18 ms·

Freedom: The Big American Lie

169 points by Riesling 13y ago

brokenmusic 13y ago
> The answer, to a depressing extent, is that our basic freedoms are threatened today because our political system and our very culture make it nearly impossible for us to act. That's why action should not come as an open fight. History is full of examples when revolutions only lead to blood, after which other elites simply take over and keep exploiting everyone else. Or, alternatively, revolutions fail and after a bloody fight the same elites stay in power. If you want real change and bloodless revolution, start using Bitcoin. Don't pay them a cut if you disagree with what your money are spent on. It's not democracy that keeps politicians in check. It's simply money. If they have none, they're powerless.
- princeverma 13y ago
  Please don't make this a case for bitcoin. This is much more serious and complicated issue and will not get solved just by using bitcoin. I think you are over-romanticising the use of bitcoin, nothing else... Just saying,..
  - brokenmusic 13y ago
    All I said that NSA, Drones and imprisonment of the population for victimless crimes requires money. I would also claim that if taxes were not collected (or would be impossible to collect) with a threat of force, very little number of people would pay them voluntarily. Also, if people were not forced by law to use national currencies for exchanging goods and services, they wouldn't be subject to hidden taxes, such as inflation. Bitcoin makes taxes prohibitively expensive to collect and inflation impossible. How is it an oversimplification then?
    - rpicard 13y ago
      > hidden taxes, such as inflation. Maybe it was a typo, but I think you should double check what inflation means.
      - Roboprog 13y ago
        The effect of the Federal Reserve increasing the money supply, and making it available to favored banks and the US Treasury at low rates helps cause inflation and has about the same effect as a tax: your holdings are worth less, and somebody else, albeit indirectly, is able to tap into the value that those dollars held.
        rpicard 13y ago
        Sounds like a pretty big stretch to call it a tax in my opinion.
        nthj 13y ago
        The government has more money and I have less. I'd be interested to hear your suggestions for a better descriptor?
        rpicard 13y ago
        I'm not convinced that the government gets more money when inflation goes up. I've only taken an introductory level economics course, but I'm pretty sure the value of a currency goes down for everyone - government included - when inflation rises.
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
    - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
      If it was not forced by law there would be no private property at all.
      - whiddershins 13y ago
        empirically not true: http://www.eleuthera.it/files/materiali/David_Graeber_Fragments_%20Anarchist_Anthropology.pdf http://www.eleuthera.it/files/materiali/David_Graeber_Fragme...
        Joeri 13y ago
        Please make a proper argument, nobody is going to read through all of that.
        whiddershins 13y ago
        TLDR; Anarchist systems have existed throughout history both alongside and within, and most certainly in awareness of hierarchical systems which they often explicitly reject. Most assertions about the nature of those societies are based on ignorance. Most relevant to your comment, they tend(ed) to maintain rules, conventions, personal property, arbitrate disputes, take care of the weak, and do any number of other things considered impossible without government. Various types of egalitarian social order have existed, it isn't one monolithic concept, and it certainly doesn't necessarily result in chaos or might-makes-right. If you want specific examples and actual information, take the time to read the pdf. It is written by an anthropologist, so it is his gig to footnote all this stuff.
        mpyne 13y ago
        How have these anarchist societies fared after hierarchically-driven societies came through? I don't seem to recall it working out well in Africa, Asia, North America, or South America.
        whiddershins 13y ago
- qwertzlcoatl 13y ago
  You would need a substantial percentage of a population to stop paying taxes to send the government a message. If you do it on your own, you run the risk of getting a message. A coercive one.
- MisterWebz 13y ago
  I wholeheartedly agree with your last point. Hit them where it hurts, and that's their wallet. If you dislike what's happening and you notice a certain corporation is associated with that, simply stop using their services and stop giving them money. If you dislike your information being shared, stop using Facebook or any of the other tech giants. They didn't have much incentive to protect their user's privacy, but they would if they noticed people moving away from their services because they can't be trusted.
  - brokenmusic 13y ago
    To be perfectly honest, I wasn't saying exactly that. Yes, you got the point right: if you don't like the services a private company provides - stop paying. It works. With government it has historically been impossible to do, because it controls money supply and extracts taxes with the threat of force (don't want to pay? Go to prison). Bitcoin offers a simple non-violent and effective way out of this, because it would be prohibitively expensive to collect taxes if people used Bitcoin. It would only be possible when they converted it to fiat or physical things big enough to be noticed and tracked (like houses or cars). Thus, my point: use Bitcoin as a unit of exchange and don't pay a cut.
    - dllthomas 13y ago
      Bitcoin offers very little here. If you are smart about how you interact with it, it might be substantially more anonymous than other digital payment mechanisms. It is not any more anonymous than physical cash, and governments collected taxes just fine when everyone was paying with cash. They do this through audit and threat of force, and that is just as applicable to bitcoin.
