If not 'proper channels', what did you mean when you said Snowden 'could have been honorable'? He would still have had to flee the country, as it is abundantly clear from cases like Drake's that otherwise nothing much would happen about the issues raised, and it is likely that his personal life would have been wrecked, even worse than it is now.
The NSA is supposed to protect the US national security. That does emphatically NOT include things like spying on allied heads of state, foreign competitors of US corporations, or the entire population of supposedly friendly nations. In other words, they are operating way, way, way beyond their brief. And the US taxpayers are funding this -- which is why even those revelations are still bona fide whisteblowing, if you ask me.
No. The NSA (and various other TLAs) have shown, again and again, that there the "proper channels" for whistleblowing are dead ends. Nothing will be fixed or improved, and for your troubles you'll be subjected to endless legal and extralegal hardship.
Snowden apparently knew better than to fall into this trap. I don't think you're actually unaware of this, just trolling. But for others, perhaps, who might be genuinely interested: Thomas Andrews Drake.
Are you saying that we should calibrate our sense of right and wrong using the worst excesses of our adversaries as baseline? That will predictably turn into a race to the bottom with nothing but losers in the end. "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind" (Ghandi)
It does not keep anyone safe. It creates and breeds more hatred and desire for revenge. It isolates the US from allies. It does the exact opposite of ending terroism. Torture is like throwing gasoline on the bonfire of terrorism.
This.
Something else I find truly and jaw-droppingly shocking is that all the discussion of terrorism remains selectively detached from our own foreign policies. So on the one hand we always hear about terrorism shaping foreign policy, but never about foreign policy shaping terrorism.
"They" don't hate us because of our freedom. And with the possible exception of a very small fraction of true believers, they don't hate us for not being Muslims. Most of them hate us because we've been overthrowing their democratic governments and propping up the brutal dictators in their countries.
How about peer pressure? Assuming that they're not entirely brainwashed, many of the folks working at NSA are probably a lot like us. Some of them likely even frequent/. for reasons other than subverting the discussion or serving up fake versions of it to selected members.
Not cool, guys, decidedly uncool even. Surely you can find a job which doesn't involve trampling on the Constitution.
And it's no wonder, when you look at American films and television. It's always some lone cop, on a vigilante mission to kill the bad guys, above the law. It's a fantasy that has been so ingrained in our culture at this point, that from when these guys are little kids to when they join the force they are already programmed to fail.
That actually works both ways. There is so much entertainment which involves terrorists and serial killers -- it's probably fair to say that the number of fictional serial killers exceeds reality by now. Which might cause the public, and possibly even some of the law enforcers who really should know better, to grossly overestimate the actual danger they're in from day to day. And overreact accordingly when something does happen.
Most Americans would be shocked and horrified if they learned about what their government and major corporations have done to places like South America, the Middle East, and parts of Africa, let alone what goes on at home.
I think that might be accurate. The thing is, though, in a nominal democracy it is up to the People to be aware of what is being done in their name. And when these things continue for decades, across different administrations of all (ahem, both) parties. The rest of the world is not wrong in holding all Americans responsible.
The only question is WHY DO THEY GO ON RECORD with the bullshit denials?
It is a calculated risk, and maybe out of habit.
Somewhere along the chain of command, though, the denials do become true. A good underling knows when to grant his masters the ultimate in plausible deniability by simply not filling them in on certain matters.
A single engineer approved a part change from a subcontractor.
But why? Parts don't get redesigned unless there is a practical reason or at least a theoretical improvement over the current model. Someone decided this was necessary, justified the costs in terms of benefits, probably had to convince the bean counters. If not in response to some spectacular failure, why this particular change? And why the same part number -- I am not very well versed in automotive engineering but it seems an odd thing to do. (Are there actually regulations about such nomenclature?)
