jivatmanx

I really don't think asking too much of our presidents to try an instill in the public the value of Liberty and Democracy; nor is this some Herculean task. It costs nothing, nor does it require a PHD from Harvard to explain, but it's an investment that will continue to pay off for generations without end.

As for Nuclear Weapons, Al Qaeda obviously does not have the technology to make them, so their safety is almost entirely a factor of international cooperation in regarding their security in countries that do. Such cooperation regarding their most sensitive and strategically valuable weapons requires trust, something that will be in shorter supply if we continue unhindered economic and political espionage.

The USSR had dozens of nuclear ICBM's pointed at every major European city, and, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, U.S. city. They also had massive armies.

If war had occurred, The U.S. could have been completely annihilated, utterly destroyed, ceased to exist. That's simply not the situation we face with today with Islamic terrorists.

It's reasonable to ask the question if we might be willing to accept a handful of causalities in exchange to remaining a free country. Than, take the money we're spending on the MIC and use it for safer pools and bathtubs, saving an order of magnitude more lives.

A useful anecdote is that Sensebrenner, the substantial author of the Patriot act, seemed shocked and almost entirely unaware how it's provisions have been interpreted and used.

If the intelligence community can't even have a reasonable relationship with the tiny minority of the most elite members of congress heading committees and authoring their bills, there is little hope for much else.

The Telecoms have long given total cooperation in exchange for monopoly privileges in cable and internet.

Carrot before stick.

This, the Parallel Construction story, and the Patriot act having been principally used for the War on Drugs than terror... has made me consider that the War on Drugs may actually be more dangerous to Liberty than the war on terror.

No doubt it's basic premise, that putting a substance into one's own body is a "crime", is a pernicious lie.

The War on Terror's pernicious lie is twofold: Terrorism isn't a crime, and thus isn't subject to any laws, that this war is eternal, and the whole world is a battlefield.

Certainly in practical effects the Drug war is worse: Minorities whose communities are regularly raided by soldiers, depopulated, and placed into our glorious, humane prison system with the highest incarceration rate in the world, than stripped of voting rights and essentially blackballed from employment afterwards, would think surely so...

My natural tendency has so far been to see the war on Terror as worse, this may be me I, like many HNers with dissident political opinions, am more likely to see myself as an actual target in the War on Terror. That, and being an Orwell fan...

Vietnam is a communist tyranny that simply applying existing laws and policies to a new medium, so this isn't really a change.

Economists prefer percentages to absolutes, and trends to isolated incidents. 9/11 has not only halted the long trend towards increasing freedom, but began a new and troubling trend of growing tyranny.

Perhaps the U.S. isn't overtly attacking press freedom, but the U.K. is, informs the U.S. before every incident, and the U.S. couldn't be happier.

Indeed, the current threat from terrorism has no significant differences from that of 19th century violent anarchism. Those who argue that "9/11 changed everything" play upon an ignorance of history to achieve their own purposes.

Furthermore, there a large number of cultural precursors that existed from before Hitler was even born.

Hitler didn't invent antisemitism. Martin Luther clearly envisioned a genocide of Jews, in what was one of Hitler's favorite books. [1]

Eugenics was bigger in the U.S. than anywhere else.

The U.S. even invented modern nationalism, and it clearly remains more popular here than anywhere else in the western world. (Though, at least originally, this was tempered by the idea that Enlightenment ideals were universal, though admittedly, "Freedom" and "Liberty" are now just empty newspeak)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Jews_and_Their_Lies

The police are the executors of the state's monopoly on the use of force, and where a state exists by the consent of the governed, it is uniquely important that the police are, without exception, held responsible to the people.

Any philosophy allowing unlimited or arbitrary state power over individuals turns the state, is one where the state, rather than the people, has full liberty, and is the master. That's the historical status quo (sans Greece, Rome) prior to liberalism, Locke.

>Wiretaps were tolerated when we could trust in processes that would guarantee that they would not be abused.

They were abused for a long time and we did nothing. The difference was you had to physically tap the line while the call was taking place, and then physically listen to the entire call.This placed enormous limitations. Now you can automatically store everyone's calls (translated to text), and search the entire database with a keyword search.

But this is one of those things that, sadly, few people outside of places like HN have the slightest understanding of.

>Still, the spending, even on stuff that was just junk, got us out of The Great Depression.

The U.S. was the only major country with cities and factories left standing, that weren't hit by wave after wave of bombers, so rebuilding your country necessitated buying U.S. goods.

