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Except For Millennials, Most Americans Dislike Snowden
HughPickens.com writes: Newsmax reports that according to KRC Research, about 64 percent of Americans familiar with Snowden hold a negative opinion of him. However 56 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 have a positive opinion of Snowden which contrasts sharply with older age cohorts. Among those aged 35-44, some 34 percent have positive attitudes toward him. For the 45-54 age cohort, the figure is 28 percent, and it drops to 26 percent among Americans over age 55, U.S. News reported. Americans overall say by plurality that Snowden has done "more to hurt" U.S. national security (43 percent) than help it (20 percent). A similar breakdown was seen with views on whether Snowden helped or hurt efforts to combat terrorism, though the numbers flip on whether his actions will lead to greater privacy protections. "The broad support for Edward Snowden among Millennials around the world should be a message to democratic countries that change is coming," says Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. "They are a generation of digital natives who don't want government agencies tracking them online or collecting data about their phone calls." Opinions of millennials are particularly significant in light of January 2015 findings by the U.S. Census Bureau that they are projected to surpass the baby-boom generation as the United States' largest living generation this year.
If you rule out everyone who thinks Snowden's a pretty cool guy, you still can't make it to "all Americans hate Snowden"?
Keep grasping for them straws, brownshirts.
That's because the elderly suffered much more stringent brainwashing as children that leads them to say that they "support those who fight for our freedom" while also promoting a police state worse than Orwells worst nightmare. The younger crowd grew up with much more access to information and see the police state for what it is and do not have the blind worship of government that the elderly do.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
It's a nutjob neocon superchristian propaganda rag. More reputable news sources exist (yes, even Fox News is fine for stories like this).
Thanks.
I suppose it goes into how blindly people support their chosen government or newscaster. Walter Cronkite had extreme influence because people assumed his word was gospel, so when he said the US was losing in Vietnam people believed it. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Propaganda Works. Smear someone for long enough, loudly enough, consistently enough, and people will eventually listen and believe. We've seen it happen to Assange, to Snowden, to dozens of other whistleblowers, in politics, in law enforcement, in finance. We've seen it happen to fucking gamers. Over time, a negative media narrative will stick.
The problem, at its core, is the media. They are not a fourth estate. They are the new First Estate.
I am well beyond millennial status and I approve of what Snowden did so I am not sure I believe the survey results. While I do approve, I also wrestle with the fact that he broke the law and put Americans in jeopardy. That makes me wonder how the questions were asked. I mean I can certainly dislike someone but approve of what they did.
I was at the U.S. Embassy in Laos monday morning. It was a horrible experience. A brand new embassy building staffed with paranoid idiots. When I got home to Thailand I described the experience at
http://www.andycanfield.com/Th...
I may be 66 years old, but Ed Snowden is my hero. He can sleep on my floor any time. He could sleep on my sofa if I had a sofa.
I wonder if the study controlled for the fact that people tend to get more conservative as they age.
I bet if Snowden had done his thing in the 90's, the age distribution of approval would be similar, and I bet you'd get the same result in another 15 years, when those same millennials have kids and are facing their mortality.
Progressive ideals are risky, and it takes more courage to take risks as folks age and have more to lose.
Note this is purely an academic comment and is not meant to endorse or deny either snowden or the NSA.
Please, I hate that word. It's ok for Facebook and Google to data mine the shit out of the stuff their emails and instant messages, but when the govt does it everyone flips their shit. I'm not saying the govt is innocent, but rather, they should be boycotting these corporate entities with similar fervor.
Millenials are dumb. I do research on data mining (not for the govt).
So...don't trust anyone over 30?
It's from an ACLU poll of 1000 online trolls
https://www.aclu.org/sites/def...
KRC Research designed the questions for an omnibus survey that was administered by ORC International. The survey was
conducted online among adults 18+ in ten countries: Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, New
Zealand, Spain, and the U.S. The omnibus is conducted regularly among a demographically representative sample of approximately
1,000 adults 18 years of age and older in each country. Fieldwork was conducted between February 12 and 19, 2015.
This kind of contradicts the polls that came out way back in 2013, but I'm not surprised how our media can sway public opinion. ACLU has their own article about it which portrays it in a slightly different light, with poll results linked at the bottom https://www.aclu.org/news/inte...
Non sequitur: Your facts are uncoordinated.
Was any attempt made to correlate people's views with the propaganda^w news sources that they viewed/read the most?
I bought a picture of his face with the words AMERICAN HERO right under it as soon as I read this headline. Guess it's time to get out and do some proselytization.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Well I am not alone. Many many people from all age groups support him. Title of the article DOES NOT MATCH the raw data. If 20% in a group like him, that is A LOT of people. The article is playing with %s making us think 56% is everyone and 26% is no one. That is not the case at all! Overall he did a good thing. New spy software and H/W is very easy to make... letting some out of the bag to protect the world and the USA from corruption is not a bad thing at all. The title should be: There is a partial inverse relationship between age and the support of Snowden with the young being more likely to support him than elder Americans. But across the spectrum overall he has about 40% support of all Americans.
When we know that Americans don't know what he did and who he is, how this junk may have any value?
That comment would have been a lot cooler if I'd written it correctly. I bought a T-Shirt with his face on. I'd look a right moron walking around with a printed, loose picture of Snowden saying LOOK AT THIS
Yes, slashdot, I know it's only been a minute since I posted a comment, but could you just let me post this and move on with my life?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Right, because all the youth who cheered on and voted a second term for a president who continues the trend of destroying our civil rights and handing arms to terrorist friendlies as he bombs kids in a country that we're not even at war with are really going to step up and make all the evils of grandpa go away.
Right. Right. Right.
Just as blind as the morons who voted for Clinton thinking he was going to legalize marijuana and that he was a hip, fresh new face for American politics or the other morons who thought that Bush Jr was going to put the US back on track and pull back the reigns of government.
You don't get the to the head of one of the major parties by threatening the power-that-be. For as much as you may think one or both parties are lead by idiots the fact of the matter is that they play the game a lot better than you do and they're 20 steps ahead of where you stopped thinking with the idea that you knew it all.
Conventional wisdom says that the young and idealistic grow up and shed their naive ideals as they confront the real world. By that logic, as millennials age, they will recognize the need for the surveillance state to keep us safe from terrorism.
Real World? How about that terrorism isn't as big a threat as we are led to believe? We have a media that makes billions of dollars a month in scaring the shit out of us and by being bombarded by that shit, we begin to think that terrorism is right around the corner. Perception bias. I live in meth country, according to the media, I should be experiencing high crime and meth labs blowing up every day. We had one in the last five years and one before my state's legislature passed a law that made getting Sudafed harder to get than a gun - I'm in the South.
