Comment by phpisthebest | Hacker News Reader

Comment by phpisthebest | Hacker News Reader

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>>which is why you vote regularly to ensure that your rights are represented and those agencies aren't able to abuse their power

That never works out in practice as the administrative state (which includes the FBI and CIA) are soo far removed from representative government they are basically unaccountable at this point, that is with out even getting into the idea that 1 vote in a nation of 350 million plus holds no real power anyway, or the problems with First past the post, or countless other topics around voting

"Democracy" is more or less an delusion those in power perpetuate to ensure the cattle think they have a choice

>>Imagine a world where the United States is convinced to stand by as Taiwan is invaded

I think we already live in such a world.

>>The CIA and FBI have checks on them and are balanced as we speak.

Do they? In any real sense? We have confirmed and rumored massive violations of constitutional rights both here and abroad yet there is no accountability. From the Torture report, to massive violation of 4th amendment via "parallel construction" to even the possibility of actual assassinations..

Who exactly are they accountable to? it is certainly not the people, or the constitution

> "Democracy" is more or less an delusion those in power perpetuate to ensure the cattle think they have a choice

I had a much larger post, but I'm going to only respond to this one now, because it sums up basically off the disagreements and no further discussion is going to resolve anything.

I don't agree with this sort of cynicism at all, and I very much do believe that while it is very flawed, democracy ultimately is still doing its job.

I understand the resistance cynicism, however your statement about democracy seems to be more faith based than any kind of data

What data do you have to support the position that "democracy ultimately is still doing its job. " further what "job" do you believe democracy is doing.

I can point to many data points that show it is not, the for mentioned lack of accountability. The fact that most of the voting population does not even vote. I can point to research studies like that from political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Paige [1] that shows Average citizens have little impact on public policy. I have all kinds of data, and clear examples in history to support my position, I would be interested in seeing a counter offer

[1] https://pnhp.org/news/gilens-and-page-average-citizens-have-...

Look at the human rights status of democratic vs. non-democratic or faux-democratic countries, that speaks for itself pretty well.

You can point out individual points of data as much as you want, the end result is what matters.

Have you seen journalists attacking a dictatorship while living there, and go unpunished? Have you seen the same, but on democratic countries?

That should answer it.

> Have you seen journalists attacking a dictatorship while living there, and go unpunished? Have you seen the same, but on democratic countries?

After Glenn Greenwald reported on the 2013 leaks, the IC and news media started up a bunch of threats of treason and were questioning his status as a journalist (to make him more legally at fault)

This doesn't necessarily contradict your statement, given we state the obvious that the US govt (and executive agencies especially) are not democratic

Perhaps the leaders of the democratic countries realised that journalists attacking them keeps the illusion alive

What you wrote there effectively amounts to:

> perhaps the illusion not actually being an illusion is what keeps it alive

> Have you seen journalists attacking a dictatorship while living there, and go unpunished?

You mean like Kashoggi, right?

Nothing bad happened to snowden after all right?

Snowden wasn't a journalist, he was a contractor with a security clearance who leaked classified information to others and didn't go through any legally recognised whistleblowing channels. He broke the law and the conditions of his clearance.

Now you could argue that he still did a good thing, and perhaps that would have been taken into account by the jury in what would have been a proper trial in a civilian court had he not left the country.

None of the journalists who reported on those leaks were imprisoned or harmed. In fact, those on beats that require them to have accreditation to the White House, Pentagon, etc still have that accreditation.

This is fundamentally and vastly different to what happens to journalists in China, Russia, and similarly authoritarian states.

Well this brings up another failure or short coming of our implementation of "democracy". How can the voting public hold the FBI, CIA, NSA, etc accountable as people here seems to claim we do by voting if we are not allowed to know what they are doing, and if anyone that is given access to info about what they are doing releases that we put them in a cage or drive them out the country.

