Re:Judge Rules Terrorism Watchlist Violates Constitutional R...
by gumby on Thursday September 05, 2019 @04:09PM
(#20890250)
Standard delusion or standard excuse? Often with authoritarians cruelty is the whole point.
I agree with you that on the broader society side, "something must be done; this is something; thus we must do it" is pretty pervasive.
Re:Judge Rules Terrorism Watchlist Violates Constitutional R...
by mindslight on Thursday September 05, 2019 @05:08PM
(#20890651)
Nobody views themselves as a bad person. If you want to understand actual motives, it is important to remember this. Your assertion is surely applicable to some sadist cops, but not to the average voter that gets riled up by the political/media establishment.
We see it across our society - it's not just the politicians, but the whole mass media cum social media narratives of the government needing to "do something" in response to something bad having happened.
In reality society is not a monolithic top-down entity, but rather full of individual actors that each have their own motivations and respond to incentives in their own way. The idea that lawmakers can simply declare something to be a certain way and it will effectively happen that way is a naive fallacy. And unfortunately bad ideas do not fail fast in the modern age due to a surplus of resources that allow them to keep going indefinitely.