Here's the full thread - http://quote.ms/2bkM2HW
Snowden: Hack of an NSA server is not unprecedented, publication of the take is
171–180 of 240 posts
Re: Snowden: Hack of an NSA server is not unprecedented, publication of the take is
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because it is a democracy. When you democratically elect representatives, it's a democracy. If you elect incompetent, or corrupt, or evil representatives, it's still a democracy.
While I see what you are saying, the OP to your post has it correct. You can say a republic is a bastardized form of democracy, but the reverse is not true. You can look at one of the few true democracies that has ever existed as an example - ancient Greece. Every citizen[1] could vote and put forward changes to laws or even create new laws (obviously with a majority vote). [1] A citizen was considered to be any pers…
I think you're thinking of the Athenian democracy, because Greece wasn't politically unified at that time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_democracy
I doubt that the Athenians had the present-day concept of "white people". Wikipedia says that citizens "had to be descended from citizens", so maybe at least in a certain era nobody known to be descended from people coming from outside of Athens could be a citizen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_democracy#Citizenship...
Edit: looking at one of the references, it seems that there was a year when explicit citizenship lists were drawn up based on all free men who lived in Athens (maybe with some kind of ethnic exclusion at that time too?). From then on until Pericles, children could be added to the list if their fathers were on the list. After Pericles, children could be added to the list if their mothers and fathers were on the list.
Re: Snowden: Hack of an NSA server is not unprecedented, publication of the take is
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But everyone just accepts that's the way it is and carries on with life because "at least it's not North Korea." They aren't Brazil either, or even most places in Europe. Were I an US citizen, I'd be very wary of people trying to fix Democracy¹. They have a pretty good quality of life, and any attempted change can go very badly very easily - the more "let's fix things" is the change, the easier it could go badly. 1…
Part of the question is the basic mechanics of democracy: does everyone actually get a vote, and does the count accurately reflect votes cast? "Fixing" that should be less controversial than it is. Far too many voting machines are still insecure, and one of the candidates is pre-accusing the other of fixing the election.
But it is not whether it should be fixed that is controversial. It is how you fix it. And there's plenty of danger with most fixing procedures.
And yes, there's also some propaganda for not fixing it at all. That's what support voting machines (at least here). But, again, how do you fix the problem that makes propaganda viable?
For the specific problem of voting machines, candidates accusing others may be the best avenue for moving people in the correct direction.
Re: Snowden: Hack of an NSA server is not unprecedented, publication of the take is
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you for summarizing that. As others have commented, I wish Snowden would simply blog about this sort of thing. Twitter is frustrating to digest for any insightful commentary that is on the longer side.
if we're lucky, twitter will do what they did with the hashtag and other things when they realised their users needs were 'inventing' new features. The 1/n 2/n n/n tweets is a huge indicator of a feature need. Of course, that's going to dilute their original value proposition of short direct messages.
I've said it before: Amazing that it was Instagram that copied the idea of Snapchat stories.
Facebook has a complete "Post" blogging mechanism.
Twitter is soon going to stop counting urls in the 140 characters.
One of these things is not like the others...
Re: Snowden: Hack of an NSA server is not unprecedented, publication of the take is
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
The law of the land is the constitution. A Republic is a land of laws. A democracy is a land of majority rule. Democracy is a tyranny of majority. The founders did NOT want a democracy.
> A Republic is a land of laws. A republic is a land where political authority isn't formally heritable personal property (e.g., basically a not-monarchy), a republic can also (like the US) be a representative democracy. It can also be an authoritarian dictatorship. It can also be a direct democracy.
A republic bound by a constitution cannot be a democracy of any sort.
The laws bind it.
I suppose since the constitution is completely ignored you might have valid points.
Re: Snowden: Hack of an NSA server is not unprecedented, publication of the take is
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A Republic is a land of laws. A republic is a land where political authority isn't formally heritable personal property (e.g., basically a not-monarchy), a republic can also (like the US) be a representative democracy. It can also be an authoritarian dictatorship. It can also be a direct democracy.
A republic bound by a constitution cannot be a democracy of any sort. The laws bind it. I suppose since the constitution is completely ignored you might have valid points.
> A republic bound by a constitution cannot be a democracy of any sort.
You clearly are using "democracy" in a very peculiar sense. If you narrowly define "democracy" as "lawless mob rule", then your statement is true, but that's not what the word democracy is generally used to mean when discussing political systems.
Re: Snowden: Hack of an NSA server is not unprecedented, publication of the take is
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But everyone just accepts that's the way it is and carries on with life because "at least it's not North Korea." They aren't Brazil either, or even most places in Europe. Were I an US citizen, I'd be very wary of people trying to fix Democracy¹. They have a pretty good quality of life, and any attempted change can go very badly very easily - the more "let's fix things" is the change, the easier it could go badly. 1…
Part of the question is the basic mechanics of democracy: does everyone actually get a vote, and does the count accurately reflect votes cast? "Fixing" that should be less controversial than it is. Far too many voting machines are still insecure, and one of the candidates is pre-accusing the other of fixing the election.
>Far too many voting machines are still insecure
And they always will be. It's impossible to have a secure voting machine.
Re: Snowden: Hack of an NSA server is not unprecedented, publication of the take is
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
Twitter started out as an SMS repeater. SMS has for ages, thanks to Nokia, had the capability of merging multiple messages into a single large one. Twitter could just make use of this and save themselves a whole lot of grief.
Let's be serious. No one reads twitter over sms anymore. This isn't at all the reason twitter continues to limit to 140 characters. (Before some smartass replies "I do read over sms", well even without sms merging, twitter could still split a tweet into multiple sms. 99.9999% of their userbase wouldn't care.)
No one read twitter over sms in the first place. It was a quirk of a pivot.
Re: Snowden: Hack of an NSA server is not unprecedented, publication of the take is
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of these countries (or regions) never took up capitalism, free markets, and liberalism. Being partners on either side of a proxy war obviously didn't help.
The classic example of a generally stable and democratic country being overthrown into illiberalism and mass murder by the US is Chile, which was missing from that list.
Would not call 73's chile stable, unless you consider current venezuela a stable country which i do not.
Re: Snowden: Hack of an NSA server is not unprecedented, publication of the take is
#180in the early nineties all this security stuff was about writing mostly harmless MS/DOS viruses. Who would have imaged that this business was going to get politicized to such a degree - that could only happen once all these machines got onto the net. Now its all as paranoid as 'Mother Night' by Vonnegut.