      - brokenmusic 13y ago
        Not true. 1) Is gets a lot harder and more expensive to collect taxes when you have to conduct audits 2) It is impossible to collect the inflation tax 3) It's easier to control people when you can close down or freeze their bank accounts for any reason you like. Bitcoin offers a lot of freedom at a price of learning a little bit about the technology.
- cpursley 13y ago
  The Diamond Age is based in a reality where all countries collapsed due to the advent of cryptocurrency and cryptocommunication which undermined nation states' ability to collect tax. I think this is an eventuality.
  - daeken 13y ago
    One of my favorite books, but the chicken and egg problem is substantial. Hitting the "tax dodger" tipping point requires a huge number of people to break the law before it 1) has any impact at all, and 2) becomes unenforcable. I think that there's a clever missing step.
  - pekk 13y ago
    Nations are not based only on the ability to collect tax. And a percentage of income or sales are not the only kinds of tax which have been collected in history.
  - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
    The Diamond Age is also a sickening crapsack world filled with immensely dangerous uncontrolled nanotechnology. And of course the mandatory Neal Stephenson lectures on programming and bizarre sex cults. That said, Snow Crash was an even worse crapsack to live in.
- monsterix 13y ago
  Here is an alternate dimension too. If both left and right political wings are full of dubious people, then don't bring them both to power. Create an alternative political party of your own and then compete in the next elections. Vow to kill all the FUD such as mass surveillance, Gitmo, SOPA, PIPA, bring in transparency, bring youth to power etc. I mean fight 'em with the system, and fight outside the system too as more and more people, I noted, have been suggesting the latter on HN here. This is how India is currently planning for the 2014 elections. The ground reality is so intense that one cannot describe in words. We have a legion of corrupt assholes both in our Government and its opposition that is called the congress and BJP duo. These guys have a history of carrying out some of the biggest scams on the planet. Shamelessly. They are known to have killed thousands of innocents, like Congress done away with Sikhs in 1984 [1], BJP done away with Gujrati muslims in Godhra in 2002 [2] and so on ... Not much of a choice w.r.t democracy, you know! So people lately have built a third political party called the 'Aam Aadmi Party' AAP [3], meaning common man party, whose president is Mr. Arvind Kejriwal [4] (A young engineer from IIT and an ex-diplomat of Indian Government.) Ground is swelling with support to put the new face into power, give power back to youth of our country. And yet traditional and powerful media continues to sleep with the incumbents, so a similar situation of dimwit reporting too. I don't know how the elections in the US work, heard it is complicated and messy, but this is one angle that perhaps you guys could look at: form a party of your own. Call it something else, like a pirate party, and then fight the elections. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_anti-Sikh_riots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_anti-Sikh_riots [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Gujarat_violence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Gujarat_violence [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aam_Aadmi_Party http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aam_Aadmi_Party [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arvind_Kejriwal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arvind_Kejriwal
  - dasil003 13y ago
    The big problem is that fear is such an effective weapon to use again any such campaign. The establishment would have to spend barely a penny to totally crush such a movement before it got off the ground given the general status quo of relative comfort for most Americans. The two party system, as alluded to in the article, really is a huge problem for getting momentum on any movement that has any kind of easy sound bite rebuttals. However I think a good place to start would be to proclaim strong support for congresspeople like Udall, and start going after the NSA shills like Kerry.
- daeken 13y ago
  > If you want real change and bloodless revolution ... destroy politicians' careers and make their techniques impossible to maintain. I've written on this subject before, but I believe that destruction is the most effective means of change in politics today. The obvious way is to dig up as much dirt on politicians as possible and back them into a corner, but 1) that can easily backfire, and 2) it's hard to deal with the systematic problems. A great example of how to deal with a serious technological hurdle: In Cory Doctorow's book "Little Brother" (absolutely worth a read -- my favorite of all time, FWIW) everyone in the bay area has RFID passes for traveling on BART and paying tolls by car. One of the characters comes up with plans for a device that will suck in IDs from these devices, then randomly swap them with others, preventing the DHS from tracking people based on their location. By distributing this far and wide, the system becomes completely and utterly useless. I think that things like this are the way forward. Destroy, guide the rebuilding (using positive -- not negative -- means), destroy again if it doesn't fit the proper form. Semi-rapid iteration of government.
  - brokenmusic 13y ago
    Why do you want a government so much?
    - daeken 13y ago
      I don't. Unfortunately, most people do, and I'm a pragmatist at the end of the day.
    - tripzilch 13y ago
      > Why do you want a government so much? Because it's the only way to take proper care of the elderly and the disabled. No anarcho-syndicalist pipe dream has ever convincingly sketched me a scenario where the elderly (without family) do not just waste away in isolation, and the schizophrenics are rotting in the streets. Now, a government is not a guarantee to fix this (see for example the NYC homeless), but without a government, the weaker groups in society are just shit out of luck.
