> However—and this is especially troubling—“if analysts stumble across evidence that an American has committed any crime, they will send it to the Justice Department,” the Times wrote. So information that was collected without a warrant—or indeed any involvement by a court at all—for foreign intelligence purposes with little to no privacy protections, can be accessed raw and unfiltered by domestic law enforcement agencies to prosecute Americans with no involvement in threats to national security.
I feel like we are a living example of history repeating itself. 9/11 -> hysteria -> implement fear-driven tactics -> suppress rights -> profit.
I believe Obama has a created a fantastic movement based on his image and figure - classic American self-superation story. But when you dig into the details of the Obama years you can quickly see that he has been a gigantic letdown in a lot of basic things that I feel are important to the long-term well-being of the country (e.g. privacy rights, drone foreign policy etc.). In the end, I think Obama didn't end up being too different from any other politician.
I've felt like that for a long time, and I think Obama is partially to blame for Trump getting elected.
When he made the compromise he did with Hilary during his first election I knew then he was going to be a political creature (and I was behind him).
I don't think Obama will be noteworthy in history outside of being the first black president. Obamacare will not be noteworthy either unless it transforms into something more meaningful.
If you think about it, the praise he gets so often is that he's a "classy guy", that should say something. 8 years in office and him being classy is the thing people think of most when considering him?
To be fair, the blame lies with our 2 party establishment system and the machines behind them. If you take closer looks at recent presidents: Clinton's admin was an overall continuation of GH Bush's administration policies. Obama's admin was a continuation of the Cheney's administration policies. I'm not sure it would really matter which establishment candidate was in office, since the end result is pretty much the same and only the rhetoric would be different. i.e. "impeachment is off the table" or "we're continuing to socialize Wall St's losses and privatize their gains even though over 90% of constituents of both parties are against it"
We haven't had a someone from outside since Carter or even Reagan. Regardless of how you feel about Trump (personally I don't like him) he was the first real alternative choice in decades.
He's a complete random element. I literally have no idea what he's going to do. ...maybe that's a good thing? Everything that was "reliable" in the past let us down.
I was entirely behind trump because of the random element.
I don't see him as old-school republican, and he's obviously not a democrat either. He's clearly his own man and I think the next 8 years are gonna be amazing.
Its really cool to see people say this hear without the immense backlash im used to bassically everywhere else on the internet. Its not what i expected at all.
I feel that poor people in the countryside figured out that no establishment candidate will really change anything like corruption or most policies for that matter. Only the faces and promises change. I wonder if and when the poor and middle class in urban areas will realize the same thing. Of course the danger is always that 'change' isn't always a good thing.
Exactly this. I have no doubt that Trump and the Republican controlled legislature (and soon judiciary) will bring significant changes to how our country operates. I have very strong doubts that these changes will be net beneficial to the lower and middle classes in this country.
> I'm not sure it would really matter which establishment candidate was in office
Obama was the change candidate that didn't have a long history in congress. He gets labeled "establishment" by Bern victims out of propaganda. It's kind of funny how there's an anti-establishment candidate every 4 years that has a long history of being part of the establishment. At some point people have to start realizing that "anti-establishment candidate" means underdog who wants his small donations to add up.
Obama may have sounded like he was an outsider in his first presidential race, but he's proven otherwise repeatedly over the years even during his first term. To be fair, Sanders would have probably been the same had he been elected.
Trump was the only major party choice in the last election though other choices of change were Gary Johnson and Jill Stein. To be clear, I am not advocating anyone; I'm just differentiating candidates who will uphold the status quo and others who won't.
Give me a break. Obama saved the economy, saved the American car industry, and provided health care to 20 million people that didn't have it before. All while facing unbelievable obstruction from the GOP that never wanted to acknowledge he was actually President.
I like Obama OK but saved the American car industry? He handed GM a check. Those funds didn't come out of his account. GM should have filed for bankruptcy, trimmed the fat and hunkered down in a leaner version of its former self.
It was definitely a tough decision to be faced with right out of the blocks. I respect his ability to make the tough calls but will taxpayers ever get their money back? Was anything done to see that they don't repeat down the road? Or did he basically slap them on the back and say carry on fellas.?
I didn't think anyone assumed the money came out of his personal account, but it was his leadership that saved that industry, which I thought was clear by what I meant. Most people at the time were saying the auto industry should save themselves -- go through bankruptcy restructuring, etc.
I think you really exaggerate how "easy" this decision was to write a check -- it was not a popular decision at the time. That money had to come from Congress, remember, it isn't like Obama can write checks when he feels like it.
Totally reasonable to debate whether GM and others should have been given money, but most of that money was paid back and that industry is doing better now:
So I think it's valid to say his leadership prevented a domino collapse of that industry through those government loans and it didn't really cost the government much, if anything, except maybe setting a bad example that auto companies can depend on government help in the future?
I've felt like that for a long time, and I think Obama is partially to blame for Trump getting elected.
This has nothing to do with why Trump was elected. The rich and powerful have been marginalizing the middle class for a long time, through reduced taxes on the wealthy and austerity measures, both here in the US and in Europe. This widening gulf between the rich and the rest of us has pissed off the middle class and they voted for Trump out of anger at the establishment that got us here.
The masses have made their voices heard on not giving a crap about surveillance. It is never high on any poll or any article I've read about the rise of Trump.
The difference is Trump reach out to the middle class and the lower class, while the other rich politicians don't give a shit.
Down-vote me all you want, but this is why Trump won. The sooner people accept that, the sooner we can move forward as a nation and rebuild this whole nation for every Americans.
Classy guy? Anyone is compared to the pres-elect. In his personal life perhaps. Every time he weighed in during an isolated racial incident before the public had all the information really did a disservice to the office. So much so that the current guy thinks it's fine to tweet about every little political gripe. Both have no problem being arrogant and divisive, so long as the base is happy. There's absolutely nothing classy about this cult of personality we're witnessing.
This pattern of behavior on Trump's behalf far precedes anything by Obama. He was publicly advocating for the (innocent)Central Park 5 to be executed in 1989, before Obama held any elected office. Let's not surrender ourselves so far to ideological thinking that every partisan is the precursor of their opposition's faults.
To some extent, yes. The base thinks it's fine, and the GP thinks Trump's win was a reaction to Obama. The media loves the tweeting, just like any time they could get Obama to weigh in on the latest racial controversy. So I guess to be fair, the reduction in presidential class is a real team effort!
Trump's tweets/statements are an order of magnitude more extreme and more frequent than anything we've ever seen. He's also a grown man who's responsible for his own actions, so blaming the media and blaming Obama seems quite partisan. Nobody is making him do anything.
Nobody is making the media publish every tweet either. It's a symbiotic relationship.
> He's also a grown man who's responsible for his own actions, so blaming...
There's blame to go around. The electorate is ultimately responsible for putting this tweeting extremist in the White House, and if you compare Obama's statements and actions compared to past presidents, then you could say that the "class bar" was lowered enough to where Trump was electable.
Let's take a railway analogy. Obama was elected to drive the train for four years a couple of times over, during his tenure things would be better on the train. However, the points, signals and power to the track was not something that was ever to be in his control, the train journey would be pretty much whatever the 'deep state' of intelligence agencies and their cronies wanted.
Like all previous train drivers Obama did not jump any signals or stop the train to hop out the cab and manually shift the points to get the train on the other track. He did a professional job of steering the train along without running too many people over or derailing the show. His predecessors were generally not as good at these finer details. Perhaps what Obama was best at was doing the announcements over the intercom, the passengers found him to be very funny and charming and all those good things.
Although we are all experts on trains - where they go, what the schedule is and what the seats are like, the reality of the coffee and so on, most of us are utterly clueless about what is in any of those boxes at the side of the track or how it all works.
If I was one of those people that always wanted to be train driver, and, if I had to put together a popular platform to be elected, I could make all kinds of promises, e.g. to floor it at 125 mph and put on some non-stop direct services with some buyable-in-able idea that it would all work out wonderfully. If I knew about the railway and the state of the track, or anything about those grey boxes, then I would not be issuing these cheques that cannot be cashed. Being a 'nice person' would not be enough, clueless me would not be able to take on the constraints of the infrastructure to deliver those 125mph direct trains.
It is easy to be matter of fact in a railway analogy when it comes to the problems of the system, with politics the 'deep state' is the 'problems of the system' and this is best discussed 'matter of fact' rather than as some mumbled conspiracy story.
You are not going to revolutionise transport by being a train driver even if you are the best guy for driving the train. Obama was the best guy for driving the train down the 'deep state' tracks.
