Mike AI, why you should join us and vote Democrat!

[Almighty Colin]

I didn't say that anything has been eradicated only that the general direction has been in a positive direction as far as "rights".

Nearly every perceived crisis results in something like the Patriot Act. It's happened at least a half dozen times in US history - probably a dozen depending on what you want to count. Each such crisis provoked a reaction and then an increasing reaction to the reaction and finally a reversal. Right now we're in the increasing reaction to the reaction stage. It was this way right at the beginning of the US as a defensive mechanism during the Revolutionary War and it's this way now. Nothing new to see here.


Trying to discern a long-term pattern from 5 years of - what I'm not really sure because it is all pretty normal - seems completely fruitless to me. There's nothing out of the ordinary here. We've had all the same "controversies" over and over again throughout the history of media.
Whether it's the New York Times or MTV, Elvis or Janet Jackson, 50s rock and roll or 90's gangster rap, Mark Twain or Nabokov, 2 Live Crew or Eminem, "Last Temptations" or "Passions" it seems to me we're just on repeat except when they happen again we've usually moved much further towards the libertarian standard. Elvis shook his hips, Janet flashed her tits and in 20 years someone will pull down their pants on MTV and we can have the same argument again.

Every decade has produced it's free speech trials and defense. What happens, I think, is we forget how important those events seemed at the time - each one inviting comparisons to the Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, or lately the Taliban and Saddam's Iraq.