Letters to the Editor
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LWM @ Property
An excellent comment--thanks.
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Rowan Berkeley
Political compass - I don't accept the premises of it. I don't accept that people even have political personalities like that. It's like pop Jungianism - you know, sensation,intuition, thinking, feeling, introversion, extroversion, bla, bla - but worse, because it somehow forecloses a whole lot of important political attitudes I can't quite think of, but I can feel.
LOL.. After all your trashing of libertarianism I bet you took the test, found out you have a lot of libertarian tendencies and now are ashamed to admit it. It's pretty obvious too that you have taken a Jungian typology test and didn't like the results of that either, you're too familiar with the terminology.
Glenn asked nicely that this ridiculous and mindless arguing stop and yet you anti-libertarians simply are incapable of ceasing your constant red-flag waving toward anyone you perceive as having libertarian leanings.
important political attitudes I can't quite think of, but I can feel.
This last sentence of yours is asinine, you can't think but you can feel? Describes you to a tee, you don't think, you are operating on emotion rather than facts and logic. Emotion is a poor foundation on which to build a philosophy of life.
I engaged with you in good faith and I'm now sorry I did, I won't make that mistake again..
Farewell.
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@Rowan
If it was an individual, rather than a state, that was flirting with this sort of thing, I would call it a psychosis.
Precisely. Instead it is the exaltation of ideology over practicality, like we see with its communist and anarchist cousins.
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Sheesh
This comments section is starting to feel like the Palestinian/Israeli fight. And my reaction is the same -- it doesn't matter anymore who started it, all of y'all, just stop it.
And when your host very politely asks you to stop with the Kir Royales and start drinking seltzer, and instead you start downing Jello Shots and puking all over the carpet, don't you feel just a wee bit ill-mannered?
It's boring and rude. Get over yourselves.
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Svensker, where are you from?
I thought it was "all y'all". The "of" in there makes it a bit more (too?) refined soundin' to my ears. But I grew up in upstate NY so what the hell do I know?
New post up, BTW.
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lwm says another priceless and stupid thing ...
" ... communist and anarchist cousins. ... "
The communist system as immortalized by the USSR is the polar opposite of anarchy. Only the world's most stupid (or disingenuous) commenter could confuse the two.
Communism, fascism, and modern America are all cousins in the way you meant; and most posts here by Greenwald highlight that fact by showing rule by propaganda and force.
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keep a copy
$ mkdir ~/milanalysts
$ cd ~/milanalysts
$ wget -krv http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/milanalysts/
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@Aycharaych
I suspect you might be surprised to find out you have a libertarian streak, most of the regulars here do..
Well, when the poles given for the social scale are control vs. more or less "live and let live," and they are called libertarian vs. authoritarian, it's not surprising to see this crowd have a strong "libertarian streak" as you put it. Most of the "big L Libertarian" rhetoric that gets tossed around here by the self-identified Libertarians, though, seems to be economic right on the Political Compass scale, and the debate is opposed by the economic left, from my read.
In case you're wondering where I fall out: Economic Left/Right: -6.75 Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.36.
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Moot, but not- clear attribution by mandate
Smith-Mundt is a Moot Case - Except It's Not
By Patricia H. Kushlis
Why is it that the U.S. government still operates its overseas information activities as if the Internet had never been invented? Or actually, it operates them with increasing impunity as if Smith-Mundt, the law that came into being in 1948 and was strengthened during the Vietnam War that separates information aimed at foreigners from information designed for American consumption, had been repealed years ago. Except it wasn’t. This artificial and meaningless firewall – supposedly to keep the executive branch of the U.S. government from “propagandizing” the American people – should have been repealed once the Internet took hold.
By 1996 when I worked in the US Information Agency’s Information Bureau and we published quarterly electronic journals on national security issues, developed our own subject-specific web pages as well as a regular news service called the Washington File, it was clear the Smith-Mundt designated separation between information and information had become meaningless.
Fast forward to today: Just look at a few reader statistics for America.gov.
America.gov is the latest product of the State Department’s Bureau of International Information Programs (IIP) which ten years ago was USIA’s Information Bureau. IIP products supposedly come under the restrictions of Smith-Mundt in contrast to the State Department's Bureau of Public Affairs webpage (state.gov) which is supposedly for Americans. I find State.gov to be one of the most complicated and confusing webpages on the Internet not to mention sporting more pictures of Condi, left and right, than even the satirical anti-Condi Princess Sparkle Pony blog.
Now I can’t access State or IIP internal data, but I can access America.gov and when I last looked at America.gov’s traffic details on Alexa, an internet ranking service connected to Amazon.com, I noted that 31.2 percent of the hits come from within the United States. India follows with 12.2 percent, then the UK with 4.5 percent, Germany with 3 percent and Canada with 2.7 percent. So much, in my view, for Smith-Mundt. It is outdated and unenforceable. The Internet is the 13 foot ladder used to scale Smith-Mundt’s 12 foot fence as our Governor Bill Richardson once said in reference to the immigration issue. Besides, I think Americans should know what their government tells others and how it presents itself abroad. It’s our taxes that pay for this stuff after all.
In comparison, 48.7 percent of State.gov's traffic comes from the U.S., the website ranks higher in Iran than the US and 58 percent of State.gov viewers are looking for travel information(47 percent) or/and electronic visa forms (11 percent).
What can and should, however, be instituted – with no exceptions for any branch or agency of the US government including the CIA and the US military is a policy of clear information attribution. This also includes any information products produced by contractors for the US government. Remember the Lincoln Group? Or how about General Dynamics which has added the manufacture of web pages for overseas audiences to its weapons production arsenal - in a bizarre sort of contractor mission creep?
What goes around comes around
The problem with Smith-Mundt is particularly true in the viral Internet era. What’s the old adage: “What goes around comes around?” Have you ever wondered how many of those “good news” stories in the Iraqi media were bought, paid for and placed by some US government contractor? Think how difficult it must be for reporters covering Iraq to distinguish the fake from the real. Some of this is called PSYOPS, or psychological operations – but I wonder sometimes who the ultimate recipient really is.
[...]
It seems to me, therefore, that the best way we can protect ourselves from ourselves – or the blow-back from overheated US government paid-for information operations particularly on the military side of the house which has been on a war footing since 2003 - is jettisoning an archaic law now all but ignored with a “wink and a nod” and replacing it with a policy of clear attribution that is strictly enforced not evaded.
This might even be a first step in the restoration of America’s image abroad by a new administration. Who knows?
http://whirledview.typepad.com/whirledview/2008/05/smith-mundt-is.html