5 ms·

Having just watched yesterday's RealTime (Bill Maher's show) as well as the mainstream news coverage of the week, I have finally come to the conclusion that no

by Udo 13y ago

Having just watched yesterday's RealTime (Bill Maher's show) as well as the mainstream news coverage of the week, I have finally come to the conclusion that no significant number of Americans has a problem with living in a surveillance state, not even the host and guests on a faux liberal talk show. Except when I'm on HN, everywhere I go there just are no people who see anything fundamentally wrong with the entire premise, so I think saying that only 45% don't care is a very low-ball estimate. From the look of things, it's more like 95%.

ataggart 13y ago
Few men want to be free; most just want fair masters.
- mratzloff 13y ago
  A great quote from Sallust, a statesman of the Roman republic. Specifically, he lived toward the end of the Roman republic. Another quote of his that seems applicable here: "Yet many human beings, resigned to sensuality and indolence, uninstructed and unimproved, have passed through life like travellers in a strange country."
f1nch3r 13y ago
Bill Maher has a vested interest in seeing Obama not be made a fool.
- booruguru 13y ago
  What are you talking about? Maher criticizes Obama all of the time...and he gets lots of flak from liberals because of it.
Amadou 13y ago
I saw that same show and I was similarly disappointed with it. However, my impression was that all of the guests and Maher himself were under-informed. Possibly even misinformed because there were echoes of talking points "Snowden is neither a hero nor a traitor." "Hong Kong is, after-all, China," "Snowden is delusional," "Snowden is a publicity seeker" etc. Last week, when the story first broke, Maher was ambivalent about it and he justified his ambivalence by focusing on nuclear weapons - as in because nukes can kill so many people the risk is just too great so we need to do everything and anything to stop them. Obviously he didn't know enough about the situation to understand that dirty bombs are the only nukes that it is even plausible to consider being used by terrorists (rather than foreign governments) and that dirty bombs are all about the dirty and not so much the bomb - fallout over a couple of city blocks and not an explosion that could destroy a city hiroshima style. Still enough to kill hundreds, maybe thousands if an attacker gets everything just right, but not the existential threat that obliterating Manhattan would be. I'd like to see Greenwald on his show, Greenwald did a pretty good job of calling Maher on his BS regarding the arab spring the last time he was on there. Since he's right in the middle of this story I'm sure he'd do even better. The only "liberal" group I'm particularly disillusioned with is mediaite - everything I've seen from them on the topic has been despicably underhanded apologisms.
wololo 13y ago
It's important to keep in mind that our national histories color what these words mean to us and what we think the implications are. Another example of this is the massive paranoia in Germany about Streetview before it came out in that country. That one seems to have been unwarranted.
larrys 13y ago
"Except when I'm on HN" Very possible that there are people on HN that don't care as well. But because of the overwhelming amount of people who make their opinions known who do care, it would be karma suicide to admit otherwise except in the most delicate terms. Even if you don't need or care about karma points it generally doesn't feel good to have people load up on you. I wonder at what point any issue within a group gets so lopsided in one direction that dissent almost never materializes. It becomes viewed as "so bad" on it's face that people rarely speak in favor of it. Or you have to walk on eggshells to even discuss the other side.
- krapp 13y ago
  There are a few, i've seen their posts here and there, and they do seem to get downvoted pretty severely. It's unfortunate, not necessarily because I agree with them but everyone has the right to at least make their case. That seems to be one of the downsides of the karma system - when a population of high karma users tend towards a certain point of view it creates social pressure for others to reinforce the orthodoxy. It doesn't help that once you get the down arrow, you're free to simply downvote opinions you disagree with rather than engage the poster. I've wondered once or twice whether karma shouldn't be publicly visible anyway. After all, one should be able to judge a post on its own merit without having a measure of the posters' relative popularity to tell you how much you probably should agree with them or not.
  - larrys 13y ago
    "without having a measure of the posters' relative popularity" I would add also that I'm sure there are people that don't realize that a high karma score can come not only from comments such as you describe but additionally simply because someone was the early poster of a story that got voted up. So in a certain karma range we don't know how many points are from that vs. from agreement with a comment. (My guess though is that as karma increases most of it comes from comments and activity that is not related to posting a popular link).
    - krapp 13y ago

by Udo 13y ago

ataggart 13y ago

Few men want to be free; most just want fair masters.

