For me, Obama has become inaudible; I don't care anymore about what he says.
I'm more interested in his actions; among these we find (by decreasing order of importance):
- use of drones to indiscriminately kill civilians, "suspected terrorists" or their children (cf. the murder of 16 years old American citizen Abdulrahman al-Awlaki)
- the detention, and ruthless and aggressive prosecution of Bradley Manning
- force-feeding Guantanamo detainees on hunger strike, depriving them of even the right to end their own life
I'm not a US citizen, so what I think about Obama really doesn't matter; but he must have set some kind of record in the amount of goodwill he was able to destroy during his time in office.
These political discussions on HN are awkward, and I wish they'd stop.
It's not because political discussions aren't important, they are, but because I don't think this is a useful place to have them.
Counterarguments are self-censored, because any moderates calmly pointing out hyperboles tend to be downvoted by the more passionate participants in the discussion.
With the moderates bowing out, online voting systems quickly gel into two extremes, maybe a far right and a far left. That's not sustainable though, one side quickly gets bigger and wins. The losing side now is best off self-censoring, because why get downvoted when you can just comment on other topics? You eventually get a political monoculture representing one extreme, with no voices of opposition or moderation.*
No moderation system has yet promoted any useful political dialogue, because you can't convince the 5% of people who are most emotional to rate argument quality independently of personal beliefs.
That's why, in general, I'm opposed to the political pulpit of HN, even for positions I agree with. It's a bad medium for good discussions on issues of significant controversy.
* (What's admittedly tricky is sometimes a political monoculture is the correct result. If someone made arguments on behalf of the KKK, we don't need a full and fair debate providing a false equivalence between both sides. One side is just wrong. The problem is, with politics, everyone thinks they're arguing against someone else who is just wrong, just like the KKK. There's no objective way to determine whether or not both sides of a discussion hold merit worthy of a full debate, or whether we should just downvote one side out of the discussion before it leaves the gate.)
Snowden unveiled a horrifying truth about our government: widespread surveillance has been combined with a class of officials who do not face consequences for breaking the law. I don't think it's hyperbolic to say that the Constitution is facing an existential threat. Normally I would be sympathetic to the view that politics should stay off HN. But this feels different. I would hope that people wouldn't self-censor their counter-arguments, however. The possibility that things aren't quite as bad as I suspect helps me sleep at night. And the truth is, there is reason for hope.
The Constitution is not under any kind of "existential" threat. You should be more worried about citizens not knowing their own Constitution than you should be worried about the government breaking it.
Literally any valid view of American history would immediately demonstrate that we are moving forward in terms of overall liberty, not backward. With the possible exception of disenfranchised minority groups and lower classes, there has been increasing political transparency and quality of life in every respect, and the former are only still mistreated because of the power vacuum in their communities.
The only reason why this is so outrageous is because people have short memories - I doubt many people are as shocked at this who lived through the Nixon Watergate scandal. That kind of corruption wouldn't so easily take place today.
Politics isn't a linear continuum from right to left, and the position between two extremes isn't necessarily more rational, even if the positions at the two extremes that you have chosen to represent right and left are both wrong.
This is the most sensible post in this thread. A good example is the user rayiner being down voted for an opposing opinion down further in the thread. He has not trolled, he has just made an argument that people disagreed with and he is being down voted. The political discussions on HN have become a pretty one sided affair (even though it is a side I for the most part agree with) and a net negative as a whole.
Ironically enough your post is being downvoted. You are not allowed to disagree with the hive mind on this topic or you risk being ensnared in it's wrath.
> These political discussions on HN are awkward, and I wish they'd stop.
I think "Worse is Better" applies here. Political discussions in online forums (or anywhere) aren't ideal, but I still think it's better to have them than not to.
I think political discourse is important, and smart folks should engage in it.
HN I'd actually say has better discourse than just about anywhere else online, as hackers, more often than not, are open to revising their opinions and ideas based on objective fact. After all, you wouldn't get terribly far coding were you to doggedly retain irrational beliefs about the subject matter you're engaging in.
As to downvoting - not so much, I don't think. HN's moderation system is pretty effective in ensuring that poor voters and contributors don't get to continue doing so.
The SNR here is still much better than, say, reddit.
Finally, the argument of "we shouldn't talk about this, because it's polarising" is a dangerous one, as ultimately it serves only to stifle discourse.
From what I gather the main reason for keeping religion and politics off HN is to prevent people from losing respect for each other due to opposing views on either of these subjects.
I'm not sure if that's a net benefit or a net negative (it looks to be a benefit), one would hope adults can at least agree to disagree.
You know that's not what's happening on HN, Jacques. What's happening is that the majority of HN politics commenters support a single analysis of what's actually happening in the world, and go out of their way to demonize and insult anyone who questions that's analysis, even when it's evident that the people they're insulting roughly agree with them. On HN in 2013 we can't even agree to mostly agree.
The worst bit about this is attempting to sensibly devil's advocate another viewpoint, then find out you're pitted 10 to one and have completely unrelated comments downvoted to oblivion just so they can prove a point. That, or all-caps comments responding to one single sentence, or people making false rebuttals that seem as though they didn't read your comment...the list goes on and on...
I disagree. From my experience trying to argue logically against the impassioned HN mob, the real reason to take politics off of HN is because of the sheer volume. There's too many people who haven't done any research, who just see headlines with buzzwords and believe them, then regurgitate their contents in arguments. Then they fallaciously argue those points and get increasingly bitter until it's pointless to continue.
No you don't. You participate almost exclusively in political discussions on HN, and when you do, you routinely attack the people you're talking to, for instance when you told this commenter to "use their brain instead of their TV for once":
In ~75 days of comments I didn't see you once acknowledge a point anyone else here made, even one that agreed with you. It appears that in the past ~quarter or so, you haven't observed a single argument that you managed to simultaneously disagree with and "respect".
We should be able to presume that you know your own comments better than I could know them in 5 minutes of skimming, so I invite you to prove me wrong and show me the place in the last 2 months where you demonstrated this appreciation of well-formed comments you disagree with.
OK - I respect you. I find myself not infrequently disagreeing with your positions, but you more often than not argue them cogently and with objective evidence - as above.
Actually, I take your point, in its entirety. I can be quite the little shrike when it comes to political discussions, and I often manage to undermine my own point with my approach - although I think you have just managed a pretty great "the worst of" collection!
That said, just to provide you one recent little counterexample -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6180222 - looks, there's me responding to your actually also reductio ad absurdum comment (it's an acronym so he's scared of it), in a balanced fashion!
But more often than not I don't feel the need to go "let's agree to disagree", in part because I loathe the phrase, and in part because even if I get and appreciate someone's counterargument, if I don't agree with them I'm unlikely to laud it.
But... I think you're right about the last few months. The Snowden affair has bought out the raving pareidoliac in me, and I've slewed from largely discussing engineering and science to, as you say, almost purely politics.
