http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/middle-east-live/2013/jun/13...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/23/fbi-occupy-wall-str...

Americans called the IRA freedom fighters. We Brits call them terrorists.

South Africans called the ANC terrorists. Now look at Mandela.

sigh

Assad is not that good himself, but the "freedom fighters" are just a bunch of muslim fundamendalists that have slaughtered innocent people and have little popular support.

The Syria situation is not like Egypt or Turkey.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CeP81s1KdM

Americans seemed to have lost their free spirit. Back in the 60s - that was a real movement. Real actions. Real spirit. Right now, most people, especially young (what's saddening), are conformists and as long as they feel relatively safe and well fed, they won't go far than writing a comment on HN... like this one :)

I think that one of the huge problems of the modernist approach is that it supposes that the only levels are the individuals and the state. Family and community are seen as things to liberate people from. In the end, though, self-employment, family, and community are the ties that if we take care of them, they create the best options for the survival of a free state.

I think you're watching the wrong people.

> Right now, most people, especially young (what's saddening), are conformists and as long as they feel relatively safe and well fed, they won't go far than writing a comment on HN... like this one :)

This has always been the case - it's human nature. It was true in 1775, it was true in the 60's and it's true today. It's the minority who stand up that change the world.

If our government threatened to limit sales of alcohol (as in Turkey), among other extremely conservative laws, that would probably create a big reaction and protesting.

Which is the entire point of the American Constitution. It was created by political malcontents for political malcontents.

Having suffered under the brutality of the King, the Colonists drafted a document that would prevent such abuses in the future by enshrining it in law. That millions and millions of people who would "get along" under any regime (see North Korea today) benefited is strictly a collateral effect.

That no one seems to understand the original point of it all is why we're going down this greased slide to hell today. And hell it will be.

What outcome do you expect from this?

I can't find the link to that study anymore, so can't back this up.

While widespread starvation might not have existed, it was certainly the threat of economic issues that sparked both conflicts.

There was a mother nursing her baby while trying to get some work done on her laptop. Did she care if the NSA is watching her? Probably not. She just had too much shit to think about. She was worried that her baby seemed to be getting sick. She was worried about being able to finish the report that was due the next day at work. She was worried about what she was going to cook for dinner that night, and whether her husband was able to catch his connecting flight in Chicago earlier.

There was the overworked barrista, who was really busy trying to process the orders from a long line of customers. Did she care if the NSA was watching her? Probably not. She had been working non-stop for the past six hours, and half an hour before the end of her shift she suddenly had to deal with a large group of new customers, each of whom was cranky because they needed their fix of caffeine. She was thinking about whether the guy she gave her number to at the bar the previous night was going to text/call her soon, because he was really cute. She was thinking about whether she would be able to make it home in time to catch the latest episode of her favorite TV show.

There were two guys sharing the table next to mine. One of them was wearing a full suit, and the other was in business casual. Judging by the bits of conversation I overheard, it was an informal job interview. Did the interviewee care if the NSA was watching him? Probably not. He was worried about a ton of other things, like being under-dressed for the interview and his growing need to use the restroom really badly. He was worried about whether the interviewer would hire him, because his bills were at serious risk of running overdue. His wife had also been texting him for the past half hour complaining about the dishwasher that stopped working.

Now, these were just my guesses about these people, and they were most likely wrong. But in the grand scheme of things, I think my point stands: people are so fucking obsessed with their own little lives that they cannot raise their heads and look at - much less critically think about and analyze - what is going on around them. They don't have the type of mental bandwidth to even try to process the big picture. Their own piece of the puzzle and the immediate surrounding pieces are what demand their attention.

I was talking to my roommate this past weekend as the NSA scandal was unfolding, and I asked her if she had heard. She said no. I was appalled. I wanted to scream at her "ARE YOU LIVING UNDER A ROCK?!?" But I couldn't. She works 12+ hour days, plus a 2 hour commute, and the rest of her time is taken up by volunteer projects she's leading in our neighborhood. How can I blame her for not having heard of some invisible party listening in on all her emails and phone calls and social media conversations? How can I blame her for not being worried about the insane implications of this surveillance and what it means for her country?

