Re:Wikileaks reveals CIA’s ‘Brutal Kangaroo’ toolkit for hac...
by derefr on Saturday June 24, 2017 @02:31PM
(#14626802)
> A similar leak in my country would be condemned across all the political arc regardless of whether 1 document out of 1000 showed something bad.
That sounds like the result of a polity entirely disconnected from the citizenry. The US is the way it is mostly because the politicians' reactions are an extension of the identity-politics at play in the popular culture itself. If the people of the US left think secrecy-culture is bad, then the politicians of the US left will also condemn secrecy-culture to "score points" with their electorate, no matter how obviously necessary such a paradigm might be for their day-to-day lives. In this way, the US is a lot more of a "democracy" than it seems to be at times—both for better and for worse.
(The "worse" is that it's very hard to enact measurably-good-from-every-angle technocratic policies in the US if they have bad optics from a populist perspective. The politicians are just summaries of the people they represent, rather than technocratic experts derived from them. "The lunatics are running the asylum" and such.)
That sounds like the result of a polity entirely disconnected from the citizenry. The US is the way it is mostly because the politicians' reactions are an extension of the identity-politics at play in the popular culture itself. If the people of the US left think secrecy-culture is bad, then the politicians of the US left will also condemn secrecy-culture to "score points" with their electorate, no matter how obviously necessary such a paradigm might be for their day-to-day lives. In this way, the US is a lot more of a "democracy" than it seems to be at times—both for better and for worse.
(The "worse" is that it's very hard to enact measurably-good-from-every-angle technocratic policies in the US if they have bad optics from a populist perspective. The politicians are just summaries of the people they represent, rather than technocratic experts derived from them. "The lunatics are running the asylum" and such.)