Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

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people are so fucking obsessed with their own little lives that they cannot raise their heads and look at - much less critically think about and analyze - what is going on around them. They don't have the type of mental bandwidth to even try to process the big picture.

I know! Why doesn't everyone just drop everything and pay attention to the stuff that you are interested in? Seriously, do you know how ridiculously egotistical you sound? You have no idea what those people do with their lives when they leave the coffeeshop, or indeed everything that's going on in the coffeeshop. The lady with the baby might just as easily be writing a book. The barista might hate TV and be looking forward to her cello lesson or some other factor. You're judging, and dismissing, people based on your completely uninformed guesses about what their lives must be like. This is as foolish as me suggesting that you don't value the perspective of the young mom because you're incapable of forming a relationship and starting a family.

You are drowning in your own hubris, and haven't stopped to consider the possibility that that your conclusions are not well-founded. There are insane implications to lots of things, like having enough nuclear weapons to destroy all life on earth many times over. And yet we've managed to avoid doing so. Spy satellites gather up enough data to map our every move, but when we look at how much imagery there is that helps to re-establish a sense of perspective. I suggest you ask your roommate why devotes time to volunteer projects instead of posting paranoid screeds on HN; you might learn something useful.

> I suggest you ask your roommate why [she] devotes time to volunteer projects instead of posting paranoid screeds on HN; you might learn something useful.

I'm printing this out and framing it in my office.

OK, but can you put the missing pronoun back? I cringe at the idea of you enshrining my lack of proofreading.

For the record, she is leading the volunteer organization I founded three years ago. I myself have moved onto bigger and better things, such as posting "paranoid screeds" on HN.

I think you have a deep, fundamental misunderstanding of what I wrote.

>>I know! Why doesn't everyone just drop everything and pay attention to the stuff that you are interested in?

It is not stuff I am interested in. It is something everyone should be interested in. WE ARE TALKING ABOUT PEOPLE'S FREEDOM. Why is that not something everyone should drop everything and fight for?

I think anigbrowl's post is itself a perfect example of the myopic and trivial mindset you explained in your OP. Let me live my life of narcissistic hedonism, or else fuck you! The government is taking away my liberties? I don't care, and that's equally valid as caring, gosh darn it! I like playing the cello!

err, the point of the OP was that people are too concerned with their own lives to be involved in politics. He wasn't claiming that it was an inferior mindset (myopic, trivial, narcissistic, apathetic), so he wasn't describing people like anigbrowl.

Or maybe, just maybe, people process the information they get about what the government is doing, and reasonably conclude that they're okay with it? Maybe it's possible for reasonable people to not believe that the NSA capturing information that even low-level IT people at AT&T have access to is not some grievous "taking away" of their liberties?

I have a lot of things on my plate (job, baby, etc), but I've though about the NSA spying, and guess what: I'm okay with it! After the Guardian walked back its initial claims and we saw what the NSA was actually up to, it amounted to:

1) FISC warrants to gather call detail records at Verizon;

2) A mechanism for Google, Facebook, etc, to easily transfer customer data to the government pursuant to valid legal processes.

It looks to me like the government took care to structure the scheme to stay within the bounds of the law, both statutory and Constitutional.

Would I prefer less data collection and stronger privacy protections? Sure. I'd also prefer universal healthcare and a reforms in federal educational funding. But I'm not going to rant and rave about the END OF DEMOCRACY if I don't get those things right now. And I didn't come to these conclusions because I don't have the "mental bandwidth" to juggle work and kids and also evaluate what I think about my government's actions.

>>Would I prefer less data collection and stronger privacy protections? Sure. I'd also prefer universal healthcare and a reforms in federal educational funding. But I'm not going to rant and rave about the END OF DEMOCRACY if I don't get those things right now.

The part where your analogy breaks down is that not having universal healthcare or reforms to federal educational funding are not things that infringe on people's freedoms.

I don't think keeping the government from seeing information that low-level IT people at AT&T or Facebok can see is, in Ben Franklin's terminology, "essential liberty." Indeed, I'm far more concerned about what kind of protections exist to keep my bank or my credit card company or my health insurance provider from seeing that information (i.e. none).

Sez you. Someone that's in ill-health for lack of affordable medical attention or unable to exploit their academic potential due to financial insecurity is facing considerable restrictions on their freedom. Equally, it can be argued that a Verizon customer whose call metadata ends up in an NSA database is not actually impacted by that data collection unless s/he had a burning urge to start calling 1-800-ALQAEDA.

All that call data could be misused for oppressive purposes. But you haven't offered any evidence that it is, other than your apparent conviction that all government ultimately ends up as tyrannical and oppressive, a conviction which I absolutely do not share.

