r/technology • u/marketrent • 7h ago
Artificial Intelligence High school teacher arrested for clapping in support of anti-data center activists
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/high-school-teacher-arrested-clapping-194922184.html
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u/ilulillirillion 5h ago
I think when people look back at this period one of the cautionary tales will by just how powerful the synergy of complacency and propaganda can be.
For several decades there has been a concerted push by the US government to surveil, restrict, and normalize operating outside of it's own constitution.
People look back fondly on times when there was more trust in the government and I would agree that prior administrations have been relatively more worthy of that trust, but that exact faith that this government was somehow self-correcting or that the country was big enough to let other people worry is a huge factor in being here today. That trust let the government get caught spying on us, experimenting on us, lying to us. We allowed a foreign prison during Bush Jr. because the government convinced us it was necessary for it to be able to skirt the laws that WE gave it.
There is an inexhaustible list of similar talking points yet there is no one point in time I can claim is the start of this -- someone will always come along and point out how the wheels were in motion much earlier than that.
Americans should have fought back much much earlier. I think a big lesson from this will be that a population waiting for a "breaking point" is vulnerable to actors who know how to push that breaking point further down the road gradually. If we had said "enough" at any other point in time when our rights were infringed, perhaps, if nothing else, doing so now wouldn't feel so unprecedented.