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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

#161

Post by pso »

rayiner wrote: post #25
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.

It wasn’t just the GOTW. It was much of the 20th century from World War I onward. Each step led to further centralization of government, a larger and larger security apparatus, and more and more foreign entanglements. We are more or less retracing the path of Rome as the Republic expanded militarily until it was no longer practical to run it as a republic and it transitioned to empire.

If GOTW, actually means GWOT and Global War on Terror, please have courtesy of reading your posts beforehand, and perhaps also not assuming a US audience.

Re: The war on terror primed America for autocracy

#162

Post by pjc50 »

pembrook wrote: post #158
Animats wrote: post #19

Yes. History will record that bin Laden won. There's a pre-9/11 book about bin Laden, "The Man Who Declared War on America". Bin Laden was interviewed. Consider the situation at the end of the Clinton administration. The US was at peace. The Soviet Union was gone. The US got along with China and Russia. No major enemies remained. The federal budget was balanced. Bin Laden looked at that, and realized that America had…

Oh come on. You’re trying to be edgy without any understanding of reality. It’s like saying History will record Gavrilo Princip as having won WW1. Huh? America’s current troubles are political polarization and ballooning deficits. Both of which are happening in every developed country, having nothing to do with 9/11. The foreign interventionism is a 100 year tradition in the US, nothing new under the sun. The only th…

I do think spending a trillion dollars on Iraq might have something to do with the deficit.

Re: The war on terror primed America for autocracy

#163

Post by noduerme »

I agree that 9/11 primed America for totalitarianism, but as someone who was tear gassed protesting our invasion of Iraq and the Patriot Act, I don't think we're living in an autocracy. I've lived in too many autocratic countries now to think that that's anywhere close to the truth..America cannot possibly be compared to China or Russia in terms of the freedom living in the country to say (and do!) what you want, protected by a fairly rigorous rule of law that is still not subject to the whim of the ruling party. America more closely resembles an anarchic zone between a failed or wannabe autocratic regime and two anti-government movements, one right-wing and one left-wing. It's a nutty situation, but it definitely prevents either party from implementing anything even remotely resembling autocratic rule, to the extent that term has meaning in any other part of the world. Any sort of objective look at American political debate makes this patently obvious.

The closest parallel to America right now is Argentina prior to the dictatorship. If or when the real dictatorship comes, you'll know it, because just as in Russia you won't be publishing articles about it.

Re: The war on terror primed America for autocracy

#164

Post by vanviegen »

graemep wrote: post #159
rhubarbtree wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In the UK there is a big element of sheer incompetence. Politicians who have not experience of life outside politics are really will-equipped to understand the consequences of what they do, and defer overly to expert opinion. Of course the police or intelligence services say they need more powers, it takes judgement to balance this against other considerations.

> and defer overly to expert opinion

That... doesn't sound so bad?

Re: The war on terror primed America for autocracy

#165

Post by aa-jv »

noduerme wrote: post #163

I agree that 9/11 primed America for totalitarianism, but as someone who was tear gassed protesting our invasion of Iraq and the Patriot Act, I don't think we're living in an autocracy. I've lived in too many autocratic countries now to think that that's anywhere close to the truth..America cannot possibly be compared to China or Russia in terms of the freedom living in the country to say (and do!) what you want, pro…

The Military Industrial Complex is the autocracy - the revolving door between the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CFR - which are the entities really running the country (for the purposes of massively profitable military mis-adventures).

https://www.transparency.org/en/corruptionary/revolving-door

From a certain angle, it actually looks less like an autocracy and more like a military junta which has captured both 'sides' and puppet-masters either one depending on the mood of the masses, according to the needs of the MIC - which gets everything it wants without interference by "The People".

Re: The war on terror primed America for autocracy

#166

Post by inigyou »

Terr_ wrote: post #137
inigyou wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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 m…

This is a pattern that exists but there's also another pattern where people downvote things they disagree with, on platforms that have downvotes. It's seen on HN and Reddit and it's thought to be the reason YouTube removed downvotes.

Re: The war on terror primed America for autocracy

#167

Post by bryanrasmussen »

graemep wrote: post #136
marcus_holmes wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

question - do the representatives and elected members of a democracy rule?

Rule, under the definition of control or dominion, is "The exercise of authority over a region or people, or the duration of a monarch's reign (e.g., colonial rule)", the word rule is often applied to mean what the leaders of a democracy do, but in most cases rule seems too strict if taking the normative definition, thus there is an informal usage that applies to democratic leadership.

The President is often referred to as a ruler, corporate elites are often referred to as rulers; in these informal groups of rulers I think it is reasonable to place the Catholic Church.

I am agreeable to say they do not rule, but then we must admit they exert a great influence, in many places and ways greater than the governments that officially hold power.

Re: The war on terror primed America for autocracy

#168

Post by aa-jv »

agnosticmantis wrote: post #151

Any policy/weapon/tech used against an outgroup (e.g. brown people across the ocean) can and will eventually be used against the ingroup (citizens voting for it) by an inner ingroup. Sooner or later any ingroup will itself be divided into an inner ingroup in power and a powerless outer ingroup who'll be treated just like the old outgroup.

A nation willfully ruled by war criminals will always become their final victim.

Americans need to start prosecuting their war criminals. This is the only way out of the quagmire.

Re: The war on terror primed America for autocracy

#169

Post by __del__ »

mullingitover wrote: post #143
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.

Who were the barbarians, really? Caesar’s conquest of Gaul was basically a massive human trafficking organization that functioned as a pyramid scheme, and Rome only went downhill (in terms of basic human decency) from there.

this is a dense comment (there's a lot here to unpack). it sounds like you're saying:

once it became clear that conquest with an explicit intended return of large numbers of enslaved people would allow caesar to pay debts and fund further expansion, the pyramid was capped and required exponential expansion to perpetuate its economic aims. and this was the beginning of the end. a model which required autocratic steering to operate.

Re: The war on terror primed America for autocracy

#170

Post by spwa4 »

Terr_ wrote: post #137
inigyou wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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 m…

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

And yet we all know why that is. We have decided that certain ideologies that are ... let's call it "easy to criticize" (because they deserve some damn serious criticism and have done enormous damage. Oh and not just one such ideology). To make things worse, in many places such discussions have been legally banned. And some of these ideologies are very visible in politics or even on the street. And discussion of such ideologies immediately devolves into pinning the blame for all that went wrong in history on a particular segment of the population.

We have collectively decided such ideologies are to be considered above criticism, and you're quite right, it's not working.

It used to be commonplace to bring the horrors of certain ideologies and expose them everywhere. In movies, on the TV, exposing the blatant failures and aggression of ideologies was commonplace.

Depicting communist dissident prisons happened in children cartoons. Associating islam with slavery, including depicting how commonplace rape and open commercial exploitation of female slaves was in islamic nations was normal. The reality hasn't changed: IS/Daesh reintroduced slavery, as one of their first acts, but it is utterly forbidden to discuss why they might have done so. Frankly, islamophobia is just a word meant to shut down criticism of the very bad parts of that ideology, as well as the supremacism built into that faith, something that has no place in America, or anywhere on the planet. And on the other hand communist and ex-communist nations are still full of dissident prisons, but it can't be discussed anymore. What communism has to do with socialism also can't be discussed, or even that socialism has evolved over time (e.g. why socialism, was rabidly anti-immigration not 30 years ago, and the reasoning behind it)

And the problem is that any suggestion of going back immediately and directly runs headfirst into extreme aggression.

Hence, no discussion.

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