Letters to the Editor
Dirigo
Published Letters: 673 Editor's Choice: 1
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@anonymous
[Read the article: The Lawless Surveillance State]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm scanning this morning's discussion and want to affirm what you said about kitchen conversations and the need to be specific.
American plain speaking will never go out of style - as long as we are aware of it, keep tasting and nurturing it, and pass it between ourselves as friends and family.
There are many literate people blogging here, many able writers.
There's also a significant amount of intellectual candle power coming through in the writing, supported by solid literary, poetic, scientific, and philosophical references.
It's fun and it's invigorating as something see, look forward to, and take part in.
As I write here, I sense, every day, a challenge to be clear, fair, rigorous, fearless, and, above all, witty.
Wit always helps a good argument get through.
High flying rhetoric and a tendency toward the use of jargon, or cant - bullshit - indicates inexperience with good writing and plain speaking. Or, in the hands of a dishonest political broker, it's propaganda.
The array of issues surrounding the government's war and security policies is daunting and frightening. We're dealing with an unprecedented threat to our liberties. Trust between the people and the government is evaporating. Fear is not striking out. Anyone with half a brain, or anyone with "half his brain tied behind his back," should know this.
I want to stop writing on this site right now, throw this contraption out and go back to a quill.
Of course, that is an absurd notion; but, it's not absurd dammit. I'm a romantic. It's just impractical; I'm in the matrix. Besides, I've already been dressed down in family kitchen debates about my romantic tendencies. Screw it.
TWO OBSERVATIONS ABOUT LANGUAGE
As a former reporter with a continued interest in professional writing, I search the Internet every day, trying to figure out how to do business while playing catch-up with the technology. Quills don't work very well here. Anyway, on many, many business sites, I notice a peculiar and irritating linguistic animal known as "global English." Boil this down and call it corporate speech. I don't want to write that crap.
The military, with which I'm familiar, famously engages in its own "global speech." It's not necessary to go further. Indoctrination and practice require tons of "can do" jargon. None of this particular public language is supposed to be clear to the uninitiated. I never reacted well to it, which is why I don't like to listen to football coaches.
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Having thousands, or millions of very specific kitchen conversations is a good idea. Rigorous, specific, jargon-free language is at the heart of the recipe for discussion.
Turn off the computer or the television. Make a good omelette and some strong coffee or tea. Break some eggs; boil the water. Think. Re-engage.
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@shooter
[Read the article: The Lawless Surveillance State]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If, under "war" conditions, dissent is equated to treason, as a secret, official government policy; there certainly can be - with the technology now in place - wholesale surveillance of, not just perceived threats and action, but all political speech, whether public or private.
Does that sound far-fetched? Conspiratorial? Paranoid?
Let's beat a dead horse here one more time while we thumb through our well-worn paperbacks by Orwell and Kafka.
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Shooter's Friendly Scouts and Spooks
[Read the article: The Lawless Surveillance State]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Governments have always spied on the people - any people; and armed troops have always tried to get the dope on enemy movements.
However, there's just a huge difference between today and long ago, technique-wise.
For example, the U.S. Army tried and tried to figure out what Sitting Bull and various chiefs might have been saying to each other out there on the Plains, at a time when Grant, Hayes, and Garfield felt they needed to know what them injuns were up to.
The Army must have done a fine job reading puffs of smoke emerging from under a series of tactically placed fires, built on high spots amidst the tall grass and the buffalo.
Sitting Bull and the rest of those good ol' boys did give it up eventually.
You'll recall that, even if they weren't citizens of the Republic at the time, they didn't like the program set out for them. They discussed it amongst themselves, and through their own intelligence network.
But the government didn't have the capability to spy on, or listen to, talks in tee pees, conducted amiably under the smoke of peace pipes. I'd wager though that some colonels and Indian agents at the time wanted to.
Why should I be happy that the government today, with the technology that can track everything I might do or say, might be in a position to monitor any puffs of dissent that I might choose to emit, whether on the street or in my home?
I don't accept that they're going to do it to "protect" me.
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@Jim White
[Read the article: The Lawless Surveillance State]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If Reid ignores Dodd's request for a hold, knowing that Dodd is threatening a filibuster, and then moves to cloture, isn't that an "I dare you" moment? Put up or shut up?
I'm not familiar with all the procedural arcana of the Senate, but aside, perhaps, from a senator's right to rise on a point of privilege - like Byrd getting up to lecture on the Constitution - isn't that it?
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@Jim White and GG
[Read the article: The Lawless Surveillance State]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]This is very fuzzy on my part, but I think it is true that, once a senator has the floor, whether or not he intends a filibuster, he can hold until another senator requests that he yield.
"Will the senator yield ... ?"
A senator holding the floor can't be ordered to give it up by the chair, as can happen in the House.
Without the possibility of a filibuster in the air, there would be no assumption that a senator holding the floor may speak indefinitely.