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You constantly defend authority and yell at anyone who speculates negatively, and yet here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5870726) you rather cynically jumped on the "Snowden is a Chinese spy" bandwagon, when really the spying accusations make no logical sense, and of course, there's no evidence of that at all. That makes you a hypocrite. I'm not sure what else you expect other than blind cynicism - the NSA constantly does pedantic backflips, lies or invokes "national security" to prevent from telling anyone what they're doing, even when it's clear they're violating any sensible ethical guideline. What should we talk about, and what's wrong with speculation? Also, the idea that we need to "see the good" in the NSA is fallacious. The NSA is a party made of volunteers who work for a government who have chosen to not only exercise authority authority over me, but to abuse it gratuitously, all while the tax dollars of myself and others fund them to do so, when most of us never asked them to. Under what moral philosophy do I have to live to ignore that context to have a peaceful discussion about the merits of a completely-broken system? On a personal note, foreign intelligence is great, which the NSA has clearly not limited themselves to in any capacity, based on the information that we actually do have. If there's a direction the discussion should move in, perhaps you could start by leading that discussion, instead of sitting on the sidelines and complaining about other people and trying to control their thoughts and minds. As I'm sure you know, actions, intuition and insight are better teachers than whining and exercising authority. I do agree that more critical thought (and less blind cynicism) is a good thing. Finally, I can't help but note that your role reversal of the 1984 example is an extremely-ironic case of "Doublethink", since under no circumstance are the masses hating on the government blindly remotely applicable to the novel. |