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I don't diagree with what you are saying (check my comment history and you'll see some similar sentiments).

However...

I don't think you should try and combine this incident into the narrative surrounding the erosion of rights in the US.

There is very little in common here, except perhaps something like "powerful countries do some shitty things".

If you do want to combine them, then I think you need to explain how things are worse now than when the US did things like the deliberate infection of native Americans with smallpox etc.

I think the truth is that things are different now. It is much more difficult for the US to let a dictator get away with things like using chemical weapons because of the rapid dissemination of information from people on the ground. At the same time the volume of bad news make it difficult to create action on the US on any single issue.

My initial post made the connection more explicit. I wrote something like, "At least Reagan had the good grace to keep his complicity using chemical weapons a secret." And then I couldn't believe I had just written that sentence.

That's how things are worse. We've done despicable things in the past, but we had shame enough to deny it, shame enough to try to edit history to hide it. Nowadays a video is released showing Apache pilots laughing while they kill unarmed civilians, and the USG from top to bottom has the temerity not only to ignore the war crime, but to attack the guy who released the video for being a traitor. And people don't riot. That's new. That's worse.

Nowadays men of conscience reveal secret plots that undermine our most basic freedoms. And rather than showing shame, contrition, rather than being apologetic, Obama "welcomes the debate" about privacy, and prosecutes the whistleblower with a ferocity unmatched in living memory. Christ, Obama had a foreign presidents plane grounded on the suspicion he might get his man.

It's worse because the brutality, the cold indifference to principle, the naked self-serving agenda, is entirely unmasked now. It's worse because people can't do anything. The myth that "public sentiment" matters at all in a democracy has finally been busted.

This is spot-on and very depressing.

ahem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre

Difference:

"Independently of Glen, Ronald Ridenhour, a former member of the 11th Infantry Brigade, sent a letter in March 1969 to thirty members of Congress imploring them to investigate the circumstances surrounding the "Pinkville" incident.[36][37] Ridenhour had learned about the events at Mỹ Lai secondhand from talking to members of Charlie Company over a period of months beginning in April 1968. He became convinced that something "rather dark and bloody did indeed occur" at Mỹ Lai, and was so disturbed by the tales he heard that within three months of being discharged from the Army he penned his concerns to Congress.[36] Most recipients of Ridenhour's letter ignored it, with the exception of Congressman Mo Udall[38] and Senators Barry Goldwater and Edward Brooke.[39] Udall urged the House Armed Services Committee to call on Pentagon officials to conduct an investigation"[1] (emphasis mine)

This was two months before the public heard about it, and corrective actions were already beginning.

"In November 1969, General William R. Peers was appointed to conduct a thorough investigation into the My Lai incident and its subsequent cover-up. Peers' final report, published in March 1970, was highly critical of top officers for participating in the cover-up and the Charlie Company officers for their actions at Mỹ Lai 4."

The general sense is that whether or not Mai Lai was sanctioned, once congress (e.g. the people) got wind of it they began to look into it. An Army general looked into it (and the cover up) and sought to find those responsible and punish them. It wasn't enough, and Mai Lai added more fuel to anti-war demonstrations, but it was far more than we get today.

Our congressmen sit there watching public videos of war crimes, and do nothing except prosecute (and put pressure on other governments to prosecute) the people responsible for leaking and distributing the evidence.

That's a big difference.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre#Reporting.2C_co...

> And people don't riot. That's new. That's worse.

Coming from a part of the world that has seen at least one revolution and several coups d'etat in the last century, this is one of the things that has made me particularly troubled about how much Americans value their democracy and about how much they value their comfort. Back there, when the Iron Curtain fell, they needed about ten years of deportations and forced imprisonments to get things under reasonable control, and it only lasted for thirty years afterwards. That's in a country where people could literally be thrown in jail because they knew someone, couldn't possess fire weapons and couldn't assembly in public places, making any riot almost impossible to start, let alone work. Countries with one tenth of the US population mobilize more people in a teachers' strike than the Occupy movement -- with arguably more widespread concerns -- mobilized.

When the government's abuse takes the form of unfair judges and militarized police force, you can't break down the abuse by whining in the press and debating on the TV. That's the circus they hand out when the grain isn't cutting it anymore. I'm yet to see even the most modest form of civil disobedience in a sizeable quantity. A bunch of people gathering up and not paying taxes or something. FFS -- a students' strike. When I was a kid, there was a point when students grew so unhappy that they simply called a strike and refused to go to class -- nationwide. A lot of professors tried to bully them into it, many of them ended up having to take a lot of exams again, but conditions did actually improve to some degree -- and they also didn't do anything that was remotely in danger of being labeled as some form of disobedience worthy of imprisonment. Basically, everyone decided to skip the classes with the same reason.

