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The war on terror primed America for autocracy

economist.com

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Re: The war on terror primed America for autocracy

#131

Post by inigyou »

roarcher wrote: post #108
inigyou wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cop and prosecutor. At least three people would have to be stupid to take my life, versus zero people at Google

> At least three people would have to be stupid to take my life And that has happened many times. It is not as improbable as you seem to think. I really can't understand the thought process of someone who thinks it would better to have their life taken than their job. You know you can just...get a new job, right?

It's happened fewer times than zero people at Google have agreed to ban an account and then it has been banned.

Re: The war on terror primed America for autocracy

#132

Post by roarcher »

inigyou wrote: post #131
roarcher wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At least three people would have to be stupid to take my life And that has happened many times. It is not as improbable as you seem to think. I really can't understand the thought process of someone who thinks it would better to have their life taken than their job. You know you can just...get a new job, right?

It's happened fewer times than zero people at Google have agreed to ban an account and then it has been banned.

Okay, but one ENDS YOUR LIFE. The other is a temporary inconvenience. Maybe a big one, but temporary.

I was baffled by this conversation until I saw that you've rapid-fire posted 30 comments in the last 2 hours. Now I understand: you are not putting any thought into this conversation at all. So I will match your effort.

Re: The war on terror primed America for autocracy

#133

Post by Terr_ »

crote wrote: post #104
asdff wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why it is important to vote in primary elections as well.

Voting the way you really want in primary elections might be counterproductive. Let's say in the main election 45% of the population will vote for whatever candidate represents side X, 45% of the population will vote for whatever candidate represents side Y, and 10% is more-or-less in the middle. If, during the primaries, side X votes for a far-X candidate, they will definitely lose the middle 10% to a moderate-Y can…

Quibble: I think you're conflating "remove winner-takes-all" with "less spoiler effect". The first implies (some of) the second, but not vice-versa.

For example, ranked-choice voting would reduce the spoiler effect and allow you vote for your real choice, however it would not (on its own) change that races have a single winner, who eventually "takes all."

This matters because even if it's preferable to have both, ranked-choice is easier to introduce incrementally and with fewer amendments to various constitutions.

Re: The war on terror primed America for autocracy

#134

Post by [deleted] »

zwarag wrote: post #116
xbar wrote: post #6

Exactly what everyone said when Patriot Act was passed and renewed repeatedly. America permanently traded away basic freedoms for the bogus promise of safety in the shadow of fear. And the Supreme Court was too scared to stop it despite its obvious constitutional problems. Crying eagle photos in chain-emails were sufficient propaganda to keep it in place.

> Crying eagle photos in chain-emails Can someone elaborate? Whwre is this reference comming from? A simple web search did not yield much

[deleted]

Re: The war on terror primed America for autocracy

#135

Post by rhubarbtree »

xbar wrote: post #6

Exactly what everyone said when Patriot Act was passed and renewed repeatedly. America permanently traded away basic freedoms for the bogus promise of safety in the shadow of fear. And the Supreme Court was too scared to stop it despite its obvious constitutional problems. Crying eagle photos in chain-emails were sufficient propaganda to keep it in place.

Yep, a lot of people saw this coming. It was so obvious - new powers are always abused in the end. Same for the UK. Perhaps the politicians knew that and didn’t care. Not sure how deep their cynicism / malice goes. More power to us, they said.

Re: The war on terror primed America for autocracy

#136

Post by graemep »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #106
rayiner wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rome took some unexpected Ls against the barbarians too. Didn’t change the trajectory of the empire.

The "trajectory of the empire" is that it became the Roman Catholic Church. Rome still rules a sizable portion of the world's population. I wonder if the USA is going the same way. Democratic Church of America?

Rules? Membership of an organisation is nothing like being a subject of an empire. Its purely voluntary. It has less power over its members than employers do. It cannot tax, only ask for donations. Its not even Rome - its run by people from all over the world. It controls only a tiny bit of territory.

Re: The war on terror primed America for autocracy

#137

Post by Terr_ »

inigyou wrote: post #54
Terr_ wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't even provide examples [of Americans cheering on temporary safety over essential liberty] I've seen other people critiquing it over the years, perhaps it has something to do with other aspects of the delivery or message?

[flagged]

The longer things stay vague, the more I become concerned that this may be a scenario that is so common that it has an enduring meme [0], where:

1. The person claims that a broad swathe of facially reasonable and views are being rejected or forbidden in a way that is an unfair overreaction.

2. Pressed, they refuse to provide any concrete details, even in a safe context.

3. They are actually facing difficulty from a much much narrower--or entirely disjoint--set of view.

In this case, OP has claimed the average HN commenter is hostile to a general class in the form of "our liberty has been improperly infringed by a false appeal to security", especially national security.

I don't think that claim is credible, and I'm offering to demonstrate it by rattling off a bunch of counterexamples... However, that won't mean much if it turns out OP real grievance has some important details they are trying to keep secret.

[0] https://xcancel.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/105039166355267174...

Re: The war on terror primed America for autocracy

#138

Post by nephihaha »

marssaxman wrote: post #5

This seemed obvious to me at the time. It was hard to understand why people in the cultural mainstream let themselves get swept up in it. I felt like I lost my country, back then, as they pretty much all went off into crazyland together.

In the same way it is obvious that internet age gating, digital ID and abolition of physical cash will lead to much worse. But who's standing in their way?

Re: The war on terror primed America for autocracy

#139

Post by alchemism »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #106
rayiner wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rome took some unexpected Ls against the barbarians too. Didn’t change the trajectory of the empire.

The "trajectory of the empire" is that it became the Roman Catholic Church. Rome still rules a sizable portion of the world's population. I wonder if the USA is going the same way. Democratic Church of America?

Not to wade too far into weeds, but the spiritual and temporal authority of Rome (ie what is now called Church and State) were considered separate entities. When the temporal authority collapsed, the spiritual authority preserved its content and form and then simply waited for conditions to improve.

Τhus the various attempts to re-manifest a Holy Roman Empire in Europe across the subsequent centuries.

Re: The war on terror primed America for autocracy

#140

Post by nephihaha »

thwarted wrote: post #76
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How old are you? I think a lot of younger folks don't fully adjust for important factors: plane hijackings used to be much more common, 9/11 was committed by the second group of Islamic terrorists who tried to blow up the World Trade Center, and 9/11 was the third major terrorist attack by Al-Qaeda in a 4 year span. It's easy now to say that it was a crazy worst-case scenario, but that was not at all obvious then; fo…

> younger folks don't fully adjust for important factors: plane hijackings used to be much more common https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings (I can not say how comprehensive that wikipedia list is). There's more in the 70s and 80s than I was expecting (having lived through the 80s), but given how many flights there are, hijackings have been and are exceedingly rare; and most of these are not even…

A lot of the plane hijackers were either funded or trained by the Communist bloc, particularly Libya... Such incidents declined a lot with the end of the Cold War.
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