Don’t Fly During Ramadan (2013)
By the way, this is the primary reason I&#x27;ve never travelled to the United States.<p>The US is missing out on tourism because people overseas read horror stories like this and scratch it off their want-to-go list. I categorise the US alongside wonderful places like Saudi Arabia, China, and Russia as a place where human rights <i>aren&#x27;t</i>.<p>I&#x27;m a white male of Christian background, I&#x27;m not on any &quot;lists&quot; that I know of, and have no reason to be. I work with government departments in my home country and have multiple clearance checks, some of which are <i>very</i> thorough. I sail through airport customs checks in every country.<p>But clearly the US is number one mainly at being a police state. It&#x27;s the world&#x27;s richest third-world country. It&#x27;s authoritarian to its core.<p>In our country we have state-local police, one branch of federal police that exists only to protect politicians and a few other special duties. That&#x27;s about it for uniformed people with arrest powers. Oh, technically we have the Office of the Sheriff for enforcing court orders, and I think Border Patrol aren&#x27;t technically Police. I don&#x27;t even know. It doesn&#x27;t really come up as an issue for law abiding people, irrespective of their skin colour or time of year. Oh sure, you hear the homeless drug addicts complain about &quot;the pigs&quot; loudly, but... yeah. They&#x27;re bound to.<p>Meanwhile, allow me to list the US police forces or police-like groups that I know of <i>the top of my head</i> just by watching US-made television shows: State Troopers, Local and county police, Sherrifs, DEA, ATF, DHS, Military Police, FBI, ICE, Marshalls, Campus Police(!), Secret Service, and I&#x27;m probably <i>forgetting a few</i>.<p>This is why the black-lives-matter riots are still going on. Your nation&#x27;s law enforcement is a militarised, authoritarian nightmare. For someone who doesn&#x27;t like being &quot;not arrested for 18 hours&quot; for &quot;looking wrong&quot; and using cleaning products, it&#x27;s a place to avoid, not visit.