      - 13y ago
jl6 13y ago
Reality check: for all the ills of warrantless wiretapping, computers are still an overwhelmingly positive force for enlightenment, empowerment and liberation of people across the world.
- alan_cx 13y ago
  We think we have been enlightened, empowered, and liberated, but really all we have done is concentrate our activity in to one nice easily monitor-able state, which means we can now be more controlled than ever before. Chat in a park? Good chance its private. Chat on line? Good chance its recorded. I could go on... Your "reality check", I'm very sorry to say, is exactly the lie we are being sold.
  - jl6 13y ago
    Nobody's claiming computers can't be used for evil. I'm just saying let's not lose sight of all the good stuff they enable which is orthogonal to whether or not their users are being monitored.
- pessimizer 13y ago
  Computers have also been crucial in facilitating many, many horrible things - with massive investments by all of the standing militaries and secret police of the world.
chasing 13y ago
Christ, what a terribly written article.
EGreg 13y ago
You know what, this is silly (except for the part about Obama's record on civil liberties and security). First of all the problem, as it often is, comes from centralization on the internet. If the web was decentralized, as it was meant to be from the beginning, there wouldn't be such outrage. Remember all the outcry of privacy on facebook, no government involved? I do. Or how about companies like Path sucking up your phone records from your phone and sending it to their servers? At the end of the day, it is we who choose to have an account with a large company running web software so they can "take care of" our email. Giant data centers delivering our movies to our doorstep instead of P2P. It wasn't always like this. People used to run desktop software on their desktop. It will be like this again, but it will take a long time. My favorite example is how git and mercurial have eclipsed svn a long time ago, and github / bitbucket are way more popular than, say, sourceforge. Bitcoin has gotten a lot of attention over currencies that can be controlled by a central authority. Adobe Cirrus and WebRTC are growing. The same kind of revolution is going to happen in multi user communication platforms. Once that happens, and everything is encrypted end-to-end and there is off-the-record messaging, those using it will take back control. We can already do almost everything in a decentralized manner except good social networking. Privacy "nuts" can run their email, etc. on a VPN and store encrypted backups in other places. To make it more mainstream, however, we will need friendlier clients. And social networking! Finally, the web itself was built to be client-server, which kind of indirectly encouraged this sort of centralization. Clients were easy to install -- netscape's business model even involved giving it away for free -- but not many people ran servers. And so it led to this. The long and short of it is, we need more user-friendly opensource servers, standardized protocols, and encryption. Those who care will then run their own servers.
- sneak 13y ago
  > First of all the problem, as it often is, comes from centralization on the internet. No, the problem comes from the maliciousness of the US military. Centralization on the internet got us Google and AWS and the iPad. (The iPad wouldn't be the iPad if it wasn't locked down with a centralized App Store.)
  - EGreg 13y ago
PavlovsCat 13y ago
I just saw a newspaper headline today, a photo of Snowden saying "would you hide this man?". I didn't buy it, so I don't know if the article was pro, contra or informative; but it got me thinking... I know it would never happen, but why shouldn't Germany give asylum to Snowden? Oh, because we're full of shit ourselves. What about other so-called first world countries? Any offers so far? How many non-offers? So, is it really the big American lie? It would be easier for rest of the world if the US were more free, sure, and the US kinda has it in the mission statement. But it would also be easier for the US if the rest of the world was more free, and it's idiotic to just follow in the shadow of the "market leader in freedom", and then complain when that market leader has a bad day, or a bad decade, or several, and runs off into a ditch. Don't ask what freedom can do for you, but what you can do for freedom, right? And hey, I'm sure Putin Polonium also tells the Russian people they're free, too. That just as a sanity check. Not that I want to belittle any of it, but realize that in the US you have freedoms of speech and organization others wouldn't even dream of. Use them! Don't fall into the trap of being like Germans, who tend to moan how bad it is, with being content others have it worse... do that other thing, that American thing, where you roll up your sleeves, kick ass and distribute chewing gum :P (those stereotypes are not meant seriously, but well)
- gambiting 13y ago
  Well, UK openly said that if Snowden arrives in the UK he won't be allowed into the country, so there you have the "democratic and free" countries. But to be honest, people should be really upset about the stuff he leaked about GCHQ since it turns out to be as bad as NSA, yet people hardly talk about it.
- unclebucknasty 13y ago
  This story has quickly evolved from one of a government violating its citizens rights, to one about Snowden. Score one (more) for the government-media PR complex.
- Joeri 13y ago
  Americans have apparently been so succesful in exporting their culture that they've managed to export american hypocrisy as well ;)
kailuowang 13y ago
...rights aren’t ‘rights’ if someone can take ‘em away; they’re privileges. That’s all we’ve ever had in this country: a bill of temporary privileges. And if you read the news, even badly, you know that every year the list gets shorter and shorter. — George Carlin, “You Have No Rights"
