By engaging in a line of comments that is so far from reality, the quality of discussion is lowered because it is off in the weeds instead of confronting the real issues.
One of the reasons I generally like HN so much is because there is so much expertise around that the comments often get right to the actual heart of an issue.
A great example is something like the P ≠ NP attempted proof from a couple years back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1585850 The top comment is extremely informative, nearly the best commentary you could find about the issue anywhere.
Imagine if the top comment was instead from one of the numerous people who believed they had already proved P = NP or P ≠ NP, and they went off about their own theories and disparaged all of the mathematical community for ignoring them. A mathematical quack, basically.
The people who actually understand math could spend their time refuting this guy, but by doing so the overall signal-to-noise ratio of the site would go down, and with it the overall comment quality. And besides, the quack has probably heard it all before and it didn't change his mind. So instead people vote stuff like this down so that the top comments are from people who actually know what they are talking about.
The problem with stories like this is that the equivalent of these mathematical quacks get voted up to the top. The natural hacker distrust for authority, which on one hand motivates good and productive work on privacy/anonymizing technologies, in this case motivates people to post comments that involve low-quality grandstanding and statements about the political situation that are objectively false. Sure it is possible to refute them, but S/N ratio is still lowered and no one's mind gets changed anyway.
By the way, I'm not someone who is downplaying the significance of Snowden's revelations. I just want to read a discussion that really cuts to the heart of the issues, instead of generic outrage, vague calls to action, and outright inaccurate statements like calling the US a police state.
By engaging in a line of comments that is so far from reality
Just because it's far from your reality doesn't mean it's the same for everyone else. People are constantly bombarded with articles about the US engaging in potentially illegal and unconstitutional activities that affects a lot of internet users, so it's only natural people get upset about it and let their emotions run wild, thus resulting in the "paranoid" comments that we now regularly see.
You should take the time to show these people an alternate point of view, because your comment will not only be read by the person you're replying to (who may or may not change his mind), but also by the thousands of lurkers who don't even participate in the discussion.
> I just want to read a discussion that really cuts to the heart of the issues, instead of generic outrage, vague calls to action, and outright inaccurate statements like calling the US a police state.
And yet instead of the usual 100% noise of naive brogrammer narrow political relativism, you are seeing some more interesting replies from people who say they have actually lived in police states and that this is where things are heading.
criley2 did that and got the cookie-cutter response I replied to. That response is the same as you'd read on any of a hundred boards that love to tread over and over through black-helicopter-ville. Nobody's mind is being changed and nothing new is being added to the discussion. Like those boards, it's boring as hell.
1. What attributes constitute a condition we call a "Police State"? (a list of which you already provided)
2. Does America (or some part of it) have those attributes?
3. Assuming the above is "Yes", what can we do to make it not have those attributes? (e.g. call currently elected representatives, elect representatives based on their historical opposition to those attributes, avoid certain companies or products, etc...)
4. How do we track if these actions are being performed and how effective they are?
Actually, we probably don't need to do categorize negative attributes so much. We can probably just focus on reversing the attributes we think are making our country worse.
Also, enacting political change is a skill as old as civilization I'm sure. There is probably lots of material around on how to do it effectively. We can start by reading and trying some of that stuff in place of arguing in circles about what is and isn't a police state.
