Very nice straw man. I didn't mention FB. And these were conversations in person.

But participation in the farce of modern democracy is exactly what you're intended to do. You somehow feel like your talking or voting matters. It doesn't.

I'm no different, of course. Our lives are too comfortable. There is only one form of political action that ever works to depose despots, and it's a form that's not worth interrupting our comfortable lives to engage in.

At the end of the day, you need to either take real action, or accept that you're too comfortable with your affluent life to risk losing your comforts, and enjoy these comforts without complaint. You've chosen this path, as have I, as have we all.

Life is too good to meaningfully rock the boat.

A lot of issues are met with the mindset of "It would never happen to me". Terrorists blowing something up make the front pages, so people think it might happen to them (even though the odds of it are tiny). Slow erosions of civil liberties usually do not make the front pages, so people don't pay much attention and assume that only bad people are going to be arrested, denied due process, shot, or otherwise the victim of a resulting injustice.

A lot of issues related to freedoms and civil rights also take second place to much more immediate practical concerns, particularly in an economic downturn, like whether your kid has a good school to go to, or whether your parent gets looked after properly at hospital. The old "It's the economy, stupid" line is as true in politics today as it ever was.

To be fair, it is also true in the West today that just as the risk of being a victim of terrorism is low, so the risk of being a victim of government abuse or incompetence in applying these anti-terrorism measures is also low. A rational and objective citizen looking at the practical reality right now might consider that neither issue is that significant and there really are much more important things to worry about.

The strongest arguments for promoting civil liberties and reducing government powers are generally those of equality (just because something bad is unlikely to happen to you, it doesn't mean it's unlikely to happen to someone equally innocent but in a less fortunate position) and long term risk (just because today's governments and security services and police forces don't routinely abuse these capabilities and legal powers on a wide scale, that does not mean tomorrow's won't, and history shows that the risk of such abuse is real and the consequences can be catastrophic).