[cygnus]

traitor XOR patriot.

This is so narrow minded in my opinion. Snowden has done something good to the world, because US administration is secrectly messing with everybody around the globe.

Stop considering it happened only within US borders or as an internal matter. US and US media still are using a group (country) scale reduction to draw some bad opinion on Snowden, divide and gain some people to this spying dementia.

If you look on an international scale, the trivial question would be : hero or villain, and the answer is quite obvious.

AAaaaand somebody is knocking on my door...

[cinquemb]

>If you look on an international scale…

I keep thinking about how in some Asian and Middle Eastern countries, the same things have been going on (if not more overt), and I wonder if their citizens have as much apathy as ours?

[einhverfr]

My experience is that everyone everywhere these days loves their country and distrusts their government. The question, as always, is how individuals and groups of people navigate the government and vice versa. The specific limits vary from one place to another but the attitudes seem remarkably stable over time too.

For example in medieval Iceland, one of the major protections against unreasonable search and seizure was a combination of limiting the number of people who could be involved in searching for a stolen item for example, and also mandating all the places where the MUST search. So you could only have so many bondir searching for a stolen item and they couldn't selectively search farms. Instead they were required to search all farms between two suspects. this made very indiscriminent searching impractical.

[cinquemb]

I've recognized that too. But with that, do you think there is any room to grow (as individuals and as a global society) under these circumstances (>everyone everywhere these days loves their country and distrusts their government)?

Personally, I find it hard to love my country (not even sure what that really means to me) or any country I've been in for an extended period of time. Maybe it is because I keep abstracting country back to ever changing lines on the ever changing maps drawn throughout history. Though, I'm not saying that there are some places that I wouldn't rather live over others.

>The question, as always, is how individuals and groups of people navigate the government and vice versa. The specific limits vary from one place to another but the attitudes seem remarkably stable over time too.

Maybe that's why it is easy for some individuals/organizations to play chess games between nation states for whatever (usually business) reasons? At least that's what is going on in my head now about the larger geopolitical landscape in relation to some national and some international issues…