I agree with your statement, but have to point out that this is a result of teaching. We could easily become a society that teaches something else if people tried. It's hard to read "The Republic" and why it could work. More than being "hard", it requires that people in power give up their power. The people need to be compelled to force that change, and begin teaching society to be better.
If we had moved to sustainable living, I would agree with you. That is not what we have, and there is no push from Governments to make us cleaner.
Instead of addressing pollution, we argue about "global warming" as if that is the root cause of our woes. It's not, but people are too stupid to see reality. Lobbyists pump money into politicians pockets to ensure that we can keep on polluting, and arguing everything except for the obvious.
If we cleaned up, it would still take a long time for ocean dead zones to become healthy, and land to become viable for farming. That is the point where I will state that you are absolutely wrong by the way. We have screwed up enough of the planet that we can't support many more people, we lack the land and water to do so.
Notice I didn't mention a whole lot of other resource issues we have to get resolved in order to sustain a larger populace. Things like shark fining, and herbicide/pesticide issues make the issue a whole lot more than simply claiming "we can plant more stuff."
He has a laptop full of stolen US national security data and is in the Communist Chinese city of Hong Kong, and has been invited to Russia
Pure speculation. Contrary to what the US Government is preaching, Snowden didn't release launch codes or classified military data to anyone. He told people about the operational details of a spying program, which confirmed a whole lot of suspicion more than anything else. He released enough classified data to two media outlets to back his claims. We know it was not something like troop movements, chemical compounds for weapons or maps showing uranium depots. It could have been Putin's "hi grandma" email for all you know.
Calls of him being a traitor and deserving death for treason are out of ignorance to the definition of traitor and treason (or more likely just propaganda and fools repeating it).
The rhetoric above is a tool being used to excuse the actions of the Government and keep real traitors and treason from being punished.
I think what both the NSA and the government learned from this, is that it really is better to ask for forgiveness (if caught) then permission.
Nothing new here. Outside of a peon or two acting as patsies, who in the Government has been punished for:
a) Fast and Furious.
b) Collusion to undermine the First Amendment, slander, libel against OWS.
c) Wrongful death of US Officials in Benghazi.
d) Perjury (starting with Bill Clinton, but GW on war in the middle east, Obama on the NDA, Hillary on Benghazi, and the list could get pretty long so I'll stop)
e) GSA abuse of power, fraud, blackmail (just the cover up for the multi-million dollar party in Vegas)
You get the idea, there is no accountability. The media is good at assisting in cover ups by changing the subject and not talking about key issues so that people don't know or forget about them. People are slowly waking up to how bad it has become, and I have hope that it will change for the better.
Actually their statement was not reasoning at all, it was a delusional rant. I appreciate your logical reference, but doubt it will do any good against someone as delusional as you replied too.
I believe you are confusing someone caught committing a crime with someone suspected of committing a crime. In the first case, you may be personally searched and questioned. Even caught in the act, the police are required to establish a warrant to search your house, storage rental, etc.. in order to gain additional evidence. In the later, the police must obtain warrants for any searches or seizures. A good judge following the Constitution would require some type of reason to allow the search, like circumstantial evidence.
The beauty of the Constitution is that it is very solid. Liars and people that want to get away with breaking the constitution will tell you that it's "open to interpretation". There is very little that is open to interpretation if you actually study Law and the blueprints for what a Republic is and how it's supposed to work (mostly Philosophy).
Are you willfully blind or just ignorant? The top 1% don't claim income on a large portion of their income. This is what the tax codes do more than anything else. They define what "is" income for those with large amounts of income. For example, investing private funds in a Government approved business alleviates that sum of money from their potential income. Certain tax investments available to those that can afford them also remove that income from taxes. Those deductions are in addition to, and exactly like, what you and I see for on our tax forms. Notice that if you make X dollars and can take 9,600.00 per person from your income, that income is removed and your taxable income is lower than you started with. Having a high income may remove or reduce things like dependent's from tax deductions, but face facts. If a person pays a hundred thousand dollars to a tax account a year, are you foolish enough to believe that they don't save at least that much in taxes? Oh, and those tax attorneys they can afford to pay for are also tax deductions that you and I may not be able to afford.
You simply can't argue about what I said unless you are either extremely ignorant intentionally ignoring facts. Go ahead and educate yourself if you are the former and not the later.
If you paid 35K you are not rich, you are middle class. I paid a bit more than you, and am at the higher end of middle class. Taxes are absolutely unfair. Wealthy people pay 8-10% tax on average while you and I pay 35-40%.
