It's quite unfortunate that so few lawmakers take lead on opposing mass surveillance (Ron Wyden and Ran Paul come to mind). This issue is without doubt way more important than most issues politicians choose to demagogue about ("cancel college debt", e.g. Sigh).
> This issue is without doubt way more important than most issues politicians choose to demagogue about ("cancel college debt", e.g. Sigh).
I feel like if you asked people whether it's more important to them to cancel college debt than to end mass surveillance, the results would not tilt toward the latter.
Do you think more people would gain awareness of issues like mass surveillance if they didn't have to constantly worry about subsistence? I think they would.
I think we're just going to have to pay for privacy. If it's important, and scarce, it will be up for sale. All societal social values and morals will be commoditized and assessed for purchase. No one is smart enough to know why this is antithetical to their society's interests.
> I feel like if you asked people whether it's more important to them to cancel college debt than to end mass surveillance, the results would not tilt toward the latter.
The latter is more important, the former more urgent.
People are buried in enough crippling debt that keeps them from leading a life that has enough breathing room to pontificate about the implications of a the government reading their web-browsing history.
If you're worried about paying rent, and whether you have enough in the bank to replace the bald tires on your '97 Civic, are you really going to riot in the streets over the government collecting some data that they will never use against a tiny cog in the machine such as yourself?
I'm assuming you're speaking about college debt specifically, but people holding student loan debt are typically:
+ Higher class
+ Opted into taking the debt
+ Have enough income to not qualify for debt relief
+ 20% of that debt is held by people with graduate or doctoral degrees
It would take somewhere on the lines of $1 trillion dollars to cancel that debt (so that's money that can't be used for increasing healthcare, public utilities, issuing new student loans, etc). Oh and college prices would probably increase as a result - why worry about taking a loan if there's a chance the government is going to cancel it?
Why worry about giving people healthcare if they're just going to use it as an excuse to smoke, and drink, and eat chocolate bars all day?
Why worry about providing people with public utilities if they're just going to use it to waste electricity playing video games and leaving the living room lights on?
I understand your cynicism, but I believe we are trapped in a local minimum where people are stuck having taken out loans for an education their parents led them to believe would help them, but which turned out to be not so useful from an employment perspective.
I choose to believe that education from good, public institutions should be encouraged as much as possible, in as many different fields as people have interest in for the overall benefit and competitiveness of the country. But I don't believe that it should trap people in debt situations that then hamstring their ability to use that education in a creative, and entrepreneurial way.
We have to move everybody that is stuck now past the sticking point, and then, as you pointed out, find ways to eliminate people from getting stuck in the first place.
I kept it cheap by going to community college and transferring to a state school. Let's get that more normalized because I paid the same amount for my first two years of college what I then paid for one quarter at the university.
There are better ways of doing things, and there are institutions in place to facilitate a better way. We just have to move past this and tweak the system a bit.
I'd be all for university debt cancellation if it was in the form of universities not getting paid. Because as you say, they provided a shitty product. And as a parent poster said, if they get paid they'll just keep or raise rates so this is the best way to correct the root problem as well.
But I'm against debt cancellation if it just means that we get to pay for their shitty schooling, and we both know this is what they're pushing for. Increasing the tax burden on those who didn't get loans and didn't go to fancy schools.
Why shouldn't they just be allowed to go bankrupt? Then people who made bad loans would suffer. And they wouldn't be able to buy TVs and other crap on credit for a few years which for this specific demographic, might be a lesson.
The issue isn't _really_ the students. Sure if suddenly all college students made aggressive financial choices we'd be better off, but really it's the more expensive universities themselves.
They know what kinds and amounts of student loans are available and they raise their prices based on that. If they can sell getting even more expensive student loans (knowing they have no risk and that you can't exactly get a refund on a degree..) then they'll keep raising prices.
And if all of these costs were resulting in the greatest workers ever who were geniuses in mathematics, maybe it'd be worth it right. Except generally it's not, these costs are going to administrators and fluff instead of things that help students or improve their outcomes.
