Rather than calling anyone a coward, I will acknowledge that standing up for freedom is never easy. I know through direct personal acquaintance people who spent hard prison time during Taiwan's transition from dictatorship to democracy, who were arrested after leading peaceful public protest demonstrations of the kind that happen every day here in the United States. I have seen what kind of sustained effort--and, yes, individual courage--it takes to move a society from a default condition of tyranny to a default condition of freedom and rule by the people.
Rather than name-calling, let's learn how to fight for freedom. I posted yesterday, to NO upvotes,
an experienced activist and supporter of people power democratic movements that originated under some of the world's toughest dictatorships. We can learn a lot more from him and his writings and those of his collaborators
than we can learn from anyone on Uncrunched or TechCrunch or any high-tech publication about how to win freedom even while under intense pressure from dictators. Try it. Don't decry anyone else for lacking courage. Build up your own courage. Build up your own effective communication with other freedom fighters, so that the movement for freedom has solidarity, unity of purpose, and resilience. Roll up your sleeves and get to work. (Anyone can participate: as a foreign student in Taiwan in the early 1980s, I was able to turn Chinese-language speech contests for foreign students into opportunities to express dissent from the dictatorship in the hearing of government officials of the dictatorship. This just takes courage and preparation.)
It's a hell of a lot easier when you're rich beyond belief; have access to the best legal counsel; have an enormous media platform; have access to lobbyists; have cultivated personal connections to legislators; can pick a very public fight which the NSA dreads getting dragged into; and can threaten obama / the democrats' link to a rich, donor heavy constituency. What John Kiriakou did took courage. What these ceos need is a hell of a lot less.
edit:
We've seen how these ceos can react when they care, ie when something threatens their income.
> how to win freedom even while under intense pressure from dictators.
That's a great problem and a great starting point for working on that problem.
But that isn't the problem here, because we aren't living under a dictator, not even a non-malicious dictator.
Rather, we have complaints about democratically elected officials. And many of us have given up on everything tied to that system and want to use non-democratic mechanisms (up to and including violence) to resolve our own complaints.
This has two major problems, of course. First, it means we are (illegitimately) overriding interests which should be democratically represented. Second, it opens the door to an arms race where those with competing opinions will do the same to us, and those who are peaceful will be marginalized unless they also embrace anti-democratic tactics.
Rather than name-calling, let's learn how to fight for freedom. I posted yesterday, to NO upvotes,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5840000
a link to the free online book From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation by Gene Sharp,
http://www.aeinstein.org/organizations/org/FDTD.pdf
an experienced activist and supporter of people power democratic movements that originated under some of the world's toughest dictatorships. We can learn a lot more from him and his writings and those of his collaborators
http://www.aeinstein.org/organizationsde07.html
than we can learn from anyone on Uncrunched or TechCrunch or any high-tech publication about how to win freedom even while under intense pressure from dictators. Try it. Don't decry anyone else for lacking courage. Build up your own courage. Build up your own effective communication with other freedom fighters, so that the movement for freedom has solidarity, unity of purpose, and resilience. Roll up your sleeves and get to work. (Anyone can participate: as a foreign student in Taiwan in the early 1980s, I was able to turn Chinese-language speech contests for foreign students into opportunities to express dissent from the dictatorship in the hearing of government officials of the dictatorship. This just takes courage and preparation.)