I didn't say you were scared of the acronym. I said people were scared of the acronym. That should be a non-controversial observation.
In fact, the attempt to distill a simple observation into a pointed personal attack is a good illustration of the kinds of bullshit arguments that happen on political threads here.
I don't feel good about singling you out and do appreciate the calm response to what was certainly an aggressive comment upthread. Please understand, I don't know you or really anything about you; it's not personal. My problem is with politics on HN.
No, I know you didn't - but it could have been taken that way, just chose not too. "People" falls under "weasel words" and is a handy debate tactic for framing your opponent's argument without overtly doing so.
Anyway - I see your point. I too worry that we're a) septembering and b) potentially balkanising on lines that this community shouldn't be balkanised upon.
I just try to take the optimistic view that HN'ers are collectively wise and mature enough to not get put out by internet bar fights, and to see them for what they are, without losing the signal.
> the argument of "we shouldn't talk about this, because it's polarising" is a dangerous one
You're right, as moderation systems and communities go, this is one of the better ones.
Please note, though, I wasn't saying we shouldn't talk about this, we should. I was saying we shouldn't talk about this with a voting system attached, because that structurally predisposes a forum towards a one-sided discussion.
In hindsight, I probably should have just solicited an "Ask HN: What's the best forum moderation system for political discussions?" instead of hijacking this thread.
US citizens have the ability to express their opinion on him through votes. That said, I am not sure the alternative would be much better. I believe the American people would benefit greatly from having more than two viable alternatives when they vote, as the two current alternatives have similar opinions in many questions.
Actually what you need is proportional representation. First past the post almost guarantees that people will vote for whoever they think will "stick it" to the party they don't like; i.e. a two party system is inevitable.
You can't really have proportional representation for the role of President, unless you want to split up the roles (head of state, commander in chief, chief executive, etc.).
> You can't really have proportional representation for the role of President
American voters don't elect the President, anyway, they elect Presidential electors; if you had more proportional (compared to FPTP single member districts) representation for the Congress [1], and PR within each states slate of electors for the Electoral College (for the EC, party-list proportional could work rather than candidate-centered), and then change the rules for the EC so that the whole EC meets physically and has a set time to elect a President and VP by majority otherwise those elections fall to the House and Senate, you'd neatly solve the problem of duopoly.
[1] Without abandoning candidate-centered elections and equal representation in the Senate, my preferred method of doing this for the Congress would be to add senators so that each state had 3 instead of 2, elect a slate of 3 Senators from each State every 6 years using Single Transferrable Vote, and also elect the House by STV every 2 years, dividing states up into House districts as follows:
If a state has 1-5 seats in the House, it has one district;
If a state 6 or more seats in the House, it is divided as evenly as possible in to districts of not less than 3 and not more than 5 members.
But that's just another election system with different attributes of subjective value. Any choice of election system is just a compromise between many desirable criteria, some of which are mutually exclusive. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_system#Compliance_of_sel....
Perhaps a primary election where the parties select between a gaggle of variously qualified candidates with a nationwide vote? Sounds like a great idea. The hard part would be getting voters to participate in it since it would be about as interesting as lower level (state/county/city) elections, which have abysmal turnout.
> The only way this could happen is if US voting system for presidency changed to a direct, 2-turn election.
If by 2-turn you mean majority-runoff, that still has perverse incentives against voting for other than the more preferred major party candidate, though slightly less so than does plurality.
> If by 2-turn you mean majority-runoff, that still has perverse incentives against voting for other than the more preferred major party candidate, though slightly less so than does plurality.
Highly less, I would say.
When the two most voted candidates go to the second round, you may vote for a third candidate knowing that, in case this preferred one fails, there is still the chance to vote against the one you hate more in the second round.
In a single-run voting, people are more compelled to vote against the candidate the hate more, instead of voting for the one they like more.
Not really. Its not like majority-runoff isn't a commonly used (in the US, even), highly studied election method, known to have very similar effects in terms of reinforcing duopoly to plurality.
I've long thought this as well. I think breaking up the cable monopoly and making large news sources compete against smaller independent ones is the only thing that will break the republicrat death grip on power. The debates have to not matter anymore.
It's not hard to see that US, China and India are big players -> they bully others. If you are little and bullied -> you just have to care even if you don't want to.
As a Norwegian I am not very happy about that one. We messed up big time.
It was silly enough to give the Nobel Peace Prize to somebody who hadn't really done anything worthwhile yet (but showed promise), but then to have that person act in such an extreme opposite to what the prize is supposed to stand for is just unreal.
I'd have expected that after the Rabin-Arafat pre-emptive prizes, they would have learned. I suppose they at least "held & promoted peace congresses" even if they did ultimately fail.
I was under the impression it was given to Obama for being the first non-white male president of the US, something many consider Nobel-worthy in and of itself.
That said, he could have done a better job living up to it.
The reasons cited by the committee was his "promotion of nuclear nonproliferation" and reaching out to the Muslim world.
That being said - a few drone strikes is a lot more peaceful than starting two big wars like his predecessor did.
Personally, i think we should never underestimate how petty people in power can be: I think the committee handing out the prize were like star-struck teenage girls and wanted to meet Obama.
A few drone strikes? An optional war in Libya. Continuing a failed war in Afghanistan. Continuing to operate Gitmo. Continuing and expanding the spying on US citizens and others. If anything, Obama has expanded warfare to anyplace in the world that can't stop drones. Peaceful isn't an adjective that should be used in conjunction with this President.
With a UN mandate, almost completely fought by the Europeans.
> Continuing a failed war in Afghanistan. However what he is doing is quite different from starting a war in Afghanistan.
Here you might have a point.
> Continuing to operate Gitmo.
Congress did that.
> Continuing and expanding the spying on US citizens and others.
This is terrible.
> If anything, Obama has expanded warfare to anyplace in the world that can't stop drones. Peaceful isn't an adjective that should be used in conjunction with this President.
Relatively peaceful compared to W. That is what I said, and I think it is accurate.
>The reasons cited by the committee was his "promotion of nuclear nonproliferation" and reaching out to the Muslim world.
That may have been the stated reason, but I doubt it was the real reason. Would a white male president have received the Nobel for that? Doubt it.
I think many people interpreted it as being awarded to Obama for having busted the glass ceiling, even if the Nobel committee went with a more pedestrian official explanation.
It happened with Kissinger before. If one were cynical, one might assume that the closed Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize committee, entirely different to the Swedish Nobel Prize committee (started by Alfred Nobel), may have been used as a PR mechanism by outside parties for quite some time.
You don't think the Peace Prize he got for "helping to establish a ceasefire and U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam" (Wikipedia) wasn't earned?
For those of us who are hawks, it was followed by a 150,000 man armored invasion of South Vietnam, employing more tanks than used in any WWII battle. Which the South crushed with the help of US ammo and air support, only 40,000 managed to make it back home sans their equipment.