I think it depends heavily on the system. For example, the Cal State system (largest public university system in the world) is pretty darn affordable if you're paying in-state tuition and commuting from home. Cal State San Bernardino doesn't have a whole lot of fluff. Just a bare-bones commuter school that gets the job done. Excellent value.
The UCs go up in price, but they're also literally world-class research institutions.
Let's focus on funneling more people through a community college/Cal State type system where they're graduating with a reasonable education that helps contribute to a well-educated and intelligent society, while not saddling people with monumental amounts of debt. And if they choose to continue their education and become specialists, they can go to grad school at a larger research university. I'm pretty sure that's what the CC/Cal State/UC system was originally intended to be. We've just sort of strayed from that path.
These KGB-stories museums are the core of the post-soviet-post-modern-neo-liberal identity that is one and only one existential reason for most of such countries. A holy churches of new-old faith which suddenly obsolete under the facts that the whole world is actually a huge Goolag or its far-close derivatives.
I read your message a few times, but your concatenation of concepts and words for no apparent reason makes this entirely not understandable. If you're going to make things up, at least explain yourself.
I noticed the same thing on one of their now flagged comments. It's like there's some list of words and metaphors that conspiracy theorists love to employ
If they're trying to make a legitimate point, then it's been completely lost in all the waffle in the rest of the sentence.
I'm talking about the United States in 2020, not the former Soviet Bloc.
Our threat vector is local police, not the state surveillance apparatus.
Don't know if you happened to catch it on the news, but we burned down a bunch of stuff, and millions of us marched in the streets over it this past summer.
No no, I'm sorry, it was not the best choise of words. It's more that I'm perplexed by your naivety.
You freely admin that the police is the enemy of the people, the very police that's supposed to protect people. Now what makes you think that the organizations whose goal is to protect the state, and not the people would be any more benevolent?
Because organizations like the CIA have almost complete impunity to do whatever they want outside of the borders of the United States.
Why worry about some guy who lives in a shitty apartment in the San Fernando Valley and works at 7/11 when you can use all the toys in the arsenal to disappear clerics in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan without anyone saying as much as a word.
They get to play with Predator Drones. JSOC drops kill/capture teams out of HH-60 Pave Hawks with satellite and drone overwatch in Afghanistan. They can run snatch-and-grabs on the streets of Italy. Nobody even knows all of the off-the-books operations they're running in the horn of Africa.
The domestic United States is pretty boring by comparison. What, are they going to hassle the 7/11 guy? Why would they even bother? Congress would throw an absolute fit if they caught wind of it.
It's not because they can't. It's because they believe their own bullshit and get to do way too much cool Rambo/James Bond stuff outside of the United States.
Regarding the police. They're not exactly the enemy of the people. Our relationship with the cops is sort of complicated in this country. It's more that they're an institution with a lot of freedom and discretion, relatively poor training, low entrance standards, they have guns (and we have a lot of guns too), and they're loosely operated by a checkerboard of local and state agencies, rather than being a monolithic state entity.
A lot of the calls our police go on are mental health-related, and it burns a lot of cops out. Add that to poor de-escalation procedures and training, historical emphasis on policing of drug-related crimes in a way that that disproportionately affects minority communities, and well, there's trouble brewing.
If you ever get a chance (I know it's a cliche), but watch 'The Wire.' It's an HBO TV show that is pretty entertaining and does sort of go into a lot of the subtleties and problems of institutional policing in America.
I got a little sidetracked there, but in answer to 'what makes you think that the organizations whose goal is to protect the state, and not the people would be any more benevolent?' I say because it's more boring and congress would throw a fit. And I wouldn't say it's because they're benevolent per-se, but there is a LOT of believe-your-own-bullshit patriotic sentiment in this country that is hard to understate. We have an almost fetishistic worship of our military, and the notion that they 'fight for our freedom' and 'protect' us. That also carries over into the intelligence community to a great degree.