The other thing is, East Germany and the old communist states. My fellow old people forgot those abuses and are under the delusion that our government is beyond such things; when in fact, we are seeing an out of control security government bureaucracy. Are my fellow old people concerned? Nope. We are all worried about Clinton's email server, Benghazi, IS, gay marriage, and other social "issues" that some how are going to ruin our country and our freedoms.
I really don't think my fellow Americans know WTF Freedom means.
Perhaps the standing question for every demographic as we try and paint a "Like" button on Snowden himself is, what if Snowden never happened?
Seems no one wants to think about how much worse this could have gotten. Unfortunately, apathy will ensure the inevitable, since I'm surprised the pollsters found enough people who still give a shit about this at all to form any opinion.
We may dislike or like E.Snowden. But there is no denial, there is the world Before Snowden and After Snowden. I am not sure which one is better, the same as the Dark Ages could be not better than Pax Romana. But that is what happened, and it is impossible to put toothpaste back into the tube.
Real change and progress in politics comes only as the old people die off and are replaced by the young. It's a slow process!
also is upset over national security revelations.
The data shows Snowden has more support than the US Congress.
It's never been slower than it is today.
Im afraid at this point change will be a hard road and that the political parties will end up in the same position as the Marketing Department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.
How did he destroy the economy? Did he write backdoors?
Did he intercept hardware and compromise it?
Did he wiretap American companies datacenters?
Oooh, I get it, he told you your government was doing this for your supposed safety.
Yeah fuck that guy, for telling me things.
We should shoot that messenger.
They weren't doing anything of the sort. They were consumers of yet another corporate pre-packaged culture. Fighting the establishment, as you call it, only supports the establishment that created a profit-center around it.
How is willingly losing your hot fiance, 200k/yr job, etc. "put[ting] themself first" ?
Yeah yeah the current generation is going to go and change things. Just like how all the hippies in the 1960s went into government and legalized pot. Oh no wait they didn't. They sold out harder than ever.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Real change and progress in politics comes only as the old people die off and are replaced by the young. It's a slow process!
Oh, how I love to read about the illusions that people have that politics will become anything other than politics, now or anytime in the future.
It's almost as fucking funny as labeling a D better than an R, or vice versa.
The only other change you will see is the young politicians becoming brainwashed into the system of politics. Wake the fuck up already.
> Real change and progress in politics comes only as the old people die off and are replaced by the young. It's a slow process!
It seems almost as if the survey didn't include my age group, or many of my colleagues from my age group. Some of us remember the 1960's, the frauds and nonsense of political and federal abuse against Vietnam protesters, and the Nixon era abuses of federal power quite well: Distrust of "the man" was fashionable, but demonstrably justified. And we had older acquaintances who remembered the "House Committee on UnAmerican Activities" of John McCarthy, and who'd lived with state enforced segregation in schools, or with being in American concentration camps for the Nisei, or in European concentration camps for being Jewish, gay, Communist, crippled, or for struggling against the invading armies.
Names change, and techniques of abuse change. So must the demands for liberty, and freedom.
Problem solved.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
+1 =)
I got a newsbreak for you, kid: grandpa doesn't ever die. The next generation just BECOMES grandpa. Every generation starts out more liberal and open-minded, and ends up more conservative and bitter. I can remember when my generation was against The Man too. And one day in the future the same millennials who are protesting in Ferguson and supporting Snowden now will be bitching about the leftie protestors and voting for Republicans.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
This country is so damn rotten. I can't wait for grandpa to die already.
Note that
Americans overall say by plurality that Snowden has done "more to hurt" U.S. national security (43 percent) than help it (20 percent).
doesn't mean that grandpa thinks that Snowden is a terrorist or that Snowden did anything wrong.
The problem with surveys like this is that any interpretation of them will be skewed. Without knowing how the person interpreted the question you can't say anything about the answer.
Say that you find a wallet containing $1000 on the street. You have the option to return the wallet to the owner, keep it or keep the money and return the wallet.
If you ask someone if they will be financially better off if they keep the wallet/money compared to if they return it then the answer will be that they are better off if they keep the money. If you ask what they think is the right thing to do you get another answer. (Hopefully.)
Short term I can agree that Snowdens actions probably hurt national security and the revelation clearly damaged the U.S. image.
Over a longer timespan it was the right thing to do and will in the long run help with creating a global stability based on mutual trust.
The NSA idea of security is to strike first against the neighbor. The ideal scenario is to have a neighbor that you can ask to look after your house while you are on vacation.
I'm 45 and I say give him a Medal of Honor, the man is better for the US than all of Congress and the President combined.
Every generation starts out more liberal and open-minded, and ends up more conservative and bitter.
It's true. And in the meantime, issue by issue, slowly, things change. That's because even though they get more conservative as they age, they rode on the backs of their predecessors, being raised in a progressively more liberal society, giving each generation a slightly higher starting point than the one before it. In my parents' lifetime we've seen schools desegregated, interracial marriage legalized, gay marriage legalized, chemical weapons outlawed, pot decriminalized, etc etc etc.
My opinion about what Edward Snowden did are summed up by what his father said in August 2013 on ABC's "This Week". He said that his son “has sacrificed more than either the president of the United States or [U.S. Rep.] Peter King [who called Edward Snowden a 'traitor'] have ever in their political careers or their American lives. So how they choose to characterize him really doesn't carry that much weight with me." (Those who sided with the colonists in the American Revolution were also called traitors.)
This survey is bunk. I'm 37 years old.
Agreed. NewsMax is laughably awful. My pre-teen can pick out dozens of fallacies and examples of bias in any given NewsMax article (I often give my kids critical thinking exercises, like taking a media story and locating logical fallacies and instances of bias).
But I believe that Snowden is a hero for exposing the incredible scope that these programs have not only in America but in allied nations.
The thing that I hate is how little change has been made since the reveal. I thought it would be torch and pitchfork time but unless something directly and immediately affects people they just don't seem to care.
No one cares what an anonymous coward thinks.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Why? He showed you what the American government was doing to its citizens. He should be commended for exposing these things and the ones perpetrating them should be punished.
If your neighbor was secretly recording all your calls and reading your mail, you'd have a shit-fit! If the government does it, it's just SOP?
Now we might not get to eat too.
I don't see the problem here. Your food is not worth my freedom.
If your neighbor knew everything you bought, you'd have a shitfit, but if google or your credit card company or paypal or Amazon... Oh wait...
This country is so damn rotten. I can't wait for grandpa to die already.
Note that
Americans overall say by plurality that Snowden has done "more to hurt" U.S. national security (43 percent) than help it (20 percent).
doesn't mean that grandpa thinks that Snowden is a terrorist or that Snowden did anything wrong. The problem with surveys like this is that any interpretation of them will be skewed. Without knowing how the person interpreted the question you can't say anything about the answer.
