How can you measure success when there are no objectives? We could leave Iraq today, just pack up our crap and leave, and the President could still claim victory. Even if your goal is "democracy" (laughable, since our allies include Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and other distinctly non-democratic) we can point to the fact that the Iraqis got to vote, and go home. Success!
Well, success if you ignore the fact that the country is falling apart, has become a haven and catalyst for terrorism, has worse access to health care/clean water/safe streets/medicine/electricity than when Saddam was in power, and their current government also uses torture, detention without trial, death squads, etc. But even if what we're doing is making things worse, more of the same will no doubt constitute improvement.
Okay, sorry for the diatribe. I'm sure you can use stats to analyze who will win a particular armed conflict--the fact that the USA represents half the global arms expenditures might be relevant. But Iraq isn't a war, but an occupation, which is of a completely different nature. If you just tasked the US military with killing Iraqis all day long, they could do that without any impediment. But asking them to make Iraq into a USA-loving western-style freedom-loving democratic republic, by the brilliant combination of the force of arms and handing out candy to kids, is a bit daft.
Your #1 point is what scares the hell out of me. The privatization of law enforcement, along the privatization of military force (Blackwater, etc) stands to do far more damage to freedom and our way of life than most things we get our knickers in a bunch over. There are military contractors in Iraq today that are not subject to any law at all. When efforts were made to subject them to the UCMJ, the military responded with "Okay, no problem, we'll prosecute reporters" to scare off the efforts of holding mercenaries to any legal standard. And people don't care. That's what truly amazes me.
If I'm still alive when this crap gets imported to the USA I'll have precious little sympathy for our population. Totalitarianism isn't sneaking up on us, and it's not being created in some secret backroom to be foisted upon us all at once in a military coup--it's growth is obvious, but we just don't care about freedom. It's so depressing to watch Hollywood movies, because in the movies the US population is passionately freedom-loving, and though there will be some nefarious, totalitarian-leaning politician or general, in the end the population's love of freedom wins out.
But the population isn't really that way--for all of Hollywood's warranted paranoia about government, they are naively optimistic about how the public's attitude towards torture or habeus corpus or the rule of law. The public really would sell us down the river for a bit of convenience and the illusion of safety. And I don't think they would need that much convenience or safety to rationalize it--I think a certain percentage of the population likes the fact that their government is "getting tough".
Yes, I went off on quite a tangent. Sorry about that.
From what I read, the California energy situation had more to do with Enron than with poor planning. When we've privatized something the public absolutely has to have and scarcity is profitable, scarcity is what you get. By design.
I dont' think that all images have the capacity to mean "anything whatsoever." Images of white cops using attack dogs on little black kids during the US civil rights era pretty much meant one thing. Images of Nazi concentration camps are pretty communicative. Images of mass graves in Cambodia are pretty clear. That hooded Iraqi guy standing on a crate pretty much clued me in to something in particular. The images need a little context, a little explanation, but once you know that background, the conclusions are obvious. Believing that torture and massacre are bad doesn't make people into sheeple.
I'm a bit dismayed that we've all grown so postmodern, and think that anything can mean anything. Everything isn't propaganda--there is such a thing as the truth, an objective reality we should be trying to get at. If a particular government is torturing people to death, or slaughtering tens of thousands, that matters, and trying to describe that objective reality isn't propaganda.
True, we can be suckered, as when we believed that Iraqi soldiers had thrown Kuwaiti babies out of their incubators to die, or when we believed that Saddam was poised to nuke cities in the USA, but that fallability shouldn't undermine our confidence that there is an objective reality we should be striving at all times to recognize.
a local radio host had on an atheist the other day who refused to recite the pledge in its current incarnation because of the "one nation under God" part.
Where do they find these atheists? I think some of these guys are ringers trying to show how much bad old atheists hate America, and so on. But to be fair, I also sometimes suspect that Pastor Fred Phelps is an atheist who takes great joy in humiliating every Christian on the planet. That guy just can't be for real.
I would've liked better pictures of Adam and Eve. Dare I be surprized that they looked ever-so-slightly olive-complected? At least they weren't blond-haired and blue-eyed. I also liked the picture showing how diversity recovered after the flood. It was strange that they picked silhouettes of domesticated dogs, which only have such diversity because humans selectively bred them for differing characteristics. I'm not surprized the museum is so slick, though. Creationism has a lot of money, and that buys good literature, nice buildings, and so on. From what I read, Howard Ahmanson, Jr funded the Discovery Institute, which of course pushes ID, everyone's favorite edited-for-the-Supreme-Court proxy for creationism. I would've liked to read more about how the flood covered the Earth--I've still yet to see an explanation of where all that water came from.
