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Comment by acabal | Hacker News Reader

As unfeeling as his statement might sound, he's entirely correct. I told a family member today that the saddest thing about this whole Boston incident isn't the (still very sad and senseless) loss of life and limb, but that it's undoubtedly going to be used as an excuse to further degrade civil rights nationwide in the coming years, to continue to justify state-sponsored human suffering like Guantanamo, and to further enforce money-wasting, civil-rights-violating theater like the TSA... all while real threats to life like car accidents and disease get left behind.

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You're wrong. The saddest thing is the loss of life and limb.

The whole point of those rights is to avoid massive loss of life and limb in the long run.

I think there's a reason the us has been relatively stable over a long period of time, and it has everything to do with civil rights that serve as another check to the power of the government. As the balance is tipped in the favor of government power over civil power, the chances for large scale loss of life and limb (civil wars, internal power grabs etc.) increases.

History provides good examples of ever powerful governments, spectacularly collapsing, and crushing way more people than are killed from individuals abusing 'lax' civil rights.

I'm not very convinced by by your slippery slope argument with regard to the US, at least in domestic affairs. (foreign is another matter)

It's probably not a good idea to mix the emotional with the analytical, but when it happens, the emotional wins; we're human beings.

I hate to get moral/philosophical, but utilitarian motives, in the eyes of societal norms, usually is the loosing position. The canonical example of this is the man waiting by the railroad switch who must decide whether to divert a train to certain doom or let the train run over an individual. According to society the man must always divert the train.

Your example is situational, and also doesn't come close to his argument.

The super-parent argument is that the loss of life in the immediate is shallow compared to the inevitable loss of life from the loss of liberty and rise of tyrrany in the name of security.

If people are on the train, condemning many to die for one is never the right decision. If the train is unmanned (assumed if there is no conductor to manage it) you are trying to minimize loss of life, so of course you divert the train and just lose some resources in the crash. That example just doesn't make sense.

Yes my example was poor; I don't think I got it right, perhaps I forgot the correct form. I guess I just am not sure how this inevitable tyranny manifests in deaths, but I can appreciate the point.

As a side note, these guys might not have even been caught if we were not living in 'the panopticon'.

I'm torn. I absolutely understand what you are saying and I agree but the problem is that this whole sequence of events cannot be separated from the larger cultural and historical sequence. The saddest thing is absolutely the loss of life but there is a huge part of me that is almost as greatly saddened by the fact that as advanced as we are as a species that we still act like complete and utter idiots when we get together in large enough groups.

People die every day. About 150,000 of them. That's nothing special. What is really going to matter in the long run is how we treat the people who are going to keep living into the future.

I'm much more concerned for the living than I am for the dead.

Not if the resulting erosion of civil liberties eventually leads to more than ~4 innocents' deaths.

except we havent seen this, so let's focus on the loss and talk about this when we see a disproportionate response

if anything, people seemed to critique that they called off letting people outside too early. its never good enough it seems

I don't know, haven't we? An entire city shut down, militarized police systematically searching wide swaths of civilian homes, all to look for a guy who caused fewer deaths than a botched bank robbery, a highway pileup, or a hospital MRSA outbreak? Focusing on the loss is fine and appropriate but it's precisely when we focus elsewhere that we lose sight of how utterly over-the-top some of our societal reactions are and will continue to be.

I've been in Colombia when some government buildings were destroyed by FARC bombs. People died, each one was a tragedy, but cities weren't shut down and society didn't let itself be overcome with fear. That's not to say they accepted that violence as OK; but the response was (and continues to be, as the FARC are still sometimes active here) very different.

going to be used as an excuse to further degrade civil rights nationwide in the coming years

I don't necessarily disagree, but I look forward to RMS's anti-terrorism proposal.

You can read his political notes and get a pretty good grasp.

But to use a metaphor, it's possible to find a bug without knowing what the patch is.

if I'm not mistaken RMSs concepts about security are to have essentially none.

You are mistaken. RMS believes that users should control their computing experience. As such, he thinks that university administrators shouldn't restrict access to powerful features, such as the ability to install software, on communal machines.

This is very different from civil safety, or defending against terrorism. RMS takes the (in my mind very reasonable) view that terrorism is not costly if it doesn't provoke an auto-immune response, and that civil liberties are more important than obliterating terrorism.

Is terrorism actually a problem in the US though?

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