It took a civil war for the end of slavery to begin in the US.
It took decades of terrorism for the Irish to stop being as subjugated by the British in Northern Ireland.
And so on.
History indicates that what you really need in the US right now is some violent, direct action against those committing human rights atrocities. Voting isn't going to do shit.
Commenting occasionally on a political topic as part of a diverse pattern is one thing, but only using HN for that is another. There are many past explanations of this at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....
If you or anyone wants to read about how we approach moderation of politics in general, https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... has lots.
(You've also repeatedly been posting flamebait comments and breaking HN's rules in other ways too. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to them?)
Rather than by those committing the human rights atrocities?
When a hundred million people will be on the street, and fire is opened on protesters, then is the time. Starting violence as a popular movement for human rights is not a good option.
I think against wide spread surveillance, small arms cannot do much.
But yes, I meant it as a figure of speech more than anything.
This of course relies on population to be at least slightly smart and not dumb herd of easy to manipulate sheeps, but that's a basic premise of democracy in general.
Direct democracy can work in small countries. Will it work in a country with 150M or 300M people? Will it work? Maybe, one has to schedule voting every 6 months, just like a train schedule.
I don’t see us anywhere near a failed experiment and until anyone can make that case strongly, changing our fundamental structure is off the table. 3rd highest GDP per capita, most innovative country by far, extremely high tourism rate, most diverse country in multiple ways, consistently expanding healthcare / best cancer treatment the world / most innovative drug research, hugely successful progressive social movements, most philanthropic, cities that give the highest amounts of social welfare in per capita terms, you can go on.
Of course you can point out many bad things, but that doesn’t invalidate that it’s not failing, just that it’s not perfect - and to be honest, much of the failures to me look like local ones, not Federal ones. Take Chicago for example.
We need diversity of governance so we can find out what rule of law works best in the long run. Let Europe experiment with more direct democracy. Look at Singapore, Rwanda for the other side. Let the experiments run so long as they don’t trample on basic human rights. America is flawed, but for the same reason Google Chrome shouldn’t win out the browser wars, Representative Democracy should stay, it matches up well on the stats I care about, and it tends not to trample on freedoms nearly as much (something something three lions and a zebra).
I do agree that K street holds too much power, not politicians. And politicians aren’t totally corrupt, just about half or so.
As for WWII, try to come up with something deeper than parroting this, ie how Swiss took tons of refugees that would face deportation and death, while being surrounded by Axis from all directions. How they decided to stop at one point because they didn't have enough food to feed their population, but Geneva canton kept taking refugees in regardless. They helped Allies' secret services with undermining axis in numerous ways, ie keeping the post in Campione d'Italia to subvert Duce's regime.
Its way more than many other 'neutral' countries done during WWII. And mistakes they made, they owned them, admitted them and paid compensations. What more do you want?
All these issues have to be put in context: the scale, the type of abuses, the proportionality, the context, the risk etc..
9/11 was a 'very scary' moment in history, the likelihood that others were planning to do the same was very high, and legit terrorist organizations were operating around the world.
The response to 'non-uniformed irregular attack' was necessarily going to have to be equally as asymmetric, i.e. getting at bad people in the locations they were working form, as opposed to a battle field.
It gets a little bit pedantic to discuss 'human rights' when in conflict, people are exterminated 'in accordance with all UN/International laws and rules' sometimes pretty arbitrarily. For example, the teenager Omar Khadr who killed a US Medic on the battlefield was injured, and about to die. It was US special forces who them saved him, ironically so he could spend a long time in Guantanamo.
The paradox of the fact that were he not of 'special interest' - he would be 100% dead, and nobody, not 'Amnesty International' or the UN would put up a fuss, as he was shot lobbing grenades at medics.
US and EU laws are not designed for acute, wartime scenarios, the only real question is how rational and reasonable the management of force can be applied without breaking too many humane boundaries, and, how many 'mistakes' we are willing to make.
The CIA black cells are definitely a stain, but in the grand scheme of history, it's nothing. Civil, lawful and humane order was otherwise broadly maintained.