All I can say is I've seen zero of those increases in my budget. And I'm buying pretty much the same shit I did three years ago. Partly that's because I got no car, so the gas price random BS doesn't affect me, but I still eat food.
As for unemployment, I have to agree on that. When I got my Masters I didn't think I'd be grateful to get full-time in a retail job with a bunch of High School grads. That's why I really love the idea of economic stimulus. Get rid of a bunch of my fellow college-grads-in-shitty-jobs and I might be able to get an interview. And my HS-level co-workers would get a raise to to reduced supply of potential retail workers.
The USA used to have the USSR to keep it in check and provide a limit to the US's more paranoid actions against foreign countries it imagined might harm it. Now that the USSR is no more, the USA allows it's fear and insecurity to run rampant and bomb the crap out of every little thing that gives it nightmares - whether rational or not.
Bullshit.
The Soviets did not help us keep our paranoia in check. They were the cause of our paranoia, and that paranoia caused numerous incidents that were both more illegal and less ethical then anything the NSA is accused of.
For example, there was the time we supported Diem in a coup d'tat against the Emperor of Vietnam. Then Diem himself got to be an embarrassment, and the coup d'tat that replaced his ass killed him. When we realized that Latin America occasionally liked to elect leftists who sympathized with the Soviets we started supporting numerous Latin American military dictatorships. These dictatorships engaged in such brutal repression that nobody knows how many bad things they did decades later. This was repeated in pretty much every region of the world. The recent film "The Act of Killing" tells the story of a bunch of massacres in Indonesia during the Vietnam war era. A million people died. In our defense our Evil Dictators were generally less evil then their Evil Dictators, but when your entire defense is "less evil then Stalin," you're in a pretty fucked up place. I could go on.
I'm not saying mass data collection of everyone is right, Constitutional, or ethical. I am saying that this is a massive improvement over the Cold War when Operation Condor killed upward of 60k, the Indonesians killed a million, etc.
I don't think the primary motivation for massive surveillance and such things is fear. In my opinion it is about control and power. Being able to silence any opposition before it gets organized and knowing in advance which groups dissent is growing gives you the power to stay in control longer. Fear is only used to gain acceptance of the public: think of the terrorists etc.
And who has been silenced by NSA surveillance?
Assange is still talking. He's got a talk-show. He just ran for Australian Senate. He got his ass kicked because he thinks ethical righteousness is more important then having friends, and it's impossible to win in politics if you're the guy who has snubbed every-damn-body. His core problem isn't that the US has silenced him, it's that the vast majority of people in the world don't think that government secrets are inherently evil. They never have. Even the founding fathers of the US refused to release the minutes of their Constitutional deliberations. People dislike some secrets, but the group that just released the info that Australia's spies actually spy on people should not be surprised that the taxpayers who paid for said spies aren't happy with them.
My major problem with criticism of NSA programs isn't that the criticism is wrong on the legal merits, but that NSA critics pretend they are terrified that the NSA has their data, while they're criticizing the NSA. On a public forum. Which nobody needs a warrant to read. You do realize you just proved that you aren't actually afraid, don't you?
Regardless, this is not about controlling you in the same way the KGB and Stasi controlled the Eastern bloc. It's about having a store of information so that if they ever find out you're doing something illegal, they can get more data on all your activities quickly. It's data the government shouldn't have, but that doesn't make it ipso facto proof the government is going to murder millions.
My secondary problem is so few of the critics actually understand how oppression works in the US. In the US The first thing a KKK/Communist/[insert evil of choice] President does will be announce major restrictions on the types of investigation law enforcement can do. Those restrictions, and Constitutional restrictions on what police can do, won't apply to the thugs "volunteer" for his party. Places where he lost will retain some freedom, because they will have local cops who do their jobs. But in places he won (and generally you don't win the White House unless you won most states) he's probably got local Governors and Sheriffs who share his agenda. And if all the local Sheriff does when the KKK/Redshirts/[evil party militia] murders some local activist is claim he can't figure it out, then it's time to be very afraid.
BTW, unlike KGB-style oppression, this has actually happened before. Prior to the Civil War, and up until 1876 or so, every Southern state was 20 points blacker then they are now. Mississippi and South Carolina were actually majority black, which should indicate precisely how free a country the Confederacy was. Then Tilden basically tied with Hayes, and to become President Hayes had to agree to stop enforcing Federal Civil Rights laws in the South. Federal power went down, but that didn't make the Jim Crow South a freer place.
You don't understand - it's the position that corrupts, not the person that is corrupt. You could "elect" the most honest person, and end up with the worst tyrant. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. There is a reason this is not a new saying.
Dude, if they were corrupt we'd be in a much different mess. Think about it.
The people with the money to pay the biggest bribes are in business. They'd prefer lower taxes and an end to regulations, but what they really need is certainty on things like the debt ceiling and the Federal budget. If it was just a matter of spending $50 Billion on bribes Tim Cook could cut the checks himself, tomorrow; instead of thanking our lucky stars that they delayed the budget/debt ceiling dispute a few months we would never have heard of a budget/debt ceiling dispute.
I agree that if Congress were more ethical we'd be in a much better situation, as would most people. The problem is that I define ethical much differently then a guy who thinks ObamaCare is evil would. Since guys who agree with me won half of Congress, but guys who agree with him won the other half, we get this constant BS arguing and brinksmanship over the same BS they were arguing over and brinking over back in 2010.
Keep in mind this is what the founders wanted. They believed that a government where Congress and the President were constantly arguing would protect freedom because no evil policies could possibly get passed.
The basic theme of the books is that when you have a government where almost everyone is 100% honorable at all times, and always refuses to compromise, the entire world is fucked. Off the top of my head I can think of two characters who died of being honorable, both of whom also managed to set back their personal causes greatly; and a third who merely managed to set back her timetable by several books. And I stopped reading so long ago I can't remember the title of the last book I read.
But back IRL the problem isn't that the Congressional leaders we've got are dishonest. The problem is half of them are actually being honest when they say "If we don't fire half the government, cut taxes on job-creators by 20 points, and end ObamaCare." The other half are being equally honest when they demand more government spending, higher taxes on the wealthy, and strongly support doubling down on ObamaCare.
This means that, for both sides, the only honest or honorable thing to do is fight to defeat the other side. Since our government is a complex dance between two Legislative houses with power, an independent Executive, and Judges who frequently heckle, this results in lots of arguing and very little happens except everyone thinks they're well-positioned for the next election.
In Europe they generally agree on things that government departments say, but then again in America we also generally agree that the actual numbers the Congressional Budget Office spits out are accurate. Our media is actually a lot more tame, and even-handed then a lot of European media. British tabloids, for example, make Fox/MSNBC/CNN/etc. look like the BBC.
What I suspect is different isn;t the amount of rancor in debates, it's the length of debate. In the US we have two political elites. The Conservative/rural elite says the government should fire itself, cut taxes to the bone, stop regulating financial behavior (ie: no individual mandate in ObamaCare, banks do what they want and die if they screw up, etc.), and strongly regulate certain personal behaviors (ie: homosexuality, RU-486). The liberal/urban elite says the government should hire a bunch more people, strongly regulate financial behavior (ie: stronger mandate in ObamaCare, banks get strongly regulated and bailed out, etc.),regulations on personal behavior should not touch sex, but should touch gun-ownership.
Since the conservative/rural elite runs the US House, but the urban/liberal elite runs the Senate and the Presidency both elites have to agree or the budget won't pass and the entire government gets fired.
This means lots of BS debates dragged out over years. Literally. The taxes-vs.-deficit spending debate has been going on since the 2010 Congressional elections, and will only pause if the 2014 elections get rid of Boehner.
OTOH almost all European countries are run on the principle of Unity of Powers. You can't have a leftish Head of Government and a rightish House of the Legislature. If somehow that happens the Head of Government loses a vote of confidence in Parliament and the people decide whose right in a new election. Which happens within 2-3 months. You can't have a debate last four years, and cover three elections cycles.
Which means you ain't gonna find out when the Social Dems disagree with the Christian Dems on basic facts, whereas in the US the only thing worth paying attention to in politics for much of the last 4 years has been the basic factual disagreements between the GOP and Obama.
Dude, This is fucking America. We have never, ever all agreed on anything. In this case a significant proportion of the people who fought the Revolution were extremely pro-aristocracy.
Our number three or four guy General was "Lord Stirling," our top trainer as "Baron von Steuben," we received aid from extremely aristocratic France, and the officers of the Continental Army created a hereditary order (the Society of the Cincinnati) at the end of the war specifically intended to become our new nobility..