Over 65,000 pages of tax code ensures that the elites do not pay their fair share. Any argument otherwise should be directed at the 65,000+ page tax code as proof of an unfair system. I'm sure some dip shit will claim "most of that 65,000 pages is dedicated to who pays taxes" at which I will laugh and tell the to actually read the codes instead of listening to the fantasized summary someone want's them to believe.
The original reasoning given under Reagan for creating such a disparate system is "Trickle Down" which has been proven to be a false theory for nearly 3 decades. It's continued under the fallacy argument that the economy will collapse if we had a fair tax for the elites. The fallacy can be dispelled by simply looking at the system working very well from the 40s through the early 80s where the elites paid a much higher percentage of income in tax. In the early 70s, it was nearly a 90% tax on millionaires and was that rate for half a century. The tax rates are public information, go learn something if you have doubts as to my statements.
Exactly. Welcome to propaganda media 101. Yesterday, watching CNN people were given 1 opinion over and over with no facts. The opinion of course was that Snowden was a dangerous person needing to be imprisoned. No mention of the crimes he's revealed of course. I'm guessing other media this morning will follow suite, and provide a similar opinion without facts. What's really sad is that so many don't question our propaganda.. er media.. system.
What possible facts could come out to make this seem better? We all know that they claim to be doing it under the guise of anti-terrorism, but many people aren't willing to give up privacy and allow all of their electronic audit trails to be cataloged by the government in return for some small reduction in terrorism. And I really think that blanket surveillance is going to have only a modest effect against terrorism since there are many ways for a terorrist cell to communicate without arousing suspicion.
Except that the US is not a pure democracy, but a democratic republic. The rule of law is the Constitution, and all other laws must abide by that document. We have processes to change the Constitution, but that was not done here. The Government can NOT simply ignore the constitution for any reason. In ignoring the constitution, each and every person that voted to deny basic human rights is guilty of treason. More-so than a whistle blower by far.
Did you know that a bit of history and logic can make someone's head explode? That's why we don't teach this to kids in school any more. It's not ROTE damnit!!
Stop making stuff up, wholly shit it's easy to read his dossier. He was at the contracting company for 3 months before fleeing to Hong Kong and releasing. Prior to this job, he was a computer security person at the CIA, and prior to that a security guard at a Government agency. Who knows what he was doing at the CIA, but he was not there long and not a Guru. Look at the work experience! Before being a security guard, he was in the US Army and released because he broke both legs in an accident.
If your opinion is based on a lie, well... shame on you for not checking basic facts.
^ THIS! ^ People need to get it through their thick heads that there is no left-right paradigm any longer, and has not been for quite a long time. They may call themselves Democrat or Republican but they are on the same team. That team does not play for the Citizens of the USA any longer.
Media keeps telling you about the left-right though, and doing anything they can to keep people away from the truth in how bad shit really is. CNN disgusted me this morning (in a waiting room, I had to watch). They had "experts" telling us how Snowden committed treason, but no counter opinion. A good number of people still believe everything that main stream media is fact, and not brainwashing garbage. Curious to see if this and Manning starts to wake more people up.
Using fuzzy accountant math, possibly true but not without fuzzy math. Are they including wireless devices like stoves that now come with WIFIbuilt in? Are they counting the bazillion other hardware controllers with WIFI? (each of which technical people are telling people it's both dangerous and stupid to have WIFI on!)
Middle class families can't afford more than 1 device per person, and a hefty portion of those can't afford more than 1 device per household (depending on which side of the middle class scale they sit on). Our middle class in the US has been shrinking rapidly over the last 20 years, so someone is fantasizing!
Oh wait, we already have welfare recipients with dozens of free Obama phones, paid for by the few middle class people that pay taxes. That's the answer then! The governments will all give away phones with money they don't have and borrow that money from each other in some sort of fuc*@d up bartering scheme right?
Great googly moogly!. Does every stupid ass thing people say now make a "story"?
Now that being said: Breaking confidentiality on top-secret stuff is no laughing matter. It's treason, a capital offense. But that doesn't mean we aren't called to follow the higher law if the top-secret stuff is in itself illegal.
Rubbish and rhetorical fallacy handed down by politicians. Failure to follow the classification system is not automatically treason, because the US Government does not just classify what would/could be confidential based on national security. The US Government (and I'm sure we could say the same exact thing for most Governments) classifies anything that may be embarrassing or illegal to cover their actions. As an example, read through everything that Bradley Manning released. Very little of what he released related to national security. It was mostly cover ups of illegal acts, collusion letters, and politicians conspiring with each other.
