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There’s a lot that worries me the these days. Covid, global warming, inflation. But nothing worries me more than the cultivated disinterest and lack of knowledg

There’s a lot that worries me the these days. Covid, global warming, inflation. But nothing worries me more than the cultivated disinterest and lack of knowledge in American civil liberties in our country. People should read this story and see it as a brazen abuse of your 4th amendment rights. It should be upsetting, and worrying. It seems that our liberty is under attack on almost every front. The “speech is literally violence” crew, those that cheer the abuse of state surveillance because the target is a political enemy, and the “blue lives matter” crew who close their eyes to police tactics that are literally killing innocence people. These civil liberties are not additive qualities to the American constitution. They’re foundational elements that can’t be removed without a collapse.

mindslight 5y ago
> [civil liberties are] foundational elements that can’t be removed without a collapse By and large, civil liberties as defined haven't been removed. They've been superseded by higher levels of structure, because the Bill of Rights was narrowly framed as only applying restrictions to the bona fide "government". The modern censorship movement is focused on tech middlemen, which as the refrain goes, are "private companies". Freedom from state surveillance wasn't laid out in the founding documents (although the spirit is there), but even so the state is just buying cooperative access from third parties - qualitatively "the state" is best seen as including Equifax, Lexis-Nexis, Google, etc, but legally they're "private companies". And criminal police are independent conspiracies that the state has simply decided to do nothing about, akin to (and seemingly descended from) historical lynching + jury nullification. I don't necessarily know what a productive synthesis is, besides that legal fundamentalism won't get us anywhere. The problem is not straightforward decay, but rather a foundational framework that is increasingly inapplicable.

mindslight 5y ago

> [civil liberties are] foundational elements that can’t be removed without a collapse By and large, civil liberties as defined haven't been removed. They've been superseded by higher levels of structure, because the Bill of Rights was narrowly framed as only applying restrictions to the bona fide "government". The modern censorship movement is focused on tech middlemen, which as the refrain goes, are "private companies". Freedom from state surveillance wasn't laid out in the founding documents (although the spirit is there), but even so the state is just buying cooperative access from third parties - qualitatively "the state" is best seen as including Equifax, Lexis-Nexis, Google, etc, but legally they're "private companies". And criminal police are independent conspiracies that the state has simply decided to do nothing about, akin to (and seemingly descended from) historical lynching + jury nullification. I don't necessarily know what a productive synthesis is, besides that legal fundamentalism won't get us anywhere. The problem is not straightforward decay, but rather a foundational framework that is increasingly inapplicable.