... but nobody put it together that this could ultimately result in a failure of the safety systems
The fact that nobody put it together is, arguably, the failure. It may or may not be subject to litigation, though, I am far from qualified to actually say but I would guess some kind of gross negligence charges. But if it turns out that there have been deliberate actions toward avoiding a costly recall, while in possession of data which would cast even a shadow of doubt on any critical part's specifications, that should be a different matter.
Admittedly I didn't phrase it too subtly... I was suggesting gross negligence with lethal consequences. That it is impossible to engineer everything 100% safe in the first iteration is fairly obvious, but what seems to have happened here is that they realized their mistake (they started making this part differently) and yet they did not initiate a recall.
So if the original part claims lives, after the manufacturer was aware of the problem, but decided not to address the problem for extant parts, then yes I think the manufacturer should be liable for these deaths. Additionally, the fact that they apparently did not use a new part number for the improved version gives at least the impression of wanting to sweep it under the rug.
Actually, I am opposed to capital punishment. The quip about a death sentence for corporations is meant to emphasize a kind of asymmetry about this whole corporate personhood idea, which is that proponents claim they should have all the rights and privileges of an individual person but typically remain quiet about the associated responsibility and accountability that individual persons have.
Finally, too big too fail (in terms of finances or jobs) doesn't exonerate even GM from wrongdoing -- if that is what will be determined to heve been the case here.
Agreed. I might just go along with the corporations-as-people idea just as soon as the first corporation is executed for having policies tantamount to murder, or gross negligence with lethal consequences, such as seems to be the case here.
I thought this documentary made some interesting points. It is reasonably balanced too, e.g. it includes some staunch free market fundamentalists (Milton Friedman trying to explain what externalities are, for instance).
It's a troll. I wouldn't be surprised if the original poster actually gets pouty about "Americans" too and wrote that in some attempt at sarcasm or humor.
You, and the AC above, are probably right. Poe's law and all that. Of course the corollary to that law is it doesn't actually work unless there really are people who genuinely believe what is being parodied. That includes some of our beloved moderators, in fact; this troll was at +1 when I replied.
And from where I am standing that also includes some of people shaping foreign policy, because the "eff you, we can do whatever we want" attitude is pretty much what the US project internationally.
I appreciate that this is not the opinion of most, or even all that many, Americans. But being a nominal democracy has the flip side that the People have a collective responsibility and accountability for allowing their elected leaders and diplomatic corps to misrepresent them so. This is not a new thing.
Fuck all these other countries. You can't stop us anyway, we are the mightiest, richest, most powrerful nation on Earth and we do whatever the fuck we want.
And Americans wonder why they have a reputation for being both arrogant and uninformed...
Ironically, this is exactly what many of the beneficiaries of, um, your foreign policy would love you to do: take all your military kit and, respectfully, piss off.
The problem is that your trampling on "weaker" nations is kind of a large part of your being "mighty" and rich (well, one marginal fraction of you anyway) and your leaders are unlikely to give that up.
there is a lot of hatred towards white Christian men
But how much of that has anything to do with them being white, or christian, or men?
Given that this group has historically been -- and to considerable extent still is -- disproportionately represented in positions of power, it is hardly surprising that those who are underrepresented or feel disenfranchised would develop some animosity. But I would guess this has much more to do with the factual inbalances than traits such as skin color, or religion, or gender.
The motivations will be a form of jealously and lack of exposure to the PR machine that people who can afford a TV are exposed to.
It seems to me these are consequences, not causes (or motivations as you put it).
It works like this:
- An impoverished person is just a poor person without the basic means for survival - A poor person is just a middle-class person without sufficient income - A middle-class person is just a rich person without the surplus cash - A rich person is just a millionaire without the millions - A millionaire is just a billionaire.....
You are describing how it is very difficult to hide "upwards" class differences (everyone is acutely aware of the things that are just out of their reach) because so much wealth is spent on advertising same. Conversely it seems this is easy in the other direction (wealthy individuals tend to spend much of it on "downward" insulation, gated communities, exclusive social occasions).