But, with the ongoing efforts to overturn the most recent presidential election, and the President's usage of federal resources in the summer protests, I have to say a lot of us are having to rethink a lot of stuff.
> The domestic United States is pretty boring by comparison. What, are they going to hassle the 7/11 guy? Why would they even bother?
Because a tough, macho president, who is also a rules-breaking maverick, decides he wants every protester who was anywhere near that burned-down police station locked up.
> Congress would throw an absolute fit if they caught wind of it.
You've got a very different impression of them to me, then.
'Ten days after leaving the White House with President Trump and walking with him across a park that had been forcibly cleared of protesters, the nation's most senior military officer is calling that excursion "a mistake."'
Despite the fact that the GOP will stand behind the president no matter what he does (even attempting a coup it seems), there is a younger generation (even within the GOP) who is a bit more grounded (e.g. Jeff Flake), and in ten years Mitch McConnell will be nothing more than a footnote in history.
If the courts keep throwing out Rudy's embarassingly-constructed cases, that fellow you're referring to is gone in a month, which is a pretty big difference from a puppet regime in the former Soviet Bloc.
Our country has been through a lot, but she has some life in her yet. Bear in mind that the younger generations have a very different political ideology than that of their parents. We are currently witnessing the death-throes of the political dominance of my parent's generation. They will slowly fade away and be replaced with a more forward-thinking and fresh approach to the same tired old problems. Glass half-full.
Police have been harassing people for decades in the US. To assign it exclusively to Trump ignores this history and it also assumes it will go away in January. We just elected the guy who unapologetically wrote the crime bill and California's "top cop." Based on their resume, It will probably get worse under their leadership.
>Regarding the police. They're not exactly the enemy of the people.
Given that policing in the US was founded to protect wealthy merchant types (later evolved into slave beating union busting monsters), they've always been the enemy of the people.
You're absolutely right. The institution of policing has for several hundred years been a team of enforcers for use by the ruling classes. It has historically been used to maintain social, economic, and racial disenfranchisement.
And there are plenty of cops who should absolutely not have a modicum of the power they now have. But, in 2020, it's important to recognize that 'police' are not a monolithic state entity, and there are plenty of good, kind officers who truly make an effort to 'protect and serve.' Let's get the bad ones the hell out of there, take some of the pressure off of the good ones so they're not acting as community mental health counselors, and maybe work to disarm folks on both sides so they don't have to enter every situation wondering if someone is going to murk them through a tinted window on a traffic stop.
It's a complicated situation that demands empathy and nuance on all sides.
It's 'we' as in 'we' rowdy Americans getting out and exercising the First Amendment, with a minority of protestors committing some property crimes along the way. A common sentiment among those who committed those property crimes was 'no one listened to us before we started burning buildings,' and in this sense I have a sympathy for their claims. I don't believe that the 2020 protests will ultimately be found to have been on the wrong side of history.
My grandfather, as an old old man, still referred to MLK as the 'bane of the south.' In his time, the civil unrest of the Civil Rights movement was an unforgivable disruption to the lives of ordinary white folks, and...well, we all know 50 years later that this was such a trivial complaint in the face of the great progress made in healing a society still dealing with the ripple effects of a most monstrous institution, which our nation firmly embraced without hesitation upon its founding. We are still grappling with the fact that when my father was a boy African Americans had to enter through the 'colored' entrance, and the song 'Strange Fruit' was disturbingly still relevant. Remember Emmett Till was lynched in 1955. That's not that long ago. The wounds are still raw.
The vast majority of protestors were peaceful, and the point of the protests was that law enforcement should no longer be able to commit violence with impunity against those without a voice.
Many, including myself, have expressed sorrow at the damage done to small businesses over the course of the civil actions. But, it's good to see a robust and healthy willingness of the citizenry to turn out in order to oppose just the kind of targeting of the little guy that our friend from the former Soviet Bloc is concerned about.
