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> It's just that if I knew how different the Obama administration's actions would be from what 2008 candidate Obama's rhetoric led my 20-year-old self to believ

> It's just that if I knew how different the Obama administration's actions would be from what 2008 candidate Obama's rhetoric led my 20-year-old self to believe, I wouldn't have donated money to him. If enough people felt this way, things could be a lot better. I can forgive someone who believed the rhetoric the first time, even though a lot of us didn't. It's a lesson we all have to learn, and if the lesson is learned, the mistakes aren't so bad. Unfortunately, a majority of voters didn't think this was enough to prevent them from re-electing him in 2012, nor I fear, from electing another person just like him in 2016.

mikeash 13y ago
It's not like the other realistic choice in 2012 would have been any better about this stuff. The root of the problem is that the majority of voters like this stuff. Americans are, by and large, terrified of terrorists (imagine that) and want their government doing everything imaginable to stop it. Never mind that terrorism is less dangerous than e. coli or sharks, it's an important issue to a lot of people. That is what we need to change, not a few politicians. Convince the public, and the rest will follow. Not that I have any clue how to even start.
- nitrogen 13y ago
  Not that I have any clue how to even start. Start with Hollywood. Perceptions can be changed through entertainment. It has worked well to promote equal rights. Bit by bit, entertainment can acclimate us to new ideas. White House Down is an interesting example of a starting point: [spoiler alert] Instead of the terrorists coming from the Middle East, they come from the military industrial complex and secret service.
  - twoodfin 13y ago
    Because Hollywood's never had military contractors as bad guys before...
- twoodfin 13y ago
  By your logic, why shouldn't Americans worry much more about E. coli than NSA surveillance? What evidence do we have from Snowden (or elsewhere) that NSA surveillance has killed or even harmed anyone in the US? You can feel "terrorized" that the NSA might use its powers for great evil, but to the average voter that probably seems less likely than one or a series of high casualty attacks by foreign nationals. I don't want to get into an argument about how we're all deeply harmed whenever laws are violated, and especially when the powerful can violate them at will. Sure. But the mortality rate argument is a loser: The public and policy makers will never make these kinds of serious decisions based only on a death toll. If they did, we'd have banned passenger cars decades ago.
  - mikeash 13y ago
    I think people should, in fact, prioritize e. coli over NSA overreach. Worrying about being spied on is the sort of high-end top-of-the-Maslow-hierarchy luxury you can indulge in after you have reliable access to good food and such. That's not to say that I don't think it's serious. But food safety is much more fundamental. No, decisions will not be made based purely on death toll. But we must demand some sort of rational basis, and when it comes to terrorism, there is none.
    - twoodfin 13y ago
      You can't come up with half a dozen ways in which Verizon's phone records would be useful to prevent or analyze terrorist attacks? #1 for me would be training pattern recognition and social graph generation algorithms on real data. That sounds like a pretty rational basis for getting that data to me. Whether its value is a good tradeoff vs. the resulting privacy concerns is a good debate to have, but surely the government has a responsibility to try to prevent mass casualty events? The Marathon bombings alone caused more havoc than a typical e. coli outbreak, even if everyone had stood up, shrugged, and gone about the rest of their Monday afternoon business without a care for their attackers.
      - mikeash 13y ago
        Why does the government have a responsibility to prevent mass casualty events more than preventing lots of individual casualty events? And no, I don't think terrorist attacks would generally cause lots of havoc if people could be convinced not to be terrorized.

mikeash 13y ago

It's not like the other realistic choice in 2012 would have been any better about this stuff. The root of the problem is that the majority of voters like this stuff. Americans are, by and large, terrified of terrorists (imagine that) and want their government doing everything imaginable to stop it. Never mind that terrorism is less dangerous than e. coli or sharks, it's an important issue to a lot of people. That is what we need to change, not a few politicians. Convince the public, and the rest will follow. Not that I have any clue how to even start.

nitrogen 13y ago
Not that I have any clue how to even start. Start with Hollywood. Perceptions can be changed through entertainment. It has worked well to promote equal rights. Bit by bit, entertainment can acclimate us to new ideas. White House Down is an interesting example of a starting point: [spoiler alert] Instead of the terrorists coming from the Middle East, they come from the military industrial complex and secret service.
- twoodfin 13y ago
  Because Hollywood's never had military contractors as bad guys before...
twoodfin 13y ago
By your logic, why shouldn't Americans worry much more about E. coli than NSA surveillance? What evidence do we have from Snowden (or elsewhere) that NSA surveillance has killed or even harmed anyone in the US? You can feel "terrorized" that the NSA might use its powers for great evil, but to the average voter that probably seems less likely than one or a series of high casualty attacks by foreign nationals. I don't want to get into an argument about how we're all deeply harmed whenever laws are violated, and especially when the powerful can violate them at will. Sure. But the mortality rate argument is a loser: The public and policy makers will never make these kinds of serious decisions based only on a death toll. If they did, we'd have banned passenger cars decades ago.
- mikeash 13y ago
  I think people should, in fact, prioritize e. coli over NSA overreach. Worrying about being spied on is the sort of high-end top-of-the-Maslow-hierarchy luxury you can indulge in after you have reliable access to good food and such. That's not to say that I don't think it's serious. But food safety is much more fundamental. No, decisions will not be made based purely on death toll. But we must demand some sort of rational basis, and when it comes to terrorism, there is none.
  - twoodfin 13y ago
    You can't come up with half a dozen ways in which Verizon's phone records would be useful to prevent or analyze terrorist attacks? #1 for me would be training pattern recognition and social graph generation algorithms on real data. That sounds like a pretty rational basis for getting that data to me. Whether its value is a good tradeoff vs. the resulting privacy concerns is a good debate to have, but surely the government has a responsibility to try to prevent mass casualty events? The Marathon bombings alone caused more havoc than a typical e. coli outbreak, even if everyone had stood up, shrugged, and gone about the rest of their Monday afternoon business without a care for their attackers.
    - mikeash 13y ago
      Why does the government have a responsibility to prevent mass casualty events more than preventing lots of individual casualty events? And no, I don't think terrorist attacks would generally cause lots of havoc if people could be convinced not to be terrorized.