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Comment by pearjuice | Hacker News Reader

Like any other outrage in the past few decades. We have become soft and there is nothing you can do about it. Instead of writing intellectual comments on the matter, we should go down the street, burn some tires, overthrow the government; stuff like that. Yet here I am,thinking that no one will be brave enough to initialize or follow me if I would. They made us soft and we obeyed. Don't tell me there is a civilized road to solving this because the stakes are way too high for anyone to turn in what we have become.

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Americans don't know outrage. They've been trained from a young age to be apathetic and those that have the audacity to fight back have been systematically beaten down.

When's the last time they've had to mobilize the National Guard because there was a protest?

The entire American economy could collapse because of a giant banking scandal and people wouldn't even raise a fist in anger.

I don't think it's that we're not capable of getting angry or taking action. It's just that nobody can be bothered to do anything until something directly affects them.

The effects of PRISM are easy to ignore for most people because its not easily visible. On top of that many people actually accept it because they feel its a necessary trade off for security.

Add all that up with the fact that we get bored easily and that's how politicians are able to do just about anything they want. They just have to be a little more patient than the public.

The best part being these downvotes only proving the point.

People aren't protesting because like the article says...they really don't care. NSA spying doesn't directly affect them in any tangible way, so there is no reason for the average person to be upset. If people were being physically yanked from their homes and interrogated related to NSA spying intel, then it might be a different story I believe.

> Americans don't know outrage.

Americans have never experienced anything really worth being outraged about, at least not the current generation of people.

Spending over a trillion dollars on various nonsense wars, completely destroying the education system, massive youth unemployment, a political system with candidates entirely out of touch with their base, you know, nothing to get upset about.

The problem is if you asked a dozen people from the under-20 demographic what "Occupy Wall Street" is it's like half would have no clue.

Probably far more than half. Because even unemployed 19 year olds in the U.S. have a vastly better quality of life than hardworking people in the rest of the world.

Regarding your points:

1) The U.S., like every major western power in the last couple of hundred years, uses war to achieve political objectives. In the case of the Iraq war, it was to turn a regime that was slipping out from under America's thumb and replace it with one that was friendlier to the U.S. That happened. Regardless of whether you think the war was ultimately in the U.S.'s interests, it's hard to call something that so much of the population supported so long truly outrageous. "Outrageous" must be more than mere political disagreement.

2) There is nothing outrageous about the U.S. educational system. Adjusted for our socio-economic demographics, the U.S. performs about the same on international educational tests as western european countries: http://www.epi.org/publication/us-student-performance-testin.... In the U.S., the educational system has become the whipping boy for deep-rooted sociological problems. In a nutshell, whites enslaved black people for hundreds of years, systematically denied them the opportunity to advance, and when the Supreme Court forced integration just 60 years ago, whites responded by fleeing the cities to homogenous suburbs, leaving urban cores full of poor blacks and none of the infrastructure of functioning middle class society. On the other front, we let in huge numbers of low-income Hispanic immigrants, far more than we can effectively integrate into the larger society. In the face of all this, we have the gall to blame it all on the educational system.

When Chicago's public school system drag's down the average of the whole of Illinois, everyone blames the schools. They blame No Child Left Behind, they blame teachers, they blame the Department of Education. But it's not the schools' fault that so many of those kids have no fathers, that the neighborhoods are dominated by gangs, that the kids come from generations of families without any education. There is no educational fix to these sociological problems. The solution isn't within the government's power, and certainly not within that of the schools. The solution is all the middle class people from the Detroit suburbs moving back into the city, stabilizing the social structure of the city, sending their kids to Detroit public schools so as to dilute the influence of social phenomena like gangs that thrive in low-income ghettos, and to build functioning integrated communities with broad parental involvement. Butt hat will happen when hell freezes over, and until then people will complain ceaselessly about the government's failure with regard to education.

3) Massive youth unemployment relative to who else? U.S. youth unemployment rate (15-24) is right around the OECD average, below all of the big western European countries except Germany: http://www.economist.com/node/21528614.