That worked the 2nd time they tried it due to Watergate denying the South ammo, which I don't believe he had anything to do with. But no matter how grim the outcome in Southeast Asia, including the Cambodian genocide, outfitting the North with three complete armored armies (the first was used up piecemeal) was critical in bankrupting the USSR and the peaceful end of the Cold War, which otherwise could have ended in even more megadeaths. And I think he gets some credit for keeping us alive when the Democrats turned dovish after one of their's was no longer in the Oval Office.
Peace through victory? Maybe they should have a separate Nobel Peace Through Victory prize that you get for killing the most civilians that year in order to create a lasting peace.
At least I'd know where to aim my spit. The mixed-up nature of the current prize is for the birds.
Teddy Roosevelt's 1906 one ratified the Japan defeats of Russia.
No awards during WWI except to the International Red Cross (ICRC).
1927: Ferdinand Buisson, France, Ludwig Quidde, Germany: "[For] contributions to Franco-German popular reconciliation" Well, at least they tried....
Same for WWII; the ICRC did fully earn their prizes to my knowledge.
While he didn't get an award for it, George Marshall was the USArmy Chief of Staff, top dog in uniform along with Admiral Ernest King.
It was rather delayed, but Begin and Sadat's 1978 prize ratified Israel's 1967 Six-Day War victory.
Excepting perhaps Norman Borlaug (Green Revolution), Lech Wałęsa (key role in the peaceful end of the Cold War), and Gorbachev (ditto, not that that was his intent), I don't think any of the awardees, or possibly all of them combined, did as much for "peace" (saving lives) as Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin did in ending WWII (Stalin of course gets a big asterisk because he was instrumental in starting it, and didn't join the other side until a figurative gun was at his head (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Barbarossa) ).
E.g. the "Greater East-Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere" was killing an estimated quarter million people a month when we terminated with extreme prejudice Imperial Japan 68 years ago this week.
It's a silly thing to begin with. I think many people didn't realize that the Nobel Prize for physics is completely different beast from the Peace Prize.
For what it's worth, I suspect Obama would have declined the prize if it were possible to do so. It came at a really inconvenient time.
> I suspect Obama would have declined the prize if it were possible to do so
It's possible to decline the Nobel Peace Prize. For instance, when the prize was jointly awarded to Henri Kissinger (Kissinger) and Le Duc Tho, Le Duc Tho declined to claim his prize and the associated rewards, because he didn't want to share a prize with Kissinger.
Not to nitpick infinitely on this question, but not only was it possible politically for Obama to refuse the Nobel Prize, it would have been the Constitutional thing to do
I guess we can agree to disagree, but IMHO refusing the Nobel Peace Prize would have made an inconvenient award into a MUCH BIGGER inconvenient international scandal. It would have been politically disastrous on a number of levels. It certainly would not have made the issue go away.
In short, the Vietnam ceasefire and American withdrawal wasn't a small thing, it's not his fault it eventually ended badly, and it bankrupted the USSR.
He was only granted that much good will because he was
1) Anyone But Bush
2) A very good orator with a brilliant 2008 campaign staff
3) Black
That none of the above contribute to satisfying governance should come as no surprise. I am (naively?) surprised that his administration turned out to so enthusiastically continue and expand the Bush era policies. It gives some credence to the idea that the administrations themselves are not primary drivers of policy. Or that power enjoys power and will forevermore.
FWIW a prominent member of Northern California's ACLU told me she believes that prioritization of healthcare is what has sidelined civil rights in this administration. I do not find her explanation entirely satisfying.
I wouldn't say he's a great "orator" as that's been classically defined. He's quite good at reciting a speech with teleprompters, and if he removes enough mental censors he speaks very well, but tellingly on the subjects. In-between he's pretty famously a disaster.
A lot of people who looked at his record and background were not in the least surprised that he "so enthusiastically continue[d] and expand[ed] the Bush era policies" As you posit, it has to do with power.
and 4) he offered an enormous amount of liberal populist rhetoric, maybe the most since Roosevelt, and people were sick of the last 30 years of post-Reagan corporate centrist/triangulationist bullshit.
>she believes that prioritization of healthcare is what has sidelined civil rights in this administration
I think healthcare was more important for this administration to deal with than civil rights, which aren't rapidly declining except due to the disaster that both healthcare spending and lack of health care has done to this country. It's affecting black people a lot more than others mainly because of our relatively tenuous hold on the middle class.
Problem is that he used up all of his goodwill on the healthcare fight, using rhetoric to push it as if he was conjuring up a new utopia, but just managed to entrench insurers and corporate rent-seekers more into the process, and to only mildly increase the footprint of coverage. The main benefit of what he passed is that it will slow the growth of healthcare spending just enough to make it difficult for conservative-libertarian scum to paint Social Security as an immanent danger anymore.
To celebrate this exceedingly minor victory, he's been trying his level best to cut Social Security by raising the retirement age, changing the inflation indexing, and acknowledging dopey schemes like means-testing. The worst part is IMO, he thinks that cutting ("saving," in centrist rhetoric) Social Security is going to be his legacy, and that history is going to view him as a hero for it.
Can you or someone else explain to me why people seem to be more angry that a person was killed via a remote controlled vehicle that launched a missile? Why is that different than a vehicle doing the exact same thing with a pilot in it? Or, why is it worse than a cruise missile?
I just don't understand why people care that a drone launched the missile rather than an A-10 or an F-18?
I think the part that gets people is that someone in the comfort of some air conditioned shelter far away from the deed pushed a button and ended a human life without any risk to himself whatsoever. The asymmetry of the situation is what gets people ticked off. War is supposed to be costly to both sides, which is why it is a means of last resort. If one side can engage in war with 0 risk and hence 0 cost (other than monetary) war becomes too easy.
I don't buy it. For one, the asymmetry in risk and strength between a manned supersonic fighter plane armed with laser-guided missiles and unarmed person on the ground is already massive. Drones should only piss you off slightly more. Second, I don't think the asymmetry is actually a problem; if you've decided to kill someone, you might as well do it by the most efficient means that pose the least risk to your personnel. In fact, if you have a really easy way to kill someone, you'd be a fool to use other means.
To me, the problem is killing people. Killing people is wrong and you shouldn't do it. Shouldn't matter what means you have at your disposal. "How hard is this to do?" is not a proxy for "Should I do this?"
If your counter is, "sure, abstractly that's right, but now how actual governments think", I guess I agree, but you're never going to talk them down from that by pressuring them to use less efficient killing machines. "But we have all these people to kill!" You're better off being angry about the decision to murder all these people, regardless of how it's done.
I agree with you, it's just that I believe that is the reason why people are ticked off.
Killing people is wrong, no matter what excuse you can come up with. Even killing terrorists is wrong.
Even killing Bin Laden was wrong, even if it was done by boots on the ground rather than by drone strike. (I assume they wanted confirmation of the kill).
Hauling him in front of a judge and having after due process and assuming he'd be found guilty serve the rest of his life behind bars would be acceptable.
1- I am outraged that Obama can kill people who are not charged with any crime, drone or no drone.
