<story><title>If PRISM is Good Policy, Why Stop with Terrorism?</title><url>http://m.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/07/if-prism-is-good-policy-why-stop-with-terrorism/277531/?</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tokenizer</author><text>Then they will fall. The protests were an abysmal failure. I&amp;#x27;ve seen plenty of &amp;quot;I don&amp;#x27;t care&amp;quot; opinions regarding it, and that&amp;#x27;s not even factoring the 50+% of people who don&amp;#x27;t even follow such things.&lt;p&gt;People get what they deserve, and the world apparently deserves the US monitoring all of its communications. My only hope is a complete collapse of their government.</text></item><item><author>milesf</author><text>&lt;i&gt;The danger of a surveillance state is not the obscure chance of a truly evil person abusing the system; rather, the actual threat, the real danger, is a person with good intentions who believes that their draconian actions are morally justified and prudent. It is such a leader, perhaps with the best of intentions, who can make the most heinous of mistakes with eyes wide open and belief that the ends justify the means. Those ends never justify eviscerating the Fourth Amendment.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the American people do not understand this, then they will abandon their freedoms and liberty voluntarily, without any outside foreign invasion or attack.&lt;p&gt;They will fall because of apathy, just like the Romans did.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>adventured</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s not: will fall; America has fallen. It&amp;#x27;s a realization most are just starting to come to.&lt;p&gt;America collapsed in four waves. 1913, 1930, 1971, 2001.&lt;p&gt;By &lt;i&gt;almost&lt;/i&gt; any metric you could measure, America has lost substantial ground over 40 years. The late 1990s or early 2000&amp;#x27;s was the peak of the visible projection of &amp;quot;superpower&amp;quot; status, but it was mostly a fraud. Even the temporary budget surplus was a fraud, made possible by an extreme economic bubble and stealing from social security inflows.&lt;p&gt;The real US standard of living has declined since the late 1960s. And that huge standard of living was only possible due to the rest of the world having been blown up in WW2; America was left with half the global manufacturing base by default, with little competition for two decades.&lt;p&gt;In the most straight-forward of terms: America got rich with manufacturing, and poor with consumption; one creates wealth, the other eats it. China is now the one getting rich off of manufacturing, along with a few other nations.&lt;p&gt;We&amp;#x27;ve been floating on borrowed time for 30 years in the form of ever cheaper credit, sustained by the military reach of a superpower that convinced the likes of Japan and China to buy trillions of dollars of worthless paper. The dollar, as the global reserve currency, has been living on a reputation it hasn&amp;#x27;t deserved for many decades, namely that it&amp;#x27;s good as gold.&lt;p&gt;The end of cheap money has arrived. You can easily guess what happens next. US national debt has a mere 64 month turn over period to it. Countries like China have shifted most of their treasuries to short term holdings. 5% * $20 trillion = $1 trillion in interest alone. See Japan for an example of what happens, they currently pay half their tax revenue toward debt interest.</text></comment>
<story><title>If PRISM is Good Policy, Why Stop with Terrorism?</title><url>http://m.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/07/if-prism-is-good-policy-why-stop-with-terrorism/277531/?</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tokenizer</author><text>Then they will fall. The protests were an abysmal failure. I&amp;#x27;ve seen plenty of &amp;quot;I don&amp;#x27;t care&amp;quot; opinions regarding it, and that&amp;#x27;s not even factoring the 50+% of people who don&amp;#x27;t even follow such things.&lt;p&gt;People get what they deserve, and the world apparently deserves the US monitoring all of its communications. My only hope is a complete collapse of their government.</text></item><item><author>milesf</author><text>&lt;i&gt;The danger of a surveillance state is not the obscure chance of a truly evil person abusing the system; rather, the actual threat, the real danger, is a person with good intentions who believes that their draconian actions are morally justified and prudent. It is such a leader, perhaps with the best of intentions, who can make the most heinous of mistakes with eyes wide open and belief that the ends justify the means. Those ends never justify eviscerating the Fourth Amendment.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the American people do not understand this, then they will abandon their freedoms and liberty voluntarily, without any outside foreign invasion or attack.&lt;p&gt;They will fall because of apathy, just like the Romans did.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>alan_cx</author><text>Yeah, here too in the UK but worse. As I have said before even the satirists don&amp;#x27;t seem to give a toss. The level of apathy is stunning. Frankly, I think the terror scare stories have worked a treat, as I suppose is predictable. Which is amazing since we in the UK lived through a real(1) terrorist campaign with the IRA.  All I hear is, &amp;quot;well, I don&amp;#x27;t care if the silly spooks see my boring facebook, email, shopping data. Ha, ha to them if they are that interested.&amp;quot;. And that is it. Heh, even heard, &amp;quot;well, I&amp;#x27;ve got nothing to hide&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I have to say, I don&amp;#x27;t really care any more. I have had enough. Yeah, I don&amp;#x27;t like what the US is doing, but my lot are in it up their necks, and are literally proud of it. My people don&amp;#x27;t care, my media don&amp;#x27;t care, no one cares. So I am the odd one out. Fine, we live in a so called democracy, so the people can have what they damn well deserve. My only hope is that I see this get really out of hand, and &amp;quot;normal&amp;quot; people start to get hurt by this. Then I can just stand there and laugh my sweet behind off at them, asking, &amp;quot;who did you vote for?&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;As for me, I&amp;#x27;ll be a lot more careful, increasingly use security and simply act in a more aware way. Its all I can do. :(&lt;p&gt;(1)I say &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; because the &amp;quot;troubles&amp;quot; lasted over 30 years with sustained attacks of many kinds were successfully launched through that entire period, including the bombing of our entire government. Way worse than anything evil Muslims have done to the UK. I was indirectly involved, I know real terror. A one off attack is NOT terror. 30 odd years sustained, damn well is. Oh, a lot of it funded by Americans who saw the IRA as freedom fighters.</text></comment>