I've heard that belief that the US is rich and the rest of the world is poor very many times. I've travelled to a few countries and can tell you without a doubt that although there are plenty of poorer places there are plenty of richer places too.
Of course it is a technical matter of how we define "rich". But along the lines of GDP per capita there are very few countries in the neighborhood of the US. Those are places like Qatar, Brunei and Norway, which happen to have enormous amounts of fossil fuels relative to their number of inhabitants, as well as tax / banking havens Luxembourg and Switzerland.
If we include the wide variety of transactions that boil down, one way or another, to the US borrowing from the world at large, or profiting from its currency being the global default, it truly is without peer.
There are lots of countries with better infrastructure and better standards of living.
I certainly won't deny there is real abject poverty in the US, but I think that says more about the extreme local inequities than it does about the wealth of the nation as it compares globally.
The US has a very positive self-image. That's a great thing. But sometimes it can cover up things that are wrong and could be fixed.
American companies have been hurt to the tune of billions of dollars. US intelligent efforts overseas have been crippled.
And before they profited to the tune of billions thanks to trade secrets that just happened to find their way from NSA into their spotless hands.
I understand your point about the difference of revealing domestic vs foreign spying, but even the latter category of leaks has demonstrated that NSA are operating way beyond it's stated purpose (which is security not economic superiority) at a huge cost to US taxpayers. In other words, still bona fide whistleblowing as far as I'm concerned.
Nope. Most of the rest if the world is dirt poor, and yet many of these dirt poor folks have the common sense to understand that this is not entirely unrelated to the West being filthy rich. Wealth distribution is pretty much the opposite of what you'd expect looking at natural resource distribution.
Similarly, even though we in the privileged comfort of our Western sofas like to pretend we're mostly a force for Good in the world, those at the receiving end somehow tend to remember who is propping up the violent and corrupt regimes whose boot rests on their faces.
So the guy who first thought of the Big Bang theory was a catholic priest. Mendel was a monk, Newton wrote more about religion than nature, Cantor became quite unhealthily obsessed with religion toward the end... I am not sure what your point is.
You appeared to be arguing that the differences in tax status of religious vs scientific institutions, such as they are, are justified because some of the former act charitably some times. I don't mean to diminish that at all, by pointing out that efforts of modern scientists also contribute a great deal of practical and immediate value. And, by that measure, the tax status difference can not reasonably be justified, imho.
Values such as you mention have not become obsolete, but following them blindly because some old book says so has. The reason I live by "do unto others..." despite being an atheist is it makes basic sense to me. I find I keep having to point out the obvious, not being a christian (or whatever) doesn't mean I oppose all of its ideals as a matter of principle or something.
I find valuable lessons, alongside unbearable smallmindedness, in the various holy scriptures, in the same way as I might find them in (other) fairytales, aphorisms, plays, poems, etc.
I agree and honestly believe that teaching critical thinking in schools would qualitatively change the world for the better. Sadly I just don't see it happening.
Teaching critical thinking is, for some reason I honestly cannot fathom, one of the argument that the Wedgers put forth as they claim equal time for blind faith.
... once all of the science organizations start running various charities, food shelves, hospitals, orphanages, offering weekly moral instruction to children...
You mean like finding answers to health, nutrition, construction problems the way scientists, physicians and engineers do? Or like passing on modern ideas on philosophy and morality in stead of ancient and outdated scripture, the way academia does?
No, not nearly all Muslim countries. As with Christianity, it is rather more complicated. See here.
Likewise your blanket statement about "all of Africa, most of Latin America". These continents are almost exclusively Roman Catholic and if you haven't noticed the Roman Catholic views on evolution are not nearly as black-and-white as those of many US protestants. "Much of Asia" is just plain wrong, as someone else pointed out.
So actually, from where I am standing, it does look like there is basically no other country on Earth with where the percentatge of young-earth creationists is even remotely comparable to the US.