It's important to understand that a majority of the violence was initiated by folks that were seeking to take advantage of the protests to carry out violence:
"Rather, the [Department of Homeland Security] bulletin said that “the greatest threat of lethal violence continues to emanate from lone offenders with racially or ethnically motivated violent extremist ideologies and [domestic violent extremists] with personalized ideologies,” specifically pointing to boogaloo-related groups as likely to be “instigating violence” at the protests."
Does that change your reasoning about the situation at all? An overwhelming majority of peaceful protestors turned out to protest police violence and racial inequality, and a very, very small minority carried out the bulk of meaningful violence.
Does that invalidate the movement?
How am I in particular dangerous? No need to clutch at pearls comrade. Feel free to be unafraid. No one bears you any ill-will, unless you're a public servant who has murdered someone with impunity recently.
I agree with you on your first point, but in a previous comment you openly associated with the people [burning stuff down].
> No one bears you any ill-will, unless you're a public servant who has murdered someone with impunity recently.
The situation is a lot more nuanced than this and I'm sure you know it. Yes the police is over militarised, yes there's a huge problem with urban killings, but you also don't get to solve those problems with violence.
Consider the black business owners who suffered greatly from the BLM riots.
I agree with your sentiment that violence is not the answer.
I personally harbor no ill-will towards you, and I only ask that you empathize with those who have been at the receiving end of institutionalized violence themselves.
> It's important to understand that a majority of the violence was initiated by folks that were seeking to take advantage of the protests to carry out violence:
Yeah, all of Antifa and a lot of BLM. And yes, a lot of unaffiliated looters.
The WaPo article you mention clearly has TDS, and it supported Biden who said Antifa didn't exist. It probably won't be that accurate in this regard. I'd suggest looking for streams from people at the protests.
Videos of Antifa violence are everywhere, and there are comparatively few (and minor) videos of right-wingers. Considering how social media is left-dominated, it doesn't seem to be censorship related, leaving you to just conclude that Antifa was much more violent.
And from reports from friends who were at various rallies, the level of potential violence was incredibly lop-sided. The worst Proud Boys protest in Portland had the PBs shooting people with paintballs if they tried to block or attack vehicles. The worst Antifa violence was straight-up unprovoked murder. Second-worst was throwing molotovs at counter-protestors and cops. Or maybe trying to burn down residential high-rises with people in them. And with 190+ night of it, there were a lot of runners-up.
> Does that change your reasoning about the situation at all? An overwhelming majority of peaceful protestors turned out to protest police violence and racial inequality, and a very, very small minority carried out the bulk of meaningful violence.
There were a few days where the majority seemed to be sincere, but once the big crowds left it was just anti-society vandals. All the statue-removal fights, for instance, were entirely warriors and no poets. Portland doesn't seem to have ever had a single sincere protest, and there are now articles about actual black BLM members telling Portland Antifa off for ruining their credibility.
> Does that invalidate the movement?
No, not at all. But you can't reasonably claim huge turnouts of mostly peaceful people because there were months of violence. The majority, by far, was unreasonable and violent. People were killing in the first day of looting in Minneapolis. The days of protest in Kenosha were violent from hour one.
But what does invalidate BLM is that the organization has known scammers for leaders, supports nonsense such as marxism and ending the nuclear family, etc. It supports black disempowerment through rhetoric that calls hard work and good fathering 'White'. It actively supports looters, both in words and money, even when they burn down black areas. It decries all personal responsibility. (Read many of the black voices who say this.)
When protestors/rioters in Minneapolis burned the first police station it was a good target. Nobody lived there, or did business from there. Nobody's life was destroyed and the cops had to work out of an ugly warehouse for a while which is a stinging rebuke in a way a few days off with pay isn't. Good target selection, good effect. And most people recognized it and they didn't get a lot of flack for that burning.
