Utopian States

No one likes criticism, especially penetrating and accurate criticism that lays bare ideological rhetoric and manipulation used to generate compliance.

Tolerance extends mostly to critiques of no consequence and gossip ("OMG! You won't believe what the state did this weekend with Bulgaria!"). The state doesn't tolerate reforms that limit its infinite scope and capricious power, and permits only ineffective reforms, such as incremental or deferred reforms that remind of Kaczynski's "Ship of Fools".

Quiz

1. Which is better?

a) A state that openly spies on its citizens, reminding them that all their communications are monitored by multiple branches of the government, strongly advising them to say nothing they would not say when visited in the night by powerful state representatives who enforce loyalty and obedience.

b) A state that covertly spies on its citizens while telling them they are free from monitoring, though in actuality multiple branches of the government make use of information gathered from their communication?

2. Which is better?

a) A state that regularly operates kangaroo courts for vendettas, censorship, and control, charging citizens with fictitious crimes and then finding them guilty. All citizens knows these courts are a fraud and the purposes for which they are used.

b) A state that claims transparency and the highest standards in honestly upholding the rule of law, yet covertly instructs its agents to use secretly obtained information to produce cases, while hiding the information it used to initiate the case and replacing it with different information of other claimed origins. Kafka is impressed.

3. Which is better?

a) A banana republic run by an authoritative military, with all elected officials unwittingly acting as advocates of the system because their actions, statements, and positions are measured to prevent retaliation from the powerful state apparatus. All citizens know the situation of elected officials and why they are tragic absurd puppets.

b) A nation claiming to be free, open, independent, and constantly seeking to express all crucial concerns and opinions, yet secretly spying on lawmakers and officials, and keeping a complete dossier containing all communications they have ever made, with which they can blackmail or publicly attack anyone who takes a position contrary to the desired interests of information collectors.

4. Bonus Question:

Courts have ruled that Americans have no reasonable expectations of privacy when carrying cell phones, and therefore can be tracked without a warrant or probable cause.

Could the published leaks revealing government tracking of all communications, spanning phone calls to internet traffic, be a way of informing the public that they are fully monitored and therefore no longer have reasonable expectation of privacy? Would this end run around the Fourth Amendment mean no warrants or cause is needed to continue monitoring all communication?

Citizens under communism knew they had to repeat nonsense lies in public, but in private everyone knew the system was rotten.

Citizens under democracy have to repeat nonsense lies in public (political correctness of all sorts, equality, and a variety of non-sequitur cause/effect relations that have become doctrine), and in private are left only with faith and hope that the foundations aren't rotten and prolific with termites.

When sacred foundations are more violated than a drunken coed stumbling through an urban center at night, their original premises are unlikely to hold.