Snowden’s biggest revelation: We don’t know what power is, nor do we care | Hacker News Reader

Snowden’s biggest revelation: We don’t know what power is, nor do we care

pando.com

94 pointsnpalli24 comments

"the only thing close to a politics around leaking is libertarianism, the worst of all political worlds."

Funny how often libertarians get this treatment even after so many prominent examples of representing the majority sentiment before the majority is ready for it, e.g. on war and pot.

I'd say the worst of all political worlds is the one in which you blindly support the actions of whichever leader bears your label. http://www.volokh.com/2013/12/24/liberals-conservatives-swit...

Eh? Confirmation bias-much? People have been against war, and pro-pot for decades, and most of them have not been libertarians, unless you want to claim the hippies were libertarian.

"Other people were also right" is not an argument against libertarians being right about things.

And isn't that the point? We should be celebrating and expanding on the opposition that exists, not dismissing it for lack of "our label".

No, but it is an argument that libertarianism is incidental to them holding a few views that happen to be popular.

Lots of people value freedom, and many of them are pro-pot and anti-war because they believe the alternative to be oppressive.

Libertarians are a narrow subset of this who subscribe to an absolutist philosophy that they believe will maximize freedom. Many people who value freedom strongly disagree with libertarianism as a means to achieving it, even though they sympathize with the desire.

Your characterization of libertarians as people with an absolutist philosophy that they believe will maximize freedom applies only to a subset of people who identify as libertarians.

If true, that supports my point further.

..and to reply to your later addition - there is no reason to celebrate libertarianism if you think it's a damaging philosophy just because libertarians agree with you on a few issues. Libertarianism isn't an arbitrary label.

I - for one - think that libertarianism is just as bad a problem as "the security state" (or whatever label you want to apply to a state-run security apparatus which appear to be beyond the rule of law).

>blindly support the actions of whichever leader bears your label

No, rather than being the worst, that avoids saying pretty much anything of substance about the political world at all. If the leaders are well-chosen and accurately labeled, you've actually described the best system.

i don't think it to be the worst of all political worlds, but isn't libertarianism like an anti-politics? cutting the political system down to minimum size, letting the economic system fill the vacuum?

Sensationalist writing to stir activity. That's all that's coming from the author.

There are many different schools of thought carrying around the word "libertarianism" but yes, they are in each their own way anti-politics. It's not left vs. right, liberal vs. conservative, but authoritarianism vs. freedom.

libertarians are absolutists. They are always on the same side of issues. So obviously they will be on the right side sometimes. But they are on the completely wrong side on other issues because they see things in black and white. they cant imagine things being more complex than that. There have been liberals and conservatives on the right side of these issues from the start.

I have no idea why author wrote this sentence. It seems completely out of context to me. Anybody care to explain?

I think the conclusion is wrong. Many people care about many things. But most of us aren't really equipped to lead a movement, and most self-organizing movements lack the focus and ability to put aside differences to achieve more than modest goals.

Put bluntly, we're (myself included) waiting for a King or Gandhi to take the reins and lead us to the promised land. Snowden can't lead us from Moscow or jail. The Dalai Lama and Suu Kyi have their own problems. And let's face it -- who wants their dirtiest secrets aired on CNN and Fox? Because that's the price of fame.

Mark Ames (Exiled, NSFW) new long reads have genuinely improved the respectability and depth of Pando Daily, since its recent merger with NSFW.

People do care what power is. The problem is the media/leaders do not seem to want to engage the public in a dialogue about the dimensions of the Snowden leaks.

The reason for that is that all media in the United States (at least the power houses that matter) is controlled by the government, whether directly or indirectly. The last of our defacto checks and balances is basically gone too.

Compound that with a good amount of people who are mostly comfortable in life, and yet get zero citizen based activism.

I am not american, but from the outside it doesn't look like the media (power houses) are controlled by the government. it more looks like the government and business interests are so closely aligned (and often personally contiguous) that there is no major disagreement between the media and the gov. please, i would be glad to be shown otherwise.

I agree with you about media. But I think lack of activism comes down to confusion. Similar to the age of the robber barons, when the American middle class just couldn't make sense of the monopolies and scandals that were forming.

"They knew that all these scandals were somehow a part of the enormous changes that were happening to American society. But they also knew that the new technologies and giant industries were bringing amazing benefits and transforming their world and the way they related to each other. Nobody seemed to be able to understand the true dimensions of what was happening."

From a recent (and very long) Adam Curtis article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/WHAT-THE-FLUCK

This should make US citizens angry, angry enough to go to Capitol Hill once a year to hustle representatives on a particular issue.

Example: Public funding of campaigns and limits to private funding is something that only engaged voters can push, because they won't stop feeding at the trough of corporate power voluntarily. (Free (corporate) speech vs. naked corruption.)

This is probably my favorite (not strictly tech) news of the year!

It is brilliant and thrilling to read from start to finish.

I never read before about this story of the two NSA analysts defecting to the USSR during the Cold War and 'whistleblowed' from Moscow many of the agency's secrets in a similar manner as Snowden's - after being unable to do so domestically.

This article is a great and sad reminder of the famous quote “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it”.

> Snowden’s biggest revelation: We don’t know what power is, nor do we care

...until we feel the resulting pain, which means it will be too late b/c the people in power will have built enough protections to ensure their position (= even less democracy).

Isn't it just voltage times current? :)

Well, it's also R*I^2 and (V^2)/R.

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