I'm sure every felon would love to be pardoned so we can get to the "healing." Shouldn't dwell on the acrimonious blame game, you know. Strangely, aren't the Republicans the party of personal responsibility? Where principle matters, and matters most when it would be more convenient to look the other way?
They indicted a sitting President over a lie over a blowjob, ostensibly because it's wrong to lie. Yes, they embarassed a nation, turned the Presidency into a joke, and exposed children throughout the country to nightly news updates about a semen-stained dress and thong-snapping.
Oral sex because a national preoccupation, was suddenly a discussable topic in respectable open conversation, because of their committment to morality and honesty and the rule of law. So why was it okay to pardon Nixon again? I lost you there after a bit. Something smells funny. Oh wait--it must be bullshit (not yours, though--just in general).
The Republicans are happy Nixon was pardoned not out of principle, but out of politics, and they impeached Clinton for precisely the same reason. Neither party gives a damn about healing, unless you count the Democratic caving on the 2000 election as the Supreme Court ignored Florida law (which party believes in states' rights again? I'm forgetful today) and appointed Bush President.
Wikipedia aside, I've always questioned the idea of intrinsic value. If all the people die, does it still have value? Gold may have "instrinsic goldness" in that the light reflected will still be of the same wavelenth (though we won't see it) and it will still be composed of the same element, but it won't have any value because there'll be no one to value it.
I like stuff for free too, but I commonly find myself buying a movie I've already downloaded. I buy a lot of classic movies, like Network or Citizen Kane, that I might not have shelled out $20US for if I hadn't already seen it once and decided that I like it.
But another reason I download movies is space. A 500-DVD collection takes up quite a bit of shelf space. I'd much prefer a HD with those movies in XVID format. DVDs are more about preventing copying (no, stop laughing) than they are about content delivery. At least that was the intent.
Ummm...excuse me but, what in the fuck are 8 year olds doing wandering about in the malls and other places without a parent/guardian in the first place?
I sent him to get beer and cigarettes. And the little bastard better bring my change back. What the hell is your problem?
Don't some manufacturers sell/market archival ink, specifically meant to last 100+ years? What do the pros use? I've never owned a photo printer, because I don't print that much, and when I do I'd rather use an online service that (I assume, rightly or wrongly) has a much more expensive printer than I could buy in my price range. But the prints I've ordered were indistinguishable (by me) from "real" photos.
Other than instant gratification, does home printing offer any advantages over commercial printing services? Is the quality of prints/paper reasonably comparable?
Well, "conservative" has different meanings to different people. I guess everyone refers to that inner definition when they use the word. I think of small government, balanced budgets, noninterventionism--along the lines of Barry Goldwater's rhetoric (I don't know about his actual record). But you're right in that some just mean "Republican." But Pat Buchanan and William F. Buckley are something as far as political philosophy goes.
I think the same problem of slipperiness goes with any political discussion. George Orwell was a socialist, but one who detested Trotsky, Stalin, and so on--was he a "real" socialist?
I guess when people identify themselves as something--socialist, conservative, Christian, whatever--and see someone else who self-identifies with the same word acting/believing starkly different, they want to re-claim the label for themselves and differentiate themselves from who they see as the imposter. Some conservatives have compassion and humility, and want to distance themselves from the Ann Coulter crowd.
Then you've never understood a basic fact about the culture in the USA. Violence is A-OK, but sex is dirty. Yes, it's a perverted way of looking at the world. We also have a fairly high murder rate, one of the highest incarceration rates on the planet, and we're in a select club (including Iran, China, and Saudi Arabia) who still practice capital punishment. We have a lot of people who think that civil rights laws were a usurpation of states' rights. We have a lot of people who think that child abuse laws are a usurpation of parental rights. We also have a lot of decent human beings, but you don't hear from them as much. I sort of wish they'd speak up more. We need more people saying "torture is wrong" and "no, we shouldn't keep people in prison forever without trial" and so on.