That was, to be honest, the biggest issue I had with Hillary Clinton and why I couldn't vote for her. (FWIW, my vote for neither major party affected nobody, my state's electoral votes are locked.)
She basically stated she wanted to continue Obama's legacy and... in retrospect, Obama's legacy sucks. I voted for him twice, and I almost wish I hadn't. Countries we weren't ever even at war with have children who have now grown up to fear the sound of an American drone. (As a note, I have no issue with use of drones themselves, I have issue with how we use them. Like assassinations without due process.)
Obama's legacy has good spots and bad spots. In the future, his drone policy is something that may be viewed as a stain on America much like America's cold war meddling in South America that caused misery and bloodshed for millions of Latin Americas.
On the other hand, Bin Laden is dead, we didn't start any new wars, the US left Iraq, and several regimes changed to democracy in the Middle East without the US military getting heavily involved.
Obama's Justice Department has successfully shed light on patterns of police misconduct in several major cities and has mandated reforms. Yet, Obama and the DoJ ignored a landmark report on forensic science that could've exonerated thousands of wrongfully convicted and prevented wrongful convictions in the first place.
Net Neutrality won the day under Obama, yet he has done precious little to roll back pervasive surveillance and indeed has strengthened it.
In the fullness of time we'll see if Obama's legacy is ultimately viewed as negative or positive. And a lot of that depends on individual perceptions and what issues are important to you. Not to mention that feelings about his legacy will depend a lot on the quality of presidents succeeding.
A kindergartener, compared to who runs the show in Middle East now.
> we didn't start any new wars
Only to see the age old religious ones reignite - Sunni IS, supported by disenfranchised Iraqi Sunnis vs Shia Iraqi government. That is effectively not only a religious war but also a civil one - Top IS brass is ex-Saddam's military.
> the US left Iraq
Should have finished the phrase: "The US left Iraq in a much, much worse state than when it first came."
I think you need to re-examine that one. I'd agree we didn't start any wars on the scale of Iraq, but we did continue with unnecessary and unsuccessful foreign interventions that have only served to further destabilize the Middle East (and bleeding into Europe...)
An important one to highlight is his administrations' advocacy for LGBT rights both domestically and abroad. It's maddening to see the dichotomy between his privacy legislation and how he's advanced the civil rights of so many at the same time.
The two facets, on the surface, appear to be at such odds...
Several regimes changed to democracy? Is that so? And how are they doing?
And don't forget dropping bombs everywhere. Including weddings and hospitals where Obama achieved first world occurrence of a Nobel peace prize winner bombing another.
Without getting too deep into a discussion about geopolitics, it should be abundantly clear that getting rid of authoritarian governments is just the first step. Democracy is hard. Americans of all people should have a deeper appreciation for how hard it is to keep a functioning democracy.
As for dropping bombs, that ties into the drone policy and the real questions about collateral damage, how targets are selected and vetted, and the reality that in some ways targeted strikes are simply extra judicial killings.
Assessing Obama's legacy requires wading through ethical morasses and coming to understand situations that may be occluded by a lot of factors that are not visible to the public.
The more I think about it. It's really like we don't actually have a choice at all. We just get to influence the letter next to the name when that official shows up on CSPAN. Policy never moves.
Space policy wavered again under Obama as well, the repetitive change in goals our executive branch has tasked NASA with has held back our ability to progress with manned space exploration. Designing for Mars and designing for the Moon each present different problems.
The F-35 project has somehow survived as long as it has, despite being a massive cash sink into a project that is going to produce a bad plane that doesn't win fights. And if we rely on it for our next generation air superiority, we're going to be at a disadvantage until the next generation comes around.
I don't feel like we've really had a good last eight years. It's a good thing gay marriage is now a right, but that was decided by a 5-4 conservative Supreme Court anyways... not exactly something Obama can take credit for.
It's disturbing that Glenn Greenwald is kept far enough away from mainstream recognition by liberal gatekeepers that people still have to come to this conclusion independently instead of just reading any one thing he's written for the past decade or more.
These cautious modifiers -- "I feel", "when you dig into the details" -- wouldn't be necessary if Greenwald's work was ever taken seriously by those in the media who could boost it, but it seems they are too cowardly.
In many respects Obama did great. Consider that a president in office has to put up with a lot of pressure from many different sources. There's the party, the opposition, the lobbyists, etc. Even if you make promises (in good faith) before the election, it's very difficult to honor them. And this applies to all politicians in office.
Oh, and we noticed that you got gas here, then had something to eat there, and there were only N minutes elapsed between them. Here is your speeding ticket and DMV record update notification.
Just as a little additional perspective, the recipient agencies may still only query the raw data for foreign intelligence purposes, so it doesn't increase that power, just spreads it further.
Additionally, there was a great interview with Susan Hennessy in the Atlantic [1], where she suggested that this policy change has been in draft for nearly a decade, and that finalizing it potentially prevents rolling back the reforms that were made post Snowden for another decade.
You make it sound like this casual thing. The only reason intelligence agencies can do all this crazy illegal stuff is because their mission is foreign intelligence, and foreigners aren't covered by US law. This is the legal basis for every intelligence agency in every democratic state, because it doesn't take a genius to realize that their activities are otherwise prima facie illegal under any human rights perspective.
So what happens when you stop making the distinction between intelligence agencies and general law enforcement agencies? You get the Gestapo [1], secret police.
But the paragraph from the EFF article that follows the one you allude to was this:
"
However—and this is especially troubling—“if analysts stumble across evidence that an American has committed any crime, they will send it to the Justice Department,” the Times wrote. So information that was collected without a warrant—or indeed any involvement by a court at all—for foreign intelligence purposes with little to no privacy protections, can be accessed raw and unfiltered by domestic law enforcement agencies to prosecute Americans with no involvement in threats to national security.
"
That is not "spread further". Given the lack of a warrant and probable cause to initiate the search, prosecution using 'serendipitous evidence' flat out contradicts the 4th amendment.
That quote is from the NYT article though, not the declassified document. That quote was not good phrasing by NYT, as they did not stress the strong limitations in place.
This is an obviously optimistic question but, I will present it anyway.
Is it possible that through expanding the, what I believe to be, unconstitutional power of surveillance that they are actually weakening it and providing an opportunity for it to be fought against by the ACLU (or other civil liberty groups)?
This is a bad time to be a liberal. Let me explain.
On nearly the eve of handing over the country to Trump, Obama is laying the groundwork for policy that has huge potential to be abused. I am confused, because if anything you would think he would do the opposite, but I refuse to believe it was done to give him a noose to hang himself, but why?
Why is it a bad time to be a liberal? Because there is a good chance you will disagree with a lot of upcoming policy. But with this in place, criticizing your government or standing against tyranny could make you a target, one that is now easier than ever to trudge through an archive of your online life for anything remotely wrong, and prosecute you, retroactively, for it.
This is nothing new. Those on the right have felt the same squeeze you're describing over the Obama years in the form of politically targeted pressure from the IRS.
The lesson /should/ be that when the government is powerful enough to use against your political enemies, it's powerful enough to be used against you. Unfortunately, the allure of what you can do with that power next time you run the show seems strong enough to override a lot of rational concerns.
>Obama is laying the groundwork for policy that has huge potential to be abused. I am confused, because if anything you would think he would do the opposite,
Why would I think that? During his campaign in 2008, he switched his stance on the issue and voted for more surveillance - something he had promised to vote against only months prior.
Since his time in office, he has stuck to this reversal.
This is nothing new - he's been doing this for the last 8 years.
Obama just gave a riveting farewell speech about the US commitment to democracy. So it's not surprising that people who bought into his words are feeling burned, despite his actions being totally different for 8 years. Even ignoring the record=setting surveillance, whistle-blower persecution, and covert wars thing, he signed more executive orders than any president in history.
Therefore he's exploited the unilateral powers given to the executive branch more than any other president in history. So even if Trump does even half it won't seem so bad.
The best part is that he's handed plenty of fuel to any Russian who wants to dismiss their own governments abuse of power by pointing to the US. And they do this at every turn. So despite his tough talk on Russia, Obama has done more to make it easier for Putin to do whatever he wants than anyone.
The problem with a 'good' seeming guy going to such extreme lengths of power is that it legitimizes the bad ones who do it. So the problems should not only be analyzed locally but also considering externalities.
This is why ideological consistency is critical. If you're going to be abusive at least be honest about it. Fortunately we won't have this problem with Trump, he can't help it even when he tries.
I don't like Obama's expansion of the surveillance state, but he's at 260 executive orders, compared to 291 for Dubya and 381 for Reagan, and a whooping 3,522 for FDR.
