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Comment by quail | Hacker News Reader

Obama continues to push hard to steal what little privacy rights US citizens have remaining. He is openly hostile about it, and lies about it constantly.

Am I exaggerating here? The scary thing is I'm not. He's not done. It's going to get worse.

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Sadly, I think this is part of our problem. "Obama".

Attaching his name to this just makes it so that we all vote for a Republican next year, congratulate ourselves for getting rid of the guy who loved spying on us all, and everything stays exactly the same.

I'm not trying to defend him or say he is blameless here. I'm saying that it's bigger than who is in the President's chair at the moment, and I wish we could think about these things in a more systemic way.

Exactly. The problem is so far beyond partisan now that people still framing it in terms of "Bush" or "Obama" have the blinders on.

The problem is systemic and cultural, the federal bureaucracy is more influential on elected officials than elected officials are on the federal bureaucracy, at least in matters of intelligence and national security.

Every politician elected into this system faces extraordinary forces of compliance, and only a few on both the left and right (Wyden, Paul, etc) seem able to resist.

What is even more scary is that we have been in freefall in this regard mostly since at least Nixon signed the Banking Secrecy Act.

This was followed by Carter signing FISA....

Regan followed, signing among other things legislation to allow the military to enforce drug laws domestically as an exemption to Posse Comitatus. This meant that the military was involved in surveillance at both Ruby Ridge and Waco, and also directly provided military equipment and in some cases personnel to these operations (in addition to Navy SEALs raiding crack houses in some cities).

Then came Clinton and things got worse again with the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and some other laws.

Then came GWB, no further comment required.

And now we have Obama.

Whoever we elect screws us. That's the truth.

The purpose of elections is to give the populace the false idea that they have a choice. If they could actually change anything, they'd be outlawed.

What you can use elections for is to extort policies from elected officials. The problem is that means being willing to vote for the greater evil if you don't get the things the country needs and our country is unwilling to enter into that mentality.

I think you're missing the point that the actual important policies are not up for debate and are agreed to by both sides before the two winners are picked for us to vote on. All the electorate gets to decide on is meaningless stuff. Both candidates will always want the elimination of privacy, destruction of the middle class, complete subservience to wall street, etc. The electorate gets to decide on unimportant stuff like the skin color of the winner... it doesn't really matter because either winner will implement the same policies, although perhaps with slightly different PR campaigns.

A fundamental impedance mismatch is the public wants/needs policies. However they're only allowed to vote on two hand picked two sides of the same coin "leaders", not the actual policies. The "winner" is the candidate who tells the best lies about policies, which will of course be forgotten after inauguration, and both are going to do the same thing anyway so it doesn't matter very much which wins.

That's why voting is the final act of a series of political actions, and merely should be cast as an up/down "keep this guy" vote without looking too close at the alternatives.

We have to take over the conversation and stop listening to the challenger. The challenger doesn't exist. It is up/down on the incumbent.

I fail to see the point of that. By definition, both the incumbent and the challenger were hired by the same political action committee to achieve the same outcome by using different PR techniques.

Your suggestion is that the general public should slightly modify how they select which lie is told to them. The result will be they'll be lied to slightly differently, and no change in actual outcome.

With enough money, and it'll take a lot of money, the public could purchase their own candidates... That would be interesting, although unlikely. And there's an awful lot of intentional divide and conquer PR work already in place to prevent it.

Once wealth inequality and income inequality exceed a certain level the system spirals out of control until it crashes and reboots. In that scenario the most sensible way to limit total overall human suffering is to floor the accelerator and encourage the process, rather than hold it back, so it crashes quicker and we get back to normalcy sooner. Given that background, a lot of current events suddenly make more sense. Look at federal reserve policy, or pretty much anything in contemporary politics.

Although people often bemoan political apathy as if it were a grave social ill, it seems to me that this is just as it should be. Why should essentially powerless people want to engage in a humiliating farce designed to demonstrate the legitimacy of those who wield the power? In Soviet-era Russia, intelligent people did their best to ignore the Communists: paying attention to them, whether through criticism or praise, would only serve to give them comfort and encouragement, making them feel as if they mattered. Why should Americans want to act any differently with regard to the Republicans and the Democrats? For love of donkeys and elephants?

EXCERPT FROM

Orlov, Dmitry. “Reinventing Collapse.” New Society Publishers, 2011-04-06. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.

I used to disagree with you and Mr Orlov, but there is a point where apathy is the correct response because it frees up energy to build a better future through other means.

George Carlin had it right yet again...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxsQ7jJJcEA

The funny thing is that FISA was originally intended to curb the intelligence abuses that had come to light earlier in the '70s, in which phones were tapped, and international telegrams seized en masse, with no legal authority whatever. It doesn't seem to have been effective in that regard even before it was effectively gutted by the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, but it's still not quite of a piece with the stuff that came later.

I don't think that it's useful to be talking about Obama specifically. Before Obama there was Bush Jr, who was the sitting president when most of these programs were put in place. It should be clear now that it's not one specific President, or one specific party, but the whole political class that has been corrupted. Thinking things will get better at the next election will absolutely not help things, unless the issue du jour of the next election is privacy, and the new president chosen based on their commitment to privacy. Even then it's not sure whether such a President could successfully make meaningful change.

I lot of people were hoping Obama was the start of a new direction. I'm now hoping he'll be the last of the old direction. The big problem to solve is: how do you elect someone different? As long as the two parties get to decide who American can elect, democracy is a hollow gesture. And the media are all in the pocket of the main parties.

