Well, this also goes to the heart of journalism: what does it mean to say that you are informed?

• The stories relay details, quotes, pictures, facts, and other "objects" ... like Lego blocks ... that some observers may assemble into a picture.
• But the building blocks can be assembled in different ways.
• In this case, the blocks could build a case of guilt or innocence. We don't know.

But that's the conceit of journalism. The mere fact that the objects are offered for the reader's judgment ... presumes ... that the objects should be assembled into something meaningful and important. And if the story's details can be assembled into a picture of guilt, the presumption of journalism is exactly that.

Otherwise, why would a journalist have wasted your time on random facts that weren't connected?

The presumption that a journalist should simply offer facts to the reader and let the reader decide what they mean ... is absurd. It's like a recipe with all the ingredients listed, but we wouldn't presume to influence you on how to cook that darned thing.

Of course a journalist intends a conclusion. Journalism depends on offering conclusions, just not directly.

It's not new - game theory has been on it for years. There's even a game called the Altruist's Dilemma.

Jon Elster has done some work on altruism that's worth reading.

Well, we've all seen thousands of such scenes, haven't we? And if you're happily married, it's not as if you ... need ... to see anything on screen.
Seems to me as if sex scenes are written to entice people who don't get sex offscreen. In other words, kids. So instead of being a honest depiction of sex in a relationship, which might be interesting, the sex scenes are geared to an adolescent imagination.

I like the idea, although I'm not a big fan of psychologizing politics.

The recent NSA surveillance issue has brought out a significant debate: how do we treat power? Is the mere possession of power corrupting, and if so, how do we deal with it?

The Lockean/American strategy is to divide power and keep it competitive. The use of great power isn't a problem if everyone actually agrees on its use. It's when people don't agree that we need some way to manage its use, or even if we use it at all.

That's also why conservatives usually rely on institutions. We're willing to follow the authority of institutions because (and to the degree)  they've proved they can exercise authority competently. We don't want to give power to untested agents, especially those who think they know better than everyone else.

The best way to protect against the abuse of power is to keep it competitive. And so, when we have presidents who arrogantly and openly act to sidestep checks and balances, that's just a Tyranny Cowbell.

But (obviously) that's a mistake. Government and society are two different things. And while society can be loosely defined as all of us, living together ... government isn't the same thing.

For contrast, think of a marriage. A (good) marriage respects  differences and welcomes them. The union is more than the sum of its parts. There's a dynamic relationship between the spouses that lets them transcend their individuality and makes them something greater.

It would be silly to think that that a person gets married simply to impose his decisions on his spouse, simply because he thinks that he's right.

But when you dismiss other parts of society as irrelevant, and treat  government and its power as the only thing that matters, that's exactly the same attitude. You didn't join in government out of respect for others; you joined government to acquire power and dictate to everyone else.

Progressivism is built on the premise that everyone must conform to the same standards. The progressive then uses government to impose his own standards, to which he demands conformity.

What makes us think that government wants to replace other institutions, like churches?

Oh, a few reasons ... I'll mention a couple ...

Government now demands that religious institutions offer services that exactly match government values, not religious values.

• Catholic adoption services have to offer adoption to gay couples.
• Government demands that Catholic institutions subsidize contraception, even ones that are abortifacients.

There are plenty of religious institutions (especially schools, but also hospitals, etc.) who enable the takeover by adopting policies based on government values, even when they directly contradict the religious values of the institution in which they work.

And it was a jury ... not a rogue administrator ... that gave a gay woman who became pregnant by artificial insemination (a no-no for Catholics) $170,000 in a "discrimination" lawsuit.The effect of these decisions is that we must live in a one-size-fits-all state, and that no values are acceptable other than what the government rules.

Instead of government being a limited institution that has specific powers for specific responsibilities, and being only one part of society, these people interpret government AS society. That's a fundamental misunderstanding of what America was designed to be.

I'll say the obvious. We hear that we're supposed to trust, and that society can't function unless we trust (which is true), but then there's absolutely no penalty or even remorse when the government betrays our trust.

The government says "trust us," then openly and arrogantly betrays that trust ... but the next time when people hold back their trust, the government-lovers say that it must be because of some crazy psychosis, especially those libertarians.

I'm not a libertarian (besides, I'm not entirely certain of the definition), but it seems to me that at this moment, distrust of government is a perfectly reasonable reaction to having been systematically betrayed.

As Reagan said, Trust but verify.

We can't foolproof government. Government still depends on ordinary men acting honestly. But we have to be on constant watch.

The whole plan behind the surveillance program is to anticipate wrongdoing before it happens ... but ironically, that's also what  critics of the program are doing. The government is trying to anticipate attacks, and so are the critics of government. 

There is no one-size-fits-all, permanent fix. Stopping the surveillance may be necessary later, but until we can verify an actual abuse (rather than the possibility of abuse), I'm willing to  keep it going.

That isn't going to stop us from verifying. Stay alert.

Oh they snooped. But in those wars, the enemy had identifiable soldiers, and the fighting was direct. We don't have that kind of a war on our hands.

I argue that it's a question of balance. When you have two or more values that can't all be satisfied all the time, sooner or later you're going to get conflict.

Managing those conflicts is what (I think) politics should be about ... not just politics as its practiced by consultants and "professionals" ... but ordinary politics, debated and argued by every citizen. Like  us. 

Gee, if only we had some forum ... some place where we could have ongoing conversations about culture and politics ... so that ideas could be batted around and refined into something better ... if only ...

Just going by the items I've heard. I caught this from Mike Rogers after the Sunday shows.

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=50148388n

http://www.newsmax.com/Headline/rogers-nsa-phone-surveillance/2013/06/06/id/508571

Now, is that the only one, or were there others stopped? I don't know. Were the attacks so large that the surveillance was collectively worth the trouble? I don't know.

But, it does support the idea that the program is useful. Apparently the data wasn't used exclusively for political spying.

Fully agree.

Because there's a distinction between content (which isn't publicly observable and privacy is expected) versus call records (which are publicly observable and no privacy is expected).

Both would be useful, but there's no expectation of privacy for call records.

Let me rephrase that - you shouldn't have had any expectation of privacy for call records.

As I said, collecting data won't solve every problem. But it has solved some problems, if reports are correct. Some attacks were stopped.

A curve ...

Suppose for fear of this program's power, we stop it. Then a terrorist attack happens, and we discover that we could have caught them, had we only connected these dots.

We aren't in a vacuum here. We can't speculate in the abstract. We have a pressing need to use this information. The good or evil of what might happen if the data is abused is one thing; but we have to balance that against what might happen if we don't.

I don't laugh off the danger, nor do I think that data will solve every problem at no cost.

It's a prudential decision that has to respect all of the possibilities. And for me, given the number of factors that I know of (and I assume there's a lot that I don't know) ... I'm willing to accept the existence of the program. Experience could change that calculation. If we discover that this was Obama's secret weapon to winning 2012, sure, that changes the calculation. But until something like that is discovered, I'll accept it.

No. We're flawed, and will never be perfect. But that doesn't mean that we're utterly incapable of handling power.

As individuals, we probably are - but that's why we disperse great power and (we Americans have learned) we must have constant checks and balances.

There are checks and balances here, but we differ on whether those checks are enough. What complicates the issue is that we're dealing with an administration that constantly thumbs its nose at checks and balances.