> Adjusted for our socio-economic demographics, the U.S. performs about the same on international educational tests as western european countries

You've been very perceptive in recognizing the situation on US educational system, but you overlook the fact that the socio-economic class who's doing poorly is increasingly getting bigger. I think therein lies the problem -- and, the continuing streak of anti-intellectualism has this peculiar feature of worsening everything around it ten-fold, and it's extremely seductive because of the capitalistic factor (dumbed down movie/shows dialogues, dumbed down news, etc.). A vast amount of data at this point portends social unrest in terms of class warfare, politics, etc. What'll happen when unemployment keeps going up, when the clamor of "entitlement programs" gets more agitated, when school systems get even more stressed with funding issues? I really think that's where shit will hit the fan.

> The solution is all the middle class people from the Detroit suburbs moving back into the city, stabilizing the social structure of the city, sending their kids to Detroit public schools so as to dilute the influence of social phenomena like gangs that thrive in low-income ghettos, and to build functioning integrated communities with broad parental involvement. Butt hat will happen when hell freezes over, and until then people will complain ceaselessly about the government's failure with regard to education.

Right, exactly. So, the way I see it, there are a good many reasons for alarm. I spent my teenage years in American inner cities, so yes I know just how bad it is, I saw at least 2 fights per week or so breaking out in high school that would end up in police involvement.

Can you think of a solution? The best solution I can think of: boarding schools, that are run like military schools, that get teens away from the bad neighborhoods for at least 8 months of the year, that give them some tough love treatment to discipline them.

The only reason there's bad neighborhoods is because people have stopped caring, and the only reason they've stopped caring is because they're powerless to change anything.

There are some instances in places like Detroit where neighbors have banded together to fight off thugs, gangs, and dealers, and it seems to be working a lot better than relying on the erratic or indifferent response of local police forces.

The solution isn't military schools, it's people taking the initiative and asserting themselves, having a direct hand in reshaping their neighbourhood.

> The only reason there's bad neighborhoods is because people have stopped caring, and the only reason they've stopped caring is because they're powerless to change anything.

If they are powerless to change anything, then them caring or not is irrelevant.

The reason that there are bad neighborhoods is that the people that aren't "powerless to change anything" (who may or may not live in the neighborhood, but nevertheless influence it by their power, including the power to direct resources away from it) have either stopped caring or, more often, have active interests that are served by actions which hurt the neighborhood.

The solution has to be practical and doable. It seems to me campaigning for boarding schools as a solution to the ills of society and getting them open is more doable than somehow getting people to take the initiative.

> Can you think of a solution?

Honestly, I can't. I've recently been on a tour of the Delaware Valley for job-related purposes, and visited Camden, Trenton, etc. And I don't know what can be done. Ending the drug war would probably help, but I think we've got Iraq-scale rebuilding to do in some of our cities...

And yet, if we actually decide to do Iraq-scale rebuilding of our inner cities you'll see people shouting "SOCIALISM!!!" Makes me wonder how we ever won the populace support to spend that kind of money on Iraq/Afghanistan. I guess probably because it was packaged as a threat "If we don't go over there they're going to bomb us because they hate our freedom". So perhaps one line of campaigning to get funding for social programs for inner cities could be "If we don't go over in inner cities to rebuild them they're going to start coming into your suburb homes and steal your stuff and make your life miserable".

> When Chicago's public school system drag's down the average of the whole of Illinois, everyone blames the schools. They blame No Child Left Behind, they blame teachers, they blame the Department of Education. But it's not the schools' fault that so many of those kids have no fathers, that the neighborhoods are dominated by gangs, that the kids come from generations of families without any education. There is no educational fix to these sociological problems. The solution isn't within the government's power, and certainly not within that of the schools.

IT probably isn't within the schools power, but not the governments? Who alloctes law enforcement resources -- resulting in safe areas and gang-dominated ones? Who sets tax policies and, through them, drives the distribution of the rewards of the economic system? Who pumps as much as the rest of the world combined into military spending, over other priorities like, say, adult education, urban law enforcement, etc.

The problems you point to are, in many cases, not within the power of the schools to correct, but they seem to be direct products of government decisions about priorities, so I am suspicious of the claim that they are outside the power of the government to correct (outside the interest of the government to correct, perhaps.)

I think it's a cop-out to say that the problems are the result of the government's priorities. I think the problems are the result of peoples' priorities.

