We are supposed to be better than that. The fight we're in is ultimately a fight of ideas. In the short term it's a fight where Americans armed with M-16s and Predator drones face off against Taliban militants armed with AK-47s and IEDs. But in the long run, it's a war of visions of the future; a war between the idea of Western-style democracy where women drive cars and vote, and al Qaeda's medieval vision of an Islamic caliphate with sharia law.
In the long run, you can't win that fight with guns. You can kill as many militants as you want, but if they can convert people faster than you can kill them, they will eventually win. What are you going to do if they convert a million people- kill them all? Ten million? A hundred million? There's no way you could prevail. Look at what happened to Rome. They crucified Jesus and fed a lot of Christians to lions, and eventually the Roman emperor ended up converting to Christianity. Look at the Soviet empire. As soon as people had a choice between the West and the Communist system, they chose the West. It was a war the West won without firing a shot. That's the power of ideas.
The West won a huge battle with the Arab spring, which will ultimately reshape the geopolitical balance far more than the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan ever could. Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and Syria could have risen up and chosen the vision of al Qaeda, they could have chosen to follow Osama bin Laden's dream. They didn't. They decided they want what we have- freedom, equality, justice, opportunity- and not the barbaric vision that Osama bin Laden has provided. And you sure as hell won't hear any of those Arab revolutionaries demanding that their government be more like China, or Russia. In the interviews with people struggling in Syria against Assad's dictatorship, they say, "we want what you have". That's the power of ideas. Sure, they despise us for our foreign policy, but they like the idea of how Americans live, even though the vast majority have never seen America except through TV, movies, internet.
People want to be like the West because we aspire to something better. And every time we let down those values, people question whether we really do have anything better to offer, and whether the values America stands for really means anything. God knows, it's been hard to be an American the past ten years. We've invaded countries without cause, locked people up without trial and tortured them, supported dictators, killed civilians... pissing on a corpse seems pretty minor after all of that, if you ask me. After the invasion of Iraq, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, it's sort of like "is that all?" So what's my point... well, I think that in the long run, America will win the war by offering something better than our enemies. But I think that perhaps more important, we owe it to ourselves to be better than that. I'm a Democrat and I know we're supposed to all hate America, but I really do believe in a lot of the stuff America stands for. And part of what we stand for is that everyone is entitled to dignity and respect. Even the guys we're killing.
Engage in racist slander much? Read the article. Kenya is not so corrupt a place. I have close friends who worked for years there (in other business sectors) who confirm that.
Also, is it your view that branch offices of American corporations, if they should find themselves somewhere more corrupt than America, should join in the corruption? That's an odd view. There's specific American law against that, in fact, with strong penalties against a firm's American corporate operation if it can be proven that it enabled or condoned corrupt practices abroad. Whether American law covers the specific varieties of corruption alleged here I can't speak to. But do you really believe that there's nothing wrong with American corporations having foreign branches and subsidiaries engage in corruption?
Transparency International rates Kenya according to their Corruption Perception Index as ranking near the bottom in terms of corruption. The country is ranked 174th out of 182 countries, and scores a 2.2 out of 10. That puts Kenya, at least by this measure, behind Nigeria (143th, 2.4 out of 10) in terms of corruption. It's not racist to call Kenya corrupt, any more than it would be prejudiced to say that America (7.1) is more corrupt than Norway (9.0) it's just a statement of fact.
As far as arguing that American companies should condone foreign corruption, that wasn't my argument. My argument was that it was more likely a poor decision in hiring at the regional level than official policy. If that is the case- and right now, all we have is a single blog to go on, so it's anybody's guess how this happened- it still isn't acceptable, and Google still needs to take action but it's more understandable. So no, if you read my post you'll see that it's not my argument that America should join the corruption, and it's not my argument that it's acceptable that American corporations engage in corruption. So in short, you've completely distorted my argument, and you've ascribed beliefs to me that I don't hold, and you've called me a racist for no reason... this is really, really odd behavior for someone who is claiming to be in favor of honesty and integrity.
Google is responsible for what its employees do, but it's ridiculous to claim that the company must be somehow corrupt and evil because of what a single branch is doing. There's a massive difference between Page and Brin actively ordering their employees to engage in deceitful business practices, and making a poor hiring decision in an obscure outpost of the company in one of the most corrupt countries in the world. It's the difference between actively doing the wrong thing, and failing to prevent it. There are shades of grey to these things and arguing that Google is evil if anyone in the company, anywhere, ever does something evil is just idiotic.
I have no idea as to exactly how qualified Jemison is. She may fit the bill on her own merits.
However, it is true that the foundation of Affirmative Action is the suspension of hiring standards in order to fill racial quotas for ethnic groups with lower mean qualifications, especially IQ. It cannot work any other way if it is to be implemented across the board in a society. If AA is enacted, it follows that most (not all) black people in highly qualified positions did not get there solely because of merit. It also follows that organizations like NASA that exist to pioneer very difficult things will be adversely impacted by AA.
Jesus Christ. OK, sure, the fact that she added some variety to the space program after a parade of white men in the 1960s and 1970s undoubtedly helped her career and opened some doors. But read her bio on Wikipedia. She entered Stanford at 16 and majored in chemical engineering, she has an MD from Cornell, she worked in the Peace Corps, she was an astronaut, she was a professor at Dartmouth for seven years, now she's hired by DARPA... yeah, sure, maybe you could get one or two lucky breaks as a diversity hire. But you don't have a career like that without being the smartest kid in your class and working amazingly hard. You don't have a career like that by being below average, you don't have a career like that just by being good, you have a career like that by being better than 99% of everyone else out there, and I guarantee this woman didn't bring down the average IQ of the astronaut program.
To do all of those things and to have some bigoted, asshole internet troll like you say that maybe she's not really qualified, and to suggest that perhaps she just got a pass because she's a black woman... well, what the hell have you ever accomplished with your life, other than to write perhaps the single most racist, sexist comment I've ever seen on Slashdot? Although perhaps you could argue that this is an accomplishment, in a perverse sort of a way. If nothing else, it's eye-opening about just how far we all have to go. Maybe we've got black astronauts and a black president, but we're still a damn long way from the color-blind Star Trek universe that inspired Jemison to become an astronaut in the first place.
U.S. involvement doesn't mean the CIA wrote the thing. United States Cyber Command (I know, it totally sounds like something out of a video game, but it really exists) includes branches of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. And there's one very good reason to think that the CIA wasn't involved in Stuxnet: Stuxnet actually worked. The CIA have a good track record when it comes to overthrowing third world governments... and kinda suck at everything else.