- raganwald 13y ago
  "It's a club, and you ain't in it." —George Carlin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV1lZMTCqf8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV1lZMTCqf8
- kailuowang 13y ago
  Karl Marx maybe be wrong most of the time, but he is probably right on one assertion: in any society there are mainly two classes: the ruled class and the ruling class. The small numbered ruling class controls the majority ruled class by controlling what they believe. Here are a couple of examples: There is no ruling class and ruled class. The ruled class has freedom beyond control from the ruling class.
- tripzilch 13y ago
  Privilege can only be granted, rights can only be seized. The reverse is the cost of complacence.
- tootie 13y ago
  All every human society has ever had is priveleges. What exactly did George Carlin think was the alternative? Who the hell else is going to guarantee your right not to be murdered for speaking your mind?
  - unclebucknasty 13y ago
    That is such a circular argument that it is impossible to determine where it begins and ends.
- rgbrenner 13y ago
  "And if you read the news, even badly, you know that every year the list gets shorter and shorter." Oh sure... I mean, this country started out with slavery, no voting rights for women, use of child labor, gunning down union workers, etc, etc, etc. And today, things are even worse. (/sarcasm) Please stop fantasizing about the perfect America of yesteryear. It never existed.
dllthomas 13y ago
"[T]o a depressing extent, [...] our basic freedoms are threatened today because our political system and our very culture make it nearly impossible for us to act." Let's act: http://www.meetup.com/Hack-Government-Bay-Area http://www.meetup.com/Hack-Government-Bay-Area To the broader point, the two party system certainly pulls "to the center", but it's also somewhat random which middle. Those pushed to the fringes of the Democrats and those pushed to the fringes of the Republicans have some substantial points of disagreement, but have some significant overlap as well. We should see how we can work together to pull both parties to a better place.
laurentoget 13y ago
The fascinating thing is that this article, which compared to US press, sounds like a liberal paranoid rant, is being published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which is about as liberal as The Wall Street Journal .... This thing is a PR disaster of the greatest magnitude.
sultezdukes 13y ago
When you have leftist democrats that are statists and country-club type republicans that don't really believe in limited government, and these two groups make up the majority of congress then there's really no hope until the people wake up to the tyranny that is happening. But the people are ignorant and all the statist politicians and government officials have to say is "security" and the majority of the sheeple fall right in line - "what do I have to worry about, I'm not doing anything wrong. I dont' care if they're spying, if it's protecting the country".
- cobrausn 13y ago
  Well, you made through three quarters of the comment before typing 'sheeple'. That's gotta count for something. Your first statement I tend to agree with, though 'tyranny' is a strong word often implying rule by a single person.
  - sultezdukes 13y ago
    Well, you made through three quarters of the comment before typing 'sheeple'. That's gotta count for something. It's weird that your offended by that. Your first statement I tend to agree with, though 'tyranny' is a strong word often implying rule by a single person. No, it doesn't imply rule by a single person.
tokenadult 13y ago
May I ask a simple question as a reality check? Granting for the purpose of discussion that the current revelations about NSA in the United States appear to show a slippage to worse conditions from the legal restrictions that originally governed NSA's activities related to Americans living in America, is it genuinely correct, as the article claims, that "idealists have, as the Washington saying puts it, 'nowhere else to go'" besides supporting one major United States political party or the other? My observation of history is that third-party political movements in the United States have never won the Presidency or a majority in Congress since the fragmented election of 1860 that began the current "two party" system, but the two parties have changed everything about their positions on policy while keeping their names the same. The Democratic Party and Republican Party went through a complete role reversal with each other on many issues from the 1890s to the 1990s, and third-party movements in the United States continue to nudge the parties to respond to popular discontent. United States political parties are not ideological, and have no ideological test for membership. Political parties in the United States are coalitions to aid the efforts of individual candidates to win elections. My state has been governed by a third-party governor quite recently, and I have voted for candidates who are genuinely independent of any party, and candidates endorsed by SEVEN different political parties, in state and federal elections since the 1970s. As for a broader question about where freedom is available to the common people, what do immigration patterns tell us? The United States is a rare example of a country that has consistent, sustained population growth irrespective of natural increase through immigration. Tens of millions of people around the world have responded to public opinion surveys to indicate that they desire to immigrate to the United States. The United States gains population on a net basis in comparison to almost any other country. If there is a freedom problem here in the United States, where is there not a freedom problem?
- Cowen 13y ago
  The fact that America's two largest political parties are not inherently ideological is part of what's wrong with them. The fact that they might change eventually does not help those who want change now.
  - parasubvert 13y ago