The only argument from the US Government on Abu Ghraib was that the Abu Ghraib dumps of illegal activities pissed people off. The relation to national security was that victims and victim countrymen may attack the US in retaliation. Well duh! The US was violating human rights in such a way as most US people that looked at the issue were horrified, let alone the populace that was being tortured. They were covering it up by making everything "TOP SECRET" instead of holding anyone accountable for the illegal acts.
Whistle blowers are supposed to have protection under the 1st amendment. But what we will see is yet another whistle blower punished by this administration, who has jailed more whistle blowers than all other previous administrations combined. And by the way, the only people punished for Abu Ghraib were soldiers, nobody involved in the cover up was punished. Similar to the punishment for Fast and Furious, or pick anything else we have found out the Government is doing which is illegal.
Did you bother to read my last paragraph, or did you just read the parts you felt would make a good debate point? I guess you have never heard of "Hollywood Accounting" either have you? Are you surprised that a studio would claim "piracy = debil" given that they can magically make negative income on block buster movies where ticket sales are records for years, like "The Lion King"?
The problem is not with SAG or "all studios" (Go read my 2nd paragraph above). The problem is that the corrupt are corrupted so absolutely that it will probably require an ugly reset to fix it. When the corrupt have political backing, the reset gets bigger and uglier right?
The thread is very easy to follow, you know. At no point was there an argument or debate. I stated that you were wrong and gave some rough facts and opinion to show how. Of course I also stated that you seemed to be rather delusional. Your claims of argument are good indicators that I am correct about you having delusions.
An argument would require you to say something other than an ad hominem or denials. You provided no fact or opinion to counter any of my statements.
I'd say "get well soon" or some such, but that would require that you actually want to leave the cave. As mentioned, I doubt you would read or attempt to understand the Allegory. I'll waste no more time on a trolling delusional person.
Google tells you up front that they read your e-mail, so why wouldn't you expect that they also hand over stuff to NSA?
What? No way should anyone have the expectation that a company telling you "we read your email to determine ads" equates to "we hand all of your data to the Government".
I'm not saying you are smart if you don't realize it could happen, hell people have warned about that exact scenario since gmail (or hotmail or yahoo mail etc...) came out. Seeing that it does happen is another thing all together, since it's ILLEGAL for the US Government to spy on US Citizens without a Warrant!
As someone else mentioned, this information should outrage you and everyone you tell the story too. It should cause people to start filing suits against the US Government and demanding criminal trials of heads and members of NSA, CIA, FBI, DOJ, and any politician that knew it was happening or approved it happening.
But Dave Schroeder, the Navy Information Warfare Officer who posts here, is still naive enough to think that this issue isn't about taking citizens servers and the empowerment that they manifest away from them.
I'm not sure that is correct. I believe it is more like he is paid to shill and present a government opinion no matter what arguments get presented. I have had numerous debates with this person on/., and all result in him ignoring facts and maintaining a pro-current-regime opinion.
In other words, he gets paid for dumping propaganda. Naivety has nothing to do with it.
By your reasoning then, there should be no issues when a Russian or Chines person gets censored by their government. There should be no issues with governments pulling phone records to silence dissent, or Twitter records, or anything else that would allow them to silence dissent.
The truth however, is that you most likely do have issue with those things. You probably hold a double standard for your government because of either ignorance, or more likely being delusional. This is where I will plug Plato's Allegory of the Cave, knowing full well that you won't read it.
The fact is that Governments do not improve without criticism for what they are doing wrong, and dialogue on how to make correction to better society. You can deny that the Government is trying to silence not only citizens, but any journalist that seeks to publish the truth. In doing so, you deny facts that are fully available for you to review. Denying facts to maintain a belief is delusion, and does not benefit society in any way.
You may be happy in your delusion, but nothing improves while members of society live in something other than reality.
As a side note, there is such a thing as trolling or flaiming when it comes to political discussion. If the person had called a politician a name in ad-hominem, I would agree that it's trolling or flaming. The person did not present an ad hominem attack, they pointed out a different opinion on results of US Political policies. Your reaction exactly matches a statement in "The Allegory of the Cave" by the way.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with your statement, but have to point out that this is a result of teaching. We could easily become a society that teaches something else if people tried. It's hard to read "The Republic" and why it could work. More than being "hard", it requires that people in power give up their power. The people need to be compelled to force that change, and begin teaching society to be better.