Later that night blocks of the city burned, where people lived and did business. Many lives were destroyed and some lost that night. And BLM came out strongly in support of the violence, most of which was against black people.
> I only ask that you empathize with those who have been at the receiving end of institutionalized violence themselves.
Sure, but you wouldn't wish BLM on your worst enemy. They aren't actually focused on anything that will help, they just push the lies about Breonna, Floyd, Blake, and others.
This prioritization of issues (where for a rational actor, economics will most often be at the top), is why democratic republic systems don't allow democracy to permeate less "important" issues.
Citizens don't get to vote on how much surveillance they want, they chose from 2 big bundles of unrelated positions, with surveillance-related positions buried within. The 2 parties might both have unpopular opinions on surveillance, the issue is comparatively not pressing enough to have any influence on their candidacy.
I think it can be satisfactory under certain conditions. City-scale works because people can vote with their feet (the binary Keynesian beauty contest has an escape hatch), diversity is somewhat limited, and there is somewhat more accountability (the mayor lives in the same city, walks the same streets as its inhabitants).
But it's certainly not democratic at the scale of a country-continent such as the USA. Their citizens don't have the freedom to vote with their feet (even less than other countries due to the unique tax on citizenship that follows them around the world), and city/countryside people have opposing opinions on many important issues.
College-debt cancellation is currently being discussed on a shallow level, so it’s easier to discuss. Mass surveillance needs some in-depth thought that requires a principled approach to simple questions like ‘if you are not doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?’. Most people can’t make it past that one point, so it’s an intellectually stunted topic at the moment.
If we sat here and said we will cancel college debt, refund everyone that actually paid for college their money, refund those who paid their college loans, then refund everyone that went to college ever with an inflation-adjusted amount, then we come to the core of the issue of the price of education, and what is fair when you give amnesty to one group of college goers but not others. The true debate is about fairness, and on a technical level, what is affordable, and lastly who bears responsibility of giving and taking loans. Anyone truly ready to discuss this in-depth? Or do we just want to say the rent is too damn high?
The whole purpose of student loans is to allow politicians to simultaneously claim low taxes AND assistance to students.
Politician A says they will help students by funding higher education and lowering tuition, but will have to implement higher taxes than politician B who says they will help students by enabling students to borrow unlimited amounts of money from the federal government.
Politician B will win the election every time, because voters want lower taxes more than helping those below them in the socioeconomic order. Higher education facilities will raise prices because people that work at those facilities like more money than less money. The customers have infinite amounts of money due to being able to borrow as much as they want, and don’t have fully formed brains nor the requisite education or guidance to be able to calculate return on investment to make an informed decision.
And the free money encourages people to go to college who probably should not. It's a predatory loan disguised as a handout to the poor. Nothing sets people up for a lifetime of failure quicker than $120k private school soft science degree
I don’t think you fully understand what having large student loans can mean for a person. Sure not everyone has 100k+ in loans but either way it’s not irrational to be concerned about immediate financial issues as opposed to mass surveillance. Not everyone has a stem degree as a result of their loans and plenty of people with degrees struggle to make ends meet
Is there a mechanism for insolvency for debts this large in the US?
I believe I would have skipped higher education if such debt would have been the result. I imagine these policies came from a time where a degree was sure to net you a well paid job. Seems unfitting for todays time especially since the logistical problems of education are irrelevant with modern communication infrastructure.
§ 523. Exceptions to discharge
(a) A discharge under section 727, 1141, or 1328(b) of this title
does not discharge an individual debtor from any debt—
(8) to a governmental unit, or a nonprofit institution of higher
education, for an educational loan, unless—
(A) such loan first became due before five years before
the date of the filing of the petition; or
(B) excepting such debt from discharge under this paragraph will
impose an undue hardship on the debtor and the debtor's dependents; or
§ 3621.