There's also the sense of community -- or, rather, the sense of division against the government. Everyone there seems to be friends with each other, but the sense of injustice is enjoyed by everyone in private, and only shared over a couple of beers.

About twenty years ago, a team from the local equivalent of the DEA missed the apartment and smashed open the door of one of our neighbors. His wife was pregnant and both of them were terrified, but when one of the policemen tried to drag her on the floor (protocol asks for it -- but they also didn't show any ID when they smashed the door open) the dude snapped and punched one of them. Needless to say, a lot of rabble ensued and the whole block woke up. Our apartment was next door to theirs, so the first one to jump out was my father (to make matters worse, he was a Colonel).

When everyone there realized what had happened, the policemen barely got out alive. One of them got out with a dislocated jaw, another one with a broken nose, and it was literally only the timely intervention of their colleagues that prevented them from being lynched.

Three of them were eventually discharged and one of them was moved to another city. I have no doubt that, under normal circumstances, nothing would have happened; the abnormal circumstance here was that my dad was the one who threw in the first punch. Pressing charges against someone from an institution who also had enough influence over judges was simply unproductive: it wasn't as much a problem of not fucking triple-checking what door you're smashing down as a problem of messing with someone who had the biggest bureaucratic cock.

This was as dystopian as it could be. There was no impartial justice to speak of and the government had no formal policy to protect its citizens from abuse, and the reach of the government's power/control was modest to say the least. However, some safety was provided by the sense of community: when everyone could jerk the system to their own interest, some of them occasionally chose to jerk it towards the interest of their families or friends.

Wow. Have you seen the movie 'Brazil'?

Nope. Wikipedia has two entries about a movie named Brazil, one from 1985 and one from 1944. Which one is it :-)?

The 1985 one by Terry Gilliam. I hope you'll like it, it's pretty dark.

Thanks for the tip! I added it to my list of films to watch, it looks quite neat from the description.

1984 meets bladerunner (minus the clones).

I think it's Gilliam's best film by far. Enjoy!

I see it the same way. As a country, overall, I think we're still in denial. Calling Manning or Snowden a traitor are examples of people still being in denial. "It just can't be that USG is that bad... These people stole and/or spied... I wouldn't ever do something like this... They caused so much hardship... They're bad, they need to be punished and everything will go back to normal"

The question, as you pointed out, is where are the angry ones? It could be that the numbers are still too small, or, the more likely reason in my opinion, people are just not used to being angry. They're used to calmly solving problems. Being angry is not something a civilized person does. It's only those who end up in jail. Being angry shows lack of control, it's emotional. If you're angry you're low class, you belong on Maury or Jerry Springer. Or it's something that can only be excused if under the influence of alcohol.

The other factor is fear. People are afraid of losing what they have. The system is built in such way that the smallest step out of line could cause significant hardship. Why would one go out and protest when doing so may get them arrested, which would prevent them for ever getting a high paying job?

When those in power realize that the lion is so well caged... why would they pretend the lion is powerful? In the long run their hubris is what will be their downfall, but we're nowhere near that. In the meantime we're lingering between denial and depression with very little acceptance. It takes time for people to process all this, and it takes even more when you don't have good sources of information.

We desperately need people in the mass media to stop beating around the bush and show us reality as it is. We need them to call corruption for what it is, to unravel the game so that people could process it. Until that happens most people will continue to be stuck in denial.

From what I recall, the US blamed the chemical weapon attacks on Iran and used them to justify continuing international sanctions which denied them access to the equipment and materials they needed to defend against the attacks. That's pretty damn evil.

"I think the truth is that things are different now. It is much more difficult for the US to let a dictator get away with things like using chemical weapons because of the rapid dissemination of information from people on the ground."

I am not so sure that we wont read in 20 years that the gassing of civilians in Syria was done by the opposition forces with logistical and tactical support of the US to legitimate another US war.

Do you have to wait 20 years for that? Isn't rt and presstv reporting exactly this today ?

That's pretty much a given.

>If you do want to combine them, then I think you need to explain how things are worse now than when the US did things like the deliberate infection of native Americans with smallpox etc. I think the truth is that things are different now

Thinking that things are worse now, helps you to want to change it.

Thinking it's same old-same old, is just a defeatist, "nothing ever changes" attitude.

>I think the truth is that things are different now. It is much more difficult for the US to let a dictator get away with things like using chemical weapons because of the rapid dissemination of information from people on the ground.

Actually in this case it's the opposite. The "rapid dissemination" can be manipulated, and events can be fabricated or done covertly by agents working for the other side. Not to mention, any agent or partisan with a phone can write his "information" as "a man on the ground".

Case in point, the current situation -- where it makes no sense at all for the (winning at the time) Assad to use that stuff, but it's a very good ploy to get sympathy and support for the other side. People spoon fed by mass and social media, will learn about it 20-30 years afterwards and be "surprised", but it kinda obvious to European observers.