This is a thought exercise, not my opinion as it's too complex/conspiracy theory-ish and more the plot of a Tom Clancy novel, but what if Obama is expanding the power and handing the reins over to intelligence groups that Trump has sidelined? The NSA/CIA are fantastic at collapsing and running foreign governments -- why not ours?
We do know Obama (like most presidents) is pretty cozy with the Intelligence Community. We know Trump isn't. I think a coup d'etat or shadow government is too much of a stretch, but this may at least let them work around Trump to an extent.
Also, we're living in interesting times where thoughts like "the intelligence agencies are covertly trying to work around the President!" are actually considered a neutral or good thing by many.
I've heard rumors that a decent number of people will resign from their jobs in the Intelligence Community. This will allow Trump to appoint more political employees. I don't know if this is true or not, but Trump's relationship with those agencies might get less hostile.
It's an interesting thought, but it would be extremely reckless for Obama to do this with the hope of undermining Trump.
Trump and those sympathetic to him could easily use the power of the intelligence apparatus to punish anyone who opposes him. We've already seen Congress pass a measure allowing them to reduce any federal employee's salary to $1. There's also a bill that would make future federal employees at-will hires that the president can fire. Imagine the climate of fear and intimidation that can be created if the president can fire anyway and has access to a massive surveillance complex that monitor all manner of digital communications.
Now maybe Obama knows something we don't, maybe he knows there really is damning information about Trump out there that just needs to find its way to the right hands. But even if that is the case, a more powerful surveillance state is not going to police itself, nor weaken itself even if Trump gets pushed out.
> Now maybe Obama knows something we don't, maybe he knows there really is damning information about Trump out there that just needs to find its way to the right hands.
Makes no sense. If he did, a couple of months ago would have been the best time for it to come out.
As the sibling comment said, maybe things only came to Obama's attention recently. There could be information that intelligence personnel were pursuing but felt like they needed to escalate to the president given other information that has come to light. Could be people with a grudge. Could be that they were pursuing rumors but then recently found more substance to those rumors.
All things considered I think there's a decent possibility that President Trump has more skeletons in the closet that haven't been outed yet.
We don't have to assume Obama knew about it back then. The spooks could have been keeping it in their pocket for December-intelligence-briefing leverage. In years past, they haven't had to worry about who was president, because they had a degree of control over each one. Now that it's clear that Trump DGAF, they're desperately circulating all the dirty laundry they have or can manufacture, but perhaps to no avail?
My first thought and in my mind not at all complex. I can imagine a bunch of last minute meetings with a bitter President (Obama) and angry and scared TLA representatives cooking up a surprise treat for the President elect. Probably phrased as "a last defence line for democracy", "in the event of a substantial rogue political support base for a compromised commander-in-chief". Or such.
>I guess we should have voted harder? 'Cause voting is the answer to problems with elected governments, right?
No. Where you you get that idea?
This is how you answer the problems in representative democracy:
1. You pick a party that has change to get representatives. You don't have to like it, it's a not beauty contest[1]. You just pick a party.
2. You join the party as a member.
3. You influence the issues inside the party. You join with the same minded people in the party. You recruit more same minded people. You push your agendas and your candidates inside the party long before any elections. You push them into councils and work groups. You push them into campaign committees and party chairs in multiple level.
4. When elections come, you vote. But that's just small part.
---
[1] People who bitch and moan how it's dirty and they don't like any party that is in actual position of power. Boo hoo. Get over it and get dirty. It's fight for power, not beauty contest.
My commitment to a personal code of ethics is the only thing that stops me from becoming a monster.
You have no idea what runs through my head sometimes. No idea. If I ever decide to get "dirty", it won't be to your benefit, in any way whatsoever. If I can't obtain power fairly and rationally, I am very unlikely to use it fairly and rationally. I'll use it to screw you over and make myself and my allies rich on your suffering. That's what people with power do now, and I have observed it to be a successful stratagem so far.
The government is running out of opportunities to present arguments against the possibility of me forming or joining a rebellion composed of strange bedfellows. Every time it changes policy to become more hostile to traditional American ideals, it is prying another board off the portal to the abyss.
Don't tell me to stop watching the circuses and go join one. I'll just nail down the tent flaps and set the big top on fire.
If you don't want me to be a walking time bomb, stop tolerating blatantly unethical behavior in your government and your political parties. Now. For me, it is a beauty contest, and the loveliest of the pageant participants is, at best, a "4". And for some reason, the crown keeps getting taken by someone who is a "1" or a "2".
Perhaps I have just lived too long in places with notoriously corrupt government.
> Don't tell me to stop watching the circuses and go join one. I'll just nail down the tent flaps and set the big top on fire.
But you won't because your peers will put the fire out before it has a chance take hold and then they'll kick you out.
In a mature democracy, no one person can attain enough power to do any long-term damage (at least relative to any other system).
In the USA, a president has limited powers and a limited time frame within which to wield them, after which he will be kicked out, whether he was doing a good job or not, so your analogy isn't really working.
> For me, it is a beauty contest, and the loveliest of the pageant participants is, at best, a "4". And for some reason, the crown keeps getting taken by someone who is a "1" or a "2".
Perhaps this is because it isn't a beauty contest for the rest of the people.
My analogy is intended to illustrate that the citizen participation in political parties is in some measure a distraction to safely diffuse the dissent energy in the system.
If you want real change to happen, you have to make the current wielders of the state's power at least annoyed.
The US is not a direct democracy. It is a republic, and the -cracy of the demo- is highly leveraged. And that's exactly how one segment of the population could abuse and disenfranchise another with Jim Crow laws.
The Democrats and the Republicans have, with their gerrymandered districts and first-past-the-post voting systems and burdensome ballot access laws, systematically disenfranchised a significant minority of the population, and tricked another significant minority into wasting their energy on their internal party politics.
That system is designed to exhaust my energy and radiate the resulting heat away into space, so that it does not adversely affect the workings of the machine. That's why those people who say "join a political party and participate in the process" can go set their heads on fire.
If your political process does not respect your voice, you should resist it, not join it. Misbehave a little. And have a little respect for those with fringe opinions on the opposite side of your spectrum that are also forced to misbehave so that their voices might be heard. There is a path to ethical misbehavior, and I aim to walk it, rather than swim the unethical cesspool of the political parties' unseen inner workings.
> I have observed it to be a successful stratagem so far.
On a short time, yes, seems to be very successful. Over a few generations, a less greed "leave some money on the table" approach seems to beat it every time.
Actually that's a fairly common refrain here on HN as well. I'm glad to have short-circuited that somewhat on this thread, to the marginally more plausible "all I need is to be very active in political campaigns and fundraising" alternate narrative.
Changing the world requires caring enough to do something. We'd be in a much worse situation if a friday afternoon's clicktivism wishes were the governing force of western civilization.
As an occasional tabletop gamer, I can often conceive several different winning strategies just by reading the rules of the game.
In the game of American representative democracy, I would not recommend your strategy. It's playing for 2nd place.
If you truly believe what you said, you should be recommending that people act to corrupt a public official in a manner that provides some leverage to them, personally. Alternately, poach the blackmail material from someone who already has leverage.
You have to be inside the party machinery where you can show up and vote occasionally and influence who are the activists that get selected into different party positions. Many of them hidden from the media spotlight but set up the scene. There are different interest groups and divisions within parties. Just being member of few and giving some support for others who do the hard lifting work is enough.
Just follow the issues from within the same way as you do now and raise your head sometimes.
That's a bit of a straw man. Nobody says voting will get you the government you want. I can't get any of my liberal friends (core Hilary voters) to care about surveillance. To the extent they're nervous about surveillance as a general concept, they trust Obama has struck the balance necessitated by what he knows about threats to the country.
Not everyone should vote. If your views are substantially outside the mainstream there is no point in voting.
There is a deeper problem here, and it's that voting in America doesn't provide the citizens with evenly distributed representation. I'm not talking about the electoral college. I'm talking about first past the post. In Australia, you literally cannot throw your vote away. It's order of preference with instant run-off. Maine just passed ranked voting laws for their state, and I'm curious to see the effects.
The US is an Oligarchy. Some people are really angry right now, because their stawperson didn't get elected. But they weren't angry for the past eight years of domestic spying, predator drones and kill lists. This anger only helps solidify the rule of the elite, because it keeps Americans fighting each other, and not the war industry or the banks or various other entities that can basically get their laws passed no matter who is elected.
I'm mainly writing this comment to say "+1". Because my analysis is basically the same, but trying to convey it to anyone else seems impossible.