As for the rest, increasing the House to 30k is simply not practical. There's a reason the Indians, with a population triple ours, have a Parliament that is less then double ours. It's just not practical to run a Legislative body with more then 600 or so members. You'd have to have a working group in DC much smaller then the 30k Congressman, and you'd probably need actual Constitutional amendments governing how that working group was chosen, when the 30k could meet to fire the working group, etc.
As for points 4 and 5, you really don't understand Progressives. At all. It's not that we think sovereign debt is a good thing, or even a not-bad thing; it's that we think the problem with sovereign debt is that it leads to inflation. OTOH the problem with cutting government spending is that it involves firing people, which reduces salaries for everyone by increasing the supply of available labor while reducing the demand for said labor. If the economies doing great, inflation is real, and the employment situation is fine government debt is a bad thing to have.
But we're in the middle of a years-long employment slump, with basically no inflation, it's foolish to cut the deficit. We'd cut everyone's salary, to solve a problem that simply does not exist.
That would be like a guy whose house is currently on fire sealing up his basement because a flood is sure to hit real soon now.
Do you think your allies need to spy on you? and your citizen?
If not, then clearly this puts limitations on the amount of trust we can have in the US.
On me personally or my government? On my government they'd damn well better be spying. At it's best moments the State Department's public stances can be incredibly complex. Generally every word in them is literally true, but that doesn't mean it's unhelpful for somebody not familiar with the nuances of legalistic American English to have the non-public version.
On me personally? They probably shouldn't bother. My hobby of internet blowhard leaves very little time for conquering Canada.
On the residents of most of the allies? They should probably only spy on people they've identified as threats. In other words if they could get a warrant on a specific individual in the US Courts, they should be spying on that guy.
On the residents of certain allies? Every-god-damn-body. And their little dogs too. The Pakistani state is very, very weak. This means that even if the Prime Minister, the President, and all of Parliament honestly want some Kashmir Separatist group, or Taliban-aligned terrorists, to cut that shit out it won't necessarily happen. The ISI might simply ignore the orders, and use Pakistani tax money to fund the attacks. Local leaders are not legally supposed top be able to stymy national terrorism investigations, but they still manage to do it quite frequently.
I have reasonable faith that no NATO member is going to sellout the alliance, and even so, the effects would be limited.
Note, the cold war is over, we're not going to have a third world war... If so it's an end of world event, no need to prepare, it doesn't matter:)
The thing about politics is that everything seems absolutely set in stone until it isn't.
In a modern context, what do you think would happen if the Russians got the Greeks, Cypriots, and Turks together, offered Turkey everything it wants in Cyprus and Syria, offered Greece $10 Billion a year in free money, and offered the Cypriots a $1 Billion grant and $150 million a year? That would be nearly enough to make the deficits of both those countries go away, and it's not like Germany's hard-line on low deficits has won the Western alliance friends in Greece. Turkey can't get everything it wants in Cyprus as a NATO member because Cyprus itself has a veto. They can't get it in Syria because Russia has a veto. If both countries switch from the West/EU to the East/Russia both problems go away.
At that point several countries have to reconsider their participation in the alliance due to simple geography. The entire Balkan peninsula would be in play. The Mideast would be in play. Russia could potentially cut us off from Suez, force the Israelis to repudiate their American alliance, and get enough of the former Yugoslavia to return the Russo-NATO front line to where it was in the Bosnian War.
The main problems with this are probably that a) Putin doesn't have the imagination to think of it, b) Russia doesn't have $10-$11 Billion a year to throw around, and c) doing what Turkey wants would involve screwing Assad, which Russia really doesn't want to do. a) is easily remedied, he just has to hire somebody with imagination; b) could be solved by a 2-3% budget cut for the rest of the government or a 2-3% increase in tax revenue (Russia's budget is $450-$500 Billion); and as for c) if you could trade Assad for Greece, Turkey, AND Cyprus guaranteed plus a chance at a dozen or so more wouldn't you take it?
This is why spying on allied governments is frequently necessary. If we know Putin's floating this idea we can use it to convince the Germans to be less self-righteous about budget deficits, or even offer some aid ourselves. If we don't everyone in the entire alliance structure is pretty fucked.
But that's not what is happening right now. The US are spying on everyone, no matter whether there is something fishy going on, there might be something fishy going on, or there is nothing fishy going on. Do you seriously believe that there is any realistic chance that any of the NATO allies is going to launch war or state-supported terrorist attacks against the US in the forseeable future? Do you seriously believe that everyone using Google or Facebook is up to something fishy?
I'll address your last sentence first: The fact that you bring up Facebook and Google shows you have not understood my argument. I am not arguing anything in this thread about that program. In fact I'm taken it as a given that was a bad thing that should never have been done. However just because the NSA did one thing that's bad, that doesn't imply everything it has ever done is bad.
As for NATO Allies, keep in mind that several of our NATO Allies are in various states of conflict with our other Allies. Greece, Turkey, and Cyprus have been in a bizarre three-or-four-way dispute over the island since the 70s. Argentina is a Major Non-NATO Ally, and their dispute with the British over the Falklands resulted in a war in the 80s. Not to mention the fact that Israel, Jordan, and Egypt are all our Allies and it's very difficult to have good relations with all three at the same time. If Obama says "we can't spy on Germany because they're in NATO and don't kill people," the first thing a Greek/Turk who hasn't conquered Turkey/Greece yet will do is point out he's in NATO and has yet to kill anyone. Then we can't find out his plans to kill millions until he actually implements said plans, because we can't spy on his ass.
When you've got 42 formal Allies, you're legally obligated to literally go to war for, and scores more countries that think of themselves as Allies (even if they aren't in that 42) you're dealing with almost thousand different bilateral relationships. Each and every one could theoretically turn into a "risk to human life," which means you need a lot of tools. For Merkel the tool is probably going to be not spying because she only shakes people down for money, and she's got the clout to be a huge pain. For Greece/Turkey/Israel etc. that would be a suicidal tool to use, and will eventually lead to risks to human life (even if the humans involved are technically allies of ours, rather then being us).
The one I read pretty strongly implied that the US was intimately involved in every element of the operation. For example the only base mentioned is described as an NSA Base, even tho it's in Australia. It said what the operation did, and it said the NSA called the shots (the NSA "was less interested in combating climate change than collecting the numbers of Indonesian security officials in case of a future emergency"). The only thing that is solely credited to the Defense Signals Directorate was requesting "an Indonesian linguist was added to the team to monitor and scan communications."
Presumably Australia's they did contribute something else to this operation, and from the text it's implied it was a fairly even split in responsibilities, but it's pretty clear that the US was a major part of it.
My point was that totalitarian governments rely on surveillance. Something like the NSA's discussed operations would be highly valuable. The absence of such a program didn't save Anne Frank, but its presence might have caught even more people like her. Nazi Germany used surveillance both in Germany and in its subjugated lands to find and weed out undesirable ethnic groups and dissidents.
You do realize that totalitarianism predates surveillance technology?
It's not like Caeser could reliably access any communications between two illiterate Egyptians.
Moreover even if you get everything you want the US will still do surveillance. It just won't do surveillance you don't like.
I also find your bizarre fixation on Godwin's law to be ridiculous. Nazi Germany is an excellent example of where this sort of official lawbreaking can go.
Here's what you really don't get: Murdering Anne Frank was not illegal in the Third Reich. It was, in fact, the law.
The Nazis would not have needed an illegal warrant to wiretap Anne Frank's cell phone, because Anne Frank was breaking the law simply by existing. If the US went the same way in 2013 the First Amendment would be repealed, and all surveillance on Jews would be entirely legal as long as law enforcement went through the formalities of getting a warrant.
To my knowledge the only laws the Nazis ever broke were restrictions on the private ownership of firearms, and a ban on private militia groups. In the US laws like that are actually illegal.
Third, when government has such wholesale disregard for the law and the property of the people, then it makes totalitarian governments easier to implement. Do I as you claim think that wrongly granting a warrant is a "first step"? No. I think it is an intermediate step.
You've already started inching towards tyranny by the point that warrants are given under unlawful circumstances. That indicates to me that the original complaint that you didn't "understand freedom" has been confirmed once again.
If every time a court screwed up and granted the wrong warrant the US became a tyranny for five minutes the US would always be a tyranny. Courts almost always grant warrants. This is not a new problem.
It's one we've dealt with fairly effectively by making it very difficult to win at trial (assuming the defendant has the cash to hire his own lawyer).