mratzloff 13y ago
A great quote from Sallust, a statesman of the Roman republic. Specifically, he lived toward the end of the Roman republic. Another quote of his that seems applicable here: "Yet many human beings, resigned to sensuality and indolence, uninstructed and unimproved, have passed through life like travellers in a strange country."

f1nch3r 13y ago

Bill Maher has a vested interest in seeing Obama not be made a fool.

booruguru 13y ago
What are you talking about? Maher criticizes Obama all of the time...and he gets lots of flak from liberals because of it.

Amadou 13y ago

I saw that same show and I was similarly disappointed with it. However, my impression was that all of the guests and Maher himself were under-informed. Possibly even misinformed because there were echoes of talking points "Snowden is neither a hero nor a traitor." "Hong Kong is, after-all, China," "Snowden is delusional," "Snowden is a publicity seeker" etc. Last week, when the story first broke, Maher was ambivalent about it and he justified his ambivalence by focusing on nuclear weapons - as in because nukes can kill so many people the risk is just too great so we need to do everything and anything to stop them. Obviously he didn't know enough about the situation to understand that dirty bombs are the only nukes that it is even plausible to consider being used by terrorists (rather than foreign governments) and that dirty bombs are all about the dirty and not so much the bomb - fallout over a couple of city blocks and not an explosion that could destroy a city hiroshima style. Still enough to kill hundreds, maybe thousands if an attacker gets everything just right, but not the existential threat that obliterating Manhattan would be. I'd like to see Greenwald on his show, Greenwald did a pretty good job of calling Maher on his BS regarding the arab spring the last time he was on there. Since he's right in the middle of this story I'm sure he'd do even better. The only "liberal" group I'm particularly disillusioned with is mediaite - everything I've seen from them on the topic has been despicably underhanded apologisms.

wololo 13y ago

It's important to keep in mind that our national histories color what these words mean to us and what we think the implications are. Another example of this is the massive paranoia in Germany about Streetview before it came out in that country. That one seems to have been unwarranted.

larrys 13y ago

"Except when I'm on HN" Very possible that there are people on HN that don't care as well. But because of the overwhelming amount of people who make their opinions known who do care, it would be karma suicide to admit otherwise except in the most delicate terms. Even if you don't need or care about karma points it generally doesn't feel good to have people load up on you. I wonder at what point any issue within a group gets so lopsided in one direction that dissent almost never materializes. It becomes viewed as "so bad" on it's face that people rarely speak in favor of it. Or you have to walk on eggshells to even discuss the other side.

krapp 13y ago
There are a few, i've seen their posts here and there, and they do seem to get downvoted pretty severely. It's unfortunate, not necessarily because I agree with them but everyone has the right to at least make their case. That seems to be one of the downsides of the karma system - when a population of high karma users tend towards a certain point of view it creates social pressure for others to reinforce the orthodoxy. It doesn't help that once you get the down arrow, you're free to simply downvote opinions you disagree with rather than engage the poster. I've wondered once or twice whether karma shouldn't be publicly visible anyway. After all, one should be able to judge a post on its own merit without having a measure of the posters' relative popularity to tell you how much you probably should agree with them or not.
- larrys 13y ago
  "without having a measure of the posters' relative popularity" I would add also that I'm sure there are people that don't realize that a high karma score can come not only from comments such as you describe but additionally simply because someone was the early poster of a story that got voted up. So in a certain karma range we don't know how many points are from that vs. from agreement with a comment. (My guess though is that as karma increases most of it comes from comments and activity that is not related to posting a popular link).
  - krapp 13y ago