Perhaps if you could provide some direct evidence of their nuclear weapons aspiration. Perhaps I'm being a cynic but we heard the whole WMD line with Iraq and it was (at least in the UK) proven to be a complete fabrication.
And perhaps if you could try actually reading the news? Here's a report from the New York Times from November 8th:
United Nations weapons inspectors have amassed a trove of new evidence that they say makes a “credible” case that “Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear device,” and that the project may still be under way. The long-awaited report, released by the International Atomic Energy Agency on Tuesday, represents the strongest judgment the agency has issued in its decade-long struggle to pierce the secrecy surrounding the Iranian program. Knowing that their findings would be compared with the flawed Iraq intelligence that preceded the 2003 invasion — and has complicated American moves on Iran — the inspectors devoted a section of the report to “credibility of information.” The information was from more than 10 countries and from independent sources, they said; some was backed up by interviews with foreigners who had helped Iran.
Keep in mind, the U.N. weapons inspectors are the same guys who- under Hans Blix- said that there was no evidence that Iraq had any WMD. They made the right call on Iraq despite tremendous outside pressure, and now these same guys who were cautious on Iraq are saying that Iran has started a nuclear bomb program.
Visit the lovely little pueblo of Chixculub in the Yucatan peninsula. That's where the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago hit. The crater itself isn't visible, it's deep underground. However, there's a ring of sinkholes about 100 miles in diameter that trace the rim of the buried impact crater. It wasn't quite The End of the World, but it was about as close as you can come- the impact sent massive tsunamis as far away as Texas and Haiti, and launched enough dust into the air that the sky was dark for months, and sulphates vaporized from the impact rock would have dimmed the sun for years afterwards. As far as we know, nothing larger than a cat survived on land.
Re:Well, they tried hacking the The New Yorker fir
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New York Times Hacked?
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UPDATE:The Times mistakenly sent e-mails today to subscribers and others, erroneously stating that home delivery of the newspaper had been canceled. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Anonymous is nothing more than a bunch of irresponsible children. What the fuck is up with targeting Stratfor? It's not some shadowy clandestine service, it's just a think tank formed by a former politics professor that does analysis. Now, I suppose if your entire worldview is informed by children's cartoons and Hollywood blockbuster movies, that's enough to make them the "baddies" and you the "goodies", but the world doesn't really work that way. Let me explain this to you Anonymous children in terms you can understand: if Batman is walking down the street and sees a guy with a strange costume, he doesn't just beat the shit out of the guy. He goes back to the Batcave, and does his homework, and does some sleuthing, and only after he has figured out that the guy is, in fact, engaged in criminal behavior, *then* Batman beats the shit out of him. See, if you break the law to stop a criminal act, then you're a vigilante. Like Batman. But if you break the law and attack people when you don't have any evidence that they are engaged in criminal activity... then you're not Batman. You're just a fucking criminal.
But the Iowa caucus will say they did if Ron Paul ends up winning.
So in other words, you're saying that the idea of Ron Paul winning isn't just improbable, it's not even remotely believable? Personally, I find that reassuring. Libertarianism is basically a sociopathic belief system; it takes fundamentally sociopathic qualities such as lack of concern for other human beings and excessive regard for the self and then extols them as virtues. If you want to believe you don't have any responsibility to society, that you're better than everyone else, and that everyone is just a parasite holding you back... fine, you have the right to do that. But don't expect us to vote for you. And don't bitch and whine when we don't. Libertarianism is all about people acting in their own self-interest, right? Well, maybe people look at Libertarian candidates and say, "it is not in my self interest to vote for this guy."
From TFA:
> The gear shipped to Iran, called NetEnforcer, can inspect pieces of data moving over a network. It can be used to eliminate spam or help network
> operators prioritize or block certain types of traffic.
It's not even funny -- it's not "spyware", it's just a traffic sniffer.
Admittedly, they break the israeli law that prohibits trading with Iran, but it's hardly a threat to national security.
The issue isn't that this is a direct threat to Israeli security, the issue is that this technology is used by the Iranian government to monitor the internet use of Iranian citizens. It's part of the infrastructure of repression that keeps the Iranian regime in power and allows them to crack down on dissent.
One thing that is rather surprising is that Iran would buy Israeli technology. The Israelis are pretty formidable when it comes to cyberwarfare- they are thought to have helped develop Stuxnet and were actually able to hack into Syrian air defense so that the Israeli planes didn't show up onscreen when they went to bomb the Syrian nuclear site. If you're an Iranian buying Israeli tech to spy on people, I think you would have to ask yourself who that tech is really spying on.
The flip side of that... is that choosing not to work for Satan means having a lot less to fear from would-be exorcists.
Since some of you have severe reading comprehension problems, and love to project your personal interpretation onto whatever you read, I'll spell this out for you: nowhere did I say it's perfectly OK that underlings may catch some of the fallout for decisions made by the higher-ups. What I am saying is that if they were more careful about choosing their employer they wouldn't have these concerns. When you choose to become part of something, you're part of it, for better or worse.
The evil organizations of the world never seem to have a problem finding those who will join ranks with them. Ever notice that and wonder if that's the real problem?
I have a hard time seeing what makes Stratfor "evil". The name "Stratfor" definitely has a kind of evil overlord sound to it, but the reality is that they're a sort of boring organization. "Stratfor" means "Strategic Forecasting", which is a fancy way of saying "news analysis". They aren't doing cloak-and-dagger missions like the CIA, and they aren't doing electronic eavesdropping like the NSA, they are mostly just looking at the news reports and the economic data and trying to figure out what it all means. They try to make sure the government knows what's going on... which is important. A lot of the bad stuff in the world- 9/11 and the War on Terror, the invasion of Iraq- happens because the people in power don't really have an accurate picture what the fuck is going on, and make stupid decisions.
Hell, look up the bio of Stratfor CEO George Friedman on Wikipedia. So who is this dude? He's not some ex-CIA spook with years of overseas experience. He's got a PhD in government and spent twenty years teaching political science. We're not talking about a stone-cold assassin who trekked through the Central American jungle to assassinate a revolutionary with Marxist tendencies. We are talking about a guy who spent two decades preparing lectures for stoned undergrads, writing books, grading papers, and dutifully showing up for really boring departmental meetings. He probably got tired of academia, had a midlife crisis, and thought intelligence analysis would be more fun. This is not a guy who would strangle you in your sleep with a length of piano wire, although he could probably bore you to death with a discussion of the strategic implications of rising crude oil prices.