2- Use of drones makes this worse, because they distort the traditional situation of war, where soldiers fight each other at a personal risk to themselves.
This, on the contrary, is the moral equivalent of shooting someone in the back.
In 18th century literary "salons" in Europe, people used to study moral dilemmas. One of the questions was "here's a button here that if pressed, would kill a very rich Chinese person. Upon her death, you would inherit all of her wealth. You don't know this person and you will never be associated with her death. Will you press the button?"
At the time it was an entirely rhetorical question, and yet it generated a lot of debate and moral questioning.
Today the question isn't rhetorical anymore (and "wealth" has been replaced by "a mild and temporary sentiment of increased security") and yet the moral debate has all but evaporated.
How we allow ourselves to feel morally superior to 18th century aristocrats is beyond me.
The people targeted in drone strikes were not "suspected terrorists." They were actively waging war against the US. The teenager who was killed was not targeted. He was killed a month later in a strike while he was traveling with a terrorist who was the target of the strike.
Anything to back that up? These are extensive extra-judicial killings, outside of 'war' by any meaningful definition, which in my book makes them wrong even in the (highly implausible) best case where every victim is a genuine evil-doer.
The premise of the article is ridiculous at base. Law is something that binds civilians and their government together. Law does not bind the military apparatus of one country against another. It is meaningless for Pakistanis to decry something as illegal when the actor in question is not bound by Pakistani law. If aliens came and started shooting at the white house, would we run to the courts?
The use of force abroad exists purely in the political, diplomatic, and military realms, not the legal realm. If Pakistanis want us to stop drone strikes in Pakistan, they'll have to resort to one of those avenues.
Your argument relies on two distinctions that seem dubious to me: civilian versus military, and domestic versus foreign. Why do these things matter? Aren't all sentient beings equal? Shouldn't we apply the golden rule to all other such beings? The moral concerns around using force, whether at home or abroad, trump any political, diplomatic, military, or legal concerns. I suspect that distinctions such as civilian versus military and domestic versus foreign are just ways to ease our conscience about hurting and killing other people far away, who aren't quite real to most of us anyway.
If Al Qaeda believed it were more effective to band with a nation state and form a uniformed army, they would. But the US should not sit on their hands until that day comes. As for the golden rule, how does that apply to people who actively trying to kill your family?
> The use of force abroad exists purely in the political, diplomatic, and military realms, not the legal realm.
Again, you are incorrect. International treaties are legally binding. What is the purpose of the Geneva Conventions, for instance, if the U.S. can, according to you, sign them, ignore them, and not have broken international law?
International treaties are not automatically binding on the US. In US courts, they are binding only to the extent that Congress passes implementing legislation or Congress signals that it is self-implementing. But they have the status of ordinary law, so if the AUMF says the President can do something, as the later enactment it overrides anything in the Geneva Convention.
Outside of US courts international law is irrelevant as applied to the US. We're not a party to the ICC and we have veto power over any enforcement decision of the ICJ.
> We're not a party to the ICC and we have veto power over any enforcement decision of the ICJ.
We're getting a bit into the woods here, but veto power over the enforcement of UN rulings _does_ _not_ change international law. You can say that it is irrelevant because it is unenforceable, but _it_ _is_ _not_ legal for the U.S. to violate international treaties which it has signed. This is "legally binding". This is what that means.
The U.S. can overrule any enforcement decision, as you said. It cannot determine the ruling in any ICJ case.
Its a "what's the sound of one hand clapping" situation. We purposefully have not put ourselves in a place where international law cannot be enforced against us. Without that, its a total fiction to say there is any law. Unenforceable obligations aren't law. They're conventions or guidelines, maybe aspirations.
No, he isn't totally incorrect. Had you not written that totally unnecessary barb at the beginning of your comment, you'd both be correct. The strike that killed the younger al-Awlaki was in fact targeting someone else, who was uncontroversially considered a terrorist.
Well, I was trying to reply to his refutation of "the use of drones to indiscriminately kill civilians", but I suppose if he was merely contesting the word "indiscriminately" he might have a point.
That is, if we believe the U.S. is making a good enough attempt to avoid civilian casualties in drone strikes, which is questionable.
He wasn't refuting that. He was refuting the air quotes around "suspected terrorists". He did not refute the fact that drones killed civilians or the teenager.
So, when US gov bombs some country it's defense, but if someone plans bombing US then it's terrorism? And if you travel with that terrorists then you are dead? Lol :-)
Also, looks like you can't see that this scenario will only make more terrorists, because you seed hate between people. If you want someone to respect you and be your friend you don't really need to bomb, kill or bully him. And you know what, sorry to burst your bubble, but your GOV is doing all that shit on purpose, so they can defend you from terrorist -> by spying on everything you do.
And yet, they talk up a storm telling us how careful they are when they authorize strikes, yet they didn't even know who they were shooting at? And they blew them up in a restaurant, with other people around!
Crimes are domestic constructs for internal policing. Waging war on the US from tribal lands in Yemen is not a crime, its in the nature of a military action. Killing in military actions does not require a judicial determination of guilt. Did we get a court to tell us the 50,000 Japanese we incinerated at Hiroshima were guilty?
War crimes are a subset of crimes, not all crimes are domestic and internal (see: Interpol).
No one in Yemen is waging war on the US, that's a construct of the creative imaginations of a bunch of people that stand to profit from having a bogeyman so they can sell their toys.
The people in the tribal lands of Yemen can't wage war on the US since:
(1) they don't have air strike capabilities able to reach the continental US
(2) they don't have a shared border where a land war could be waged
(3) they don't stand a chance of getting a boat in US coastal waters
Yemeni people or people residing there are not waging war on the USA.
> Killing in military actions does not require a judicial determination of guilt.
To which I respond:
> We have not declared war on Yemen or Pakistan.
Which means that our military actions in Yemen or Pakistan are illegal. This is still ignoring other obvious questionable points about drone strikes, such as issues regarding proportionality.
Illegal how? The strikes are within authority authorized by the AUMF. No "formal declaration of war" (whatever that is, it's not a term that is defined anywhere) is necessary.
The president is both wrong and not wrong. He's saying things that are both true and not true, or true and beside the point.
For example, "No domestic spying program" may be 100% true. It's a foreign spying program that's devouring domestic data because of where the data is tapped and how data flows, then having the data shared domestically outside the program.
Any time government officials are commenting here, the adjectives and adverbs -- okay, even verbs and nouns -- are being used as qualifiers to eke out a "technically true but in a practical sense false" statement.
In another example, when he says "nobody's reading your emails" that's true for all but a handful of his listeners. For the rest of us, an algorithm may be parsing, but "nobody" as in no human, is "reading" as in with her eyeballs, until the emails are flagged live for review or "collected" (read with eyeballs, according to Clapper) later.
It's a shame dialectic isn't a popular school subject any more. The TL;DR crowd doesn't stand a chance against this kind of nuance.