So basically you're complaining that a legal system that benefits you (by making searches of criminals easier), is EVIL as soon as it turns around and bites you on the ass.
As to your claim that your vote was suppressed, it's painfully clear that you didn't care enough to try to vote despite that minor hurdle. I can't be bothered to care about your frivolous excuses for not voting. You only need to look in the mirror to see who is responsible for the suppression of your vote.
This is so typical.
I ask for a simple name, of one person whose in-person voter fraud justifies Voter ID and this guy can't name one. I mention one name (me) disenfranchised by voter ID and this guy calls me lazy.
Look, in the US freedom doesn't die by fake warrant. Fake warrants lead to the prosecution losing at trial, not mass repression. OTOH BS voter restrictions do. The oppressor finds a non-stupid-sounding explanation for a hoop. He then makes everyone jump through it. Mysteriously his political enemies (and I strongly disagree with both the Governor and his Secretary of State) only make it through the hoop at 95% the rate of his friends. So he wins re-election. The hoop is declared a massive success at solving whatever ridiculous problem the Governor justified it with, and is strengthened. A few of his friends are brought back in (the "grandfather clause") and a few more of his enemies are thrown out.
The whole damn time the disenfranchised are blamed for their predicament, the Governor is lau
This is actually why the Snowden as traitor thing will simply never go away. No matter what. He could bring George Washington back to life to vouch for him, and nobody who serves the US Government (especially the military) would believe that shit. Some previous leaks advanced the Constitution by stopping mass surveillance. This leak is an attack on the entire practice of spying, and since combat troops find spy-data really useful in their jobs (particularly the bits of their jobs that involve not being killed), Sbnowden will never be able to live this down.
Would you care to explain this point? As far as I can tell, neither Snowden nor the journalists he has cooperated with have stated anywhere that they want to abolish intelligence practices completely. Nor have they done anything that endangered ongoing operations with imminant risk for human life.
There really isn't much to explain.
99.9% of what intelligence agencies do doesn't directly affect "risks to human life". It's spying to get basic information that allows you to know when to launch an operation that actually does influence those risks. You don't find out that some Arab Sheik is a threat to the US unless you're spying on Arab Sheiks. Since Arab Sheiks are hardly the only threat (the Taliban, for example, aren't Arab), the US has to be able to spy on anyone if it thinks something fishy's going on. Most countries think of themselves as our allies in at least some things (a full 42 are legally "Major Allies"). Most of the world lives in democracies. That means most of our spy operations are gonna happen in countries that aren't unfriendly to us and are democracies. That's where the people of the world are, we haven't pissed off non-Earthers quite yet.
You can make a good moral case against mass surveillance. To an extent you can make a moral case against spying on the Germans, because they're our ally; but Pakistan is also an ally. And we really need all the info we can get on Pakistan. By the time you get down to Indonesia and Brazil on our friends list you've abolished most spying we do.
Snowden leaked shit that he really really really should not have
Such as? I haven't heard of one revelation that the world isn't better off now that we know. The same goes for Bradley Manning and Wikileaks. No harm has come to anyone from any of these leaks, and The People know better now what their government is up to. That's a great thing all around.
You wouldn't hear much from people harmed by Wikileaks. The regimes that killed/imprisoned/etc. them wouldn't be advertising that it couldn't recognize a threat without a pointer from Assange and they wouldn't be able to advertise this fact. But several Chinese dissidents have been outed by Wikileaks, a couple Zimbabwean Army Generals were charged with treason, an Ethiopian journalist had to flee the country, etc. Obviously Wikileaks itself thinks none of these cases are real, but they don't feel fake. A fake would be both more serious (something that Assange can't claim is fake), and less serious (there would be an improbable rescue by Navy SEALs followed by a speaking tour of the US denouncing Assange).
As for the harms done by Snowden, did you read this article at all? It revealed a tactic US intelligence uses on US enemies in Asia. US enemies in Asia are not nice, sane, social democrats from Northern European monarchies. They're Kim Jon-Un. We can argue over how much this leak increased the odds of his takeover of South Korea, but the simple fact is that it does make it easier for him to do so.
Hell, even if you prove that leaking US Tactics magically made US Ally South Korea more secure, I'm not arguing that point. I'm arguing the perception of reality that exists in the heads of people who make policy in the US. And the perception is that there's no Constitutional bar on spying on other governments, that (in legal terms) those governments have no "expectation of privacy," and therefore this act cannot (by definition) be patriotic. Moreover the perception is that this helped Kim Jon-Un quite a bit, so therefore Snowden hurt the entire world with this leak, but cannot claim it was patriotic. The end result is the man is fucked in the US Legal System. Period. He'll get off more lightly then Manning, but that's only because civilian courts are pushovers compared to the military system.
I haven't even watched Dennis Miller in years. He's way too conservative for me.
But I am a cynical son-bitch, so all this discussion of foreigners angsting isn't criticism of those foreigners. I freely admit it's the pot calling the kettle black; but who knows black better then goddamn pot?
My criticism of people like Rousseff and Merkel is that they actually seems surprised that they needed to do that shit, not that they shouldn't be doing it. Their international agreements, UN Resolutions, etc. make for really good press conferences but won't actually change anything.
Who told Indonesia they're a US ally? I'm quite serious here, every statement I've seen from Obama on the country where he grew up avoids that word very carefully.
Who said anything about the US surveilling Indonesia? This is about surveillance conducted by Australia.
The spying in question was allowing the US to use Australian embassies as spy-bases. Snowden had access to the relevant documents solely because the NSA did some heavy lifting in this particular operation. If it had just been Australia's spy services acting on their own somebody besides Snowden would have to leak it.
Quiet diplomacy does not mean "the government does whatever the hell they want, legal or not, and gets a pass".
I think it's funny that the government thinks it's OK to take our information, but when we get to see their information, they cry like a five year old with a skinned knee.
They do have a warrant. You may disagree with the warrant, but they do have it. Moreover they don't have all your information. They don't seem to have access to your gmail account, or the content of your phone conversations.
OTOH you don't got a warrant. And you have everything.
Moreover, whereas their data on you doesn't actually seem to do anything, your data on them is also going to Chinese counter-intelligence who now know what the state-of-the-art in US Intelligence is, which means that the odds of Kim Jon-Ung becoming Dictator of All Korea just went up from 0.01% to 0.1%.
No, it's clearly the new of the leaks that did it. Last week there wasn't a diplomatic crisis, then the leaks came, and now there is a diplomatic crisis.
Yes, and when your wife finds out that you're cheating on her, it's not your fault for cheating but her fault for finding out. Do you really not see anything wrong with that reasoning?
The analogy doesn't hold.
You have no right to cheat on your wife, ever. OTOH if countries did not have the right to spy on each-other then there'd be a specific international convention against all spying, and everyone would pretend to take it seriously by (for example) renaming the CIA. Moreover the reason your wife has a right to not expect cheating is that you have a specific legal relationship with her, based on a solemn ceremony. To my knowledge the Indonesians are not formally Austrlia's allies, and I can tell you that they are not US Allies.
The analogy is probably unfixable because we're not gonna agree on a crime. You think spying is a huge deal, so you might insist on at least cheating-on-long-term-girlfriend. I think it isn't, so I'd say flirting-with-another-woman-when-you've-just-set-up-a-date.
Quiet diplomacy is only possible when confidentiality is possible.
Trust, but verify.
There will probably be more human smuggling and trafficking due to Snowden.
No, blame falls entirely on the bad behavior of the Australian Signals Directorate and their lack of trustworthyness.
So the Indonesians went to a negotiating table with a country that has spies, and then they were told those spies do, in fact, SPY; and it's 100% Australia's fault? Except for the bits that are America's fault?
Don't get me wrong. I don't blame the Indonesian government for walking away. Their public is as naive as everyone-else. But if their government is at all surprised that Australia and the US both use spies it's dumber then paste. The way the US tries to figure out which guys are good guys (and which are bad (or at least which are lesser-of-two-evils) is spies.
Who told Indonesia they're a US ally? I'm quite serious here, every statement I've seen from Obama on the country where he grew up avoids that word very carefully.
They're a friendly state, and "allied" in the sense that we help each-other achieve certain fairly important tactical goals, but we've got 42 actual Allies. These are countries we are treaty-bound to die for under certain circumstances. In simple practical terms releasing the information that we spy in Indonesia shouldn't surprise anyone. The entire point of having spies is that you use them to spy on people, and if you can't spy on the 3/4 of the world you aren't treaty-bound to protect it was pretty stupid of you to have spies.