Section 523(a)(8) of title 11, United States Code, is amended—
(1) by striking "for an educational" and all that follows
through "unless", and inserting the following: "for an educational
benefit overpayment or loan made, insured or guaranteed
by a governmental unit, or made under any program
funded in whole or in part by a governmental unit or nonprofit
institution, or for an obligation to repay funds received as an
educational benefit, scholarship or stipend, unless"; end
(2) by amending subparagraph (A) to read as follows:
"(A) such loan, benefit, scholarship, or stipend overpayment
first became due more than 7 years (exclusive of any applicable
suspension of the repayment period) before the
date of the filing of the petition; or".
§ 971. NONDISCHARGEABILITY OF CERTAIN CLAIMS FOR EDUCATIONAL
BENEFITS PROVIDED TO OBTAIN HIGHER EDUCATION.
(a) AMENDMENT.—Section 523(a)(8) of title 11, United States
Code, is amended by striking "unless—" and all that follows through
"(B) excepting such debt" and inserting "unless excepting such debt".
§ 220. NONDISCHARGEABILITY OF CERTAIN EDUCATIONAL BENEFITS AND LOANS.
Section 523(a) of title 11, United States Code, is amended
by striking paragraph (8) and inserting the following:
"(8) unless excepting such debt from discharge under this
paragraph would impose an undue hardship on the debtor
and the debtor's dependents, for—
"(A)(i) an educational benefit overpayment or loan made, insured,
or guaranteed by a governmental unit, or made under any program
funded in whole or in part by a governmental unit
or nonprofit institution; or
"(ii) an obligation to repay funds received as an educational
benefit, scholarship, or stipend; or
"(B) any other educational loan that is a qualified education
loan, as defined in section 221(d)(1) of the Internal Revenue
Code of 1986, incurred by a debtor who is an individual;".
(1) Qualified education loan
The term "qualified education loan" means any indebtedness
incurred by the taxpayer solely to pay qualified
higher education expenses—
(A) which are incurred on behalf of the taxpayer,
the taxpayer’s spouse, or any dependent of the taxpayer
as of the time the indebtedness was incurred,
(B) which are paid or incurred within a reasonable period
of time before or after the indebtedness is incurred, and
(C) which are attributable to education furnished during
a period during which the recipient was an eligible student.
Such term includes indebtedness used to refinance indebtedness
which qualifies as a qualified education loan.
The term "qualified education loan" shall not include any
indebtedness owed to a person who is related (within the
meaning of section 267(b) or 707(b)(1)) to the taxpayer
or to any person by reason of a loan under any qualified
employer plan (as de-fined in section 72(p)(4))
or under any contract referred to in section 72(p)(5).
It might work, but I'm not sure this is proof of that.
Say you're currently in $30k college debt. You're basically being asked to pay $30k to protect your privacy.
Would you pay that? Is it irrational to reject it?
I've got student loans myself, quite a lot. However when I asked for them I made sure that the profession I choose is profitable enough that I will be able to repay them.
I'd never ask other people to repay it for me, not would I ask my government. I'm an adult and take responsibility for my actions.
I'd wonder if the same government that's willing/able to spy on me are also willing/able to influence relative success of certain industries or even specific success of certain companies.
How much of my career decision would truly be mine if several of my possibilities say "poverty subsistence" or "early death" and I have to accept that or toss those possibilities out?
And I did well enough in school to get scholarships and avoid college debt. Congrats we both beat the system currently destroying thousands of students. That doesn't mean we should avoid fixing it.
Which is precisely what's wrong with neo-liberalism these days. A massive lack of rationality.
Cancelling college debt is about as screwed up an idea as one can come up with. It rewards exactly the wrong behavior, and is subsidized by those most deserving of a reward. Those who rack up unsustainable debt, picking expensive schools to earn degrees the market doesn't value, then go on to not repay those debts stand to gain the most from this. Meanwhile, those who take personal responsibility and sacrifice to make their college education sustainable — who went to cheaper colleges, who worked their way through it, who sacrificed their lifestyle post-graduation to get their debts paid off — are subsidizing the cost of that giveaway. It's a massive transfer of wealth from the responsible to the irresponsible.
