Well people who salivate over military tech tend not to attend protests. There are many people who (probably correctly) believe the tech won’t be used on them because they would never do anything against the status quo and belong to an economic strata + dominant ethnic / religious group.

I’m not disagreeing but I am saying that unfortunately I think many voters are completely fine with the boomerang effect.

I guess what happens after the boomerang effect is the leopards-eating-people's-faces effect.

That's usually a second (or more) order effect. It won't matter much.

The thing is if things turn so far south that the milquetoast WASP suburbanite is now in some real danger, the cellphone networks being tapped is the least of their worries. Kangaroo courts don't need real evidence. Neither do militias conducting their own frontier justice.

A lot of the people who were attending protests against COVID measures (or otherwise engaged in civil disobedience in public) when the President was a Democrat are very excited about measures that would have been very effective against them and will be again.

This is why we need to teach critical thinking o everyone. Not to help those people but to stop them from harming us by making stupid decisions.

>>many voters are completely fine with the boomerang effect

They know liberal governments won't engage in similar activities.

They might not be so fine with it when their kids start getting arrested.

A lot of these people are actually fine with their family being affected.

They are operating under a parasocial delusion that the president knows about their problem, cares about their problem, and will fix their problem so any issues are transitory and don’t require them to update their beliefs

Everybody used to believe in gods, some people still do, the predisposition to beliefs in illusory protective father figures is still present in our genomes.

Uhh, there is no used to (past tense). Its important to have a faith-based belief system you can fall back on when you are subjected to torture.

I'm with the greeks on this, which is what they try to communicate in and through their stories.

TL;DR

The gods exist, they walk among us, they are powerful, they look just like humans, they are intelligent cruel deceptive and capricious. They are not there for your benefit.

You survive your encounters with them by being observant and measured, and follow a framework based in objective reality which could be intelligence and a fair bit of luck; or you don't.

Not all religions have all powerful protective father figures that will shield you from everything stunting and coddling you. Most in fact don't if you pay attention.

This gem is littered throughout greek mythology especially heavily in the Odyssey.

I dunno, seemed to be an awful lot of them “protesting” on January 6th.

>believe the tech won’t be used on them because they would never do anything against the status quo and belong to an economic strata + dominant ethnic / religious group.

More or less identical thought pattern as when someone on HN is gushing about punitive fines for petty civil nuisance behavior or noncompliance with bureaucratic stuff, something everyone here should be familiar with.

Different issues, same evil.

>could

More like WILL. It's the nature of all empires, first to grow, and then to shrink. But, the empire's mechanism of repression won't suddenly become humane and forget all its tools and tactics for torture, rape, extralegal imprisonment, etc. As the shrinking empire causes friction at home, those same techniques will be unleashed to suppress dissenters.

Schmitt's friend-enemy distinction doesn't save you from this either, because you can still group your red-blooded countrymen into those brackets arbitrarily once you have plenary powers.

The funny thing is, the iPhones are also weapon and surveillance platforms that are used against us.

Predator drones can monitor protests, but so can the phone company, only in greater detail, with knowledge of exactly who everyone in the crowd is, how long they've been there, where they came from, where they went when they left, who their friends are

What is interesting is that this system basically exists to catch the most petty criminals, since the actual baddies do not use it at all. Bin Laden didn't have a cellphone. FBI only cracked the sinaloa cartel cellphone network by managing to flip its architect, not by their own technical expertise, their partnerships with telecoms, or any surveillance technology.

In fairness, almost all of this is pure conjecture aside from Bin Laden which has had documents and accounts on record released/declassified.

We don't actually know how these entities do certain things because they don't have credibility, and it is well known that they lie to protect tradecraft.

Fascism occurs when imperial tendencies point inward. And if there are imperial tendencies, it's only a matter of time until they point inward.