Hacker News Reader

Comment by powertower | Hacker News Reader

What you posted are a few negative events. What you did not post are the few million or billion positive events that happened at the same time.

What you're reading/seeing is an ever increasingly opinionated and vocal crowd that think they possess the truth and are right about everything. They want a perfect system. And a simple system. And worst of all, they don't know what they don't know (how utterly destructive their actions and changes would be). So this negativity parade continues... Where they hold a magnifying glass on the few negative events while pretending what they are seeing is the entire picture.

View on HN

> "that think they possess the truth and are right about everything"

All those things I listed are well-documented. For the sake of keeping my post short I didn't post links to the appropriate Wikipedia articles nor to mainstream US online newspapers that reported the events.

powertower did not imply that anything you originally listed as incorrect, but saying that you are looking at a very small part of what the US does.

I'm pretty sure we could look at any person or government, find all their past flaws/mistakes and only list this to show that the person is 'evil'. But without looking at the bigger picture of everything they do, you aren't being fair with your judgement of that person/country.

I don't think the idea was to color the US government as "evil" - but rather that the criticism that these are "exceptions" is off base.

In all but one of the examples cited, this was acknowledged, deliberate policy of the government at many levels. Extraordinary rendition, imprisonment without charge, torture, drone strikes, all were known, approved of, and carried out with the assistance of many levels of the central government.

The only example there that can be reasonably cited as an aberration of the norm is the judge taking payoffs for heavy sentences - that's an example of one piece of the machine going rogue.

Sure, the US has done good during all this time as well, but the atrocities cited are not "exceptions", they are a core part of the American government of the past decade.

US doesn't have the resources to give every one of the hundreds of thousands of individuals interested in blowing up a chunk of Americans a full blown 8 month trial, 3 hots and a cot, and loving handjobs twice per week.

As in all things in life there's a tradeoff between "justice" and "security". Luckily for you and most of the people in this thread, you get to benefit from the actions of people who have to make that call, while looking down on them from your moral high horse in your comfortably AC'ed parents' basement.

And who told you there are "hundreds of thousands" of people who want to blow up Americans?

But actually, even (very generously) at 100,000 brand-new prisoners for the USG to deal with it would certainly cope just fine (an increase of 4% on the current prison population). And imagine all the money which would be saved from surveillance programs if all the terrorists were dealt with!

The richest country in the world, by far, and you think we lack the resources to give fair trials and humane prison conditions to the people we accuse of crimes? You do know that innocent people get arrested sometimes, right?

> As in all things in life there's a tradeoff between "justice" and "security"

Some amount of tradeoff between freedom and security, I will grant you. But I can't see how strong security precludes us from actually bothering to properly investigate, try, and incarcerate people. That's just laziness, if not pure malice.

But you do have resources to start wars in name of XYZ, bomb other countries because of ZYX, etc? You really should know there are objective reasons why people from other countries can't stand US government/politics during last decade. If you don't understand what i'm talking about, that same politics is going after it's own citizens now, so you will find out soon.

We're never fair in our judgements...

just ask any black guy in a court room.

Weighing information is the nature of judgement. Sometimes we don't know what we don't know. Sometimes we don't care what we don't know. Sometimes we don't care even though we know. It's the nature of the human machine.

This is the principal reason for the old adage "Life's Unfair".

It's just that we usually won't notice that until it's unfair to us.

We should fix these negative things as they come up instead of doing the gymnastics it takes to justify them. You never want to get caught fighting a rear guard action against the truth.

>> All those things I listed are well-documented.

So are many of the positive events powertower mentioned.

Either way, you don't even live in your own native country let alone the US, you don't have a dog in this hunt.

Oh, and if you think Spain is a good example of a decent place to live; look up those bull runs. Barbaric.

I think that's a little harsh. We don't know the reasons why he's not living in NZ or why he's in Spain. Calling that into question and using that as an excuse to dismiss his claims is just wrong.

I'm not agreeing with him and I'm not disagreeing with you. I just don't think the way you're attacking him is entirely appropriate.