These pronouncements and these nebulously defined NSA behaviors are like Schrödinger's cats. We need Snowdens to help us observe and collapse their states.
In time Snowden will enter the history books for what he did, Obama not so much. Maybe only to serve as a reminder that the Nobel peace prize lost its prestige.
Part of this is that Snowden did a service to everybody on the planet (including Obama) and Obama serves a limited set of interests.
Let's not exaggerate and say that Obama won't be entering the history books for what he's done. Love him or hate him, he's a US president, he's in the history books even if he never gets out of bed for his entire term.
That was about what he did during his presidency, not about achieving the presidency in the first place.
If becoming president is your main achievement including two terms as president then that's sad, not good.
Even Reagan will be remembered because he's seen as a factor (not all good, but ok we'll give him a pass) in the collapse of the former Soviet Union. And Reagan was embarrassing in many other respects.
Obama will be remembered as the guy that could have changed so much but didn't. Part of that is his own fault, he was harping so much on hope and change that some of us (including me) actually believed he meant what he said.
I'm extremely disappointed in him as well (without buying into the hope hype). We do have to take into consideration that the opposing party has declared that their number one priority was to limit him to a single term and had been entirely obstructionist.
Also, as President he is in theory limited in what he can actually do. Case in point: he promised to close Gitmo but is unable to do so because it requires Congress to make it happen and they are not cooperating.
I really hope that one day we will have progressed far enough that the skin color or ethnic heritage of our presidents is ignored by the history books--ideally diminishing to a factoid on the same class with "so and so hated broccoli".
I also hope (and think) that we will get to that point, but that doesn't mean the history leading there won't be important, and things like Obama becoming the first non-white president will likely be remembered as key things which helped get there, next to people like Rosa Parks.
Who was the first US president to speak out against slavery? (Hint: it wasn't Abe Lincoln.) I think this factoid will ultimately matter about as much to the average American after we've had 5 more black presidents.
Who was the first Catholic president? Sure JFK did several other important things, and there were other events that transpired that made him famous.
Still, I think it's pretty important that Obama was at least partly black - it showed that it could be done, and I'm sure he inspired millions of people (black and otherwise).
Give me some examples of stuff that you believe Obama will be remembered for that he did during his time as the most powerful man in the world in 100 years or more from now.
Won election as President with no substantial prior notoriety, overcoming a strong Democratic candidate in Ms. Clinton, a popular "maverick" Republican candidate, and did it all while being black and wearing "Hussein" as a middle name.
Further strategic arms limitations treaties negotiated with Russia.
Osama bin Laden.
Withdrew from Iraq as promised and on schedule.
Set a timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan and, so far, every indication of sticking to that.
Shifted American strategic policy away from Cold War Europe plans over to the Asia-Pacific.
"ObamaCare", which if you think is not notable, can only mean you're not paying attention... Hillary herself had tried to push for health care reform in 1994 and been utterly and completely stonewalled.
Managed to get re-elected as a black president, in a fairly decisive victory against a very capable Republican opponent (for everyone who was afraid of Romney's Mormonism there were 3 who were happy the GOP had finally fielded a not-crazy candidate).
But either way, 100 years is a fairly long period of time, especially in the Age of the Internet. Ask your average person the difference between the accomplishments of McKinley, Harding, or Taft and they'll just stare at you and drool. If you're lucky they'll have at least heard of Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt.
I think he meant for the rest of the world. We only remember US presidents if they were killed or notoriously bad at their jobs - maybe except for F.D Roosevelt. (A bit tongue in cheek, but it also has some truth to it).
2. Quite a nice example of the kind of justice the USA likes to export
3. Extremely limited reform, check on France, the UK and Canada for other options
4. Too big to fail, who else would have done so?
5. Gays & Lesbians, Transgenders and Transsexuals have a long long way to go in the US before parity is achieved. The fact that there was a don't ask don't tell policy in the first place was bad, repealing it is not a victory of any kind.
6. NSA -> that's Snowdens ball, Obama is mostly doing damage control. It's how this whole thread got started in the first place, by Obama claiming that this debate would have happened without Snowden.
History books tend to take the long view, 100 years from now the 'first non-white President of the United States' (which is something he achieved before becoming president) is the one thing that I think may just make it.
But given the opposition (Palin as VP was unthinkable to me, when they chose her as McCain's running mate they handed the presidency to Obama, and it is surprising how close it still was) it wasn't all that impressive to me.
Still, I'll concede that that is what makes his presidency noteworthy. If he'd only done something a bit more useful with the power that he wielded it would have been more impressive. Change we can believe in...
1. True. Born black. Became first black president. Still relevant.
2. True. I'd fathom most of the US population and probably many around the world agreed with us taking him out though.
3. 180 degree healthcare changes can't happen over night.
Obamacare is still relevant.
4. Not the Republicans
5. Of course repealing it is a victory.
6. The NSA issue is only being carried here and there on NBC news because of Snowden. Honestly the media and public attention will die out soon when the next major news cycle happens. This was known and talked about back in 2006 in published books, no one cared to pay attention though. This will become the reality again soon and the NSA will get back to doing exactly what it does now.
I'm a huge fan of Tesla, but GM/Chrysler wasn't just about the vehicles. It was about the employees, the economies in that part of the country, and the ripple effect that killing off American auto-makers would have had to every industry they touched.
I truly hope what Tesla is doing becomes the future of the American auto-industry, but the nation was in no position, at that time, to facilitate that transformation in a way that was logistically, economically, or politically acceptable.
I have a history book detailing the minutiae of the Gettysburg battle, and I keep meaning to read Robert Caro's books. Did you know that historians are different people and write different books on different topics that are of interest to them? Shocking, but true! In fact, one of the many reasons they do this is because they want to provide interesting information about people in the past to the people in the present!
> Capturing Bin Laden, maybe.
I like how you can't even get the facts straight here. Bin Laden's dead, dude.
This comment solidifies why HN is out of touch with reality. There is more to the Obama presidency than his (up until now lack of involvement with the NSA). Try and think outside the tech bubble for a few minutes on this issue and you will become enlightened.
There is a limit, actually. From my non-American point of view, people who want to understand the context and direction of the US in the early 21st century will study Bush as he is the US president that defined this era.
Exactly, it's like mentioning Gerald Ford of Jimmy Carter outside of the States. Of course that people have heard their names and sort of know who they are, but not as much as they know about Nixon or Reagan.
I think he will be mentioned on the same page as Warren Harding.
And also again in the chapter about notable African Americans. Let's not forget that getting elected president as the first African American is an achievement in itself, and one which I believe benefits the African American community, even if Obama's performance as a president doesn't live up to our initial hopes.
Yeah but he hasn't done fuck all for all those people who are persecuted because they are black in America. Look at the prison system and the way drug cases are prosecuted. In fact just watch this TED talk - this black president is for the 65 year old white corporate executive more than anyone:
One would argue it was the only way a black person could be elected US President: by being whiter inside than white old men. Someone threatening like Jesse Jackson never stood a real chance; in fact, giving the electoral system, no real reformer will ever have a chance: old white people from rural states are overwhelmingly over-represented, the game is rigged in their favour.