My view is that you can't have functioning, stable societies without strong social ties. And in the U.S. much more so than in Western Europe, those social ties have broken down, especially across racial and socio-economic lines. And when middle and upper class people have no personal investment in the social institutions that lower class people depend on, there is nothing the government can do to fix that.

I'll give you a concrete, personal example. I'm moving to Wilmington, DE because my wife is starting a job there. Wilmington is one of the most dangerous cities in the country, adjusted for population. It's also about 60% African-American, and 25% of the population is below the poverty line. My wife and I have identified one of the few neighborhoods in downtown Wilmington where we'd be willing to live, a new development by the riverfront. The development is literally walled-off from the rest of the city. I-95 divides it from the neighborhoods to the north-west. The Amtrak line, built on a raised stonework viaduct with only a few points of access underneath, separates it from neighborhoods to the north-east. The river and a wildlife refuge separates it from neighborhoods to the south and southeast. None of the people in the city who work for the law firms or the banks, or DuPont, etc, send their kids to the downtown public schools, and as a result have no investment in the quality of those schools (even though its overwhelmingly their tax dollars that fund those schools). The two groups of people live in a city where the downtown core is just a mile across in each direction, and yet somehow live and work in a completely disjoint set of residential areas and workplaces, segregated by race and class.

So tell me how the government is going to fix Wilmington, DE? Or Camden, NJ? Or Baltimore, MD? This is a situation that is replicated all over the country and it's intractable.

> I think it's a cop-out to say that the problems are the result of the government's priorities. I think the problems are the result of peoples' priorities.

Okay.

The problems are a result of peoples' priorities, as implemented through the government.

That doesn't make it any less within the power of government to stop causing problems. The things you point to about social ties are why it is not in the interest of the government (and the people who influence it) to correct the problems, not why it is not within the power of government to do so.

You can't legislate social cohesion. San Francisco, for example, tried. They made it so school assignments were heavily randomized and living in a wealthy neighborhood was no guarantee of your kid going to the local school. And it was a miserable failure of a policy. Instead of taking the chance of little Timmy going to school with 50% Chinese immigrants, families just left the city for the suburbs as soon as they had kids. They abandoned the policy just a couple of years ago.

You certainly can legislate to promote or inhibit social cohesion. (The family-priority structure of much of the US legal immigration system is one example of how you can promote it, and the poorly-aligned-with-demand per-country/per-category quotas and resulting huge immigration delays in legal, family-based categories are an even better example of how you legislate to inhibit it.) There's plenty of examples (on both sides, because US policy is incoherent as regards this goal) in other policy areas besides immigration.

What are some of them, outside immigration?

There are some social residence programs that place minorities/lower-class folks in areas with good schools, high average incomes, etc. If I recall correctly (I heard it on NPR a few months ago) the program had varying degrees of success -- some folks just couldn't fit in and opted to go back previous inner-city residences, while some actually saw measurable improvement in quality of life: children doing better in school, improved outlook and satisfaction.

You probably saw the research results of the crack baby studies -- as it turned out poverty plays an incredibly big role in how children grow up [1]. So I really think this is something we need to continue experimenting with. Sadly, these residency programs cost a lot and most communities are unwilling to fund it. So really the first step is convincing people the reality of these things -- e.g., my neighbor, an incredibly smart biomedical engineer, calls advocates of these programs "troublemakers" who want to "bring socialism" into this country.

[1]: http://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Family/2013/0725/Crack-...

You can't legislate social cohesion.

Singapore does. I don't know enough about Singapore to know how well that is working out, though.

The US has never been shy about using its military power, but to fight two wars of aggression simultaneously with only limited opposition speaks to how passive or passively supportive the population has become. Killing hundreds of thousands is just the cost of doing business, apparently. At least it wasn't Mexico where things would be awkwardly close to home, right?

> ...[America] let in huge numbers of low-income Hispanic immigrants...

They aren't low-income immigrants, they're immigrants who are paid low incomes. This is exactly the same as happened to the Irish, the Polish, and the Italians.

Your arguments basically boil down to race being a huge factor, but maybe it's more a case of racism than race.

