There's the old saying that "we are free only as much as we don't have guns in our face telling us we're not". The reigns placed on our freedom are just unrecognized by the vast majority of people so they feel they have more freedom than what they might appreciate.
Most of it these days is less about being intelligent enough and more about whether you're positioned to encounter or hear about a "chilling effect" [1]. Historians will probably only ever be able to debate order-of-magnitude estimates of how many students gave up protesting because of the Kent State shootings, or how many writers "self-censored" because of PRISM/XKeyscore [2], or how many people decide not to exercise their Second Amendment rights because they don't want to risk being categorized as "armed" in a police encounter [3] [4].
One example that's a bit more concrete is the combination of pre-trial detention and plea bargains. These form, in effect, a punishment for exercising one's right to a fair trial, a punishment that exists because our court system is quite far from having the capacity to properly handle the sheer volume of prosecutions that occur [5].
As an attorney, I find your plea bargain argument unpersuasive. Major themes in the criminal justice system are acknowledgment of guilt and acceptance of responsibility. These are going to work against you after spending a year claiming you didn’t do it if the jury decides you did.
If you're a heterosexual white male, you probably won't notice them. You'll also probably not care for that any non-heterosexual white male might feel differently. For everyone else, we have loads of examples of how not free they are at times. Heaven help you if you "fit the description".
If you can't think of any specific examples on your own, then you're just not really trying very hard.
Try driving while not white in certain cities and see how free you feel. Try being a naturalized citizen or first gen to see how free you are in certain cities. Try being a female and looking to make your own health care decisions in certain states. Are these less vague allusions enough for you?
Freedom does not mean the opposite of being in jail. There's a lot of freedoms that are taken away from people purely based on race/sex whether you want to call it baiting or not. They still exist as problems.
No, not at all. For example, plenty of white people feel unwelcome in areas — but neither group is prohibited and in both cases the experience is generally a) in their own head because nobody thinks about other people and/or b) cultural because there’s members of that community who don’t experience the same.
> Try being a female and looking to make your own health care decisions in certain states.
When your rights intersect another’s rights is always a matter of law — I’m not free to kill others outside legislated confines, either.
> There's a lot of freedoms that are taken away from people purely based on race/sex whether you want to call it baiting or not.
Then you should list some, rather than give vague and untrue grievance narratives.
Quoting what you heard off your telescreen is not convincing. For one, what “certain cities” are you even talking about? Are you referring to blacks being pulled over in black-majority crime-heavy areas? And I have never heard of stigmas against naturalized citizens. As for the vague allusion to abortion, I’m not allowed to kill a baby after it comes out, so why should it be legalized for the mother to? Especially when, if she doesn’t want a child, she can simply get an IUD, or simply take birth control and morning afters?
I’m not entirely sure if I understand the point you’re making, but let me try an analogy.
We are all forced to buy a car. There is no one with a gun to our head forcing such a purchase, or a law specifically requiring you to buy a car. But nevertheless the laws are structured so that everyone realistically must buy a car, whether they want to or not.
If you chose not to buy a car then your life will be dramatically more expensive and difficult to live, because of the network effects of this requirement.
So while you are technically free to not buy a car, realistically you are forced to do so.
> If you chose not to buy a car then your life will be dramatically more expensive and difficult to live, because of the network effects of this requirement.
That depends where you live. In Chicago, for example, your life will be simpler and less expensive if you don't own a car.
I don't understand this as a blanket rule either. My life is dramatically less expensive because of not having a car. I don't have to fill it with gas. I don't have to carry insurance. I choose not to have a car, and while somethings are less convenient it does not prevent me from existing. I have an ebike and it suffices for everything thing that is a necessity for me. For the other things, rental for a weekend away is very much a thing.
Now, for people that choose to live in the further reaches of suburbia where things are not nearly as close, then cars become more of a need. But that is a decision when location to suburbia or further was made.
Eh, eventually there is a network effect and much of everything needs a car.