The problem with depending on Fox News to keep the population on your side is that you can't keep the population on your side without Fox News. If Fox started reporting negative stuff about the Republicans with 1/10 the zeal they brought to trashing Clinton, Kerry, Gore, etc, then the Repubs would stand about a five percent chance of staying in office, as opposed to the 25 percent chance they have now.
Fox News owns the Republicans, not the other way around. Fox could break the Republican Party and build a new faux-conservative party in a few weeks. O'Reilly viewers alone could break the Republican Party, because they are depended on so heavily.
I don't envy the Republicans, or at least the real conservatives among them. Their party is beholden to a fickle TV news network and its viewers, and the religious right. You can't please both forever. Evangelicals are starting to wander, for different reasons. Some, because Republicans aren't right-wing enough, and some because they do care about the environment, the poor, etc. A near-death experience may be good for the GOP long term. Maybe they can get some conservatives in charge for a change, instead of all the visionary would-be world-shapers like Cheney and Rumsfeld.
We botched it, now we're reaping the consequences.
Whoa there, bucko. The USA has not, is not, and will not ever be responsible, in any way, for the consequences of any of our decisions. We are responsible for our motives, which are pure and idealistic. Only other countries are responsible for their actions. So this whole "We did A, and A caused B" shenanigans needs to stop right f-ing here. We don't cotton to that talk, because it means you hate us for our freedoms.
I tried to read your post, but the word "Knoppix" kept flashing through my mind so prominently that I couldn't understand what you had written. How long before someone releases a live[dvd|cd] with Truecrypt installed?
How hard can it be to make stuff, for all practical purposes, inaccessible? Truecrypt + VMplayer + keyfiles + good passphrases has to equal some pretty good security. Of course that only applies if they burst through the door, not if they came in quietly while you were shopping and installed keyloggers and screencap software ahead of time and then arrest you later. If they're that interested in you, and they have physical access to your system, you're toast anyway. But I somehow doubt the local PD is going to break a Truecrypt container or PGP key, unless your passphrase is written down...oh wait.
You don't have to prove anything to the prosecutor. He has to prove you're guilty, at least to the satisfaction of a jury. Yes, I know, it doesn't really work that way, but the entire "presumption of innocence" thing is on my side. And if we throw that out, then the academic arguments over Truecrypt or rot13 are pointless because we've moved beyond the rule of law anyway.
It may make you feel smarter than the other guy to point out how the "real world" justice system works, but in a society where the government can lock you up without presenting evidence, there is no justice system.
I don't think the Saudis wear turbans. And I doubt that history will take the destruction of 2 buildings, however iconic, to be all that important in the long-term picture. It's normal that we consider our people and our landmarks to be invested with an almost mystical significance, but if the 9/11 attacks symbolize anything long-term, it will be the blossoming of terrorism that we enabled by invading Iraq, which wasn't the nationality (or money, or supplies, or planning, or even post-it notes) of any that attacked us on 9/11. We have been instrumental in undermining the international respect for the rule of law, and destabilizing an entire region. That, if anything, is what the 9/11 attacks will bring to mind.
A group of opportunistic would-be visionary politicians with a pre-existing plan (PNAC) took the gift of 9/11 and used it to run with their program, which proved to be a lot uglier and nastier than they thought it would be. And the CIA did warn the White House about terrorists using planes to attack the USA. Our security services didn't fail--it's more accurate to say that you can't prevent everything, all the time, indefinitely. Preventing a nuclear attack is easy compared to preventing all the improvised attacks that could possibly occur at any time in any venue.
Please stop acting as if I'm saying we should do absolutely nothing about terrorism. Stop acting like I'm President Bush and it's the first nine months of my term. I'm saying we should have perspective. That doesn't mean "do nothing."
We've had bioweapon attacks within the USA, and I don't see much being done about it. White supremacist groups have been caught with bio and chemical weapons and caches of conventional weapons, and I don't see much being done about it. Just a few days ago someone brought chemical weapons to Falwell's funeral, and I don't see much being done about it.
The hysteria is very selective, and I don't like being played for a chump. When the hysteria benefits a particular preexisting political agenda, it's run into the ground, and when it doesn't, it isn't. So this isn't really about saving lives. It's about being manipulated by a cynical government (aren't they all) into supporting an open-ended occupation of an oil-rich nation and pushing the entire PNAC agenda all the way down the line.
