World is Falling Apart Thread (Locked forever)

[Exhuminator]

Lots of things I'm tempted to quote and rebuke from the last few pages. But I'm going to choose the saner route of just letting Trump be in office for at least six months before I take the bait. I'm willing to give the man a chance to start expressing his policy changes before I start judging them. All this circumstantial speculation and doomsaying doesn't interest me much.

[marurun]

I'm willing to give the man a chance to start expressing his policy changes before I start judging them. All this circumstantial speculation and doomsaying doesn't interest me much.

I would argue that you have less at stake than some others, and that makes it easier for you to wait and see. A lot of Americans feel threatened by Trump's proclamations and the past and current behavior of those he surrounds himself with. For those individuals it would be foolish to wait until they are under direct threat to attempt to defend their rights. Better to be proactive, since many minorities are at a structural disadvantage even now. These people cannot afford to wait and see, because any lost ground is too much.

[J T]

Trump is appointing Mike Pompeo to be Director of the CIA.

Let's look at his record on some pertinent issues related to his new position at the top of the CIA:

Mike Pompeo is strongly in favor of of the NSA surveillance programs that spy on everyone in the US, regardless of whether they are under suspicion for terrorism or crimes. In fact, he thinks even more info should be collected and analyzed. He has said "Congress should pass a law re-establishing collection of all metadata, and combining it with publicly available financial and lifestyle information into a comprehensive, searchable database. Legal and bureaucratic impediments to surveillance should be removed. That includes Presidential Policy Directive-28, which bestows privacy rights on foreigners and imposes burdensome requirements to justify data collection."
Source: http://www.wsj.com/articles/time-for-a- ... 1451856106

Mike Pompeo also would like to see whistle-blower Edward Snowden killed for exposing this secret government surveillance, saying Snowden "should be brought back from Russia and given due process, and I think the proper outcome would be that he would be given a death sentence."
Source: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/lawma ... le/2583023

Mike Pompeo has also been against Barack Obama's decisions to close secret black site prisons like Guantanamo Bay, and Mike Pompeo believes we should go back to allowing torture techniques in interrogations.
Source: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/11/19/us ... .html?_r=0

[Exhuminator]

I would argue that you have less at stake than some others, and that makes it easier for you to wait and see.

Provided the fears that some of you profess in this thread come true, then this statement is not outside the realm of viability. In the meantime, if those who feel threatened wish to indulge in preemptive speculation more power to them.

[Xeogred]

I think no matter how you cut and who you appoint for those kinds of things, we're screwed no matter what. It's just the technological future of our civilization. It sucks.

[MrPopo]

I think no matter how you cut and who you appoint for those kinds of things, we're screwed no matter what. It's just the technological future of our civilization. It sucks.

When you consider most of modern surveillance is looking at someone's Facebook page I agree with this. But I expect our government to spy on us, and I do think Snowden is a traitor who deserves to be prosecuted for his crimes. It's one thing to whistleblow that the government is collecting a lot more information than people think they are, but it's quite another to dump data like he did.

[J T]

The data dump was necessary to have evidence of the scope of the NSA. Otherwise, it just would have been an accusation easily dismissed.

[MrPopo]

If he really thought it was important then he should have sat and faced the consequences. He could always have gotten a Presidential pardon if the public did think what he did was important. But he ran like a coward.

[J T]

The consequence would be death. Leaving the country seems like the intelligent thing to do.

[marurun]

Whistleblower laws aren't strong enough in the US. He did try passing his concerns along through some channels but was ignored. And he did expose programs that went well beyond the scope of current law. Under current law he would be most likely charged under the Espionage Act, but that act is over-broad and antiquated, meaning it can easily be abused. There definitely isn't a case under US treason laws. We use the term traitor so freely, but the law on treason is actually quite specific.