If we had moved to sustainable living, I would agree with you. That is not what we have, and there is no push from Governments to make us cleaner.
Instead of addressing pollution, we argue about "global warming" as if that is the root cause of our woes. It's not, but people are too stupid to see reality. Lobbyists pump money into politicians pockets to ensure that we can keep on polluting, and arguing everything except for the obvious.
If we cleaned up, it would still take a long time for ocean dead zones to become healthy, and land to become viable for farming. That is the point where I will state that you are absolutely wrong by the way. We have screwed up enough of the planet that we can't support many more people, we lack the land and water to do so.
Notice I didn't mention a whole lot of other resource issues we have to get resolved in order to sustain a larger populace. Things like shark fining, and herbicide/pesticide issues make the issue a whole lot more than simply claiming "we can plant more stuff."
He has a laptop full of stolen US national security data and is in the Communist Chinese city of Hong Kong, and has been invited to Russia
Pure speculation. Contrary to what the US Government is preaching, Snowden didn't release launch codes or classified military data to anyone. He told people about the operational details of a spying program, which confirmed a whole lot of suspicion more than anything else. He released enough classified data to two media outlets to back his claims. We know it was not something like troop movements, chemical compounds for weapons or maps showing uranium depots. It could have been Putin's "hi grandma" email for all you know.
Calls of him being a traitor and deserving death for treason are out of ignorance to the definition of traitor and treason (or more likely just propaganda and fools repeating it).
The rhetoric above is a tool being used to excuse the actions of the Government and keep real traitors and treason from being punished.
I think what both the NSA and the government learned from this, is that it really is better to ask for forgiveness (if caught) then permission.
Nothing new here. Outside of a peon or two acting as patsies, who in the Government has been punished for:
a) Fast and Furious.
b) Collusion to undermine the First Amendment, slander, libel against OWS.
c) Wrongful death of US Officials in Benghazi.
d) Perjury (starting with Bill Clinton, but GW on war in the middle east, Obama on the NDA, Hillary on Benghazi, and the list could get pretty long so I'll stop)
e) GSA abuse of power, fraud, blackmail (just the cover up for the multi-million dollar party in Vegas)
You get the idea, there is no accountability. The media is good at assisting in cover ups by changing the subject and not talking about key issues so that people don't know or forget about them. People are slowly waking up to how bad it has become, and I have hope that it will change for the better.
Actually their statement was not reasoning at all, it was a delusional rant. I appreciate your logical reference, but doubt it will do any good against someone as delusional as you replied too.
Incorrect.
I believe you are confusing someone caught committing a crime with someone suspected of committing a crime. In the first case, you may be personally searched and questioned. Even caught in the act, the police are required to establish a warrant to search your house, storage rental, etc.. in order to gain additional evidence. In the later, the police must obtain warrants for any searches or seizures. A good judge following the Constitution would require some type of reason to allow the search, like circumstantial evidence.
The beauty of the Constitution is that it is very solid. Liars and people that want to get away with breaking the constitution will tell you that it's "open to interpretation". There is very little that is open to interpretation if you actually study Law and the blueprints for what a Republic is and how it's supposed to work (mostly Philosophy).
Are you willfully blind or just ignorant? The top 1% don't claim income on a large portion of their income. This is what the tax codes do more than anything else. They define what "is" income for those with large amounts of income. For example, investing private funds in a Government approved business alleviates that sum of money from their potential income. Certain tax investments available to those that can afford them also remove that income from taxes. Those deductions are in addition to, and exactly like, what you and I see for on our tax forms. Notice that if you make X dollars and can take 9,600.00 per person from your income, that income is removed and your taxable income is lower than you started with. Having a high income may remove or reduce things like dependent's from tax deductions, but face facts. If a person pays a hundred thousand dollars to a tax account a year, are you foolish enough to believe that they don't save at least that much in taxes? Oh, and those tax attorneys they can afford to pay for are also tax deductions that you and I may not be able to afford.
You simply can't argue about what I said unless you are either extremely ignorant intentionally ignoring facts. Go ahead and educate yourself if you are the former and not the later.
If you paid 35K you are not rich, you are middle class. I paid a bit more than you, and am at the higher end of middle class. Taxes are absolutely unfair. Wealthy people pay 8-10% tax on average while you and I pay 35-40%.