Yes, you should investigate terror cells. You should also heed the widely given and widely ignored insight that our actions in the middle east are fomenting and exacerbating the terrorism we're ostensibly trying to defeat. There is no evidence at all that any terrorist network has nuclear weapons, and I'm not going to support totalitarianism just because of a far-flung hypothetical. And if Clinton/whoever wins the next Presidential election, not one Republican will either. All of this "But OMG what if they kill MILLIONS!!!! We have to support the President, unless you love terrorists!" crap will sail right out the damned window, and you know it.
This whole "we follow the President because we're at war!" crap will end as soon as a Democrat is elected, and you damned well know it. Fox News will be trumpeting that dissent is the true expression of patriotism in about 12 seconds, and instead of Franklin's liberty/safety/deserve neither quote, Slashdot will be inundated with Jefferson's tree of liberty/blood of patriots quote ad nauseum. This is politics masquerading as concern for our safety.
...than to addressing a curable disease that kills the same number of people.
But we aren't talking about two causes of death that kills the same number of people. And I was quite wrong about influenza deaths--according to the CDC, the value is 61,472 (1994). That means that 9/11 killed about 1/20th the people killed by the flu in one year.
Even if you wanted to give 2 orders of magnitude (a factor of 100) more money to preventing deliberate deaths than disease deaths, terrorism prevention is still vastly overfunded. Cancer kills 183 times more people than the 9/11 attacks, and it does so every year--even by your standard, we'd be putting 1.83 times as much as we spend in Iraq and Afghanistan every month towards cancer research.
Even that's being generous to antiterrorism funding, because if we annualize the 9/11 deaths out over the intervening years, every which of one saw ~500K cancer deaths, we'd be putting 9 times more money towards cancer than we do terrorism--and that's using your 2 orders of magnitude standard. And we aren't even getting to the other diseases yet, or things like auto or firearm deaths.
On top of all this, I don't even agree with your 2 orders of magnitude standard--why is the life of one who died from diabetes worth 100 times less research money than the person who got a plane flown into them by a Saudi with a boxcutter?
I didn't say terrorism should be ignored. I said we should have perspective. Would you like me to link to a dictionary? We had terrorist attacks prior to 9/11, and we dealt with them. We used the military, police, international pressure, and so on. There isn't much else to respond to in your post, since your outrage is directed not at what I said, but towards some imaginary composite terrorist-loving liberal or whatever you think I am. I said what I said, not what you think I might as well have said, or could very well have said, and so on. I loved it that my message of perspective mutated into...
"People like you apparently would be content to have building after building come down"
Yep, I'd be "content" with all that utter destruction. That was exactly my point--you saw right to the heart of my message. Now go take your pills.
Yes, that is my very objection. Would-be totalitarians have a ratchet-like mechanism. They want more power, so they wait for something to happen. Something happens, and they ratchet away a little on civil liberties. Now this new, lower, level of freedom becomes normal. Something else will happen eventually, so one more click of civil liberties are in the past. The new, yet lower, level becomes normal, and so on. Sometimes something big happens like 9/11, and we get a few whole turns of the wrench, so we end up with military tribunals, warrantless surveillance, torture, secret prisons, the whole bit.
We don't go all the way to gulags, not right away, at least not on US soil, because people won't stand for it--yet. But once something else happens--and it always does, eventually, with or without an agent provocateur--the current level of freedom will seem excessive, and we get a few more clicks towards totalitarianism.
There are already feelers out investigating exactly what conditions would have to exist for elections to be suspended and the current President to be just "in charge." Will it happen? No, I don't think it will, even in my most paranoid moods. The population won't stand for it--yet. But if there is a big attack, at least by someone with brown/olive skin, it would be easy to temporarily "put off" the election. An attack by a white supremacist or Christian Identity group wouldn't cut it (and probably would barely make the news), but one by Muslims would be center stage on all the networks, around the clock.
Would we see death camps and Stalinesque tactics? No, I don't think so. Michael Moore and Rosie wouldn't be rounded up and imprisoned, much less shot, Ann Coulter's book sales notwithstanding. But a "unitary Executive" or whatever his lawyers are calling him this week, in charge of the entire federal government, exempted (de facto, if not de jure) from oversight or checks/balances by the legislative and judicial branches, who can suspend elections at will--what else do you really need? As long as there wasn't any slaughter or mass imprisonment, which there wouldn't be, would people really take to the streets for democracy? I wonder.
I'm not upset over there being a Slashdot story on terrorism. I'm upset over our larger cultural obsession with terrorism. Whether or not there is yet another terrorism post on Slashdot is nothing compared to the rest of the wide-ranging effects of our hysteria over this.