"National Security" is often used to cover up government abuse, the public only knows of a few rare instances of this abuse and based on those I can pretty much assume the abuses are FAR FAR more extensive than has been reveled to the public and there is great incentive by government to classify everything to ensure there is never any accountability. Just look at the actions around these JFK files that multiple administrations have tried to declassify, or the Torture report that clearly the CIA violated the law even during the investigation

You must have immense trust, not backed by any rational data to support that trust, to proclaim Snowden an enemy of the people simply because he violated state secrets laws, laws that IMO should be unconstitutional in the first place, and are completely antithetical to a functional democracy.

If the government can keep secrets from the voters, then the voters can not hold them accountable, it is as simple as that

Could you post something other than the Paige study? That one has more than enough question marks to be taking its broadest claims at face value. Example: https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-...

Ask the citizens of Guatemala, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Bolivia etc. about how wonderful the CIA is at spreading democracy.

In your scenario the CIA plays the equivalent role of a Chinese agency in the original one. Agencies within their own local government play the equivalent role of CIA.

Maybe for US citizens, but not so much for everyone else since 2001, hence why the EU effectively banned US companies in 2015 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems#Schrems_I (China/TikTok is even worse of course.)

It's just a taste of our own medicine. We sit here in the imperial core and expect that nothing we do globally will ever come back to haunt us (except it has and likely will again). We think that exporting our ideas and culture is good for the world, but that's just as unlikely to be true for us, just as it is for China.

I'm sure the us would love an EU/UK with private health care and weaker unions and labor laws.

> China/TikTok is even worse of course.)

Is it tho? Is it worse than Cisco or bcci? What about CryptoAG? Instagram and Meta literary have got shadow profiles on near every single person on the planet....

Yes, Huawei owns much more our telecoms than Cisco, and I also expect the US to align more with my values than China :

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26843068

Are you sure it aligns with your values, considering the stark rise in Christian Fascism within its political environment?

Two party system with entry barriers for new parties isn't a democracy. It's a system that's only slightly better than a single party system like what you have in PRC.

> I don't agree with this sort of cynicism at all, and I very much do believe that while it is very flawed, democracy ultimately is still doing its job.

Democracy is good, yes, but blindly asserting that USA == democracy is an incredibly naive, elementary school textbook level take of how our society propagates itself (not saying you're asserting this, but addressing the hypothetical point)

That kind of cynicism is also a seedbed of authoritarianism, ironically.

It's rocket fuel for demagogues, who swoop in and exploit it and turbocharge it even more (see Trump). They say the old system isn't working, they promise to disrupt it. The old rules aren't working anymore, give me all the power, I alone can fix it.

> "Democracy" is more or less an delusion those in power perpetuate to ensure the cattle think they have a choice

Democracy is a system that ensures that whoever has the actual power also holds the formal power.

The only direct result of this is that it makes revolutions unnecessary. But indirectly, it also makes revolution-like changes much more common, what is really great.

What democracy isn't is a system that empowers the small people, or that removes power imbalances, or whatever propaganda you've got. There are many visible false features about it that lots of people believe. But that doesn't mean it's a bad system, it's the best we currently know about.

>possibility of actual assassinations

There are documented examples of FBI killings of dissident citizens (e.g. Fred Hampton). This is not even a "possibility".

> “Democracy" is more or less an delusion

The primary strength of democracy is removing people that mistreat us, and it is a real power in a properly run democracy. Lose that power, and democracy dies.

I do generally agree voters have little influence on policy.

> "Democracy" is more or less an delusion those in power perpetuate to ensure the cattle think they have a choice

Like him or not, Trump was very much not the preference of those in power, and very much was the preference of many people in America. That shows the people do have power.

Yeah, as much as he disgusted me, it was really interesting watching him subvert the powers-that-be by defeating the Republican candidates one-by-one until he was the only one left, and then winning the general election largely because so many people really hated Hillary. What was sad was observing how, at the beginning of the primaries, most Republican voters seemed to hate him, and only a small core of extremists really liked him. But than after he was elected, the rank-and-file Republican voters all changed their opinions of him and became True Believers. It was an interesting exercise in group psychology I think.

An aberition in the system is not a rule. Look what happened after the person that was supposed to win lost. That will never happen again the system will see to that

> An aberition in the system is not a rule

An aberration shows your rule is not actually a rule. Trump is also not the only time this happened. FDR also bucked the trend.

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