[ExI] The Total State

[Lee Corbin]

IN the earlier flds thread, John Clark wrote

> Amara writes
>  
>> I found the State of Texas' actions to be a mind-numbing
>> expression of among the worst of the U.S.' aggressive
>> against-its-citizens, police-state, government-imposed
>> purity criteria actions
> 
> A bit of verbal inflation here. If the USA is a police state then
> you'll have to invent a new word to describe North Korea, and
> all that can get tedious. And you're being unfair to police states.
> Totalitarian regimes have worked long and hard developing evil
> into a high art and there you go cheapening their image by 
> comparing them to the wimpy actions of the USA.

Masterfully said.

>> and it added to my long list of reasons why I shouldn't be
>> living in the  U.S.

Well, every country has its problems (for any given one of us).
Even the enlightened countries of Europe, e.g., Italy, pose
their own obnoxious and disagreeable problems for some people.
Alas, on the globe the realist sees only real countries, no ideal
ones.

Amara goes on to write in this thread r'chere

> > A bit of verbal inflation here. If the USA is a police state
> 
> Brief references:
> 
> 1)
> The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek
> (a primer on the making of The Total State. The US is right on track.)

That sounds *exactly* correct to me. It's very sad, but very true.

I wonder what countries, however, are not headed down this path?

> 2)
> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/20797485/chinas_allseeing_eye/1
> China's All-Seeing Eye by Naomi Klein
> With the help of U.S. defense contractors, China is building the
> prototype for a high-tech police state. It is ready for export.

Thanks for that too.  Yup, things are bad all over, no lie.

(Though we must be careful to be objective about this
and realize just how wonderful it is to be living in almost
*any* industrialized modern nation, compared to living
in 1950 anywhere at all.)

> 3)
> "The Best Prisons that Money Can Buy"
> http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2006/02/index.html

The U.S. is such an incredible outlier on that graph!

But there is a simple explanation. Now, since we are
talking about the prospect of becoming a police state,
let me indulge in (and exult in) a little bit of hate speech
and thought crime (while I still can get away with it).
I hope that no one on this list gets too upset.

Consider that in California prisons, the highest representative
ethnic group is Hispanic. And blacks are nearly a third also.
In order of size, are Hispanics, whites, and blacks.
(Where is the Asian contingent, one wonders.  Maybe
they're in charge, and everyone else is being discriminated
against?)

Also, as everyone knows, half of those incarcerated in
American prisons are there for drug possession.

So, if you subtract half the inmate population who're
there on drug charges, and then subtract the minorities,
the U.S. stats resemble the stats for the enlightened
northern European countries exceedingly well. Which
is true simply because that's where they came from.

Lee