Chomsky: spying does not protect you • Hacker News Board

Re: Chomsky: spying does not protect you

#61

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jun 24, 2013, 2:04 AM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #60

rbanffy wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They still have plenty of other targets. As long as they are internal affairs, it's their problem. If the problems cross borders, there are international organizations with proper authority do deal with them. When one country decides to make a military intervention, the international bodies are further weakened.

What international police force with proper authority are you talking about? NATO? The UN? I think most of the world is actually against a world-wide police force with any real authority.

[deleted]

Re: Chomsky: spying does not protect you

#62

Post by seanmcdirmid » Mon, Jun 24, 2013, 2:11 AM UTC

sneak wrote: post #52

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There needs to be more good faith from both sides; until then it will be quite a mess. As a stable functioning democracy, the Israeli people really should decide to stop the settlements even though that won't bring about peace: it does them no real good while merely agitating an already volatile situation. The Palestinians (including Gaza and Hezbollah) should also develop their government into something not dysfunct…

> We can argue all day if its worse for civilians to be killed by drones or the Taliban, but they are still dead. Except in one situation it's not "us" killing them. Or our tax dollars paying for the flying killer robots that do the job.

The killer robots are inevitable, at least they are an improvement on the more imprecise F-22 airstrikes (we now have precision to make real mistakes, before mistakes were inevitable because we lacked precision). On the other hand, we are just a few steps away from SkyNet.

But the issue is should we be in Pakistan, Afghanistan, or Iraq at all, or just let those countries go to hell by themselves? Civilians die either way given that peace is elusive. If you visit these countries, perhaps your perspectives shifts from "we should get out" to "we should at least try and do something!" Morality goes both ways.

Re: Chomsky: spying does not protect you

#63

Post by ars » Mon, Jun 24, 2013, 2:14 AM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #59

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would only demotivate terrorists against us. They still have plenty of other targets. I don't see how isolationism for the states will actually make the world better. We tried it before, it didn't work.

> They still have plenty of other targets. As long as they are internal affairs, it's their problem. If the problems cross borders, there are international organizations with proper authority do deal with them. When one country decides to make a military intervention, the international bodies are further weakened.

> international organizations with proper authority do deal with them.

Are you kidding? The UN has no authority unless given to it by the country involved, which of course they won't. (Example: Syria and chemical weapons.)

Plus the UN lost most of it's moral authority by allowing jokes like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Commission_on_Hu... to exist for years.

It's cute how they tried to fix it by starting a new council to replace it (instead of simply fixing it) - and the new council appears to be "the UN council to criticize Israel and ignore everyone else".

The UN is a joke. They are not weakened by country's military intervention, they are weakened because they have no legitimacy in anyone's eyes because of their own policies.

Re: Chomsky: spying does not protect you

#64

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jun 24, 2013, 2:29 AM UTC

danenania wrote: post #19

glurgh wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's about as practical as asking people to kindly stop flying planes into buildings or blowing up buildings with day-care centers in them.

It may sound crazy to you, but yes you do actually stand a greater chance of making peace with enemies and therefore reducing attacks from them if you stop shooting at them and bombing them and ask them kindly why they are flying planes into your buildings and then make a good faith effort to address those issues.

[deleted]

Re: Chomsky: spying does not protect you

#65

Post by foxylad » Mon, Jun 24, 2013, 2:30 AM UTC

glurgh wrote: post #26

danenania wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may sound crazy to you, but yes you do actually stand a greater chance of making peace with enemies and therefore reducing attacks from them if you stop shooting at them and bombing them and ask them kindly why they are flying planes into your buildings and then make a good faith effort to address those issues.

You're right, it sounds completely crazy to me. Nobody really bombed or shot Timothy McVeigh. Or the RAF. Or the Brigate Rosse. They did all their shooting and bombing all by themselves, at the cost of hundreds upon hundreds of innocent lives. It's not that the questions of causes or morality of our own actions are illegitimate - they aren't. The idea that we're going to practically stop amoral nutjobs by just being…

I think the point is that you can't stop the amoral nutjobs (awesome term BTW!) by killing them (and their family and friends) either, because that just embitters another generation. Your examples actually illustrate this perfectly - Timothy McVeigh justified his murdering in revenge for the murdering done at Waco; and both the RAF and Brigate Rosse were driven partly by the injustice of former Nazis (those nutjobs really took their amorality seriously!) returning to power. I accept that there are psychopaths who murder for no reason, but luckily for our species they are very rare. All the killing discussed above was triggered by severe injustice including murder - revenge. Our civilised societies are practically defined by their rejection of revenge as a reason for anything, replacing it with either rehabilitation or prevention. "An eye for an eye" is the mark of a primitive society (or person) that doesn't understand positive feedback loops.

Re: Chomsky: spying does not protect you

#66

Post by Tloewald » Mon, Jun 24, 2013, 2:53 AM UTC

danenania wrote: post #51

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There needs to be more good faith from both sides; until then it will be quite a mess. As a stable functioning democracy, the Israeli people really should decide to stop the settlements even though that won't bring about peace: it does them no real good while merely agitating an already volatile situation. The Palestinians (including Gaza and Hezbollah) should also develop their government into something not dysfunct…

The US can't prevent regional conflicts. Getting involved just helps them to spiral out of control and simultaneously puts America's own neck on the line. If there were actually a situation where a so-called adversary presented a legitimate threat to the US if left alone, it might be a different debate, but that hasn't been the case for many years. None of the states that the US is currently fighting in could hope to…

The US could cut its military budget by more than half and not have to even become less offensive. It might need to stop building weapon systems to win a war against the Soviet Union though.