Slashdot Mirror
If not 'proper channels', what did you mean when you said Snowden 'could have been honorable'? He would still have had to flee the country, as it is abundantly clear from cases like Drake's that otherwise nothing much would happen about the issues raised, and it is likely that his personal life would have been wrecked, even worse than it is now.
The NSA is supposed to protect the US national security. That does emphatically NOT include things like spying on allied heads of state, foreign competitors of US corporations, or the entire population of supposedly friendly nations. In other words, they are operating way, way, way beyond their brief. And the US taxpayers are funding this -- which is why even those revelations are still bona fide whisteblowing, if you ask me.
Snowden could have been honorable
No. The NSA (and various other TLAs) have shown, again and again, that there the "proper channels" for whistleblowing are dead ends. Nothing will be fixed or improved, and for your troubles you'll be subjected to endless legal and extralegal hardship.
Snowden apparently knew better than to fall into this trap. I don't think you're actually unaware of this, just trolling. But for others, perhaps, who might be genuinely interested: Thomas Andrews Drake.
Are you saying that we should calibrate our sense of right and wrong using the worst excesses of our adversaries as baseline? That will predictably turn into a race to the bottom with nothing but losers in the end. "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind" (Ghandi)
It does not keep anyone safe. It creates and breeds more hatred and desire for revenge. It isolates the US from allies. It does the exact opposite of ending terroism. Torture is like throwing gasoline on the bonfire of terrorism.
This.
Something else I find truly and jaw-droppingly shocking is that all the discussion of terrorism remains selectively detached from our own foreign policies. So on the one hand we always hear about terrorism shaping foreign policy, but never about foreign policy shaping terrorism.
"They" don't hate us because of our freedom. And with the possible exception of a very small fraction of true believers, they don't hate us for not being Muslims. Most of them hate us because we've been overthrowing their democratic governments and propping up the brutal dictators in their countries.
How about peer pressure? Assuming that they're not entirely brainwashed, many of the folks working at NSA are probably a lot like us. Some of them likely even frequent /. for reasons other than subverting the discussion or serving up fake versions of it to selected members.
Not cool, guys, decidedly uncool even. Surely you can find a job which doesn't involve trampling on the Constitution.
And it's no wonder, when you look at American films and television. It's always some lone cop, on a vigilante mission to kill the bad guys, above the law. It's a fantasy that has been so ingrained in our culture at this point, that from when these guys are little kids to when they join the force they are already programmed to fail.
That actually works both ways. There is so much entertainment which involves terrorists and serial killers -- it's probably fair to say that the number of fictional serial killers exceeds reality by now. Which might cause the public, and possibly even some of the law enforcers who really should know better, to grossly overestimate the actual danger they're in from day to day. And overreact accordingly when something does happen.
Most Americans would be shocked and horrified if they learned about what their government and major corporations have done to places like South America, the Middle East, and parts of Africa, let alone what goes on at home.
I think that might be accurate. The thing is, though, in a nominal democracy it is up to the People to be aware of what is being done in their name. And when these things continue for decades, across different administrations of all (ahem, both) parties. The rest of the world is not wrong in holding all Americans responsible.
The only question is WHY DO THEY GO ON RECORD with the bullshit denials?
It is a calculated risk, and maybe out of habit.
Somewhere along the chain of command, though, the denials do become true. A good underling knows when to grant his masters the ultimate in plausible deniability by simply not filling them in on certain matters.
A single engineer approved a part change from a subcontractor.
But why? Parts don't get redesigned unless there is a practical reason or at least a theoretical improvement over the current model. Someone decided this was necessary, justified the costs in terms of benefits, probably had to convince the bean counters. If not in response to some spectacular failure, why this particular change? And why the same part number -- I am not very well versed in automotive engineering but it seems an odd thing to do. (Are there actually regulations about such nomenclature?)
... but nobody put it together that this could ultimately result in a failure of the safety systems
The fact that nobody put it together is, arguably, the failure. It may or may not be subject to litigation, though, I am far from qualified to actually say but I would guess some kind of gross negligence charges. But if it turns out that there have been deliberate actions toward avoiding a costly recall, while in possession of data which would cast even a shadow of doubt on any critical part's specifications, that should be a different matter.