If you want to fight "evil", fine. Good luck with that. But maybe you should first get a clue and spend at least fifteen minutes on Wikipedia reading about what these supposedly "evil" organizations actually do before taking a deeply held political stand. Otherwise your'e just acting out of ignorance... and ignorant people probably do just as much damage in the world as evil people do.
White knighting the corporate world isn't going to get you very far these days.
Many of their crimes are known and public opinion is against them.
You seem to feel that the Anonymous attacks against Stratfor are justified. So I have a question for you. Can you even tell us what exactly Stratfor is and just what it is that they do- without looking it up on Google or Wikipedia?
I'm not saying you are wrong with this information, what I'm saying is that the NY Times wouldn't run this story unless they did due diligence to be completely sure they are 100% right because they are held to journalistic standards. As a blogger or armchair Wikileaks reader, you have nothing to lose by publishing this under your pseudo-name online. "Oh, maybe I'll try my hand at investigative journalism today." But let's face it, you get this wrong and you lose nothing. A journalist gets this wrong and they should lose their job and be blacklisted. And that's how news sources work.
Just like the New York Times did their homework before running those stories saying that Iraq had WMDs... we all remember how well that one worked out, don't we? That's arguably the single biggest journalistic cock-up in the past twenty years. Judith Miller got too close to her White House sources and repeated their "evidence" without doing her homework and checking the facts. When we most needed the Times to be on top of things- to provide a objective check on the White House's arguments for invading Iraq- they ended up parroting the White House's propaganda and helped persuade the nation to send our army into the biggest military disaster since Vietnam.
As far as what this guy has done reporting on the situation in Kazakhstan, he's gone through Wikileaks and reported what diplomats are saying in these cables... how, precisely, does this differ from what the Times and other news information outlets were doing with the Wikileaks cables? Were they calling up and diplomats and saying, "excuse me, I'd like to fact check something... did you or did you not say that Russian prime minister Medvedev was 'Robin to Putin's Batman?'" As far as I know, they just read through the cables and reported what was written there.
That is not how poverty is defined by the U.S. Census Bureau. Poverty is defined in terms of income, not in terms of nutrition, housing, or health. See: http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/08poverty.shtml. And the research suggests that many of the people defined by the U.S. government as living in poverty are actually reasonably well-off in material terms: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2011/09/how_rich_are_poor_people.html. Poverty is relative. That's not to say that poor people aren't struggling in the U.S. or that we shouldn't help them. But the reality is that what we consider poverty in the United States is a life of luxury compared to what you'll see in many places in the Third World. When's the last time you saw a child in the United States with a belly distended from malnutrition? Have you ever seen that? If you go to Africa, you will. I've seen it. That's real poverty. In fact, one of the biggest problems with nutrition among the poor in the United States is obesity.
What all these things have in common is that they're all local, they're all just an email or a phone call or a click away, and that they'll have an immediate impact - within days - and they all benefit your community. Charity begins at home.
I think there's a strong argument to be made for charity overseas, because that's where the need is greatest. The typical poor household in America is poor only in relative terms. A typical household at the poverty line will have clean water, electricity, enough to eat, a car, two TVs and cable, a microwave, and a video game system. They are poor in the sense that they have fewer luxuries than the average household, not in the sense that they don't have enough of the essentials.
There's a huge difference between struggling to pay the cable bill and struggling to find enough food to keep your child alive. That's not to say that everyone in the United States does get enough to eat- but compare the situation to the horn of Africa, where it's estimated that 30,000 children have starved to death, and three quarters of a million are malnourished. UNICEF, which has a pretty good track record as charities go, says they can feed a child there for $1 a day, which is not bad considering the logistical challenges and security threats posed by operating in east Africa. I'd argue that if you've only got $100 to give, those people need that $100 a lot more than just about anyone in your local community, and that $100 donated to UNICEF is going to have a much bigger impact on a much larger number of people.
Person 1: There are bad aspects to X.
Person 2: No! Here is a good aspect to X!
That's really a caricature of the argument. The hard-care atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins aren't arguing that religion has bad aspects to it, they're arguing that religion has no good aspects to it, no redeeming qualities whatsoever. I mean, Hitchens did not title his book, "Is God Great? Maybe We Should Think Carefully About This Religion Thing", he titled the book "God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything" so its pretty clear where he's coming from.
What I find rather striking is not the thesis, but rather, the unwavering commitment to the idea. Hitchens had, like his fellow atheist Richard Dawkins, a deeply held belief that religion was fundamentally bad, and was unwilling to question this belief. His atheism was unshakable, and he was unable to listen with an open mind to any evidence or argument that contradicted that belief, to concede that perhaps once in a while, people found solace or guidance in religion, or that faith or the guiding principles of the Judeo-Christian religions had in some way contributed to our civilization. He argued with the ferocity of the True Believer who tolerated no dissent. In other words, he was guilty of precisely the narrow-minded, dogmatic, zealous, self-righteous thinking that he condemned religious people for. He didn't just disbelieve in God, he disbelieved in God with a righteous passion, and then went to the masses to spread the word and convert other people to his way of thinking. He was a fundamentalist atheist. He was an evangelical disbeliever. In other words, he was a hypocrite. I'm an atheist, and I think Hitchens was a disgrace to atheism. It's possible to be an atheist but to be open minded and to respect other people, Hitchens did neither.
I think it's really worth asking whether ships like the Nimitz-class super carriers are even going to be that relevant in 10 or 20 years. Right now, more and more missions, both reconnaissance and combat, are being flown by drones. We're also seeing the first generation of combat drones getting ready to enter service. The Northrop X-47B made its first flight this year, and they are planning carrier trials in 2013. The question then becomes, couldn't you get away with building a fleet of smaller carriers that would fly drones rather than manned aircraft? Remember that the main reason carriers won out over battleships in the first place was that airpower gave you the ability to sink a battleship long before the carrier was in range of the battleship's guns. Currently, the X-47B has a maximum range of 2100 nautical miles versus 1600 nautical miles for an F-14. Assuming your maximum strike range is half of that, a small carrier equipped with an X-47 or something comparable could attack a Nimitz class carrier armed with F-14s 250 miles outside of the range of the Nimitz-class carrier. If drones do require less infrastructure than aircraft (you don't need to house and feed pilots and copilots, you don't need rescue helicopters in case the pilots go down) then you ought to be able to get away with something that would give you the force-projection beyond that of an existing aircraft carrier, but in a smaller, cheaper package.
