Letters to the Editor
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Screwed up the tags
I should be exterminated!
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Your number is up, LWM
Please report to the detention center downtown.
Brightstar will provide directions, since only he knows where it is.
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@Paul Daniel Ash
Preview.
Well, when you're so gosh-darn worked up, one button looks like all the rest... :(
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Silence
Isn't what they're doing the equivalent of taking the 5th? Their only public response may be to pooh-pooh it, as Brian Williams did, but the news organizations have surely had their lawyers look carefully at this, and their advice, understandably, is "Say nothing." Only a thorough Congressional investigation could possibly make a difference, and even then there's no reason to believe that the networks would report it as "news."
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What have I done?
But what have you done, brightstar? what gives you the moral standing to lecture the rest of us about "doing something about it." Quite frankly, tired hectoring like yours has done a lot to drive people away from protest. Nobody likes to be harangued.
What have I done? I was one of the first, banging the drum that something is not right in Oz, the day after I found out in 2001 that the PatROT Act had gotten voted in WITHOUT HAVING BEEN READ. I knew the jig was up then. I was vocal about it online for the next five years, TO DEAF EARS. It took another four to six years for people to begin to question where this country is headed.
I do my part, I did my part. Nobody cared. I gave up. Fuck you all, jerks. You get WHAT YOU DESERVE apparently.
As someone els said, there is little that can be done-- or it seems to be that way.
My chastising is deliberate and meant to spur people to discuss the TRUTH OPENLY until every voice in the country is talking about this.
Gee, you think at that point there might be some action? Like drumming out of Washington every goddamn puppet and voting in new blood? Like getting the rich around us to pull some strings using their influence? Like embarassing the agents of evil running this country down? The list of opportunities is endless WHEN PEOPLE TALK.
But at this point, I take this country as a goner.
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Just a comment, but a serious one
But I will say, I see entirely too much apologetic excuse making by people on here on behalf of government. How do you know so much about why the government is the way it is, that you can feel safe making weird suppositions?
Maybe LWM really does have his head buried in the sand, and thinks everything will be all right if only he keeps his head down and believes.
But I can't see how accurate observations of actual behavior by the US government, and gross distinctions of same, can be seen a excuse-making. Maybe we're reliving Germany in 1930, but if so, then it's not yet 1941, is it? Witness intimidation and death camps simply are not the same thing.
And you say there is no difference, then YOU are the one making weird suppositions.
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@Brightstar
I do my part, I did my part. Nobody cared. I gave up. Fuck you all, jerks. You get WHAT YOU DESERVE apparently.
I have to conclude from this that you didn't care that much in the first place.
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Bless Mona's Heart
She was correct about one thing awhile ago on another blog. There is a place where the fever swamps of the left and right anarchist/anti-state fringes seem to meet, but you have to appreciate the irony of an anti-statist like Brightstar claiming that "Ron Paul is the only solution to the current Constitutional crisis. Anyone challenging this is an enemy of the state."
I don't trust any anti-statist, anti-government type running for elected office in "The Leviathan" they profess to despise.
Bush and the Republicans did that and look where we are. Read Glenn's book for Chrissake!
The state is a necessary evil for now. It is not that I am a statist so much as a realist and a pragmatist. The same as Chomsky. Ron Paul is the last guy I want anywhere near the seat of power. We are a long way off from that. America especially, precisely because of the poor state of the evoluton of political consciousness of minds like Brightstar and Bucky and even Arthur Silber. They are full of fear:
ES: And now there's more protest and discussion.
Chomsky: Yes, because the country has gotten more civilized. No U.S. president today or for the last 20 years, could conceivably do what Kennedy could do with total impunity 40 years ago. And the reason is because there was massive popular protest, opposed by the intellectual classes, of course, who hated it, but it did, it lead to all sorts of things including opposition to aggression and violence. It also spawned the contemporary civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the environmental movement and all sorts of other things. And it imposed important constraints on straight violence. In fact, that's how we got rid of slavery. That's how we got rid of feudalism.
ES: So are we moving towards emancipation from these states? You're optimistic about it?
Chomsky: Yes.
Over time, there has been agonizingly slow progress, but very real, always opposed by the States, by the intellectuals who support violence and atrocities and try to justify them and try to prevent the population from knowing about them, but fortunately, their control is limited.
ES: What will the state look like at the end?
Chomsky: At the end, I think states ought to dissolve because I think they're illegitimate structures, but that's a long time.
ES: Is it the end of the nation-state that you foresee?
Chomsky: I don't foresee anything. What I'm saying is that as long as people, ordinary people, are able to free themselves from the doctrinal controls imposed on them by their self-appointed betters and mentors, as long as they're able to do this, they'll continue to be able to struggle for peace and justice and freedom and limitations on violence, and constraints on power, as they've been doing for hundreds of years. And I don't see any end to that. Where it'll end up in the long run, I'd tell you where I'd like it to, but I wouldn't even dream about that.
The immediate problem is to free ourselves from the shackles imposed, very consciously, by the kind of people you're talking about. Who don't want the facts to be known. And for very good reasons. Because if people know the facts, they aren't going to tolerate them. So therefore you have to prevent them from knowing. You have to indoctrinate them, you have to tell them stories about how we're really good guys, and if we use violence, it must be for the general good because we represent the course of history.
That's the job of propagandists, for power and violence, and it's the task of populations to free themselves from those kinds of controls and domination.
ES: Good to see you.
Chomsky: Good to be here.
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Articles/Chomsky_DV-HotType.htm