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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Its this sort of uneducated, a-historical crap that makes it impossible to read HN lately. If you think the government was less scary back then, in the grip of anti-communist paranoia, you're insane, deluded, or just plain uneducated. Saying that MLK could count on a fair shake from a justice system that didn't give any minority a fair shake back then, much less political radicals, is the height of ridiculousness.

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You don't need to resort to insults.

Frankly, I think the offending comment is insulting to the intelligence, as well as to the (collective) experience of people who were the target of racial discrimination laws. I don't want to be political about it, but HN as a community is sometimes subject to an alarming degree of demographic myopia.

HN has been especially frustrating for the last 2 weeks.

Maybe, instead of hoping that people will maintain perfect civility throughout a nonstop stream of political discussions, something could instead be done to ratchet back the politics on HN?

Perhaps reality has been especially frustrating?

Although yeah, implying that blacks in the American South in the mid-20th C could rely on the justice system is ridiculous enough to force me to agree with rayiner for once.

Sorry, I got emotional and attacked him instead of his comment. For that I apologize. But he essentially implied that a black guy fighting segregation during the height of communist paranoia and racial tension in the 1960's could count on a fairer shake from the justice system than a wealthy white kid in 2013 with the support of a rich and influential segment of society. That's the kind of statement that tends to engender emotional, rather than cool and collected responses.

    But he essentially implied that a black guy fighting 
    segregation during the height of communist paranoia and 
    racial tension in the 1960's could count on a fairer 
    shake from the justice system than a wealthy white kid in 
    2013 with the support of a rich and influential segment 
    of society.

I get what you're trying to say... but I'm not sure if the latter point of that statement is so spot on. Manning was a wealthy white kid with the support of a rich and influential segment of society... as was Aaron Swartz, and yet they were both met with the heavy side of law.

Manning was a soldier and faced the military justice system, which is necessarily harsh. With Schwartz, we'll never know what kind of shake he would have gotten--a judge never even got to hear his plea.

Saying that Snowden will receive a fair shake today is also pretty ridiculous.

I don't think so. right now Major Nidal Hasan (the army psychiatrist who, by his own admission, perpetrated a small massacre at Fort Hood, Texas in 2009) is having a trial right now and acting as his own defense counsel. Predictably, he's making a hash of it and is likely to receive the death penalty because his only offered defense, which has been rejected as a matter of law, is that he was acting to protect the lives of Taliban leaders; but he's most certainly getting a fair trial - a fact which is irritating a great many people on the right.

I'm pretty sure TPTB exactly predicted the events of Hassan's trial. It has gone forward in this manner because this is the manner they desire. It's not like Hassan was held for months in solitary without the luxury of clothing.

The point isn't that the government has suddenly gone bad, but that the specific nature of the badness has changed very substantially and fairly recently. Snowden's choices may be unprecedented, but so is the situation that the rest of us are facing. His greatest fear (which he was very explicit about) is that this new and very unsettling state of affairs would go unrecognized, even after he made his revelations.

It was scary back then for sure. MLK and his supporters suffered beatings, faced extrajudicial lynchings, etc. I'm not disputing any of that. Yet, we don't have to speculate whether MLK could count on a fair shake from the justice system, because history tells us. MLK was arrested 30 times[1], yet he spent relatively little time incarcerated. The longest sentence he ever received was 4 months (compare that to Aaron Swartz' 6 months plea offer), but he served less than that. His famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail was written when he was in jail for only 11 days[2]. As screwed up as things were then, the justice system was not so draconian that it prevented him from leading an effective campaign of civil disobedience.

I don't think it's unreasonable to speculate that Edward Snowden, if arrested in the US, would be denied bail. He would be facing decades in prison. It's quite likely he'd be held in solitary confinement and he could even be subjected to "Special Administrative Measures" (a recent invention) that would severely restrict his freedom to communicate with the outside world[3]. There would be no Letter from a Federal Detention Center from Edward Snowden. These draconian sentences and measures make it completely impossible to conduct a meaningful campaign of civil disobedience, as they can be wielded to completely neutralize a movement's leaders and serve as a warning to anyone else who is thinking of doing the same thing.

What's truly ahistoric is comparing Snowden to MLK to suggest he needs to come back to the US and face the consequences. Snowden may not be facing beatings and lynch mobs, but he would be facing a justice system that would treat him far more harshly than it ever treated MLK. We've thankfully lost many of the great evils of the past, but there are new evils. Civil disobedience is even more difficult today, and what's especially insidious is that instead of it being discouraged by lynch mobs and corrupt southern sheriffs, it's discouraged by the justice system itself.

(We should be thinking about the consequences Snowden would face because the essential civil disobedience of the future may very well be about information, but if you'd rather look at "conventional" protesters more akin to MLK, consider Al Sharpton being jailed for 90 days in 2001 for trespassing during a protest against a naval base in San Juan[4], or the case of the anti-nuke protesters that was on HN a few days ago[5]. Not quite as draconian as the situation Snowden could be facing, but the sentences are still unfair, longer than what MLK faced, and make carrying out effective civil disobedience extremely difficult.)

[1] http://www.thekingcenter.org/faqs

[2] http://www.lib.lsu.edu/hum/mlk/srs216.html

[3] They're mostly used for "dangerous" prisoners, like suspected or convicted terrorists, but they're also used for those accused or convicted of espionage charges: http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2009/June/09-ag-564.html

[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/24/nyregion/sharpton-and-3-fr...

[5] https://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/05/15-7

Hey rayiner, if it helps at all, I frequently follow your comments on Hacker News, and I've been able to grasp all your (very cogent) examples of how the government was worse in the 20th century. So it's not falling on deaf ears.

Just wanted to give some encouragement since you seem really discouraged by HN this week. It's been straining on the whole community, I think.

Strong agree (for both rayiner and tptacek). It's amazing how much abuse has been heaped on them for simply putting things into perspective, for questioning stories, for thinking carefully about what's actually being stated and claimed by various parties.

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