Yeah, it's pretty delusional: "What we see is that youth are pretty much fed up with iPhones. Everyone has the iPhone."
OK, so we see that everyone has an iPhone or an Android... and we conclude from this fact that everyone must therefore hate the iPhone and the Android. Reminds me of that Iraqi information minister who claimed that the American troops attacking Bagdad were committing suicide in droves. On the other hand, the guy quoted in the article is their director of marketing and sales, you pay marketing people to foster delusional thinking, so that's not an entirely bad thing. As long as the management isn't drinking the same kool-aid as these marketing guys. If the CEO is so disconnected from reality that he believes this, Nokia is completely hosed. But even if they do go out of business, I have the feeling that a certain Niels Munksgaard, Nokia Director of Product Marketing and Sales has a very bright future and will land on his feet.
And this is why we need government, and why we need government regulation. In that bizarre fantasy world that the Libertarian true believers inhabit, we can let the free market take care of everything. The reality is that corporations will risk people's health, risk people's property, and risk people's lives in order to make a profit. We saw this with the Deepwater Horizon drill rig, where BP took shortcuts that killed workers, led to a disastrous oil spill, and shut down offshore oil exploration. We saw this in West Virginia, when a mine owner cut corners on safety, leading to an explosion that killed 29 people. We saw this with the paint industry, which continued to put toxic amounts of lead in paint long after this was known to be a major health risk. And we saw this with Wall Street, which gambled with billions of dollars of borrowed money, causing a financial panic that sent the economy into a recession.
Government regulation can get out of hand. But if you just let corporations police themselves and expect the market to solve everything, then what you get is the situation in China: poison in baby formula, lead paint in children's toys, toxins in the toothpaste. Of course, if even a fraction of the health concerns raised about fracking are true, we may be closer to that situation than we'd like to think.
Think of all the recent examples of governments collapsing or suffering major revolts. The collapse of the dictatorship in Tunisia, the collapse of the Egyptian government, the Libyan uprising, the ongoing revolt in Syria, the ouster of Saddam Hussein, the Taliban government of Afghanistan, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the various Soviet satellite states. In every single case I can think of, the government was headed by men. And there are currently about 20 different countries with female heads of state- Ireland, Finland, Germany, Argentina, Brazil, Thailand, Liberia, India... hell, Iceland is run by a lesbian.
In other words, it seems pretty clear that having a female head of state makes your country far less likely to undergo a revolution or to invite the invasion of a foreign power. Of course, this is one of those correlation does not equal causation things. It could be that women are less likely to do things like get involved in wars with other countries, or to run repressive regimes. It could also be that free, open, egalitarian societies are more stable, and more likely to elect women. I suspect it's probably a combination of the two. Personally, I happen to believe that there are profound biological differences in men and women that tend to be reflected in how they govern... but if there really is a difference in the sexes, there's a strong case to be made that the women should be the ones in power.
What propaganda machine? The author of the article happens to be employed as an analyst by the Air Force, but he does not speak for the U.S. government in an official capacity. In fact, the official response to Stuxnet has been pretty telling. According to Wikipedia, the White House Coordinator for Arms Control and Weapons of Mass Destruction has said, "we're glad they [the Iranians] are having trouble with their centrifuge machine and that we – the US and its allies – are doing everything we can to make sure that we complicate matters for them." That's not a denial; that's about as far from a denial as you can get without coming out and taking credit. So what's the problem here? The U.S. has publicly stated that they are against nuclear proliferation, and they have covertly taken action that is entirely consistent with their stated position. Or would the world be better off if the U.S. stood by and let Iran, a country currently run by a radical theocracy, develop nuclear bombs and ICBMs?
Or should the government decide who gets this clinical trial money? Not sure if you know this, but the government isn't always the best judge of which companies / ideas to support.
The free market has its own failings. When drug development is strongly driven by the profit potential, drug development inevitably goes where the money is, but that's not always where we need drug development to go. For instance, there are a lot of well-off white guys who have trouble getting boners, so the drug companies have spent untold millions giving us Viagra and similar drugs. Meanwhile, there are a lot of poor, dark-skinned people in the Third World who are suffering from malaria. But since they don't have a lot of money to spend on drugs, drug companies haven't done such a good job of developing antimalarials. In fact, many of the widely used anti-malaria treatments are the result of government research. Mefloquine (Lariam) was developed by the U.S. Army, Chloroquine was invented by Bayer but only used for malaria following U.S. government testing, and artemisinin- the newest addition to the antimalarials- was developed from a folk remedy by the People's Liberation Army of China. In short, if there's money to be made treating a disease, the free markets (with incentive provided by patents) are a very effective way of developing and testing treatments. But if the sufferers are poor, the free market isn't much help. Nobody is going to dispute that there are things that the free market does best, however there are definitely some places where governments need to step in and do things that are unprofitable, but necessary.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. If you read the article, it starts out with the story of a suspicious character by the name of Mike Fikri. Fikri has bought a one-way ticket from Egypt to Florida, he's making bank withdrawals from Russia, talking to suspicious people in Syria, scoping out crowded places at Disneyworld. The scenario lays out something a lot like the lead up to 9/11: lots of individual actions that alone mean nothing, but together make a huge red flag and make this guy a Person of Interest. And Palantir can allow the government to spot this guy before he executes his plot. And you start thinking, wow, if this technology really spotted this guy, maybe it's worth thinking seriously about it. And then the article's punchline: "Fikri isn’t real—he’s the John Doe example Palantir uses in product demonstrations that lay out such hypothetical examples."
Here's the problem with all these liberty-vs-security debates. Before we get into the argument about just how much personal liberty we're willing to give up for security, let's first establish that the proposed measures would actually make us safer. Does any of this security theatre actually work? If torture isn't an effective interrogation technique- and all of the available evidence strongly suggests that it is not- we don't need to have a debate about whether it's moral to torture someone to save lives. If torture doesn't work, then the left, right, and centre should all be able to agree that we shouldn't torture. Similarly, has all of this government eavesdropping actually produced useful leads in the War on Terror? If so, then we can have a debate about the merits of something like Palantir. But if after ten years the government still can't point to a single credible case of where massive, indiscriminate domestic surveillance has spotted a credible threat from a terrorist, well, there's no need to even debate the civil rights aspect of it. It's just a waste of resources regardless of whether it's justifiable or not.
