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Exactly what everyone said when Patriot Act was passed and renewed repeatedly. America permanently traded away basic freedoms for the bogus promise of safety i

• nielsbot 4mo ago
  > And the Supreme Court was too scared to stop it Too scared? They may have been on board...
• rayiner 4mo ago
  It wasn’t just the GOTW. It was much of the 20th century from World War I onward. Each step led to further centralization of government, a larger and larger security apparatus, and more and more foreign entanglements. We are more or less retracing the path of Rome as the Republic expanded militarily until it was no longer practical to run it as a republic and it transitioned to empire.
  • danans 4mo ago
    > We are more or less retracing the path of Rome as the Republic expanded militarily until it was no longer practical to run it as a republic and it transitioned to empire. The current military "excursion" seems to be transitioning the US out of being an empire.
    • rayiner 4mo ago
      Rome took some unexpected Ls against the barbarians too. Didn’t change the trajectory of the empire.
      • shakna 4mo ago
        The failure to integrate the barbarian Goth refugees is generally marked as the beginning of the fall - and absolutely changed the trajectory of the empire.
        • deleted 4mo ago
          [deleted]
        • rayiner 4mo ago
          “Failure to integrate” is one way to describe the Goths sacking Rome. But I agree the barbarians did them in at the end. My point was that the Iran fiasco is more like the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, where Rome backed off after taking a beating. That didn’t mark a transition away from Empire, simply a retreat after a military loss.
          • shakna 4mo ago
            And my point, is the current administration is closer to Caligula and Nero, than they are to Varus. You see this as nothing more than another blip in a long history. I see unstable and dangerous individuals getting standing ovations for failure. "I don't care if they respect me so long as they fear me." - Caligula.
          • rvba 4mo ago
            The Iran fiasco is Suez Canal 2.0
            • arethuza 4mo ago
              Did you mean the 1956 Suez Crisis? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Crisis
          • modo_mario 4mo ago
            >is one way to describe the Goths sacking Rome To be fair they had been in the empire for a good amount of years at that time if i remember well. ...so when comparing to other previous influxes that did get integrated and/or assimilated it does seem apt.
          • constantius 4mo ago
            Teutoburg wasn't a battle but an ambush, and Rome killed almost everyone involved in the next years. This didn't represent a retreat: Germans weren't conquered because they had nothing to conquer. Rather, hopefully, Iran will be to the US what Turks were to Byzantium.
      • marcus_holmes 4mo ago
        The "trajectory of the empire" is that it became the Roman Catholic Church. Rome still rules a sizable portion of the world's population. I wonder if the USA is going the same way. Democratic Church of America?
        • sally_glance 4mo ago
          Homelander approves.
        • graemep 4mo ago
          Rules? Membership of an organisation is nothing like being a subject of an empire. Its purely voluntary. It has less power over its members than employers do. It cannot tax, only ask for donations. Its not even Rome - its run by people from all over the world. It controls only a tiny bit of territory.
          • bryanrasmussen 4mo ago
            question - do the representatives and elected members of a democracy rule? Rule, under the definition of control or dominion, is "The exercise of authority over a region or people, or the duration of a monarch's reign (e.g., colonial rule)", the word rule is often applied to mean what the leaders of a democracy do, but in most cases rule seems too strict if taking the normative definition, thus there is an informal usage that applies to democratic leadership. The President is often referred to as a ruler, corporate elites are often referred to as rulers; in these informal groups of rulers I think it is reasonable to place the Catholic Church. I am agreeable to say they do not rule, but then we must admit they exert a great influence, in many places and ways greater than the governments that officially hold power.
          • marcus_holmes 4mo ago
            Every single human living in Europe for around a thousand years went to a priest once a week and told them their innermost darkest secrets. There has been no more totalitarian rule ever implemented, anywhere. The North Koreans aspire to what the Catholic Church had.
        • 4mo ago
      • mullingitover 4mo ago
        Who were the barbarians, really? Caesar’s conquest of Gaul was basically a massive human trafficking organization that functioned as a pyramid scheme, and Rome only went downhill (in terms of basic human decency) from there.