169 points by Riesling 13y ago

> The answer, to a depressing extent, is that our basic freedoms are threatened today because our political system and our very culture make it nearly impossible for us to act. That's why action should not come as an open fight. History is full of examples when revolutions only lead to blood, after which other elites simply take over and keep exploiting everyone else. Or, alternatively, revolutions fail and after a bloody fight the same elites stay in power. If you want real change and bloodless revolution, start using Bitcoin. Don't pay them a cut if you disagree with what your money are spent on. It's not democracy that keeps politicians in check. It's simply money. If they have none, they're powerless.

princeverma 13y ago
Please don't make this a case for bitcoin. This is much more serious and complicated issue and will not get solved just by using bitcoin. I think you are over-romanticising the use of bitcoin, nothing else... Just saying,..
- brokenmusic 13y ago
  All I said that NSA, Drones and imprisonment of the population for victimless crimes requires money. I would also claim that if taxes were not collected (or would be impossible to collect) with a threat of force, very little number of people would pay them voluntarily. Also, if people were not forced by law to use national currencies for exchanging goods and services, they wouldn't be subject to hidden taxes, such as inflation. Bitcoin makes taxes prohibitively expensive to collect and inflation impossible. How is it an oversimplification then?
  - rpicard 13y ago
    > hidden taxes, such as inflation. Maybe it was a typo, but I think you should double check what inflation means.
    - Roboprog 13y ago
      The effect of the Federal Reserve increasing the money supply, and making it available to favored banks and the US Treasury at low rates helps cause inflation and has about the same effect as a tax: your holdings are worth less, and somebody else, albeit indirectly, is able to tap into the value that those dollars held.
      - rpicard 13y ago
        Sounds like a pretty big stretch to call it a tax in my opinion.
        nthj 13y ago
        The government has more money and I have less. I'd be interested to hear your suggestions for a better descriptor?
        rpicard 13y ago
        I'm not convinced that the government gets more money when inflation goes up. I've only taken an introductory level economics course, but I'm pretty sure the value of a currency goes down for everyone - government included - when inflation rises.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
  - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
    If it was not forced by law there would be no private property at all.
    - whiddershins 13y ago
      empirically not true: http://www.eleuthera.it/files/materiali/David_Graeber_Fragments_%20Anarchist_Anthropology.pdf http://www.eleuthera.it/files/materiali/David_Graeber_Fragme...
      - Joeri 13y ago
        Please make a proper argument, nobody is going to read through all of that.
        whiddershins 13y ago
        TLDR; Anarchist systems have existed throughout history both alongside and within, and most certainly in awareness of hierarchical systems which they often explicitly reject. Most assertions about the nature of those societies are based on ignorance. Most relevant to your comment, they tend(ed) to maintain rules, conventions, personal property, arbitrate disputes, take care of the weak, and do any number of other things considered impossible without government. Various types of egalitarian social order have existed, it isn't one monolithic concept, and it certainly doesn't necessarily result in chaos or might-makes-right. If you want specific examples and actual information, take the time to read the pdf. It is written by an anthropologist, so it is his gig to footnote all this stuff.
        mpyne 13y ago
        How have these anarchist societies fared after hierarchically-driven societies came through? I don't seem to recall it working out well in Africa, Asia, North America, or South America.
        whiddershins 13y ago
qwertzlcoatl 13y ago
You would need a substantial percentage of a population to stop paying taxes to send the government a message. If you do it on your own, you run the risk of getting a message. A coercive one.
MisterWebz 13y ago
I wholeheartedly agree with your last point. Hit them where it hurts, and that's their wallet. If you dislike what's happening and you notice a certain corporation is associated with that, simply stop using their services and stop giving them money. If you dislike your information being shared, stop using Facebook or any of the other tech giants. They didn't have much incentive to protect their user's privacy, but they would if they noticed people moving away from their services because they can't be trusted.
- brokenmusic 13y ago
  To be perfectly honest, I wasn't saying exactly that. Yes, you got the point right: if you don't like the services a private company provides - stop paying. It works. With government it has historically been impossible to do, because it controls money supply and extracts taxes with the threat of force (don't want to pay? Go to prison). Bitcoin offers a simple non-violent and effective way out of this, because it would be prohibitively expensive to collect taxes if people used Bitcoin. It would only be possible when they converted it to fiat or physical things big enough to be noticed and tracked (like houses or cars). Thus, my point: use Bitcoin as a unit of exchange and don't pay a cut.
  - dllthomas 13y ago
    Bitcoin offers very little here. If you are smart about how you interact with it, it might be substantially more anonymous than other digital payment mechanisms. It is not any more anonymous than physical cash, and governments collected taxes just fine when everyone was paying with cash. They do this through audit and threat of force, and that is just as applicable to bitcoin.
    - brokenmusic 13y ago
