Comment by nickysielicki | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickysielicki | Hacker News Reader

Obama's presidency makes me feel so swindled.

I voted for this man. I debated friends and did my best to persuade them to do the same. I genuinely believed in his 'Change I can Believe In' shit. I trusted that he was an honest politician who believed what he said. Not as much as Paul (my primary vote went to him), but at election time I knew that he had no chance and I felt that Obama was at least better than Romney. I'm not so sure that's honestly even true.

I feel as if the interests of young people are systemically downplayed as presidents are generally 50+ years old. I genuinely believe Obama is a good guy. I actually think George W. is also a good guy at his core as well. I just think they're incapable of truly understanding what the internet is about because they're not digital natives like we are. So they push these laws, and they push mass surveillance, because they fear what they do not understand.

The unfortunate thing is that it looks like the internet of my childhood and adolescence will be dead by the time any digital native could have found herself in office. Gone are the days of the wild wild west. The average 12 year old online spends his time on a locked-down tablet watching youtube poops, watching YouTube channels with professional production, and interacts with his friends on Facebook. Its not necessary to learn about the computer to use the computer, and its not necessary to explore the internet to consume the internet.

Its just profoundly sad. I might be pessimistic here but as someone who had their own computer in their room since I was six, (thanks to my father who was an EE) I know that the wild internet shaped the core of who I am; I feel persecuted by the masses of people who aren't curious enough about the computer systems they rely on.

Good points but I think internet as we know it now will evolve over time. Spaniards leaving Twitter for GNU social was interesting article, emphasizes the shortcomings of centralized services. I truly believe in future things would not be like today and maybe not easy to block as they are today.

Something that I'm a big proponent of is that its likely impossible to persuade the masses to move to something new if it doesn't provide a large advantage for them.

We need a social network that improves on Facebook and Twitter, not just in terms of preventing censorship, but in UX and performance and what it provides to boring Average Joe. It also cannot have any disadvantage.

Forgive my lack of imagination here but I don't know if that's actually going to be possible. How can we create a distributed platform that Average Joe can use? Facebook requires only an email address, and all his friends are already on it.

It's not impossible, but it is difficult, and I just don't see it happening.

I think the people who really need to understand these things (far before legislative or executive branches) are the people in the judicial branch of the government. Just consider that it's been centuries since the signing of the US Constitution and we're still ironing out the details of what it really means. The judicial branch is both the first and last line of defense against injustices.

First line of defense because things will happen, and conflicts will occur, and lawsuits will be filed long before people may even understand that there's some underlying paradigm that needs to be addressed in the form of new laws.

Last line of defense because even after laws are created by legislative and laws are upheld by the executive branch, there will be critical issues that will need to be addressed when a case finally gets to trial that were perhaps never considered when laws were created or when people were put in jail (in this case assets seized) for their alleged wrongdoing.

Just for the record (may be unpopular in this thread). I think if you use 24 hr news cycle to inform yourself about people in politics you should already consider yourself highly misinformed.

Personally I think, when the dust settles, Obama will go down as one of the greatest presidents in US history.

Somehow, I don't think John McCain or Mitt Romney would have made any better paragons of civil rights or of a restrained executive (though it was hard to believe Obama would be worse than Bush in that regard). It's a political system created by the bipartisan 'one party with two wings'.

But what was disappointing was the primarily Democratic Party 'peace movement' which rallied so hard against Bush's wars and then dissolved away as soon as Obama got elected. People will go along with the worst kinds of abuse if their political favorite is doing it.

I agree. By far the worst thing Obama has done is his continuing of wars, his drone strikes, and the additional military action hes done in the middle east.

Romney probably wouldn't have been better. Its hard to imagine he would have been worse though.

But with regards to McCain, you should go look up some of what he had to say before he was Candidate McCain. I think he's one of the better members in the GOP.

He hates citizens united.[1]

He understands why young people like Snowden.[2]

He understands that our torturing is unacceptable (given he was a POW, this makes sense).[3]

So yeah, I like him more than most of the back-asswards GOP.