I know! Why doesn't everyone just drop everything and pay attention to the stuff that you are interested in? Seriously, do you know how ridiculously egotistical you sound? You have no idea what those people do with their lives when they leave the coffeeshop, or indeed everything that's going on in the coffeeshop. The lady with the baby might just as easily be writing a book. The barista might hate TV and be looking forward to her cello lesson or some other factor. You're judging, and dismissing, people based on your completely uninformed guesses about what their lives must be like. This is as foolish as me suggesting that you don't value the perspective of the young mom because you're incapable of forming a relationship and starting a family.

You are drowning in your own hubris, and haven't stopped to consider the possibility that that your conclusions are not well-founded. There are insane implications to lots of things, like having enough nuclear weapons to destroy all life on earth many times over. And yet we've managed to avoid doing so. Spy satellites gather up enough data to map our every move, but when we look at how much imagery there is that helps to re-establish a sense of perspective. I suggest you ask your roommate why devotes time to volunteer projects instead of posting paranoid screeds on HN; you might learn something useful.

I'm printing this out and framing it in my office.

>>I know! Why doesn't everyone just drop everything and pay attention to the stuff that you are interested in?

It is not stuff I am interested in. It is something everyone should be interested in. WE ARE TALKING ABOUT PEOPLE'S FREEDOM. Why is that not something everyone should drop everything and fight for?

It is something everyone should be interested in.

Really? Who put you in charge of how people should order their priorities, or made you the arbiter of how people gauge their freedom? I understand that you find the NSA monitoring intolerable and consider it an imposition upon your freedom, but you seem baffled by the idea that anyone might have come to a different conclusion from you about this. You assume that it must be because their minds are taken up with other matters which you consider trivial, and that they simply don't have the 'mental bandwidth' to understand what's going on, unlike yourself.

Now, granted that this is true of some people, and there are a good many people out there that have simply never thought about these issues. But there are others (such as myself) that have thought about them and don't share your views. Historically it seems to me that the trend has been towards greater transparency, more responsive government, and a greater degree of individual autonomy. I hold this view in spite of the fact that I assumed the NSA was accumulating data on a vast scale before these revelations (both because it was obvious that the Patriot Act was designed to facilitate such information-gathering, and because of the existence of other systems that already existed for that purpose).

I have no expectation or especial desire to convert you to my point of view; you're perfectly free to disagree with it. What I object to is your assumption that there's no possible way that anyone could understand what's going on and not share your view. Posting in all caps doesn't make your argument any clearer, it just tells me that you're feeling frustrated by the discovery that there are people who don't share your perspective.

If you have time, I invite you to read this essay, 'The paranoid Style in American Politics,' which was written in 1965 but still remains entirely relevant today: http://archive.harpers.org/1964/11/pdf/HarpersMagazine-1964-... I offer it not to suggest that you are paranoid, but because it effectively sketches out the limiting nature of discourse based around Manichean assumptions and zero-sum representations of what are complex and multi-faceted issues.

I've reread his post 3 or so times, and I never came to the conclusion that he had this belief.

"and that they simply don't have the 'mental bandwidth' to understand what's going on, unlike yourself."

If you lead a busy life, you won't have time, motivation, or enough attention to consider outside affairs. Is that false? What's the big deal?

'People are so fucking obsessed with their little lives' is a dismissive statement, suggesting that the (imagined) concerns of others are too small to deserve the attention people give to them.

If you lead a busy life, you won't have time, motivation, or enough attention to consider outside affairs. Is that false?

Yes, I do think that's false. Being busy can crowd out all other considerations due to fatigue or necessity, but not necessarily so. To stick with the coffeeshop example, is it not just as possible that the busy barista spends her evening studying to be a civil rights lawyer or some other socially responsible task as she does mooning over a hypothetical boyfriend? People are quite adept at dividing their time, in my experience.

This is just one of the many misunderstandings you have about what I wrote earlier.

I did not say there is no possible way that anyone could understand what is going on. I said people seem to have no desire to understand it and make sense of it because they are, to put it bluntly, too self-absorbed. Some of this is due to choice, and some of it is due to circumstance.

