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Obama’s Path From Critic to Overseer of Spying

nytimes.com

21–30 of 199 posts

Re: Obama’s Path From Critic to Overseer of Spying

#21
post #7

What is honestly the point of even concerning ones self with politics anymore? There has been nobody I've talked to in real life that has their head in the game completely, who knows what they are talking about, myself included. Nothing is going to change, it's a big boys club, debating it, writing about it, all fruitless.

This seems like a really sad and poor way to concern yourself with how our society governs itself.

Do you truly believe that you as an individual can make any difference at all? And do you truly believe that it is in fact the society that governs itself?

Re: Obama’s Path From Critic to Overseer of Spying

#22
post #7

What is honestly the point of even concerning ones self with politics anymore? There has been nobody I've talked to in real life that has their head in the game completely, who knows what they are talking about, myself included. Nothing is going to change, it's a big boys club, debating it, writing about it, all fruitless.

This seems like a really sad and poor way to concern yourself with how our society governs itself.

Roughly 125 million people voted in the last presidential election. Had I been among them, I'd therefore have had roughly 1/125,000,000 of a say in who gained the office. Perhaps, to a homeopath, such a marvelous dilution of political power might leave something meaningful in its wake. Not being a homeopath myself, I find it somewhat less than compelling.

I fail to see how resignation in the face of inevitable powerlessness can be anything other than healthy. "How our society governs itself" is a subject over which very few people have, or might gain, any sort of influence; not being one of those people, and having neither desire nor reasonable prospect of joining their ranks, the profligate expenditure of mental and physical effort, to say nothing of precious and irreplaceable time, to pursue the meaningless self-appellation of "good citizenship", strikes me as falling well within the realm of foolishness.

Local politics, depending on where one happens to live, may well present a more worthwhile prospect. In my own case, and being that I live in Baltimore -- a city whose corruption is almost as famous as it is nigh-boundless -- I see little more reason to involve myself on the local level than on the national. Those of a temperament for politics, and who find themselves living in places where local politics are other than an Augean stable of gerrymandering and nest-feathering, might be well advised to involve themselves.

Re: Obama’s Path From Critic to Overseer of Spying

#23
post #3

The headline might as well be a more Onionesque "After gaining power, politician turns out not to actually hold the strongly principled views he expressed while campaigning". I'd be surprised if Obama holds any of the views he expressed during his campaign. A campaign is a marketing effort intended to install a team of people in power. Generally speaking, the vast majority of power holders agree that aggressive spyin…

The portion of the status quo most related to spying is "Safe and Peaceful", so not sure I blame him.

Re: Obama’s Path From Critic to Overseer of Spying

#24
Just seems like a worse version of http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/12/16/131216fa_fact_...

By the way if your getting most of your updates on this subject from HN, you're most likely out of the loop. Since a lot of the insightful content doesn't make it. IIRC there's even a penalty on this subject on HN.

Re: Obama’s Path From Critic to Overseer of Spying

#25
post #16
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" A campaign is a marketing effort intended to install a team of people in power. " You've just described the current crisis of representational democracy.

Any campaign will be a marketing effort in any context. The crisis is that the marketing effort is the only data point that most of the voting population considers prior to the vote. Without an informed population there is no incentive for honest campaigns.

You can turn that argument around just as easily; without honest campaigns, there is no incentive for an informed population, because there is no meaningful chance for popular support to elevate a candidate running an honest campaign to the same heights attained by those to whom all weapons are friends.

Re: Obama’s Path From Critic to Overseer of Spying

#26
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a really sad and poor way to concern yourself with how our society governs itself.

There's just no way to do it from the bottom. All these protests, all this (sl)activism, it doesn't do anything. You either need to dedicate your life to politics and get into the club and start working from the inside, and pray some holy fucking deity that there are others like you, or nothing will change. Maybe severe violent revolt but I literally don't ever see that happening. There isn't enough time in the day t…

> Maybe severe violent revolt but I literally don't ever see that happening.

I always find this sentiment (or various forms of "wiping the slate clean") to be quite amusing. It is historically more likely for a society to be less free after violent revolution than the opposite. Radicals who believe in a cause strongly enough to engage in revolution also tend to be ideologues who, once in power, want to remake society in the mold of their own viewpoint.

The historically successful revolutions have been conservative ones. For example, the Glorious Revolution in which Parliament asserted its supremacy over the King of England. In another example, modern democratic Spain arose with the restoration of the monarchy!

Re: Obama’s Path From Critic to Overseer of Spying

#27
“He has more information than he did then. And he trusts himself to use these powers more than he did the Bush administration,” said the former Obama aide

Okay, so given the trend of these powers is to increase, and he's not going to be in power after 2016, does he trust the next guy with even more powers, or the guy after that with even more than that?

When civil liberties advocates visited to press him to do more to reverse Mr. Bush’s policies, Mr. Obama pushed back. “He reminded me that he had a different role to play, that he was commander in chief and that he needed to protect the American people,”

The role of President isn't to follow through on the platform you were elected on?

Re: Obama’s Path From Critic to Overseer of Spying

#28
post #25
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any campaign will be a marketing effort in any context. The crisis is that the marketing effort is the only data point that most of the voting population considers prior to the vote. Without an informed population there is no incentive for honest campaigns.

You can turn that argument around just as easily; without honest campaigns, there is no incentive for an informed population, because there is no meaningful chance for popular support to elevate a candidate running an honest campaign to the same heights attained by those to whom all weapons are friends.

[deleted]

Re: Obama’s Path From Critic to Overseer of Spying

#29
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a really sad and poor way to concern yourself with how our society governs itself.

There's just no way to do it from the bottom. All these protests, all this (sl)activism, it doesn't do anything. You either need to dedicate your life to politics and get into the club and start working from the inside, and pray some holy fucking deity that there are others like you, or nothing will change. Maybe severe violent revolt but I literally don't ever see that happening. There isn't enough time in the day t…

> Maybe severe violent revolt but I literally don't ever see that happening.

Nor I, and God be thanked for it! The trouble with "severe violent revolt" is that it includes no guarantee that the people on the wrong end of the "severe violence" are the same ones whom you think should be. Indeed, there's not even a guarantee that the people on the wrong end of the "severe violence" won't include you. Escalation of commitment can be ugly enough as it applies to individuals and small groups; do you really want to see its effect on the national scale?

That said, you're not quite right to say "it doesn't do anything". Political activism, as it is currently conceived and undertaken in the United States, serves a useful social purpose as an in-group/out-group marker, and I gather that, given sufficient youth and sex appeal, it can be an excellent means of finding pleasant and willing bedmates. Either by itself would suffice as a reason for the young and energetic to involve themselves in what goes by the name of activism; both together make such involvement nigh irresistible.

Re: Obama’s Path From Critic to Overseer of Spying

#30
What's interesting is that the article suggests that Obama himself did not know extent of the NSA's activities. ("At the same time, aides said Mr. Obama was surprised to learn after leaks by Edward J. Snowden... just how far the surveillance had gone.")

If that's true, it seems to indicate that Obama is not an overseer at all.

Have our worst fears been confirmed? Is the NSA an unstoppable organization that reports to nobody except itself?

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