Over 65,000 pages of tax code ensures that the elites do not pay their fair share. Any argument otherwise should be directed at the 65,000+ page tax code as proof of an unfair system. I'm sure some dip shit will claim "most of that 65,000 pages is dedicated to who pays taxes" at which I will laugh and tell the to actually read the codes instead of listening to the fantasized summary someone want's them to believe.
The original reasoning given under Reagan for creating such a disparate system is "Trickle Down" which has been proven to be a false theory for nearly 3 decades. It's continued under the fallacy argument that the economy will collapse if we had a fair tax for the elites. The fallacy can be dispelled by simply looking at the system working very well from the 40s through the early 80s where the elites paid a much higher percentage of income in tax. In the early 70s, it was nearly a 90% tax on millionaires and was that rate for half a century. The tax rates are public information, go learn something if you have doubts as to my statements.
Not new, I continue to have faith that things will get better as long as we keep pointing out mistakes. I get disappointed a whole lot too, but...
Exactly. Welcome to propaganda media 101. Yesterday, watching CNN people were given 1 opinion over and over with no facts. The opinion of course was that Snowden was a dangerous person needing to be imprisoned. No mention of the crimes he's revealed of course. I'm guessing other media this morning will follow suite, and provide a similar opinion without facts. What's really sad is that so many don't question our propaganda.. er media.. system.
What possible facts could come out to make this seem better? We all know that they claim to be doing it under the guise of anti-terrorism, but many people aren't willing to give up privacy and allow all of their electronic audit trails to be cataloged by the government in return for some small reduction in terrorism. And I really think that blanket surveillance is going to have only a modest effect against terrorism since there are many ways for a terorrist cell to communicate without arousing suspicion.
Except that the US is not a pure democracy, but a democratic republic. The rule of law is the Constitution, and all other laws must abide by that document. We have processes to change the Constitution, but that was not done here. The Government can NOT simply ignore the constitution for any reason. In ignoring the constitution, each and every person that voted to deny basic human rights is guilty of treason. More-so than a whistle blower by far.
Did you know that a bit of history and logic can make someone's head explode? That's why we don't teach this to kids in school any more. It's not ROTE damnit!!
Stop making stuff up, wholly shit it's easy to read his dossier. He was at the contracting company for 3 months before fleeing to Hong Kong and releasing. Prior to this job, he was a computer security person at the CIA, and prior to that a security guard at a Government agency. Who knows what he was doing at the CIA, but he was not there long and not a Guru. Look at the work experience! Before being a security guard, he was in the US Army and released because he broke both legs in an accident.
If your opinion is based on a lie, well... shame on you for not checking basic facts.
You need to change your signature unless you are simply playing advocate.
^ THIS! ^ People need to get it through their thick heads that there is no left-right paradigm any longer, and has not been for quite a long time. They may call themselves Democrat or Republican but they are on the same team. That team does not play for the Citizens of the USA any longer.
Media keeps telling you about the left-right though, and doing anything they can to keep people away from the truth in how bad shit really is. CNN disgusted me this morning (in a waiting room, I had to watch). They had "experts" telling us how Snowden committed treason, but no counter opinion. A good number of people still believe everything that main stream media is fact, and not brainwashing garbage. Curious to see if this and Manning starts to wake more people up.
Using fuzzy accountant math, possibly true but not without fuzzy math. Are they including wireless devices like stoves that now come with WIFIbuilt in? Are they counting the bazillion other hardware controllers with WIFI? (each of which technical people are telling people it's both dangerous and stupid to have WIFI on!)
Middle class families can't afford more than 1 device per person, and a hefty portion of those can't afford more than 1 device per household (depending on which side of the middle class scale they sit on). Our middle class in the US has been shrinking rapidly over the last 20 years, so someone is fantasizing!
Oh wait, we already have welfare recipients with dozens of free Obama phones, paid for by the few middle class people that pay taxes. That's the answer then! The governments will all give away phones with money they don't have and borrow that money from each other in some sort of fuc*@d up bartering scheme right?
Great googly moogly!. Does every stupid ass thing people say now make a "story"?
The Constitution is the law. Since that statement is true, your argument is invalid.
The US is not a democracy, it's a Republic. Learn the difference!
Now that being said: Breaking confidentiality on top-secret stuff is no laughing matter. It's treason, a capital offense. But that doesn't mean we aren't called to follow the higher law if the top-secret stuff is in itself illegal.