Setting aside the tanks that are built solely to keep congressmen in office, consider US carrier groups — around which the entire US surface fleet is built — it's an open scandal that military exercises with allies frequently result in US carriers being taken out by diesel subs and cruise missiles, but rather than realize that the carrier group is now just as obsolete as the battleship flotilla, the rules of the game get changed. It's like the Japanese planning for Midway all over again (where naval cadets did exactly what the US did and annihilated the Japanese forces so they changed the rules and ran the simulation again).

Re: Chomsky: spying does not protect you

#67

Post by olalonde » Mon, Jun 24, 2013, 2:53 AM UTC

discostrings wrote: post #48

joelrunyon wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is copy/paste the same exact response from the top thread on reddit[1] Been seeing this a lot around here lately...Could be the same user, but I've seen it happening enough that I bet it's not. [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1gxehl/chomsky_sp...

It looks like the reddit user "kaax" is taking insightful posts from HN and posting them on reddit [for karma?]. See the Bitcoin comments at http://www.reddit.com/user/kaax and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5929622 .

Might want to post this on http://www.reddit.com/r/karmaconspiracy.

Re: Chomsky: spying does not protect you

#68

Post by olalonde » Mon, Jun 24, 2013, 3:02 AM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #40

patrickaljord wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> stop supporting the abusive policies of Israel Really? You had to drag Israel into that? You're aware that the only "abuse" Arabs are actually angry about is the fact that Israel exists at all? I'm an Arab so let me tell you, any stupidity that is committed in the West Bank is overblown by Arabs to delegitimate Israel which is part of Arabs quest to get rid of Israel altogether. They consider the whole of Israel to…

There needs to be more good faith from both sides; until then it will be quite a mess. As a stable functioning democracy, the Israeli people really should decide to stop the settlements even though that won't bring about peace: it does them no real good while merely agitating an already volatile situation. The Palestinians (including Gaza and Hezbollah) should also develop their government into something not dysfunct…

> Isolationism will only make things worse.

You are misusing "isolationism" here. The word you are looking for is "non-interventionism". What OP was suggesting was that the US should "stop supporting the abusive policies of Israel", not stop all trade, travel, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolationism

Re: Chomsky: spying does not protect you

#69

Post by PavlovsCat » Mon, Jun 24, 2013, 3:06 AM UTC

MarkMc wrote: post #55

abalone wrote: post #13

Favorite quote: "Obama is running the biggest terrorist operation that exists maybe in history." "Suppose you are walking down the street and you don't know whether two minutes from now the guy across the street and everything around him is going to be blown away by a sudden explosion run by somebody a couple thousand miles away. You're terrorized. And in fact villages, regions, countries are terrorized by these [dro…

OK, I can understand Chomsky's argument that drone strikes should be classed as a terrorist operations. But the 'biggest in history'? What about the fire-bombing of Tokyo, the rape of Nankin or the genocide of Cambodia?

"Biggest operation" can mean many things.

Just consider the time spent on TV, the time by pundits spent rationalizing it, the time spent in secret discussions with allies, the INCREDIBLY HUGE budgets, the vast network of stationed weapons and personel, the vast network of snoops, the ripple effect it had and has on authoritative regimes all over the world ("living in a post-9/11 world" you say? cut me a piece of that!), and the vulture corporations getting in on all that. And then there is the fact that with the current trajectory it will go on forever, as we've been proudly been told from day one.

Though I wouldn't call that "Obama's campaign", he did expand it, and he is currently responsible for it continuing while he wards of clouds that could rain on the parade.

Re: Chomsky: spying does not protect you

#70

Post by rdtsc » Mon, Jun 24, 2013, 3:14 AM UTC

beloch wrote: post #38

If you're looking for a simple way to reduce support for the Taliban and start bringing stability to Pakistan and Afghanistan, look no further than grounding the drones. Vietnam taught U.S. strategists that wars of attrition simply don't work. You'll never kill all of the enemy because every attack creates more enemies than it destroys. In this sense, drone attacks do exactly the opposite of what they're supposed to…

> U.S. drones do more for General Atomics than they do for U.S. citizens!

Understandably nobody wants to think their own country, that they have been taught to love and idolize, would deliberately target and kill goat herders without too much evidence. "Well of course these are all accidents" everyone replies with a unified voice. But are they? How do we know? There is no transcript, court record or transparency in the process.

I believe there is not a single shred of _written down_ evidence that shows targeting of innocent civilians to be taking place. But large bureaucratic systems always evolve hidden channels and vocabulary (using double meaning words) to exactly indicate what is do be done while also allowing for plausible deniability.

(For example think about at-will employment states and racial or sexual discrimination. If anyone can be fired for any reason any time, but oh, one cannot discriminate, companies evolve language such as "personality fit", "restructuring", "not a team player" to indicate internally what they mean when they want to fire someone whose race they don't like).

I believe there is such a language / channel (hell, there maybe even open discussions, wouldn't be surprised) between contractors like drone builders, NSA, CIA and other government agencies that signal and encourage targeting of civilians. Why? Because it is simply too profitable. Every new terrorist cell, every IED, every phone call captured that mentions "revenge", "jihad" or Arabic version of "the motherfuckers killed my 13 year son when he was out with the goats in the mountain" is linked to money in the bank for everyone involved -- drone manufacturers, drone maintainers, logistics, all the hire-ups, government departments, pilots. Everyone in the chain gets paid the more severe and persistent the threat gets.