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In the US, you can give extra money to reduce the deficit. You cannot redirect what you already owe so that it all goes towards reducing the deficit. So I think your point "nonono, I didn’t mean to pay down the debt with my money!" is moot.
That sort of direction wouldn't be meaningful anyway, since money is fungible.
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The government is already wasting half my paycheck, I'm not going to donate more money and hope its spent wisely. The issue is an inability to budget. If we doubled tax revenue, we would double spending and increase the deficit further.
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1984 and A Brave New World were written as warnings, not how-to manuals, but that's what the governments of the world are clearly doing.
I'm sure there's some underlying universal principle related to entropy. You see the same with code bases. Unless you are diligent about caring for and correcting things, every large code base will eventually become a steaming pile of tech debt after a few decades.
So many people are okay with unconstitutional things as long as it supports their side and beliefs. It is genuinely unsettling. Personally, I don’t care about the underlying thing the protests are about, the important aspect is that if you allow unconstitutional government action like this, eventually it will be used against you. A decade from now we have no idea what the political climate will be. If the precedent i…
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>Abortion is considered immoral Not praying as often as one should is considered immoral too. But "immorality" is not binary, and abortion tends to be quite low on the scale. Especially early abortion, which is specific to one particular branch of Christianity. >Abortion “rights” arises from a belief system The same one that got us other human rights, like freedom of speech. It's called humanism. It's different from…
Humanism is just as made up and non-falsifiable as any religion, and in some cases more so. If you autopsy a dead body, you won’t find either a soul nor any form of “human rights.”
At least religious traditions are often based on practical experience. For example, in Islam it’s considers a moral obligation to get married and have children. Leaving aside any supernatural basis for that moral dictate, it makes sense given that human societies have to raise a lot of kids simply to perpetuate themselves from generation to generation.
But what about the humanist idea that you have no such moral obligation, and that “child free” people are of equal value to society as people doing the labor of perpetuating society—because of some invisible “human dignity” and “right of self actualization.” That’s pulled straight out of thin air.
> But "immorality" is not binary, and abortion tends to be quite low on the scale.
Not true. Most muslim countries, for example, including the one I’m from, have more restrictive abortion laws than any U.S. state. India similarly has a quite restrictive abortion law (not one inherited from the British, but one of their own construction after an extensive process) from 1971 until its Supreme Court intervened in 2022.
To my knowledge, no major culture that isn’t formerly Christian has the western notion of an individual “right” to an abortion. Even in Asian countries that permit abortion, it’s viewed more in terms of a collective policy of reproductive control than an individual right. That fact is completely unsurprising: deciding when life begins is obviously a matter for the government. Only westerners are so pathologically individualistic as to think that social determination should be subject to overruling by individual morality.
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You have an inalienable right to express any view on abortion in the US, regardless of merit.
You have an inalienable right to express any view on flat earth in the US. But it doesn't matter if the state law is enforcing religious rules, like in the case of abortion ban.
Can someone explain the legal theory that diffentiates using something like Dataminr to monitor tweets vs simply having an army of agents manually searching for them? I agree that it feels like the scale of the former makes it different, but is there a principled reason why that is the case?
You would think with AI we could track all guns and bullets to crimes eventually.
A point of context: Dataminr == Tweets, with ML and human filtering. They're one of the few remaining firehose consumers.
From the article, "the agency had cast such a broad surveillance net that large volumes of innocuous First Amendment-protected activity regularly got swept up as potential security threats." This is funded by unlimited federal deficit spending. Let's reduce their budgets.
Saying that the government is spending too much money is such a triviality. The facts are that there is no serious appetite in U.S. politics today to reduce law enforcement budgets[0], and that reducing the budget of the U.S. Marshals would be unlikely to stop them from using these tools (which they see as a less expensive way to accomplish their objectives). If you want to stop this kind of surveillance, your best b…
How does one make reading publicly posted tweets illegal?