101–110 of 232 posts
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A direct democracy would probably be even more shortsighted than today's flawed system. It would almost certainly be hell on earth. No, the answer is NOT direct democracy. For samples of what your average fellow human thinks about the world and whether you think it's a good idea to entrust them with governance, please search a random keyword on Twitter and see what you find. It will not be pretty.
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This guy is nothing more than an extremist. Ask him about his prison system and I'm sure he'll parrot how privatized prisons are the solution to our woes. Alas, they aren't. Be weary of someone trying to tell you that if we just did X everything would be so much better.
There's a reason I described myself as a "true seeker". "No theory, no ready-made system, no book that has ever been written will save the world. I cleave to no system. I am a true seeker." - Mikhail Bakunin You're overestimating my risk for memetic infection and underestimating how much prior exposure I may have had to this subject. I often ask people for examples or book recommendations to learn more about them as…
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I hope you'll be downvoted to hell. HN should be about constructive criticism. We're all intelligent people, we can all tear down anything we put our mind at, but that doesn't mean that we should, or we wouldn't leave our house every day. I know I'm a cynic and it's a bad habit I'm trying to change, maybe you should try too.
Do you imagine your comment constructive?
This is something real, tangible, and valuable that we can all actually do. All of this month I have felt powerless. This is something within everyone's power to do, and it can definitely help start the ball rolling back the way it came. It is pretty unfortunate that there is such a short window of time in which this information can be disseminated. I can imagine if there were a bit more time, this could really sprea…
I disagree, it is not something real or tangible. I'm all for defunding NSA, but it's not like a regular business which you can boycott by not giving them money. You have to go and ask permission from the government to not give the money (which they previously extracted from you by force for the "good of society") to some of the government agencies. It's pretty much like going to NSA itself and ask them to defund the…
> 2. Protect yourself against the police and the military who will try to extract them by force (possibly by having crowdfunded guards).
> 3. Switch from using US Dollar as most of the money government generates comes from inflation (gov sells "bonds" that it will never repay in exchange for new money). Since all national currencies are inflationary and controlled by similar institutions all over the world, only Bitcoin is a good alternative. Or gold, if we can protect the vaults properly and build trust in a company that keeps it (but history shows it doesn't work).
> 4. Pay only what you think is fair and where you think it's fair. E.g. if you like social security, pay there directly as much as you want.
So the solution of breaking free from the NSA and problems of US gov't is to isolate yourself and recreate the exact same systems in miniature?
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Well now, I live in the UK. We don't have a written constitution, so the Powers That Be don't have to hack the legal system in quite the same way as as they do in the US (secret courts, secret injunctions, requirements for industry leaders to deny activity &c). However, we have absolutely no oversight and no way to gain oversight of the agencies that purport to be acting for our protection. It is difficult even to fi…
Saying you have absolutely no oversight in the UK is not true. I recently read David Omand's "Securing the State" which is the most informative book I have found on how to integrate secret intelligence into a democratic society. Most of the analysis in the book focuses on the UK system as he is a longtime member of the UK intelligence community. There is a detailed discussion of how to meet the challenges of keeping…
I shall add that to the summer reading list. I'm still dubious about how much accountability there actually is. For instance, the quote below is from a (generally favourable) Amazon review of the book referenced
"The book is a bit weak in the realm of intelligence collection, but this is because this is a very sensitive area and Sir David was clearly trying to avoid stepping on toes."
We are good at 'sensitive areas' in the UK.
"...the mushrooming growth of myriad, largely redundant secret intelligence groups..."
I suspect we have some of those as well but as projects/units within the main agencies.
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Your post accomplishes nothing except to persuade people to give up the fight for civil liberties. You propose no solution or do you give any additional insight into developing a solution. Regardless of your actual intentions, you might as well be performing psychological propaganda. It's not helpful.
No offence is taken. I've been reading and studying Intelligence/espionage for a long time. Not the fancy James Bond stuff, just the boring average, mundane stuff of the past 100 years. I offer no solution because quite frankly, there isn't one. Unless you want to shut down the US military's and civilian intelligence gathering capabilities, it's not going to happen. There will always be reading your mail and listenin…
Considering how many Americans die of heart attacks, and how many in terrorist attacks, wouldn't giving your citizens an actual first-world health care system a much better use of these gigantic black budgets?
Despite the recent revelations having vindicated the world's tin-foil-hats, we still seem to collectively lack the stomach for darker conspiratorial notions. To be in step with reality, it may be important to build up a bit of tolerance. I'm not making any claims (because I just don't know), but I see absolutely no reason to assume that democratic process applies to these agencies. They may have gone rogue; they may have always been rogue. Their global network may be the actual, de-facto world government. Would it really surprise anyone at this point if a convincing leak exposed such notions? What would we do then?
Let's stop imagining that Law will take care of this problem so we can at least assume a proper direction for our efforts. Which is to say, let's dispense with some of our convenience and fashions and start writing software the right way -- the paranoid way.
To quote the eternal R. Buckminster Fuller:
"In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete."
I have a question. It's pretty much a safe bet that the NSA runs Open Source Software. You can't do anything on the internet these days without using FLOSS. I'm not an expert in software licenses but can't GNU, Linus, Mozilla and all other Open Source contributers revoke the NSA's license to use their software? Surely Open Source licenses, just like any other license, can be revoked?
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> remember that threats from the US are the only thing that prevents many countries from doing more horrible shit than they already do. You mean horrible shit like drone strikes that kill innocent civilians, illegally detaining "terrorists" and torturing them, spying on the whole world, and commanding other countries to ground a president's plane? Is that the kind of shit "they" already do?
LOL Fools You know that the CIA run most of the drugs in and out of the great US. You know that they have massive surplus cash? Like so big they don't really know what to do with it These 'government' bodies can and will exist without government. This is how they fund most if not all their black ops, that way nothing needs to be on the books. if we stopped public money, I doubt it would even make a dent
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6089979
I want so suggest however, that you follow my lead in taking a sternly honest but less antagonistic approach to the topic. This reality implies a complete breakdown of democracy, which is terrifying. And while it may be true, we won't get far calling each other "fools", even if the effort is impotent.
Still, let me reiterate that I'm very glad you said it.