Obviously it's a matter of opinion, but the comment I replied to offered a naively rosy picture of how justice was administered in MLK's day. It's a common error in political debates to invoke an earlier time as if it were a golden age of some sort.
As a parallel example, I'm not too enthused about our use of drones in military conflicts these days, but a lot of people who object to the use of drones overlook the fact that 20 years ago we did the same thing with cruise missiles, and 20 years before that we engaged in carpet bombing, with a much higher loss of life in the aggregate as you go farther back in history. So it's reasonable to argue that drones are bad, but naive to omit the fact that they're substantially less bad than how we used to wage war.
Sorry I think I got distracted, accidentally pressed enter while tabbing through pages, and never finished my thought. I totally agree with your point about nostalgia.
I was going to say that we need to adopt a new understanding of what it means to be free.
Maybe most people care more about security than freedom from surveillance or government corruption. If this is what they want, then this is what they'll get and if we're going to talk about being free we need to redefine freedom so that it reflects the unrestricted flow of information instead of arbitrary "endowed" rights, which aren't rights at all if we don't want them.
The Civil Rights movement was a struggle of a minority against a majority for rights that were rightfully theirs. Today, the majority is handing its rights over on a silver platter to the security/intelligence agency. I think we are less free.
> I wouldn't say that the US is substantially more free today than it was then.
It's not something that needs a lot of thought if you consider that the current president allegedly personally authorises deadly drone strikes even on american citizens (on "Terror Tuesdays"), while Nixon had to resign over Watergate.
I don't think American should get any preference here. Nothing gives the US to force its might onto other countries, but while we're at it regardless of my non-voting voice, drone strikes are better than the carpet bombings of civilians that Nixon/Kissinger ordered in Laos and Cambodia [1] during the Vietnam War, not to mention the other things American troops did to flush out guerrilla fighters (killing entire villages). The violence is at least starting to have less unintended casualties (I don't think the drone program has many casualties that were not known before the order). In the big picture, I'm more worried about how to control the state in a world whose infrastructure enables mass surveillance.
As a parallel example, I'm not too enthused about our use of drones in military conflicts these days, but a lot of people who object to the use of drones overlook the fact that 20 years ago we did the same thing with cruise missiles, and 20 years before that we engaged in carpet bombing, with a much higher loss of life in the aggregate as you go farther back in history. So it's reasonable to argue that drones are bad, but naive to omit the fact that they're substantially less bad than how we used to wage war.