If you happen to live in one of the numerous cities in the US that has a hollowed out core, you need a car even if you live downtown. And often the cities that have vibrant walkable downtowns are expensive to move to.
Any city with a "downtown" is in 2024 going to have uber/lyft, probably bus services of some sort, and there's always cycling. Groceries and supplies can be delivered to your door. There is less need for a car today than there has been in a long time.
You’re still forced to participate in car culture if you use Lyft/Uber/Instacart, you’ve just added middlemen and increased the cost even further.
This comment comes across as incredibly privileged, to be honest. Most people must drive to work. Asking them to use Uber for such a purpose is just… it’s kind of infuriating.
Eh, I lived for 7 years without a car in suburbs. Granted the local market, and I specifically mean market vs supermarket, was a 5 minute walk from me, the supermarket was a 30 minute walk if I felt fancy that night, and Amazon delivered.
I will grant that I was within walking distance of the last stop on the local metros subway system so maybe some people wouldn’t consider that the suburbs, but it was considered so for the city.
Also just broke 20k miles last week on my vehicle I bought in 2021 after moving to the countryside so it’s not like ive
this sounds like not the US. in the vast majority of the US traditional markets/small groceries are effectively extinct and illegal to build new in a financially sensible way.
I don’t have enough data to give you an answer one way or another but this was New England and we have a lot of things that are common for us but weird for the rest of the country by dint of being where colonization efforts were good enough to be started and built up, but not so bad that they are worth replacing.
Examples include individual shops that used to be called markets which are not farmers markets or supermarkets, basements in all/most homes, and town halls being an expectation of normal governance rather than a newsworthy event
Ironically, outside the US I managed to live until the age of 41, before I caved in and got a driver's license. Instead, I got around by train, tram, bus, bicycle, feet and taxi. I would argue, that in a society not designed to require a car, you are not really forced to.
The car industry has been lobbying congress and locales for 50+ years. Laws like jaywalking were at the behest of car companies, and that alone makes walking legally very difficult in nearly any area with a downtown.
The lack of subsidies certainly don't help. Neither does the insatiable appetite for new cars.
It's more like, you think you are free, because from birth society and CorpGov condition you to operate within an accepted status quo, and incentives are structured in order to support that.
But the moment you question the status quo, or try to go against it, you find yourself targeted by corporate and social violence. You might lose your job, the respect of your peers, your family, house, car or more.
Here is an easy example:
A portion of your tax money is funding genocide and anti-democratic military coups in Israel and other countries.
If you decide (as any rational citizen should) to no longer pay income tax knowing that you lack any discretion over how it is spent, and you decide to demand a more transparent and restricted tax system, then the government will threaten you with economic hardship and even prison. They will surveil and discredit you if you receive any modicum of notoriety, just as they do to sociopolitical activists and protestors.
You won't be able to operate a business while opposing income tax laws, and thus conscious political action is relegated to the elite, who don't need to work, and the poor, who already don't significantly benefit from the system. The rest of the working class is forced to play ball, or lose everything.
That's not freedom, even if it looks like Freedom™ to a certain class of bootlickers who are conditioned to maintain the status quo, even if it means turning on their neighbor.
The ICC recognizes Netanyahu as a war criminal. The UN recognizes and denounces the genocide taking place in Gaza.
Just because you want to be ignorant to reality doesn't make you correct or worth listening to. There is nothing to allege. The genocide is happening, it's well-documented, no matter what you choose to believe. Take your bootlicking drivel somewhere else.
And no, you're missing the point. Thanks to our Bill of Rights, we currently are able to publicly denounce the genocide. That doesn't mean I'm free to disentangle myself from the economic pipeline fueling it.
Just because you can point to some amount of freedom doesn't invalid the fact that going against the status quo opens you up to state and social violence. Reread my post.
> “less taxes, no wars!” party just won the US election
Surely you have an ounce of intelligence to recognize that it is purely lip service, and both parties are considered far right by any progressive standards.