        • __del__ 4mo ago
          this is a dense comment (there's a lot here to unpack). it sounds like you're saying: once it became clear that conquest with an explicit intended return of large numbers of enslaved people would allow caesar to pay debts and fund further expansion, the pyramid was capped and required exponential expansion to perpetuate its economic aims. and this was the beginning of the end. a model which required autocratic steering to operate.
    • Terr_ 4mo ago
      Either way, I'd just caution that the empire-ness of a country's military or diplomatic reach doesn't necessarily tell us what to expect in terms of its internal hellhole-ness of authoritarianism.
      • rayiner 4mo ago
        The two things are related because maintenance of the empire imposes demands on the domestic political and economic structure. Look at the domestic politics during Vietnam and the GWOT.
    • rvba 4mo ago
      The poster above seems to promote the secession of Texas and other states - what is the next step of the russian propaganda playbook to ruin USA
      • amanaplanacanal 4mo ago
        Would secession ruin the USA? Hard to know. Secession from the EU has certainly been bad for the UK, but the rest of the EU seems to be doing ok.
        • rvba 4mo ago
          Of course seccession would be bad for USA. Worse for Texas than the states that remained. Note that we heard before Brexit that it would not cause problems, yet it in fact bring benefits as expected by anyone with any idea how economy works. UK has a 6% decline of the economy due to Brexit https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg75npqkq4o https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg75npqkq4o
        • danans 4mo ago
          > Secession from the EU has certainly been bad for the UK, but the rest of the EU seems to be doing ok The UK might have paid the biggest price due to Brexit, but the EU also lost a significant trading partner for it's goods and services. Arguably it was a lose-lose outcome.
    • klntsky 4mo ago
      The empire is not defined merely as "a big state with deep foreign influence". In this context it is about the style of governance rather than strength
    • tharmas 4mo ago
      On the contrary, the goal is energy dominance and it seems to be working. To be clear, I do not support how this is being achieved. In its endeavor the US has made a lot of people furious against it.
  • gmadsen 4mo ago
    A Pax Romana would be a considerable upgrade
    • rayiner 4mo ago
      No it wouldn’t. The empire sapped Rome and destroyed its democracy.
  • pyrale 4mo ago
    > It wasn’t just the GOTW. It was much of the 20th century from World War I onward. If you're looking for the seeds of imperialism, you'll find them all the way back to US independence. The point the article is making is that 2001 was a tipping point in that evolution.
    • deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
  • inigyou 4mo ago
    Do you mean GWOT? Global war on terror?
  • pso 4mo ago
    If GOTW, actually means GWOT and Global War on Terror, please have courtesy of reading your posts beforehand, and perhaps also not assuming a US audience.
  • lopsotronic 4mo ago
    For all the editorial hay to be made from the "The Victory of Capital" or the purported "Inevitable Self-Destruction of Communism (with Russians In It)", the process of nations transforming into "security state zombies" is probably less a model of economics/ideology and more a normal lifecycle stage for nuclear powers. It's mistaking metabolic stage for victory. Once a major power has credible nuclear deterrent, the functions of the Westphalian state focuses on that singular threat of destruction - it's a cannon that ends the state. Having it be a single cannon is antithetical to an open society or democratic patterns in government. Hence, Security State Zombie, unable to perform anything other than its duties of destruction. Russia started the game in a depleted state and hit the lifecycle stage first - less open society to burn down. We teetered for a long time, but the 9/11 attacks, combined with a reactionary wing that no longer had to run a moral race with the Communists, sent the balance over the edge. I suspect, right now, we are seeing the "Yeltsin Era", where people finally lose their last patience with the established system, and during which the nomenklatura/technocrats/security state solidify their holdings in communications and media. Terminating this period in an orderly fashion will require some organizational energy and talent. Increased direct cooperation between national security "black" assets and local law enforcement like Texas Marshalls (hey like in Sicario, except not in Mexico), or between black assets and federal groups not operating under legislative or judicial oversight (which I leave to you to name). It will not be a modest effort - the local assets will need to be linked up with aggressively, as they are less numerous than the law enforcement under direct local jurisdiction. I do wonder who our Putin will be, or if we will even see his face without a thermonuclear bonfire.
• vlian2088 4mo ago
  >Exactly what everyone said when Patriot Act was passed I've been seeing plenty of Americans cheering on temporary safety over essential liberty since then, and I can't even provide examples without getting [flagged].