Are you kidding me? Not having access to guaranteed-issue health care makes it impossible for many families to start companies and keeps them chained to full-time jobs just so they can be assured that they won't be bankrupted if they get appendicitis.

I don't think I do.

It is something everyone should be interested in.

Really? Who put you in charge of how people should order their priorities, or made you the arbiter of how people gauge their freedom? I understand that you find the NSA monitoring intolerable and consider it an imposition upon your freedom, but you seem baffled by the idea that anyone might have come to a different conclusion from you about this. You assume that it must be because their minds are taken up with other matters which you consider trivial, and that they simply don't have the 'mental bandwidth' to understand what's going on, unlike yourself.

Now, granted that this is true of some people, and there are a good many people out there that have simply never thought about these issues. But there are others (such as myself) that have thought about them and don't share your views. Historically it seems to me that the trend has been towards greater transparency, more responsive government, and a greater degree of individual autonomy. I hold this view in spite of the fact that I assumed the NSA was accumulating data on a vast scale before these revelations (both because it was obvious that the Patriot Act was designed to facilitate such information-gathering, and because of the existence of other systems that already existed for that purpose).

I have no expectation or especial desire to convert you to my point of view; you're perfectly free to disagree with it. What I object to is your assumption that there's no possible way that anyone could understand what's going on and not share your view. Posting in all caps doesn't make your argument any clearer, it just tells me that you're feeling frustrated by the discovery that there are people who don't share your perspective.

If you have time, I invite you to read this essay, 'The paranoid Style in American Politics,' which was written in 1965 but still remains entirely relevant today: http://archive.harpers.org/1964/11/pdf/HarpersMagazine-1964-... I offer it not to suggest that you are paranoid, but because it effectively sketches out the limiting nature of discourse based around Manichean assumptions and zero-sum representations of what are complex and multi-faceted issues.

"matters which you consider trivial,"

I've reread his post 3 or so times, and I never came to the conclusion that he had this belief.

"and that they simply don't have the 'mental bandwidth' to understand what's going on, unlike yourself."

If you lead a busy life, you won't have time, motivation, or enough attention to consider outside affairs. Is that false? What's the big deal?

I've reread his post 3 or so times, and I never came to the conclusion that he had this belief.

'People are so fucking obsessed with their little lives' is a dismissive statement, suggesting that the (imagined) concerns of others are too small to deserve the attention people give to them.

If you lead a busy life, you won't have time, motivation, or enough attention to consider outside affairs. Is that false?

Yes, I do think that's false. Being busy can crowd out all other considerations due to fatigue or necessity, but not necessarily so. To stick with the coffeeshop example, is it not just as possible that the busy barista spends her evening studying to be a civil rights lawyer or some other socially responsible task as she does mooning over a hypothetical boyfriend? People are quite adept at dividing their time, in my experience.

>>What I object to is your assumption that there's no possible way that anyone could understand what's going on and not share your view.

This is just one of the many misunderstandings you have about what I wrote earlier.

I did not say there is no possible way that anyone could understand what is going on. I said people seem to have no desire to understand it and make sense of it because they are, to put it bluntly, too self-absorbed. Some of this is due to choice, and some of it is due to circumstance.

Out of these two categories, I gladly and righteously pass value judgment on the former - I believe it is everyone's civic duty to care about what is going on in their country. If one makes the choice to not perform that duty, that means they are taking what they have (i.e. their freedoms) for granted, and that is the most disadvantageous thing they can do if the ultimate goal is for them to keep what they have. Thomas Jefferson said it himself: the price of freedom is constant vigilance. If you don't pay that price, you don't deserve your freedoms.

For the latter category, I cannot pass judgment because a lot of people do not have the means to determine their circumstance. If one has to work sixteen hours to pay the bills, then they won't have any energy to think about much else. I gave my own roommate as an example. Could she quit her well-paying job and become an activist? Sure. Is it reasonable to expect her to? Not really. But it would be reasonable to expect her to watch less TV, for example, to be able to pay attention to the important issues of our time.

I did not say there is no possible way that anyone could understand what is going on.

Nor did I attribute such a view to you. I said you assumed there's no possible way anyone could understand what's going on and not share your view. Omitting that last clause completely changes the meaning of the sentence.

Let me word it another way: I think you assume that anyone who does understand what's going on would, as a matter of course, share your opinion. I think a person could be just as well-informed as you are but hold an opinion that differs from yours. I hope that's clearer than my previous statement.

I don't want them to share my view, dude. I just want them to be aware of what's going on. To be informed. Disagreement is completely fine with me.

But, looking around, people are way, way more obsessed with the latest episode of Game of Thrones, for example, than the fact that they are being watched. And the reason is that they aren't even aware of the latter. They have shut it out.

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