Say the NSA really is reading all of our emails, and that that's happening because of 9/11. That would be an enormous setback for civil liberties. But it wouldn't be indicative of a terminal condition; our country has weathered worse, and what's important (over the long term) is that our compass points towards liberty and that we keep struggling to go where it points us.

Thank you for bringing some sanity to the discussion. "our country has weathered worse" is true and an excellent way of putting all this shit in perspective.

I believe he's saying the America you believe to be lost never existed.

Thank you.

If it never existed, then it can't be true that our country's moral compass has been aligned toward civil liberties, unless we still haven't achieved that ideal after two centuries of struggle.

I don't have a specific position that I'm defending. I'm trying to learn some more historical perspective, and to understand your political philosophy in general.

60 years is the blink of an eye in world historical terms. An eyeblink. 60 years ago, the color of your skin determined where on the bus you had to sit.

In that contest, 20 years is the single beat of a heart. 20 years ago, the media was entirely controlled by a handful of corporations, and you had no means whatsoever of telling an audience as large as the one you have now that you think America died on 9/11.

Say you want to make the NSA drama especially bad for Obama, and assert that the worst of their snooping is just a couple years old. A couple years. Just a few neurons have fired in that interval. Maybe wait for a few more before we rush to judgement at a world historical scale.

>>60 years is the blink of an eye in world historical terms.

In world historical terms, yes. But not in US historical terms, which is what matters here.

tptacek is arguing that we need to take a longview in addressing political and societal issues. You're arguing that nope, America is irrevocably fucked like it's never been fucked before since your existence on Earth.

You may actually be right, depending on when you were born. If you were born in the 80s, then things weren't too bad (unless you were a homosexual or other estranged group, of course). I think tptacek is reasonable to counter that, a decade or two earlier, things were noticeably worse than they were now. That's not to say that he's justifying what's going on now with "well, this is fine, because Vietnam was way worse".

You know who else thinks that the current period of time is absolutely the scariest, most dangerous time in American history? The kind of politicians who enact the laws that you are opposing.