This. If you can cancel college debt, colleges will more willingly dump piles of debt onto their students as well. It will also fuel the soaring cost of education to go even higher.
The problem is that debt financing is given to people who never should have gotten it in the first place. You should not give loans to such bad investments, not pay off the bad investments while allowing continued issuance of debt.
Governments forgiving student loans doesn't seem very neoliberal to me. In fact I'd say it's pretty much the opposite of neoliberalism's free market approach.
>so few lawmakers take lead on opposing mass surveillance
There is even a bigger problem underneath it - US government institutions were also proven (on numerous occasions) to unlawfully spy on citizens without any repercussions.
No amount of law will rectify the issue unless the law gets enforced.
It doesn't actually affect the daily life of the vast majority of Americans in a way that visibly alters the trajectory of their life to a degree that they care enough to get upset about it.
The CIA isn't dropping-in to ship Fred down the street off to a reeducation camp for committing thoughtcrime.
Cops might shoot you for reaching into the glove compartment for your insurance and registration during a traffic stop over a broken taillight though. So, people were pretty willing to riot in the streets. Because it actually affects them in a meaningful way (at least the way they see it).
> adjective
relating to a system of government that is centralized and dictatorial and requires complete subservience to the state.
The word “totalitarian” has a meaning—the root “total” reflects the intrusion of government and enforcement of behavioral norms in every facet of life.
Even snooping on the content of everyone’s calls, which the US never did, wouldn’t make it a “totalitarian state.” Snooping in everyone’s calls and prosecuting everyone who said anything bad about the President would be closer to the real meaning of the word.
"of or relating to a political regime based on subordination of the individual to the state and strict control of all aspects of the life and productive capacity of the nation especially by coercive measures (such as censorship and terrorism)"
Is it only "total" if it's explicit visible control of some aspect of my life? An even more effective way to control my life would be to control the set of possibilities that come to my mind for a particular decision, because then I'll probably think the result of that artificially-constrained choice was my idea and may even fight to defend my choice from people who picked a different iOS/Android, Xbox/Playstation, PC/Mac, Reddit/Instagram than me.
People make a lot of noise about the Second Amendment, but, what, they gonna shoot down a predator drone with their semi-auto AR-15? They gonna stop a SWAT team from disappearing them at 3am? They gonna be able to lead a decent life if all of their bank accounts get frozen? Local police departments acquiring armored vehicles and driving around wearing tactical gear are slowly morphing into a network of sketchy paramilitary forces.
Whistleblowers, however, really are on the front-lines of protecting us from actual, meaningful government corruption, overreach, and misconduct. They're what head-off 1984 before it turns into 1984.
If you have to worry about stockpiling ammunition in your basement, things have already gone way too far. Whistleblowers and the press are mechanism by which we don't get to that point.
In some civil wars it was neighbor vs neighbor. In the Lebanese civil war people were pulled out of cabs and shot. This wasn't the state you have to worry about.
How would you compare the success of guerilla war in the last few decades against larger powers?
Guerilla warfare is asymmetric warfare fought by a small minority against a more powerful enemy. It typically emerges in situations like Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan where you have a large, technologically advanced invading force that you are resisting. In the United States, there is very low risk of an exogenous actor occupying US soil, so we don't really have to worry about that.
Rather, we have to worry about our own government, and our best option is to take full advantage of our democratic system to head tyranny off at the pass.
Lebanon was a Civil War in the context of a failed state. The state no longer had a monopoly on the use of violence. A more recent analogy you could draw that would be more apropos would perhaps be Mexico where large swathes of the country are outside of state control, and rather in the hands of transnational criminal organizations.
I would again, argue that we should worry about preventing our country from becoming a failed state. The effort of preparing for the worst case scenario could perhaps be better spent through political engagement and activism to ensure that our country does not reach the point of being a failed state.
