Comment by alan_cx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alan_cx | Hacker News Reader

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The obvious question is you why you believed were living in a free world while the US was kidnapping and torturing foreigners, while threatening countries by telling them they'd be bombed back in to the stone age?

I do very much agree with your points, but I don't understand why this issues is a tipping point. Since I began to understand politics, I have been as wary and skeptical of the US government as I have been impressed by the good achievements of the US. I've not believed in the idea that the US leads any sort of free world for years.

Or, if you are honest, is this the first issue that you feel affects you? Were you confident that you wouldn't be rendered, bombed or drone struck? But now you can be sure the NSA have your data and that it might actually matter?

If so, Im not judging you in any way. Its just I think a lot of people are possibly in that boat too, and it also might highlight why still a most people seem to dismiss this. They think it isnt or wont be a problem for them.

What has been blown for me by all this is the notion of freedom of speech. While we in Europe seem to have given that up, I used to think the US hadn't.

For me, this actually was the tipping point. In social groups I hung out I was usually the guy who'd defend America on numerous accounts, but in the last few weeks I've been bombarded by a load of information which I find to be truly chilling.

By the way, it is interesting to note how we separate our past history from our active perceptions of the place. America's early history is not too bright -- we did some of the most batshit evil stuff you could think of: genocide of Red Indians, slavery (which to me when I really sit down and think deep about, sometimes, seems worse than just killing a person -- it's fucking killing the very dignity and respect every human being is owed, it's depriving them of any and all pleasures to life). I don't think we've made much amends for it -- the cycle of poverty still persists for a lot of African American folks, there are rather few social programs that really try to help them in meaningfully substantive ways. There are folks alive to this very day who faced system institutional racism from our government.

We did some pretty evil stuff during and after the Cold war too -- someone linked this in another post yesterday: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentatio... -- this one truly shocked me:

    Researchers in the United States have performed thousands of human 
    radiation experiments to determine the effects of atomic radiation and 
    radioactive contamination on the human body, generally on people who were 
    poor, sick, or powerless.

It has suddenly become a lot more uncomfortable for me living in America in these few weeks after some reading (especially as I'm actually a foreigner to this land -- I escaped a different country through asylum some while back). It is apparently completely uncontroversial that United States experimented on poor people with radioactive contamination... how do I know the US won't poison me with some biological weapon as an experiment, or because I'm currently unemployed (and thus poor)?

Thanks for that. I understand your position a lot better now.

Interesting that you chose to escape to the US. So, its not like you had negative feeling form the start, in fact, the exact opposite. The US represented not just freedom, but perhaps life for you, perhaps too your family. So, I guess it must be quite hard for you to have to re-evaluate that.

For me, the jarring thing is that for years I was able to sit here in the UK claiming some sort of moral superiority and intelligent of policy/thought. I suppose that deep down I know that was BS, but in this spying think I feel we are actually worse. To be honest, the tow post 9/11 wars were a huge dent, but this is twisting the knife as it were.

The history of human civilization in general has been one of force and savagery, gradually (and not monotonically) becoming more civilized.

It's an interesting idea that a country (that is, the people living in a certain country) should have some kind of "original sin" for things that happened before they were born. Ask a German how they feel about that idea. Even so, there is nothing special about the United States in the respects that you mentioned. Learning about history is the antidote to that belief.

> It's an interesting idea that a country (that is, the people living in a certain country) should have some kind of "original sin" for things that happened before they were born.

Interesting, but not at all controversial, especially here.

Why, I can't say for sure. This NSA fiasco was just a wake-up call for me, personally.

But my theory is that if people are left comfortable enough, they won't question authority. Even when we hear of torture, corruption it's almost always happening to someone we don't know or have a hard time sympathizing with. The assumption is, if I am not doing anything wrong, why should I worry?

I am not a terrorist, I am not a criminal. But the real issue is that we don't live in a system governed by laws. We live in a system controlled by people and by all accounts, very greedy people. So the definition of "wrong" comes in to play.

What warrants "them" to take away your "freedom of speech" or "freedom to privacy"? Are you a drug smuggler, terrorist, child-pornographer, movie pirate or just someone who failed to account for a 5000 dollars on your last tax return?

Who gets to decide? It's not the people, that's for sure!

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