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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (386497)	5/26/2008 2:12:00 PM
From: i-node	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575859

Suffice to say that people these days fear a police state more than they fear terrorism. Better to convince yourself that terrorism is just a "pimple on your ass" than to accept the presence of Big Brother. I understand this view, but I find the "Big Brother" reference to be alarmist, while the fear of terrorism isn't. For example, the Patriot Act which has been so heavily criticized, was a total over-reaction. Were there some great pattern of abuse that indicated Americans were losing rights, on a long-term basis, I would have been totally onboard with the liberals on it. But really, was it cause for alarm? Of course not. People have to rationally weigh the sacrifice against the benefit, and that just hasn't occurred. We can sacrifice by allowing the government to monitor phone calls to/from suspected terrorists, so long as it isn't abused -- and it never was. OTOH, I have seen the RICO act used to prosecute people for crimes it was never intended for, and I have great opposition to that. I once had a client who was prosecuted in a real estate transaction under RICO. WTF? Yet, Congress never acted to restrict THAT in any way. Why not? Why not go after the real problem? The answer is that it is about politics, not about real concerns or problems. The problem is that the Muslims (whichever ones they are) view this as a very long-term war, while we see it is four-year increments that permit us to swing from a Bush policy to an Obama policy, potentially every four years. It makes a cogent foreign policy difficult, and the prospects of fighting a long-term war daunting even for the most powerful force in the world.