Quote:Perfect example I just had Fox News on the TV and that show Justice with Jeanine was on in her opening monologue she starts off with there's a radical threat facing the nation to which the solution is for everyday citizens to be armed, at that point I'm like ok yes keep going, THEN she shifts into and be ready to give up some privacy she starts a whole speech about how I should accept NSA style megadata collecting and spying that some how my right to privacy should be second to some promise of security, she's an authoritarian!
to me the authoritarian that wants to disarm me is just as dangerous as the authoritarian that wants to monitor me. But conservatives see boogie men and default to bigger more powerful military programs which compromise individual liberty, and liberals see boogie men and default to disarming the population and more powerful legislation which compromises individual liberty.
We're being bombarded by authoritarians from all directions. It really is starting to feel like the options are all the same, just pick your style of authoritarian every few years.
It's all about control. Conservatives want you to give up control of your daily activities by welcoming them to monitor every second of your activity under some false pretense of "security" that would make Benjamin Franklin barf. Liberals want to take away your means of resisting and control your thoughts under the guise of creating a perfect utopia.
Personally, I hate all of them at this point. The Constitution and national stupi--er--security are not exclusive concepts. People can own guns without being mass murderers. Not everyone who wear a burka, faces Mecca to pray or observes Ramadan is a terrorist, but some of those people are--just like some white Americans are terrorists waiting for the opportunity to strike. It's all just a dance for control. Conservatives want you to believe that giving them the ability to read your emails, listen to your phone calls, browse your credit card history, read your texts and stop you on the street to be searched without a warrant is a necessary evil that keeps the terrorists from blowing up the World Trade Center again. Liberals want you to think that if we all agree to be thought-policed and told what we think about other people, we'll be in some kind of worldwide kumbaya around the campfire. It's all bull. When you sit down and really look at it, liberals and conservatives only want one thing: complete control over you. They're just playing with different means of achieving it, but as long as people continue buying into the NSA crap or allowing DOJ employees to say that they want to be able to suspend the First Amendment, we're all going to lose in the end.
Personally, I think the liberals' means of control are a little more palatable than allowing the police state that Chris Christie, Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush want to bring into being. I'd like to know that when I tell a cop to screw off, they won't be able to throw me against a wall and search me without a warrant. I'd like to be relatively sure that Uncle Barack isn't stockpiling and reading my evening text messages to my wife when I'm away on business, and I want to know that a tank full of pigs in assault gear won't crash into my living room because I made a joke involving a Muslim cleric walking into a bar. That's 90% of why I like Bernie. The other 10% is that Rand doesn't stand a chance. I'd sooner let a Democratic regime try to thought police us, because I believe that will be easier to push back against in the long run. NSA, FBI, TSA, CIA, state and local police surveillance would be forgotten or, worse yet, perverted by officials into, "Government surveillance shouldn't be a problem for you unless you've got something to hide."
Like you said, it's all about which authoritarian sect you want in control: the thought police, or the rights-are-for-the-elite crowd.