This is actually why the Snowden as traitor thing will simply never go away. No matter what. He could bring George Washington back to life to vouch for him, and nobody who serves the US Government (especially the military) would believe that shit. Some previous leaks advanced the Constitution by stopping mass surveillance. This leak is an attack on the entire practice of spying, and since combat troops find spy-data really useful in their jobs (particularly the bits of their jobs that involve not being killed), Sbnowden will never be able to live this down.
I don't think that's fair to Snowden. Greenwald is the one making the decisions, and he's clearly decided to go for a) the scoop, and b) attacking the Five Eyes while he still can. I don't blame Greenwald for doing this, it's his job. I don't blame Snowden for being so naive that he wouldn't understand Greenwald's entire job is to out secrets with no regard of whether they should be kept secret.
But this isn't High School, so fairness is irrelevent. Snowden leaked shit that he really really really should not have, therefore he will be hated everywhere but slashdot.
It's not the leaks that threaten these talks. It's the espionage that threatens the talks.
So if you told a drug-kingpin that one of his dealers was talking to the cops, you'd have nothing to do with the dealer's murder (and the subsequent end of the police investigation)?
Legally speaking you'd probably be fine. For the murder. There might be conspiracy charges, or obstruction charges, tho.
The thing I hate about groups like Wikileaks isn't what they do in principle. It's that, in practice, they almost never discriminate between reasonable secrecy and unreasonable secrecy. In this case the US isn't actually an Indonesian ally. They aren't an enemy, but they aren't any closer to us then the Chileans or Indians, and they have no reason to expect us to treat them better then we treat those countries. Moreover they're Muslim, which means somebody in Al Qaeda is always gonna be trying to convince them to attack the West, and occasionally they will succeed (see: Bali). You're damn right we're gonna keep an eye on that shit, and the Aussies (who were most of the victims in that Bali Bombing) are gonna help. The US keeping an eye on that shit is (by definition) spying.
This is the problem with taking your leaks to a journalist. His job is to get eyeballs, and letting the world know about Australia's spies will get him millions of eyeballs. However it will do approximately jack-squat to advance the cause of actually stopping NSA bullshit, and in fact will advance Feinstein's bill to further codify and strengthen said NSA bullshit.
You are the naive one if you think simply by protecting people's communications with each-other you could have prevented Hitler.
You're the only one who made that assumption. Let's look back at what I actually wrote.
Something like the NSA records would give a similar dictator today the power to chase down people with dangerous opinions or associations and kill or imprison them.
Look at what I bolded. This might look familiar since I just copied and pasted it from your post. You couldn't even be bothered to read what you quoted.
I read that.
That's why I made the logical jump to the conclusion that you were implying that if Hitler hadn't had NSA-style surveillance authority Anne Frank would have lived. Because if your entire argument is that "this would really help a new Hitler," the simple fact is that everything that has happened since Hitler and today would help a new Hitler.
The thing that makes guys like Hitler special isn't that they have massive surveillance powers, it's that they grant themselves other powers that make massive surveillance a total waste of time. If you know who a few Jews and you have the power to torture entire families, metadata doesn't add much to your investigation.
I've never said that these programs shouldn't be stopped, but if you insist that a court wrongly granting a warrant is the first step to Hitler you should probably be on anti-psycotic drugs.
Can you name one?
The Texas voter ID law. You even quoted me on that.
Not one law in response to purported fraud. One proven case of actual fraud. And you know this is what I meant.
I can name you a proven case of actual voter suppression. I tried to vote today, but since my ID was stolen I couldn't. Technically I cast a Provisional ballot, which will be counted if I show up at the election office during work hours with an ID, but I work 6 AM thru 2:30 PM in the southeast corner of the County, I'm on the bus, and the election office is in the middle of the County. It closes at 4:30.
Hell I can probably name two. One of my co-workers has been on the bus this week because his license just expired. It's a lot cheaper to take the bus for 50 minutes then to drive a truck for 20 minutes, and he works two jobs, so he doesn't have a lot of free time during business hours to get it fixed.
Now the only question is: did khallow bother to read those three paragraphs.
It's rich to be accused of "not bothering to read" when you've quoted me and twice in the last post alone to this point have demonstrated that you can't even meet your own level of criticism. As to your three paragraphs, they're still bullshit. Claiming as you do that:
And how long did it take you to figure out that you could avoid responding to my actual question by pretending I hadn't just written an essay on the law you used?
I'll note you have yet to answer any substantive criticism of this law. For example:
I said that Democrats live in places that actually enforce the laws all the time, but Republicans live in places where the cops let things slide.
Voter ID is not enforced by the cops. Your original claim has been shown to be bullshit, but you're still digging the hole.
And now you bring up everybody's favorite Jr. High debate tactic: the dictionary.
Unfortunately for you the actual dictionary defines any government regulator as a "cop," therefore local officials count.
So not only has my logic forced you to bring up Hitler in a hilarious fashion, it's forced you to dodge me on at least two points with ridiculous (and clearly intentional) misinterpretations, and one of them isn't even right in the literal sense.
Are you trying to prove Voter ID is actually a racist conspiracy by people like you? Be
The problem I wasn't talking about was everyone's problem with the NSA. I was talking about Snowden's problem with the law. And even if Obama (or the next President) does a 180 on this shit, Snowden is still 100% fucked because Snowden leaked classified info. That's illegal. It's not what the founders intended (Checks and Balances means Congress is supposed to be point man in disputes like this, not some British dude who happens to be a reporter). For that reason they threw the book at him. And it ain't gonna be unthrown.
I didn't call Fukishima/Chernobyl countries, I called them counties. I'm pretty sure I'm technically wrong to call them counties, because I'm pretty sure Ukraine and Japan don't actually have counties. What I meant was that a relatively large area around the plant is uninhabitable, and the area within is comparable to a US County. In Michigan, for example, almost every county is a 30 mile square for 900 sq mi. the Chernobyl exclusion zone is 1000 sq mi. Fukishima's seems to be significantly smaller, but is still a hundred or so square miles.
You're wrong about Chernobyl's population. The Exclusion Zone still has no legal residents, and the illegal settler population has been on the decline for years. Scientists are saying that the disaster has been a boon to local wildlife, due to the fact that human neighbors are a lot more deadly for large mammals then mere radiation; but nobody is legally allowed to live there yet.
The people of those countries are actually unhappy about it. That doesn't mean their leaders are being entirely honest. And note I'm not talking about all their leaders. Merkel and Rousseff seem to be doing more then angsting. But there's more then two countries complaining.
France, for example, loves Snowden's revelations so much that it refused to let Evo Morales plane through it's airspace because it suspected that Snowden might get out of Russia on said plane. Mysteriously the southern European countries who have all joined France in protesting this also banned Morales from their airspace. It seems an awful lot like the French elite saw these allegations, decided that they'd have to pretend to be pissed at the US for doing shit that France does all the fucking time, and then arranged for a bunch of countries highly dependent on French goodwill to deliver a dramatic "fuck you," to the region of the world most intent on supporting Snowden.
If the US were the victim the proposed solution would probably be something reasonable like increasing US counterintelligence efforts (for the cynics there: Spending Billion$ on random shit that might work, because if you do 12 things with a 5% chance of success you have a 54% chance of success), while bitching self-righteously in press releases nobody gives a shit about. And yes, if a Chinese Snowden had revealed the Chinese operations against the US I'd refer to our numerous protests as self-righteous bitching. But China is actually a dictatorship, so there won't be a Chinese Snowden.
Even assuming you're right about the long-term expenses and safety of a nuclear plant, there's the minor problem of what to do with the nuclear waste when you're done with it. Yucca Mountain would have been great, if it had any chance in hell of getting re-started.
As for "only the West can have nice things," I'm not arguing we should keep using nuclear. We have some plants set up we should probably continue to use, but the Africans/Latin Americans/etc. would be much better off building something else. Damn near anything else. Solar would be great in the Sahara. Hydroelectric would be good in the Congo river basin. I don't like coal in general, but South Africa has plenty of it.
I'm sure somebody will try a nuclear plant. I hope they use one of the ones that is hard to weaponize, and I really hope they don't hand ANY of the contracts over to some guy who happens to be an important Minister's cousin. Because fucking up nuclear power is not like fucking up a website, it cannot be fixed by simply delaying the project six months.
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All I can say is I've seen zero of those increases in my budget. And I'm buying pretty much the same shit I did three years ago. Partly that's because I got no car, so the gas price random BS doesn't affect me, but I still eat food.
