I’d say it was the all of the politician’s knee-jerk response to the vocal segment of their constituency’s fear and anger that are responsible for much of the first Patriot Act support. (Have I mentioned lately how much I hate that misleading name?)
As for renewing and nurturing it? Let’s see. In an emergency you were given a high speed cable modem for some specific tasks. When that’s done (or irrelevant) we expect you to go back to using dialup? Hard to see that happening.
I hate how politicians can’t see past the end of their next election cycle.
Totally off the topic but from here on out I’m going to substitute ‘douche’ for the name of our President-Elect Douche.
While i agree with @bibliophile20 i can’t help but hope that any moment now the simulation is revealed and we all unplug and look at each other & say “Well, we fucked that one up. Another game before mealtime?”
Yes, we are in deep trouble. Trump will use the surveillance apparatus against political, personal, and business enemies. We need to defend our communication as much as possible. If you are an enemy of Trump you might be thinking about leaving the country.
We are in mourning. We need to take a sober assignment of what happened and develop strategies and tactics to deal with Trump. We may have dictator in the White House.
Sad humor aside, yeah. Trump is very much the kind of person who will use the state’s hammer to smack down people that he personally has a beef with. It’s going to go from “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” to arrest lists of personal and political enemies–something that he’s already promised to do to Hillary.
Exactly. It wasn’t like Bush II ----> Trump. We had 8 years of a supposed liberal president who went nuts expanding surveillance, military intervention, partisan persecution and secrecy.
NOW everyone is going to act worried that a president has those powers?
Eh. The yottabytical Utah Data Center was being built no matter who was in office. There are good psychopathic personalities who sometimes run things, there are bad psychopathic personalities who sometimes run things. Your sense that Trump is a delusional psychopath rather than a demagogic hustler does not much detract from the sense that 9/11 was a terrible moment in our nation’s history for more than one reason, and that the eventual consequences of trying to prevent a repeat of that attack are likely (very likely!) to be even more harmful than the consequences, in the Middle East as well as domestically, of the attack itself.
You had 8 years of finding out that when the government is controlled by the Republican Party and the Supreme Court is controlled by the “religious” Right, the President could go into a phone box and change into Superman and still not be able to make things better. Obama was largely a figurehead President - a problem with the US system of government.
The British one is just as bad the other way. It’s as if two countries both shot at democracy and missed in opposite directions.
