Comment by jihadjihad
13 hours ago
> [The Patriot Act] contains many sunset provisions beginning December 31, 2005, approximately four years after its passage. Before the sunset date, an extension was passed for four years which kept most of the law intact. In May 2011, President Barack Obama signed the PATRIOT Sunset Extensions Act of 2011, which extended three provisions. These provisions were modified and extended until 2019 by the USA Freedom Act, passed in 2015. In 2020, efforts to extend the provisions were not passed by the House of Representatives, and as such, the law has expired.
> In 2020, efforts to extend the provisions were not passed by the House of Representatives, and as such, the law has expired.
The wording is confusing. Two provisions expired, not the entire Patriot Act.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250306093943/https://www.nytim...
The Wikipedia article is quite confusing, and seems to imply that those two provisions expired because they were the only two provisions not sunsetted already. The table indicates that most of the law sunsetted on March of 2006:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act#Section_expiration...
But then they say "The first act reauthorized all but two Title II provisions. Two sections were changed to sunset on December 31, 2009"
But the first act was passed in 2005, and so it's unclear whether it reauthorized provisions only until 2006 or a longer term.
I looked into this a little more, and these were the final two provisions of the Patriot Act, so the did law expire.
Unfortunately, that doesn't mean a whole lot, as many of the provisions live on in the USA Freedom Act.
Was not aware of the USA Freedom Act
details on it:
Reauthorization of Other Patriot Act Provisions: The USA FREEDOM Act extended two other provisions from the Patriot Act that were set to expire: "Lone Wolf" Provision: Allows for surveillance on individual terrorists who may not be directly linked to a foreign power. "Roving Wiretap" Provision: Enables surveillance to follow a suspect even if they change their communication methods or devices.
Everyone should be super clued in whenever the government chooses to classify something as 'terrorism' because of these provisions.
There appeared to be a lot of "good things" associated with this Act but also... as things go. Not great things such as above.
The wording is confusing.
Being confusing, I'm almost certain, was the entire point.
"USA Freedom Act"
We're truly living in Orwell's world.
For nearly quarter of a century.
Longer than that. I feel like people have completely forgotten things like Iran-Contra, or the Gulf of Tonkin.
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Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ensuring Effective Discipline Over Monitoring Act.
It's just an acronym bro, don't get all worked up about it, now let's go down, the Two Minutes' Hate is about to start.
We're incredibly lucky the 'just an acronym' ended that way then. Had they named it the 'Joining and Reinforcing the Nation by Satisfying Liberties and Guaranteeing Efficient Control Over Surveillance' we would have ended with the JRN SLGECOS Act.
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It's a deception, something that should have no place in law coding.
If the law has expired, how do they "expand" the law? I am confused. Did they refer to the wrong one?
The patriot act is not really “a law” in the sense of being a concrete series of statements you can point to in today’s US Code. It’s more like a patch to a codebase. At the time it was passed it (like any statutory act of Congress) created and amended dozens of sections of the US code. Some of those provisions had expiration dates which have lapsed, but not all, and (apparently) not the sections this article discusses dealing with financial crimes.
I believe you have misread the comment. In 2015, it was expanded and extended until 2019. After that, it was allowed to expire and was not extended or expanded further.
My comment refers to the original news article:
> The Treasury Is Expanding The Patriot Act To Attack Bitcoin Self Custody
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> Whenever leftists say that "Trump is a symptom of an illness that has been metastasizing for a long time" this is what we mean.
It's also the thing I don't understand about party loyalty.
When candidate George W. Bush was running for President, he was saying all kinds of things about how big government is bad and regulation destroys small businesses etc. Clearly not consistent with what he did once he was in office. When candidate Obama was running for President, he was saying how those things Bush actually did were bad and unconstitutional, and then once he's in office he signs a Patriot Act extension, fails to pardon Snowden, etc. When candidate Trump, well, you know.
Most of this is structural, not partisan. And a lot of it is Congress even though people mostly talk about the President. The partisanship itself is structural -- get your state to use STAR voting instead of first past the post and you get more than two choices, and then liars can be evicted even if their state/district goes >60% to the left or right.