Rubbish and rhetorical fallacy handed down by politicians. Failure to follow the classification system is not automatically treason, because the US Government does not just classify what would/could be confidential based on national security. The US Government (and I'm sure we could say the same exact thing for most Governments) classifies anything that may be embarrassing or illegal to cover their actions. As an example, read through everything that Bradley Manning released. Very little of what he released related to national security. It was mostly cover ups of illegal acts, collusion letters, and politicians conspiring with each other.
The only argument from the US Government on Abu Ghraib was that the Abu Ghraib dumps of illegal activities pissed people off. The relation to national security was that victims and victim countrymen may attack the US in retaliation. Well duh! The US was violating human rights in such a way as most US people that looked at the issue were horrified, let alone the populace that was being tortured. They were covering it up by making everything "TOP SECRET" instead of holding anyone accountable for the illegal acts.
Whistle blowers are supposed to have protection under the 1st amendment. But what we will see is yet another whistle blower punished by this administration, who has jailed more whistle blowers than all other previous administrations combined. And by the way, the only people punished for Abu Ghraib were soldiers, nobody involved in the cover up was punished. Similar to the punishment for Fast and Furious, or pick anything else we have found out the Government is doing which is illegal.
Did you bother to read my last paragraph, or did you just read the parts you felt would make a good debate point? I guess you have never heard of "Hollywood Accounting" either have you? Are you surprised that a studio would claim "piracy = debil" given that they can magically make negative income on block buster movies where ticket sales are records for years, like "The Lion King"?
The problem is not with SAG or "all studios" (Go read my 2nd paragraph above). The problem is that the corrupt are corrupted so absolutely that it will probably require an ugly reset to fix it. When the corrupt have political backing, the reset gets bigger and uglier right?
The thread is very easy to follow, you know. At no point was there an argument or debate. I stated that you were wrong and gave some rough facts and opinion to show how. Of course I also stated that you seemed to be rather delusional. Your claims of argument are good indicators that I am correct about you having delusions.
An argument would require you to say something other than an ad hominem or denials. You provided no fact or opinion to counter any of my statements.
I'd say "get well soon" or some such, but that would require that you actually want to leave the cave. As mentioned, I doubt you would read or attempt to understand the Allegory. I'll waste no more time on a trolling delusional person.
Google tells you up front that they read your e-mail, so why wouldn't you expect that they also hand over stuff to NSA?
What? No way should anyone have the expectation that a company telling you "we read your email to determine ads" equates to "we hand all of your data to the Government".
I'm not saying you are smart if you don't realize it could happen, hell people have warned about that exact scenario since gmail (or hotmail or yahoo mail etc...) came out. Seeing that it does happen is another thing all together, since it's ILLEGAL for the US Government to spy on US Citizens without a Warrant!
As someone else mentioned, this information should outrage you and everyone you tell the story too. It should cause people to start filing suits against the US Government and demanding criminal trials of heads and members of NSA, CIA, FBI, DOJ, and any politician that knew it was happening or approved it happening.
But Dave Schroeder, the Navy Information Warfare Officer who posts here, is still naive enough to think that this issue isn't about taking citizens servers and the empowerment that they manifest away from them.
I'm not sure that is correct. I believe it is more like he is paid to shill and present a government opinion no matter what arguments get presented. I have had numerous debates with this person on /., and all result in him ignoring facts and maintaining a pro-current-regime opinion.
In other words, he gets paid for dumping propaganda. Naivety has nothing to do with it.
Awe, someone has a head hurt due to reality. Please stay in the cave you happy little slave.
By your reasoning then, there should be no issues when a Russian or Chines person gets censored by their government. There should be no issues with governments pulling phone records to silence dissent, or Twitter records, or anything else that would allow them to silence dissent.
The truth however, is that you most likely do have issue with those things. You probably hold a double standard for your government because of either ignorance, or more likely being delusional. This is where I will plug Plato's Allegory of the Cave, knowing full well that you won't read it.
The fact is that Governments do not improve without criticism for what they are doing wrong, and dialogue on how to make correction to better society. You can deny that the Government is trying to silence not only citizens, but any journalist that seeks to publish the truth. In doing so, you deny facts that are fully available for you to review. Denying facts to maintain a belief is delusion, and does not benefit society in any way.
You may be happy in your delusion, but nothing improves while members of society live in something other than reality.
As a side note, there is such a thing as trolling or flaiming when it comes to political discussion. If the person had called a politician a name in ad-hominem, I would agree that it's trolling or flaming. The person did not present an ad hominem attack, they pointed out a different opinion on results of US Political policies. Your reaction exactly matches a statement in "The Allegory of the Cave" by the way.