Admittedly I didn't phrase it too subtly... I was suggesting gross negligence with lethal consequences. That it is impossible to engineer everything 100% safe in the first iteration is fairly obvious, but what seems to have happened here is that they realized their mistake (they started making this part differently) and yet they did not initiate a recall.
So if the original part claims lives, after the manufacturer was aware of the problem, but decided not to address the problem for extant parts, then yes I think the manufacturer should be liable for these deaths. Additionally, the fact that they apparently did not use a new part number for the improved version gives at least the impression of wanting to sweep it under the rug.
Actually, I am opposed to capital punishment. The quip about a death sentence for corporations is meant to emphasize a kind of asymmetry about this whole corporate personhood idea, which is that proponents claim they should have all the rights and privileges of an individual person but typically remain quiet about the associated responsibility and accountability that individual persons have.
Finally, too big too fail (in terms of finances or jobs) doesn't exonerate even GM from wrongdoing -- if that is what will be determined to heve been the case here.
Agreed. I might just go along with the corporations-as-people idea just as soon as the first corporation is executed for having policies tantamount to murder, or gross negligence with lethal consequences, such as seems to be the case here.
I thought this documentary made some interesting points. It is reasonably balanced too, e.g. it includes some staunch free market fundamentalists (Milton Friedman trying to explain what externalities are, for instance).
It's a troll. I wouldn't be surprised if the original poster actually gets pouty about "Americans" too and wrote that in some attempt at sarcasm or humor.
You, and the AC above, are probably right. Poe's law and all that. Of course the corollary to that law is it doesn't actually work unless there really are people who genuinely believe what is being parodied. That includes some of our beloved moderators, in fact; this troll was at +1 when I replied.
And from where I am standing that also includes some of people shaping foreign policy, because the "eff you, we can do whatever we want" attitude is pretty much what the US project internationally.
I appreciate that this is not the opinion of most, or even all that many, Americans. But being a nominal democracy has the flip side that the People have a collective responsibility and accountability for allowing their elected leaders and diplomatic corps to misrepresent them so. This is not a new thing.
Fuck all these other countries. You can't stop us anyway, we are the mightiest, richest, most powrerful nation on Earth and we do whatever the fuck we want.
And Americans wonder why they have a reputation for being both arrogant and uninformed...
Ironically, this is exactly what many of the beneficiaries of, um, your foreign policy would love you to do: take all your military kit and, respectfully, piss off.
The problem is that your trampling on "weaker" nations is kind of a large part of your being "mighty" and rich (well, one marginal fraction of you anyway) and your leaders are unlikely to give that up.
You realize that "puberty" is nature's way of basically ensuring that young people learn to question authority, right?
there is a lot of hatred towards white Christian men
But how much of that has anything to do with them being white, or christian, or men?
Given that this group has historically been -- and to considerable extent still is -- disproportionately represented in positions of power, it is hardly surprising that those who are underrepresented or feel disenfranchised would develop some animosity. But I would guess this has much more to do with the factual inbalances than traits such as skin color, or religion, or gender.
The motivations will be a form of jealously and lack of exposure to the PR machine that people who can afford a TV are exposed to.
It seems to me these are consequences, not causes (or motivations as you put it).
It works like this:
- An impoverished person is just a poor person without the basic means for survival
- A poor person is just a middle-class person without sufficient income
- A middle-class person is just a rich person without the surplus cash
- A rich person is just a millionaire without the millions
- A millionaire is just a billionaire.....
You are describing how it is very difficult to hide "upwards" class differences (everyone is acutely aware of the things that are just out of their reach) because so much wealth is spent on advertising same. Conversely it seems this is easy in the other direction (wealthy individuals tend to spend much of it on "downward" insulation, gated communities, exclusive social occasions).