This. Or any cardinal voting, such ask approval, ends up being a huge win.
The system is flawed from its roots. People need a voting system that allows them to specify their conscious, not vote on strategy only. The latter only leads to a race to the bottom. Unfortunately ranked voting systems do not allow for this, and we've seen those predictions come true in places like New York.
What I don't understand is how a lot of people will state both parties are corrupt and then also be party loyal. My parents are some of these types of people, but it is also pretty common. Together we'll happily criticize any member of the left, we'll happily criticize the abstract notion of politicians, but as soon as a name like Donald Trump leaves my mouth there's accusations of communism. I've literally had conversations where we both agree Biden is too old, we both agree that the country shouldn't be run by geriatrics or anyone over 60, but as soon as the next part is mentioned about how this means I don't want Trump then they start talking about how he's a special case and will contradict everything that they said before. They literally cannot understand how I voted Biden but also happily criticize him and state that I think he was unfit to be president.
We've turned politics into religion. It's not just the right (though I'd argue it's more common), but so many people love to paint everything as black and white. Anyone who thinks the world isn't full of shades of gray is a fucking zealot and we've let that go on for too long.
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My big ask is, was it always this stupid? Like, all these huge historical events and figures, did it all go down as stupidly and clownishly as the modern USA? Was there an early 20th century fascist Europe equivalent to a man named Big Balls being beat up by children and a fascist police action being triggered as a result? Was there a Napeolonic era equivalent to a media figure known for making light of school shootings, getting killed in a school shooting, a second after again making light of school shootings? Was George III as publicly and flagrantly fellated by the court as Trump is by the media still allowed into the White House?
I feel like I can't possibly live in the stupidest era in world history so it makes me try to see other historical eras in a similar light - how can I reinterpret the past such that it also experienced a bunch of clownish nonsense?
To know the answers to all of these questions, you should really check out the Behind the Bastards podcast because that is the whole premise. Covering the lead-up to horrible situations and the inevitable slide in fascism. It's insanely detailed about covering many, many stupid fascist bastards and a few smart ones.
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To know the answers to all of these questions, you should really check out the Bbehind the Bastards podcast because that is the whole premise. Covering the lead-up to horrible situations and the inevitable slide in fascism. It's insanely detailed about covering many, many stupid fascist bastards and a few smart ones.
Well, I at least know that teenagers were considered adults, not children, in the past and were expected to be responsible. Maybe that change is a big part of the problem.
> was it always this stupid?
Excellent question. There are two easily readable sources I know of covering historical events of the sort you're asking about. The first is Barbara W. Tuchman's The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, where the entire premise is that stupid people did stupid things and then doubled down on stupidity as they went along. The second is Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, in which Hannah Arendt details just how dull and unimaginative Eichmann was. She writes, "it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown", and suggests that Eichmann was not especially different from anyone he worked for, right up to the top.
History doesn't seem clownish because of the way it is recorded and taught. Even Arendt's writing is cool and formal compared to the histrionics we see on social media and many news outlets.
> Was there a Napeolonic era equivalent to a media figure known for making light of school shootings, getting killed in a school shooting, a second after again making light of school shootings?
The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and subsequent events leading to the start of the First World War, were filled with errors and stupidity, so much that history mostly lumps them all under the term "July Crisis", and rarely goes into detail. If you're familiar with the Abilene paradox, you have a framework for how the Great War started as the result of collective actions by soldiers, diplomats, and national leaders.
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Apparently (can't be bothered to fact check this) the nazis liked having parades in the dark because it was easier to propagate the idea of the nazi ubermensch when you couldn't see that the dedicated members of the nazi party were generally on the uglier side of average. As you'd expect of dissatisfied radicals, really. Probably same reason there's a stereotype of right-wing people on social media having a profile picture of themselves in a car with sunglasses on.
Anyway, as stupid as this is, Americans are generally literate, with access to unadulterated messages from the other side of the world. Imagine how stupid things were when 95% were illiterate and all information passed through a giant game of telephone before it arrived to you.