Basically, the War on Terror proponents want to engage you in a debate that goes like this: "Aren't you willing to give up just a little liberty for a lot of security?" It's a reasonable proposition for anyone but a hardcore libertarian, so that's a debate they can win with many people. So if you engage them in that discussion, you're basically ceding the argument. They're going to win over the majority of the people every time. But the debate we need to be having first is, "Are all of these invasive, expensive measures you're proposing actually going to make us safer at all?"
Or look at it this way. A guy comes up to you with a handful of beans and says, "These are Magic Antiterrorism Beans. They cost a billion dollars but they'll keep you safe from terrorists forever. Isn't that a small price to pay for security?" Before you start haggling over the price, wouldn't you want to be sure that the beans actually worked?
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, R&D dominance? Whew! When I first read that, I thought it said that the U.S. was losing D&D dominance to Asia.
In the long run, you can't win that fight with guns. You can kill as many militants as you want, but if they can convert people faster than you can kill them, they will eventually win. What are you going to do if they convert a million people- kill them all? Ten million? A hundred million? There's no way you could prevail. Look at what happened to Rome. They crucified Jesus and fed a lot of Christians to lions, and eventually the Roman emperor ended up converting to Christianity. Look at the Soviet empire. As soon as people had a choice between the West and the Communist system, they chose the West. It was a war the West won without firing a shot. That's the power of ideas.
The West won a huge battle with the Arab spring, which will ultimately reshape the geopolitical balance far more than the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan ever could. Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and Syria could have risen up and chosen the vision of al Qaeda, they could have chosen to follow Osama bin Laden's dream. They didn't. They decided they want what we have- freedom, equality, justice, opportunity- and not the barbaric vision that Osama bin Laden has provided. And you sure as hell won't hear any of those Arab revolutionaries demanding that their government be more like China, or Russia. In the interviews with people struggling in Syria against Assad's dictatorship, they say, "we want what you have". That's the power of ideas. Sure, they despise us for our foreign policy, but they like the idea of how Americans live, even though the vast majority have never seen America except through TV, movies, internet.
People want to be like the West because we aspire to something better. And every time we let down those values, people question whether we really do have anything better to offer, and whether the values America stands for really means anything. God knows, it's been hard to be an American the past ten years. We've invaded countries without cause, locked people up without trial and tortured them, supported dictators, killed civilians... pissing on a corpse seems pretty minor after all of that, if you ask me. After the invasion of Iraq, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, it's sort of like "is that all?" So what's my point... well, I think that in the long run, America will win the war by offering something better than our enemies. But I think that perhaps more important, we owe it to ourselves to be better than that. I'm a Democrat and I know we're supposed to all hate America, but I really do believe in a lot of the stuff America stands for. And part of what we stand for is that everyone is entitled to dignity and respect. Even the guys we're killing.
Engage in racist slander much? Read the article. Kenya is not so corrupt a place. I have close friends who worked for years there (in other business sectors) who confirm that.
Also, is it your view that branch offices of American corporations, if they should find themselves somewhere more corrupt than America, should join in the corruption? That's an odd view. There's specific American law against that, in fact, with strong penalties against a firm's American corporate operation if it can be proven that it enabled or condoned corrupt practices abroad. Whether American law covers the specific varieties of corruption alleged here I can't speak to. But do you really believe that there's nothing wrong with American corporations having foreign branches and subsidiaries engage in corruption?
Transparency International rates Kenya according to their Corruption Perception Index as ranking near the bottom in terms of corruption. The country is ranked 174th out of 182 countries, and scores a 2.2 out of 10. That puts Kenya, at least by this measure, behind Nigeria (143th, 2.4 out of 10) in terms of corruption. It's not racist to call Kenya corrupt, any more than it would be prejudiced to say that America (7.1) is more corrupt than Norway (9.0) it's just a statement of fact.
As far as arguing that American companies should condone foreign corruption, that wasn't my argument. My argument was that it was more likely a poor decision in hiring at the regional level than official policy. If that is the case- and right now, all we have is a single blog to go on, so it's anybody's guess how this happened- it still isn't acceptable, and Google still needs to take action but it's more understandable. So no, if you read my post you'll see that it's not my argument that America should join the corruption, and it's not my argument that it's acceptable that American corporations engage in corruption. So in short, you've completely distorted my argument, and you've ascribed beliefs to me that I don't hold, and you've called me a racist for no reason... this is really, really odd behavior for someone who is claiming to be in favor of honesty and integrity.
Google is responsible for what its employees do, but it's ridiculous to claim that the company must be somehow corrupt and evil because of what a single branch is doing. There's a massive difference between Page and Brin actively ordering their employees to engage in deceitful business practices, and making a poor hiring decision in an obscure outpost of the company in one of the most corrupt countries in the world. It's the difference between actively doing the wrong thing, and failing to prevent it. There are shades of grey to these things and arguing that Google is evil if anyone in the company, anywhere, ever does something evil is just idiotic.
I have no idea as to exactly how qualified Jemison is. She may fit the bill on her own merits.
However, it is true that the foundation of Affirmative Action is the suspension of hiring standards in order to fill racial quotas for ethnic groups with lower mean qualifications, especially IQ. It cannot work any other way if it is to be implemented across the board in a society. If AA is enacted, it follows that most (not all) black people in highly qualified positions did not get there solely because of merit. It also follows that organizations like NASA that exist to pioneer very difficult things will be adversely impacted by AA.
Jesus Christ. OK, sure, the fact that she added some variety to the space program after a parade of white men in the 1960s and 1970s undoubtedly helped her career and opened some doors. But read her bio on Wikipedia. She entered Stanford at 16 and majored in chemical engineering, she has an MD from Cornell, she worked in the Peace Corps, she was an astronaut, she was a professor at Dartmouth for seven years, now she's hired by DARPA... yeah, sure, maybe you could get one or two lucky breaks as a diversity hire. But you don't have a career like that without being the smartest kid in your class and working amazingly hard. You don't have a career like that by being below average, you don't have a career like that just by being good, you have a career like that by being better than 99% of everyone else out there, and I guarantee this woman didn't bring down the average IQ of the astronaut program.
To do all of those things and to have some bigoted, asshole internet troll like you say that maybe she's not really qualified, and to suggest that perhaps she just got a pass because she's a black woman... well, what the hell have you ever accomplished with your life, other than to write perhaps the single most racist, sexist comment I've ever seen on Slashdot? Although perhaps you could argue that this is an accomplishment, in a perverse sort of a way. If nothing else, it's eye-opening about just how far we all have to go. Maybe we've got black astronauts and a black president, but we're still a damn long way from the color-blind Star Trek universe that inspired Jemison to become an astronaut in the first place.