  • Terr_ 4mo ago
    > I can't even provide examples [of Americans cheering on temporary safety over essential liberty] I've seen other people critiquing it over the years, perhaps it has something to do with other aspects of the delivery or message?
    • inigyou 4mo ago
      [flagged]
      • Terr_ 4mo ago
        The longer things stay vague, the more I become concerned that this may be a scenario that is so common that it has an enduring meme [0], where: 1. The person claims that a broad swathe of facially reasonable and views are being rejected or forbidden in a way that is an unfair overreaction. 2. Pressed, they refuse to provide any concrete details, even in a safe context. 3. They are actually facing difficulty from a much much narrower--or entirely disjoint--set of view. In this case, OP has claimed the average HN commenter is hostile to a general class in the form of "our liberty has been improperly infringed by a false appeal to security", especially national security. I don't think that claim is credible, and I'm offering to demonstrate it by rattling off a bunch of counterexamples... However, that won't mean much if it turns out OP real grievance has some important details they are trying to keep secret. [0] https://xcancel.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/1050391663552671744#m https://xcancel.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/105039166355267174...
        • graemep 4mo ago
          I think not in this particular case, and downvoting more than flagging, but I see perfectly reasonable things downvoted. In fact I often upvote things I disagree with because I think the downvotes were unfair. I have been downvoted for reasons that are not obvious to me, and sometimes for posting verifiable facts. Its hard to guess what a particular person's experiences might have been.
• zwarag 4mo ago
  > Crying eagle photos in chain-emails Can someone elaborate? Whwre is this reference comming from? A simple web search did not yield much
  • deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  • pjc50 4mo ago
    Eh, I think they meant the general colour of "not quite social media" that was present at the time: chain emails and blogs. But the patriotic fervor was nuts. While there were substantial anti-war protests, that was very much not the majority opinion, and people were "cancelled" over opposing the war. It was inevitable. I remember, in the UK mid-afternoon after we'd found out about the first plane hitting the first tower, saying that would be the end of the Palestinians. Then the second plane hit. America would have to have reprisals, and Iraq was the target. Mind you, the PNAC (Project for a New American Century; that era's version of project 2025, now quite hard to find on the Internet) always did want to go to war with Iran, and Iraq was a convenient vector for that.
    • jhbadger 4mo ago
      Even though I'm American, I was living and working in Montreal at the time of 9/11 and it was weird how even there in the weeks after there were American flags displayed "in solidarity" with the US.
• rhubarbtree 4mo ago
  Yep, a lot of people saw this coming. It was so obvious - new powers are always abused in the end. Same for the UK. Perhaps the politicians knew that and didn’t care. Not sure how deep their cynicism / malice goes. More power to us, they said.
  • graemep 4mo ago
    In the UK there is a big element of sheer incompetence. Politicians who have not experience of life outside politics are really will-equipped to understand the consequences of what they do, and defer overly to expert opinion. Of course the police or intelligence services say they need more powers, it takes judgement to balance this against other considerations.
    • vanviegen 4mo ago
      > and defer overly to expert opinion That... doesn't sound so bad?
      • ozlikethewizard 4mo ago
        its also not true, if we listened to expert opinion more often we wouldnt have had numerous extreme economic and policy failures in my rather short life. Austerity, Brexit, Covid, Public Order Act 2023, every moment of those last Tory years.
        • osullivj 4mo ago
          I agree with you on Brexit, austerity. But you can always find an expert briefing in yr direction cf Walters, Lawsom, Thatcher
        • graemep 4mo ago
          The politicians did defer to expert and business opinion over Brexit. The referendum was only called because they thought they would win it. I personally think it was a good thing, but the politicians definitely did not - the point was a referendum win would fatally weaken the leave movement. An interesting irony is that polls before the referendum in the 70s suggested people did not want to remain, the ones before 2016 suggested they did. Lots of experts favour austerity. The trick with economics (and many other things) is to find the experts who agree with out. The government did listen to experts over covid. Whose idea was lockdown? Who advised them that a rapid vaccine rollout was required. The government did get confused by experts having different opinions (as one would expect with a novel disease) but once convinced which experts they listened to they did follow them. The main fault was not balancing advice from experts in different areas (e.g. balancing physical health, mental health and economic impacts of lockdown correctly) which is exactly what I was complaining politicians fail to do