Trump, like those before him, works for the elite, and gives them tax breaks, while letting the middle class take on the brunt of the taxes. He is also pro-war, just like his opposing candidate Kamala Harris was.
I think your comment would be much more effective if it didn’t attack another person. It’s an emotional topic but we should assume the best in people we talk to. Maybe they just aren’t aware of everything you are, in which case showing them can be very effective.
You're correct, and usually I try to be extremely measured in how I interact here, avoiding appeals, fallacies and insults.
However, I have an understandably short fuse for anyone with the audacity to not just claim ignorance, but actively put forth a narrative that no genocide is taking place. I've spent too long being nice and understanding to these people.
There is little hope in connecting with them via fair argument, because they only understand appeals to authority (thus my invocation of the ICC and UN), but selectively reject them as well. They reject sound arguments in favor of feelgood statements. It takes that caliber of person to arrogantly proclaim in December, 2024 that there is no genocide.
The most effective option for dealing with this kind of person would actually be to disengage and not respond. However, that opens up the possibility that someone else reads their comment, and when not presented with a counterargument, takes their argument in good faith.
I mean, look at his yet unanswered reply to my statement. How do you even begin to engage fruitfully with something like that? They set up a system of biases and then try to frontrun you by invoking the words "bias" and "projection" before you can use them, engaging in a preemptive tu quoque [0].
You don't even get a chance to attack their core arguments, because they're shielded by a continuously growing pile of weaker arguments, and you'll get lost in a meta-argument about semantics or some other trapdoor.
Sometimes ignorant people are just ignorant, and they need to hear it. But I do generally agree with you, and thanks for the criticism!
The best thing to do is absolutely to disengage from your extremely toxic and ignorant style of communication. You have no intention of having a fair discussion or establishing any common ground. You came into my thread looking to start shit, not to consider and share new ideas.
Your arguments are steeped in bias, conservative talking points, and after reviewing your comment history, I just see a cesspool of ignorant, bigoted takes and projection.
I've already argued against your talking points a thousand times with others who share your exact same spoonfed worldview. There is no need to do it again.
Hacker News is not the place for this kind of behavior, and I hope one day you lose some ego and grow up.
The burden of evidence is not on me, at some point there is enough overwhelming public evidence for something that the burden of evidence shifts to you to disprove general consensus.
I think it's better to leave the exercise of Googling "evidence of genocide in Gaza" and "history of Israeli-Palestinian conflict" to you, the reader. It will teach you some basic research and inference skills.
Certainly, if I try to link to government and NGO press releases, Wikipedia articles, social media accounts of field press and Palestinians, or news articles, I run a very high risk of you conveniently denouncing my sources as biased before you even try to critically engage with them. It's better that you encounter sources on your own, corroborate them and follow hyperlinks, taking time to really understand the heart of this conflict. There is a lot of geopolitical and economic history coming into play here.
> You’re literally going against the status quo right now — you just aren’t allowed to arbitrarily not pay your taxes
You have a narrow definition of "going against the status quo" which conveniently suits your argument. However, that is clearly not the definition which I used when laying out my argument. It is disingenuous to purport a straw man argument derived from manufactured ambiguity. You know what I mean, do not deflect and devolve into a meta-argument about the meaning of my words.
laws are structured? or just the cumulative impact of societies decisions.
humans are social creatures, of course if everyone else has a car it is going to be inconvenient for you to not have one. this is not a solvable problem
The problem is that corporate interests pushed for a car-centric society. You can't point to consumer choice as a justification for the current system, when we were given little choice to begin with.
It might seem like a moot point in San Francisco where there is free public transit, but in cities like mine, there is an intentional lack of alternatives, in order for cars to be leveraged as a self-reinforcing socioeconomic class boundary.
> The problem is that corporate interests pushed for a car-centric society
I'd say it's more NIMBY interests than corporate interests.