None of this is new. Manipulating and controlling the Internet is, and is a scary new precedent, and I still stand by my statement that it is really a bad thing. With everyone jacked in all the time, manipulating the masses is a thousand times easier than before.

But as for the slowly becoming brutal and unethical? Nah. They've done that for a while. A recent example of this is the Cold War: they fed radioactive oatmeal to mentally-retarded to children to "test its effects" (http://tech.mit.edu/V114/N28/fernald.28n.html), supported brutal tinpot South American dictators to "fight communism" (http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20000919/) and abused this giant list of people who we thought were Communist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_Un-American_Activities_Co...).

Notice how the actions and methodology are the same (replace "communist" with "terrorist"). Notice how the reasoning is the exact same. Notice how it all starts with "wanting to protect you" from a threat most feel is real, and does exist to some extent.

The people in the government are humans like anyone else. Some people really can't grasp the idea that those people might actually be abusing you or lying to you. If and when they figure it out, they have a small revolution, become heroes, write a book, and then forget about the past and the victims and keep on rolling.

Maybe if we'd all stop have "reasonable" discussions about how people who say, "HEY GUYS, THIS PATRIOT ACT THING IS A REALLY BAD IDEA" are crackpots or paranoid when it's happening, we'd have more of a chance of stopping this...but probably not.

Systems run by people are created and exist to protect us from the nature of people.

It shouldn't be surprising that the historical shift from violence to public opinion incentivizes propaganda, just as capitalism incentivizes advertising. And any country where the propaganda isn't working? No problem: ship them some viol... er, democracy!

I think the OP shows the opposite of your thesis, that the USG is getting worse. As much as I agree that the USG is doing bad things now, it seems clear that in any historical context things have gotten better overall. We now have lawyers involved in picking the targets of drone strikes. Contrast that with the large scale bombing of civilians in countless wars in the 20th century, and I think things, in regards to the behavior of a powerful state like the US, have improved a lot.

I find some irony in the complaining about all the spying the USG is involved in. I much prefer that they do that than go to war. The various intelligence agencies in the US got a lot of (political) grief for not stopping the 9/11 bombers, and whether it is actually helpful or not, it is understandable that there would be an institutional response to step up "intelligence" activities.

In terms of whether the USG has become more brutal and unprincipled to the suffering of our own civilians, I see no evidence of this. A simple look at the treatment of blacks and Native Americans throughout the history of the US shows this sentiment to be a false idealization of the past.

That said, I am certainly appalled by many of the current scandals. I'm just not quite as appalled as I am by the outrageous actions of the USG throughout its history.

The reason I think this matters is that the US is a complex and powerful nation. To effect positive change requires at least a roughly accurate view of the various trends, and the forces driving them.

I think you don't see the outrage because most people don't get outraged until they start to see significant, ongoing, systemic negative effects on themselves or those close to them.

For example, the injustice of the Jim Crow laws was so massive, and had a direct negative effect on African Americans, that there was a substantial number of highly motived citizens from which to build a movement.

Another example was the Vietnam War protests in the US, which were given huge fuel by the fact that a civilian draft was pulling so many US citizens directly into the war against their own wishes.

The negative consequences of the NSA spying on US citizens are nowhere near these examples.

I also happen to think that the NSA has been spying on whoever it can for a long time. The scale has just gotten much bigger because of the internet. The modest outrage we are seeing is a positive sign.

> As governor Christie pointed out so eloquently, it's not about principles, it's about winning.

This is, of course, the same Chris Christie who has recently abandoned his own purported principles in order to court his party's base in preparation for a run at the presidency in 2016. He's also wasting millions of taxpayers' dollars in order to hold a special election a few weeks before the general this November in order to ensure that his reelection bid is as successful as possible.

No matter how much power We The People imbue in our representatives, even when they perfectly reflect the will of their constituents, inevitably there are intangible powers that overwhelm them: old boy networks, corporate benefactors, "special interests", etc. There are simply too many parties who benefit from existing abuses of power, with an opposing party that will seize the slightest PR advantage mercilessly, and media networks that require their millions in kickbacks in order to legitimize you, making it unwise to upset your donors.

On the one hand, we need democratic processes to peacefully resolve unresolvable conflicts: to find workable middle grounds on issues of disagreement. But on the other, we also need collective solidarity in preserving the system as a whole: law and order, transparency, corruption, etc. We got so good at competitive democracy as a culture (due in no small part to First Past The Post), that we've forgotten how to engage in the cooperative democracy that allowed a Constitution to be drafted in the first place, despite all the vehement disagreements at the time.