As for unemployment, the United States is not as bad as the worst basket cases of Europe, but that's hardly worth celebrating. Unemployment has doubled according to the numbers you've provided. Isn't that a bit worrying? Isn't nearly 20% unemployment just a little high? It's like Spain was in 2005 and look what happened then.

> Killing hundreds of thousands is just the cost of doing business, apparently.

And always has been. The U.S. has been aggressive in using "military diplomacy" since the Spanish-American war, if not earlier. And when you're the dominant military power in the world, that's probably the winning play.

> They aren't low-income immigrants, they're immigrants who are paid low incomes.

They're paid low incomes because they have no education and little skills. Yes, their experience matches that of the Irish, the Polish, etc, but back then people weren't bashing the U.S. educational system for the fact that poor Irish immigrants weren't doing well in school. This is not an argument against immigration--its an argument against papering over the fundamentally different demographic factors at play in the U.S. when condemning its education system relative to that of Western European countries.

> Your arguments basically boil down to race being a huge factor, but maybe it's more a case of racism than race.

There is nothing racist about pointing out that the U.S. faces sociological challenges that most western European countries do not. It's the policies that led to those sociological challenges that are racist (slavery, segregation, white flight, the drug war).

> ...back then people weren't bashing the U.S. educational system for the fact that poor Irish immigrants weren't doing well in school...

Back then it was okay to bash them for just "being Irish" and there wasn't much of an education system to criticize.

The demographic challenges the US faces are not unlike those in Spain, Britain, France, or any country that's had to absorb a portion of its colonial population.

The US seems to favor hyper-segregation, where you have schools that are 99% black and others that are 99% white. Integrated schools, by and large, simply don't exist.

> The US seems to favor hyper-segregation, where you have schools that are 99% black and others that are 99% white.

The segregation of US schools is largely a product of the segregation of the US population more generally.

The NSA is collecting information; nerds rage at how the U.S. has become a third world dictatorship; lawyers argue about whether it's legal or not; the average American rightly realizes that nothing has happened that is worth burning tires and trying to overthrow the government over.

There is no civilized way to overthrow a government that no longer has the interests of its people at heart. Luckily, we don't live under such a government. At worst we have a bunch of misguided old people that don't realize that the internet is much more valuable to younger people than just the tool for commerce they perceive it as. At the end of the day, the kind of liberties that average Americans care about, the kind that affects the lives of Americans directly: being able to own guns, being able to get abortions, being able to belong to religious groups, however mainstream or wacky, being able to criticize the government, etc, are strongly in place. And despite the recession, Americans still enjoy among the highest standards of living of any large liberal democracy on the planet. Few Americans would trade places with someone in Spain or Italy, or the UK (with its oppressive laws re: speech and guns) for that matter.

It’s not simply apathy, and personally I think one of the most dangerous things is for American’s to blame ourselves for lack of change when the system is pretty much designed to minimize civil unrest.

The biggest issue is simply comfort. Most HNers work for pretty cool companies, but even then how many would face repercussions if they took the day off to burn tires in the street? Also this type of serious protest you discuss does happen for just a day, but maybe weeks (or longer). Many HNers would definitely face employment concerns if they took weeks off to protest, and most people outside the tech community would be fired/seriously repremanded as the employer/employee balance of power is extremely imbalanced right now.

The surveillance state is, imho, one of the greatest existential threats to individual freedom in the history of the US, but for anyone looking at the risk calculus it’s still a future threat: today you have tons of food, entertainment, a place to live and most people don’t actually feel the affects of the shrinking limitations on freedom (in fact the only people who do are those who are fighting against this changes, another point in favor of not protesting from the pov of risk).

So the calculus of pleasure means for most people protest is more painful than the current state of things. But there’s also the pain factor. Most Americans are aware of the incarceration rate of the US. We’re also aware of the terrible conditions in US prisons. We know the fate that became Manning, can only imagine what will happen to Snowden and under the current administration US citizens have even been targeted for assassination (no due process involved). Not only is there a threat of reduced pleasure to consider, you really, really don’t want to face punishment at the hands of the US government.

Finally there’s the completely uninteresting but real problem of geolocation: The US is a huge country, where are we going to meet? Even in DC today most protester are actually hired to protest, they aren’t concerned citizens but paid by a group of concerned citizens to protest in a formulaic and safe way.