Say that you find a wallet containing $1000 on the street. You have the option to return the wallet to the owner, keep it or keep the money and return the wallet. If you ask someone if they will be financially better off if they keep the wallet/money compared to if they return it then the answer will be that they are better off if they keep the money. If you ask what they think is the right thing to do you get another answer. (Hopefully.)
Short term I can agree that Snowdens actions probably hurt national security and the revelation clearly damaged the U.S. image. Over a longer timespan it was the right thing to do and will in the long run help with creating a global stability based on mutual trust. The NSA idea of security is to strike first against the neighbor. The ideal scenario is to have a neighbor that you can ask to look after your house while you are on vacation.
No. The fuckers "running" the US damaged the US's image. The NSA has all kinds of support in looking at the OTHER GUY's citizens.
The toolbags in charge turned all that around and used the government AGAINST the citizens, 99.995% of whom were doing nothing wrong and who's rights were absolutely violated.
If Snowden didn't do what he did, somewhere, someone else, would have. And the thing is, if you aren't doing anything wrong when your shit gets revealed then you don't have a lot to worry about.
Are you implying that what is legal == what is right/moral/appropriate?
According to John Oliver most people think Edward Snowden is Julian Assange. Oliver did "man-on-the-street" style interviews in New York, asking people who Snowden was. Most people, if they knew the name at all, thought he was "the guy who sold government secrets to Wikileaks."
The report doesn't mention this at all, so I'm not sure what to make of the statistics. If you asked people "Which color is brighter: green or brown" but they had never heard of brown before, you wouldn't be able to draw many meaningful conclusions from it. The report itself doesn't even mention what questions they asked people. There's really just no information here at all.
Yes, look at the young sh*** running for president in the Republican Party. How does Harvard put out so many of these A** Holes?
Of course most people hate him.
Not everyone of us old farts become more conservative. I don't mind my tax money going to help the poor, I do object it going for the defense corporate welfare state or the Fatherland Security Department.
Except For Millennials, Most Americans Don't Understand Snowden
Presently here, but not there.
Devil's advocate here. Here is my question: What good has Snowden done overall by selling out who he worked for?
Is the world safer? Nope. ISIS and terrorist groups know the channels they were eavesdropped on, and are now that much more potent due to knowing this. There are a lot of people dead which might have been prevented.
Is the economy any better? China has just as pervasive a spy network, and theirs is intact. The US and Europe are not perfect, but grouse about government stuff in some other countries, and you (as well as your family) will wake up in pieces in some organ bank auction. In fact, it just makes Chinese devices (which backdoors are not unheard of) to be chosen, and then used as staging grounds for attacks. The people Snowden betrayed don't trash data on my business's machines, but if a single one of those many attacks rattling my firewall from overseas addresses makes it through, I better hope my backups are good and that my liability insurance is current.
Its been a while since Snowden. Are we better off as a whole? Nope. The real bad guys (as in the guys who want to kill us, our civilization, our history, everything) are empowered now.
Completely different. Those services are offered to me and they have direct access to them. I can chose not to use them if I want. Also, Google doesn't have access to Amazon, Amazon doesn't have access to google, att doesn't have access to google, etc. the government on the other hand has access to all.
If the government were to offer Internet, television home, mail service for free, then it would be acceptable for them to have access. They don't, so it's not acceptable for them to be able to just scrape everything anytime they want.
Millennials know who Snowden is because they watch the Daily Show.
The real difference is that older people are more likely to be fearful of whatever boogey man du jour the government is pushing. When I was a little kid, my grandparents really were afraid of communists. When I was a teenager, I was told by older folks what horrible stuff marajuana was, and how it would definitely ruin your life. In 2002 I was having a discussion with an older co-worker, who was a really smart guy, and he told me that he was concerned and scared about Sadam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction.
Today government officials tell us we are supposed to be afraid of terrorists, and that Snowden hurt their ability to fight these ubiquitous terrorists.
I do not know why, but as people age, they watch more TV, become more fearful about the state of the world, and buy the official propaganda. I'm am trying to avoid this.
I can remember when my generation was against The Man too.
No, you got it wrong. Well, you are correct in that - when we were younger - it was our generation who fought against "The Man". We did this by throwing our support behind the New Guy who would rid of us of "The Man". And thanks to us, eventually, the New Guy ousted "The Man" and all his old-fashioned notions, enacted policies we supported, and we were happy. But then the New New Guy started making noise, winning the support of the next generation, and foolishly calling our New Guy "The Man". But that's just ridiculous. Our New Guy isn't "The Man"; that's the people our parents supported!
So you see, it is not that our generation has become any less less open-minded and rebellious; after all, we got rid of "The Man". It's just that we already put the proper people into power and can recognize these New New Guys as the loud-mouth troublemakers trying to lead our children astray for what they are.
What Dad, you thought "The Man" was a New Guy too and you were fighting for truth 'n' justice and the American Way? Now that's just silly; obviously you are just being conservative and bitter. ;-)
Not sure if you're trolling or just, well, you know.
> Good it means the government it was doing it's job correctly.
On the contrary - he demonstrated that even though the government has all this resources at it's disposal, conducting unconstitutional, warrantless searches and interceptions of communications - they failed miserably at preventing recent attacks at USA (Boston marathon, anyone? Allowing a know terrorist, that even the Russians warned US about on US soil because they couldn't write his name down correctly) and further investigation brought out that NSA, FBI and other alphabet agencies were unable to provide even one single case where all this surveillance helped prevent an attack. Guess everyone was too busy spying on their girlfriend and digging up dirt on next political candidates.
> It's illegal for a neighbor. It's entirely legal for the government.
It's also illegal for the government, since no warrants were requested and even the process the government setup for itself was abused and disregarded. Snowden also exposed multitudes of abuses, where employees of said agencies used the power in their hands to pursue their personal agenda.
Every generation starts out more liberal and open-minded, and ends up more conservative and bitter.
Then I must be an outlier since I'm now 67 and far more liberal than I was 50 years ago... and for the record, I think Snowden is a hero.
Its hard to bring a case if you don't have "standing." It is also hard to prove standing when the government claims state secrets to prevent you from getting the needed documentation. The government has taken an end run around the legal system this way ensuring they never have to answer in a court of law. And you try to use that as proof that its legal? GFY.
How does that saying go????
If your not a liberal at 21 you have no heart, If your not a conservative by 40 you have no brain.
Or something there about.
The same jackoffs who share everything on Facebook apparently care a lot about privacy, who would've guessed?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
>> Snowden damaged our industry.
