Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by EscapeFromNY | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

EscapeFromNY

When it comes to the US, a lot of people treat "freedom" as a euphemism for war. (see: Team America)

I wonder if "protection" will start becoming a euphemism for surveillance.

View on HN

That's a word to be avoided in branding, I think.

The former German SS (Schutzstaffel) translates to "protection squadron" in English.

that would be double-plus-ungood.

The US Department of Defense (renamed from Department of War) is currently waging offensive war in a half dozen foreign lands right now.

Which foreign lands?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_armed_conflicts_involv... < look for present, it's probably more than a half-dozen. Falls under the same Authorization for Use of Miltary Force of 2001.

There are five conflicts under "present", none of which are offensive. Two are helping countries put down insurgencies, two are fighting piracy from Somalia and two are involved in civil wars in the Middle East. (They add up to six because insurgents and pirates are allies). Most of them are as part of a giant collation. Only the Syrian one is actually being led by the US.

None of them are to conquer territory or any other description of "offensive war" I've ever seen.

None of them involve defending the US.

Moving the goalposts. Original claim was offensive wars.

Well given that they're not engaging in the defense which is in the title of the organization, they must be offensive - there is no third option.

Point being that we already invert terms like "defense" to mean "offense".

Are these charitable wars? Decorative wars? What's the right term for entering into war with countries that aren't attacking you?

None of them are terribly US specific. The UK is involved in all the same conflicts. France, all but the intervention in Somalia. Three of them have countries like Belgium and Canada involved.

The two fighting pirates who are attacking US ships overseas are clearly "defending the US" under international and US law. (And the coalition there includes Russia and North Korea fighting on the US side). The others are the US honoring it's treaty obligations by defending her allies or honoring the request of a government for help, usually by providing training and logistics support.

Except for Syria, where the US is actually leading a coalition. But that is more a humanitarian intervention than anything else.

> Except for Syria, where the US is actually leading a coalition. But that is more a humanitarian intervention than anything else.

The intervention is what created the humanitarian crisis. Currently, its humanitarian goal is to guard oil production.

If? We're already there. That's the crux of this article.

Team America was satirizing a specific moment in history, where they used fear of 9/11 to support an unjust war. That moment has passed. We may be vulnerable to that kind of crap again, but I don't see it right now.

I am not sure. I feel more surveilled than I thought would ever be possible. My car watches me in my own garage, and the FBI can pull that data without telling me, without a warrant, just to learn my impressive laundry habits (I'll skip you the trouble, FBI: I use Gain and Downy and Borax, always on cold, tumble dry low).

And how is that related to using freedom as a reason to invade a sovereign state and suppress opinions not in favor?

Sure, but to be fair, how many 9/11’s have happened since the first one?

9/11 was the extreme statistical anomaly. US Citizens have been historically safe from domestic terrorism for 50 years.

ref: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/04/16/eight... (2013 but the numbers are about the same. Odds of dying in a domestic terror attack vary between 1:12000000 & 1:40000000 or the same as picking the correct inch between DC and NYC).

It is interesting this period of safety coincided with the release of the Pentagon Papers and the Church Committee that followed. One result of which was forcing the FBI away from domestic surveillance and refocusing it into a law enforcement mission. This lasted for about 40 years (after which the FBI officially abandoned it's LEO mission to pursue the power that comes with NatSec operations).

How many have been attempted since then?

They happen annually.

lol, you got me

The FBI never needed a warrant to get information you give to companies freely. That's why they never needed a warrant for phone records.

You have rights to protect your data, but you (and Tesla, et al) don't have rights or legal responsibilities to protect data you collect on others.

No. Team America was satirizing the general US approach of trampling over all other countries in the name of "The American Way".

That's not really changed.

Not really.

I haven't seen the thing since 2004. But I thought it was pretty dumb and ironically very US centric in its treatment of these topics. It wasn't a deep criticism. It also at the same time mocked celebrities for being against the war.

For the record I was very vehemently against the Iraq war from day one.

Maybe you missed the deeper satirical message.

Or maybe it was a shitty movie. There's lots one could say about US foreign policy, but that was 90 minutes of fart jokes. It's weird what people try to venerate sometimes.

Lots of people seemed to have really liked it.

As an example, when I was staying at a backpacking hostel in Perth, Australia many years ago the entire lounge area was packed out by people (during the day!) when it was being shown.

That was ~70 people, many of them who were walking by initially but saw it on and stuck around to watch it.

In that backpacking hostel, there'd not been anywhere close to that number of people watching any other movie. So, there was definitely some kind of interest by people. :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com