Letters to the Editor
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@Aycharaych
Why should I care about your issues now?
One response and then I really need to go. Absolutely no reason you should care. I was just entreating people who do care, but who believe articles that tell them the data will swamp the NSA computers, or who do care, but believe articles that tell them the government doesn't have anything more sophisticated than keywords and call tracing, that they need to disbelieve such articles.
Didn't mean to imply that you should take time off from your important things for stuff I find important. I did the whole pissing in cups thing years ago. I created an uproar about it at my company. I filed a formal complaint because they required a test on a guy who'd been working for the company, under me, for 6 months. All that happened was it was another nail in my coffin when they laid me off. These days, I'm required by law to get background checks in my state to practice emergency medicine. So it goes. I'm taking today off from here myself. I need to go do worry about torture. So today you and me both, like Dick Cheney, have other priorities. Wear some black.
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@Aycharaych
I'm not doing anything wrong so I have nothing to worry about.
If you're not doing any drugs, why don't you mind peeing in a cup? You're just being a little prissy prude, man up and take your medicine.
That's not how I feel, but that's exactly the argument wiretapping proponents put forth.
Again, why should I care?
And I guess you missed the part where I pointed out that to get or keep a decent cup I have to submit to a (what is to me at least) a humiliating procedure.
You should care for the same reason you dislike peeing in a cup: you are being presumed guilty of a crime.
Wiretapping is even worse because while you have the option of working at 7-11 and not peeing in a cup, you have NO options to protect yourself from wiretapping, there is no consent whatever. It is forced on you in a much more direct way than the drug test. I suppose you could resort to only talking to people in person.
(keep in mind, I'm saying this as someone who opposes the bogus drug war in all its aspects, both on philosophical and practical grounds.)
How many people are in prison because of "data mining"?
How many are in prison because of the drug war?
Which is really the more significant threat to freedom?
The real question is: why would you think for even a second that the never-ending war on drugs and the never-ending war on terror won't wind up being the exact same program, operationally if not officially?
The same abuse of power that characterizes the war on drugs cannot fail to develop if unrestricted access to the phone lines of this country is given to a bunch of careerist spooks.
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We humans seem to have become enamored with extremes.
I find it facinating to observe the heft and swing of the pendulum that politics and culture have taken over the past 44 plus years. I am not a historian, this is just how long I have been directly observing, gathering data, and interjecting my own scio-political, religious, and philosophical schema.
I would argue that due to the rise of the middle class and the rapid scaling of "Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs" we humans seem to have become enamored with extremes. Perhaps we are innately adrenaline junkies and running from tigers has (d)evolved to running from each other.
I think it is instructive that the more emotionally laden, radicalized, and some say excessive dialectics of the 60's, which followed the deeply restrictive government propaganda of the 50's, has shifted to the more widespread intellectual model of the present. Although it does appear that perhaps the scholarship of intellectuals has always been the seed for change. I'm thinking as far back as "Salon's" great-great-great-great grandmothers of the Reformation, which in turned supported the Enlightenment etc...
Reaching for higher and greater purpose seems to be juxtapositional with the, perhaps just as inherent, entrenched, and self-limiting human response to change. The ideas of the intellectual are confound by the needs of the physical and emotionally less secure. The semantics of balance suggests movement from one thing to it's opposite. And the extreme of poverty and it's fear is ease and intellect. But like Greenwald, I believe there are more choices then those that a limited bilateral discussion allows.
Correct argument doesn't have much meaning for those who are afraid they are being supplanted by machines, unable to attain a living income lawfully, or working so hard and long that they can't possibly gather data and reflect on every pertinent adjudication of law or public circumstance. I believe that what does get attention is emotional appeal to hopes and fears, think Obama. This is not an endorsement. My own leanings are feminist in nature.
Call it country, duty, mom and apple pie but call out to the people that can not understand or are too afraid to slow down long enough to think for themselves. The wrong-Right have known this but my beloved Left is often left talking to themselves and scratching their heads about the "others". Like another writer suggested, discover the basic needs of the opposition and appeal to those needs with facts and emotion. As often, as simply, and as positively as we can. Let's get repetitious! Yah, this sounds like sound bite philosophy. But if it is our purpose to get through the wrong-Right's numbing strangle hold on America, I believe it is necessary. And telling people they are stupid and ignorant just pisses them off, no matter how true it is.
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prunes
The real question is: why would you think for even a second that the never-ending war on drugs and the never-ending war on terror won't wind up being the exact same program, operationally if not officially?
I've been pointing out ever since I started posting on this blog that the war on terror is simply the the war on drugs on meth ;-)
People get upset with me when I point that out though, I get called things like "arrogant" because I saw this coming about twenty years ago and have the temerity to say so.
Frankly I'm tired of hearing about how wiretapping and all is so anti freedom from people who really don't give a fuck about the freedom of *others* only their own freedoms.
"Oh, (eyeroll) Aychy is on about how America is the largest cager of human beings on the planet again".. (yawn)
I had an interesting experience yesterday, a long conversation with a middle class black couple a few years my junior.. They were shocked when an old white dude told them that one in three black men in the US will go to prison in their lifetimes. They didn't know that and they were almost as shocked when I told them that one in every hundred Americans is in prison.