As for unemployment, I have to agree on that. When I got my Masters I didn't think I'd be grateful to get full-time in a retail job with a bunch of High School grads. That's why I really love the idea of economic stimulus. Get rid of a bunch of my fellow college-grads-in-shitty-jobs and I might be able to get an interview. And my HS-level co-workers would get a raise to to reduced supply of potential retail workers.
there has not been any real big change
The USA used to have the USSR to keep it in check and provide a limit to the US's more paranoid actions against foreign countries it imagined might harm it. Now that the USSR is no more, the USA allows it's fear and insecurity to run rampant and bomb the crap out of every little thing that gives it nightmares - whether rational or not.
Bullshit.
The Soviets did not help us keep our paranoia in check. They were the cause of our paranoia, and that paranoia caused numerous incidents that were both more illegal and less ethical then anything the NSA is accused of.
For example, there was the time we supported Diem in a coup d'tat against the Emperor of Vietnam. Then Diem himself got to be an embarrassment, and the coup d'tat that replaced his ass killed him. When we realized that Latin America occasionally liked to elect leftists who sympathized with the Soviets we started supporting numerous Latin American military dictatorships. These dictatorships engaged in such brutal repression that nobody knows how many bad things they did decades later. This was repeated in pretty much every region of the world. The recent film "The Act of Killing" tells the story of a bunch of massacres in Indonesia during the Vietnam war era. A million people died. In our defense our Evil Dictators were generally less evil then their Evil Dictators, but when your entire defense is "less evil then Stalin," you're in a pretty fucked up place. I could go on.
I'm not saying mass data collection of everyone is right, Constitutional, or ethical. I am saying that this is a massive improvement over the Cold War when Operation Condor killed upward of 60k, the Indonesians killed a million, etc.
I don't think the primary motivation for massive surveillance and such things is fear. In my opinion it is about control and power. Being able to silence any opposition before it gets organized and knowing in advance which groups dissent is growing gives you the power to stay in control longer. Fear is only used to gain acceptance of the public: think of the terrorists etc.
And who has been silenced by NSA surveillance?
Assange is still talking. He's got a talk-show. He just ran for Australian Senate. He got his ass kicked because he thinks ethical righteousness is more important then having friends, and it's impossible to win in politics if you're the guy who has snubbed every-damn-body. His core problem isn't that the US has silenced him, it's that the vast majority of people in the world don't think that government secrets are inherently evil. They never have. Even the founding fathers of the US refused to release the minutes of their Constitutional deliberations. People dislike some secrets, but the group that just released the info that Australia's spies actually spy on people should not be surprised that the taxpayers who paid for said spies aren't happy with them.
My major problem with criticism of NSA programs isn't that the criticism is wrong on the legal merits, but that NSA critics pretend they are terrified that the NSA has their data, while they're criticizing the NSA. On a public forum. Which nobody needs a warrant to read. You do realize you just proved that you aren't actually afraid, don't you?
Regardless, this is not about controlling you in the same way the KGB and Stasi controlled the Eastern bloc. It's about having a store of information so that if they ever find out you're doing something illegal, they can get more data on all your activities quickly. It's data the government shouldn't have, but that doesn't make it ipso facto proof the government is going to murder millions.
My secondary problem is so few of the critics actually understand how oppression works in the US. In the US The first thing a KKK/Communist/[insert evil of choice] President does will be announce major restrictions on the types of investigation law enforcement can do. Those restrictions, and Constitutional restrictions on what police can do, won't apply to the thugs "volunteer" for his party. Places where he lost will retain some freedom, because they will have local cops who do their jobs. But in places he won (and generally you don't win the White House unless you won most states) he's probably got local Governors and Sheriffs who share his agenda. And if all the local Sheriff does when the KKK/Redshirts/[evil party militia] murders some local activist is claim he can't figure it out, then it's time to be very afraid.
BTW, unlike KGB-style oppression, this has actually happened before. Prior to the Civil War, and up until 1876 or so, every Southern state was 20 points blacker then they are now. Mississippi and South Carolina were actually majority black, which should indicate precisely how free a country the Confederacy was. Then Tilden basically tied with Hayes, and to become President Hayes had to agree to stop enforcing Federal Civil Rights laws in the South. Federal power went down, but that didn't make the Jim Crow South a freer place.
You don't understand - it's the position that corrupts, not the person that is corrupt. You could "elect" the most honest person, and end up with the worst tyrant. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. There is a reason this is not a new saying.
Dude, if they were corrupt we'd be in a much different mess. Think about it.
The people with the money to pay the biggest bribes are in business. They'd prefer lower taxes and an end to regulations, but what they really need is certainty on things like the debt ceiling and the Federal budget. If it was just a matter of spending $50 Billion on bribes Tim Cook could cut the checks himself, tomorrow; instead of thanking our lucky stars that they delayed the budget/debt ceiling dispute a few months we would never have heard of a budget/debt ceiling dispute.
I agree that if Congress were more ethical we'd be in a much better situation, as would most people. The problem is that I define ethical much differently then a guy who thinks ObamaCare is evil would. Since guys who agree with me won half of Congress, but guys who agree with him won the other half, we get this constant BS arguing and brinksmanship over the same BS they were arguing over and brinking over back in 2010.
Keep in mind this is what the founders wanted. They believed that a government where Congress and the President were constantly arguing would protect freedom because no evil policies could possibly get passed.
Have you read or watched Game of Thrones?
The basic theme of the books is that when you have a government where almost everyone is 100% honorable at all times, and always refuses to compromise, the entire world is fucked. Off the top of my head I can think of two characters who died of being honorable, both of whom also managed to set back their personal causes greatly; and a third who merely managed to set back her timetable by several books. And I stopped reading so long ago I can't remember the title of the last book I read.
But back IRL the problem isn't that the Congressional leaders we've got are dishonest. The problem is half of them are actually being honest when they say "If we don't fire half the government, cut taxes on job-creators by 20 points, and end ObamaCare." The other half are being equally honest when they demand more government spending, higher taxes on the wealthy, and strongly support doubling down on ObamaCare.
This means that, for both sides, the only honest or honorable thing to do is fight to defeat the other side. Since our government is a complex dance between two Legislative houses with power, an independent Executive, and Judges who frequently heckle, this results in lots of arguing and very little happens except everyone thinks they're well-positioned for the next election.
This isn't really true.
In Europe they generally agree on things that government departments say, but then again in America we also generally agree that the actual numbers the Congressional Budget Office spits out are accurate. Our media is actually a lot more tame, and even-handed then a lot of European media. British tabloids, for example, make Fox/MSNBC/CNN/etc. look like the BBC.
What I suspect is different isn;t the amount of rancor in debates, it's the length of debate. In the US we have two political elites. The Conservative/rural elite says the government should fire itself, cut taxes to the bone, stop regulating financial behavior (ie: no individual mandate in ObamaCare, banks do what they want and die if they screw up, etc.), and strongly regulate certain personal behaviors (ie: homosexuality, RU-486). The liberal/urban elite says the government should hire a bunch more people, strongly regulate financial behavior (ie: stronger mandate in ObamaCare, banks get strongly regulated and bailed out, etc.),regulations on personal behavior should not touch sex, but should touch gun-ownership.
Since the conservative/rural elite runs the US House, but the urban/liberal elite runs the Senate and the Presidency both elites have to agree or the budget won't pass and the entire government gets fired.
This means lots of BS debates dragged out over years. Literally. The taxes-vs.-deficit spending debate has been going on since the 2010 Congressional elections, and will only pause if the 2014 elections get rid of Boehner.
OTOH almost all European countries are run on the principle of Unity of Powers. You can't have a leftish Head of Government and a rightish House of the Legislature. If somehow that happens the Head of Government loses a vote of confidence in Parliament and the people decide whose right in a new election. Which happens within 2-3 months. You can't have a debate last four years, and cover three elections cycles.
Which means you ain't gonna find out when the Social Dems disagree with the Christian Dems on basic facts, whereas in the US the only thing worth paying attention to in politics for much of the last 4 years has been the basic factual disagreements between the GOP and Obama.
Dude, This is fucking America. We have never, ever all agreed on anything. In this case a significant proportion of the people who fought the Revolution were extremely pro-aristocracy.
Our number three or four guy General was "Lord Stirling," our top trainer as "Baron von Steuben," we received aid from extremely aristocratic France, and the officers of the Continental Army created a hereditary order (the Society of the Cincinnati) at the end of the war specifically intended to become our new nobility..