This story in particular is a very clear indicator of what Obama has been the whole time - a mere salesperson for the oligarchy. The standard backstop excuse, that he "needs to compromise to get anything done", doesn't work when it's his last days of office! But the sunk cost fallacy is a powerful thing that causes people to overjustify their choices.
They're receptive when the criticism is leveled at the "other team", but given an opportunity to vote for "their team" they'll fall right into line. This time it happened with Trump voters, because "the media establishment HATES him". So they're all convinced he will actually change things in their interest - nevermind the Obama they've been hating on for the past 8 years ran on the exact same message! The best I've been able to do is to preemptively ask them to try to evaluate his actions on whether they're actually disrupting the status quo we all hate so much, or just pandering to polarizing surface issues while leaving the fundamental corruption intact. But I don't have hope that a year from now they will remember such criticism as being from an a priori perspective rather than simply shoring up their defensive ranks over the moral panic du jour.
How do you talk people down after spending a year telling them Hitler was coming to power? The same media that created Broadway shows to lambaste the last President for being a war-monger are crying tearful farewells for Barry because he said something about climate change once. All the willful ignorance I see day in and day out gets harder and harder to take.
Wow, with such a biased estimation of events, you must be talking about your own willful ignorance.
"Barry because he something about climate change once." If you willfully ignore everything that has happened, then perhaps you're not impressed or don't see drastic differences.
"How do you talk people down after spending a year telling them Hitler was coming to power?" Which is of course not in the least bit realistic.
Sure, one can create strawmen all day, and use those strawmen to push whatever argument they want, but nobody is the wiser for it. If you actually try to look at the world with as clear eyes as possible, rather than through the most rosy-colored or other filtered view, you will have a better chance of getting through days without them being hard and also of convincing people of your points of view.
1. "It’s ridiculous to compare any living person to Hitler or Mussolini."
2. No mention of Hitler. A point by point comparison to a historical and previous description of fascism.
3. Not Hitler, talks about conservatism and totalitarianism.
4. No mention of Hitler anywhere.
5. " I am not suggesting that what is happening in the United States replicates in every sense what happened in Italy and Germany. "
6. "The Republican presidential candidate is not a Fascist, but his campaign bears notable similarities to the reign of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini."
Compare these viewpoints to the claim of "But people really were saying Trump is literally Hitler."
Edit: I should also say that I don't doubt you could come up with something somewhere where somebody claimed that Trump is "literally Hitler." However, it is not a prevalent or even mainstream viewpoint. Even calling Trump a fascist, and defending it based on evidence, is a pretty extreme and rare viewpoint.
His point was broadly about the tone in which Trump has been described in the media, and how that contributes to the division that currently exists in America.
"How do you talk people down after spending a year telling them Hitler was coming to power?" vs. "How do you talk people down after spending a year telling them a fascist was coming to power?" isn't a very meaningful distinction to me in that context. Your mileage may vary. Many mainstream outlets have expressed that opinion for a long time, and it's a point of view I've seen defended here on HN many times in political threads. I don't think it's a fringe viewpoint at all.
There's a difference between what all these people are warning of, and then "literally Hitler" of starting a world war and imprisoning all political opponents and then executing millions of the prisoners like cattle in an industrial processing plant.
The "literally Hitler" smear is an attempt to distinguish that careful, and important distinction, so that the entire thought can be dismissed as ridiculous.
Looking at each of those articles where they say "not hitler, but he still is making noises like he'll be bad," do you think that needs to be walked back? Were they ignoring reality, or facing an unpleasant reality?
"Literally Hitler" is not a thoughtful, fair, or even useful characterization of these viewpoints.
I think I misunderstood what you were calling "unrealistic". It doesn't matter whether Trump is really like Hitler. People really did make that comparison, and now the people who were convinced by those arguments are stuck on high alert. As Pigo said, it's going to be very hard to talk those people down to a point that we can have a productive political conversation.
I've seen people saying it's illegal to be Muslim now. You can't underestimate the intelligence of people on social media and rioting cities. Maybe it's different where some of you live, or some of your online circles.
Preferential voting is a bit useless in a presidential election isn't it? With only two major candidates, wouldn't that result in someone getting like 90%+ of the vote?
Side note: As an Australian, it absolutely blows my mind that voting is not compulsory in more countries. I have no idea why voting isn't compulsory, like taxes.
I used Australia as an example, and yes, I have several Aussie friends who say, "Well we pretty much have a two party system now."
Do you have any insight as to why this is? Do people just not mark more than one or two preferences, given that they have more choices? I understand the "big" parties work hard to get there, and they'll work even in the limits of a system to stay on top.
I also had Australians tell me about the "top" and "bottom" of the ballot. The bottom can have a long scrolling amount of entries, and Australians who care will go to various websites where they can input their issues, get a list of which MPs agree, print out this list and take it into a voting booth to see which parties they should vote for. O_o I've been told most Australians only fill out the top.
The top/bottom of the ballot thing is rubbish. Basically each senator is aligned with a political party, if a party has 2 or more candidates in the running for senator (I think?) then they get an "above the line" box. And if you desire, you can tick the above the line box to let that party place your vote for you.
So what ends up happening is instead of a diversified senate with plenty of conflicting opinions and a broad knowledge base acting as the gatekeepers of whatever ridiculous legislation the lower house can dream up, we end up with the two major parties controlling the whole senate.
And whenever that's not the case (which sometimes happens due to the preferential voting) the media runs a huge billion dollar campaign about how the entire country is going to stagnate into a giant flaming pile of shit unless one of the major parties gets a majority in the senate and is allowed to push all their horseshit through unopposed. Then next election the uneducated masses vote against their best interests in droves once again.
The system is fucked. I don't see an easy solution, it's not like forcing below the line voting would be any better because then all the braindead racist bigots like Pauline Hanson would be voted in in a landslide due to sheer media coverage and we'd lose any lesser named senators that managed to grab an infinitesimal piece of power by aligning themselves with a major party.
Maybe if someone has a good solution they could enlighten me, I'd love to hear it.
EDIT: I should mention, if you elect to vote below the line you have to literally number every senate candidate, which is generally 50-100 boxes. The system itself is imposing a huge barrier to the average person placing an educated vote.
Not everyone should vote. If your views are substantially outside the mainstream there is no point in voting.
Voting pragmatically in local elections likely still makes sense even for people with extreme views. A few of the races are likely to be close and have candidates with disparate viewpoints.
Years ago I volunteers to work on a local campaign to help a candidate. I use to think local elections were different as well, but during that time I realized local elections are pretty much just as screwed up as elections on the state/national level. It all comes down to money, advertising and building a narrative.
People don't pay attention to what mayors actually do, plus a terrible mayor can live off the planning of the previous administration for most of their term in office (and thereby take credit for things they didn't touch).
I'm not confused about your meaning, but disputing such characterization of the situation. A vote for a candidate is a vote for that candidate, an endorsement of their subsequent actions. Don't get tricked by subjectively slightly "less worse" candidates.
It is also possible to care deeply about privacy, to be frustrated to no end by this area of policy under the Obama administration, and to still have voted for Hillary, say.
The problem with a two party system dominated by a president is that many important issues bundled together. Democrats let me down on privacy, but the new Vice President's signature policy focus is persecuting gay families like mine.
I just want to say that we can vote even while agitating within our own parties and social groups for improvements on privacy.
> If your views are substantially outside the mainstream there is no point in voting.
There's still a big reason to vote: pick the candidate with the least amount of problems that has a chance of winning. But I do agree that voting is usually too-little-too-late if you don't already have the majority of voters knowing about your cause.
Yes, in a classical two-party system, voting for lesser of two evils is the only option.
But in the US, there's also the question in which state you live in. For example, there's no point voting Republican in California, nor Democrat in Texas.
There are several Republican enclaves in California (particularly in rural areas) just as there are several Democratic enclaves in Texas (particularly in urban areas).
I live in Ithaca, NY. That means we have a very, very liberal municipal government, gerrymandered-to-shit knucklehead (mostly) Republican legislative representation in Albany and DC, and a moderately liberal governor (Cuomo). These layers matter.
But if you don't mind tyranny then by all means don't vote.
"Not everyone should vote. If your views are substantially outside the mainstream there is no point in voting."
Voting outside the mainstream over time (for some definition of "substantially outside") can normalize and legitimize viewpoints that would otherwise be regarded as fringe forever. We've seen that with the Green party here in Canada.
That said, I agree (if you think this) that the fetishization of voting for the sake of voting is pretty naive.