      Not true. 1) Is gets a lot harder and more expensive to collect taxes when you have to conduct audits 2) It is impossible to collect the inflation tax 3) It's easier to control people when you can close down or freeze their bank accounts for any reason you like. Bitcoin offers a lot of freedom at a price of learning a little bit about the technology.
cpursley 13y ago
The Diamond Age is based in a reality where all countries collapsed due to the advent of cryptocurrency and cryptocommunication which undermined nation states' ability to collect tax. I think this is an eventuality.
- daeken 13y ago
  One of my favorite books, but the chicken and egg problem is substantial. Hitting the "tax dodger" tipping point requires a huge number of people to break the law before it 1) has any impact at all, and 2) becomes unenforcable. I think that there's a clever missing step.
- pekk 13y ago
  Nations are not based only on the ability to collect tax. And a percentage of income or sales are not the only kinds of tax which have been collected in history.
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  The Diamond Age is also a sickening crapsack world filled with immensely dangerous uncontrolled nanotechnology. And of course the mandatory Neal Stephenson lectures on programming and bizarre sex cults. That said, Snow Crash was an even worse crapsack to live in.
monsterix 13y ago
Here is an alternate dimension too. If both left and right political wings are full of dubious people, then don't bring them both to power. Create an alternative political party of your own and then compete in the next elections. Vow to kill all the FUD such as mass surveillance, Gitmo, SOPA, PIPA, bring in transparency, bring youth to power etc. I mean fight 'em with the system, and fight outside the system too as more and more people, I noted, have been suggesting the latter on HN here. This is how India is currently planning for the 2014 elections. The ground reality is so intense that one cannot describe in words. We have a legion of corrupt assholes both in our Government and its opposition that is called the congress and BJP duo. These guys have a history of carrying out some of the biggest scams on the planet. Shamelessly. They are known to have killed thousands of innocents, like Congress done away with Sikhs in 1984 [1], BJP done away with Gujrati muslims in Godhra in 2002 [2] and so on ... Not much of a choice w.r.t democracy, you know! So people lately have built a third political party called the 'Aam Aadmi Party' AAP [3], meaning common man party, whose president is Mr. Arvind Kejriwal [4] (A young engineer from IIT and an ex-diplomat of Indian Government.) Ground is swelling with support to put the new face into power, give power back to youth of our country. And yet traditional and powerful media continues to sleep with the incumbents, so a similar situation of dimwit reporting too. I don't know how the elections in the US work, heard it is complicated and messy, but this is one angle that perhaps you guys could look at: form a party of your own. Call it something else, like a pirate party, and then fight the elections. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_anti-Sikh_riots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_anti-Sikh_riots [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Gujarat_violence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Gujarat_violence [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aam_Aadmi_Party http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aam_Aadmi_Party [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arvind_Kejriwal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arvind_Kejriwal
- dasil003 13y ago
  The big problem is that fear is such an effective weapon to use again any such campaign. The establishment would have to spend barely a penny to totally crush such a movement before it got off the ground given the general status quo of relative comfort for most Americans. The two party system, as alluded to in the article, really is a huge problem for getting momentum on any movement that has any kind of easy sound bite rebuttals. However I think a good place to start would be to proclaim strong support for congresspeople like Udall, and start going after the NSA shills like Kerry.
daeken 13y ago
> If you want real change and bloodless revolution ... destroy politicians' careers and make their techniques impossible to maintain. I've written on this subject before, but I believe that destruction is the most effective means of change in politics today. The obvious way is to dig up as much dirt on politicians as possible and back them into a corner, but 1) that can easily backfire, and 2) it's hard to deal with the systematic problems. A great example of how to deal with a serious technological hurdle: In Cory Doctorow's book "Little Brother" (absolutely worth a read -- my favorite of all time, FWIW) everyone in the bay area has RFID passes for traveling on BART and paying tolls by car. One of the characters comes up with plans for a device that will suck in IDs from these devices, then randomly swap them with others, preventing the DHS from tracking people based on their location. By distributing this far and wide, the system becomes completely and utterly useless. I think that things like this are the way forward. Destroy, guide the rebuilding (using positive -- not negative -- means), destroy again if it doesn't fit the proper form. Semi-rapid iteration of government.
- brokenmusic 13y ago
  Why do you want a government so much?
  - daeken 13y ago
    I don't. Unfortunately, most people do, and I'm a pragmatist at the end of the day.
  - tripzilch 13y ago
    > Why do you want a government so much? Because it's the only way to take proper care of the elderly and the disabled. No anarcho-syndicalist pipe dream has ever convincingly sketched me a scenario where the elderly (without family) do not just waste away in isolation, and the schizophrenics are rotting in the streets. Now, a government is not a guarantee to fix this (see for example the NYC homeless), but without a government, the weaker groups in society are just shit out of luck.
    - 13y ago