The dilution of habeus corpus, the normalization of torture, the normalization of warrantless surveillance, an open-ended war that is making the world more dangerous, the fact that we as a nation are represented by George Bush and the neocons--all of this is what I am upset over, and all is traceable to a fear of terrorism that is vastly disproportionate to the actual risk. If you have a Firefox extension that can deal with all of this, please send me a link. I'm all about installing it.
I'm sick of it taking up every waking moment of our intellectual lives. About 3000 people were killed in 9/11, and that was how many years ago? The flu kills about 15000 Americans each year. The flu. Let's not even go into cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and all the rest of the diseases that kill us off by the hundreds of thousands. Worldwide, cholera and other diseases that could be remedied by clean water kill vastly more than terrorism.
Our sense of risk is so badly out of whack that we're just being ridiculous--it isn't even hysteria anymore, not after this many years. We're being suckered by a sensationalistic media working in cohorts with government, which always, always wants more power. I'd say it was shocking if I could even muster any surprize at how stupid we're being over this.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, success if you ignore the fact that the country is falling apart, has become a haven and catalyst for terrorism, has worse access to health care/clean water/safe streets/medicine/electricity than when Saddam was in power, and their current government also uses torture, detention without trial, death squads, etc. But even if what we're doing is making things worse, more of the same will no doubt constitute improvement.
Okay, sorry for the diatribe. I'm sure you can use stats to analyze who will win a particular armed conflict--the fact that the USA represents half the global arms expenditures might be relevant. But Iraq isn't a war, but an occupation, which is of a completely different nature. If you just tasked the US military with killing Iraqis all day long, they could do that without any impediment. But asking them to make Iraq into a USA-loving western-style freedom-loving democratic republic, by the brilliant combination of the force of arms and handing out candy to kids, is a bit daft.
If I'm still alive when this crap gets imported to the USA I'll have precious little sympathy for our population. Totalitarianism isn't sneaking up on us, and it's not being created in some secret backroom to be foisted upon us all at once in a military coup--it's growth is obvious, but we just don't care about freedom. It's so depressing to watch Hollywood movies, because in the movies the US population is passionately freedom-loving, and though there will be some nefarious, totalitarian-leaning politician or general, in the end the population's love of freedom wins out.
But the population isn't really that way--for all of Hollywood's warranted paranoia about government, they are naively optimistic about how the public's attitude towards torture or habeus corpus or the rule of law. The public really would sell us down the river for a bit of convenience and the illusion of safety. And I don't think they would need that much convenience or safety to rationalize it--I think a certain percentage of the population likes the fact that their government is "getting tough".
Yes, I went off on quite a tangent. Sorry about that.
From what I read, the California energy situation had more to do with Enron than with poor planning. When we've privatized something the public absolutely has to have and scarcity is profitable, scarcity is what you get. By design.
I'm a bit dismayed that we've all grown so postmodern, and think that anything can mean anything. Everything isn't propaganda--there is such a thing as the truth, an objective reality we should be trying to get at. If a particular government is torturing people to death, or slaughtering tens of thousands, that matters, and trying to describe that objective reality isn't propaganda.
True, we can be suckered, as when we believed that Iraqi soldiers had thrown Kuwaiti babies out of their incubators to die, or when we believed that Saddam was poised to nuke cities in the USA, but that fallability shouldn't undermine our confidence that there is an objective reality we should be striving at all times to recognize.
I would've liked better pictures of Adam and Eve. Dare I be surprized that they looked ever-so-slightly olive-complected? At least they weren't blond-haired and blue-eyed. I also liked the picture showing how diversity recovered after the flood. It was strange that they picked silhouettes of domesticated dogs, which only have such diversity because humans selectively bred them for differing characteristics. I'm not surprized the museum is so slick, though. Creationism has a lot of money, and that buys good literature, nice buildings, and so on. From what I read, Howard Ahmanson, Jr funded the Discovery Institute, which of course pushes ID, everyone's favorite edited-for-the-Supreme-Court proxy for creationism. I would've liked to read more about how the flood covered the Earth--I've still yet to see an explanation of where all that water came from.
They indicted a sitting President over a lie over a blowjob, ostensibly because it's wrong to lie. Yes, they embarassed a nation, turned the Presidency into a joke, and exposed children throughout the country to nightly news updates about a semen-stained dress and thong-snapping.
