Meanwhile, during peak "War on Terror", they routinely accused people who raised concerns about law enforcement abuses of being unpatriotic "bleeding hearts"
Meanwhile, during peak "War on Terror", they routinely accused people who raised concerns about law enforcement abuses of being unpatriotic "bleeding hearts"
I completely agree with your position that the stance on the war on terror was abhorrent - although I wouldn't claim it to be as uniquely republican as you make it out to be, democrat warmongers were and are aplenty, and it was under obama that the biggest surveillance scandals of this century occurred-. All this shows is that both sides are about as hypocritical as the other really, three letter agencies are good when they're on my side, bad when they're on the other side, the population in general be damned.
*:curiously they may not even have been the brunt of people that felt it, due to its use on the george floyd riots.
I have little faith in efforts to criminal justice reform, because just about everyone, regardless of party, has a crime for which the mere allegation is enough to justify throwing the book at the alleged perpetrator. This seems just as true with government abuses (at least in the social media era -- no idea what the real median is) -- but the far left seems more than happy to allow the government to abuse the rights of the far right, and vice versa. The degree varies depending on what suspected wrongdoing has occurred, but the point of rights is that if they don't apply in the worst cases (e.g., hate speech "exemptions") then they don't really exist, so nobody should be surprised when the government does a poor job of protecting them.
I don't really care who was "cared" 20 years ago. There's a problem that needs to be fixed now. It's a wasted of time to whine about different people at a different time not being upset at a similar thing that was going on.
I give as an analogy nuclear weapons. People are pretty universally in agreement that the threat of global armageddon is, well, bad, and we could really minimize it if we just ditched the nukes. Even unilateral disarmament, given the massive disparity of the US stockpile vs. other stockpiles, would take a huge chunk out of the apocalypse pie-chart.
... so why is suggesting unilateral disarmament absolutely horrifying to so many people?
People vote their hearts. Dig into the feelings underpinning support for a surveillance state and address them, because if the feelings don't change the votes won't change. Propose alternatives to the surveillance state that address those feelings.
Americans just watched a faction try to take over the government with violence. There's a story that can be told there, and told one way it creates feelings that encourage more centralized surveillance, and told another way it creates feelings that encourage far, far less surveillance.
I do not agree with this "Americans just watched a faction try to take over the government with violence."
The think they watched someone try to take over the government because that's what the media and certain politicians wanted you to think. In no way was that a government takeover unless you're talking about the actors (cops) that opened the doors and led clueless people inside. No government takeover consists of unarmed people with zero plan, where the only person killed was one them doing nothing.
Certainly no successful one that I can think of. But that doesn't mean it wasn't an attempt. Also, they were not unarmed (https://www.npr.org/2021/03/19/977879589/yes-capitol-rioters... ); they were (thankfully) under-armed to deal with the resistance they encountered.
> where the only person killed was [the] one [of] them doing nothing
I'm assuming we both saw the same video. That's definitely not "doing nothing." Never was and never has been, and the question has already been litigated and put to bed.
But all that aside, to determine whether they were trying to take over the government, one need merely ask: had they succeeded in getting to the floor while the Senate was still in session, what did they want to do? What did those who spoke about their intentions say they were going to do?