> Voting outside the mainstream over time (for some definition of "substantially outside") can normalize and legitimize viewpoints that would otherwise be regarded as fringe forever.
What's the scale of the timeframe we're talking about here? Doesn't seem like the Green Party in the US has a chance of getting normalized on a scale of 2 generations (~50 yrs), based on the past history of voting.
Having people vote based on the idea that at some point in the future, possibly not in their lifetime, their viewpoint may (or may not) become mainstream/legitimate is absurd. People are not that far forward thinkers.
If we're lucky and the news media gets completely destroyed by the Internet (which process has certainly begun) whatever replaces it probably won't be as unified in reinforcing the two-party hegemony. I think that's the biggest factor in people not even considering a vote for even the milquetoast alternatives that we got this last time around. Every time the "other" candidates get a mention, it's to poke fun of them for some geographical error. ("She flew to the wrong city!" "He couldn't find Aleppo on a map; doesn't he know we'll have to bomb that city soon?")
I wonder if it would be better if voting cost a small amount of money, say $50 (everyone can easily afford to save $50 once every two years). That would encourage those who choose to vote to research the issue (if they care enough to pay $50 they likely care about the choices).
That's a poll tax, and in implementation is what is known as "regressive". That $50 is far, far more dear to some minimum wage single mom, than a CEO. That in fact is the objection to many of the voter IDs GOP states keep pressing for; the goal, as stated, is simply to prevent voting fraud, but the actually results are to disenfranchise the poor, who can't necessarily afford the $25-50 cost, nor can they afford the time off work to take public transit to a DMV (or similar) during the times they're open. Effectively, you're setting the bar higher for the poor than for the rich to vote.
> That in fact is the objection to many of the voter IDs GOP states keep pressing for
Tangential, but this is a great example of a fabricated wedge issue in American politics. The solution is so simple, just issue everyone a free national ID card. Passports should be free too and could also double for this purpose. Then the Republicans can stop complaining about voter fraud and Democrats can stop complaining about voter disenfranchisement (the latter of these I am legitimately concerned about, I just wish someone would actually follow through and do something about it).
Also, it's ridiculous that there isn't a national holiday at least on the day of the presidential elections.
There are many voting laws/rights regarding employment for states. If you don't like that there isn't one, or it isn't paid, or it doesn't give you enough time; well then, you should probably talk to your representatives.
(In addition, imagine an interest group instituting a "we'll pay your poll tax for you!" campaign, but only in counties carefully selected for demographics.)
Yea, but the racist origins are not an explanation why poll taxes are inherently unconstitutional. I feel like there's a step missing in the explanation.
I have better solution: Break up Mega Govts. They are truely too big to fail. USG can exploit as much as it wants because it knows citizens have nowhere to go.
This will happen eventually. That which is unsustainable will not be sustained. I hope it will happen the "easy way", through popular votes in the seceding areas, but that will depend very much on the attitudes of federal officials at that time. Also it will probably depend on which areas secede first, and why they are popularly understood to have chosen to secede.
One possible sequence:
1) Trump fever sweeps Rs to power in 38 state legislatures two years from now.
2) Those legislatures pander to morons by passing a Constitutional Amendment barring those without physician-issued certificates of femininity from women's restrooms.
3) Millions of Californians take to the streets in protest for weeks at a time, unable to accept life under what comes to be called "wrong-partheid".
4) Desperate business owners cast about for some way to get everyone back to work, and hit upon secession. A plebiscite is called, and with 90% of California citizens voting, every county except Modoc and Lassen vote to secede. Those counties petition Oregon for admission, but are turned down and have to join Nevada instead. Then Las Vegas has a vote to secede from Nevada, but last-minute distributions of maps illustrating where the water comes from cause secession to fail.
At this point, Trump could send in the Army to enforce the Union, but I really hope he doesn't. If he did, many soldiers would refuse the order, and many generals would push for some other solution. Perhaps California will bribe Trump with some real estate deals. They can write it into their new constitution to make sure it's legal.
After that I would hope for many more secessions. This nation needs to be drastically shrunken to put all the lobbyists out of business.
Literacy tests were not about literacy; the questions were often intentionally ambiguous (Think "What is the last letter of the first word?" or "Write backwards forwards."), allowing the instructor full discretion in passing or failing the would-be voter.
Then what I suggested bears no resemblance to a literacy test. You wouldn't need to "pass" the test, just simply take it in order to encourage you to consider the issues and how the candidates align with your views.
But I agree with the other commenter, selecting the questions in a fair way would be challenging.
I just think that the more emotional voters, the ones more easily manipulated by propaganda, are more likely to keep voting when it costs something, whereas people who don't care all that much will just not bother anymore.
I'm not sure if that will generate a representative and, uh, positive outcome.
There's also the problem that many jurisdictions have 2+ elections each year. A federal poll tax would create quite a bit of room for local poll taxes that would be that much more abusive.
I've more or less come to believe that voting - at least on the national scale - doesn't really function the way most like to think - that its some noble expression of the will of the people (even presuming that the will of the people is rational in the first place - more than likely it isn't).
Voting, combined with checks and balances, term limits - is more of a hamster wheel for power seekers. The combination of those things makes power really difficult and costly to attain, transient, and limited (hopefully). And it helps ensure that power transitions peacefully, more or less. Its less about the actual candidate, and more about churn.
Not sure why you're downvoted. I've lived in multiple countries, including a dictatorship and a very corrupt democracy. The dictatorship was definitely preferred to the corrupt democracy - nothing worked in the latter. It was just deadlock after deadlock.
The US isn't as bad as that very corrupt democracy, but I do not share many people's views that when a country switches to democracy things will improve. There are far too many factors in play, and people voting is only a small factor amongst all of them. The culture of the people probably matters a lot more than whether they get to vote or not.
However, it seems to me that it keeps _individuals_ churning through the powerful offices of state yet ensures that those individuals are only only drawn from a particular _restricted group_.
That's the reason for the animosity to Trump. Within that restricted group he wields more power with fewer ties than other group members.
If he were one of the usual oligarchs who has to compromise with the investment banks and lobbyists for powerful special interests he would be more controllable. But who knows what someone with their own resources might get up to.
The fact of the matter is - voting did work, for Republicans and the right wing.
This environment of abridged civil liberties, police militarization and increased surveillance is what many Americans wanted, post 9/11.
Donald Trump's election signals a successful vote for more of the same - although one that assumes, in ignorance, the commonly held belief that Obama as a Democrat weakened and undermined the surveillance state and that a corrective policy shift to the right is necessary.
> This environment of abridged civil liberties, police militarization and increased surveillance is what many Americans wanted, post 9/11.
No. Nobody wants to live in the iron curtain.
This is an absolute and total failure of leadership, from the Bush administration through the Obama administration. 16 years of inexcusable failure. (It probably goes back even further)
People with bombs have not created fear, politicians have.
So unfortunately there is a pretty significant group of people that are okay with increased surveillance.
Note that from what I see, this divide doesn't appear to be traditional US liberal/conservative. In fact, if anything, the divide carries more of a generational rift, where older people are more okay with surveillance than younger people are. (The USA Today poll on Snowden mentions this, and there is also this: http://www.people-press.org/2013/07/26/few-see-adequate-limi...)
For those concerned with digital privacy and rights, I guess the question would be how to counter this narrative of fear that from my viewpoint drives these sort of opinions.
But if you actually clarified and asked "is it OK if the NSA reads your email and monitors your google searches because you ordered pizza from the same place that someone who is facebook friends with a guy who's uncle owns a rental unit that houses a 22 year old who read three Al Jazeera articles about ISIS last week and tweeted 6 times to a guy on a watch list because he works for a website that mirrors wikileaks - which as you know published classified government information?"
You would get an entirely different set of answers.
Or, if you for example told them that they were currently classified by religion and political leaning, and that they are loosely associated with the bombing of abortion clinics (but don't worry, lot's of people in Indiana are)
People wanted "abridged civil liberties, police militarization and increased surveillance" applied to other people. The whole thing relies on "othering".
America has long been happy to have a more violent police force and higher rate of imprisonment than other countries so long as that violence is directed against nonwhite people. It seems people imagine that they'll be the priviliged ones behind the iron curtain; the neighbourhood informers.
(This is also why e.g. HOAs have such oppressive rules, they're aimed at eradicating "difference" and a form of soft-redlining)
>> Donald Trump's election signals a successful vote for more of the same
Actually that's not why people voted for him. Of all the issues people voted on, national security was/is at the bottom of the issues that were important to them.