Out of these two categories, I gladly and righteously pass value judgment on the former - I believe it is everyone's civic duty to care about what is going on in their country. If one makes the choice to not perform that duty, that means they are taking what they have (i.e. their freedoms) for granted, and that is the most disadvantageous thing they can do if the ultimate goal is for them to keep what they have. Thomas Jefferson said it himself: the price of freedom is constant vigilance. If you don't pay that price, you don't deserve your freedoms.

For the latter category, I cannot pass judgment because a lot of people do not have the means to determine their circumstance. If one has to work sixteen hours to pay the bills, then they won't have any energy to think about much else. I gave my own roommate as an example. Could she quit her well-paying job and become an activist? Sure. Is it reasonable to expect her to? Not really. But it would be reasonable to expect her to watch less TV, for example, to be able to pay attention to the important issues of our time.

Nor did I attribute such a view to you. I said you assumed there's no possible way anyone could understand what's going on and not share your view. Omitting that last clause completely changes the meaning of the sentence.

Let me word it another way: I think you assume that anyone who does understand what's going on would, as a matter of course, share your opinion. I think a person could be just as well-informed as you are but hold an opinion that differs from yours. I hope that's clearer than my previous statement.

But, looking around, people are way, way more obsessed with the latest episode of Game of Thrones, for example, than the fact that they are being watched. And the reason is that they aren't even aware of the latter. They have shut it out.

I have a lot of things on my plate (job, baby, etc), but I've though about the NSA spying, and guess what: I'm okay with it! After the Guardian walked back its initial claims and we saw what the NSA was actually up to, it amounted to:

1) FISC warrants to gather call detail records at Verizon;

2) A mechanism for Google, Facebook, etc, to easily transfer customer data to the government pursuant to valid legal processes.

It looks to me like the government took care to structure the scheme to stay within the bounds of the law, both statutory and Constitutional.

Would I prefer less data collection and stronger privacy protections? Sure. I'd also prefer universal healthcare and a reforms in federal educational funding. But I'm not going to rant and rave about the END OF DEMOCRACY if I don't get those things right now. And I didn't come to these conclusions because I don't have the "mental bandwidth" to juggle work and kids and also evaluate what I think about my government's actions.

The part where your analogy breaks down is that not having universal healthcare or reforms to federal educational funding are not things that infringe on people's freedoms.

All that call data could be misused for oppressive purposes. But you haven't offered any evidence that it is, other than your apparent conviction that all government ultimately ends up as tyrannical and oppressive, a conviction which I absolutely do not share.

So very true.

Of course, graduating into a life of debt, being forced to go to work to get affordable healthcare, working 50+ hours a week and constantly being distracted by shiny new expensive things to buy will amplify this exponentially.

Not all countries are like that.

What do you think 2008 was about?

Can you point out as single mistruth in his works?

Can you point out where he has not been academic where he should have been?

He might very well produce the most academic political writings ever.

Seriously...

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop

Just because someone sticks in a heap of footnotes doesn't validate their claims. Climate-change denialists do this as a matter of course, but that doesn't make their work academically rigorous. Facts and data points taken out of context can be enormously misleading.

He might very well produce the most academic political writings ever.

LOL no. I read legal opinions and law review articles for fun. I have an intense dislike of Chomsky because I am the sort of person who reads all the footnotes and consults the cited reference works, and doing so on Chomsky's writings has led me in every instance to conclude that he habitually misrepresents his source material by selective quotation and omission of equally important countervailing facts.

When I first encountered Chomsky's writings I was tremendously excited, thinking that this was a guy who Tells It Like It Is. But the more I read and analyzed, the more disappointed I became. Not being American, I wasn't bothered by his challenges to conventional wisdom or the fact that he held a radical viewpoint. What bothered me was his near-constant manipulation of his readers.

But his views on politics and world affairs are extremely eccentric, and have remained on the fringe for a reason.

Yea, for the same reason people who claimed the US was spying on everyone remained on the fringe.... until we had a bunch of evidence of it dropped on us.

Edit: I can not over emphasize 'incredible amount of evidence.'

They have remained on the fringe because most people would rather tell themselves that things are generally okay.

Chomsky is a legendary linguist, a rightly deserved reputation, but that doesn't give him automatic credibility outside of linguistics.

Hello admins, this would be a good time to click that hell-ban button next to samstave ;)