While I agree with a few things you say Inobu, one of the problems we face is the escalation and misuse of language, and the blurring of real differences to make political points. This cuts both ways: for every person on one side who says that we live in a police state, there is someone on the other side saying that the world is in danger from the leftist conspiracy run by the United Nations to take away our guns. Neither of these are true. The idea of using this kind of language (benignly) is to identify aspects of the current situation that remind one of certain of the aspects of real police states or whatever -- however the result is the opposite, it doesn't clarify, it obscures. If you say that we live in a "police state" then the only recourse is despair or armed revolution: that is what a police state is like -- I have been in African countries and South American countries under police states, and there is no comparison, none. If you live in a real police state like, for example, Burma, that is it, those are the options -- despair or revolution. If you wrote statements like you have done on the Internet in China, they would throw you in jail -- they are doing that right now to people who are writing on the Internet. That is a police state. This is not. There are important distinctions: if there weren't, we would have to give up trying to do most of the things that I assume you would want to do to change the way our societies operate. So they can't be police states in any useful sense of the words. Our societies are deeply prejudiced, weirdly skewed as to their priorities, structurally biased against the poor and minorities, and prone to punishment. But they are not police states.

yours, Peter T.