As you see right now, the current presidential administration is in the process of attempting a coup. It is not the lone citizen with an AR-15 that has prevented it. It is our institutions. What stands between the current administration staying in office for the next four years in full defiance of the voters as they would very much like to do? It's our institutions, including the whistleblowers, the free press, the judiciary, congress, state legislatures, and a military with a good head on its shoulders.
In fact, I have hundreds of rounds of 7.62x39 in my garage and a few thousand of 9mm. But, I have it because it's cheap in bulk, not because I have any aspirations to shoot another human being in any conceivable scenario. I believe in the strong institutions of my country, rather than my ability to murder my fellow Americans.
I bear no ill will, however, towards those who choose to 'trust in Allah, but tie up your camel.' I only ask that they consider giving their time to mending the patchwork of our society rather than simply preparing for when it rips.
I was with you until the last line. It takes either incredible ignorance or incredible callousness to suggest that the crushing, impossible-to-pay debt hanging over tens of millions of Americans is a less of an immediate problem than web surveillance.
They shouldn’t, but it’s too late, they already are. If they default now, it will be one of the most regressive wealth transfer in history, with tens of millions of college graduates, most of whom having good jobs and no problem paying off their student debt (which on average is on the order of a price of a good new car, which plenty of college graduates do draw additional loans on) being the beneficiaries. It would be horrendous policy built upon a terrible one.
Better to just allow those loans to be discharged in bankruptcy the way they used to be. The great majority would still be paid back, but those for whom it really is crushing would get relief.
For those for whom it is really crushing there are plenty of relief available, most importantly income based repayment program. I simply don’t see why allowing bankruptcy, which is redistribution favoring college graduates, is needed.
The same reason we allow other debts to be discharged. Unless you think that college loans should be privileged for some reason. Or unless you are against the idea of personal bankruptcy completely.
College loans are privileged, because it’s unsecured debt that is issued to young people without any income or assets. I would be totally for discharging student debt if it worked like, say, car loans — that is, if it was backed by private companies who can refuse extending credit to people whom they judge are unlikely to pay it back, and if upon bankruptcy, the degree is “repossessed”, i.e. records of attendance are scrubbed, and the bankrupt debtor is not allowed to claim they had held that degree under criminal penalties. Then sure, discharge student debt, I don’t care.
However, in the current arrangement of federally backed student loans, the incentives are completely misaligned. The taxpayers are shelling out tens of thousands of dollars to fund ever-more-expensive universities, which can keep jacking up the prices because there will always be feds who’ll write the check with few questions asked. Then, if you could just discharge it in bankruptcy, why wouldn’t just everyone do it first thing after graduation? Sure, you’ll have mangled up credit score for a few years, but for most people it’s worth the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars saved, and if everyone does it, credit score companies will have to account for it to keep the scores informative, so it likely wouldn’t even cause any problems for you at all.
Traditionally you were not able to discharge directly after graduation, there was a several year delay. By that time either your career has taken off, or you really are stuck.
> In fact, “one of those 61 orders resulted in the production of information that could be characterized as information regarding browsing,” Mr. Ratcliffe wrote in the second letter. Specifically, one order had approved collection of logs revealing which computers “in a specified foreign country” had visited “a single, identified U.S. web page.”
Don't forget Russ Feingold. The only original vote against the Patriot Act - and who lost in the 2010 mid-term while the act was extended/reauthorized in 2011.
About 43 million people in the US hold that debt collectively. That's an average of $23,000 per person. The median is likely much lower as many doctors, lawyers, and other post-grads have $100-300k in debt.
I don't think that it's an arduous sum at all. I came from a working class family and I had nearly twice that amount ~$40,000 when I got out of college in 2001. I set up a payment plan and paid it off with about 5-6% interest.
The good ol’ classic “if I did it, anyone can do”. Funny you say you got out of college in 2001, when the entire global and domestic political-economic scenario were different and the social value of a degree was much higher than today.