It's like the football/soccer rule-changing committee being structured in a way that nobody can change anything if British federations don't agree.
Be careful of this kind of talk. I understand and probably agree with what you probably mean to say, but reifying whiteness as some sort of meaningful quality of the soul, and by contrast characterizing blackness as "threatening" is not a good way to think about it.
You're using "white" and "black" here as stand-ins for something else. It's easier for everyone if you just refer to the actual qualities that you intend to refer to, rather than implying that there's a proper ways for people to behave or be that are appropriate or inappropriate in relation to their skin colors.
sorry, I apologise if I wasn't clear. By "whiter inside" I meant "unquestioningly faithful to institutions and systems that purposely (an occasionally violently) discriminate not-whites, not-rich and not-Americans". Which I think fits the current US President quite well at the moment, regardless of his skin.
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." -- Guess Who
Thank you for the link.
I am not African American (neither African nor American) but when I lived in America it always struck me how racially divided the country still is, even in New York, and how poor many African Americans are.
What do you suggest he do? He cannot even close Gitmo, real reform of the prison system requires buy in from Congress. About the only thing they were able to squeak through was reducing the penalty gap in mandatory sentencing guidelines between crack and powder cocaine. Then the GOP took control of the House and any further legislation seen as being soft on [non white collar] crime have nearly a 0% chance of passing.
Health reform alone will land him in a nice place in the history books. Even against the immutable recalcitrance of congressional republicans he has managed to accomplish a lot.
I think most people don't recognize how accomplished Obama is because 1) the rapid news cycle and 2) Obama himself doesn't run around telling everybody what he's done.
I don't like this NSA crap either, but overall Obama is an amazing president.
You certainly have a strong point, Democrats have been trying to accomplish this since Harry Truman right after WWII, and e.g. Hillary! infamously botched it.
And e.g. if Obama's "trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see" cause a fiscal collapse of the Federal government including Obamacare, Obamacare will be a footnote aside from explaining why he focused on it as opposed to the fiscal health of the government like Clinton did.
Yes there are still ways for the law to be hurt, beyond Republicans pointlessly voting to repeal it 40 times. Long story short however, the law will survive mostly in tact, which is definitely for the better in my opinion.
By the way, the federal deficit under Obama has gone down.
The "reckless spending" thing is just another example of the style of politics that republican politicians are good at. You'll notice, for example, that "spending" wasn't an issue until Obama was president. And if anything, there hasn't been enough spending for the sake of the economy.
Please don't move the goalposts. While they're of course inextricably linked, I'm talking about the issue of "reckless borrowing", i.e. that stuff we have to pay interest on.
And I don't care so much how they're trending down as how they're still above a trillion dollars. By the same token, should we give Bush and the Republican Congress credit for reducing deficits 2005-7? With 2007 still above 2002..?
As for spending, debt etc. being an issue, while it certainly matters what "Republican politicians" say and do, "conservatives" and libertarians have been raising as big a fuss about it as we can since the days of Nixon, and I gather longer (I became politically aware during his Administration so I can only vouch for it starting then).
Isn't that a bit patronizing? It doesn't matter if he sucks at his job, because being black and doing it is accomplishment enough? I know this is what some people actually believe, but it just sounds racist to me.
If you put it in those terms, yes. But you are the one who put it in those terms. No one said a black president has lower standards for the job, they said it was notable that a person from a community who has been historically marginalized by American society reached the highest office in the country by winning a majority vote.
No, it's the opposite of racist. I am saying that it is such an acomplishment to be voted president of the US as an African American and that it will inspire other African Americans irrespective of how he actually performs.
On a side note: You should't accuse people of racism or other terrible character traits unless you are sure about it.
He's not really an African-American in the strongest sense of this term, he doesn't have black American ancestors who lived through slavery, or even the civil rights movement.
In time Obama will enter the history books for what he did, Snowden not so much. Maybe only to serve as a reminder that the Nobel peace prize lost its prestige.
Part of this is that Obama did a service to everybody on the planet (including Snowden) and Snowden serves a limited set or interests.
Another possibility would be: He has (or thinks he might have) a gun to his head and fears to meet a JFK-like fate (for himself or his family). In this case he should step down and denounce the degree of corruption of the system.
EDIT: ...because in case he's unable to have enough courage to correct the issues, stepping down and stating why would open up the possibility for the People to have a frank discussion about the system in place and to correct it for the next x decades to come. Because don't kid yourselves, the system itself is sick and it's not with cosmetics that it will be fixed and future corruption eliminated.
Obama said that? Shame on him. He doesn't even need re-election.
I was so happy for the US and world in general when Obama was elected. This man has become the world biggest disappointment. Americans appear love world records and things that go down as "historic". Well chaps, you have another one.
This man is worse than George W Bush. Bush was clearly what he was. We all knew what we were getting, and could rely on it. Obama is a lie in a suit. He makes the US look like a national and international lie. Maybe it is.
I am certainly disappointed with Obama, but I think there's a need for perspective here. If the US right had their way, we'd have invaded Iran by now. And there's a list of domestic horrors that I'm sure would be well underway if we had McCain and Palin running the show; you need only look at state-level activity in the red states to get an idea.
I also think that Bush presented a much more reasonable face in the 2000 elections than we came to see. Compassionate conservatism was a line they pushed pretty hard that turned out to be a lie. And nobody expected Cheney to make Lord Voldemort look good by comparison. Rigged evidence for a war? Torture? And, of course, starting all these domestic surveillance programs that Obama is just continuing.
In 2000, the Republicans could still lay claim to the legacy of the Rockefeller Republicans, who were sane and reasonable stewards of the state, people actually interested in public service. W himself could claim that because Bush Senior was one of those reasonable Republicans.
So no, I don't think we all knew what we were getting with Bush. I'd say he turned out to be radically worse than people thought.
Most of what you say is...false or half-truths. Rigged evidence for war? Everyone thought the evidence was there, Dems, Pubs, and foreign nations. Obama isn't just continuing the surveillance programs, he has EXPANDED them. I didn't like Bush and I hate Obama. To say "if the right was in charge" is a) speculation and b) probably 100% wrong.
And if you were reading foreign newspapers at the time, you would have noticed that Colin Powell's presentation at the UN was met with much skepticism. Even in newspapers who thought that getting rid of Saddam Hussein was a good idea in principle.
And yes, the evidence was rigged. We know now that Curveball had lied and that George Tenet in particular had been told that Curveball wasn't trustworthy. But the CIA gave his testimony to Powell, anyway.
No. We foreign nations thought the evidence was bullshit too. Our leaders in the uk were entirely transparent and the population didn't believe a word. We were ignored.
