151–160 of 301 posts
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.
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What do you think distinguishes the post-9/11 craziness from the Cold War/Red Scare craziness? My reason for asking is because I believe that "that's unconstitutional!" has been a failed protest message for more like 100 years than 25 years (and there's threads of state violence at the local and state levels that go back far longer). And IMO that is even stronger evidence that words on an ~240-year-old-doc—and the wa…
I am still amazed by the typical internet American's (Yours also I presume) love for voting, despite having long degraded into a two-party charade. Your sentiment starts out fierce: "constantly, actively..." and is immediately cut short "... choose to (only?) vote it that way." You point out that voicing one's interpretations of the 2nd amendment is powerless - but voting, reduced to such a miniscule gesture, is also…
This critique had its heyday in the 2000 election. I can't fathom still holding fast to it. The last 26 years have been a continuing, relentless stream of evidence to the contrary.
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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…
The UK has winner takes all parliamentary elections but still has multiple parties represented in it. There seem to be a lot of other barriers to other parties in the US doing the same.
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How (and if) you vote is really the one and only thing politicians care about.
They care about appearing to care about it. In reality if they don't think you'll vote the right way they just prevent you from voting, like with a vaccine passport or an ID card. (See? Both sides covered)
If you nevertheless are certain that that was or is the goal of one of the US's two major political parties, then you've reached a perplexing conclusion based on, I can only guess, no evidence, evidence imagined, evidence misunderstood, or evidence contained in a source that should be tossed into the garbage can.
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> 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?
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The failure to integrate the barbarian Goth refugees is generally marked as the beginning of the fall - and absolutely changed the trajectory of the empire.
“Failure to integrate” is one way to describe the Goths sacking Rome. But I agree the barbarians did them in at the end. My point was that the Iran fiasco is more like the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, where Rome backed off after taking a beating. That didn’t mark a transition away from Empire, simply a retreat after a military loss.
To be fair they had been in the empire for a good amount of years at that time if i remember well. ...so when comparing to other previous influxes that did get integrated and/or assimilated it does seem apt.
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…
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 thing Bin Laden accomplished is making air travel annoying, making some military contractors filthy rich, and getting hundreds of thousands of his Muslim brothers killed over values that are slowly eroding in the Middle East anyways.
The American global military empire was always going to decline over time, if anything, his actions reversed that decline and led to more American intervention. He got the opposite of what he wanted.
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.
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I'm gonna be that guy and say that the concern about torture is orthogonal to authoritarianism. There were very much "less authoritarian/less centralized" eras in the US when it was general course of action was to do torturous things far worse than many of the things that got labelled 'torture' in the post 1990s era.
My first reaction is that the step to torture was a step backwards, a disregard for what we've learned about the efficacy of torture in getting reliable information, and an embrace of sadistic revenge as an end in itself as state policy. It's the state policy part that I find the worst. Individual acts of senseless violence you can blame on the individual; state acts that in retrospect are senseless violence you can…
The US still more or less remembers how to improve and that book is an example of how such improvement could start, what changed in the last decades is that more and more Americans don't want to. The word "Again" is crucial, MAGA don't want to make America great, they want the America from their nostalgia. It's hollow, that's not what they wanted but it could never have been otherwise.