Hacker News Reader

Comment by panic | Hacker News Reader

This sort of defeatism isn't helpful. Surveillance technology doesn't sprout up from nothingness; it's built on a culture and a political/economic environment which can be changed.

View on HN

US Congress doesn't represent US citizens. 84% of the time, the congress person that wins in that district raised the most money. Corporations and the wealthy provide that money to get congress people who represent THEM, not US citizens.

US Congress doesn't represent US citizens. So nothing changes if moneyed interests want US citizens to live under surveillance.

Your logic doesn't leave room for the possibility that there is a correlation between electability and ability to raise funds. I.e. the candidate most likely to win raises more funds and not vice versa.

>Your logic doesn't leave room for the possibility that there is a correlation between electability and ability to raise funds. I.e. the candidate most likely to win raises more funds and not vice versa.

That's circular logic. "They must be the most qualified, because they raised the most money and the person who gets elected is the one who raised the most money".

In a functioning democracy there should be a cliff where, no matter how much you spent, you cannot simply buy the election.

the whole notion of 'electability' is a ruse created by democrats to push voters towards politicians that agree more with the corporate wing of the party than any issues people care about. if electability was actually a thing, trump would not have won.

https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-67-the-gate-keepi...

Except when this correlation is wrong. Such as when Trump won with less than 60% of the money spent by Hillary Clinton.

https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/graphics/2016-presidentia...

Targeted ads/disinformation campaigns are very effective

They were talking about Congress not the presidency, and the presidency is not popular vote. The electoral college is specifically designed to be different

Well the idea is that having more money means you can get your message out more. The money has to be spent to be useful. It isn't just the person who "has" the most (though you could also use Trump as an example to that).

But Trump's team did a good job at getting in the media. Any news station you turned on there was more talk about Trump than Hillary.

This is one of the problems with money in politics. As money becomes more important in winning elections, politicians' interests align more with the "moneyed interests" rather than the voters or even the public.

The house of representatives should serve as a bulwark against "moneyed interests", but even they are being targeted and bought by money. What good is democracy if a small group of people buy all the politicians?

There's currently a "small donor boom" on the Democratic side (possibly Republicans too, I'm unsure). Super PACs etc are fading in importance, in this cycle at least.

Yeah, they say that every election cycle. Remember Ron Paul? Bernie Sanders? Remember the "small donors" for Obama? Nobody remembered them and neither did Obama. Super PACs are growing. Not sure where you got the idea that they are fading. Super PACs are only a few years old and they have tons of room to grow.

This isn't defeatism. I just think there is a wave coming that's really hard to stop and I don't see anything in the current political structure that's willing to stop it.

Just because you're not interested or motivated in changing something, doesn't mean it can't be changed.

City and state level political change is very malleable.

Federal power trumps state and local

Marijuana legalization is proof of the contrary

Any examples with regard to "national security" i.e. mass surveillance, perpetual war, besides Kennedy?

It is not. The federal government has simply chosen not to challenge the states on this issue... so far.

Frankly because it would be extremely unpopular. Even in the right wing places, where there is a correlation to less favorable views of marijuana, there's a high correlation to belief that states rights should trump federal rights. Really they believe that the fed should be minimal and things mostly run by the states.

> City and state level political change is very malleable.

Corporations have already figured this out, e.g. ALEC [1] writes laws, then gets sympathetic minions to enact them, but city politics still operate on a human scale in many places. I'd bet that a motivated campaign could reverse this move in San Diego, or at least figure out who pushed for it. I don't think there was massive popular support for cameras in streetlights.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Legislative_Exchange_...

More articles like this to raise awareness and importance of issues.

Getting younger people who give a shit to vote, and to become immune to the bogus fear mongering.

Hope the baby boomers die off of old age before the panopticon is built.

"Hope the baby boomers die off of old age before the panopticon is built."

The current builders of the panopticon are very young and work for Google, Facebook and others. This has nothing to do with age.

The ‘builders’ are better described as ‘profiteers’.

The panopticon is being requested and purchased by municipalities, which are predominantly governed by those from the baby boomer generation. Start-up 101. Build what the Users want.

Young blindly build Facebook like apps, old build a CCTV network.

Everything feels scary, try walking around at 2 a.m. and not feeling it. People are tired of it.

I don't think that all the surveillance will work. You always find the most amount of sketchy people around police stations. The cameras will make things worse. Good people will flee to other neighborhoods, were they are not being watched.

Fundamentally, why arn't things safe?

Because everyone might own a gun? I live in a fairly large German city and I am not aware of any no go areas there at night or day. Some areas of Berlin and Hamburg might have them but generally we are pretty safe here.

How does that make them profiteers?

Why would you think that young people would be more inclined to not accept a surveillance state?

Good question. Younger people in general seem to be less fearful, presumably for reasons human nature (as your mobility, visual and mental acuity etc decrease the world simply becomes more dangerous, though most threats are things like bathtubs).

Also though the kids at the moment seem to understand better the risk/reward benefits of some technologies and have a better idea what actual risks they take. You see this in voting patterns.

People need to band together and vandalize and destroy these things, basically the only way currently.

There are already cameras at every intersection in California that feed into the Department of Homeland Security.

https://www.cu-citizenaccess.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/...

> which can be changed.

But won't be. GWB expanded the state's powers with the Patriot Act, Obama signed an extension and then a new version of the act when parts expired. When both sides are pro-surveillance and Americans refuse to change the system or support 3rd parties, what change can there be?

Why call them the "two sides" if there are the same? You need actual change.

Both parties then.

The two-party system is a direct result of FPTP election forms.

  First past the post receives a lot of criticism for 
  restricting options to vote for due to the idea of vote 
  splitting and strategic voting. This leads elections to 
  run into the commonly referred to "Lesser of two evils" 
  dilemma and ends with a 2-party system in place. With 42% 
  of Americans saying they identify as independent and 60% 
  of Americans saying the need for a new party is apparent, 
  it would suggest that the FPTP voting system is failing 
  democracy, failing Americans, and failing America.

https://old.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method#Comparison_tabl...

Downvoted for indented text. Sorry I don't know how else to put an end to this.

HN has this dogma where they won't add any more markup even if it's reasonable. I guess they don't want every comment turning into a fancy formatted mess with different font sizes and lists, but blockquotes are a necessity. > is used a lot, and it always looks bad, particularly for multi-line quotes. HN won't add proper blockquote rendering for ">", so people try to mimic it, badly, using indented <pre>/unflowed text (which HN bizarrely implemented even though they didn't implement indented flowed text). Don't blame people, blame HN.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com