Which Government on this planet is willing to negotiate with accused criminals in order to bring them to trial? It doesn't happen, not in Democracies or Dictatorships. The most you might get is "I'll surrender at the station tomorrow morning so you don't have to haul me out of my house in handcuffs." but even that isn't a sure thing.

Yeah; the dumb kids sitting at the back of the class eating their crayons, who didn't realize Orwell was referring to communist regimes which already existed at the time. In other words, the same idiots who make up the majority of the various Conspiracy Theory movements today.

Man, I wish I were psychic :(

I totally get your point though. If only we'd never invented the printing press and the telegraph, we'd be completely tyrant-free by now. These newfangled gadgets are always making the world more dangerous for us. Pretty soon we won't even have lawns for yelling at kids to get off of.

Complete fucking nonsense. The average American is more afraid of vaccines than they are of terrorists.

Only in the mind of a delusional sociopath is being ignored the same as being oppressed. And what kind of egomaniac do you have to be in order to believe that you have a right to other peoples attention?

Also, your tinfoil hat seems to be leaking.

So secret that you and your cat were able to find loads of evidence which you would happily share with others if only the MIBs hadn't stolen it from you!

Yeah, very little difference. I mean, both parties are human. And they firmly obey the laws of physics. And no matter how many Americans would like to repeal the law of gravity, it never seems to happen. OPPRESSION!

Only a ignorant child who's never stepped foot outside the western sphere could EVER make such an absurd claim. You have absolutely no idea what real oppression and control are. You're so completely obsessed with your own petty grievances that you can't even be bothered to try and understand the plight of people who's entire lifetimes are spent in absolute terror of saying the wrong thing, or being perceived to be anything short of completely dedicated to the wishes of the state. You have no idea how disgusting your words truly are.

That's hilarious. You're talking about the country which built concentration camps for Japanese citizens, had an official policy of enslaving and then later segregating blacks, and treated the Jews and the Irish as second-class citizens for centuries. That's the country which you think is "doing an increasingly good job on [brutalizing] minorities".

You've either never picked up a history book in your life, or you care more about politics and ideology than you do about reality.

Well while we're making up numbers, why not say it's 3%? Or 93%? As long as you can just pull numbers out of your ass you can make any kind of long-winded comment you like!

That's the inevitable result of constant FUD; people just ignore everything. That's why I'm ok with the idea of labelling "GMO", as long as we go ahead and label everything else.

"May contain trace amounts of Dihydrogen Monoxide".
"Possibly manufactured near tumour-inducing cell towers".
"Likely produced adjacent to a haunted graveyard".

Label everything so people will stop worrying about stupid labels.

So true. It's really time you guys did something about the affordability of your mental-health services.

Kinda funny, then, that bankrupt regimes with 1980s era electronics are orders of magnitude better at this "oppression" thing than our own high-tech governments.

I strongly suspect that those people can still be safely dismissed as tinfoil hat wearers. When you spit out a hundred different conspiracy theories every day, one of them is bound to be right eventually. That's the magic of probability and large numbers.

Everything is ambiguous if you're ignorant. Why does that matter? Should I stop using words with more than three syllables just because someone might misunderstand them?

The phrase "begs the question" is never ambiguous to an educated individual who actually looks at the context in which it's employed. It's only ambiguous to those who either don't understand it's original meaning, or don't bother paying attention to the discussion.

Debatable, the takeaway I had from the show was that the Psi-Corps was largely responsible for it.

I'm going to ignore the hyperbolic statement about 9/11 (really dude?) and just point out the fact that the Shadows never really seemed to give two shits about the domestic politics of any of their puppet races, least of all humanity. And in such a situation as the B5 universe, humanity would have to be incredibly stupid not to take advantage of any scraps of technology the Shadows were willing to dole out, particularly given the aforementioned issues on Minbar and the fact that the survival of the human race depends on being able to effectively defend it against aliens with many times our technology.

Except it wasn't credible. That entire storyline was stupid and it was resolved by a deus ex machina ending. There wasn't even anything to get invested in as a viewer of the show. The Shadows are fucking with some minor races that we rarely see and don't care about as viewers. Yawn. The only time I genuinely cared about that entire story was when the Vorlons were about to waste Centauri Prime, otherwise it was all off screen minor races that nobody gave two shits about.

There's a difference between a war and a holy quest for genocide. One would expect a race that's smart enough to go to the stars not to start the latter over a botched first contact. Failing that, one would expect them to actually wage a competent war of annihilation, but they couldn't even manage to do that.

Stalingrad, one lousy campaign in a war of annihilation, six months of fighting: 2,000,000 casualties on both sides
Earth-Minbari War, two years, conducted across light-years, including a last stand to save the human race: 250,000 casualties on one side, unstated (probably hundreds?) but low numbers on the other

It doesn't pass the smell test, and even if we excuse JMS' obvious lack of knowledge regarding geopolitics/military matters, the back story was laughable.

Who commanded them in a war against his own people? Who had previously sworn an oath to Earth? Who killed (rightly or wrongly) thousands of humans and left Earth nearly defenseless? Sheridan treated the White Stars as his own personal toys, with full support from Delenn, it's not a huge reach to imagine Earthforce getting their hands on one, particularly if Sheridan had actually upheld his oath once Clark was gone.

You want to know what would have been a good story in the B5 universe? The Minbari Warrior Caste nutjobs actually seizing power (hopefully killing that religious zealot Delenn in the process) and going on a vendetta against a weakened Earth. Let Sherdian reap what he sowed in leaving Earth nearly defenseless, then have him build an alliance to combat that threat, to save something we actually give a shit about. That would have been infinitely more compelling than trying to figure out why all these humans are fighting and dying to stop the Shadows, whom never really expressed any interest in harming humanity. All they did was stir up chaos amongst races that the audience rarely saw and was never overly invested in caring about. Yawn.

As it happened, the most compelling story JMS had (President Clark and the Civil War) was the one that got short shrift because of the looming threat of cancellation. More's the pity.