&gt; You&#x27;re saying, &quot;We should not trust the government because they did things that I didn&#x27;t agree with in the past&quot;. This seems like an unfair standard to hold any person or group of people to.<p>A better paraphrase would be &quot;We should suspect that the US government will act in a way similar to how it has acted repeatedly over the span of decades.&quot;<p>I think this is a perfectly fair standard, and actually am held to that standard all the time, including professionally. If I had a continual, systemic habit of flaws in my work, for instance, I would be fired.<p>Your phrasing suggests that these are things that &quot;just happen&quot;, instead of a pattern of decades of intentional programs with the same kinds of aims and behaviors.<p>&gt; But like the GGP post, you&#x27;re begging the question and assuming that your beliefs are so correct that anyone who disagrees with them must be insincere.<p>I actually think you&#x27;re insincere because you&#x27;re minimizing and denying a pattern of sustained behavior as a few mistakes, rather than an intentional, continuing program.<p>That insincerity can be directly seen above when you switch from &quot;did things I didn&#x27;t agree with&quot; to &quot;made mistakes&quot;. No one is talking about the US government making mistakes, and decades of intentional programs operated with similar strategies is hardly &quot;making mistakes&quot;.<p>Your entire analogy was insincere and meant to elicit an emotional response.<p>&gt; If they get out of hand then we, the people, will deal with it.<p>Will we?<p>I&#x27;m actually very skeptical that we&#x27;ll deal with it in any meaningful way, and find it much more likely that we&#x27;ll surrender a great deal of control over the country to an autocratic government with a good social control program, precisely because people like you don&#x27;t want to sincerely discuss the likelihood of that happening by stages.