As for the rest, increasing the House to 30k is simply not practical. There's a reason the Indians, with a population triple ours, have a Parliament that is less then double ours. It's just not practical to run a Legislative body with more then 600 or so members. You'd have to have a working group in DC much smaller then the 30k Congressman, and you'd probably need actual Constitutional amendments governing how that working group was chosen, when the 30k could meet to fire the working group, etc.
As for points 4 and 5, you really don't understand Progressives. At all. It's not that we think sovereign debt is a good thing, or even a not-bad thing; it's that we think the problem with sovereign debt is that it leads to inflation. OTOH the problem with cutting government spending is that it involves firing people, which reduces salaries for everyone by increasing the supply of available labor while reducing the demand for said labor. If the economies doing great, inflation is real, and the employment situation is fine government debt is a bad thing to have.
But we're in the middle of a years-long employment slump, with basically no inflation, it's foolish to cut the deficit. We'd cut everyone's salary, to solve a problem that simply does not exist.
That would be like a guy whose house is currently on fire sealing up his basement because a flood is sure to hit real soon now.
Do you think your allies need to spy on you? and your citizen?
If not, then clearly this puts limitations on the amount of trust we can have in the US.
On me personally or my government? On my government they'd damn well better be spying. At it's best moments the State Department's public stances can be incredibly complex. Generally every word in them is literally true, but that doesn't mean it's unhelpful for somebody not familiar with the nuances of legalistic American English to have the non-public version.
On me personally? They probably shouldn't bother. My hobby of internet blowhard leaves very little time for conquering Canada.
On the residents of most of the allies? They should probably only spy on people they've identified as threats. In other words if they could get a warrant on a specific individual in the US Courts, they should be spying on that guy.
On the residents of certain allies? Every-god-damn-body. And their little dogs too. The Pakistani state is very, very weak. This means that even if the Prime Minister, the President, and all of Parliament honestly want some Kashmir Separatist group, or Taliban-aligned terrorists, to cut that shit out it won't necessarily happen. The ISI might simply ignore the orders, and use Pakistani tax money to fund the attacks. Local leaders are not legally supposed top be able to stymy national terrorism investigations, but they still manage to do it quite frequently.
I have reasonable faith that no NATO member is going to sellout the alliance, and even so, the effects would be limited.
Note, the cold war is over, we're not going to have a third world war... If so it's an end of world event, no need to prepare, it doesn't matter :)
The thing about politics is that everything seems absolutely set in stone until it isn't.
In a modern context, what do you think would happen if the Russians got the Greeks, Cypriots, and Turks together, offered Turkey everything it wants in Cyprus and Syria, offered Greece $10 Billion a year in free money, and offered the Cypriots a $1 Billion grant and $150 million a year? That would be nearly enough to make the deficits of both those countries go away, and it's not like Germany's hard-line on low deficits has won the Western alliance friends in Greece. Turkey can't get everything it wants in Cyprus as a NATO member because Cyprus itself has a veto. They can't get it in Syria because Russia has a veto. If both countries switch from the West/EU to the East/Russia both problems go away.
At that point several countries have to reconsider their participation in the alliance due to simple geography. The entire Balkan peninsula would be in play. The Mideast would be in play. Russia could potentially cut us off from Suez, force the Israelis to repudiate their American alliance, and get enough of the former Yugoslavia to return the Russo-NATO front line to where it was in the Bosnian War.
The main problems with this are probably that a) Putin doesn't have the imagination to think of it, b) Russia doesn't have $10-$11 Billion a year to throw around, and c) doing what Turkey wants would involve screwing Assad, which Russia really doesn't want to do. a) is easily remedied, he just has to hire somebody with imagination; b) could be solved by a 2-3% budget cut for the rest of the government or a 2-3% increase in tax revenue (Russia's budget is $450-$500 Billion); and as for c) if you could trade Assad for Greece, Turkey, AND Cyprus guaranteed plus a chance at a dozen or so more wouldn't you take it?
This is why spying on allied governments is frequently necessary. If we know Putin's floating this idea we can use it to convince the Germans to be less self-righteous about budget deficits, or even offer some aid ourselves. If we don't everyone in the entire alliance structure is pretty fucked.
But that's not what is happening right now. The US are spying on everyone, no matter whether there is something fishy going on, there might be something fishy going on, or there is nothing fishy going on. Do you seriously believe that there is any realistic chance that any of the NATO allies is going to launch war or state-supported terrorist attacks against the US in the forseeable future? Do you seriously believe that everyone using Google or Facebook is up to something fishy?
I'll address your last sentence first:
The fact that you bring up Facebook and Google shows you have not understood my argument. I am not arguing anything in this thread about that program. In fact I'm taken it as a given that was a bad thing that should never have been done. However just because the NSA did one thing that's bad, that doesn't imply everything it has ever done is bad.
As for NATO Allies, keep in mind that several of our NATO Allies are in various states of conflict with our other Allies. Greece, Turkey, and Cyprus have been in a bizarre three-or-four-way dispute over the island since the 70s. Argentina is a Major Non-NATO Ally, and their dispute with the British over the Falklands resulted in a war in the 80s. Not to mention the fact that Israel, Jordan, and Egypt are all our Allies and it's very difficult to have good relations with all three at the same time. If Obama says "we can't spy on Germany because they're in NATO and don't kill people," the first thing a Greek/Turk who hasn't conquered Turkey/Greece yet will do is point out he's in NATO and has yet to kill anyone. Then we can't find out his plans to kill millions until he actually implements said plans, because we can't spy on his ass.
When you've got 42 formal Allies, you're legally obligated to literally go to war for, and scores more countries that think of themselves as Allies (even if they aren't in that 42) you're dealing with almost thousand different bilateral relationships. Each and every one could theoretically turn into a "risk to human life," which means you need a lot of tools. For Merkel the tool is probably going to be not spying because she only shakes people down for money, and she's got the clout to be a huge pain. For Greece/Turkey/Israel etc. that would be a suicidal tool to use, and will eventually lead to risks to human life (even if the humans involved are technically allies of ours, rather then being us).
Are you sure we read the same article?
The one I read pretty strongly implied that the US was intimately involved in every element of the operation. For example the only base mentioned is described as an NSA Base, even tho it's in Australia. It said what the operation did, and it said the NSA called the shots (the NSA "was less interested in combating climate change than collecting the numbers of Indonesian security officials in case of a future emergency"). The only thing that is solely credited to the Defense Signals Directorate was requesting "an Indonesian linguist was added to the team to monitor and scan communications."
Presumably Australia's they did contribute something else to this operation, and from the text it's implied it was a fairly even split in responsibilities, but it's pretty clear that the US was a major part of it.
My point was that totalitarian governments rely on surveillance. Something like the NSA's discussed operations would be highly valuable. The absence of such a program didn't save Anne Frank, but its presence might have caught even more people like her. Nazi Germany used surveillance both in Germany and in its subjugated lands to find and weed out undesirable ethnic groups and dissidents.
You do realize that totalitarianism predates surveillance technology?
It's not like Caeser could reliably access any communications between two illiterate Egyptians.
Moreover even if you get everything you want the US will still do surveillance. It just won't do surveillance you don't like.
I also find your bizarre fixation on Godwin's law to be ridiculous. Nazi Germany is an excellent example of where this sort of official lawbreaking can go.
Here's what you really don't get:
Murdering Anne Frank was not illegal in the Third Reich. It was, in fact, the law.
The Nazis would not have needed an illegal warrant to wiretap Anne Frank's cell phone, because Anne Frank was breaking the law simply by existing. If the US went the same way in 2013 the First Amendment would be repealed, and all surveillance on Jews would be entirely legal as long as law enforcement went through the formalities of getting a warrant.
To my knowledge the only laws the Nazis ever broke were restrictions on the private ownership of firearms, and a ban on private militia groups. In the US laws like that are actually illegal.
Third, when government has such wholesale disregard for the law and the property of the people, then it makes totalitarian governments easier to implement. Do I as you claim think that wrongly granting a warrant is a "first step"? No. I think it is an intermediate step.
You've already started inching towards tyranny by the point that warrants are given under unlawful circumstances. That indicates to me that the original complaint that you didn't "understand freedom" has been confirmed once again.
If every time a court screwed up and granted the wrong warrant the US became a tyranny for five minutes the US would always be a tyranny. Courts almost always grant warrants. This is not a new problem.
It's one we've dealt with fairly effectively by making it very difficult to win at trial (assuming the defendant has the cash to hire his own lawyer).