jl6 13y ago

Reality check: for all the ills of warrantless wiretapping, computers are still an overwhelmingly positive force for enlightenment, empowerment and liberation of people across the world.

alan_cx 13y ago
We think we have been enlightened, empowered, and liberated, but really all we have done is concentrate our activity in to one nice easily monitor-able state, which means we can now be more controlled than ever before. Chat in a park? Good chance its private. Chat on line? Good chance its recorded. I could go on... Your "reality check", I'm very sorry to say, is exactly the lie we are being sold.
- jl6 13y ago
  Nobody's claiming computers can't be used for evil. I'm just saying let's not lose sight of all the good stuff they enable which is orthogonal to whether or not their users are being monitored.
pessimizer 13y ago
Computers have also been crucial in facilitating many, many horrible things - with massive investments by all of the standing militaries and secret police of the world.

chasing 13y ago

Christ, what a terribly written article.

EGreg 13y ago

You know what, this is silly (except for the part about Obama's record on civil liberties and security). First of all the problem, as it often is, comes from centralization on the internet. If the web was decentralized, as it was meant to be from the beginning, there wouldn't be such outrage. Remember all the outcry of privacy on facebook, no government involved? I do. Or how about companies like Path sucking up your phone records from your phone and sending it to their servers? At the end of the day, it is we who choose to have an account with a large company running web software so they can "take care of" our email. Giant data centers delivering our movies to our doorstep instead of P2P. It wasn't always like this. People used to run desktop software on their desktop. It will be like this again, but it will take a long time. My favorite example is how git and mercurial have eclipsed svn a long time ago, and github / bitbucket are way more popular than, say, sourceforge. Bitcoin has gotten a lot of attention over currencies that can be controlled by a central authority. Adobe Cirrus and WebRTC are growing. The same kind of revolution is going to happen in multi user communication platforms. Once that happens, and everything is encrypted end-to-end and there is off-the-record messaging, those using it will take back control. We can already do almost everything in a decentralized manner except good social networking. Privacy "nuts" can run their email, etc. on a VPN and store encrypted backups in other places. To make it more mainstream, however, we will need friendlier clients. And social networking! Finally, the web itself was built to be client-server, which kind of indirectly encouraged this sort of centralization. Clients were easy to install -- netscape's business model even involved giving it away for free -- but not many people ran servers. And so it led to this. The long and short of it is, we need more user-friendly opensource servers, standardized protocols, and encryption. Those who care will then run their own servers.

sneak 13y ago
> First of all the problem, as it often is, comes from centralization on the internet. No, the problem comes from the maliciousness of the US military. Centralization on the internet got us Google and AWS and the iPad. (The iPad wouldn't be the iPad if it wasn't locked down with a centralized App Store.)
- EGreg 13y ago

PavlovsCat 13y ago

I just saw a newspaper headline today, a photo of Snowden saying "would you hide this man?". I didn't buy it, so I don't know if the article was pro, contra or informative; but it got me thinking... I know it would never happen, but why shouldn't Germany give asylum to Snowden? Oh, because we're full of shit ourselves. What about other so-called first world countries? Any offers so far? How many non-offers? So, is it really the big American lie? It would be easier for rest of the world if the US were more free, sure, and the US kinda has it in the mission statement. But it would also be easier for the US if the rest of the world was more free, and it's idiotic to just follow in the shadow of the "market leader in freedom", and then complain when that market leader has a bad day, or a bad decade, or several, and runs off into a ditch. Don't ask what freedom can do for you, but what you can do for freedom, right? And hey, I'm sure Putin Polonium also tells the Russian people they're free, too. That just as a sanity check. Not that I want to belittle any of it, but realize that in the US you have freedoms of speech and organization others wouldn't even dream of. Use them! Don't fall into the trap of being like Germans, who tend to moan how bad it is, with being content others have it worse... do that other thing, that American thing, where you roll up your sleeves, kick ass and distribute chewing gum :P (those stereotypes are not meant seriously, but well)

gambiting 13y ago
Well, UK openly said that if Snowden arrives in the UK he won't be allowed into the country, so there you have the "democratic and free" countries. But to be honest, people should be really upset about the stuff he leaked about GCHQ since it turns out to be as bad as NSA, yet people hardly talk about it.
unclebucknasty 13y ago
This story has quickly evolved from one of a government violating its citizens rights, to one about Snowden. Score one (more) for the government-media PR complex.
Joeri 13y ago
Americans have apparently been so succesful in exporting their culture that they've managed to export american hypocrisy as well ;)