U.S. involvement doesn't mean the CIA wrote the thing. United States Cyber Command (I know, it totally sounds like something out of a video game, but it really exists) includes branches of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. And there's one very good reason to think that the CIA wasn't involved in Stuxnet: Stuxnet actually worked. The CIA have a good track record when it comes to overthrowing third world governments... and kinda suck at everything else.
Perhaps if you could provide some direct evidence of their nuclear weapons aspiration. Perhaps I'm being a cynic but we heard the whole WMD line with Iraq and it was (at least in the UK) proven to be a complete fabrication.
And perhaps if you could try actually reading the news? Here's a report from the New York Times from November 8th:
United Nations weapons inspectors have amassed a trove of new evidence that they say makes a “credible” case that “Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear device,” and that the project may still be under way. The long-awaited report, released by the International Atomic Energy Agency on Tuesday, represents the strongest judgment the agency has issued in its decade-long struggle to pierce the secrecy surrounding the Iranian program. Knowing that their findings would be compared with the flawed Iraq intelligence that preceded the 2003 invasion — and has complicated American moves on Iran — the inspectors devoted a section of the report to “credibility of information.” The information was from more than 10 countries and from independent sources, they said; some was backed up by interviews with foreigners who had helped Iran.
Keep in mind, the U.N. weapons inspectors are the same guys who- under Hans Blix- said that there was no evidence that Iraq had any WMD. They made the right call on Iraq despite tremendous outside pressure, and now these same guys who were cautious on Iraq are saying that Iran has started a nuclear bomb program.
Visit the lovely little pueblo of Chixculub in the Yucatan peninsula. That's where the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago hit. The crater itself isn't visible, it's deep underground. However, there's a ring of sinkholes about 100 miles in diameter that trace the rim of the buried impact crater. It wasn't quite The End of the World, but it was about as close as you can come- the impact sent massive tsunamis as far away as Texas and Haiti, and launched enough dust into the air that the sky was dark for months, and sulphates vaporized from the impact rock would have dimmed the sun for years afterwards. As far as we know, nothing larger than a cat survived on land.
UPDATE:The Times mistakenly sent e-mails today to subscribers and others, erroneously stating that home delivery of the newspaper had been canceled. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Anonymous is nothing more than a bunch of irresponsible children. What the fuck is up with targeting Stratfor? It's not some shadowy clandestine service, it's just a think tank formed by a former politics professor that does analysis. Now, I suppose if your entire worldview is informed by children's cartoons and Hollywood blockbuster movies, that's enough to make them the "baddies" and you the "goodies", but the world doesn't really work that way. Let me explain this to you Anonymous children in terms you can understand: if Batman is walking down the street and sees a guy with a strange costume, he doesn't just beat the shit out of the guy. He goes back to the Batcave, and does his homework, and does some sleuthing, and only after he has figured out that the guy is, in fact, engaged in criminal behavior, *then* Batman beats the shit out of him. See, if you break the law to stop a criminal act, then you're a vigilante. Like Batman. But if you break the law and attack people when you don't have any evidence that they are engaged in criminal activity... then you're not Batman. You're just a fucking criminal.
But the Iowa caucus will say they did if Ron Paul ends up winning.
So in other words, you're saying that the idea of Ron Paul winning isn't just improbable, it's not even remotely believable? Personally, I find that reassuring. Libertarianism is basically a sociopathic belief system; it takes fundamentally sociopathic qualities such as lack of concern for other human beings and excessive regard for the self and then extols them as virtues. If you want to believe you don't have any responsibility to society, that you're better than everyone else, and that everyone is just a parasite holding you back... fine, you have the right to do that. But don't expect us to vote for you. And don't bitch and whine when we don't. Libertarianism is all about people acting in their own self-interest, right? Well, maybe people look at Libertarian candidates and say, "it is not in my self interest to vote for this guy."
From TFA: > The gear shipped to Iran, called NetEnforcer, can inspect pieces of data moving over a network. It can be used to eliminate spam or help network > operators prioritize or block certain types of traffic.
It's not even funny -- it's not "spyware", it's just a traffic sniffer. Admittedly, they break the israeli law that prohibits trading with Iran, but it's hardly a threat to national security.
The issue isn't that this is a direct threat to Israeli security, the issue is that this technology is used by the Iranian government to monitor the internet use of Iranian citizens. It's part of the infrastructure of repression that keeps the Iranian regime in power and allows them to crack down on dissent.
One thing that is rather surprising is that Iran would buy Israeli technology. The Israelis are pretty formidable when it comes to cyberwarfare- they are thought to have helped develop Stuxnet and were actually able to hack into Syrian air defense so that the Israeli planes didn't show up onscreen when they went to bomb the Syrian nuclear site. If you're an Iranian buying Israeli tech to spy on people, I think you would have to ask yourself who that tech is really spying on.
The flip side of that ... is that choosing not to work for Satan means having a lot less to fear from would-be exorcists.
Since some of you have severe reading comprehension problems, and love to project your personal interpretation onto whatever you read, I'll spell this out for you: nowhere did I say it's perfectly OK that underlings may catch some of the fallout for decisions made by the higher-ups. What I am saying is that if they were more careful about choosing their employer they wouldn't have these concerns. When you choose to become part of something, you're part of it, for better or worse.
The evil organizations of the world never seem to have a problem finding those who will join ranks with them. Ever notice that and wonder if that's the real problem?
I have a hard time seeing what makes Stratfor "evil". The name "Stratfor" definitely has a kind of evil overlord sound to it, but the reality is that they're a sort of boring organization. "Stratfor" means "Strategic Forecasting", which is a fancy way of saying "news analysis". They aren't doing cloak-and-dagger missions like the CIA, and they aren't doing electronic eavesdropping like the NSA, they are mostly just looking at the news reports and the economic data and trying to figure out what it all means. They try to make sure the government knows what's going on... which is important. A lot of the bad stuff in the world- 9/11 and the War on Terror, the invasion of Iraq- happens because the people in power don't really have an accurate picture what the fuck is going on, and make stupid decisions.