US government damaged your industry.
>> Sure the leak confirmed what many of us expected. It didn't change anything though. We still have surveillance. Now we might not get to eat too.
And who is to blame if you are too lazy to get off your sofa? If you don't get to eat - good, maybe that will motivate you to do something about all the surveillance and start earning the trust back that you squandered.
It's shocking exactly how easy it is to verify this fact and how little difference that has made to the narrative.
Clearly the people who continue to verbally attack McCarthy aren't attacking him for being incorrect - they're attacking him for being right.
Well, I was pretty sure that lying to Congress was illegal, but I guess I missed the part "unless you are too important to be put in prison, in which case it's totally legal", or that spying on your ex was illegal, using NSA resources.
Troll much?
Nixon was involved in a campaign of spying on political rivals and running a ring for breaking and entering, financed by campaign funds, for personal gain.
McCarthy's witch hunts are well documented. Just because there were spies in the State Dept doesn't justify his actions.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
a substance that distorts reality, that can make you a veggie and slowly destroys your ability to have fun without it is just a way to make a whole generation less intelligent than the one before
You just described alcohol.
>> If you ask me to view the story objectively, he's a con artist who never worked for any of the places he claims to have worked for and drew the allegedly leaked "Powerpoint Slides" himself in Windows Paint.
Even US government confirmed he worked at those places and said that the leaks were legit and confirmed the existence of said programs.
>> All of this is cooked up by collusion with Glenn Greenwald, a UK reporter who has no business sticking his nose in US policy in the first place, to create a paper tiger bogeyman out of the toothless US intelligence industry the likes of which even Senator McCarthy would have blushed to turn out.
> UK reporter who has no business sticking his nose in US policy in the first place
Wouldn't you like to decide who gets to stick his nose and where. Nixon was pretty sure that those pesky journalists shouldn't had no business to stick their nose into his affairs either. But, hey, if US government has nothing to hide, then they have nothing to fear, right? If they haven't done anything wrong, then Snowden leaking their info won't hurt them? Isn't that what they've been telling every time they've justified the dragnets in the internet?
Then he started releasing information that was less and less pertinent to government violating American's privacy. Every country has spying capability and they have every reason to need it. At this point, it seems to me that he's just releasing information that sabotages foreign relations.
- A Millennial
You really think it's changing for the better? I look at some things in the last 50 or 60 years and see improvements. Then I look at the way government has grown incredibly huge and intrudes into every part of our lives and wonder if the bad doesn't outweigh the good. For the improvements in civil rights I am happy but most of the other improvements are worrying to say the least. When I was young it seemed Vietnam would never end and now we have the anti-terror war.
They are attacking him for attacking people that hated America. It's now fashionable to hate America. Get with the times.
Keep dreaming. However old you are, when your generation takes power, it's going to be the same old cesspool inside the beltway. But, you go ahead and dream. That's one of the good things about youth.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
You just described alcohol.
Exactly ;-)
You can't legislate it away though. That's not the job of the government and it wastes resources in a futile effort. Everyone clearly saw what kind of hell Prohibition caused so I fail to understand why they continue to repeat that mistake. You get rid of Pot the same way you get rid of cigarettes. Change the culture and make it uncool and ostracize those who partake. It's something society has to do not the government and no matter what you do there will always be a fringe that wont stop no matter what. This insanity of using the power of government to do things that government really can't do has to stop.
Well better lock up the potheads and dealers and send them to the rape factories right?
On a tangent, the fact that we can't even control crime in prison says a great deal about the ineffectiveness of our approach to crime. Heck, I'm sure they can't even keep drugs out of prison.
If you believe the video that John Oliver posted, the problem isn't so much that Americans hate him, it is that most Americans don't really know who the hell he is, and really don't care.
Indeed, times are changing. It's really cheap to buy a lot of potentially dangerous technology. Personally I don't care if my data is collected as long as it's not used to influence me. That's the difference between read only and write access to your mind. I'd hate to see an all unified system of Internet data, which outputs exactly the song you are supposed to listen to based on your preferences, exactly the conversation you're supposed to hear, until you buy a Diet Coke. It becomes a system for enforcing negative and positive tagged influences, ya know like cattle prodding sheep. As far as I'm concerned nobody who hasn't directly authenticated themselves to me (said hello, and is within my field of vision) should know anything more than how I sound and what I'm wearing. But I have a feeling we'll have a Mecha-Hitler first, before it becomes bad enough for change.
He helped to reveal how negative and authoritarian most people are.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
You can call me a troll as much as you want, it is just my opinion. I don't say it's better to send pot smokers in prison, it's just that pot smoking is very very often an introduction to other, more harmful drugs. My brother commited suicide because, among other things, of drug abuse. He started smoking pot when he was 12, got introduced to LSD, mescaline and other craps, and ended hanged with an electric extension cord... I don't say pot causes everyone to commit suicide, I just say it's one more thing that makes people go in a possibly very, very wrong way.
That being said, that's totally off-topic.
I think people say they don't like Snowden only because if they say they like him, they fear to end up in a dark prison after being picked up by a group of black Chevy Suburbans...
[...]pot decriminalized[...]
You make it sound like it's a good thing. I hate that stuff, and I personnaly don't think that legalizing a substance that distorts reality, that can make you a veggie and slowly destroys your ability to have fun without it is just a way to make a whole generation less intelligent than the one before.
I could say the exact same thing about alcohol. You never see the stoned filling out a&e though.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Thanks, grandpa!
No matter what age you are, if you're at all tech-savvy and security-conscious, Snowden is owed your thanks for this reason alone. (Or from Wikipedia, if you prefer).
Related: There's a widely-circulated conspiracy theory that the NSA has solved P vs. NP and broken RSA (and most other forms of) encryption. The fact that Snowden hasn't leaked any documents confirming this seems to be to be pretty strong evidence that the theory is false.
I was thinking of Yale, given their standard of acceptance for qualified candidates, lost village idiots can aspire to become president.
And thats the problem, who cares what other people do, we already have systems in place to deal with people being irresponsible in public. Substance abuse is also a problem, but we have services for people to seek help. It has nothing to with intelligence, there has always been things that degrade your ability to perceive the world around you, and rather than wasting time preventing people from doing something, inform and help them. It seems a lot more stressful to society to fight people with self-destructive behaviors than it is to help them pick up the pieces.
Its not my fault, someone put a wall in my way.
Research done in the 60's showed that almost 100% of heroin addicts ate cornflakes for breakfast as children. You could probably repeat the research today with Kinder Eggs in place of cornflakes.
If you are unhappy and turn to pot, it probably won't solve the problem. So you try something harder. obviously, it aint gonna work, so you take more and harder stuff, and it ends badly. If you start young, your judgement was probably worse too.
