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Comment by wavesounds | Hacker News Reader

If you're apathetic its because you don't know your history. For example, our government not that long ago locked up every Japanese-American they could find in prison camps. The government is entirely capable of doing terrible things. We should by principal only give them as much power/money/information as necessary and not an iota more. Being cynical and apathetic is a danger to you and your fellow Americans.

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See my other comment in this thread.

I disagree very strongly that my position is apathetic. I'm conscious and alert to what's going on around me and my opinions are well-formed. Choosing not to be outraged isn't the same as apathy.

> I'm conscious and alert to what's going on around me and my opinions are well-formed.

Question that. The key to Andy Groves success.

Yeah, I probably was unwise to state that so conclusively. How about this?

"I try to have well-formed opinions and to be conscious and alert to what's going on around me."

I should have phrased that better, I think if you reexamine some history you will be more outraged

Like I said in my comment above, from my always-shrinking knowledge of history, battling institutionalized paranoia with individualized paranoia and outrage just escalates the problem. I'm not saying there's no problem here to fix; I believe quite the opposite. It's just that promoting anger and fear will get us nowhere.

I wonder if that would be possible today with people being so connected. You can't disappear Americans without people noticing.

They weren't disappeared -- the American population was aware that it was happening, and there was a mix of support and opposition. The US Supreme Court in 1944 -- during the war -- voted 6 v 3 in Korematsu vs United States that it was a military necessity and, thus, Constitutional. Perhaps we would see stronger, more organized opposition today, but it wasn't hidden from the population.

The Japanese internment was not done in secret. Hell, the government advertised it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_for_Japanese-America...

I doubt that having twitter would have helped. The public knew and there was significant support for it.

Interesting related aspect of that dark point in history: "The United States Census Bureau assisted the internment efforts by providing confidential neighborhood information on Japanese Americans. The Bureau's role was denied for decades, but was finally proven in 2007.[11][12]"

"Nothing to hide" indeed...

You can't disappear Americans without people noticing.

Tell that to those 3 women in Cleveland who were kept against their will for years & years...

Oh, people noticed that they disappeared. There were all kinds of vigils in support of at least one of the women. (Apparently, the kidnapper was even at some of these. This in my mind was the most bizarre fact of the whole story.)

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