The US, in contrast to Asia and Europe, builds sprawling suburbs, consisting only of single-family houses, with no multi-story apartment complexes and no other services/infrastructure in walking distance.
Most people would tell you that they don't want things to be this way, but will actually complain about proposals to make things better.
If you build apartment complexes, you can fit more people in a smaller area, which makes public transit a lot more economical. Add the fact that you don't need to go anywhere far at all for a lot of things, like grocery shopping for example, and that makes you need a car a lot less.
It's also worth considering that the US has been constantly rich for the last century or so, it has been far less affected by the second world war, dictatorships and communism than Europe and Asia, which made cars a lot less of a luxury, and hence made public transit a lot less of a necessity.
Leveraging cars as a self-reinforcing socioeconomic class boundary is a direct consequence of all of this, but also one more (self-reinforcing) reason why people need cars. You just can't do that sort of thing in Europe, if there are well-off people without cars, you can't assume that well-off people have cars, so well-off people will keep not having cars, and so it goes.
Maybe in your specific case, that is cities with poor public transit, but the US is massive and has always required some form of long distance travel. One can make arguments for corporate interests in expensive gas-guzzlers, completely eliminating the small and medium sized automobiles, or for corporate-backed government decisions in new city infrastructure being less accessible without a car, but we have a car-centric society here because they are physically required for the majority of Americans to get from A to B, and there is literally no way of fixing that.
> but we have a car-centric society here because they are physically required for the majority of Americans to get from A to B, and there is literally no way of fixing that.
The majority of Americans trying to get from A to B are driving less than 60 km/day, a distance which trains can cover pretty damn fast.
For longer travel you could have high speed trains on both coasts' corridors, very few people are traveling NYC -> LA on a regular basis, most people will travel on their surroundings (500-1000 km).
You could have a multimodal system covering the most important urban corridors, rural places would almost always need cars due to the low density but it's a big fat lie that the USA is car-centric because it's the only solution for its size.
The only reason you are a car-centric country in 2024 is because of incentives for the car industry, the design of your cities being stuck in car-centric mindset from the 1950s-1960s.
You don't need to give up cars completely, you just need infrastructure to not require a car for people traveling around your major urban centres. High speed rail corridors between Seattle - Portland - San Francisco - Los Angeles - Las Vegas - Phoenix, another corridor from Boston - NYC - Philadelphia - Baltimore - DC branching out to Pittsburgh - Cleveland - Detroit - Chicago. With those you cover a lot of the major economic centres.
China is also massive and they've managed it.
Except for some new shiny skyscraper, the USA feels more backwards each time I visit, like the country is stuck in the 1980s-1990s and refuses to be updated to how a modern country can be in 2024.
What I said is obviously correct, especially historically, and you pointed out exactly why: medium travel, which is far more prevalent than simply modern suburbia. Have you even been outside a city? Take a quick glance at history and you will see just how crucial private transport for medium-long distance is in America. Horses and buggies have been a mainstay before the car. Rail is simply too inflexible to support medium travel in sparsely populated areas. And medium travel is what I would classify most rural Americans are from their nearest grocer. Long distance via train, that makes sense. A centralized rail system, such as subway, in a city also makes sense to cover medium distances. However, we already have the infrastructure to handle medium distances without new expensive rails, that being highways. The cost to fit rails across the entire US would be enormous, and that’s ignoring the long term costs such as staffing and maintenance.
In my small town, we have roughly 125 people. We are, roughly, 35 minutes away from the nearest grocery store, or about 40 miles. Too long to walk or bike in a reasonable time. You could use a motorized bike but the amount of food for a family would be unwieldy. The only viable solution is to drive via car, because you need the trunk space. And both options to get there require roads. Now, let’s suppose we magically replaced highways for rails. What happens is simple: either the government is bleeding immense amounts of money orchestrating train rides to places where no one is regularly using it, or certain less populated areas are underserved.
