I don't need to lie about what you wrote, you are doing that yourself. Firstly, you come out with this stuff whenever an even tangentially related topic comes

I don't need to lie about what you wrote, you are doing that yourself. Firstly, you come out with this stuff whenever an even tangentially related topic comes up on HN. So you are not making an observation about political science, you are engaging in advocacy. You are saying "Hooray for throwing out the rule book! That keeps us safe and stops the towelhead terrorists!". Like you did here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4474143 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4474143 Secondly, you are engaging in the no true scotsman fallacy whenever I give a counterexample. Breivik wasn't true terrorism because he was just one guy. Well that's irrelevant. The size and scale of any terrorist attack ever made up to now has been insignificant next to the damage to civil liberties from "security" or even to the death toll from road accidents. The difference is whether the population get hysterical, as you are advocating, or maintain their sense of proportion, as I am advocating. Marinus Van Der Lubbe was also just one guy, but we got Hitler and the Nazis being given emergency powers as a result of the Reichstag fire, because the Germans in the 30s ran around screaming about how the scary, scary legions of communist barbarians (well funded by their Russian backers) were a serious threat to all of civilization, just like you keep screaming about how the scary, scary legions of islamist barbarians (well funded by their oil-sheikh backers) are a serious threat to all of civilization. Well we don't have to treat this crap as natural. Any sane society, like the Norwegians today and unlike the Germans in the 30s, can just refuse to be scared, and put checks and balances in place to curb the politicians, like the European courts curbed the British government. Politicians taking away liberties under the excuse of "security" is the oldest fraud in the book, as anyone can see from Julius Caesar's comments on Sulla. Nobody who grew up in a country with functioning schools and books has any excuse for not knowing better.