Assaults on American freedoms are being extracted in such a brilliant way that pleasure/pain calculus won’t sway in favor of massive protest and unrest until the government has such power that such protests can be squashed before their inception (this is exactly why the surveillance state is so dangerous).

But please don’t turn your anger inward or towards other Americans: learn about tools that can fight the surveillance state (legal and technical), start small community discussion about these topics, and continue to fund organizations that are fighting for your rights in these domain. And yes keep being angry on HN, everyone who up or down votes your comment at least has to think about what is being said.

I don't think Americans are soft; I think they know that the odds aren't in their favour. America is a massive country, so it is hard to reach critical mass - the point at which people feel they can go out and "raise hell" without simply getting arrested/killed because their group is too small and lacking in support. For example, the Restore The Fourth protests were extremely tiny. They barely made a blip in international news, which tends to feature happenings in the US prominently. An uprising of that size would be extinguished almost immediately if it became violent or destructive. However, if the streets were filled with angry protesters, to the point where local police might not be able to handle it, then people would more open to revolutionary action. At a certain point, people will recognize the risk/reward balance is in their favor, but right now it is not anywhere close. I think you can blame the fact that Americans have fairly comfortable lives. If Americans were going hungry, it would be different.

In the USA, there's a chance to completely revamp the government (well, Executive and Legislative branches, anyways) every 6 years. No anarchy required.

That is a pipe dream they sell to keep people compliant. It costs a lot of money to run a campaign. Oddly enough we have these weird rules where the fund raising entities can hide where the money is originally coming from. Most likely because both parties are being funded by the same source, the whole two party system is a fraud that is used to keep people docile with the illusion of choice. Under the current system we have no choice, the whole thing needs to be torn down and rebuilt....

No one forces anyone to vote for any candidate. No argument that it costs a lot of money to run a campaign, and perhaps that should be changed. But ultimately, I think the majority of the country (myself included) thinks that the best way isn't to tear the country apart and start from scratch, it's to work with what we have. And outside of just money, there are plenty of other ways to get involved, starting in your community. Start with your local representatives if you want, and clean house from there. Go door to door in your neighborhood and talk to people one-on-one and get the movement started!

Again you can't change it by voting for candidates when they all bow to the same master. You must first remove those who control the system.

Mole people?

Seriously, who? CEOs? Wall Street CEOs? CEOs tend to act according to the board & shareholders, and if they don't, they tend to get replaced with someone else. The largest shareholders tend to be places who get money from 401k plans, or pension funds. Want to send a real message? Convince everyone to stop contributing to 401k's or their pension funds. The money dries up, Wall Street feels the pinch in a BIG way (to the tune of trillions), the big corporations fold / find a new CEO that will convince people to put their money back into the markets.

You should do more research into the subject, sadly, is well documented but people tend not to believe or acknowledge it. In fact the knee jerk react when it is mentioned is to call everyone who has looked into it a cook or a quack.

Regardless there is a group of individuals who have been pushing their agenda for well over a 100 years now, they have been instrumental in enacting federal taxes, the federal reserve, the moving off of the gold standard, and pretty much every war we have fought. The control the candidates and those who serve in their cabinets. You can start by looking at www.cfr.org.

Kings, Presidents, Congressman all are interchangeable and just pawns to them.

> It costs a lot of money to run a campaign.

That's exactly the barrier to entry. Obviously, it plays in favor of a few ultra-rich people.

And that's why they will try everything so money will NOT be taken out of politics.

Deleted comment

I love George Carlin, but I don't draw a lot of political opinions from his humor! It's easy to pick villains by using "they" and "them", because it's vague. Vote the bums out. The problem really is that everyone hates someone else's representative.

I guess if you want to take something away from that Carlin video, it'd be that people are lazy. If people did more political research before voting, we could be in a lot better shape. But instead, people (myself included more than I'd like) make their voting choices based on either A) political affiliation alone or B) political ads. People don't spend enough time to really think about critical issues because they're boring--they'd rather read reviews about the new XBox, or the new iPhone or whatever. It's no fun to seriously considering farm subsidies, pension funding for people you don't know, etc.

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