Sometimes I can't help but wonder if an adversarial political system is doomed to failure, and if we wouldn't be better off if anyone would wanted to participate in the political process was able, at least in some capacity.

the question is are we more or less brutal than we used to be? Remember the good old days -- you know, when Reagan authorized crack sales in LA to finance war crimes after congress explicitly banned any money going to the contras?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UEpQOecmbo

Seems more real today than ever.

> Where do we find these candidates?

Why not you? Sure, you don't have the money. Go and get it. Tell HNers to put their money where their mouth is, get yourself elected, and do right.

The bipartisan system has done it's damn best to ensure this will never happen.

Just to be clear, this is not the fault of some malign agency. Duverger's law says that two-party systems are the natural outcome of single-winner, plurality rule elections.

But is its best enough? Are you beaten before you even try?

Thanks. But I believe that it would be more beneficial to de-gamify politics than to get elected to any particular position. One person can only do so much. The ideal situation would be to reboot the entire government, elect new people in every position, all at once. I think it's possible, actually. But it would take a ground swell movement. I've shared the idea on how to do this with some friends, and they like the idea, but it's not quite ready for public consumption. If you like I might write about it here.

It's not just about elections. Hackers have a much bigger role to play in modern civics, in my opinion, than they currently have. We need to be writing open-source software platforms for city, state and even federal governments and putting them on github. It's time for software to eat the bureaucracy. We need to have software that's ready to use, free, and with all the features we, as technologically enlightened citizens, know that it needs. Good technology would lessen the leverage bureaucrats wield over elected officials, because it would make them easier to hold accountable and to replace.

(We could write open-source banking platforms too, while we're at it. The software could have a "transparency slider" that banks could set according to their whim. But more importantly, it would reduce the barrier to entry for new, small banks to arise and compete with the incumbents.)

There is one policy change I think is very important: put limits on the complexity of law, and end what I call "The Tyranny of Complexity" (a take on Mill's "Tyranny of the Majority"). Complexity lies at the heart of many of our political and societal ills, perhaps most directly expressed as the brutality of our justice system, a system that punishes you for years whether or not you are found guilty. But complexity is also the enemy of transparency, which hurts accountability and prevents the voting public from being informed. One simple measure, at the federal level, would be to put a hard upper-bound on the size of the United States Code - and require all new bills to be written out in longhand by the congressperson proposing the bill. The law of the land is too important to delegate the writing of them to underlings. Our laws should be short, to the point, and meaningful - and writing them out, pen on paper, helps to ensure that. Word-processing and hired help have made our body of law so unwieldy and impossible to comply with that hardly any law makers read the bills that they vote on. A similar rule can and should be instituted on the state and local level.

You have good ideas. Please consider politics. There are plenty other people who could write that software.

> If you like I might write about it here.

I'd be interested, public or private. I'm working on such an idea myself, though as a person, I'm ill-suited for actually getting it to work.

> Hackers have a much bigger role to play in modern civics, in my opinion, than they currently have.

Than they've currently taken. They do. This is one of the reasons "everyone should learn programming" is actually a good policy; even if they're not experts, they can take data and draw conclusions.

Another thing we need is stronger collaboration infrastructure. The NSA got themselves that shiny new Utah datacenter which can apparently hold all the data in the world. (That's probably an exaggeration.) Why wasn't that money spent on improving citizens' ability to communicate with each other? Our discussion tools are extremely weak. I wish I could give better specs, but if I could, I'd be building it.

> We need to be writing open-source software platforms for city, state and even federal governments and putting them on github.

Being a politician doesn't actually preclude you from doing this.

> There is one policy change I think is very important: put limits on the complexity of law, and end what I call "The Tyranny of Complexity" (a take on Mill's "Tyranny of the Majority").

I think it'd be interesting if someone could figure out an algorithmic way to rate the complexity of laws. I recently came up with the notion of a body that would at least garbage-collect law by checking for rulings of unconstitutionality and just writing a repeal for submission, but I assume the idea has problems I haven't figured out yet.

Without such a standard, it'd be difficult to objectively determine over-complexity.

The answer to all of your questions is: money.

Those at the bottom are making enough to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table.

Those at the top are making tons and tons of it off power: oil deals, stocks, lobbying/corruption, etc.

Those at the bottom don't make a fuss because they don't want to become homeless.

Those at the top don't make a fuss because they don't want to die: if the powers that be are powerful enough to invade foreign countries, grab the president, hang him on live TV and then lie to the rest of the world about how he was keeping the country back while at the same time the country regresses back into the stone age (Libya, Egypt, Iran, Iraq) - what chance have you to keep your own head if you were to start blabbing about how things are unfair?

It's all about money.

But that doesn't really answer anything, does it? Blaming money (which is just an instrument of exchange) is not a useful starting point for any reform. Likewise with going further up the chain and blaming greed (or any other facet of human nature).

The only reliable tools for effecting change in society are: education/information, policy/law and enforcement.