He doesn't live in his own country (his fact not mine) and the one he chose (his fact not mine) has a violent history of torturing innocent animals that continues today. Yet he saw fit to criticize the US.

Just because something is a fact doesn't mean it's relevant.

The exact same comment could be a response to a description of China. The US should hold itself to a higher standard than one where comparisons are with China.

> What you posted are a few negative events. What you did not post are the few million or billion positive events that happened at the same time.

But positive and negative events don't cancel each other out. It's not arithmetic. If you have 1,000 excellent meals for every time you get poisoned, the 1,000 excellent meals really aren't relevant and they're certainly no consolation.

The point is, focusing on that 1 poisoned meal can be misleading. You might think, "How could we ever allow a poisoned meal!?", but if you are serving 900 million meals each day, it may be unavoidable. You certainly try to reduce it as much as possible, but you should not look at the 3 poisoned meals you serve out of 900 million and exclaim how the world has lost its morals and good heart, and Mankind is taken by the Devil.

"No Society Takes On the Characteristics of Its Exceptions".

That's a terrible phrasing. Every society generates the characteristics of its "exceptions" through its internal contradictions.

I removed the quote because the original source is too controversial, but how exactly do the many and real positive characteristics of a society get outweigh by a few negative and mostly overblown characteristics that are not even characteristics as much as exceptions, and in most cases are simply natural products of ANY and ALL societies (and in other cases just emerge due to the sheer number of overall events)?

That phrasing means that definitions describe the whole or major; they don't describe the minor... That is, I'm not going to describe the buildings of an entire city as derelict, when only a few are so.

But that's not how societies work. America doesn't have a school shooting problem because all human societies develop shooting problems, it has them because America specifically squeezes its youth in ways that makes them more violent.

> America doesn't have a school shooting problem because all human societies develop shooting problems, it has them because America specifically squeezes its youth in ways that makes them more violent.

That's actually a good point you're making against yourself, because I went to a public school from grades 4-12, and spent 5 years in state college. Not once was a gun fired. And most people will say the same.

What you listed are again exceptions...

America has 300MM people, 400MM guns, some crazy violent demographics, yet the "school shooting" incidence in the last 40 years can be counted on two hands. And from what I've heard, have been steadily decreasing.

Even if they were 10x the rate, they would still be exceptions to the rule.

> Yet the "school shooting" incidence in the last 40 years can be counted on two hands.

Wow, you are either not informed, not human (got like 100 fingers per hand?) or using some very narrow definition of school shooting (like children below 6 in Michigan).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the...

I've seen that list many times before and was even going to post it myself. I'm guessing you just skimmed over it and did not read the notes.

So let me rephrase, how many school shooting can you count on your hands that you knew about? I'm guessing you won't make it pass your two hands.

I'm not going to count crime infested ghetto area school shootings that involve a 70% dropout and incarceration rate, where one student shoots another over some argument over a girl. Nor gang related violence in those same schools. They will do that in and out of school as much as anywhere else. It's not related to any particlar place or time.

I'm not going to count a depressed kid that goes into the school to commit suicide in the bathroom. Nor someone that purposely shoots someone else in the butt and gives up. Or attempts to murder one single person at school because they don't know were that other person lives and it's convinent... All those things have nothing to do with schools.

What I'm going to do is only count real school shootings that involve someone walking in and trying to kill as many people as possible. And weight that against all the non-school shooting events in relation to the the number of pupils, schools, and days. Guess what happens then?

Data should always be filtered, outliers removed, then normalized or standardized.

This is practically a lesson in the misuse of data. However you define the metric you're measuring, you should be comparing America to other countries. By any measure, America has more school shootings than most other countries.

So its choice 3.

Enough to know that it's larger than ten. And knowledge of shootings is like the worst possible criteria. How many people you knew that died of asthma?

Why not count the crime infested ghetto? They are also result of current politics in one way or other.

I'm guessing with enough applied statistic any conclusion you wish can be reached. Also even by that statistics you'll reach a conclusion that American has a lot of school killings compared to other countries of similar wealth.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com