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A comment on It’s time for Silicon Valley to ask: Is it worth it?. Parent comment

Re:It’s time for Silicon Valley to ask: Is it worth it? by dasil003 on Thursday October 31, 2013 @07:22PM (#6650782)
You're trampling over his legitimate point, which is that gears of the US government PR machine are massive, and the well-fed targets of their propaganda are well-fed and cozy, and yet the dangers of government overreach are bigger than ever.

Are there potentially reasons why "terrorism" might in fact be a greater threat to our ideals and way of life then government power? Sure! Anything's possible. But such threats would need to be justified publicly, they can not be justified behind closed doors with classified documents.

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Re:It’s time for Silicon Valley to ask: Is it worth it? by tptacek on Thursday October 31, 2013 @07:25PM (#6650791)
His entire point appears to be that an entire branch of discussion is out of bounds. If I'm trampling, consider it counter-trampling.
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Re:It’s time for Silicon Valley to ask: Is it worth it? by duairc on Thursday October 31, 2013 @07:36PM (#6650840)
I don't know where you're getting this “out of bounds” thing from. I didn't tell anybody to shut up. I didn't tell them that they can't say what they're saying. And even if I did, it's not like I'm in any position of power to force them not have that discussion. I just alluded to the negative consequences of having such a discussion (yes, discussions on the Internet do not exist in a vacuum, and they do have material effects in the real world, therefore we have a responsibility to choose carefully what discussions we have and what we say). People can still choose whether or not they want to have it.

Edit: I know there is no malice intended in this, and it's not directly related to the discussion at hand, but I would appreciate it if people didn't assume that my preferred pronoun set was he/him/his. In general, it's best to use they/them/their unless you've been explicitly asked to use otherwise.

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Re:It’s time for Silicon Valley to ask: Is it worth it? by tptacek on Thursday October 31, 2013 @09:26PM (#6651262)
I looked you up before referring to you as a "he", but if your preferred pronoun is "they", I'm happy to respect that.
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Re:It’s time for Silicon Valley to ask: Is it worth it? by duairc on Thursday October 31, 2013 @09:55PM (#6651355)
Okay, I appreciate that. People generally refer to me as “he”, and I usually don't say anything, but sometimes it bothers me. But that's neither here nor there. I appreciate that you made an effort at least.
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Re:It’s time for Silicon Valley to ask: Is it worth it? by nitrogen on Friday November 01, 2013 @03:08AM (#6652274)
I'm beginning to see the PR value of having a clear, consistent message and sticking to it, which I believe may be the point to which your fellow commenter alludes.

A willingness by one side of a debate to consider arguments that favor the other side could be perceived (or misrepresented) as weakness and counted in favor of the debating opponent.

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Re:It’s time for Silicon Valley to ask: Is it worth it? by ctoth on Friday November 01, 2013 @01:43PM (#6655123)
You're eluding to http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/
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Re:It’s time for Silicon Valley to ask: Is it worth it? by mpyne on Friday November 01, 2013 @04:08PM (#6656055)
Well, that was the same theory behind the Republican effort to defund Obamacare by shutting down the government and breaking the debt ceiling. Stay relentlessly on message and get what you want. Obviously, that was not a PR success.

I prefer the system where we actually talk to each other to see which ideas make sense and which ones are insane instead of trying to debate via religion.

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Re:It’s time for Silicon Valley to ask: Is it worth it? by nitrogen on Friday November 01, 2013 @06:22PM (#6656906)
Well, that was the same theory behind the Republican effort to defund Obamacare by shutting down the government and breaking the debt ceiling. Stay relentlessly on message and get what you want. Obviously, that was not a PR success.

We're not congress, though, we're an interest group. We want congresspeople to debate, reason, and compromise; we ideally want interest groups to do the same, but I fear it may be necessary for at least some of us to be relentlessly consistent in our appearance, to counteract the relentlessness of the other sides (NSA, RIAA, etc.).

I prefer the system where we actually talk to each other to see which ideas make sense and which ones are insane instead of trying to debate via religion.

So do I, but we don't necessarily exist within that system.

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Re:It’s time for Silicon Valley to ask: Is it worth it? by mindcrime on Thursday October 31, 2013 @08:47PM (#6651118)
Are there potentially reasons why "terrorism" might in fact be a greater threat to our ideals and way of life then government power? Sure! Anything's possible. But such threats would need to be justified publicly, they can not be justified behind closed doors with classified documents.

This is, to me, the core point. Government exists to serve US, the People, not the other way around. And to maintain that order of things, government must be held accountable by the People. And we can't do that if our government operates in the shadows, behind a veil of secrecy - regardless of how they justify it.

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Re:It’s time for Silicon Valley to ask: Is it worth it? by tptacek on Thursday October 31, 2013 @09:51PM (#6651340)
If by some horrible miracle --- a "horribilicle" --- we had upon us a series of public referenda on a Constitutional amendment enabling foreign intelligence services to ignore the 4th Amendment in the service of any reasonable pursuit of Islamic terrorists, how do you think "WE" would vote on it?

I know how I'd vote ("fuck no"), but I don't think I could predict whether the amendment would pass.

It's worth keeping in mind that the government exists to serve all of us, not just us noisy nerds on Hacker News, and that we don't all agree on things that everyone on Hacker News believes we agree about.

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Re:It’s time for Silicon Valley to ask: Is it worth it? by mindcrime on Thursday October 31, 2013 @10:30PM (#6651477)
Right, this is one reason I'm not actually a big fan of government and "democracy" at all... the "tyranny of the majority". Nonetheless, within the framework of what we are working with here, I think it's important that our government be very transparent, so that at least the option of holding the government accountable exists.
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Re:It’s time for Silicon Valley to ask: Is it worth it? by duairc on Friday November 01, 2013 @09:25AM (#6653491)
Maybe you are already well-read in this department, but you might like reading some anarchist critiques of different forms of democracy:

In Defense of Anarchism by Robert Paul Wolff: http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/robert-paul-wolff-in-...

Democracy, by Monsieur Dupont: http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/monsieur-dupont-democ...

Democracy vs. Desire: Beyond the Politics of Measure, by Andy Robinson: http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/andy-robinson-democra...

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Re:It’s time for Silicon Valley to ask: Is it worth it? by mindcrime on Friday November 01, 2013 @02:12PM (#6655347)
I have not read any of those three, so definitely thank you for sharing. FWIW, my individualist anarchist tendencies have largely been influenced by people like Lysander Spooner and Murray Rothbard.
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