussion, AT ALL!
Stop bombing everything, period.

Stop producing the bombs, once you make them, you need to use them just to justify the cost put into producing them. And you can't stock pile them, technology moves too fast. Just Stop already. America has become the self-appointed Big Brother to the world and anyone who disagrees, risks getting attacked.

Sorry, another one:

http://rt.com/news/apple-patent-transmission-block-408/

Publish a year ago and is the source of the Guardian article.

As I suspected, this is old news. Plus, the technology wasn't designed as a way for Big Brother to shut down the little man. The concept of movie theaters turning off phone service has been asked for for a long time by theaters to prevent texting and cell phone use during movies. Same thing with schools. Weddings, well, let's just say The Guardian made me laugh when they implied it was all about "national security." It's actually getting more popular for brides to tell people to not use their phone while they're walking down the aisle and such.

Privacy and freedom are orthogonal. Privacy both grants freedom and takes it away. You're talking like there is a clear path for a centrist to take on this matter. My thought experiment was meant to expose a hypocrisy in too commonly held ideals. "Information should be free!" is often taken to mean that we should be able to access whatever information we want. On the other hand, "big brother" is a pejorative describing dystopian violations of individual privacy that reasonable people holding the former position often use.

We can't have it both ways. Either we get to know what people are up to (e.g. terrorists, banks, lobbyists, politicians, government agencies, etc) while coping with oversight of our own activities. Or we lock down all the information and cope with the inevitable cheat avoiding detection.

You can play the game of trying to break it down case by case, but the fact is surveillance can't really be implemented piecemeal. Once you decide to collect the information, you sort of get what you get.

Heh. Because public-sector big brother is the right way to go?

They should have just written "What happens when you Big Brother".

Terror attacks that get prevented tend not to get quite the same news coverage. We'll likely never know how effective it was, but is the efficacy of the program at all relevant?

I don't think the motives behind this whole prism thing were some machiavellian aspiration to become Big Brother. They have blown the terror threat out of proportion and have allowed the ends to justfy their means. Nobody wants another Boston or 9/11, but the idea of a future where such terror attacks are impossible by way of mass survelliance is far more frighteningly dystopian. Buuuuuut I am in danger of making a slippery slope argument and creating a false dichotomy. Needless to say society is about the sacrifice of freedoms for some degree of security. I hope the debate as to where that trade might become unfavorable continues, and I certainly hope those that provided the seed for it dont end up swinging from a rope for treason.

I must admit that Israel, in my humble opinion, is damaging herself in the long run. We are aggressors. we have this "kill before get killed" way of thinking for the past I don't know how many years. We are doing basically whatever we like, running around with a hall pass from our big brother the U.S., knowing that almost nothing will be done to us due to the severe consequences. I can assure you that people in Israel have a distorted view of things, due to the long standing feud in the middle east. Oh, and another example, you will not see students been taught that Israel started any war. The arabs were always the aggressors.

I can only imagine what acts will be taken if Syria decides to attack a missile shipment from the U.S. coming to Israel...

It does NOT MATTER one bit if guns are regulated or not during a war. This is not about war, this is about trying to protect people from crazy shits and accidents during 'peacetime'. Obviously, if tyranny happened, and there was mass fear in the populace of this or any country, people find a way to stand up and fight back. Guns will be apart of that, and will be a big part. But these regulations that they are trying to put in place have nothing to do with 'surrendering to big brother'.

I completely understand the idea that this can be a 'slippery slope' that will eventually ban all guns and turn us into slaves... somehow. BUT I have a hope in my heart that most of humanity actually is human, and caring of others. We as a species have survived before the gun and after the gun. Unfortunately I can't say that about alot of the other species.

Well, only one down-vote:

IMO Carey just pissed on what's left of any real career-The producers of Kick-Ass 2 seem to agree that he's not thinking clearly, not unlike some of the peeps on this banal thread.

If you begin with the Kool-Aid being served with semantics like "assault rifle" and end up on a video blog with about 5 videos published with any meat having to do with the recent whack-job mass-shooting, the bulk of whose active users are east/west coast U.S. and outside of the C.U.S....IS IT SURPRISING, that you have a skewed representation of attitudes towards free will relative to firearms in the United States?

I do see these bills introduced in states and nationally the writing on the wall to an eventual fascist future for the entire fucking world, and those who don't, deserve that future.

Carrey's schtick never did it for me after age 16, he's so off in the realm of some EST whack-job in interviews, (like some motivational speaker from a closed-circuit kid's show in Ottawa on at 6 a.m.) and now with this, why the turd even dishonors the memory of Stringbean Akeman by taking a jab at Hee Haw and the fine people of Nashville.

Fuck Jim Carrey, BIG BROTHER say's he's doubleplus unfunny

(Only applies to Americans)

Unfortunately you have very little understanding of the US legal system.

A) Under the Constitution you HAVE NO RIGHT to privacy, of any short, whatsoever. The word privacy doesn't even exist. I am perfectly 100% legally allowed to sit on a public sidewalk and take pictures of you all day long. If I can see you, from that sidewalk (or any public space) I can photograph, video, draw or whatever your likeness to my hearts content. And there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. Period.

B) By US law, any previous offenses cannot be used against you. If they have footage of you kicking a cat on a sidewalk and you're being charged with a speeding ticket, they cannot use that footage for anything. If they do, you win. It's called a mistrial. Now, if you were being charged with animal abuse by your mom for kicking her cat, they still CANNOT use that footage. Unless, of course, it was her cat you kicked in the video. (This is why you hear being being charged with 7 counts of murder. The previous murders are not evidence that they committed the most recent one, but the evidence applies jointly to several cases such as DNA, weapon, motive, location etc. Same with the animal abuse. You could be charged with 2 counts of animal abuse, but someone would actually have to file that charge.)

