MCerberus said:
erttheking said:
Tanis said:
Rape porn; women getting raped IRL;
-Cops do little to nothing.
-Politicians be like "it's a cultural things."
HOLY SHIT SOMEONE UPLOADED A MOVIE!
-Cops go all 'The Raid' on this ass.
It's a damn shame Japan's government is as morally bankrupt as our own.
I think they may even be harsher. I mean, have there been any recent police raids because of piracy?
Well, I know that Japan isn't out-Orwell'ing the US right now.
I mean we have the surveillance, we're getting close to thought crimes, and we've got so many endless wars. Hell, one of the things they say we're at war with in order to keep support is
Christmas
Hmmm, well yes and no. Have you ever actually read "1984"?
To be honest I think we're a long way from that, though truthfully a lot of politicians would like to create it, albeit a bit at a time where they tend to represent their own little issues which when added up will amount to the same thing. Our wars are largely "endless" because of our morality rather than them being government constructs, we don't just destroy the enemy and come home, rather we get concerned about humanitarianism and "winning the peace" without harming the "innocent civilians" that form the backbone of the civilization that has forced the conflict. When it comes to surveillance, I have seriously mixed opinions, but at the end of the day our law enforcement hasn't gone as far as the UK and Canada, never mind a lot of other nations. Americans like the QQ, and actually make a big show out of "OMG, this is oppressive, I'm going across the border" and invoke images of Orwell and Hitler, but really the US doesn't seem to yet have the surveillance network I hear a lot of UK citizens complaining about, nor does it have the "blank warrants" of the Canadian police. In short if you don't consider the UK, Canada, and a number of other western first world countries Orwellian hellholes, especially if you make pretensions of fleeing there to get away from the US like a lot of people do, then you can't be quite that critical of the US.
Personally I think it's kind of a self perpetuating problem on a lot of levels. The US's surveillance programs are the direct result of a number of attacks on the US, ranging from thefts by Clinton-era Chinese spies (missile guidance systems among other things), to current threats from Russia and other nations with big time intelligence services, to
of course the biggest concern... terrorism, caused by the 9/11 attacks.
In the US we have a left wing that tends to advocate a "peace at any price" philosophy, and taking a defensive posture. Rather than saying heading in and killing pretty much everyone in a Muslim theocracy with all of the weapons we build up (we don't even need WMDs) we pretty much decided to rebuild ourselves into a more conventional army and go in there rifle to rifle to try and occupy the area and hope we could reform the civilizations without directly targeting the civilians. Something that has of course failed because the idealogy held by the civilians is the threat, and what the more active fighters are ultimately created by. People forget that "World War II" was largely won by guys like Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris decimating the german civilian population to break their will and idealogy. At the end of the day we wrote the history books, but we were arguably simply bigger bastards than the Nazis were and our "war crimes" became acts of heroism despite being in many cases worse than the very guys we labeled war criminals (well the ones we didn't simply recruit for ourselves once the central Nazi idealogy was more or less broken).
The point here being is that rather than destroying our enemies, we allow them to continue to exist, and thus make constant attacks on us, covert ones given the possibility of the US actually getting it's act together on a large scale still exists (though is trying to be undermined). A defensive posture thus requires installing the level of covert surveillance on a wide scale that we're seeing now, combined with draconian counter-intelligence methods.
On a lot of levels the fact that Obama is largely the one doing it should surprise nobody, since this is pretty much EXACTLY what the left wing asked him to do. It's just when the bill comes due, nobody likes it, especially when they didn't think through what a defensive posture against terrorists and infiltrators on a national level was going to entail. Not to mention that a defensive strategy is ultimately one that fails because at the end of the day someone or something always still gets through if you don't deal with the central problem.
While it goes back over 10 years now, a lot of people on various sites seem to forget that ONE of the reasons why I advocate what amounts to near-genocide (the breaking/elimination of cultures numbering in the hundreds of millions) when it comes to The Middle East is because I very much saw this coming, and was actually laughed at pretty regularly in some places (with people forgetting that). I knew from the beginning that a defensive posture was going to involve the kind of draconian counter-intelligence practices that only tended to exist under martial law, and that the government was going to have to gradually find a way to give itself wartime powers during peacetime if it was going to have any hope of protecting the country this way, and what the predictable spillover and challenges to human rights and indeed the very concepts our country was based on being inevitable.
Of course this is off the subject of someone stealing a movie in Japan. Honestly I can't really complain too much about this because your dealing with a first run movie that is going to be sold traditionally on store shelves. It's not like passing stuff around that was freely available on TV, or isn't available in the form you want in another country and is being provided uncensored under the table. As someone who is in China'a "face" constantly and even advocating military action against them for economic reasons involving the theft of IPs and copyrighted/patented material and the refusal to acknowledge international law, I'm hardly going to complain about Japan pretty much doing what it's supposed to do. Sure there are worse crimes going out there, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try and stop the ones you can as they happen.
There are many things I defend file sharing sites and the like for, and even businesses I think deserve to be pirated due to their practices, but this pretty much represents a perfect storm of exactly when and where anti-piracy laws should be enforced. It's not like some company QQing about how people are downloading a show that was available on TV for free just so they can sell fancy boxed sets of it for a premium, when really the major advantage of that is convenience (and for that reason I tend to buy such things quite a bit) and should be viewed that way. Their basic model being the sales to the networks, with the networks making money off of the commercial space sold during the show's on-air run, selling that space is why you were giving people the show. Something that gets particularly obnoxious when people whine about it with a show that might have been off the air for a decade or more before someone even considered that it might be worthwhile to re-release.