Earlier quoted context omitted.
> One difference here is that when the USG says "well it's all done according to law", that law was written and passed by an institution who at least nominally represents and is elected by the people. I don't know if the same can be said of the USSR. The USSR was also nominally run under laws, which were notionally written and formally adopted by an institution which at least nominally represented and was elected by…
I am asking this out of genuine interest and lack of knowledge - was there a representative legislative body in the USSR in the 1920s?
Edward Snowden: Saving Us from the United Stasi of America
131–140 of 157 posts
Re: Edward Snowden: Saving Us from the United Stasi of America
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
So what the Supreme Court says, goes? You have quite the romantic opinion of them. Maybe we should ask the Japanese Americans who were put into camps if they feel safe with the Supreme Court protecting us from the legislative and executive branches.
The WWII Japanese situation was a black mark on the history of the US. Apparently the Japanese Americans were exceptionally loyal to the US. The excuse was that we were at war, in particular with Japan. The fear was that Japanese in the US would work for Japan. We knew that putting all Japanese, at least those in the West, in camps was an ugly situation. And, when the war was over, the camps were emptied. In the camp…
What happens in war is different from what happens in peace.
First off, things don't "happen", people do them. Secondly, the actions of people determine peace or war, not the other way around. Thirdly, the "War On Terror" is a rhetorical device, and depending on the thickness of your skin, an exercise in hipocrisy or comedy.
all the terrorists, many tens of millions of radical Muslims
Wait, what???
what is going on in Gitmo is not really the US criminal legal system. It's a bad situation. But 9/11 was a bad situation
9/11 was a tragedy and a horrible crime, but what made it the bad situation you are referring to were the, how do I put this, nazi cunts who abused it for their ends. I also assume building 7 collapsed out of sheer sympathy with the whole situation being so bad? And of course, this logic applies to the attackers as well. Killing thousands of people wasn't ideal, but the situation was "bad", you know.
Re: Edward Snowden: Saving Us from the United Stasi of America
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the likelihood of of abuse of intercepted material by individual agents is probably worth emphasizing more than the remote possibility of America electing (and supporting) the Presidential candidate that wants to build death camps Frankly, if you think that in 10-15 years America is remotely likely to be introducing gulags and death camps, then NSA surveillance is the last thing you should be worrying about;…
>I think the likelihood of of abuse of intercepted material by individual agents is probably worth emphasizing more than the remote possibility of America electing (and supporting) the Presidential candidate that wants to build death camps The possibility for individual abuse is certainly worth emphasizing, but the risk of systemic corruption is not to be dismissed. People blame Hitler and Stalin individually, but th…
Yeah. That people can now be put in prison forever on tax payer money, instead of "having" to find cheap ways to kill them, is not exactly progress. Sure, it's still "better", but it's nowhere near good.
Things change. We should measure the poor and powerless of today against the rich and powerful of today, not against the poor and powerless of yesterday.
Re: Edward Snowden: Saving Us from the United Stasi of America
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not so sure. Europeans stopped conquering and colonizing in favor of economic colonialism, which is just as bad perhaps, but now with a veneer of credibility. They are just doing business. Nevermind that the despot du jour was installed by the CIA. Similarly we can talk about NSA overreaches all we want, as opposed to the old way of actually silencing the dissent. Great, except everyone is just talking, they are…
In East Germany, this thread would likely have led to our arrest.
In a free country on the other hands, every last (healthy adult) citizen would be able to think without employing sophistry, and to see woods despite the trees.
Re: Edward Snowden: Saving Us from the United Stasi of America
#135For once I'll avoid Godwin's law and link instead to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_58 > The article was used for the imprisonment and execution of many prominent people, as well as multitudes of nonnotable innocents. (...) Article 58 of the Russian SFSR Penal Code was put in force on 25 February 1927 to arrest those suspected of counter-revolutionary activities. So the point is that even in Soviet Russia…
> I'd say there's nothing that the minority can do (if it matters I'm not from the US) No, not at all. The situation is still all well within the US Constitution in the sense of want people "can do". In particular, as I will outline, there is a very fast, simple solution well within what "the minority can do". Background: In the US Federal Government, there are three branches, executive (e.g., headed by the president…
I'm afraid your optimism is based on fairly tales, not actual historical precedent.