[1]: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/12/john-mccain-citizen...

[2]: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/aug/11/mccain-young...

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wR7qsQDWVPU&feature=share

> I don't think John McCain or Mitt Romney would have made any better paragons of civil rights or of a restrained executive

They didn't campaign on those issues whereas Obama did, explicitly.

G.W was a Goog-Magoog mumbling idiot, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2009/au... (yes, he may still have been good).

That said, I think Ron Paul is awesome - although IMO he's a bit too libertarian. Definitely not charming enough for contemporary sensibilities, however.

Totally agreed.

What drew me to Paul was the way he spoke. He was this frail looking old man that mumbled in debates, which the general public sees negatively, but to me it just made him so genuine.

The guy believes everything he ever said. He's honest. He doesn't change his opionions to pander to audiences. He doesn't try to go all Hollywood and make agreeable soundbytes. He lays all the gory details right in the open, and you can see his thought process as he goes along. This doesn't bode well for the political debate world where you're limited in time and have to give a bunch of elevator speeches.

Most politicans will tell you how they feel, and then say why they feel that way, where Ron Paul brings you through his thought process. What this means is that even where I disagree with him, I understand where he's coming from.

"This doesn't bode well for the political debate" ...which is precisely why all this (the "zeitgeist" ?) is so worrying.

Even with all the pessimism that I express here about the future of the internet, I think that the internet can and is fighting against this. We need an educated voting population. One with an attention span that's longer than 60 seconds. This is difficult to do. But more importantly, for those who do have the attention span, we need to provide a way for them to get the debates that they deserve.

I hope that someone on HN is building a better US debate platform. I want to see a back-and-forth between the 2016 candidates that isn't limited to 140 characters or 60 second increments. I want to read paragraphs and paragraphs of their reasoning, and I want to see candidates criticize each other asynchronously.

I don't think the Internet is doing anything good.

If you have a wide reading, you'll quickly realize that you can easily predict the positions taken by articles, by simply looking at the outlet publishing it.

No one cares for the truth, or for the middle path.

I don't think they don't understand, but rather they don't care. Obama is at least a decently smart guy. After all these repeated infringements by the government, there's not really a chance that he's somehow unaware.

Look at the first few pages of this: https://www.eff.org/document/appellate-court-opinion

See how the court chooses their words to paint a simple technical action such as changing a user agent to be this inherently malicious thing that only an expert hacker would ever do?

I believe that is shared by everyone in government. They just do not know what's going on, and they fear it.

Because of this, I think Obama lacks the wherewithal to understand how this legislation could possibly hurt technical people that are not malicious. There's a collective fear in government of anyone technical.

I think that if Obama had a working understanding of computers, he wouldn't be pushing for this. He'd understand how it could hurt the good guys.

Maybe I'm naive though.

It seems a bit improbable that everybody in the government is not wise enough to see what they're doing.

I think I fall on the opposite end of spectrum from you, as I tend to think that 99% percent of the politicians holding office at high levels don't actually care about their constituents. I have yet to see any evidence that contradicts my current belief.

If Obama doesn't fully understand what he signed, that would be even more frightening than him not caring.

Rather, "don't care to understand".

After the first four years of his presidency, Obama had a shocking record of human rights violations. This was heavily publicized in the press. You must have known about it, and yet you still voted him in for a second term.

What was your rationale for doing it a second time, even when the warning signs were clearly present?

Could you or anyone else who voted Obama in for a second term answer this?

Please stop downvoting this guy, it's a fantastic question that challenges me and others to think critically about their actions.

I'm a bit of an edge case, I just barely wasn't old enough to vote in 2008.

In 2012 I would have much preferred to vote for the Green Party. I would have preferred to vote for Ron Paul. I might have even preferred to vote for McCain if he was running.

But my idealism couldn't overcome the fact that I live in a swing state and Mitt Romney would have probably been even more devastating to the issues I care about.

I'm not happy about having my hand forced, but that's just a problem with the US two party system and that's a topic for another day.

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