Honestly, it seems like only Al-Jazeera US might be the only independent news station.

One of the Wikileaks releases contained allegations that Qatar was leaning on Al-Jazeera:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/05/wikileaks-cable...

Yep, most people would say Al-Jazeera is not biased on the topics we are speaking about, but everyone has a corporate master somewhere.

see http://gulfnews.com/news/gulf/qatar/al-jazeera-turning-into-...

Thanks!

how do you elect someone different

Start by being intellectually curious about the person, who he is, what he has done on the past, what philosopies he is associated with. Quit labeling people who try to do this as wingnuts or racists or employing other logically fallacious arguments to try to shut down debate.

"lot of people were hoping Obama was the start of a new direction"

Anyone who thought that wasn't paying attention, of course, but it's not like that's a new thing.

And it makes sense: it's not like your vote is actually going to do anything, so why bother paying attention? Just go vote if you remember, and pick the guy with the letter by his name that you voted for last time. (Can look up Ilya Somin's writings regarding "rational political ignorance" for more on that.)

"As long as the two parties get to decide who American can elect,"

No, its one set of political campaign donors, not two parties.

One set of donors, hires two competing PR firms masquerading as political parties, to implement two different messages aiming at the identical goal.

Its relatively effective and stable as a technology for social control. Its also effective at benefiting the people who are running it, which is obviously not the general public or humanity overall or the environment or pretty much anyone but a couple 1%ers.

> I lot of people were hoping Obama was the start of a new direction. I'm now hoping he'll be the last of the old direction.

As long as people are hoping for some politician to deliver them from government unaccountable to the people, its not going to happen.

> The big problem to solve is: how do you elect someone different?

Elections are important, but they aren't everything. More needs to be done to think about "how do we effectively hold those we do elect accountable".

> As long as the two parties get to decide who American can elect, democracy is a hollow gesture.

To the extent this is part of the problem, it is probably more tractable if you realize that it is a problem effecting many elections, isn't amenable to a quick one-step fix, and that elections to the Presidency aren't the best place to start.

We -- all citizens of Western countries -- should seriously stop voting altogether. And I mean full stop. When the next election comes, nobody votes. That'll destabilize things right quick.

I think it'd be too difficult to execute this plan.

Not ever going to happen. All you've accomplished then is abdicated your vote to people who did.

Would be more realistic to elect a third party, meaning someone who is not part of the corrupt R/D duopoly.

More pragmatic would be to vote anti-incombant regardless of party until things change. Let the elected officials know that if they want a second term, they had better cooperate.

most people in the US already don't vote, and look what that has accomplished ...

There is no "we", but I also disagree that it would "destabilize things". I think that after a brief initial upheaval, it would stabilize things to a great degree, and in a positive manner.

It is a curious quirk of psychology that a single vote for a two major parties is considered to matter, despite being guaranteed not to sway the outcome, while a vote for a third party is considered "wasted". And even curiouser, choosing not to vote at all is considered the more rational option.

Here's hoping that the people eventually figure out that instant runoff can be implemented state-by-state.

"Here's hoping that the people eventually figure out that instant runoff can be implemented state-by-state."

I prefer approval, but hey, your state can have IRV and mine can have approval and thanks to the electoral college that doesn't break things!

Unless we're in the same state, in which case we'll have to agree on something I guess.

Unpack "approval" for me?

Honestly, I'm in favor of any modifications to winner-take-all. "None of the Above" would be a major win for the protest vote, with a huge meta-electoral effect even if it never wins. And while it would boost morale and turnout for presidential years, the real effect would be seen if we elected Congress that way as well.

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

Basically, you check yes or no for everyone, and the winner is the one with the most "yes" votes. Less expressive than IRV, but also simpler to understand and tabulate.

Belatedly: thanks for sharing. It does seem an easier sell, because the counting process is so easy to understand. It's not as favorable to third parties as IRV, because "[X] Minor [X] Major" obviously doesn't carry as much weight as "[1] Minor [2] Major", but at least it still kills the spoiler effect. While IRV seems more "pure" in an information theory sense, Approval is elegant in its simplicity.

That's mostly my views as well, yeah. There are a couple (narrow) weird cases with IRV, too... but IRV is unquestionably a tremendous improvement over FPTP.

"the real effect would be seen if we elected Congress that way as well."

Elaborate on that a bit - I know it's popular to say that Congress has a low approval rating, but no one votes for "congress" - they vote for their congresspeople, who typically have high approval ratings. There may well be other effects I'm not spotting, though...

> Here's hoping that the people eventually figure out that instant runoff can be implemented state-by-state.

Here's hoping that people eventually figure out that better voting systems can be implemented state by state, including non-single-winner systems where appropriate (e.g., legislative elections), and single winner systems better than IRV (which is pretty much the preference voting system that does the most to preserve the problems of majority/runoff) for the places where single winner systems are still needed, as might be the case with executive elections (or not, if you reform more than just the election system.)

Add a third option on the ballot for re-doing election with different candidates:

"Dont like either of these two (expletive) - come back with better ones".

If this option comes tops in the election, both parties pay a percentage towards the cost of next round. Can't say their donors would be very happy if this shit goes on for months. Oh my god, how will we function without a government? Well, its not like the government we chose is doing/gonna do all that better.

Atleast it'll slowdown most of the shitty laws that get passed with alarming efficiency.

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