I understand this argument when it's something like a good stance on education, with bad stances on abortion and the environment. There are lots of people on the left who would share that education stance, and they should be championed instead.
But that's really, really not the case on surveillance. We don't have the luxury of siding with the left and denying the right (or vice-versa). Dianne Feinstein is the Congressional Democrat's standard-bearer on surveillance. We don't want to empower the right, great. But this is a hugely important issue where the left is terrible. So is most of the right - only a handful of figures on each side (especially Wyden, Udall, and Paul) doing anything good.
So what the heck does party discipline look like? Surrendering the entire issue because the Democrats are so profoundly wrong?
On surveillance? They do. High-profile Democrats consistently talk about privacy advocates and encryption developers/users as threats to the security of the country. This is my point - surveillance is perhaps the most nastily bipartisan issue going.
More broadly: I absolutely support primary challenges from the outside. But I see no particular reason to pretend that Feinstein is any more open to change stance on this issue than your conservative of choice; if anything she's more unapologetically pro-surveillance than Republican moderates like McCain.
There are more things wrong with American than surveillance. The Republicans are making them all worse.
This attitude is the reason politics is fucked. Vote based on issues, not party bullshit. If a party is good on one issue you support and bad on every other issue obviously they won't get your support but voting based on a party and not issues is idiotic.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-the-apocalypti...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/lets-just-say-it-the...
http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/mehdi-hasan/2011/09/republ...
http://www.thehypertexts.com/Republican%20Insanity.htm
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/201...
There is such a thing as false balance.
[0] http://www.truth-out.org/goodbye-all-reflections-gop-operati...
What I don't understand is how you think you can have a discussion with one side willing to do anything to subvert your position. My point is that republicans have been playing to win and Democrats have been playing along. If you value science or secular society there isn't another choice. You have to oppose them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
More importantly, HN isn't supposed to be a place for political and partisan battle. We ban accounts that use the site primarily for that. Fortunately that doesn't seem to be your case, but comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13863594 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13860575 are definitely not ok here, so please don't do that.
No, it was Mike Lofgren [0]
[0] http://www.truth-out.org/goodbye-all-reflections-gop-operati...
I understand you feel strongly about your beliefs but you really are out of line. Everyone else is not evil nor wrong for not supporting the Democratic party in all they do.
I'm saying that the Democrats are the only option for change. The Republicans are opposed to evidence based decision making. My point is that Rand Paul is not a moderate because he's got a good position on this one issue. On other issues he's extreme. Without some strategy to deal with the Democratic party's problems there's no way to get anything done, because the Republican's are completely captured.
So far, people have been downvoting me and replying with pablum about party politics being the problem. Well, no one has told me how you roll back the surveillance state or draw down the military budget. In fact, the "discussion" is really just people saying how bad it is and how RMS was right. Without getting involved in politics there is no way to roll it back. If you have to get involved in politics how do you do it in a way that succeeds? I'm saying that there is a way to do that. Everyone who has responded has said...I don't like your attitude.
My larger point is that defeating the surveillance state is no good if we have large numbers of people getting lead poison from their water. If we roll back militarism but lose coastal cities due to the rising water level...is that a victory? The Republicans are worse then the Dem's so we should concentrate on forcing the Dems to take the correct positions.
If you don't want to talk politics, fine. Don't put words in my mouth, though. If I thought the Republicans could be useful I would say we should use them.
Ok then. When this is the axiom there isn't much discussion to be had. You are free to paint with as large brush strokes as you like. I'd just request you stop making extremist and insulting comments please. I come here to read interesting articles and commentary. Not see juvenile ideological flame wars.
My point was that those actions have to be taken inside the democratic party because allying with the republicans would mean empowering them on voter suppression or you name it.
People said that partisanship is what is wrong with politics and I pushed back saying that any potential solution would require a strategy for working through the two party system.
Criticizing the Republicans for their wrong headed positions isn't an insult its an observation. The Democrats aren't great, they are just all we have.
So, does commentary have to be bland to be mature? Do you have a counter point? Who in the republicans can sway the party towards dealing with climate change or away from supporting creationism in classrooms? I'm not saying that there aren't republicans who wouldnt support those things, I'm saying they are powerless to change the direction of their party and that the majority of republicans are staunchly opposed to things people on this site claim to care about.
I don't see how that's being juvenile.
Putting party warfare comjng first before the actual issue is the reason why politics is such a shitshow.
I think it is you not paying attention if you haven't noticed yet that Democrats and Republicans are nearly the same and equally blunderous and corrupted. They both support war, surveillance, mass incarceration, mass deportation, drug prohibition, and more. Barack Obama was a terrible president, so much so that I'm not sure even Trump will do worse. At least Trump seems to attract more scrutiny.
I get your gripe with the GOP. We all do. But your posts don't have much depth or add anything new to the discussion.
What I meant by the last line of my comment, is that the Republicans are willing to do some really bad stuff to the least powerful among us in service of their ideals. It isn't going to effect you and me. It's going to effect the people that clean my building. There are more issues on the table than mass surveillance. If you ally with the Republicans on this issue you empower them on those issues. We need strategies to break the Republican party, that can only be done by a massive coordinated defeat and then causing irreparable fissures between their coalitions.
On the other hand you have the party who rigged their primaries to ensure that their neoconservative warhawk could be elected. Which one do you think you could have an impact on?
From a federal government perspective, the intelligence community is a tool; it's not a terminal goal (where I think one party is obviously more reasonable than the other), it's an intermediate step to achieving terminal goals. Neither party seems interested in restricting their power (even to restrict the power of their opponents) or to give a damn about the incidental harms caused by surveillance tools.
This is why I get so irritated by the argument that mechanical approaches to privacy are techno-solutionism. The same people pursuing strong encryption lead the political fight, but they're viciously opposed by both parties. On surveillance, anything resembling the political establishment in either party has proved utterly immovable.
You are right, the foreign policy elites in both parties are largely homogenous. That being said, I don't think that it's possible to build a coalition with the Republicans that doesn't betray something else that you hold dear. I think that you have a better chance of building a coalition inside the democratic party that can move the center of power away from the foreign policy elites.
And then the right does the same, and nothing ever gets done in the Legislature. Now any real progress needs to be made by the judiciary or by executive fiat.
"Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future." -JFK
Put your country before your party or you're damned to lose both.