Correlation does not imply causation.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
That was the point. No one is suggesting that the US isn't doing a lot for security, they're suggesting that the US is violating privacy too much in a blind quest for security. Snowden provided proof of this. Anyone who wants more security should move to Russia. Most of us want less, but more focused security. Dragnets aren't a wise use of tax money and aren't very effective.
Most of us like him...if we know who he is. Sadly my generation's decline into apathy and rigid-minded thinking...because of being the original victims of the then often-theorized and feared, yet now-confirmed tactics of the surveillocracy...has begun to claim us.
Nixon lied to the world about others who would challenge his running for president. Using the same methods as Carly Fiorina; who got fired at HP for doing the same thing. The only thing these two people haven't done is write a diary on the topic.
Sounds like an oversimplification. Meaningful social change still happens despite what you're saying.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Most american's are so blissfully ignorant they don't even really know who he is
maybe perhaps, they don't. I sure would not bet on it. What does Google do? Searches, you say. Well, I never. They search, they find. Finders keepers.
You are damn right the government has access to everything. The real lesson from Snowdon is, anything the government knows, will leak out sooner or later. (Probably sooner than you think).
Snowdon told us what he found. The other few thousand leakers kept their traps shut so we dont know who they sold the data to.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
If the John Oliver show is anything to go by, it would seem that the average American actually has very little idea (if any) who Snowden actually is, or even what he did. Many seem to think he's related to Wikileaks.
I take it you're also all for re-criminalizing alcohol, right?
We gotta get back to those wonderful crime-free days of prohibition after all.
This is a correlation thing. It is conceivable that whatever caused him to commit suicide is the same thing that caused him to use drugs and that instead of cutting his life short, the drugs made his life tolerable enough to stay in it longer.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
I hate that stuff, and I personnaly don't think that legalizing a substance that distorts reality
1. Why on Earth should any of us give a fuck if you hate it.
2. If you aren't a prohibitionist (alcohol), for these same reasons, then you're a hypocrite.
3. Feynman smoked weed, and did alright in the intelligence stakes.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
I think it's just an oft-repeated cliche that everyone becomes more right wing as they get older. I think it's just that people become grumpy bastards as they get older, which gets confused with conservatism (on account of how conservatives are dickheads). :)
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
More to the point, Amazon or Google can't lock you up in prison or legally kill you. The government can. That's not a small difference.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Whose basement will you live in then?
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I think the guy's name was Joe McCarthy, a senator while Nixon was VP. The House Un-American thing was during Nixon's presidency, watched it play out live on the TeeVee. Nixon's 'big' crime that doesn't get much attention was his sabotaging the Vietnam peace talks before and during his first campaign, with help from Kissinger, no doubt. It was unfortunate Johnson let it go. But then we all know these people can't really touch each other without bringing down the entire house of cards. 'Fast and Furious', 'Iran-Contra', the Philippines, Cambodia, Chile ... Molasses from Havana to Canada. They are all a bunch of rum-runners and slave traders. It's a gangster's paradise.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
This liberal/conservative dichotomy seems to be precisely what keeps American politics stuck in a never ending rut.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
do you really think Mitt Romney would have done anything differently with regard to the security theater? He is on record repeatedly as being in support of domestic spying as well as increased military spending. Romney would not have changed anything. the only thing that might be said in support of him is that at least he woudl've been more open about it.
Spot on - people have forgotten that the only person jailed over the torture scandal was the man who didn't do any torture and instead blew the whistle on the "cruel and unusual" (unconstitutional by 8th amendment) practice . That was a couple of years before Snowden's leak and he's still in jail.
Yeah, except that's their strategy, not yours. They have you too scared to look for alternatives, lest the *wrong lizard* gets in. It works like a charm, for over 150 years now.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The Millennial in particular seems to have a short attention span and perhaps more a taste for political theater than effective political action.
Such as the US Army? Try again sunshine.
He was a prick with no sense of morality trying to bulldoze his way to the Presidency before scandal caught up with him, and the world is lucky it did catch up with him in time.
Think about it, if what he said was real wouldn't that make him one of the biggest traitors in US history for refusing to turn over his "lists" to law enforcement?
Older people still get their news and information from more traditional sources; radio, TV, newspapers. Younger people tend to get their news from Internet sources which can be more varied in their viewpoint. I wonder how much that contributes to the difference in opinion. Traditional media have cast Snowden in a harsher light, and that is where older people get their opinions.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
You make it sound like it's a good thing. I hate that stuff, and I personnaly don't think that legalizing a substance that distorts reality, that can make you a veggie and slowly destroys your ability to have fun without it is just a way to make a whole generation less intelligent than the one before.
Maybe so, but having a dozen Al Capones and a legion of Al Capone wannabes slinging lead willy-nilly turned out to be a greater evil.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
At this point, i think they are just trolling. Im sorry for responding to an AC, should have known...
He should be executed for treason.
Snowden needs a very slow and very painful death.
Whilst I don't agree that it necessarily needs to be slow and painful, I agree with your sentiment.
When will we throw off the chains of the older generation? Are we their slaves?
Strategic voting is unfortunately a necessity in the US voting system. The solution is to change the voting system, not to tell people to stop voting strategically.
courtequdotbiz version 1:
[...]pot decriminalized[...]
You make it sound like it's a good thing.
courtequdotbiz version 2:
I don't say it's better to send pot smokers in prison...
What are you saying then? Perhaps "decriminalized" and "legalized" got mixed up?
IMO, all drugs should be legalized and regulated. I feel the benefits of the latter part out weight the negative effects of the former. IE. you'll know what you're taking, its potency, it's strain info and effects, etc etc etc. In addition, rather than the government (and, by extension, all tax payers) spending LOADS of money trying to fight the war on drugs, they'll be able to make loads of money on taxing those drugs. It's not a perfect solution (ex. see cigarettes), but at least there's an influx of cash coming from the same product that will eventually cost the people money to support those users in recovery/sickness/etc (I dislike how tobacco tax is currently utilized, but it could be used as a wash and even a money maker). Legalizing all drugs would also shut down almost all of the related violent crime from dealers and distributors, and stop the flow of cash to countries we don't really want to support.
The biggest issue I see with legalizing drugs is how we deal with those that are currently incarcerated for possession or use. We could pretend that it's ok to think, "the rules changed; they broke the rules before; their breaking of the rules still happened and so they should see out their punishment". I have trouble with that, but I don't know how we'd handle adjusting the sentencing of hundreds of thousands of people.