Oral sex because a national preoccupation, was suddenly a discussable topic in respectable open conversation, because of their committment to morality and honesty and the rule of law. So why was it okay to pardon Nixon again? I lost you there after a bit. Something smells funny. Oh wait--it must be bullshit (not yours, though--just in general).
The Republicans are happy Nixon was pardoned not out of principle, but out of politics, and they impeached Clinton for precisely the same reason. Neither party gives a damn about healing, unless you count the Democratic caving on the 2000 election as the Supreme Court ignored Florida law (which party believes in states' rights again? I'm forgetful today) and appointed Bush President.
Wikipedia aside, I've always questioned the idea of intrinsic value. If all the people die, does it still have value? Gold may have "instrinsic goldness" in that the light reflected will still be of the same wavelenth (though we won't see it) and it will still be composed of the same element, but it won't have any value because there'll be no one to value it.
But another reason I download movies is space. A 500-DVD collection takes up quite a bit of shelf space. I'd much prefer a HD with those movies in XVID format. DVDs are more about preventing copying (no, stop laughing) than they are about content delivery. At least that was the intent.
Other than instant gratification, does home printing offer any advantages over commercial printing services? Is the quality of prints/paper reasonably comparable?
I think the same problem of slipperiness goes with any political discussion. George Orwell was a socialist, but one who detested Trotsky, Stalin, and so on--was he a "real" socialist?
I guess when people identify themselves as something--socialist, conservative, Christian, whatever--and see someone else who self-identifies with the same word acting/believing starkly different, they want to re-claim the label for themselves and differentiate themselves from who they see as the imposter. Some conservatives have compassion and humility, and want to distance themselves from the Ann Coulter crowd.
Then you've never understood a basic fact about the culture in the USA. Violence is A-OK, but sex is dirty. Yes, it's a perverted way of looking at the world. We also have a fairly high murder rate, one of the highest incarceration rates on the planet, and we're in a select club (including Iran, China, and Saudi Arabia) who still practice capital punishment. We have a lot of people who think that civil rights laws were a usurpation of states' rights. We have a lot of people who think that child abuse laws are a usurpation of parental rights. We also have a lot of decent human beings, but you don't hear from them as much. I sort of wish they'd speak up more. We need more people saying "torture is wrong" and "no, we shouldn't keep people in prison forever without trial" and so on.
Fox News owns the Republicans, not the other way around. Fox could break the Republican Party and build a new faux-conservative party in a few weeks. O'Reilly viewers alone could break the Republican Party, because they are depended on so heavily.
I don't envy the Republicans, or at least the real conservatives among them. Their party is beholden to a fickle TV news network and its viewers, and the religious right. You can't please both forever. Evangelicals are starting to wander, for different reasons. Some, because Republicans aren't right-wing enough, and some because they do care about the environment, the poor, etc. A near-death experience may be good for the GOP long term. Maybe they can get some conservatives in charge for a change, instead of all the visionary would-be world-shapers like Cheney and Rumsfeld.
I tried to read your post, but the word "Knoppix" kept flashing through my mind so prominently that I couldn't understand what you had written. How long before someone releases a live[dvd|cd] with Truecrypt installed?
How hard can it be to make stuff, for all practical purposes, inaccessible? Truecrypt + VMplayer + keyfiles + good passphrases has to equal some pretty good security. Of course that only applies if they burst through the door, not if they came in quietly while you were shopping and installed keyloggers and screencap software ahead of time and then arrest you later. If they're that interested in you, and they have physical access to your system, you're toast anyway. But I somehow doubt the local PD is going to break a Truecrypt container or PGP key, unless your passphrase is written down...oh wait.
It may make you feel smarter than the other guy to point out how the "real world" justice system works, but in a society where the government can lock you up without presenting evidence, there is no justice system.
A group of opportunistic would-be visionary politicians with a pre-existing plan (PNAC) took the gift of 9/11 and used it to run with their program, which proved to be a lot uglier and nastier than they thought it would be. And the CIA did warn the White House about terrorists using planes to attack the USA. Our security services didn't fail--it's more accurate to say that you can't prevent everything, all the time, indefinitely. Preventing a nuclear attack is easy compared to preventing all the improvised attacks that could possibly occur at any time in any venue.
