4 ms·

Yep. Regardless of which party has more of the "reigns of government", this is not a good path to go down. Modern McCarthyism.

• throwaway894345 5y ago
  The extent to which this lends itself to abuse largely hinges on how precisely/narrowly and neutrally we define 'extremism'. We have to do better than the bipartisan counter-terrorism legislation of the 2000s, for example.
  • marcusverus 5y ago
    Based on a cursory google search, domestic extremism results in ~40 deaths per year.[0] With that in mind, I'd like to pose a related question; would you be cool if the government monitored our speech to help end the scourge of death by lawn mower? Probably not, because it's not a serious threat, right? And yet, you're 20x more likely to be killed by a lawn mower than to be killed by a domestic extremist. This isn't a matter of precision, it's a matter of scope. And given that these people are, collectively, 95% less deadly than the fearsome lawnmower, I'd say the appropriate scope is zero. [0]https://www.adl.org/media/12480/download https://www.adl.org/media/12480/download [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_strike#Epidemiology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_strike#Epidemiology
    • throwaway894345 5y ago
      That seems like a fair point. No doubt the news cycle distorts the importance of these things. If the capitol hill security were capable of repelling LARPers we probably wouldn’t be having this debate (though no doubt some equally silly debate would have ensued).