I must have to admit that I have been disturbed by your patronizing attitude about claiming to "teach" something regarding Plato, Kant, etc. You did not connect

I must have to admit that I have been disturbed by your patronizing attitude about claiming to "teach" something regarding Plato, Kant, etc. You did not connect your "arguments" with the ideas of those philosophers either. This kind of attitude is not very productive, and not welcome in a community like HN. Bringing up names of some classical, old-fashioned philosophers as if they represent some kind of absolute "truth" never works to support an argument (see: appeal to authority). Plus, we are talking about Plato who confused actual reality with abstractions, and Kant whose ideas had have led to "instrumentation" of reason; both of whose outmoded ideas have been criticized thoroughly in recent social thought. I would similarly suggest that you "haven't been doing your reading" on Foucault, Baudrillard, Adorno, Horkheimer, Deleuze, etc., but I am not going to do that. Still I hope that you would emphatize with my situation imagining the case that I did. Textbooks aside, let's look at the real situation at hand with some clear, simple, direct language. > The US military could lay down its arms. They don't. > I assure you, no one wants peace more than a professional soldier. I, for one, don't believe that they do. And nobody can quite assure anyone whether they do want it or not. > Someone will collect signals intelligence. Why is this even necessary? > The people who work at the NSA read the headlines. If they really do, this makes the situation even worse because they are either too uninformed (or even stupid) to understand the ethical implications of their work, or reading the wrong headlines. > I'm fairly certain there's are many very active debates within the NSA But about what? To find out, just refer to Snowden documents to see what exactly they have been having debates about. By the way, how could you be so "certain" of everything? One might or might not further counteract to my points, or comment that I am overreacting. But it doesn't really matter. The more we talk, the more get away from the actual reality of what is happening. What is happening is, SURVEILLANCE. Those who defend power of surveillance fear nothing more than "privacy", which they call "conspiracy". I wish we could spend more time participating in meaningful action instead of getting lost in rhetorics.