While he does believe in collecting basic meta data, he supports having judicial oversight and having courts make rulings on when that meta data can be accessed:
>> This environment of abridged civil liberties, police militarization and increased surveillance is what many Americans wanted, post 9/11.
Actually police militarization goes back to 1981, when Reagan passed the Military Cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Cooperation_with_Civi...) which allowed the US Military to co-operate with local law enforcement agencies during the early days of the War on Drugs.
You also have to remember the environment at the time when the flood of cocaine into this country was turning Florida communities in war zones. Remember the 1979 Dadeland Shopping Mall killings?
Dadeland did not just represent the year’s 37th and 38th drug homicides. The brazen assassination, at midday, in a mall packed with families and ordinary Miamians, was a worrisome escalation. Miami’s police chief told a friend that he feared the Colombians were turning Miami into Medellín. The shootings also introduced “cocaine cowboys” to millions of Americans and almost overnight gave South Florida a Wild West reputation. A prominent Miami executive, Arthur Patten, told Time: “I’ve been through two wars and no combat zone is as dangerous as Dade County.”
Maybe government isn't where the answer is going to come from. Maybe we should stop placing our hope in the government.
As a Christian, this makes perfect sense to me - hope should not have been in the government in the first place. But even if you're not a Christian (or any kind of a theist), if you look at the situation honestly, it seems pretty clear: Hope is going to have to come from somewhere else. The government isn't going to provide it. Sure, they sell hope. That's what their campaign says. But they don't actually deliver what they sell.
Wrong. Voting is one of the most basic and fundamental forms of engagement when there are elections available, but far from "the answer" to problems with government. Very often combinations of other forms of activism, whether directly in the electoral process (working campaigns, actually running for office, etc.), or less directly related to the electoral process specifically (public lawful protest, various forms of direct petition), and even outside the formal bounds of the law (civil disobedience as protest, for instance) are necessary to address some problems with elected governments, and, many of those (even voting) often require substantial organizing, mobilizing, and communication to spread ideas to work effectively.
And whichever combination of methods is needed also often takes many years to be successful.
The simpler solution would be simply to break up America into a bunch of smaller, more ideologically homogenous countries. (Federalism isn't the answer, because Maryland won't put up with Alabama making abortion illegal while flying the same flag.)
Based on the 2016 electoral map - or indeed, almost any from the last 20+ years - the ideologically homogeneity isn't a regional thing but a city vs rural thing.
Take the largest ~20 cities in the US and they would be city-states while literally everything else would be a single country.
Yep, this is the big problem. There's simply no viable way to split into urban countries that hold and produce a vast majority of the wealth and the majority of the population, and have a massive swathe of the the most beautiful land in the US as a separate country or countries. It would make the most awkward-looking of maps. Although, on the other hand, splitting off into city-states is a pretty fun thought project. It'd impact the electoral playing field a bit more, as well as provide some interesting effects on congressional/senatorial representation. It'd also very likely deepen the rural-urban divide even further. But rural Californians might like being separate from its more populous city-state neighbors, and I know the city-state of Atlanta would just love to be free of its surrounding rural citizens. Cleveland would likely feel better about holding its own versus the rest of rural Ohio.
It's pretty interesting to contemplate what elections would look like if all states simply apportioned their electoral votes according to Maine/Nebraska rules, or a popular-proportion scheme, and disposed of the unit rules entirely.
Maine/Nebraska rules (1 EV to winner of each CD, + 2 to statewide winner) would increase the value (and thus incidence) of partisan gerrymandering, because then it buys you not only House seats but also Presidential EVs.
87% of Maryland lives in an urban area, versus 48% of West Virginia. Maryland would drift way to the left if it wasn't forced into political compromises to accommodate other states.
> The simpler solution would be simply to break up America into a bunch of smaller, more ideologically homogenous countries.
No, it isn't, because while different ideologies have slightly different proportions among the states, the big divide is more urban/rural than regional. Breaking up just gives you the same problems multiplied numerous times with different winners and losers in each of those fights.
Your comment nailed it. Real democracy is a process involving many techniques and hard work. What you describe is how all types of corruption were ended and civil rights gained. People didn't just sit at home voting for a candidate promising, for example, blacks, women, or unionizing workers that they'd make it all better. They had to get off their ass to work at it themselves every day sometimes for years.
The faux-participation model devolved in recent election to shout stuff on online, shout stuff at TV, shout at people listening, and cast vote for one of two scumbags. The real work that got people elected was done by a combination of campaign donors, campaign workers/volunteers, media people, marketing experts, and recently hackers. This collectively filtered the election into a small number of scumbags that voting people chose from. People wanting someone better must get into the groups I listed to help someone better get into that list and stay on it despite smear campaigns. Or use the tactics you mention after election process does what it nearly always does.
In the UK Teresa May just passed the 'Snoopers Charter'(Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act) which is at least as bad as this. Agencies like the 'Food standards agency', and 'Health and safety executive' now have powers to read your browsing history without a warrant. Somehow this is supposed to stop terrorism?
Now we have the 'Digital Economy bill' which is where the UK's 'Great Firewall' begins under the guise of protecting our children from porn.
Its Orwellian and it is disgusting. What is worst is how the press ignored it and the Corbyn opposition abstained from voting on it! I will never vote for a politician who did not vote against it, and that is a very small number!
Considering EU's various proclamations against surveillance had zero effect on any of this it's probably good that Brexit happened. The problem will be easier to solve internally with a smaller government without the baggage of having to solve France/Germany's security problems thanks to EU open borders.
Whether or not the people care is then the primary question. Who knows, maybe the youth today will be the ones who realize that judicial oversight over law enforcement and intel agencies was a good thing.
As an ordinary citizen, I'm definitely wary and suspicious of government surveillance. I probably prefer a slightly increased risk of terrorism vs an increase in government surveillance powers. But I wonder if I was the president and faced with a constant threat and paranoia of a terrorist attack under my watch if I would compromise my own usual ideals to protect the country. It's definitely a rock and a hard place situation.
Honestly, given the near-unanimous stance, towards surveillance, of most governments in most developed countries (NA, EU, etc.) it's becoming increasingly difficult to dismiss their motivations as simply "stupid" or "misguided" or "power-hungry". I mean, it's impossible that all of them are uneducated about history (how surveillance is a double-edged sword that never fails to backfire), or just plain authoritarian at heart. "Because we can" isn't satisfactory either.
So there must be another explanation. I don't know what the Presidents / Prime Ministers / Intelligence Agencies of this world know, but if they all respond to current threats in the same inexplicable way, there must be some 'logical enough' underlying motivation.
Definitely pointing at a "rock and a hard place" indeed.
The other cold reality is that, for all the horror, terrorism isn't a threat to civilization, we're talking ~25k deaths/year worldwide (DoD/UN figures, cf. Wiki), which is orders of magnitude less than other threats like cancer or alcoholism or smoking tobacco (~2.5m deaths/year _each_). Terrorism is emotionally horrific, but demographically it doesn't even register. Nowadays it doesn't even really affect stock markets that much (e.g. in France, despite everything that happened in recent years). So based on the data we have as citizens, it doesn't make sense to spend so much (money, political capital, loss of freedom) to avoid so 'little' demographic/economic risk. Not saying we shouldn't fight against it, or protect citizens, but A) mass surveillance is a bad means to fight terrorism, good ol'fashionned spying is the way and B) the huge means (CIA etc.) are totally not proportional to the very risk we're trying to avoid.
So what's the _real_ reason for surveillance? What is it about Big Brother-ing citizens that is so necessary that the public does not know about? How is it even possible that after a decade and a half post 9/11 no official in any country ever talked about the _real_ reasons behind this apparent unbalance between counter-terrorist means and terrorism consequences?
I am everything but a conspiracy lunatic, so I don't accept the idea that people in power are organizing, all together, a dystopian reality a la 1984 --doesn't make sense to me.
So what gives? What are this rock and this hard place, exactly?
How is it inexplicable? When you're tasked with stopping individual suicidal extremists hiding within your citizenry, the obvious first step is "I need more information". There doesn't need to be any conspiracy or hidden threat, it is a natural and logical response.
Politicians aren't robots, obviously they care more about terrorism than tobacco. And they aren't spending political capital by setting up surveillance, they're gaining it. Obama took huge hits every time he said "ISIS is the JV", "terrorism isn't an existential threat", "chill out everyone". Imagine if he said he was diverting NSA funding to fight the tobacco industry.
Basically, if you don't understand politicians, talk to the people voting for them. The NSA exists because people want it to.
> When you're tasked with stopping individual suicidal extremists hiding within your citizenry, the obvious first step is "I need more information".