The U.S. also suffered relatively fewer casualties than the other major players. The Nazi scientists didn't hurt either.

You are correct in that spending money on otherwise useless military items / people, is indeed useless[0], though those receiving military contracts argue the opposite, called "Military Keynesianism".

[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window#Th...

"So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do."

-Benjamin Franklin

You should have also put terrorists in quotes. We already know that the NSA is going after drug crimes.

I wonder what logic Karp has used to convince Peter Thiel that he's still a libertarian? I mean, talk about cognitive dissonance.

“If we as a democratic society believe that license plates in public trigger Fourth Amendment protections, our product can make sure you can’t cross that line”

The majoritarian argument - That's a popular one amongst libertarians /s.

On the other hand, Jimmy Wales considers himself an Objectivist... I guess, forget the mumbo-jumbo and judge people by their works?

Thanks Rhizome.

I'd like to add,

The Gulf States are already under Sharia, and have been since their founding almost a century ago. The Taliban copied Saudi Arabia, even using the exact same names for bureaucracies. [2] Relations with them were excellent before 9/11.

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_for_the_Promotion_of_....

But, as Iraq showed, there's no need to understand elementary facts about their culture before you invade and engage in a massive social engineering project, or engage in an global, eternal, "war on terror".

Keith Alexander believes that terrorists live amongst us, trying to implement Sharia and create a Caliphate. To fight this, he needs to "Collect it all".

It's just as important to understand his motivation as it is to understand ours, and assess the reasonableness of each in comparison to the other, comparing our current situation to others in history that were similar, and the result they had.

>The same could be done to bring creative works like books into the public domain.

This is a great idea. Unpopular works would be inexpensive to acquire rights for, so dedicated fan communities could try this.

Some out of print works might only cost a token amount. Might be able to buy them in bulk from publishers.

He's not really an African-American in the strongest sense of this term, he doesn't have black American ancestors who lived through slavery, or even the civil rights movement.

Great post. I think my central point is that it's dangerous for a democratic society to believe that nine robed Brahmins are the only people qualified to interpret it.

Congress must take seriously the idea that upholding the Constitution is a central duty, and that the existence of the Supreme Court does not in any way eliminate that duty.

We now know that the DEA has been using laundered NSA intelligence. That's relevant to the Drug War, where primarily minority communities are routinely terrorized by soldiers, and imprisoned en mass at the world's highest rate.

Many countries have more powerful and interventionist Supreme Courts. Notable, Germany[1]

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Constitutional_Court_of...

There's a big gap between the philosophies of "Everything is public by default" and "Secretly giving all of your private communications to the NSA". The former is utopian, though naive. The latter is just old school tyranny.

At a point in our nation's early history, we decided to trust Constitutional interpretation to the Supreme Court. There were cons to that decision - the Constitution is our social contract and thus it's interpretation is ultimately up to the people - but on the whole I think it was a good one.

But, if for whatever reason, this Judicial review cannot occur - whether that be willful avoidance by the DEA for "Parallel Construction", or various activities related to the FISA Star Chamber - that's a problem that needs to be solved, lest the constitution lack any enforcement ability whatsoever.

I think the writing is already on the wall in favor of that movement.

The biggest civil rights movement left is the War on Drugs, with soldiers routinely terrorizing minority communities, putting them in chains en-masse, taking their right to vote.

Considering the DEA's use of Laundered NSA intelligence, and the Black Caucus's support for the Amash Amendment (due to the FBI's historical relationship with the civil rights movement) this might be a good fit.

The goal of Al-Qaeda's internationalist effort has been achieved, the image of the "Shining City on the Hill", of the U.S. as a beacon of liberal democracy and thus liberal democracy itself, has been tarnished, not to mention grave economic damage.

So, the obvious next phase is to shift to taking local control of various territories.

Prohibition succeeded because they formed an alliance with the Women's Suffrage movement.

The primary qualification is now ideological purity.

With "Parallel Construction", we see an explicit attempt to avoid Judicial Review, with the DEA mysteriously dropping charges whenever a case goes to court. Which is bad, as we've now trusted the constitution entirely to Judicial Review - congress has washed their hands of a responsibility to uphold it.

I suppose you could argue that the DEA knows it's unconstitutional and is willfully violating, and that raises even more troubling questions.

I also wish the constitutionality of FISC court itself could be challenged, as I think it clearly doesn't fall under article 3. But I have no idea how this would be done.

Some countries, like Germany, have Supreme Courts with more interventionist abilities, and more recourse against willful violations.