"I'm not convinced they're actually capable of being principled on these things"

Doesnt look to me like they even tried to pretend otherwise. Rather than taking a stand to censor or allow these videos, they seem to be saying they will censor them - but only if they dont like the reactions that are being posted. I believe that's the least principled stand they could possibly have taken here.

"hair protects your head from sunburn"

You know what works even better for that?

A hat.

"Ask BSCS grads who graduated in 2008 or earlier how much of what they learned in school is still relevant."

And if the answer is not most/all they got ripped off.

College is not supposed to teach you to use the current gadgets. It's supposed to teach you to read, write, and think. Those skills do not go out of date.

Your key lever for wiggle room is 'of US law' and the key pivot is 'in foreign countries.'

US law includes any international accord properly ratified by the Senate. And foreign countries includes many with whom we have friendly relations and various formal ties. And there are many cases where it is indeed forbidden by US and/or binding international law to do a lot of the things they have been doing. For instance bugging the phone of an accredited embassy or ambassador. Whether inside or outside of the US, that violates binding law.

Of course we all know that it was common practice in the cold war for cold combatants to bug each other anyway, and just try very hard not to get caught. All that plausible deniability stuff has worn thin over the years, these days they dont seem to care whether or not it's plausible anymore. But even back then no one was going around bugging tens of thousands of phones on either side. That scale of operation they had to have understood was way too big to stay secret for long.

The nations we are spying on now are supposedly friends, in several cases close allies.

You are not making any sense here.

Illegal actions taken by our government against foreigners, causing damage to our countries reputation, its relations, and indeed sparking violent blowback as well, is one of the major dangers that Americans face in todays world. Ignoring or avoiding those problems is pointless.

"We have always been at war with Eastasia."

I know you probably are not old enough to remember it, but there was a time before this BS. Then came the cold war, and it made sense to build stuff like this to stop them. Then they keeled over dead from bad economics and we... started making new enemies. And by that time generations had gone by so constant wartime footing seems 'normal' to a lot of people.

But it's bad economics and if we keep it up we're going the way of the Soviet Union.

Spying on friendly governments *might* be technically legal, though I doubt it. Nonetheless it is certainly not what anyone tasked with national security *should* be doing, because it is completely contrary to the supposed goal.

"It's especially ballsy to try and argue that the Supreme Court doesn't have jurisdiction."

It's worse than you think.

They are simultaneously arguing in lower courts that the lower courts have no jurisdiction because it's a matter for the SC, AND in the SC that the SC does not have jurisdiction, because it's a question for the lower courts.

Actually they are supposed to be spying on *enemy governments*.

Problem is we dont have any more of those left, but bureaucracy doesnt know how to shut down when it is not needed. Instead they keep trying to make new enemies. And unfortunately succeeding...

I am not so sure this is insightful.

Much use of Mathematics in human/social science, in my experience, has more to do with Physics-envy than with real science. Another related function is to give a scientistic seal of approval on what amounts to modern witchcraft - this is particularly prevalent in the region of applied psychology I have found. It does not have to make sense, just be slightly denser than your grad students (and patients/clients) can parse, in order to give you the full and wondrous benefits of the holy placebo.

"The National Highway System isn't a constitutional mandate. Do you REALLY want to defund interstate highways?"

Absolutely.

That's effectively a subsidy to trucking, which distorts the market in favor of that method of shipping, to the detriment of competitors (air and train) and through this chain of unintended consequences works against the greater good and makes us all poorer. Get rid of it.

""Unproductive expenditures" to YOU might mean "the only thing keeping X industry from unceremoniously collapsing and causing a domino effect on the economy.""

If industry X is dependent on subsidies or supports in order to avoid collapse, that is exactly the situation where it is most critical that no such supports be provided, that the sick industry be allowed to collapse so that healing can then begin. Propping up a sick industry only allows the problem to fester and makes the effects of the inevitable collapse even more devastating in the end.

"Thats called throwing the neighbor's baby out along with your own dirty bath water."

Really? Your neighbors baby is pork funding? I dont think I want to meet your neighbor.

Who said anything about ignoring problems?

I am talking about getting the federal government out of the way, not ignoring the problem, but striking at the root of it.

"How much money and people would have been saved if someone had taken proper precautions against passengers hijacking planes before 9/11?"

Not as much as you might think, in the grand scheme of things - falling furniture still kills more of us than the terrorists get. But yes, some proper prevention could have saved us massively. Read up on something the CIA calls 'blowback' and get back to me when you are ready to have an intelligent conversation on how an imperial foreign policy costs us over and over again - both in direct costs and in blowback later.

"How much money and people would have been saved if they had built the walls around New Orleans properly before Katrina?"

The people directly affected are always the ones in the best position to deal with this sort of thing ahead of time. Letting them keep their own money and spend it where it's needed is more likely to produce favorable results than sending it to DC and expecting a bureaucrat there to spend it wisely - while encouraging the locals to shut up and leave it to him. What a recipe for disaster that was - and continues to be.

"Ignoring problems to save money will cost more in the end."

Not talking about ignoring problems. Talking about finally solving a lot of them instead of making them worse every year.

"Oh please. I am fairly sure that the constitution doesn't specify the building of roads, bridges, provision of education, etc., but every person in the country benefits from these. "

And thus would benefit from freeing critical infrastructure from the vagaries of federal funding.

"The elephant in the room that very few people are talking about is cutting the military-intelligence-industrial complex."

Obviously where the largest slice of the pork is concentrated, I agree. Anyone that claims to be 'tea party' but is not serious about reducing the size scope and cost of the US military dramatically is a fake - just another politician flopping in the wind for votes.