How about using the information that they have in the first place instead? They knew about a few of the attacks in recent years and didn't do anything to stop them. It's obviously a power-grab rather than an attempt to actually solve the problem.
> people in power are organizing, all together, a dystopian reality a la 1984
I'm not sure anyone believes that, really. And it isn't required in order to explain the explosion in surveillance.
In my view, it seems that increased surveillance throughout the world is a natural consequence of increased technology. If it's your job to stop crime, why wouldn't you digitize and automate?
The law is the last obstacle, and that is slowly being dismantled.
Paper clip maximizing is a widely known and very common failure mode for bureaucracies. Remember, they never get smaller.
(How did people deal with oversized bureaucracies in history? I mean before the XVIII century when no size became too big anymore? Was there any peaceful solution?)
Syria and Iraq are not good enough sources for you?
I know what you are thinking "Those countries already had problems".
But you have some circular thinking: because they were not able to stop terrorism, they had problems, because they had problems terrorism got much worse.
If Western countries stopped fighting terrorism it would get worse, at some point it would get so bad the countries would be at risk.
Obviously in the real world no one would let it get that bad. But how bad is acceptable to you? 3 bombings/truck rammings per year maybe? 50 would be too much I'm sure.
Do you have some place you would draw the line?
I draw it at zero, which means, you need to spend a ton of money.
Look at Israel: They have not had a bombing in ages, so obviously they can stop spending money on preventing it, right? They have a problem with knife and truck attacks and I'm sure they are working how to stop it.
Once they do stop it, people like you will ask "Why do we need to keep spending money on this?"
I heard a security professional once quip "We should let a few attacks get through, just so they don't cut our funding." It's a quip - but there is some truth to it.
An option: Stop immigration from places that are prone to terrorist attacks happening and then you won't have to give up nearly as much privacy in the name of fighting terror at home.
And of course most deaths from terrorism in the US are from "mass shooters", who tend to be self-radicalised US nationals with fringe political beliefs.
> The 9/11 hijackers were mostly on tourist visas from a place with almost no history of terror attacks:
Your source (correctly) says they were mostly from Saudi Arabia, which has a rather extensive history over several decades of terrorist attacks (both attacks in Saudi Arabia, and attackers outside of Saudi Arabia by Saudi nationals and/or with Saudi sponsors.) There is no sense in which Saudi Arabia is (or could be fairly described in 2001 as) "a place with almost no history of terror attacks."
Your source (correctly) says they were mostly from Saudi Arabia, which has a rather extensive history over several decades of terrorist attacks
That's a detail that doesn't matter. What matters is that we open the doors to men who have high risk of radicalization and ties to rich Saudis, bigot.
What's your point? That not all terrorists are from abroad? We know that. Why is it necessary to bring in people who have high risks of radicalizing? Homegrown terror isn't a reason to stop trying altogether.
It would call for special skills and oratory, normally associated with Leadership. We should be a better country than this. We need a leader that will inspire us to be our better selves. We haven't had much of that lately; we'll have to wait at least 4 more years for another chance to elect a Leader.
> "if analysts stumble across evidence that an American has committed any crime, they will send it to the Justice Department"
This is troubling on many levels, but the one that concerns me the most is game theory.
We want people to pay taxes on criminal activity (because it's economic activity and uses services taxes pay for) without the tax authorities "narcing" on the source. IRS is doing the right think by not leaking Trump's tax info even if people within the IRS think the public have a legitimate right to know.
You are required to look after your kids yet you can drop off a baby you can't look after, no questions asked.
Hospitals have to treat patients no matter if they can pay or not, and no matter if they became ill due to criminal behavior because we don't want people with tuberculosis or Hep C wandering around (not to mention presumption of innocence).
Every time we add a "mandatory reporter" rule we actually endanger ourselves, so we should tread carefully.
I'm pissed, but I don't feel duped. But that's simply because no serious presidential contender, save maybe Bernie Sanders, would have done otherwise.
Well, maybe Trump. But I believe his distrust of the intelligence community is only due to the fact that he thinks their findings regarding Russia undermine his legitimacy. Once that blows over, I expect he'll be more than happy having the authoritarian tools of the intelligence community, if he's smart enough to heal the rift.
What blows my mind a bit is that the rise of Trump should make it crystal clear just how dangerous these powers could be in the wrong hands. Obama should understand this more than anyone.
There were many people pointing out the dangers of consolidating so much power into the Presidency over the last few years but most of them were told to shut up with their paranoia conspiracies and racist rhetoric.
It also didn't help that Congress is more and more doing absolutely nothing of substance. The last 8 years have been nonstop obstructionism, and the next 4 appear to be headed the same way. (note: this is not to say I agree with overuse of executive powers, I do not.)
Not sure why you think next 4 years will be the same... I think the next 4 years will be markedly different due to Trump leadership and Republican majorities in the House and Senate.
We're hearing about Repeal & Replace in January, maybe as late as March and voting has already started to lay the framework to allow passage with 51 votes in the Senate.
Regardless Obama expanded executive power more than any president in history. So even if Trump doesn't plan to expand it he has plenty to work with already. I doubt he'll reverse it other than streamlining bloated intel agencies.
He's pledged to reverse all of Obama's "illegal" executive orders... and I assume that, being a Republican, he considers all of them to be illegal.
Trump may not do so, but the Republicans seem to want to dismantle Obama's legacy as thoroughly as possible, and blot him and the effect of his presidency from history like Akhenaten. There would probably be a political cost to pay if Trump didn't reverse it, just on principle.
It's probably the 'last few years' part that is what gets someone accused of racism. Pushing the boundaries of presidential power is not unique to Obama and indeed has no party affiliation.
> But that's simply because no serious presidential contender, save maybe Bernie Sanders, would have done otherwise.
I have my own issues and gripes with him, but I feel that Rand Paul was also one of the few who spoke sanity when it came to all these matters. In the only primary debate he actually participated in, when asked about interfering in Syria, his response was "we've done that how many times now - when has it worked out for us?" which, of course, the populist audience did not like.
I suspect that the intelligence apparatus is so influential across the administration that it's very hard for the President to rein it in.
Obama has had to make compromises on which issues he's going to push for. The disappointingly slow progress on Guantánamo Bay was an example of this... And that's a single prison camp with a relative handful of people in it. Digital surveillance is an out-of-control monster that all branches of intelligence just want to have more of, as evidenced by this latest decision on data sharing.
I doubt it. Trump has praised NSA surveillance in the past and has hinted that Snowden should be executed. Unless he was just saying such things to try to get the intelligence community on his side pre-election, he's in favor of authoritarian tools.
In 2008, before the election, Obama clearly showed he would increase the surveillance state when in office. In what way did he dupe you ? He already showed what he would do in office in July 2008. Claiming buyer's remorse now is too little too late. The above vote was why I decided not to vote for him.
I believe Obama's pick for VP was an obvious enough contradiction of his platform. Retaining Gates & Geitner solidified, IMO, "change" was not in the cards. Trump is an anomoly to the vetted & selected candidates we usually get to "elect", for better or worse. His cabinet picks hint at the latter, time(not the MSM) will tell.
1. Gay marriage/rights
1.5 Pulling out of Iraq (half an accomplishment, because the US had no business being there in the first place)
ACA is a dud, because it does nothing to address the artificially inflated costs.
So, in 8 years, we traded gay marriage for insane massive surveillance and a 'recovery' in job growth in the gig economy. Is that a fair exchange? Maybe, for the LGBT community. To be fair, he did inherit a giant pile of shit in 2008, but to think of him as some accomplished or revolutionary leader is a mistake.
In the end, he's just another centrist status quo "liberal".
Pulling out of Iraq (half an accomplishment, because the US had no business being there in the first place)
Not even a half accomplishment considering that there are still 5000 US soldiers in Iraq.
I was 20 in 2008, the first election I could vote in. I was reasonably politically aware at the time but still learning. One of my very basic litmus tests for being a decent, rational person is / was acceptance of gay marriage. I was quite surprised to find that Barack Obama, this liberal phenom who had become a household name overnight, was not publicly supporting such a cut-and-dry issue that would've been barely controversial among his constituency at the time. That was not the sole reason I didn't vote for him, but probably the jumping off point of being more skeptical of his candidacy. Of course, his change of opinion on gay marriage nearly mirrored opinion polls crossing the 50% mark, just like Clinton.
Except that, as I understand it, Osama was tracked down using "good ol' fashion HumInt", not surveillance. Obama's attitude toward intelligence gathering has been one of the more perplexing contradictions of his entire administration. All I can figure is there is some trusted figure advising him on these matters who has an agenda of some sort.
