Imagine if Britain had this same technology when the USA was founded... It of course would have quickly cracked down on communications and it would have done so in the name of "peace" and "what's right"...
This idea that thinking critically of a government and even believing that perhaps the government as it stands today is not the government "of and for the people" (sure could be interpreted as anti-democracy by that same corrupt government)... And maybe that's not correct, but who is the government to say that we can or cannot challenge them in public discourse as it is supposedly protected under the first amendment?
This is indeed an insanely slippery slope and people willing to trade their freedoms because they think it's for the ultimate good, I think are really making a mistake... it's not difficult to understand that this is one of the first steps of an actual fundamentally corrupt government... This is easily open to abuse and vast interpretation.
If the American revolution had happened 100 years later it would have looked like the Boer war. That's the war where the British used barbed wire and the machine gun to invent the concentration camp.
> If the American revolution had happened 100 years later it would have looked like the Boer war.
Smart. It would have. That is indeed how you fight an insurgency.
Not sure how new it really is though. Compare and contrast to the Harrying of the North.
> to invent the concentration camp
I hear they borrowed the idea from the Spanish in Cuba.
Compared to alternatives, it was supposed to be more humane: "Get the civilians out of harm's way (and keep them from aiding the guerillas without killing them)".
It wasn't until the Nazi extermination camps of WW2 that the phrase "concentration camp" took on such negative valences.
Granted people did die in concentration camps, but the deaths were of things like cholera -- the same diseases that would run through army camps. Arguably we still have them today, under the new name "refugee camp".
> the Boer war
It shouldn't be left out that the British had a decent case for moral high ground in that war. The Boers were religious hyper-conservatives who believed God had given them a right to Black slaves, whereas the British had banned slavery throughout the Empire and were going to some expense to enforce this.
This idea that thinking critically of a government and even believing that perhaps the government as it stands today is not the government "of and for the people" (sure could be interpreted as anti-democracy by that same corrupt government)... And maybe that's not correct, but who is the government to say that we can or cannot challenge them in public discourse as it is supposedly protected under the first amendment?
This is indeed an insanely slippery slope and people willing to trade their freedoms because they think it's for the ultimate good, I think are really making a mistake... it's not difficult to understand that this is one of the first steps of an actual fundamentally corrupt government... This is easily open to abuse and vast interpretation.