(Sure maybe the "elite" were already obviously openly corrupt, but now that it's reached to the lower levels of society...).
What has happened is that America has slipped from being a high trust society to a medium trust one.
I think both falsehoods here are things many people want to believe because not being just like all those other places “overseas” is important to the cultural identity.
Not going to agree or disagree, but I just want to make sure you're claiming that while being fully aware of, say, the following:
I am absolutely not convinced of this. I truly believe a significant fraction of US police would, and perhaps do, accept bribes.
it's been like that as long as I can remember
also, in the late 80s I remember my GF's father bribing the SF building inspector to overlook something.
If you had a girlfriend in the late 80s, I don’t see how police could have been bribed with gift cards as long as you can remember.
I should also add that I myself have never heard of it being common to bribe SF cops with gift cards, in any decade.
Nobody says “hey here’s the bribe”, they act like they’re mistakenly handing over money or whatever. This is basic bribery etiquette.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-aide-homan-accepted-5...
In addition:
Things you can do in the USA right now without punishment (as long as you the corrcect kind of Republican)
* Try to kill the vice president.
* Terrorize the capital
* Try to kill police
* Rape
* Being a pedophile
Things you can and will be killed or punished for, or that the government is getting vigilantes to go after.
* Walking
* Exercising your rights under the Bill of Rights
* Literally upholding the law
* Speaking negatively about the President
* Following Christianity
* Being Jewish
So, yeah, it's fairly corrupt.
I haven't even talked about the white collar crimes that are happening every day. But none of the above is hyperbole.
I assumed you were referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Paul_Pelosi but that ended with a 30 year sentence. So what are you referring to?
We’re Sorry! This website is unavailable in your location.
Error 451 It appears you are attempting to access this website from a country outside of the United States, therefore access cannot be granted at this time.
Part of why I assumed the latter is that sports, in particular, had a high occurrence of "this content isn't available where you are" blocks.
Every day I see Europeans on here sharing tips how to de-cloud and de-America, bemoaning the open Internet, yearning for Balkanisation. Cool. Well, this site does it for you. You're welcome! Enjoy!
This status code can be used to provide transparency in circumstances
where issues of law or public policy affect server operations. This
transparency may be beneficial both to these operators and to end
users.
...
This status code indicates that the server is denying access to the
resource as a consequence of a legal demand.
GDPR law does indeed make it illegal to serve certain web pages to EU visitors. If the operators are not willing to make amendments to comply with the law, then responding with HTTP 451 is the most correct thing to do. It doesn't mean the law is inherently bad, but it does mean that serving the request would be illegal, because that is how the law is written.
If this feels "completely inappropriate", then maybe it's because the modern web platform is completely ass-backwards in the first place. One must wonder why we're continuing to tolerate giving effectively static web pages so many privileges on our computers passively. I think browsers should flat-out start removing said privileges from websites that abuse them.
Saying "they could just not collect data" is like saying "they could just not show porn" or talk about Winnie the Pooh or whatever.
I don't know how to break this to you, but that is the correct status code. They can be forgiven that they didn't make a second status code for "Page Can't Be Loaded Because It's Illegal But Actually It Should Be In Many People's Opinions".
I'm not in favor of pervasive internet tracking, but that doesn't change the reality: it is illegal for them to serve you that page. Putting it that way does make it sound bad, but what do you want to do, invent new words to make it seem better? It's what it is.
To be pedantic, they aren't refusing to protect privacy, they're refusing to comply with GDPR which requires more than just protecting privacy.
It could be that they just don't want to put a big dumb banner on their site.
Why? Even logging an IP address in a request log is creating records controlled by GDPR.
When TV news in the US is broke and only gets along because large companies buy up stations to control the news, its hard to justify spending tens of thousands of dollars on complying with laws from another continent.
Untrue. IP is an category of PII but its not PII in itself unless you're a law enforcement.
Separately, if you log IP addresses you're doing it to prevent abuse and to provide security to your server, you're already permitted to do so.
More on that: https://missinfogeek.net/gdpr-consent/
Meanwhile, in the UK, police cars are tarted up with fluorescent geometric patterns to make them as visible as possible.
It certainly shows a contrast in intent. One is "Here I am, come to me for help!" and the other is "I'm the secret police, show me your papers while I switch off my body camera."
Now, there are counties / cities in the USA where the requirement on contract between text color and body color aren't as clear, and then are abused by the police to have even their marked vehicles blend in more.
If the police were intentionally there to help then they wouldn't be abusing this loophole, or the people making the rules would correct it. The fact that they don't is the tell.
From volunteers up to the ICE gestapo, people watch too much TV where the cops get to shoot things up and look awesome doing it, and that's often what they want to be.
Can I ask you to expand on this part? I’m really, sincerely curious.
Police are supposed to "protect and serve."
"To Protect and to serve" is just the LAPD motto (other departments decided it made them sound good so they copied it). US Courts have generally disagreed that police inherently have any such duties.