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This. Reducing the size of the security apparatus is a very politically costly move. Politicians sometimes do politically costly things, e.g. Merkel and the ref
by tormeh 11y ago
This. Reducing the size of the security apparatus is a very politically costly move. Politicians sometimes do politically costly things, e.g. Merkel and the refugees, but it really has to be tremendously important for them to do that thing for them to put their political life on the line.
Few politicians has hitherto had privacy as their personal favorite value and therefore few politicians has been willing to put his political life on the line for privacy. Anyway, it's not a very inspiring thing to care about - some security hawk is probably going to just reverse everything you've done afterwards.
- narrator 11y agoWe have our collective chains jerked all the time over some random lunatic shooting a few people for some random lunatic reason if it happens to fit some political narrative. My facebook feed gets absolutely flooded by this stuff on a regular basis. Until people wake up and learn that they are just being thrown around emotionally like a dog being tempted with a snack, they are going to have an easy time influencing the public to do whatever they want. For some reason, I am regularly downvoted when I make comments like this. The key thing is that people don't think about how something in the media affects them directly. It's like shark attacks. The risks are negligible, yet they captivate the imagination. The mental images and pictures that they are exposed to on a regular basis by the media, both news and fictional tv shows and movies, are specifically chosen to get a response out of them, like a bully getting a rise out of taunting his victim. People don't think they can be manipulated, because they don't like to think they are that stupid, yet it ridiculously common.