kailuowang 13y ago

...rights aren’t ‘rights’ if someone can take ‘em away; they’re privileges. That’s all we’ve ever had in this country: a bill of temporary privileges. And if you read the news, even badly, you know that every year the list gets shorter and shorter. — George Carlin, “You Have No Rights"

raganwald 13y ago
"It's a club, and you ain't in it." —George Carlin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV1lZMTCqf8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV1lZMTCqf8
kailuowang 13y ago
Karl Marx maybe be wrong most of the time, but he is probably right on one assertion: in any society there are mainly two classes: the ruled class and the ruling class. The small numbered ruling class controls the majority ruled class by controlling what they believe. Here are a couple of examples: There is no ruling class and ruled class. The ruled class has freedom beyond control from the ruling class.
tripzilch 13y ago
Privilege can only be granted, rights can only be seized. The reverse is the cost of complacence.
tootie 13y ago
All every human society has ever had is priveleges. What exactly did George Carlin think was the alternative? Who the hell else is going to guarantee your right not to be murdered for speaking your mind?
- unclebucknasty 13y ago
  That is such a circular argument that it is impossible to determine where it begins and ends.
rgbrenner 13y ago
"And if you read the news, even badly, you know that every year the list gets shorter and shorter." Oh sure... I mean, this country started out with slavery, no voting rights for women, use of child labor, gunning down union workers, etc, etc, etc. And today, things are even worse. (/sarcasm) Please stop fantasizing about the perfect America of yesteryear. It never existed.

dllthomas 13y ago

"[T]o a depressing extent, [...] our basic freedoms are threatened today because our political system and our very culture make it nearly impossible for us to act." Let's act: http://www.meetup.com/Hack-Government-Bay-Area http://www.meetup.com/Hack-Government-Bay-Area To the broader point, the two party system certainly pulls "to the center", but it's also somewhat random which middle. Those pushed to the fringes of the Democrats and those pushed to the fringes of the Republicans have some substantial points of disagreement, but have some significant overlap as well. We should see how we can work together to pull both parties to a better place.

laurentoget 13y ago

The fascinating thing is that this article, which compared to US press, sounds like a liberal paranoid rant, is being published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which is about as liberal as The Wall Street Journal .... This thing is a PR disaster of the greatest magnitude.

sultezdukes 13y ago

When you have leftist democrats that are statists and country-club type republicans that don't really believe in limited government, and these two groups make up the majority of congress then there's really no hope until the people wake up to the tyranny that is happening. But the people are ignorant and all the statist politicians and government officials have to say is "security" and the majority of the sheeple fall right in line - "what do I have to worry about, I'm not doing anything wrong. I dont' care if they're spying, if it's protecting the country".

cobrausn 13y ago
Well, you made through three quarters of the comment before typing 'sheeple'. That's gotta count for something. Your first statement I tend to agree with, though 'tyranny' is a strong word often implying rule by a single person.
- sultezdukes 13y ago
  Well, you made through three quarters of the comment before typing 'sheeple'. That's gotta count for something. It's weird that your offended by that. Your first statement I tend to agree with, though 'tyranny' is a strong word often implying rule by a single person. No, it doesn't imply rule by a single person.

tokenadult 13y ago

May I ask a simple question as a reality check? Granting for the purpose of discussion that the current revelations about NSA in the United States appear to show a slippage to worse conditions from the legal restrictions that originally governed NSA's activities related to Americans living in America, is it genuinely correct, as the article claims, that "idealists have, as the Washington saying puts it, 'nowhere else to go'" besides supporting one major United States political party or the other? My observation of history is that third-party political movements in the United States have never won the Presidency or a majority in Congress since the fragmented election of 1860 that began the current "two party" system, but the two parties have changed everything about their positions on policy while keeping their names the same. The Democratic Party and Republican Party went through a complete role reversal with each other on many issues from the 1890s to the 1990s, and third-party movements in the United States continue to nudge the parties to respond to popular discontent. United States political parties are not ideological, and have no ideological test for membership. Political parties in the United States are coalitions to aid the efforts of individual candidates to win elections. My state has been governed by a third-party governor quite recently, and I have voted for candidates who are genuinely independent of any party, and candidates endorsed by SEVEN different political parties, in state and federal elections since the 1970s. As for a broader question about where freedom is available to the common people, what do immigration patterns tell us? The United States is a rare example of a country that has consistent, sustained population growth irrespective of natural increase through immigration. Tens of millions of people around the world have responded to public opinion surveys to indicate that they desire to immigrate to the United States. The United States gains population on a net basis in comparison to almost any other country. If there is a freedom problem here in the United States, where is there not a freedom problem?

Cowen 13y ago
The fact that America's two largest political parties are not inherently ideological is part of what's wrong with them. The fact that they might change eventually does not help those who want change now.
- parasubvert 13y ago