We've had bioweapon attacks within the USA, and I don't see much being done about it. White supremacist groups have been caught with bio and chemical weapons and caches of conventional weapons, and I don't see much being done about it. Just a few days ago someone brought chemical weapons to Falwell's funeral, and I don't see much being done about it.
The hysteria is very selective, and I don't like being played for a chump. When the hysteria benefits a particular preexisting political agenda, it's run into the ground, and when it doesn't, it isn't. So this isn't really about saving lives. It's about being manipulated by a cynical government (aren't they all) into supporting an open-ended occupation of an oil-rich nation and pushing the entire PNAC agenda all the way down the line.
Yes, you should investigate terror cells. You should also heed the widely given and widely ignored insight that our actions in the middle east are fomenting and exacerbating the terrorism we're ostensibly trying to defeat. There is no evidence at all that any terrorist network has nuclear weapons, and I'm not going to support totalitarianism just because of a far-flung hypothetical. And if Clinton/whoever wins the next Presidential election, not one Republican will either. All of this "But OMG what if they kill MILLIONS!!!! We have to support the President, unless you love terrorists!" crap will sail right out the damned window, and you know it.
This whole "we follow the President because we're at war!" crap will end as soon as a Democrat is elected, and you damned well know it. Fox News will be trumpeting that dissent is the true expression of patriotism in about 12 seconds, and instead of Franklin's liberty/safety/deserve neither quote, Slashdot will be inundated with Jefferson's tree of liberty/blood of patriots quote ad nauseum. This is politics masquerading as concern for our safety.
Even if you wanted to give 2 orders of magnitude (a factor of 100) more money to preventing deliberate deaths than disease deaths, terrorism prevention is still vastly overfunded. Cancer kills 183 times more people than the 9/11 attacks, and it does so every year--even by your standard, we'd be putting 1.83 times as much as we spend in Iraq and Afghanistan every month towards cancer research.
Even that's being generous to antiterrorism funding, because if we annualize the 9/11 deaths out over the intervening years, every which of one saw ~500K cancer deaths, we'd be putting 9 times more money towards cancer than we do terrorism--and that's using your 2 orders of magnitude standard. And we aren't even getting to the other diseases yet, or things like auto or firearm deaths.
On top of all this, I don't even agree with your 2 orders of magnitude standard--why is the life of one who died from diabetes worth 100 times less research money than the person who got a plane flown into them by a Saudi with a boxcutter?
Yep, I'd be "content" with all that utter destruction. That was exactly my point--you saw right to the heart of my message. Now go take your pills.
We don't go all the way to gulags, not right away, at least not on US soil, because people won't stand for it--yet. But once something else happens--and it always does, eventually, with or without an agent provocateur--the current level of freedom will seem excessive, and we get a few more clicks towards totalitarianism.
There are already feelers out investigating exactly what conditions would have to exist for elections to be suspended and the current President to be just "in charge." Will it happen? No, I don't think it will, even in my most paranoid moods. The population won't stand for it--yet. But if there is a big attack, at least by someone with brown/olive skin, it would be easy to temporarily "put off" the election. An attack by a white supremacist or Christian Identity group wouldn't cut it (and probably would barely make the news), but one by Muslims would be center stage on all the networks, around the clock.
Would we see death camps and Stalinesque tactics? No, I don't think so. Michael Moore and Rosie wouldn't be rounded up and imprisoned, much less shot, Ann Coulter's book sales notwithstanding. But a "unitary Executive" or whatever his lawyers are calling him this week, in charge of the entire federal government, exempted (de facto, if not de jure) from oversight or checks/balances by the legislative and judicial branches, who can suspend elections at will--what else do you really need? As long as there wasn't any slaughter or mass imprisonment, which there wouldn't be, would people really take to the streets for democracy? I wonder.
The dilution of habeus corpus, the normalization of torture, the normalization of warrantless surveillance, an open-ended war that is making the world more dangerous, the fact that we as a nation are represented by George Bush and the neocons--all of this is what I am upset over, and all is traceable to a fear of terrorism that is vastly disproportionate to the actual risk. If you have a Firefox extension that can deal with all of this, please send me a link. I'm all about installing it.
Our sense of risk is so badly out of whack that we're just being ridiculous--it isn't even hysteria anymore, not after this many years. We're being suckered by a sensationalistic media working in cohorts with government, which always, always wants more power. I'd say it was shocking if I could even muster any surprize at how stupid we're being over this.