>>10786There's plenty of aspects of the US government, like the Patriot Act, that are very pro-government, yes. That's generally to be expected. But it is a
big leap from what we have now to having no social or political rights. The OP mentions stuff about free speech and handing out anti-government fliers as things that might hypothetically be outlawed, but as it is almost no one would support that. Nearly the entire country exercises its right to say the government sucks every single day. I won't say there aren't any government thugs hospitalizing people, but it hasn't happened to anyone that actually holds any kind of influence, and for them to attempt that would only martyr their target and incite the group further. It wasn't more than a year or so ago that there was a whole insurrection staged and they can barely even contain those guys, god forbid there was an actual cause for armed conflict.
To go back to the Patriot Act, people were pretty quick to allow it for two reasons. The first is that the government's been spying on its own citizens since spying was feasible. The second was sometimes there's legitimate threats within the country that are trying to make it worse, perhaps by turning it into a libertarian dictatorship or something. The second is mostly trumped up nothingness that spooks people just long enough to pass stupid laws like the Patriot Act. But the first is something we've gotten
very used to for the sole reason that it's largely unnoticeable because the
legal right to spy on your citizens doesn't make it easy to do. I can barely read all of
my emails, I can't even imagine the kind of manpower it would take to actually read every single email sent in or out of this country. What I
can imagine is what a colossal waste of time that would be. God, even 90% of our phone calls these days are automated spam centers, and the other 10% sure isn't terrorist organization. The only thing the Patriot Act actually did was let the state bring the spying it was already doing into court as evidence, where you're still subject to a jury of peers, at least hypothetically.
We are just so so far away from anything as fant
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