[mods... feel free to offtopic this]
Personally I have **ZERO** trust in these sorts of surveys. The people that answer these surveys are self selecting, not a random selection. It only includes people that don't have caller ID, or that are willing to answer the phone from an unknown number, then those that are willing to take the 10 minutes to take the survey. Since this it is not a random selection of the general US public no inferences on the general US public can be made.
Is the world safer?
Yes. The revelations, and public reactions to them (the real public reaction as expressed in the marketplace, not whatever jaw-flapping occurs in response to some inane telemarkepollster call) have led to security improvements. The fact that it has also led to the entertaining spectacle of useless bureaucrats running around pissing and moaning and whining and generally making fools of themselves in public is just a bonus.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
You can chalk this up to those who still believe in the lie (which then hate snowden) and those who dont. The lie here is of course that the gov has your best interest in mind, and that thing people called "american dream".. turns out it really was a dream.
Most people are heavily invested in the lie. They will fight to defend it and can't be unplugged.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
When I first saw it, I assumed that it meant people born in or after 2000.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
No one trusts our software now. This is horrible for our economy.
Well, then, you need to throw out the bastards in government who caused that to happen with their bad policies.
Now we might not get to eat too.
Well, then, you need to do it quickly.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Indeed. As to the latterr, the raw misogyny of people who dismiss the LOVEINT revelations as trivial make the Gamergate cretins look like Betty Friedan.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Roughly two thirds of the people surveyed in the US have an opinion (or even recognize the name). You need to drill into the original survey to find that number.
Of the people who have an opinion, in the usual demographic breakouts only the 18 to 34 y/o group tends to have a positive opinion of him.
Children don't like rules and think that the ends always justify the means.
Time to clean up the Romper Room in Washington DC and put adults in charge.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
I dislike Edward Snowden for the same reason I dislike Jesus, Muhummad, and Jehovah: He's a religion shoved down my throat without anybody giving me a chance to make up my mind whether he's done anything good for the world or not.
If you ask me to view the story objectively, he's a con artist who never worked for any of the places he claims to have worked for and drew the allegedly leaked "Powerpoint Slides" himself in Windows Paint. All of this is cooked up by collusion with Glenn Greenwald, a UK reporter who has no business sticking his nose in US policy in the first place, to create a paper tiger bogeyman out of the toothless US intelligence industry the likes of which even Senator McCarthy would have blushed to turn out.
To what purpose? Revolution! Why? So Wrong Paul! What for? End the Fed, Occupy Wall Street, Tyler Durden, we are the 1%!!!
It's this generation of filthy hippies making lots of noise and changing nothing, a Xerox copy of everything wrong with the Baby Boomers. Only at least the Boomers had better music.
Does anybody remember when Slashdot was about tech news? I sure miss those days.
You're a Millennial? You do a disservice to your generation. This has to be one of the more clueless and incoherent posts I have read here in a while. And if you're a millennial, you're too young to remember what Slashdot used to be like.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
It's sneakier than most people think, isn't it?
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
The solution is to change the voting system...
Well, if you can get people to vote for this 'change', you may have killed more than one bird, no?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Adults respect the rule of Law and civilized society and know that what Snowden did was wrong.
Children don't like rules and think that the ends always justify the means.
Color me completely shocked.
Adults like those in the NSA? They're the ones ignoring the Constitution and lying to Congress about it. Why don't you hold them to the same standard?
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Real change and progress in politics comes only as the old people die off and are replaced by the young. It's a slow process!
You know... There were great hopes raised in my parents' day, when the hippies threatened the anachronic values of a dying, obsolete social construct.
Young people are always more likely to embrace change, difference, to agree that the risk to be different is worth it, that the old corrupt system is not worth pursuing anymore. Then they grow up. Then, the old hippies become the dwellers of old age care homes, and are as reactionary as their grandparents were.
And no, I don't mean that YOU think it was illegal, or some judge said was 'probably' illegal. That a Federal court found it to be illegal. It's been over 2 years so this should be easy. I'll wait.
There's this. And this. And there's also this. Yep that was easy. I hope you didn't have to wait too long.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Be more specific ?
Which young shit do you think the nominee will be against the old entitled bitch ?
It's shocking exactly how easy it is to verify this fact and how little difference that has made to the narrative.
Clearly the people who continue to verbally attack McCarthy aren't attacking him for being incorrect - they're attacking him for being right.
Funny thing Nixon had the same problem with Alger Hiss.
Anyone who grew up during the cold war will see Snowden for the "useful idiot" he is. There were plenty of them back in the 70's and 80's. We used to call them traitors.
I grew up during the Cold War and I have no idea what you're talking about.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Apparently he valued his own notoriety far more highly than either of those. It's a common trait in narcissists.
You mean the guy who said he didn't want the story to be about him? The one who gave hi information to responsible parties, so that he could stay out of the picture? That guy?
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Between Facebook, Google, and Iphone based location services the NSA didn't have to do very much.
I still think he is an active NSA operative. By making it a story about himself, he diverted attention of a HUGE percentage of the population away from the program he exposed and towards himself. His "coming out" might as well have been code-named "operation lightening rod."
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
We actually overwhelmingly like what Snowden did. Many of us just dislike him because he looks like a hipster.
(source: IJMIU)
Is it just me or does this seem ironic?
Generally it seems Millenials(the ones I know and work with) are more accepting of surveillance by the government and corporations.
Gen X and the Boomers have more of the 20th century leftover attitude that Americans have a right to privacy, and that the blood and treasure spent to keep the "World Safe for Democracy" by the "Greatest Generation", etc, The Constitution, etc, means we have those rights.
You would think Millenials would be more apathetic to the whole Snowden thing(which has been my experience talking to people about it). The attitude I've encountered is the usual, "I'm just on FB posting videos, etc, playing games, etc", "I'm not doing anything wrong", "why should I care?"
My experience is that Gen X and the Boomers are much more paranoid and concerned about rights, etc;
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
No one trusts our software now.
You trusted it before Snowden?
Wow...
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
You talk about those abuses like if they ever stopped. They just got better at hiding them...
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
46 here. I work in the military-industrial complex. Snowden did us all a signal service.
Think about the limitations of the general public in perceiving this. Do you really think that people who think Kim Kardashian is interesting and like the NFL are really going to give this any serious thought? They'll parrot the line the government throws out.
The interesting part of the poll is that even a tiny percentage think that Snowden did the right thing. Not enough to give me much hope, but enough to surprise me.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Collecting call meta data is technically indistinguishable from peeking at someone's phone bill (it just views the information in electronic, rather than paper, format). Opening someone's phone bill (without a warrant) is illegal. Just because the court said "unc" and followed it with "le", you are arguing that the court hasn't said "uncle." That's a pretty weak argument.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
"The broad support for Edward Snowden among Millennials around the world should be a message to democratic countries that change is coming," says Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union.
