You Might Be An Extremist If...

[Smapti]

@Grumman

And of course you see this as a one way street, don’t you, Smapti? When the government goes to extreme lengths to hide its actions from oversight, that’s not evidence that they’re working against our best interests?

Sometimes it’s in our best interests that things be hidden.

Any decent government exists to be a slave.

The government is the people. Do we exist to be slaves?

It is not a person, and should not be afforded the right to privacy afforded to a person.

Government secrecy has nothing to do with personhood. (The government is a person, however, much in the same way that corporations are.)

It is granted extraordinary powers only to make it a better slave, not to advance the goals of a few corrupt employees.

I’m perfectly OK with public executions of corrupt employees. Your definition of “corrupt” seems to vary from mine, however.

[Grumman]

@Chihuahua

The Government has no right to privacy. Classified information is not “privacy,” it is security. We as voters and taxpayers have invested billions of dollars in intelligence collection resources because we realize those resources are important to our safety and security, and help our leaders make informed decisions (at least, they should). When a collection platform is compromised, the enemy can avoid it and YOU, taxpayer Joe, have squandered your own investment… not to mention placing people’s lives at risk.

Self-serving bullshit. The government does not only hide information when necessary to make it a better slave, but also to help it betray us. Secret legal memos are used as psychic paper - a way to convince idiots that the government is holding whatever document they imagine would justify their illegal actions. Crimes are classified to make it easier for government employees to avoid punishment for torturing prisoners and executing infants. Programs that attack the rights of the American people are classified so that their victims can be denied the legal right to object due to lack of standing.

I hate to be the one to point this out, but we live in a Representative government. We give our representatives the ability to make decisions that we believe will be in our best interest, and we hope that the democratic process allows us to pick the person who represents our interests the best. A part of this trust is that we hope our representatives will make wise decisions for us even when security dictates that we cannot and should not know the exact details of us. This is part of the unfortunate part and parcel of living with a representative government, but our system certainly represents our interests better than most of the autocrats and dictatorships in the world have done for their people.

We give our representatives the explicit power to oversee these programs, and the NSA has committed felonies to avoid that oversight. What do you say to that? How can you defend our representatives’ ability to make wise decisions for us while refusing to allow them to make informed decisions?

[Smapti]

@Grumman

Self-serving bullshit. The government does not only hide information when necessary to make it a better slave, but also to help it betray us.

In what way has the government “betrayed you” lately?

Crimes are classified to make it easier for government employees to avoid punishment for torturing prisoners and executing infants.

Cite for government employees “executing infants”?

We give our representatives the explicit power to oversee these programs, and the NSA has committed felonies to avoid that oversight. What do you say to that? How can you defend our representatives’ ability to make wise decisions for us while refusing to allow them to make informed decisions?

I say they can vote to disband the NSA if they really think it’s as dangerous and evil as you claim it is, and no amount of secret memos could stop them.

[CurtC]

@Smapti

And an ordinary member of the public couldn’t figure out every stop you made on your daily commute, or everywhere you used your debit card last weekend, without needing some serious hacking skills and probably breaking a few laws.

This is not a compelling argument that the police should not be allowed to collate that information from traffic cameras and your bank records.

But the police can’t get that info from your bank records without a court warrant. That’s the whole point - they’re not allowed to go sniffing through the bank records of anyone unless they’ve convinced a judge that the person is suspected of a crime. That was the problem with the NSA’s activities that Snowden revealed - they were going through the private records of everybody.

[Sage_Rat]

@Grumman

No, the problem is (1) that the government wants to and (2) that the government’s concept of “threat” is not always one I agree with. To the government, someone who won’t keep quiet about a spree killing by their employees is a threat to their interests in the Middle East, but to a decent human being that does not justify persecuting whistleblowers as Obama does.

The government isn’t a mysterious organization, run by people who sit in the shadows cackling and chewing down some Eye of Newt. It’s a group of people who wanted to do something to help make/keep the country a good place, convinced hundreds of thousands of people (at least) that they had their best interests in mind, and now spend most of their days reviewing information and talking to experts and their colleagues to make tough decisions on how to fairly and reasonably run a country.

Despite that, I’ll concede that the things the NSA does may have been inspired by an excessive reaction to 9/11 and approved by a President who had no concept of “review information, talk to experts, and try to fairy and reasonably run a country”. But since then most of the people in charge of the NSA have been swapped out with new people, the President has been swapped out, and the program is continuing (at least in part). One has to assume that they have access to classified information which demonstrates that minus these programs, genuinely horrible things would probably have occurred.

[Grumman]

@Sage_Rat

One has to assume that they have access to classified information which demonstrates that minus these programs, genuinely horrible things would probably have occurred.

No, one does not. This is what I meant by “psychic paper” earlier, this foolish belief that when the government says “I have proof that what I do is right, but I refuse to show you,” that the proof they claim to possess must be whatever you would need to see to be convinced.

[Sage_Rat]

@Grumman

No, one does not. This is what I meant by “psychic paper” earlier, this foolish belief that when the government says “I have proof that what I do is right, but I refuse to show you,” that the proof they claim to possess must be whatever you would need to see to be convinced.

They haven’t said they have such proof. They’ve said that they aren’t doing it.

We have strong reason to believe that they are doing it, that it’s illegal for them to do, and that if they demonstrated the proof they needed, it would demonstrate that their program was illegal. We have also seen them (Obama) admit to things that they’re doing, show proof that they aren’t effective, and shut them down. That seems to be fair evidence that, at least with Obama as president, illegal and ineffective programs are shut down.

[BrainGlutton]

@Steve_MB

**You Might Be An Extremist If… **

. . . This isn’t a Jeff Foxworthy joke, is it?

[BigT]

@Sage_Rat

They haven’t said they have such proof. They’ve said that they aren’t doing it.

We have strong reason to believe that they are doing it, that it’s illegal for them to do, and that if they demonstrated the proof they needed, it would demonstrate that their program was illegal. We have also seen them (Obama) admit to things that they’re doing, show proof that they aren’t effective, and shut them down. That seems to be fair evidence that, at least with Obama as president, illegal and ineffective programs are shut down.

Not fair evidence at all, really. It all happened after the leaks. Only after some information was made public did Obama do anything. The leaks forced his hand. We still don’t really have much reason to believe we can trust the government about things we don’t know about.