So basically you're complaining that a legal system that benefits you (by making searches of criminals easier), is EVIL as soon as it turns around and bites you on the ass.
As to your claim that your vote was suppressed, it's painfully clear that you didn't care enough to try to vote despite that minor hurdle. I can't be bothered to care about your frivolous excuses for not voting. You only need to look in the mirror to see who is responsible for the suppression of your vote.
This is so typical.
I ask for a simple name, of one person whose in-person voter fraud justifies Voter ID and this guy can't name one. I mention one name (me) disenfranchised by voter ID and this guy calls me lazy.
Look, in the US freedom doesn't die by fake warrant. Fake warrants lead to the prosecution losing at trial, not mass repression. OTOH BS voter restrictions do. The oppressor finds a non-stupid-sounding explanation for a hoop. He then makes everyone jump through it. Mysteriously his political enemies (and I strongly disagree with both the Governor and his Secretary of State) only make it through the hoop at 95% the rate of his friends. So he wins re-election. The hoop is declared a massive success at solving whatever ridiculous problem the Governor justified it with, and is strengthened. A few of his friends are brought back in (the "grandfather clause") and a few more of his enemies are thrown out.
The whole damn time the disenfranchised are blamed for their predicament, the Governor is lau
This is actually why the Snowden as traitor thing will simply never go away. No matter what. He could bring George Washington back to life to vouch for him, and nobody who serves the US Government (especially the military) would believe that shit. Some previous leaks advanced the Constitution by stopping mass surveillance. This leak is an attack on the entire practice of spying, and since combat troops find spy-data really useful in their jobs (particularly the bits of their jobs that involve not being killed), Sbnowden will never be able to live this down.
Would you care to explain this point? As far as I can tell, neither Snowden nor the journalists he has cooperated with have stated anywhere that they want to abolish intelligence practices completely. Nor have they done anything that endangered ongoing operations with imminant risk for human life.
There really isn't much to explain.
99.9% of what intelligence agencies do doesn't directly affect "risks to human life". It's spying to get basic information that allows you to know when to launch an operation that actually does influence those risks. You don't find out that some Arab Sheik is a threat to the US unless you're spying on Arab Sheiks. Since Arab Sheiks are hardly the only threat (the Taliban, for example, aren't Arab), the US has to be able to spy on anyone if it thinks something fishy's going on. Most countries think of themselves as our allies in at least some things (a full 42 are legally "Major Allies"). Most of the world lives in democracies. That means most of our spy operations are gonna happen in countries that aren't unfriendly to us and are democracies. That's where the people of the world are, we haven't pissed off non-Earthers quite yet.
You can make a good moral case against mass surveillance. To an extent you can make a moral case against spying on the Germans, because they're our ally; but Pakistan is also an ally. And we really need all the info we can get on Pakistan. By the time you get down to Indonesia and Brazil on our friends list you've abolished most spying we do.
Snowden leaked shit that he really really really should not have
Such as? I haven't heard of one revelation that the world isn't better off now that we know. The same goes for Bradley Manning and Wikileaks. No harm has come to anyone from any of these leaks, and The People know better now what their government is up to. That's a great thing all around.
You wouldn't hear much from people harmed by Wikileaks. The regimes that killed/imprisoned/etc. them wouldn't be advertising that it couldn't recognize a threat without a pointer from Assange and they wouldn't be able to advertise this fact. But several Chinese dissidents have been outed by Wikileaks, a couple Zimbabwean Army Generals were charged with treason, an Ethiopian journalist had to flee the country, etc. Obviously Wikileaks itself thinks none of these cases are real, but they don't feel fake. A fake would be both more serious (something that Assange can't claim is fake), and less serious (there would be an improbable rescue by Navy SEALs followed by a speaking tour of the US denouncing Assange).
As for the harms done by Snowden, did you read this article at all? It revealed a tactic US intelligence uses on US enemies in Asia. US enemies in Asia are not nice, sane, social democrats from Northern European monarchies. They're Kim Jon-Un. We can argue over how much this leak increased the odds of his takeover of South Korea, but the simple fact is that it does make it easier for him to do so.
Hell, even if you prove that leaking US Tactics magically made US Ally South Korea more secure, I'm not arguing that point. I'm arguing the perception of reality that exists in the heads of people who make policy in the US. And the perception is that there's no Constitutional bar on spying on other governments, that (in legal terms) those governments have no "expectation of privacy," and therefore this act cannot (by definition) be patriotic. Moreover the perception is that this helped Kim Jon-Un quite a bit, so therefore Snowden hurt the entire world with this leak, but cannot claim it was patriotic. The end result is the man is fucked in the US Legal System. Period. He'll get off more lightly then Manning, but that's only because civilian courts are pushovers compared to the military system.
I haven't even watched Dennis Miller in years. He's way too conservative for me.
But I am a cynical son-bitch, so all this discussion of foreigners angsting isn't criticism of those foreigners. I freely admit it's the pot calling the kettle black; but who knows black better then goddamn pot?
My criticism of people like Rousseff and Merkel is that they actually seems surprised that they needed to do that shit, not that they shouldn't be doing it. Their international agreements, UN Resolutions, etc. make for really good press conferences but won't actually change anything.
Who told Indonesia they're a US ally? I'm quite serious here, every statement I've seen from Obama on the country where he grew up avoids that word very carefully.
Who said anything about the US surveilling Indonesia? This is about surveillance conducted by Australia.
The spying in question was allowing the US to use Australian embassies as spy-bases. Snowden had access to the relevant documents solely because the NSA did some heavy lifting in this particular operation. If it had just been Australia's spy services acting on their own somebody besides Snowden would have to leak it.
Quiet diplomacy does not mean "the government does whatever the hell they want, legal or not, and gets a pass".
I think it's funny that the government thinks it's OK to take our information, but when we get to see their information, they cry like a five year old with a skinned knee.
They do have a warrant. You may disagree with the warrant, but they do have it. Moreover they don't have all your information. They don't seem to have access to your gmail account, or the content of your phone conversations.
OTOH you don't got a warrant. And you have everything.
Moreover, whereas their data on you doesn't actually seem to do anything, your data on them is also going to Chinese counter-intelligence who now know what the state-of-the-art in US Intelligence is, which means that the odds of Kim Jon-Ung becoming Dictator of All Korea just went up from 0.01% to 0.1%.
No, it's clearly the new of the leaks that did it. Last week there wasn't a diplomatic crisis, then the leaks came, and now there is a diplomatic crisis.
Yes, and when your wife finds out that you're cheating on her, it's not your fault for cheating but her fault for finding out. Do you really not see anything wrong with that reasoning?
The analogy doesn't hold.
You have no right to cheat on your wife, ever. OTOH if countries did not have the right to spy on each-other then there'd be a specific international convention against all spying, and everyone would pretend to take it seriously by (for example) renaming the CIA. Moreover the reason your wife has a right to not expect cheating is that you have a specific legal relationship with her, based on a solemn ceremony. To my knowledge the Indonesians are not formally Austrlia's allies, and I can tell you that they are not US Allies.
The analogy is probably unfixable because we're not gonna agree on a crime. You think spying is a huge deal, so you might insist on at least cheating-on-long-term-girlfriend. I think it isn't, so I'd say flirting-with-another-woman-when-you've-just-set-up-a-date.
Quiet diplomacy is only possible when confidentiality is possible.
Trust, but verify.
There will probably be more human smuggling and trafficking due to Snowden.
No, blame falls entirely on the bad behavior of the Australian Signals Directorate and their lack of trustworthyness.
So the Indonesians went to a negotiating table with a country that has spies, and then they were told those spies do, in fact, SPY; and it's 100% Australia's fault? Except for the bits that are America's fault?
Don't get me wrong. I don't blame the Indonesian government for walking away. Their public is as naive as everyone-else. But if their government is at all surprised that Australia and the US both use spies it's dumber then paste. The way the US tries to figure out which guys are good guys (and which are bad (or at least which are lesser-of-two-evils) is spies.
Who told Indonesia they're a US ally? I'm quite serious here, every statement I've seen from Obama on the country where he grew up avoids that word very carefully.
They're a friendly state, and "allied" in the sense that we help each-other achieve certain fairly important tactical goals, but we've got 42 actual Allies. These are countries we are treaty-bound to die for under certain circumstances. In simple practical terms releasing the information that we spy in Indonesia shouldn't surprise anyone. The entire point of having spies is that you use them to spy on people, and if you can't spy on the 3/4 of the world you aren't treaty-bound to protect it was pretty stupid of you to have spies.
