How are you going to regulate IM wiretapping? I wrote a simple IM app as a sophomore in 1997. Will that be a criminal act?
In the process of acquiring the power to murder US citizens via targeted assassination, his verbalized position was that he would never abuse that power. That's a punch right to the face, while claiming it's not.
Obama was always obviously a big government politician. Who thought he was going to give back the massive expansion of power and spending that the Bush years delivered? Neither side wants to give anything up, they just want to fight over who gets to run it.
The only 'upside' I can see, is that the system is bankrupting itself. Police states are expensive and tend to destroy themselves (the only example I can think of that hasn't so far, is modern China, and that has required vast liberalization of their economy).
Superb analysis! I do believe that these power structures are not only expensive but also they depend on incomes via depleting resources - like energy, oil etc. So it's kind of double trouble.
People should be scared to lead because every little detail of their personal and professional life will become a matter of public record. They will have to essentially try their best to be Saints. That way no leader will ever have any real power to do anything. They will truly be public servant, nay slaves.
You trespass on us, we trespass on you. It's only fair.
The problem with this idea is that governments themselves would have to legalize "spying" on them, whatever that would mean after it's been legalized.
> That way no leader will ever have any real power to do anything.
That's a nice thought, and if you take it a bit further, you may end up thinking there should be no government at all.
Which is good, because I also miss the days where the man with the biggest club had the power.
Not sure if you've noticed, but those days haven't gone anywhere.
Then consider a place like Pakistan where politicians of nearly every political party are having their gatherings literally bombed by people with actual big clubs.
You're playing with hyperbole here and it's not helping the argument.
Edit: To be clear, the point is that something will have a "biggest club", and we want that something to be under the control of the population at-large and not under individuals. Having that "biggest club" under the tender care of "no one" is just a subset of the case of having it under individuals, after all the bleeding is done...
The WBC, the Tea Party, and the birthers aren't squashed by the club only because the government doesn't consider them a serious enough threat.
Anyone who is considered a serious threat is brutally beaten, tortured, detained, etc. whether or not their actions were noble (i.e. PFC Manning), or likely cases of mistaken identity, false accusations (Guantanamo, etc.), or living in the wrong part of the world (Iraq, etc.).
Of course, you also don't have to be considered a "real threat" either to feel the weight of the club. Simply act out of line with the law, regardless of whether the law is just or not, and you will feel it smashing down upon you. Just because we have fancy formal proceedings before we hit you in the head doesn't mean the club has somehow disappeared. Its impact is just delayed, that's all.
Past uses of the club included having the wrong color of skin or being of the wrong nationality (blacks a few decades ago, Japanese during WW2). All of these happened during times when we supposedly lived in a "free, civil and open society". The big club is always there, just sometimes it doesn't care about you.
Watch yourself. http://th05.deviantart.net/fs70/200H/f/2010/027/5/7/Obama__y...
This might surprise you, but I agree completely. I do feel that it's better on the average (at least for the U.S.) than the counterexamples you might see elsewhere of where government is ineffective or nonexistant.
Make no mistake, unless you're the one at the top you will be governed by somebody. Once you come to that realization the rest is an optimization problem of how best to control the damage.
The other one, well, whatever their deficiencies, not most of those things.
This is the sort of silliness ('they're all exactly the same!') that, with the help of the Naderites actually helped put a Bush administration in power.
There's no shortage of perfectly defensible complaints one can have with this or any other administration without having to resort to tinfoil hat ones.
There was a whole lot of extrajudicial killing of US citizens in the course of domestic counter insurgence between 1861 and 1865; Obama has neither made this legal (as if he could) or made it scalable in a way which it wasn't before.
Both the threat environment and the tools used in response have changed, and certainly in the modern situation the line between interstate war and domestic insurgency is much less well defined, as are the fronts in either kind of war. This does produce quite involved issues in how to deal with both, and how to deal with that (and the interactions, in either the internal or international case, between war and police functions.) And certainly there is considerable room to debate the appropriateness of the particular choices and policies of this, the previous (and, no doubt, the next, etc.) administration on these issues.
But lets not pretend that they are something they aren't, because that isn't helpful.
It has precedent all the way back to the Clinton administration (if not farther, I'm just going by my own memory), when Bill Clinton authorized cruise missiles to be used against "terrorist training camps" at least a couple of times.
Actually, there was a time when the U.S. used military force against its own citizens in a legal, but extrajudicial fashion: The Whiskey Rebellion (which even occurred on U.S. soil). There were at least no direct battle fatalities as a result, but that was due to the fact that the insurgents gave up.
From what I can see, Obama has not given Americans back one single freedom that Bush removed, in fact he has expanded and built on them.
Or, just imagine if that Bush monkey had been able to do the Hollywood USA, USA, USA murder of Bin Laden, sitting there sniggering (Insert Jon Stewart impression) like a nut job while the operation was executed, like Obama petty much did. (Lets be honest, Obama could hardly contain himself.) The left and rest of the planet would have gone mental.
Don't get me wrong, I do exaggerate to show the point, but we in the UK experienced something like this and you could see it coming a mile off. When Blair (remember the British gimp Bush had in tow?) came to power it was after Thatcher and the limp replacement, John Major (forgotten him? Most have). People were over the moon and expected much. With in 3 days it was pretty clear that we had just replaced one terrible regime with one while was moulded in its image, and just build on the questionable things the previous government did, and reversed nothing what so ever.
This pretty much destroyed my engagement with politics and I saw the exact same tragedy unfold with Obama. Its a real shame, and damning indictment of western politics. Frankly the whole thing is a sad tragedy.
That's certainly your privilege and right but surely you have to recognize it automatically makes any discussion of politics with you impossible or at least, deeply unproductive.
And my point is, very specifically, not that 'if you have misgivings about one side or administration, you ought to have none about another'. It's just that lumping them all together as equivalent seems so utterly naive and simplistic and wrong that why even bother discussing politics with anyone? - it's a decidedly unfalsifiable position to begin with.
I actually feel empowered by thinking that way though, because it eliminates distractions (politics) in favor of actual meaningful actions I can take in my own community (building things, helping people, etc.). If politics is removed as a tool, then problems no longer look political and you can do something about them that is ultimately much more effective than voting (in my opinion).
Perhaps you're not familiar with the way campaign funding works. In short, the parties band together to increase funding that, while really only good for making it easier to get elected, and is therefore somewhat self-perpetuating (e.g., I need money to win, to get more money, to win, etc.) - it is still money, and people covet it.
Why can't he have worthwhile things to say about politics even if he's given up on voting? Actually, I suspect he'll have even better ideas now.
> It's just that lumping them all together as equivalent seems so utterly naive and simplistic and wrong that why even bother discussing politics with anyone?
Tell me, what exactly was the distinction between voting for Obama over Romney? How would life be different now, had Romney won? Would it be better? Worse? Would Romney have done something to actually help with the economy, unlike Obama?
What about jobs then? Would Romney have "created" jobs better than Obama (as if jobs could be created by central planning anyway)?
Lumping Obama and Romney together as roughly equivalent is exactly what someone who sees things for what they are would do.