> how can I reinterpret the past such that it also experienced a bunch of clownish nonsense?
The thing is, you don't know what happened in the past - you weren't there. What you have is a lot of stories and films that bring that to life for you.
Personally, I'm pretty sure nothing in the implementation has changed, but that the goals being sought have changed, as has the technology and therefore the implementation.
This rings poignant now that I finally got around to reading The Three-Body Problem. It starts off depicting struggle sessions during the cultural revolution in China in the 60s, in which they're beating a physicist to death for teaching relativity because Einstein gave imperialists the bomb. It's so stupid, that if it was fiction, I wouldn't find it realistic that people would be this stupid.
To be clear, the book is fiction, but struggle sessions and beating physicists to death is not.
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Details vary but from time-to-time, yes, things do go this wildly off the rails.
You could argue that the entirety of Europe declaring war on itself over the death of one royal (and not even a reigning monarch; an heir-apparent) is such an example; tens of millions dead over something as transient as birthright rulership. Others that come to mind are much of the reign of Henry VIII (everyone knew he was dangerously paranoid, nobody with the potential to do so mounted an overthrow of his power, and his son was shaping up to be worse and England was narrowly spared his reign by the luck of his own bad health). Then there's the French overthrow of a monarchy to replace it with a bloody civil war that liquidated, among others, most of the people who overthrew the monarchy (and replaced it with an empire).
Power consolidation begets perverse effects.
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>I feel like I can't possibly live in the stupidest era in world history.
Your statistical intuition is sound, and while there are many historical sources describing very stupid events (VSE) dating as far back as recorded history, it is difficult to appreciate the outer bounds of the stupidity range because what has been written is a small fraction of the history that people have lived for at least 100,000 years.
So while I feel we are living in the stupidest era in history (the SEIH), I must conclude that we don't.
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You would have to define what stupid is. We have some definition of crazy, which is, doing something that doesn’t work over and over.
Recurring racism is either crazy (as in, it doesn’t work but people keep doing it), or, it … works for some people. It makes them feel better, builds camaraderie and unity amongst a group. So in practical terms, I don’t know if we can call this stupid or crazy.
The word we might be looking for is “rotten”. To watch the evil of the past and continue to harbor any adjacent attitudes absolutely does qualify as “one of the the most rotten eras”, especially because our era was educated on the past and given so much comfort and luxury.
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I wanna expand why I am honing in on racism. I can only define the American Right as something that has battery pack that is powered by hate. I can’t find the source of the hate. There’s no foreign occupier in America, there’s no evil army here locking people up. The hatred is rooted somewhere, and the core emotion of hatred is the fertile ground for all the obstinance (why nothing good seems to take initiative in this country).
It doesn’t take a genius to say “hey, I think this multi century issue of white racism is still here guys”, like discovering that a alien monster was on the ship all along, lingering, a horror movie.
Edit:
Get the audiobook for this. You can hear just how crazy things have always been:
https://www.amazon.com/Abuse-of-Power-Stanley-I-Kutler-audio...
I listen to this on nice walks, and I’ve literally had to stop in the middle of walking to laugh at the absurdity of it all. It’s surreal and relevant to what’s going on today, as usual.
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The more I study 20th century fascism - and by "study" I mean "listen to podcasts like Behind the Bastards" - the more I learn that, yes, they were just as goofy and cringe in their time as their modern equivalents. Hitler was seen as a bit of a comic buffoon with his over-the-top rhetoric, he had an Austrian accent which made him come off as a country bumpkin, and many people were unimpressed by him. Trump in 2016 was a joke, a C-list celebrity game show host only known for being rich and sleazy and playing himself on television.
The core elements are usually similar. Fetishism of militarism often by people who never see a day of combat, occult and antiscientific beliefs, grifts, purges and nepotism, brutish mocking cruelty. The Nazi Totenkopf was the shiba inu of its day.
History doesn't repeat but it does rhyme. I think the lesson here is people tend to understimate what they can't respect. Thinking "no one would be stupid enough to take this guy seriously" is often a mistake.
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Every generation gets the stupidest politics the world has ever seen... So far.