I don't know what foreign nations you're talking about, but the UN was against it because their inspections found nothing. Going further I remember both Germany and France speaking against it. The only real allies you had was the UK, but the UK is always happy to agree with your bullshit and it is regrettable because if only you'd have pulled your head out of your ass for just a moment you would have realized that everything is a big fat lie, that the whole world was seeing, except you.
Obama was elected on a platform of opposition to those programs. Many he shut down outright. Others he imposed changes on.
In this case the changes didn't go far enough, IOHO, but it's amazing to me how quickly people change their opinion of someone, even in relation to much worse examples, due to single issues.
You know, somebody who has clearly stated goals, consistent platforms, and who actually is engaging in some of the political issues surrounding federalism.
Or, you know, screw it, let's vote for a guy because he got a bogus Peace Prize and is the first dude of some skin color in office--that's some solid bona fides there.
EDIT: And to be fair, I'm equally sick of the smug Republicans saying you get what you deserved; they laid a lot of the groundwork for this tomfoolery.
Yeah right. The Supreme Court appointees by Bush has caused the greatest damage we will see for years (Citizen United)
The way America supported the Govt involvement in religion and tax money, the senseless wars, the intrusion of our lives by TSA etc. all accelerated by Bush and continued by Obama and will continue until this country collapses.
Yeah keep on not caring about how our history has changed for the worst and for good.
Frankly, both Bush and Obama are patsies for the system, which at this point is a fully fledged self-sustaining kafakesque bureaucracy. It's easy to personify and be angry with a person, less easy to be angry with an abstract clusterfuck of human interaction and behaviour gone horribly wrong, systemised, and enshrined in transgenerational tradition.
He also categorically denied that any warrantless searches were/are being performed - which is also a flat lie, and explicitly refuted by the Guardian's piece a few hours before his bullshit session.
(Copy and Pasted from) Obama's Ethics Agenda (2008)...in his own words.
Protect Whistleblowers: Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled. We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government. Obama will ensure that federal agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process.
Yup, he said (wrote, had his staff
publish, whatever) that. It sounded
good, didn't it? Yup, it sounded
good. So, in part with such things he got
elected.
Now, guess what, he isn't following
what he said. We have to guess that
maybe what he said was a deliberate
lie.
But it appears so far that he has
'read' the voters correctly: People
will vote based on such promises but
then, later, during the term of office,
nearly completely forget about such
promises. Uh, maybe Obama would have
a better memory if more voters did!
One reason in the past to forget was
that, for tens of millions of voters,
it was a bit clumsy to clip the
original statement from a newspaper,
file it, and then find it later. And,
even if did find it, tough to do anything
with it, e.g., get enough publicity
about it to cause the politician start
to make good on the promise.
Of course now we have easy ways to find
all such promises and publicize, if only
on blogs and fora, that a promise is
not being followed. But, apparently,
still nearly all the voters are like
they used to be and not really paying
attention.
If a voter was wise, then during the election
they likely assumed that nearly everything
the candidates said were lies, only had
two candidates to vote for, picked one,
but never expected that the winner would
honor the promises.
Net, really, especially now with the Internet,
what government we get is up to the voters;
when 60% of the voters are up on their hind
legs yelling and screaming about the government
tracking mud over the Fourth Amendment, then
we will get some big changes quickly.
The good news is that all we need is the 60%.
The bad news is that getting the 60% on
a 'technical' or 'detailed' issue that
does not yet directly affect the daily
lives of the citizens is tough to do.
An old remark is that in a democracy
the voters get the government they deserve.
So far, by making promises that are lies
and then forgetting about the promises,
Obama is just giving the voters what in
effect they want. That's part of why
he won election twice.
I don't know if he was asked about this text, by any journalist. However, read the text from Obama's perspective, and you'll easily find the answer he'd give: Snowden did not use the official channels for whistleblowing. Snowden commited a crime, and should be handled as a criminal.
That text can be read as having the intention to neuter whistleblowers by providing a sanctioned escape valve as much as the interpretation you're giving it (that of general protection of whistleblowers).
The proper channel is the press. That's why we have free speech. What Bradley Manning did is much more questionable, Snowden gave the information over to the Fourth Estate and let professional journalists sound the whistle. You would rather have him blow the whistle to the same people who are benefiting from The Way Things Are? What incentive do they have to do anything about it?
Obama also mentioned that he signed an E.O. giving IC members whistleblower protections for the first time in history, protections which Snowden declined to pursue.
I still don't really think that the debate we're having would have occurred in quite that same way, but Obama certainly took steps to comply with that 2008 policy paper.
Has he been asked about this statement by a journalist? It seems like his position on Snowden is the complete opposite of what his Protect Whistleblowers promise was.
Especially as a foreigner, it's pretty clear that there's no end to any of this. Even if it is claimed that spying has stopped, there's almost no chance that anything will actually change. You're talking about an organisation that has it's own interpretation of the rules, has nobody to pull them up on what they do wrong, and for all intents is invisible to the public. If a public court "shuts them down", it's just a facade to keep the media at bay.
If their president is lying to them on simple facts that get refuted by a whistle browser at the next available moment, there's no telling what else goes on behind closed and private doors.
Also, rest assured that the US government will continue to put enough pressure on foreign/European governments to continue mass surveillance on their behalf.
If there is no fundamental structural change in the US, the Western World will remain a surveillance society and the current degree of democracy will be so much weakened that the term "democracy" will need to be "redefined".
The headline should be "The president is lying" but that would upset the readers and the sponsors. So lets just say he is "wrong", just like the NSA is just "wrong" about not collecting data on everybody.
Just remember that the author knows the NSA is watching him, and if he goes too far (i.e. by outright saying that they or the president is lying), he might become a risk to national security. In this country, the people do not have the right to criticize the government, you know? ;)
So we should prefer self-censorship that strengthens the position of the totalitarian elements in the US government and leads to further erosion of constitutional rights?
There's no progress and no remedy for the current situation if people continue to act "reasonably" (Snowden didn't and we made progress).
Sarcasm, lazyjones. I was being sarcastic. I dream of a world where you can say what you want without getting persecuted for it, not the world represented in the following video:
Obama is not wrong. He's just lying. Who actually believes he would've started any kind of reforms without this, when he commanded over this program for five years? Not to mention that none of these "reforms" seem too serious anyway. The only reform that is needed is to repeal the Patriot Act and the FISA Amendments Act. Then we can start the debate from scratch, rather than trying to win inches in this debate from the privacy point of view.
This is beginning to have the feel of a watergate - the press can sense blood in the water - senior administration figures have outright lied, in public, and been found out.
That usually leads to a resignation - but now there are bigger fish to hunt.
Shutting down the program will no longer be enough - there is an impeachment in the offing. What will be enough to call off the dogs?
Edit: I often let my cynical side overrule me - and happily claim "they" will always continue doing shady and disreputable things. But the reason "they" can is that "we" do not stand up and shout loudly enough and so build the laws to prevent them.
It seems an ownership change has not hurt WaPo, for which I am glad.
