RE: https://mstdn.social/@Remittancegirl/116221646008456537
I have mixed feelings about this. I spent 20 years living in Vietnam, not photographing the things I was prohibited from photographing.
Because I was visitor. It wasn't my country, and I was allowed to live there under the forbearance of the government. So, you know, I obeyed their laws.
Dubai isn't a democracy. Your rights are whatever the government says they are. If that offends you, go home.
And yet I can understand that people living expat lives come to believe the rules don't apply to them. I saw it often, Westerners who believed themselves to be above the laws of the country that was hosting them.
And with smart phones it is very easy to think that because you can take a picture of anything, you should and have a right to.
But you don't.
One useful definition of a police state is one in which you are compelled to obey the police, not the law.
@Remittancegirl @EricLawton Isn't it just? Kinda like how it's not illegal to wear a mask at protests here in Britain...but it *is* illegal to refuse to remove a mask if asked to do at a designated protest location, by police.
Which, of course, makes it 👉🏼de facto👈🏼 illegal to wear a face covering should the cops arbitrarily decide they don't like the look of you.
Police state. 🤷🏻♂️
@Life_is Wait, are you inferring that their hypocrisy robs them of the right to apply their laws?
Because no matter where you live, governments behave hypocritically to attract investment.
When a country is being bombed, it seldom has the foresight to think about future commerce.
@Life_is ?
Sorry, I just don't see the connection.
@Remittancegirl I have seen it all my life traveling. I do the chameleon thing. Most seem to morph into the mythic creatures they can't be at home.
Entitlement.
@knowprose @Remittancegirl Oh my, I could spend hours ranting about expats in China ruining things for me (also an expat for the record). There was the English lady (though she identified as Scot because she lived there for two years) who *unironically* said things like "why are they not letting me to the head of the ticket line, can they not see I'm a foreigner?!"
And the extreme whining that starts when consequences strike!
@ZDL You just know how many times I saw similar things.
@pthane Apparently so.
I cannot remember how often I had to stop a Western tourist, taking a picture of the Naval yards in HCMC and point out the incredibly LARGE PICTOGRAPHIC SIGN that indicated that photography was prohibited there.
I think they simply assume the rules don't apply to them. This is fairly typical western arrogance.
@Fishercat
Well, you're right, democracy is a thin veil; you can tell it's a dictatorship when the veil gets replaced by a a concrete wall.
@Fishercat
Definitely, dictators; sometimes the walls they build are not tall enough.
Well, democracies only function when the people living under them take responsibility for them.
The fact that 1/2 the fucking country wasn't out on the street protesting after Pretti's murder is proof of this.
People COULD get out and protest en mass, but they chose not to.
In non-democracies, you can't. You get shot.
@Remittancegirl @CosminOprescu
Protestors are murdered by every form of government. When the kleptigarchs feel like there's threat to their position, protesters get shot. To my mind, there's not a significant difference between those deaths being at a protest or in front of a firing squad.
Quelling protests, and making it clear that white privilege is no protection, was part of the point of killing Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
Here you're absolutely wrong. Dictators are those who kill; thousands of people or more.
In democracy you might see tear gas or even rubber bullets but no mass shooting by police.
When protesters like Renee Good or Alex Pretti are killed, you know a country took its first step towards a totalitarian regime. The fact that people can still protest against those killings means it was *only* the first step.
@CosminOprescu @Remittancegirl
There's certainly a difference in scale between dictatorships and democracies with respect to how many of their citizens they kill. That doesn't mean people in democracies are *safe* from being shot by their governments.
Tear gas and rubber bullets aren't harmless, and the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti were absolutely not the first step the US took towards fascism. This has been building for decades.
It's not new, and it's not just the US.
https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/publications/lethal_in_disguise_inclo_single_page.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings
I agree, and this's why I believe crimes like those committed by ICE are the first sign a wannabe-dictator has started building 'walls'.
Anecdotal data is not reliable, for sure, but it's hard for me not to mention this:
I live in a country (Ro) that went from a horrific Stalinist dictatorship to being a self titled 'original democracy' to being a full EU member state, and all these in only one generation.
And now I realize the more democratic the country became, the safer protests became.
From machine gun shooting, to isolated incident, to being safe to take a kid to a protest.
Yes, Romania was the only place where things got terribly violent, culminating in the execution of the dictator.
And looking at the fate of - for instance - Belarus, we can tell Ceausescu's attempt to cling to power was not entirely unrealistic, after all.
@snaefell The wannabe autocrat who ran Norway on behalf of the Nazis in WW2 considered himself "minister president" still when the war ended. He claimed his innocence until the firing squad shut him up.
Please, let us not pretend that, for most of history under democracies, it has ever been completely safe to protest.
The short periods when it has been completely safe have been the exceptions, not the rule.
@CosminOprescu @Fishercat
That's clearly true, and what I believe is that the more democratically a country is the safest the protests are.
It doesn't mean once a country is labelled as a democracy the protests become 100% safe.
And the problem is we see democracy as a binary status, when, instead, it is more like a spectrum.
@benjamin @Fishercat
@racingdaily Yup. None of them are democracies, nor do they claim to be.
And while their citizens have every right to try and change that, a visitor, an expat on a residency permit... does not.
Because they don't have to stay and suck up the consequences.
@Remittancegirl I apologize; I hijacked your thread.
You were talking about your mixed feelings WRT being a good guest(?) in another country, and suppression of information (I think).
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