The nimrod from the ACLU doesn't take into account that peoples opinions change as they get older, and typically becoming more conservative.
Just another day in Paradise
Yes, I'll trade '75 for '15 any day. If' you'd prefer the mid-70's you're a moron.
Just another day in Paradise
More accurately, people generally get more selfish as they age. Because they acquire, adapt and invest within the existing system - it's all really about THEIR STUFF.
People who do well with the status quo almost universally become biased to whatever maintains what they have, their stuff. It's a matter of self interest and most will put down other people at the hint of a threat, which clearly makes them selfish. Sure, they have excuses which rationalize their positions and behaviors - I've not met an overtly selfish person over 8 who doesn't cover it up.
The middle classes are quite self-centered with a "conservative" bias too but not as much as the group above them; the lower classes are not a great deal better but because they have less stuff to lose, their demographic is more open to alternative thinking. Still, the lower classes mostly are the same because they want to find ways to get more stuff. Once they move up the economic class system, most will "change" but in reality they never changed their motives, only the ones who really thought different and meant it stay the same.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Seems there is nothing left of the spirit that once founded the US....
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Nixon lied to the world about others who would challenge his running for president. Using the same methods as Carly Fiorina; who got fired at HP for doing the same thing. The only thing these two people haven't done is write a diary on the topic.
What??? Pullllleeese link to where Carly did anything similar to Nixon. Simple lying doesn't count. What "methods" are you claiming? Did she hire a goon squad to break into the competition's offices? I'm not asking you to like what she did or her politics, but let's get a grip on reality here.
Just another day in Paradise
"House Committee on UnAmerican Activities" of John McCarthy
McCarthy was a Senator and had nothing to do with that Committee in the House, but thank you for false mud slinging there.
Also, could you please inform me what Nixon did that was wrong? I've been trying to figure it out but haven't been able to yet. The articles of impeachment said he talked about using the IRS to target opponent, Obama has actually done it. Nixon also deleted 18 minutes of audio that was incriminating, Obama's team has deleted 3 years of Learner's emails and 30,000 of Clinton's emails that may be incriminating and has refused to turn over documents on Fast and Furious gun running. So I basically am trying to figure out what Nixon actually did that was wrong because none of it seems to be even questionable today. I guess its more lies like you had about McCarthy, who was looking for Russian spies in the State Department and from recently released documents he was 100% correct.
What is wrong about your comparisons to Nixon is the fact that you think Obama is suddenly right.
He's not. It's just that the American People don't give a shit anymore.
And I mean that.
And as a result, you have a government that gets more and more arrogant and in-your-face with every passing day, as if to say "Yeah, we broke the law. What the fuck are you gonna do about it? You're just a voter, until we decide to label you a terrorist for speaking out."
Why is this a report on slashdot? NewsMaxx is an extreme right-wing flakes and kooks site, for folks who think Faux News is liberal.
mark "Boomer, and I'd be happy to shake Snowdon's hand in appreciation for what he did".
It is a very slow process because while those young people are waiting around the old people to die, they have to live their lives, and by the time those old folks are finally dead, the young people aren't so young anymore and their opinions have changed so as to be not so different from the old folks of their youth. Life is funny that way.
If you don't raise your children, something else in their environment will raise them for you
They have little right to complain about the results of giving up their responsibilities or blindly supporting a society which takes away most their time working to support their children.
Not that everybody should home school their children to be selfish pricks who are unable to contribute positively to society... learning civics and ethics are dead already in the schools... as if we don't have enough psychopathy today.
Civics and Ethics are as religion neutral and scientific as one can get; needed far more today given the LACK of similar teachings at home or even at many churches (or the ones I attended as a kid which were largely caught up in dogmatic tripe.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Was the question maybe "Has Snowden done "more to hurt" U.S. national security than help it"?
In this case, even someone who agrees with his actions has to answer yes. He probably did actually hurt national security. But the benefit for the liberty and transparency for every person on the planet, and especially in the US, outweighs that easily.
Screw that survey.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"Pretexting" is such a nasty word. Carl lost his job because of it. Running for President is not like a piece of fruit one barters for, if one is considering a long term form of success.
"China and America are two countries separated by a body of water" - Bush Jr.
When the Raptor pilots had concerns about the F-22 they carefully followed the whistleblower laws. This guy couldn't figure it out.
You still won't get any of that without people to vote for it. You can relax. It's a simple fact
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
If Snowden had revealed that the government was storing meta-data about who went to gun shows, browsed for guns, or anything else related to guns, he would be a national hero.
I am with you.
I really feel that by making drugs illegal and taboo we make it
These points alone play a big part in setting some people on to a dark path.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
It would be interesting to see if more millennials as opposed to the general population actually know what Snowden did. In the interview John Oliver did recently, it seemed like people were largely ignorant of his (Snowden's) whistle blowing.
Is which side wins the ensuing battle/war. The British probably had an equally poor opinion of the originators of the Declaration of Independence. Is it any surprise that Snowden's name has an overall negative public connotation when all the media regarding him is itself negative?
For his naivity about the the consequences of his actions. Hasn't improved since his exile.
Since when do most people think?
I remember the cold war, the very real fear of nuclear war. X generation here, and I think Snowden and Manning are heroes, because they obeyed the supreme law of the land and blew the whistle on unlawful government activities. In Manning's case, s/he refused to obey illegal orders - she was damned if she did, violating the law and her oath, and violating orders if she didn't. She chose to do the right thing and is paying a high price for it right now. Snowden - well, he's a dead man walking right now, unfortunately, but he also did the right thing.
People of my generation and older are generally too trusting of the government, because they view the situation in black-and-white terms, us vs. them, Democracy[sic] vs. commies.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Oh, you mean how the NSA goes after financial intel for Wall Streeters and the ultra-rich?
If that's your definition, and Petrobas and others are your enemy category, than one might suppose he did, but if you stand by the citizenry, one day you might actually comprehend who your real enemy is (assuming you aren't a chatbot or some type of poseur).
...of non-Americans, of whom about 98% of those who know Snowden also like him. After all, he did help us a lot by showing us that the NSA most likely holds all our politicians by the... tapped cell phones ;) Suddenly many strange decisions made by our voted representatives in the last 15 years make much more sense.
Can you show me anywhere where it was said that the NSA was recording phone calls, reading mail (even email) or any other kind of surveillance on US citizens (except the metadata program, which was already ended by the time of the revelation according to the gov).
Every program I have seen exposed by Snowden was foreign surveillance, which is kind of sort of what we ask the NSA to do...
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
To me it looks like he put his oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies ahead of his own well being. (I'm one of those older Americans, born in 1952).
There's no point of argument like or not like Snowden as an individual. All that matters is the information revealed.