Obama is just saying some things, little
things to defuse the situation until
it is out of the headlines. The article
explains that what Obama said
the effect Snowden had isn't true,
but since Obama is only trying to defuse
the situation before the vast majority
of voters who are not paying much attention,
that what he said is not true seems not
to matter much. And for reminding voters
in the future that what Obama said here
is not true also seems will not matter much to
the vast majority of voters.
I'm concluding that the political process,
i.e., involving Obama and Congress, will
consist of a lot of pushing to save the
Fourth Amendment, etc. from the small
minority of voters who care a lot, a
little movement by the politicians,
the issue out of the headlines, and then
no more movement by the politicians.
So, for saving the Constitution,
I'm counting on legal cases going to
the SCOTUS and the SCOTUS defending the
Fourth Amendment, etc.
Well, arguably everything he said in yesterday's news conference was at best questionable (and at worst deceitful). But I'm still glad he said it. The fact that he had to address these issues publicly, and in a manner that's effectively "oh yeah, I would have revised those programs anyway" (rather than some senators' "the programs are essential! don't listen to the traitors") is greatly encouraging; the system may not yet be beyond redemption. Are his measures palliatives rather than cures? Very likely. And he's still hiding behind concocted phrases designed to "reassure the people". But the moment can nonetheless be savored as a promising victory for the digital civil rights movement.
It's funny to think of how Clinton was hounded for lying under oath about a blowjob, and how the US Congress seems to be asleep at the wheel (or complicit) in this case. At least, that's the impression from abroad.
I am really rather certain there are members of Congress, perhaps members of the Intelligence Oversight Committee even, that can get at anything they want. Sadly, that they are not pushing harder tells that they agree with the actions of the administration.
When Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked for a “ballpark figure” of the number of Americans whose information was being collected by the NSA last year, the agency refused to give the senator any information, arguing that doing so would violate the privacy of those whose information was collected.
Well, doesn't that answer automatically imply that a very large percentage of the population was watched? Otherwise, if the number were, say, 1%, the mere number would not have violated anyone's privacy.
> "My preference, and I think the American peoples’ preferences would have been for a lawful, orderly examination of these laws."
Yes, and you had the time to bring that to the fore. I recall one of the rationales Snowden offered for not acting sooner was that he was holding off to see whether you did anything about them via that more orderly process.
I wonder how much faith in the political process, especially among young people, Obama's managed to burn.
I was very happy Obama was re-elected.. So much for that. But at least now I've realized I need to start voting independent. Our two party system is a failure. We lose when your voting choices are "bad" or "worse".
Even if the US escapes from the two party local maximum, it'd probably land in a three party local maximum like many modern democracies (Germany is a good example). Then, a middle-ground party works with the election winner to maintain government stability. It is not a much better model.
The conclusion we are reaching is that representative democracy has very serious limits. Voting for the whole ideologic package does not allow my voice to be heard on stuff that: a) I really care about, or b) I really know inside and out. I'd prefer to relinquish my opinion on some stuff (agricultural policy, for example), and really be heard on other matters (there's absolutely no excuse for torture).
In this day and age, especially with such a strong emphasis on advertising and consumerism, the people governed on the whole do not deserve a say in how things are done. We had a thread not a day ago where mass numbers of HN folks earnestly pleaded that we couldn't reasonably expect normal people to learn to use computers beyond knowing how to app store a thing, how to socializeauth their twitterscapes--people who routinely bemoan how bad politicians are on tech policy issues.
Fuck it. If we want to progress as a race, we need to stop pretending that the 'common man' ought to have a say in long-term priorities, or in how we should govern their fellow citizens.
I think you've got it exactly backwards. We need to rely much more on the "common man" being able to take care of his own day-to-day needs, and take the attitude that the government is what is harmful, incompetent, corrupt, and does not deserve a say in how many things are done.
These are not mutually exclusive--let the marching morons manage their own affairs as well as they can, and don't let them intervene in politics and create perverse incentives for "democratically elected leaders" to do the wrong things to get votes.
I can completely get behind the idea that the government ought to function like a microkernel operating system, doing as little as it can get away with while providing services for all. Part of that, though, is that userland stays well the fuck over in userland.
No, quite the opposite. Allow people to vote on stuff they are interested in, and only on those subjects. Do not interpose a proxy between citizens' opinions and the deciding vote. In essence: give the common man more power.
People do only vote on stuff they're interested in--see also "single-issue voters".
The trend is very much that politicians will make a big to-do about shit that doesn't affect most people but is really polarizing (gay marriage, abortion, gun control, nuclear power, terrorism, whatever) and people will vote on that, and ignore the issues that they personally don't understand/care about (entitlements spending, education spending, electronic surveillance of all communications, etc.).
If the common man deserved more power, I'd advocate for it, but the fact is they've remained willfully deaf, dumb, and blind to the essentials of civic process and liberties, and are by necessity driven by their stomachs and whatever the latest little drama in their lives is.
The common man of America today is hardly able to govern himself, much less contribute in a meaningful way to a system which enforces its laws onto others. If that changes, maybe we can do more.
How else does one affect change? As a citizen you rely on elected officials to act in your best interest. Today that doesn't work. So where does democracy work if you feel it isn't possible here?
Even accepting on its face the notion that Obama was preparing to look at reforms, how does that make what Snowden did less patriotic? I don't think anybody but Obama knew that he was preparing to look at reforms, and after 6 years of an Obama presidency where things were just getting more spy-happy how was Snowden supposed to assume anything but more of the same? According to Obama, Snowden and Obama agreed that the programs needed change, and they both chose to do something about it.
Yes, it's called an Impeachment. According to the Constitution it can only be for an high crimes and misdemeanors. The Congress then holds a trial and if convicted the President is removed from office. Then the next in succession becomes President until the next election. Basically, it's not going to happen over this. Remember, Congress agrees with the actions of the government more or less.
To more directly answer your question. There is no popular recall mechanism. The closest would be if there was enough public outcry to their congressional representatives that Congress began to move against the President. The bar is really, really high on this. It's not going to happen.
He never promised to end drone strikes. In fact I believe he emphasized drone strikes even then in order to shift away from American "boots on ground" and the then-current policy of using JDAM bomb strikes (which are even more dangerous w.r.t. collateral damage).
According to Snowden's slides, PRISM began to receive information from Microsoft in 2007. So now in... wait for it.. 2013, Obama was juuust about to start looking into what those crafty NSA people were doing?? The amount of stupid here is Unbearable!!
I'm more interested in his actions; among these we find (by decreasing order of importance):
- use of drones to indiscriminately kill civilians, "suspected terrorists" or their children (cf. the murder of 16 years old American citizen Abdulrahman al-Awlaki)
- the detention, and ruthless and aggressive prosecution of Bradley Manning
- force-feeding Guantanamo detainees on hunger strike, depriving them of even the right to end their own life
I'm not a US citizen, so what I think about Obama really doesn't matter; but he must have set some kind of record in the amount of goodwill he was able to destroy during his time in office.