Remember that Obama has access to privileged information we don't. This could go beyond advising. There may be threats that are unsafe to discuss that he sees an urgent need to track down. I've seen many politicians describe the same thing - once they get security clearance, they see all these horrible threats... and it becomes very hard to explain the situation to the public, so they just give up on justifying it.
Fear porn. Point to the scary unknown as a justification for X.
I tend to think our math teachers were right. If you can't show your work, then didn't do any. (Not an absolute but I lean heavily that way.)
> once they get security clearance
Or it could be that once they get authority, the intelligence community tries harder to scare the shit out of them. There's no way to know if Obama, for example, is getting more legitimate info. I don't buy off on it being safe to assume that he is. If you listened to the intelligence community they'd have you believing that everyone on your block is a lone wolf, bomb wielding, child porn collector. Or that the only reason we haven't had another 9/11 was because of the NSA's phenomenal cosmic power.
Is Obama getting more honesty from the NSA or is he getting more bullshit? We don't know. We only know that he's getting more something. Do you expect the NSA to say something other than "Boss, I'm doing good work"? Are they going to say "um, yeah, so, that big spy network we built... um... it basically doesn't do shit for us"?
The TL;DR is that it's not just the scary details he's getting access to but the high level political shenanigans too.
Except they could say exactly that and none of them do, and over time incidents /can/ be revealed to the public where surveillance was instrumental in stopping terror/hunting down terrorists/preventing attacks but it never has been. Their crowning achievement was locking up a taxi driver who gave to a Muslim charity overseas that spent some of its money on terror.
Don't you think the surveillance boosters would love to provide proof that it actually works while right now all we have is proof of its failures? "Classified" information can be quickly declassified if it helps the public perception of intelligence agencies; Zero Dark Thirty was a propaganda film built on classified intelligence leaked because it made intelligence agencies look good and glorified torture. Incidentally, the people who leaked information for that film were surprisingly not targets in Obama's war on intelligence leakers.
I wish it was all conspiracy theory (just like NSA registering your calls, right?) but ibn Laden is known to be death somewhere around 2003 due to kidney failure. He had very serious health issues for many years - sort of issues you most likely die even when taken care of by best doctors in west hospitals, not in caves somewhere in remote mountains in Afghanistan.
Its a matter of time. Shapiro proved Obama birth certificate is fraudulent fake [1] and we know from gossips the photo op from ibn Laden capture was fake (then convenience bury at seat with no photos and whole team 6 conveniently dying on helicopter crash) - its a matter of time when someone somewhere is going to prove it.
Where does that link show evidence of a fake? My reading is that the supposed guardians of our democracy failed in executing their due diligence. That's the "powerless" part of the article. I didn't see anything, either explicit, or linked in the article that said it was a fake.
Maybe this better: press conference with LEOs that finished their investigation. You are talking about officers with 20+ years of experience evaluating fraudulent documents.
Well unless proven otherwise I'd just assume it wasn't meant to be particularly political/strategic and leave it at that.
The only potential "anti-Trump move" angle I can see is it directly empowers the intelligence community only. So if Obama is counting on a continued strained relationship between the Trump administration and the intelligence community insiders then this could be it. But I wouldn't personally believe it to be too likely.
I completely agree with your sentiment, but privacy is a bit harder to sell--guns are badass and cool to collect, privacy is geeky and suspicious. Another key difference is that the second amendment is big business (Smith Ruger & co stock went up >500% during Obama). There are big businesses that could get behind anti-encryption, but mass appeal is more difficult- perhaps at least until something spectacular happens.
Second Amendment supporters are often interested in the Fourth as well; I think you would find a very solid group of them (particularly those who concealed-carry, rather than just hunters) are strongly opposed to this sort of thing.
Right. I live in Oklahoma which has...a strong 2nd Amendment contingent. The OK state government is taking a lot of heat from the federal government for refusing to implement the Real ID requirements for state DLs.
I'm not a conservative, but I can see the reasoning behind it: they know very well that this is one important step towards building a national database of personal information (or more likely, augmenting one that already exists). Actually, I have found more on the right concerned about privacy, government surveillance, etc, than on the left because this concern naturally meshes with the right's "small federal government" stance.
Remember how Social Security numbers were "just for Social Security -- not any kind of personal identifier"?
But perhaps the left, which has just as much ability to be hypocritical as the right, will see the light starting...oh, say, 12pm on January 20.
Agreed that there is a spectrum of second amendment supporters even amongst my acquaintances. "What should be do about Snowden?"is a conversation that can be fun to start over beers with mixed company.
if it doesn't ensure accountability to the people its not democracy. There is now enough evidence that democracy is not serving the people and is increasingly looking like posturing and tokenism every 4 or 5 years while vested and special interests lobby everyday and capture the regulatory framework to further their interests. It has all the underpinnings of a ruling class.
Inspite of the Snowden revelations nothing has changed, no one is punished and folks like Clapper lie and get promoted. Obama may posture differently but he is the biggest supporter of security services and given his behavior against Syria and Russia an unrepentant warmonger.
Bankers tank the economy and are rewarded with bailouts in a country that worships capitalism and hates unearned benefits. And they get away lightly with attorney generals in one state after another unwilling to prosecute and more keen on fines which do not ensure any kind of proportional accountability.
This is not democracy as we understand it. 4 or 5 years is too long and there must be multiple processes along the way to ensure things are on track. Things like lobbying, revolving doors, political corruption and abuse of power, corporate interests over public interest and critical decisions around fundamental rights and war must be strongly secured with laws and processes that work.
Petition only work if there is actual political power behind them.
There is at least one country that allows petitions to force a referendum on any law. Switzerland.
Naturally such a system develops to a consensus democracy. The reason beeing that a group that is big enough can force a referendum on any law that is passed. So the laws that are passed are usually some sort of consensus.
I would love to see some data on this. A lot of times people tell me that one way to solve social issues to get start some type of activism (march to the capital, start a rally in your town, etc). However, I haven't seen much data on the effectiveness of those things.
I would guess actually marching or attending a rally is much more effective than online petitions, because it shows people are already across the mobilization threshold.
Implicit in a march at the capital is "This many people could be here with torches and guns". By contrast, people clicking online aren't very active.
I had the same thought a few weeks ago (specifically about Change.org petitions). Here is a page I found that shows petitions that achieved some action: https://www.change.org/victories
The effect of an attack like 9/11 is primarily nationalistic outrage, and a subsequent power-grab by whichever parties or individuals conduct their politics accordingly. Now ask yourself, which parties and/or individuals in American politics stand to benefit most from being handed a Mount-Everest-sized pile of nationalistic outrage, should another 9/11 level event occur? How much power would they try to grab? What would be the outcome for the US, and the world for that matter? Obama isn't acting on ideals, he's choosing a path in an ugly world.
Is there anyone left who actually believes that it's Obama who makes these decisions?
I find it amazing that nobody looks at Obama's insipid presidency as the main explanation for Trump's election. When Trump says "Russia? Everybody spies on us!", that resonates with people because they know it is the truth and no other politician says it so openly and so bluntly.
Everybody in this thread should explain why they think what they are saying. I don't really know much about what Obama did or did not, but I'm not saying anyone providing me that information, just a bunch of people taking about their opinions. So I'd really appreciate if people could share their reasons for them.
from what I understand intelligence agencies in some other countries work in this fashion: one agency does the "data gathering" and provides other agencies with information upon request. in theory, this means fewer agencies snooping in your private life and that there is some sort of gate keeper that limits circulation of data based on need-to-know.
so back to my not sarcastic questions: is this a good or bad thing?
I don't know but this sounds scary to me, we just went from threats to national security to any crime.
However—and this is especially troubling—“if analysts stumble across evidence that an American has committed any crime, they will send it to the Justice Department,” the Times wrote. So information that was collected without a warrant—or indeed any involvement by a court at all—for foreign intelligence purposes with little to no privacy protections, can be accessed raw and unfiltered by domestic law enforcement agencies to prosecute Americans with no involvement in threats to national security."
This is a horrible thing for privacy but would information collected this way even be admissible in court? They could use it to inform investigations but I think they would have a very hard time trying to use this information to prosecute.
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Too bad there isn't a focus on expanding the openness of how many rights are being violated by surveillance.
I can understand why Obama is so pro surveillance.
When you belong to the minority spectrum that has already made it past the point where surveillance will only help.
I just wonder what minority is going to face more of a struggle to get to the point where Obama's minority now is in history.
Sweet, Thanks Obama.