Comment by csallen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by csallen | Hacker News Reader

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This is vague and hyperbolic.

For starters, there is no united group known as "liberals" whom either of us can speak on behalf of, but I will indulge you and also speak in generalizations.

Liberals do not arbitrarily support "moving as much power to Washington as possible". Rather, they believe strongly that human rights should be dispensed equally to everyone in the country. If abortion is a right, then being born in Texas shouldn't deprive a woman of that right any more than being born in the south in the 19th century should've deprived blacks of their freedom. Similar arguments can be made for gay marriage, miscegenation laws, female suffrage, the availability of healthcare for the poor, quality education, etc.

There's nothing whatsoever baked into the liberal ideology that supports things like domestic spying and warrantless wiretaps. Rather, the better explanation is any branch of government (in this case the executive branch) is incentivized to increase its own power, and people tend to be biased in favor of their party's presidents. But I've met countless pro-Snowden liberals, and I think you've really mischaracterized the essence of what makes liberals liberal.

You're skirting around his point. American liberals don't just believe in human rights for everyone in the country--they have embraced using a strong centralized government and its court system as the way of enforcing those rights. But the side-effect of that is taking away autonomy and independence from the states, which leaves states less capable of opposing centralized surveillance.

Liberals may not want surveillance, but they helped create the power structure that enables surveillance as a byproduct of pursing end goals they do want. I think the benefits of that approach far outweigh the drawbacks, but it's important to acknowledge the drawbacks. If you give the central government more power so it can achieve X, you have to be aware of the possibility that it will use its power to also do Y.

Both parties have been complicit in creating the power structure that enables surveillance - it's certainly is not something new. It has been growing ever since WWII and supported by both parties. Neither party wants to be seen as anti-military, and a lot of the technology used for domestic spying originated in the military (or as off shoots of the military). Saying that liberals created that power structure is disingenuous.

Exactly. It's totally inaccurate to blame our domestic spying apparatus on liberal initiatives to protect human rights. It's the inevitable result of fearful citizens on both sides of the aisle ceding their rights in response to war, terrorism, and foreign enemies.

Perhaps they did not create the beast, but they wholeheartedly wanted federal government to be bigger.

I fail to see how civil rights legislation or Loving v Virginia allowed the creation of the NSA.

It appears that most surveillance programs are operated under the foreign intelligence and/or defense umbrella, a part of government that has been centralized longer than the country itself exists.

I'd also like to see a few examples of states vigorously opposing these programs. I mean – so many of them are willing to overstep their authority when it comes to hot-button issues such as the widespread voter fraud that some must have tried to get creative to stop surveillance, right?

Point taken. But I'm not sure that liberals (myself included) embraced centralized government for its own sake. It could have been a simple matter of opportunism: If your state won't budge on rights, and the central government will, then the central government becomes the way to expand rights.

Likewise, I'm not sure conservatives really care so much about decentralized government, but are opportunistic about the effectiveness of influencing state and local governments.

An interesting aside is that in my state, the (nominally) conservative state government is enacting laws saying what kinds of ordinances the cities are not allowed to pass. A piece of land not far from my house was declared by the state to be exempt from local zoning.

So I think the preference for central or local government power is a matter of opportunism that is chosen on a situational basis.

The continued use of the term "Liberals" is problematic to my agreeing with some of your otherwise valid points.

If you split the Left-wing into the authoritarian (Clinton/DLC and unfortunately, Obama) and libertarian (ie, Sanders/Warren), you'll see why most of your complaints irk those of us who agree with right-libertarians on lots of points.

Using a 2-dimentional compass to orient the political map is a lot more helpful: https://www.politicalcompass.org

There are many good 2-dimension alignment indicators and tests, but the one you linked to is not one of them. It was very obviously written by someone who considers themselves 'left libertarian', and most of the questions (and answers) are written with implicit biases. They use words like 'rights' and 'trust' to construct what some (myself included) consider false choices.

What is a court system for, if not enforcing a party's rights? Why would you chose fifty long, hard fights over one long, hard fight?

Ironically, libertarians seem pretty happy to stay in the US despite all their wailing and gnashing of teeth, and despite there being a variety of places with low centralised government in the world (some of them are quite nice).

> Liberals may not want surveillance, but they helped create the power structure

Ah, they 'helped' create it. Not 'created' it, but merely 'helped'. Even though you can't even say that they did it themselves, you're more than willing to just blame them for it. It's bizarre how 'liberal' is a derogatory term in the US.

Some of what you outlined aren't rights. Some are really issues of equal protection under the law. Sometimes political groups try to mischaracterize these issue as rights but they are overextending.

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