For those of us in the states, how the &*$# did we end up here? Was this value system mentioned anywhere in our founding documents? In any government/civics class that any of us took in school? Who are the people they have making these arguments?
Over the past several decades, however, the system of self-restraints has broken, however, probably irreparably. I don't think there was any one reason or master conspiracy or anything -- just lots of little compromises made by people doing the best they could.
Understanding why it happened doesn't make it any better, though.
Back in Lincoln's day you could ride all the way to DC, wait in line at the White House, and based on a lottery be able to go in and talk to the president. And he would feel embarrassed for whatever problems you had and would listen to you patiently.
Those days are long gone. And the goal of perfect safety for elected officials is still just as far away now as it was then. Not a good trade for the republic.
Only because those making arguments against having a king are not persuasive.
If you squint too much you will end up confusing the media generated with the opinions of the population. They are very different though.
In our fairly strong President system, we have a temporary king, and very much related to your point, we solve the succession problem that has historically haunted hereditary systems of nobility with things like assassinations. FDR didn't respect that, so we fixed it with a Constitutional amendment.
That significantly weakens a lot of arguments for "killing the king", President for Life, etc., because you just have to wait 4 or 8 years and he's no longer has much power.
The U.S. has always been a deeply conservative place, skeptical of dramatic change or threats to the existing order. Even the American Revolution was conservative--while the French were running around beheading people and switching to 10-day weeks, we decided to keep everything running pretty much the same, with a few tweaks.[1]
The value system of "we have a tremendous amount to lose and so are excessively cautious" doesn't need to be written down anywhere--it's the sociological default. We've gotten by fine without drones so far, and they hold the potential for disrupting a status quo that is at the end of the day pretty damn good. So why should people not be deeply skeptical?
[1] The difference between British Parliamentary monarchy and American democracy was, even in 1776, more significant in rhetoric than in substance.
I'm frankly shocked people think this way. I feel it requires a robust whitewashing of US activities over the last couple decades.
We have been in more active wars than any other nation over the last decade. Our banks caused a fiscal crisis that bore international financial ruin. Our presidential candidates speak openly about overthrowing foreign governments during public debates. The NSA has set the info era surveillance bar so high that i fear we, as a people, will never be able to reverse it.
I won't even begin to rebuttal a hilariously hypocritical stance the US is taking on domestic vs militaristic drone use. Though, it is much the same stance they have with NSA snooping, so we should not be shocked.
As for the fiscal crisis, in the grand scheme of things it's quite a short blip on a very long streak of prosperity, and it wasn't just U.S. banks involved--their counterparts in Europe were doing the exact same things.
How did you get that from the article?
Drones are and will increasingly be used for criminal enterprise. Being rational about how that changes things seems like a pretty reasonable thing to do, just as personal backpack helicopters would probably lead to a rapid rise in robberies where someone escapes via their helicopter, necessitating the appropriate change in capture techniques.
From the second-to-last paragraph of the article. That is why I said "stops one step short of". The one step that the article left unstated was "And since sufficiently advanced firmware is impossible, these should be banned."