I've heard that belief that the US is rich and the rest of the world is poor very many times. I've travelled to a few countries and can tell you without a doubt that although there are plenty of poorer places there are plenty of richer places too.
Of course it is a technical matter of how we define "rich". But along the lines of GDP per capita there are very few countries in the neighborhood of the US. Those are places like Qatar, Brunei and Norway, which happen to have enormous amounts of fossil fuels relative to their number of inhabitants, as well as tax / banking havens Luxembourg and Switzerland.
If we include the wide variety of transactions that boil down, one way or another, to the US borrowing from the world at large, or profiting from its currency being the global default, it truly is without peer.
There are lots of countries with better infrastructure and better standards of living.
I certainly won't deny there is real abject poverty in the US, but I think that says more about the extreme local inequities than it does about the wealth of the nation as it compares globally.
The US has a very positive self-image. That's a great thing. But sometimes it can cover up things that are wrong and could be fixed.
Absolutely, no argument there.
American companies have been hurt to the tune of billions of dollars. US intelligent efforts overseas have been crippled.
And before they profited to the tune of billions thanks to trade secrets that just happened to find their way from NSA into their spotless hands.
I understand your point about the difference of revealing domestic vs foreign spying, but even the latter category of leaks has demonstrated that NSA are operating way beyond it's stated purpose (which is security not economic superiority) at a huge cost to US taxpayers. In other words, still bona fide whistleblowing as far as I'm concerned.
UM, does anyone else feel like saying F--- Snowden at this point?
Free Snowden? Yeah I'll second that.
Nope. Most of the rest if the world is dirt poor, and yet many of these dirt poor folks have the common sense to understand that this is not entirely unrelated to the West being filthy rich. Wealth distribution is pretty much the opposite of what you'd expect looking at natural resource distribution.
Similarly, even though we in the privileged comfort of our Western sofas like to pretend we're mostly a force for Good in the world, those at the receiving end somehow tend to remember who is propping up the violent and corrupt regimes whose boot rests on their faces.
So the guy who first thought of the Big Bang theory was a catholic priest. Mendel was a monk, Newton wrote more about religion than nature, Cantor became quite unhealthily obsessed with religion toward the end... I am not sure what your point is.
You appeared to be arguing that the differences in tax status of religious vs scientific institutions, such as they are, are justified because some of the former act charitably some times. I don't mean to diminish that at all, by pointing out that efforts of modern scientists also contribute a great deal of practical and immediate value. And, by that measure, the tax status difference can not reasonably be justified, imho.
Values such as you mention have not become obsolete, but following them blindly because some old book says so has. The reason I live by "do unto others..." despite being an atheist is it makes basic sense to me. I find I keep having to point out the obvious, not being a christian (or whatever) doesn't mean I oppose all of its ideals as a matter of principle or something.
I find valuable lessons, alongside unbearable smallmindedness, in the various holy scriptures, in the same way as I might find them in (other) fairytales, aphorisms, plays, poems, etc.
I agree and honestly believe that teaching critical thinking in schools would qualitatively change the world for the better. Sadly I just don't see it happening.
Teaching critical thinking is, for some reason I honestly cannot fathom, one of the argument that the Wedgers put forth as they claim equal time for blind faith.
... once all of the science organizations start running various charities, food shelves, hospitals, orphanages, offering weekly moral instruction to children ...
You mean like finding answers to health, nutrition, construction problems the way scientists, physicians and engineers do? Or like passing on modern ideas on philosophy and morality in stead of ancient and outdated scripture, the way academia does?
No, not nearly all Muslim countries. As with Christianity, it is rather more complicated. See here.
Likewise your blanket statement about "all of Africa, most of Latin America". These continents are almost exclusively Roman Catholic and if you haven't noticed the Roman Catholic views on evolution are not nearly as black-and-white as those of many US protestants. "Much of Asia" is just plain wrong, as someone else pointed out.
So actually, from where I am standing, it does look like there is basically no other country on Earth with where the percentatge of young-earth creationists is even remotely comparable to the US.