Edward Snowden: Saving Us from the United Stasi of America

Post by sneak » Thu, Jun 20, 2013, 2:05 PM UTC

uptown wrote: post #9

This whole thing has reminded me how prescient the movie "Sneakers" was. "There's a war out there, old friend. A world war. And it's not about who's got the most bullets. It's about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think... it's all about the information!" "The world isn't run by weapons anymore, or energy, or money. It's run by little ones and zeroes, little bits of data. It's…

Post by mseebach » Thu, Jun 20, 2013, 2:11 PM UTC

jsmcgd wrote: post #16

paganel wrote: post #3

For 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…

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…

Post by brown9-2 » Thu, Jun 20, 2013, 2:26 PM UTC

paganel wrote: post #3

For 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…

Post by rmc » Thu, Jun 20, 2013, 2:28 PM UTC

grey-area wrote: post #11

alan_cx wrote: post #5

What I wonder is at what point words like stasi become reasonable or acceptable. OK, I don't like what is happening, and almost day by day thing happen that I feel are pushing the west, led by the US, more and more towards something highly controlled and not in any way free. Liberty is slowly being eroded, and I genuinely feel that is a true statement objectively. Right now, words like stasi, fascist, etc are an exag…

The Stasi were the secret police for Eastern Germany, nothing to do with the Nazis as far as I know. The surveillance undertaken by the Stasi wasn't really as extensive as (for example) collecting all phone records for the entire country, so in some ways the US has surpassed the Stasi in surveillance, while in others obviously it's nowhere near the same situation (e.g. in-person surveillance and recruiting ordinary c…

Post by gasull » Thu, Jun 20, 2013, 2:31 PM UTC

mseebach wrote: post #33

jsmcgd wrote: post #16

Earlier 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…