Laws, Supreme Court and so on mean nothing. They who hold the force make the rules. The constitution is nothing more than a security blanket that people can hold onto and pretend it's protecting them from something. In reality, the government will do what they want to do and (possibly, if they care to) justify it later with some "interpretation" of the law.
Re: Edward Snowden: Saving Us from the United Stasi of America
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So, the Supreme Court will let claims of 'secrecy' trash the Constitution? They already have for decades, starting with United States v. Reynolds . That ship has well and truly sailed.
Then the court should revisit the case. They can do that, too.
Why would they? What do they care?
Re: Edward Snowden: Saving Us from the United Stasi of America
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
So what the Supreme Court says, goes? You have quite the romantic opinion of them. Maybe we should ask the Japanese Americans who were put into camps if they feel safe with the Supreme Court protecting us from the legislative and executive branches.
The WWII Japanese situation was a black mark on the history of the US. Apparently the Japanese Americans were exceptionally loyal to the US. The excuse was that we were at war, in particular with Japan. The fear was that Japanese in the US would work for Japan. We knew that putting all Japanese, at least those in the West, in camps was an ugly situation. And, when the war was over, the camps were emptied. In the camp…
All your posts in this thread just make you sound utterly delusional. You're presented with clear cases that prove your optimistic beliefs to be little more than prose from a romance novel and you wave it away with "was a black mark on the history of the US.". So was every other time they've ignored their own laws in the past and every time they will continue to do so in the future.
Re: Edward Snowden: Saving Us from the United Stasi of America
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Godwin's Law, or people's interpretation of it, has a lot to answer for. It's perfectly acceptable to make comparisons to the Nazis if it's relevant to where a conversation is at, at a particular moment. Not only is acceptable, it should also be encouraged. The most valuable thing to emerge from World War Two was the anti-blueprint for society. Let's not make this taboo merely for the sake of falling foul of some int…
The problem is that references to the Nazis or Soviets are very hard to get right without tripping over the slippery slope argument. Hitler was not only a vegetarian, he was a health fanatic, and there's evidence that it informed his obsession with purifying the race. That's doesn't make any number of locavore glutenfree vegan hipsters a step towards nazism. Hitler "militarized" society, and emphasized such organisat…
Can you name a place with that level of surveillance that turned out good for anyone? Because I can point to a lot of vegans there are more obsessed than Hitler was and didn't gas a single Jew.
Re: Edward Snowden: Saving Us from the United Stasi of America
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Godwin's Law, or people's interpretation of it, has a lot to answer for. It's perfectly acceptable to make comparisons to the Nazis if it's relevant to where a conversation is at, at a particular moment. Not only is acceptable, it should also be encouraged. The most valuable thing to emerge from World War Two was the anti-blueprint for society. Let's not make this taboo merely for the sake of falling foul of some int…
Absolutely. Godwin's Law is the sort of thing Hitler would have invented.
A meta-invocation of Godwin's law. I don't believe I've seen that done yet, kudos to you.
Re: Edward Snowden: Saving Us from the United Stasi of America
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the key is that we don't have Article 58. Per the quote in the op-ed, the NSA has had the ability to make America a tyrrany since 1975 and it hasn't done so. None of history's police states required digital surveillance. What they required was, you know, tyranny. We don't have any right now. I look at this purely as a question of privacy and due process.
When I was a kid, the Soviet Union was declared bad _because_ it did these things. So it's hard for some of us to shift from a mindset that it was bad on its face as proven by the Soviet Union, to that it's only bad if it's done by a bad state. I mean, right or wrong, this is the conditioning society gave us at the time. I happen to think it was right. I don't really care about their reasons, no legitimate process op…
I agree that they don't have the right to do this, I just don't think it amounts to tyranny. The Soviet Union was a police state because the national security apparatus was used not just for national security, but also for mercilessly squashing political dissent. A policy enforced with an iron fist by unelected oligarchs.
As an analogy, consider how Americans view gun ownership in relation to gun crime as opposed how Europeans might view it. Crime is the telltale of a criminal, not having a gun.