Hell, look up the bio of Stratfor CEO George Friedman on Wikipedia. So who is this dude? He's not some ex-CIA spook with years of overseas experience. He's got a PhD in government and spent twenty years teaching political science. We're not talking about a stone-cold assassin who trekked through the Central American jungle to assassinate a revolutionary with Marxist tendencies. We are talking about a guy who spent two decades preparing lectures for stoned undergrads, writing books, grading papers, and dutifully showing up for really boring departmental meetings. He probably got tired of academia, had a midlife crisis, and thought intelligence analysis would be more fun. This is not a guy who would strangle you in your sleep with a length of piano wire, although he could probably bore you to death with a discussion of the strategic implications of rising crude oil prices.
If you want to fight "evil", fine. Good luck with that. But maybe you should first get a clue and spend at least fifteen minutes on Wikipedia reading about what these supposedly "evil" organizations actually do before taking a deeply held political stand. Otherwise your'e just acting out of ignorance... and ignorant people probably do just as much damage in the world as evil people do.
White knighting the corporate world isn't going to get you very far these days. Many of their crimes are known and public opinion is against them.
You seem to feel that the Anonymous attacks against Stratfor are justified. So I have a question for you. Can you even tell us what exactly Stratfor is and just what it is that they do- without looking it up on Google or Wikipedia?
I'm not saying you are wrong with this information, what I'm saying is that the NY Times wouldn't run this story unless they did due diligence to be completely sure they are 100% right because they are held to journalistic standards. As a blogger or armchair Wikileaks reader, you have nothing to lose by publishing this under your pseudo-name online. "Oh, maybe I'll try my hand at investigative journalism today." But let's face it, you get this wrong and you lose nothing. A journalist gets this wrong and they should lose their job and be blacklisted. And that's how news sources work.
Just like the New York Times did their homework before running those stories saying that Iraq had WMDs... we all remember how well that one worked out, don't we? That's arguably the single biggest journalistic cock-up in the past twenty years. Judith Miller got too close to her White House sources and repeated their "evidence" without doing her homework and checking the facts. When we most needed the Times to be on top of things- to provide a objective check on the White House's arguments for invading Iraq- they ended up parroting the White House's propaganda and helped persuade the nation to send our army into the biggest military disaster since Vietnam.
As far as what this guy has done reporting on the situation in Kazakhstan, he's gone through Wikileaks and reported what diplomats are saying in these cables... how, precisely, does this differ from what the Times and other news information outlets were doing with the Wikileaks cables? Were they calling up and diplomats and saying, "excuse me, I'd like to fact check something... did you or did you not say that Russian prime minister Medvedev was 'Robin to Putin's Batman?'" As far as I know, they just read through the cables and reported what was written there.
That is not how poverty is defined by the U.S. Census Bureau. Poverty is defined in terms of income, not in terms of nutrition, housing, or health. See: http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/08poverty.shtml. And the research suggests that many of the people defined by the U.S. government as living in poverty are actually reasonably well-off in material terms: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2011/09/how_rich_are_poor_people.html. Poverty is relative. That's not to say that poor people aren't struggling in the U.S. or that we shouldn't help them. But the reality is that what we consider poverty in the United States is a life of luxury compared to what you'll see in many places in the Third World. When's the last time you saw a child in the United States with a belly distended from malnutrition? Have you ever seen that? If you go to Africa, you will. I've seen it. That's real poverty. In fact, one of the biggest problems with nutrition among the poor in the United States is obesity.
What all these things have in common is that they're all local, they're all just an email or a phone call or a click away, and that they'll have an immediate impact - within days - and they all benefit your community. Charity begins at home.
I think there's a strong argument to be made for charity overseas, because that's where the need is greatest. The typical poor household in America is poor only in relative terms. A typical household at the poverty line will have clean water, electricity, enough to eat, a car, two TVs and cable, a microwave, and a video game system. They are poor in the sense that they have fewer luxuries than the average household, not in the sense that they don't have enough of the essentials.
There's a huge difference between struggling to pay the cable bill and struggling to find enough food to keep your child alive. That's not to say that everyone in the United States does get enough to eat- but compare the situation to the horn of Africa, where it's estimated that 30,000 children have starved to death, and three quarters of a million are malnourished. UNICEF, which has a pretty good track record as charities go, says they can feed a child there for $1 a day, which is not bad considering the logistical challenges and security threats posed by operating in east Africa. I'd argue that if you've only got $100 to give, those people need that $100 a lot more than just about anyone in your local community, and that $100 donated to UNICEF is going to have a much bigger impact on a much larger number of people.
Person 1: There are bad aspects to X. Person 2: No! Here is a good aspect to X!
That's really a caricature of the argument. The hard-care atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins aren't arguing that religion has bad aspects to it, they're arguing that religion has no good aspects to it, no redeeming qualities whatsoever. I mean, Hitchens did not title his book, "Is God Great? Maybe We Should Think Carefully About This Religion Thing", he titled the book "God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything" so its pretty clear where he's coming from.
What I find rather striking is not the thesis, but rather, the unwavering commitment to the idea. Hitchens had, like his fellow atheist Richard Dawkins, a deeply held belief that religion was fundamentally bad, and was unwilling to question this belief. His atheism was unshakable, and he was unable to listen with an open mind to any evidence or argument that contradicted that belief, to concede that perhaps once in a while, people found solace or guidance in religion, or that faith or the guiding principles of the Judeo-Christian religions had in some way contributed to our civilization. He argued with the ferocity of the True Believer who tolerated no dissent. In other words, he was guilty of precisely the narrow-minded, dogmatic, zealous, self-righteous thinking that he condemned religious people for. He didn't just disbelieve in God, he disbelieved in God with a righteous passion, and then went to the masses to spread the word and convert other people to his way of thinking. He was a fundamentalist atheist. He was an evangelical disbeliever. In other words, he was a hypocrite. I'm an atheist, and I think Hitchens was a disgrace to atheism. It's possible to be an atheist but to be open minded and to respect other people, Hitchens did neither.
I think it's really worth asking whether ships like the Nimitz-class super carriers are even going to be that relevant in 10 or 20 years. Right now, more and more missions, both reconnaissance and combat, are being flown by drones. We're also seeing the first generation of combat drones getting ready to enter service. The Northrop X-47B made its first flight this year, and they are planning carrier trials in 2013. The question then becomes, couldn't you get away with building a fleet of smaller carriers that would fly drones rather than manned aircraft? Remember that the main reason carriers won out over battleships in the first place was that airpower gave you the ability to sink a battleship long before the carrier was in range of the battleship's guns. Currently, the X-47B has a maximum range of 2100 nautical miles versus 1600 nautical miles for an F-14. Assuming your maximum strike range is half of that, a small carrier equipped with an X-47 or something comparable could attack a Nimitz class carrier armed with F-14s 250 miles outside of the range of the Nimitz-class carrier. If drones do require less infrastructure than aircraft (you don't need to house and feed pilots and copilots, you don't need rescue helicopters in case the pilots go down) then you ought to be able to get away with something that would give you the force-projection beyond that of an existing aircraft carrier, but in a smaller, cheaper package.
