Comment by jnbiche | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jnbiche | Hacker News Reader

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>Writing my representative and senators now.

That will accomplish absolutely nothing, except to legitimize those who have overseen this reprehensible development, and all the other political and social catastrophes of the past 30-40 years.

Our...political...system...is...fundamentally...broken.

Voting, writing your congressman, and helping elect another corrupt politician are all activities that do nothing to improve the status quo. Voting in particular helps maintain the facade that America is a functioning democracy, when in fact our only choices are two sides of the same coin.

The sooner the citizenry understand that, the better we'll all be.

Instead, work toward educating your fellow citizens about these problems, and why they're happening.

Refrain from spending your money on companies that back up the status quo. It's a hard task, but there are some major offenders (defense industry and banking industry are two big ones).

If you're entrepreneurial or technical, consider developing technical solutions to these political problems, that work around the problems or help solve them. This recent ycombinator company offering "justice-as-a-service" is a good example of this approach:

http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/20/tech/mobile/fixed-app-parking-...

They're starting small (parking tickets), but you have to start somewhere.

And there's lots of room for growth in the injustice sector.

Got it. Don't vote, don't attempt to hold elected officials accountable or even let them know in tangible communications about what I feel. Give up and disengage completely, educate other citizens on why they should give up and disengage completely, put my money into my mattress (or a credit union, I guess), and start a garden so I can feed myself. But where do I buy the seeds!?

I say get more engaged, but be pragmatic and protect yourself emotionally. I do believe that many, but not all, representatives would respond to increased personal communication. All of my conversation with former DC staffers has done nothing by reinforce this view for me.

But don't leave it there. Support causes you believe in, and if you can use technology or commerce to enact change positive change then that's even better.

On the contrary, he advocates a proactive approach to 'engage and inform other citizens' and start having people stop relying on a broken system, instead of taking responsibility for their actions and effectuating real change.

The problem is that his analysis is weak: the reason that there are two choices are because of people like him disengaging and not supporting a third choice.

Further, it's not the case that actions like those done by the NSA happened in a vacuum. The reality is that most of the country demanded, following one stinging terrorist attack that this must never happened again. The men and women of our military fulfilled that wish: at the cost of $20 billion a year, they delivered to us most of the globe on a silver platter, completely electronically dominated and ready to be watched to stop even a whiff of such a threat.

That our social demands (in aggregate) are childish, insane, bipolar, etc isn't their fault. They simply did what society demanded it needed to feel safe, what they saw as their duty.

The simple truth is that the current state of affairs is exactly what we've asked for, in large part, and that the most realistic way to reform it is to engage with other citizens and help them understand why their contrary and silly demands are contrary and silly.

All that pulling away from the political exchange will do is lead us down the path of a civil war (or other turmoil) as people who refuse to be part of the rule making also refuse to follow the rules.

> the reason that there are two choices are because of people like him disengaging and not supporting a third choice

I think this is untrue, or at least not the major factor. First-past-the-post voting seems to result inevitably in the situation the US finds itself in, with two main parties with no significant differences on most major issues, where voting for a third party candidate causes a spoiler effect.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo

Writing politicians is an early response. Not the last.

I am sometimes surprised that this type of argument gets downvoted. How can it be said that the political system is NOT broken? You`d think after all the information uncovered by Snowden this would be obvious to most of us.

Saying "the system is broken because it doesn't represent my interests" doesn't seem likely to go anywhere. Someone will always say that. Assuming you fix the system, whoever's interests are currently being represented will make the exact same complaint.

For the majority of American history, the system was fundamentally broken for women. That wasn't fixed by women sitting out and saying boohoo.

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