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Comment by christophilus | Hacker News Reader

Is that the case? It seems to me that the people who cared about Snowden are basically the same people who care about Flock. Most of the people I know who didn't like Snowden also don't seem to care about Snowden. I do find it interesting / strange that conservatives (of which I am somewhat) don't care about Snowden or Flock. To me, the things Snowden revealed, and the crap Flock is doing are completely incompatible with the way I think government should function. But, maybe I'm more libertarian than conservative.

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If my local groups are any indication the flock stuff is angering both the left and the right, perhaps for different reasons. Same with datacenters.

The datacenter meeting for our board was the largest I've ever seen in town. They had to move it to the school auditorium when 1000+ people showed up the first time.

The world (I guess politics, but more broadly how you envision society to fundamentally function) is far more broad and nuanced than the silly (American) liberal vs conservative buckets.

Just adding a “libertarian vs. authoritarian” axis to both labels changes things up wildly. And shows me at least a little bit how someone can label themselves conservative and also be totally fine with the surveillance state. Or totally against it.

Libertarians are frequently authoritarians. Maybe even overwhelmingly so. What they dont like are restrictions on their controlling impulses.

As a centrist libertarian, I would say the dynamic is better framed in that authoritarians are frequently attracted to libertarianism as a way of cloaking and justifying their true beliefs, to both themselves and others. So called "right" libertarianism is rife with this, as it emphasizes a fallacious axiomatic conception of rights which are to be overtly rejected when the logical preconditions have not been met. This captures essentially all of the Surveillance Valley hucksters claiming to be "libertarians" - rights for me, not for thee.

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