Yeah, it's pretty delusional: "What we see is that youth are pretty much fed up with iPhones. Everyone has the iPhone." OK, so we see that everyone has an iPhone or an Android... and we conclude from this fact that everyone must therefore hate the iPhone and the Android. Reminds me of that Iraqi information minister who claimed that the American troops attacking Bagdad were committing suicide in droves. On the other hand, the guy quoted in the article is their director of marketing and sales, you pay marketing people to foster delusional thinking, so that's not an entirely bad thing. As long as the management isn't drinking the same kool-aid as these marketing guys. If the CEO is so disconnected from reality that he believes this, Nokia is completely hosed. But even if they do go out of business, I have the feeling that a certain Niels Munksgaard, Nokia Director of Product Marketing and Sales has a very bright future and will land on his feet.
Government regulation can get out of hand. But if you just let corporations police themselves and expect the market to solve everything, then what you get is the situation in China: poison in baby formula, lead paint in children's toys, toxins in the toothpaste. Of course, if even a fraction of the health concerns raised about fracking are true, we may be closer to that situation than we'd like to think.
In other words, it seems pretty clear that having a female head of state makes your country far less likely to undergo a revolution or to invite the invasion of a foreign power. Of course, this is one of those correlation does not equal causation things. It could be that women are less likely to do things like get involved in wars with other countries, or to run repressive regimes. It could also be that free, open, egalitarian societies are more stable, and more likely to elect women. I suspect it's probably a combination of the two. Personally, I happen to believe that there are profound biological differences in men and women that tend to be reflected in how they govern... but if there really is a difference in the sexes, there's a strong case to be made that the women should be the ones in power.
What propaganda machine? The author of the article happens to be employed as an analyst by the Air Force, but he does not speak for the U.S. government in an official capacity. In fact, the official response to Stuxnet has been pretty telling. According to Wikipedia, the White House Coordinator for Arms Control and Weapons of Mass Destruction has said, "we're glad they [the Iranians] are having trouble with their centrifuge machine and that we – the US and its allies – are doing everything we can to make sure that we complicate matters for them." That's not a denial; that's about as far from a denial as you can get without coming out and taking credit. So what's the problem here? The U.S. has publicly stated that they are against nuclear proliferation, and they have covertly taken action that is entirely consistent with their stated position. Or would the world be better off if the U.S. stood by and let Iran, a country currently run by a radical theocracy, develop nuclear bombs and ICBMs?
Or should the government decide who gets this clinical trial money? Not sure if you know this, but the government isn't always the best judge of which companies / ideas to support.
The free market has its own failings. When drug development is strongly driven by the profit potential, drug development inevitably goes where the money is, but that's not always where we need drug development to go. For instance, there are a lot of well-off white guys who have trouble getting boners, so the drug companies have spent untold millions giving us Viagra and similar drugs. Meanwhile, there are a lot of poor, dark-skinned people in the Third World who are suffering from malaria. But since they don't have a lot of money to spend on drugs, drug companies haven't done such a good job of developing antimalarials. In fact, many of the widely used anti-malaria treatments are the result of government research. Mefloquine (Lariam) was developed by the U.S. Army, Chloroquine was invented by Bayer but only used for malaria following U.S. government testing, and artemisinin- the newest addition to the antimalarials- was developed from a folk remedy by the People's Liberation Army of China. In short, if there's money to be made treating a disease, the free markets (with incentive provided by patents) are a very effective way of developing and testing treatments. But if the sufferers are poor, the free market isn't much help. Nobody is going to dispute that there are things that the free market does best, however there are definitely some places where governments need to step in and do things that are unprofitable, but necessary.
Big Brother.
1984... is freaking real
I wouldn't be so sure about that. If you read the article, it starts out with the story of a suspicious character by the name of Mike Fikri. Fikri has bought a one-way ticket from Egypt to Florida, he's making bank withdrawals from Russia, talking to suspicious people in Syria, scoping out crowded places at Disneyworld. The scenario lays out something a lot like the lead up to 9/11: lots of individual actions that alone mean nothing, but together make a huge red flag and make this guy a Person of Interest. And Palantir can allow the government to spot this guy before he executes his plot. And you start thinking, wow, if this technology really spotted this guy, maybe it's worth thinking seriously about it. And then the article's punchline: "Fikri isn’t real—he’s the John Doe example Palantir uses in product demonstrations that lay out such hypothetical examples."
Here's the problem with all these liberty-vs-security debates. Before we get into the argument about just how much personal liberty we're willing to give up for security, let's first establish that the proposed measures would actually make us safer. Does any of this security theatre actually work? If torture isn't an effective interrogation technique- and all of the available evidence strongly suggests that it is not- we don't need to have a debate about whether it's moral to torture someone to save lives. If torture doesn't work, then the left, right, and centre should all be able to agree that we shouldn't torture. Similarly, has all of this government eavesdropping actually produced useful leads in the War on Terror? If so, then we can have a debate about the merits of something like Palantir. But if after ten years the government still can't point to a single credible case of where massive, indiscriminate domestic surveillance has spotted a credible threat from a terrorist, well, there's no need to even debate the civil rights aspect of it. It's just a waste of resources regardless of whether it's justifiable or not.
Basically, the War on Terror proponents want to engage you in a debate that goes like this: "Aren't you willing to give up just a little liberty for a lot of security?" It's a reasonable proposition for anyone but a hardcore libertarian, so that's a debate they can win with many people. So if you engage them in that discussion, you're basically ceding the argument. They're going to win over the majority of the people every time. But the debate we need to be having first is, "Are all of these invasive, expensive measures you're proposing actually going to make us safer at all?"
Or look at it this way. A guy comes up to you with a handful of beans and says, "These are Magic Antiterrorism Beans. They cost a billion dollars but they'll keep you safe from terrorists forever. Isn't that a small price to pay for security?" Before you start haggling over the price, wouldn't you want to be sure that the beans actually worked?