When judges fail to appreciate what the first Congress meant by "unreasonable search", where is the rule of law? And when lawsuits against government officials are dismissed because evidence of law violations falls under the "State Secrets Privilege", where is the rule of law?
and yet you find exactly ZERO laws broken on the government side.
Replies to Anonymous Coward's comment point out laws that the government broke.
Republicans aren't ass holes; they're elephant holes. But it's not like there's a big difference anymore.
the problem with this country is we don't talk about issues, we talk about people, and who is and isn't a good person, and we don't talk about policy, and what is just policy. Half of it is celebrity culture, and how public relations and the press games reputation by pushing your emotional buttons.
They also use this in dogwhistle politics. For example, niether party is really ended the wars, stopping the mass surviallence, or ending the security state or warrantless wiretaps, but they use the "good guy/bad guy" image to get Americans to swallow otherwise bad policy because it comes from a source they are conditioned to accept.
But again, who cares about snowden, lets instead talk about what he revealed, because he has some pretty hard proof, and its some pretty glaring contradictions between US policy and rhetoric.
Among those aged 35-44, some 34 percent have positive attitudes toward him. For the 45-54 age cohort, the figure is 28 percent, and it drops to 26 percent among Americans over age 55, These are a generation of baby boomers and gen xers who WANT government agencies tracking them online or collecting data about their phone calls and are angry that a man revealed this to them by sacrificing his lifestyle, freedom of movement and social life in an effort to expose the dirty dealing and corrupt hypocrisy the government they still believe serves them is doing.
If you are angry about what Snowden did, or think he damaged our security or think he is a traitor, then you WANT stingray, you want govt intrusions and more and more control via the government. Like John Oliver had Snowden himself explain, you WANT your 'Dick pics' exposed on the internet.
There is NO middle ground here. If the NSA actually served the citizens then Snowden would have needed to do nothing. He is no worse a person that ther founding fathers who are traitors to King George and the british crown.
I bet you think a woman can be partially pregnant.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Okay, well you totally lost me on that response. I see nothing related to the previous discussion. Have a nice day.
Just another day in Paradise
What Nixon did wrong was (1) alienate the press (2) get caught doing wrong. Foul play that would have been swept under the rug for Kennedy or Clinton was publicized ad nauseam by Nixon's rabid detractors.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Adults respect the rule of Law and civilized society and know that what Snowden did was wrong.
That's kind of a contradictory statement if you believe the US Constitution's (the basis of our Law) privacy provisions proscribe what the NSA has been doing.
I think he tried to do the right thing, but I sincerely believe that he did the wrong thing. Truth is relative and anyone who didn't always know that the SPY agency was SPYING probably shouldn't know it now either. Oh and he went to Russia, then told world leaders their phones were tapped. As if the US was the only one doing any of this... If you want to change the system, you have to play by the existing rules, otherwise you are just a cheater.
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
You haven't been paying attention. Every few weeks there's a story about an arrest of a group of bomb makers or other terrorists - usually with a batch of defective chemicals supplied by a gov't planted agent.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
I'm 64 and I like Snowden.
I don't know if he's a snob, an asshat, a jerk or a nice guy and I don't care
What he did was a great service to the population and citizenry of the USA
I love my country, America, but I fear my Government
Age-wise I am not that far from you
I am not an American by birth, I got it through the naturalization process
I do love America - the country, but the government? The more anti constitutional things it does the more I am fearful of it
I came from China, and I guess I do not need to remind you guys the reputation of the CCP which controls China --- and the real sad thing is that the government of the United States of America is fast approaching the level of notoriety of the CCP government of China
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
[...]pot decriminalized[...]
You make it sound like it's a good thing.
I am
I think Snowden is terrific, smart, great sense of humor. And had nothing to gain materially for his actions in june, 2013. No one made a bust of Obama and his anti-whistleblower activists and placed it in Brooklyn
We should make this a Slashdot poll:
1. I like Snowden
2. I dislike Snowden
But the internet told me they were! I keed, I keed. Im going to take off my tin foil hat and retreat from posting for a bit. I think the new diet and breakup has made me a little argumentative lately.
McCarthy was not 100% correct. He was partly correct.
He attempted to ruin people's lives because he suspected they were Communist, whether or not they were, or whether that made any difference (a Communist in the State Department was a danger, a Communist in Hollywood was harmless). He lied from the start about the extent of the danger. Had he gone after Communists in dangerous places, and made sure they were Communists, the story on him would have been much different.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
How much of that was from smoking pot, and how much from the fact that pot was illegal? If you have to break the law to indulge in a mostly harmless activity, you're going to lose respect for the law and those who tell you your activity is extremely harmful, and you're going to be dealing with criminals frequently.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Well that makes sense considering that Newsmax is a right leaning news organization aimed at the Baby Boomer generation. They sure wouldn't like to hear that he is viewed favorably by the majority of the country.
Moon? Oh, the convicted and served time in prison foreign agent? The one who thinks he is the Second Coming?
mark
Just goes to show how credible (or in this case the lack thereof) polling groups can be. We don't know what the question was which produced such an answer but you can make any poll reflect any outcome you want by the way you word the question. If it is a conclusion from a polling it is worthy of being ignored and discounted. Here's a poll results--everyone in my age group (55+) that I know think Snowden is an American HERO. My results are every bit as solid as the results in the article. Polls are only meant to persuade the undecided into agreeing with the results someone wanted. Cheeze!
Every generation starts out more liberal and open-minded, and ends up more conservative and bitter.
I hear this weird disconnect every time talk about pot use comes up. I'll always hear people from the 60s talking about how it was ok when they used pot, but how it's terrible/awful/dangerous if young people use it today. There is always some desperate attempt to cling to some BS argument, ANY argument to show how they're right and not hypocritical. Frequently the most compelling was "the marijuana was normal when I as young, but it's so much stronger and more potent today! It's much more dangerous." This is, of course, all nonsense, a way for them to have their cake and eat it too.
Oh, and let's not forget the main champion for gay marriage was this guy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
One of many strong champions. I'm not sure why you don't think he can be a man who has principles. That he would partner with Boies only reinforces the theme of greater freedom over time.
It's shocking exactly how easy it is to verify this fact and how little difference that has made to the narrative.
Clearly the people who continue to verbally attack McCarthy aren't attacking him for being incorrect - they're attacking him for being right.
Because it was witch hunting. No one is saying that witches/communists didn't exist. But he used that as a cover for using the federal government to attack political enemies and plenty of people who just got in the way.
Hate my generation.
That's the "detriment of others" part, not putting themselves first.
Patriotism is a favorite device of persons in India with something to sell; A true patriot honors all nations;
Casteism