C) They don't even store that video. You obviously believe big brother has invented some new fangled massive storage device. CCTV eats through tape/disk fairly quickly, especially higher resolution ones. An average McDonalds has around 12 CCTV's throughout the store. (It's been a while, so don't quote me.) That's a lot of footage. That's one of the big cons is that most systems only record 4 frames a second in SD. Most systems also only store the data for a few days. Essentially long enough for the store owner to realize something happened and pull the tapes.

D) Most CCTV's aren't even monitored. They're there for evidence after the fact. The City of Tampa was planning to use facial recognition software to look for known Top Wanted. Why? Because as much as you think there's a secret lair of lackies watching your every move, a person can only watch one screen full of people. When they're over 10,000 cameras in that city, that's 1% of the population watching monitors. Well, 3% if they go in shifts. And yet, I don't see a "CCTV Watchers Union" anywhere.

E) Again, you HAVE NO RIGHT TO PRIVACY. Only protection against unreasonable Search and Seizure. Which only protects you within private property, or articles on your body. As in, they cannot search you, your vehicle, house or business without a warrant. If you don't want people looking at you, stay inside, close the blinds, and use Amazon to buy everything you need.

Lower taxation? Much like people who say it's against their so-called privacy to run red lights without a camera taking their picture? Because I'm pretty sure spending 20k is cheaper than 50k it'd cost to hire just 1 officer to stand at an intersection and chase people down.

Cameras aren't some big evil. It's improper use of the cameras that's evil. It's illegal wire tapping that's evil. It's the recording of all text messages without any safe guards in place that's evil. You're worried about a camera? Seriously, what are you doing that makes you so terrified of a little camera?

Why do police cars have cameras? I doubt it's so they can be all big brother on you. It's to keep the officer honest. It's a non-biased witness to a crime. In most cases a camera isn't going to prevent a crime, but it certainly helps when it's a he-said/she-said incident.

I think I vaguely recall some discussion about guns not killing people. Or something along those lines. If guns are perfectly okay despite the massive evidence of the rampant gun use and rampant gun sales to foreign entities that use them to suppress and murder, I don't see the same argument being applied to CCTV. Why is the gun ok but the owner bad, but the camera bad and the owner is never talked about?

Maybe instead of cheering on the destruction of tax payer property we should discuss the rules and regulations of handling the data from these cameras. After all, I for some reason see tons of idiot criminals on here due to these things. Obviously that benefit outweighs any lame excuses listed above.

1. CCTV is a lot cheaper than an armed guard at every intersection, every school blah blah. Not to mention, armed security hasn't really been all that effective. Hell, someone just shot a few cops the other day. I'm pretty sure the cops had guns. But who's counting.

2. First they make us drive on roads. Next they're going to make us get LICENSED! OMG! Pretty soon they're going to require us not to run over babies, or run red lights, or shoot people who are going too slow! Jesus we're becoming such a nanny state! Why can't I just hire a doctor who went to Joe Bob's School or 3 Day Medical Training?

3. Aside from all the evidence pointing to the fact that CCTV does deter crime. If 1 out of 5 crimes don't take place because of a camera, that's called a Deterrent. But I could be thinking of statistics and not emotion. The reason why these cameras catch idiots is because they're stupid enough to do them in the first place. Locks don't stop criminals. Locks determine your level of honesty. If you're determined enough, you will get in no matter what. If I reaaaaally want in your car, I will find a way, even if you lock it. So why bother locking it? Oh, right, because 1 out of 10 will be super desperate while 9 out of 10 will be ok with just opening the unlocked door.

4. Yeeeeaaaaaaaaah. That's such a good reason. Hey, I don't really like these whole murder laws. I say I should dissent. Or I don't like financial regulation, let's just crash the entire countries economy . . . or sell futures for a product that doesn't exist. See your number 2. Slippery slope here . . . so while I agree with you that some laws should be broken, ignored, fought etc, it's not exactly a "one good reason".

1. Lower taxation, these things cost money (initial outlay and ongoing costs) to keep an eye on a populace that, by and large, aren't doing anything wrong. Most of us don't want em, don't need em and don't want to pay for them.

2. Changing rules aka slippery slope. The people who agree to big brother on the first day might become victims of it later down the track. Once you establish a state where the citizens are constantly under surveillance and have accepted that onus, you can implement worse measures. Look at post 911 USA... Land of the free? As long as you don't mind the government setting up camp in your rectum 24/7.

3. There is no such thing as "safe". CCTV doesn't deter crime, it just catches the idiots too stupid to take it in to account (ie. people who cut down poles sans facial coverings for example...). Much like any other precaution, criminals find ways around CCTV. That is not an argument for more surveillance, it's an argument about the futility of it in the first place.

4. Sometimes the rules should be broken. How many things were illegal 100 years ago that are perfectly legal now? Worse, think of the things that were legal 100 years ago that are outlawed now (*hint: most of them are self harm crimes such as drug use etc) How often have nanny states tried to decree what you can and can't do only to find that people do not want to live under that rule? The camera is the start, if they can see what you are doing constantly, they can stop you. Why do you think organisations like Anonymous exist? To quote a memorable cutscene from Sid Meir's Alpha Centauri, "We must dissent...".

Send 10 bucks to the charity of your choice.

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