This is actually why the Snowden as traitor thing will simply never go away. No matter what. He could bring George Washington back to life to vouch for him, and nobody who serves the US Government (especially the military) would believe that shit. Some previous leaks advanced the Constitution by stopping mass surveillance. This leak is an attack on the entire practice of spying, and since combat troops find spy-data really useful in their jobs (particularly the bits of their jobs that involve not being killed), Sbnowden will never be able to live this down.
I don't think that's fair to Snowden. Greenwald is the one making the decisions, and he's clearly decided to go for a) the scoop, and b) attacking the Five Eyes while he still can. I don't blame Greenwald for doing this, it's his job. I don't blame Snowden for being so naive that he wouldn't understand Greenwald's entire job is to out secrets with no regard of whether they should be kept secret.
But this isn't High School, so fairness is irrelevent. Snowden leaked shit that he really really really should not have, therefore he will be hated everywhere but slashdot.
It's not the leaks that threaten these talks. It's the espionage that threatens the talks.
So if you told a drug-kingpin that one of his dealers was talking to the cops, you'd have nothing to do with the dealer's murder (and the subsequent end of the police investigation)?
Legally speaking you'd probably be fine. For the murder. There might be conspiracy charges, or obstruction charges, tho.
The thing I hate about groups like Wikileaks isn't what they do in principle. It's that, in practice, they almost never discriminate between reasonable secrecy and unreasonable secrecy. In this case the US isn't actually an Indonesian ally. They aren't an enemy, but they aren't any closer to us then the Chileans or Indians, and they have no reason to expect us to treat them better then we treat those countries. Moreover they're Muslim, which means somebody in Al Qaeda is always gonna be trying to convince them to attack the West, and occasionally they will succeed (see: Bali). You're damn right we're gonna keep an eye on that shit, and the Aussies (who were most of the victims in that Bali Bombing) are gonna help. The US keeping an eye on that shit is (by definition) spying.
This is the problem with taking your leaks to a journalist. His job is to get eyeballs, and letting the world know about Australia's spies will get him millions of eyeballs. However it will do approximately jack-squat to advance the cause of actually stopping NSA bullshit, and in fact will advance Feinstein's bill to further codify and strengthen said NSA bullshit.
You are the naive one if you think simply by protecting people's communications with each-other you could have prevented Hitler.
You're the only one who made that assumption. Let's look back at what I actually wrote.
Something like the NSA records would give a similar dictator today the power to chase down people with dangerous opinions or associations and kill or imprison them.
Look at what I bolded. This might look familiar since I just copied and pasted it from your post. You couldn't even be bothered to read what you quoted.
I read that.
That's why I made the logical jump to the conclusion that you were implying that if Hitler hadn't had NSA-style surveillance authority Anne Frank would have lived. Because if your entire argument is that "this would really help a new Hitler," the simple fact is that everything that has happened since Hitler and today would help a new Hitler.
The thing that makes guys like Hitler special isn't that they have massive surveillance powers, it's that they grant themselves other powers that make massive surveillance a total waste of time. If you know who a few Jews and you have the power to torture entire families, metadata doesn't add much to your investigation.
I've never said that these programs shouldn't be stopped, but if you insist that a court wrongly granting a warrant is the first step to Hitler you should probably be on anti-psycotic drugs.
Can you name one?
The Texas voter ID law. You even quoted me on that.
Not one law in response to purported fraud. One proven case of actual fraud. And you know this is what I meant.
I can name you a proven case of actual voter suppression. I tried to vote today, but since my ID was stolen I couldn't. Technically I cast a Provisional ballot, which will be counted if I show up at the election office during work hours with an ID, but I work 6 AM thru 2:30 PM in the southeast corner of the County, I'm on the bus, and the election office is in the middle of the County. It closes at 4:30.
Hell I can probably name two. One of my co-workers has been on the bus this week because his license just expired. It's a lot cheaper to take the bus for 50 minutes then to drive a truck for 20 minutes, and he works two jobs, so he doesn't have a lot of free time during business hours to get it fixed.
Now the only question is: did khallow bother to read those three paragraphs.
It's rich to be accused of "not bothering to read" when you've quoted me and twice in the last post alone to this point have demonstrated that you can't even meet your own level of criticism. As to your three paragraphs, they're still bullshit. Claiming as you do that:
And how long did it take you to figure out that you could avoid responding to my actual question by pretending I hadn't just written an essay on the law you used?
I'll note you have yet to answer any substantive criticism of this law. For example:
I said that Democrats live in places that actually enforce the laws all the time, but Republicans live in places where the cops let things slide.
Voter ID is not enforced by the cops. Your original claim has been shown to be bullshit, but you're still digging the hole.
And now you bring up everybody's favorite Jr. High debate tactic: the dictionary.
Unfortunately for you the actual dictionary defines any government regulator as a "cop," therefore local officials count.
So not only has my logic forced you to bring up Hitler in a hilarious fashion, it's forced you to dodge me on at least two points with ridiculous (and clearly intentional) misinterpretations, and one of them isn't even right in the literal sense.
Are you trying to prove Voter ID is actually a racist conspiracy by people like you? Be
The problem I wasn't talking about was everyone's problem with the NSA. I was talking about Snowden's problem with the law. And even if Obama (or the next President) does a 180 on this shit, Snowden is still 100% fucked because Snowden leaked classified info. That's illegal. It's not what the founders intended (Checks and Balances means Congress is supposed to be point man in disputes like this, not some British dude who happens to be a reporter). For that reason they threw the book at him. And it ain't gonna be unthrown.
Just ask Chelsea Manning.
I didn't call Fukishima/Chernobyl countries, I called them counties. I'm pretty sure I'm technically wrong to call them counties, because I'm pretty sure Ukraine and Japan don't actually have counties. What I meant was that a relatively large area around the plant is uninhabitable, and the area within is comparable to a US County. In Michigan, for example, almost every county is a 30 mile square for 900 sq mi. the Chernobyl exclusion zone is 1000 sq mi. Fukishima's seems to be significantly smaller, but is still a hundred or so square miles.
You're wrong about Chernobyl's population. The Exclusion Zone still has no legal residents, and the illegal settler population has been on the decline for years. Scientists are saying that the disaster has been a boon to local wildlife, due to the fact that human neighbors are a lot more deadly for large mammals then mere radiation; but nobody is legally allowed to live there yet.
The people of those countries are actually unhappy about it. That doesn't mean their leaders are being entirely honest. And note I'm not talking about all their leaders. Merkel and Rousseff seem to be doing more then angsting. But there's more then two countries complaining.
France, for example, loves Snowden's revelations so much that it refused to let Evo Morales plane through it's airspace because it suspected that Snowden might get out of Russia on said plane. Mysteriously the southern European countries who have all joined France in protesting this also banned Morales from their airspace. It seems an awful lot like the French elite saw these allegations, decided that they'd have to pretend to be pissed at the US for doing shit that France does all the fucking time, and then arranged for a bunch of countries highly dependent on French goodwill to deliver a dramatic "fuck you," to the region of the world most intent on supporting Snowden.
If the US were the victim the proposed solution would probably be something reasonable like increasing US counterintelligence efforts (for the cynics there: Spending Billion$ on random shit that might work, because if you do 12 things with a 5% chance of success you have a 54% chance of success), while bitching self-righteously in press releases nobody gives a shit about. And yes, if a Chinese Snowden had revealed the Chinese operations against the US I'd refer to our numerous protests as self-righteous bitching. But China is actually a dictatorship, so there won't be a Chinese Snowden.
Even assuming you're right about the long-term expenses and safety of a nuclear plant, there's the minor problem of what to do with the nuclear waste when you're done with it. Yucca Mountain would have been great, if it had any chance in hell of getting re-started.
As for "only the West can have nice things," I'm not arguing we should keep using nuclear. We have some plants set up we should probably continue to use, but the Africans/Latin Americans/etc. would be much better off building something else. Damn near anything else. Solar would be great in the Sahara. Hydroelectric would be good in the Congo river basin. I don't like coal in general, but South Africa has plenty of it.
I'm sure somebody will try a nuclear plant. I hope they use one of the ones that is hard to weaponize, and I really hope they don't hand ANY of the contracts over to some guy who happens to be an important Minister's cousin. Because fucking up nuclear power is not like fucking up a website, it cannot be fixed by simply delaying the project six months.
I'm pretty sure the article-writer agrees with you. His site is Antipolygraph. I have no clue if he talked to the police.
When's the last time slashdot actually slashdotted a site? It must have been years ago.