I was going to write something more about this NSA crap - and people's reactions to it - but I think it's been summed up, pretty well, by Hot Air:
A debate dominated by the extremes, with little patience for nuance, calibration, or balancing. The reality may be less exciting (and less suited for talk show dialogue) than the paranoid narrative, but the boring reality is what must be addressed,...
All nothing new, including the fact we've crossed that line again - left "the boring reality" I so recently used to revel in. The crazies have us in their grip once more.
Now, we've got to wait for them to loosen up, so we can get back near normal.
What a way to run a country. No critical thought. No common sense. Nobody cares about any of that. Just a bunch of (sorry, mostly white) bozos, bouncing from one paranoid's ravings to another, all claiming they're perfectly rational as we clearly saw them intentionally go over the railing. They use to claim it was only Glenn Beck, right? Riiight. (Like Glenn Reynolds and blogging, Beck just got an early start.) This is now their moment.
It's sad, man. If you love your country, and desperately want to take pride in it, watching this nonsense happen in politics, over-and-over again, is completely disheartening. Like identifying your kid's ass in a Gay Parade - or like he or she has announced taking up yoga. ("That's an accomplishment to you? How much did we spend on your education again?")
Between this madness and the protests, the protests, the protests, a political junkie can only be grateful time crawls as it does, allowing the (obviously) slow ones little opportunity to form new ideas.
Homeopathy hasn't changed much since it was "invented," over 200 years ago, either.
Like I wrote a bit back, the likeliest scenario is somebody innocent's going to get hurt, and - since it's a national security issue - that could be a lot of innocent somebodies, meaning me and you.
"Forgive them, Father, for they may never know what they do,..."
Considering that the guy who leaked the NSA stuff just hopped ship to Hong Kong (and is an admirer of Bradley Manning), I'm not so sure the truly scandalous stuff isn't to be located somewhere other than most of these dunderheads are looking.
ReplyDeleteAs for surveillance: LOL...we've had some pretty cool tech for that shit for a very long time, and there are (or used to be) some pretty stringent protocols for that shit too (but as the Bradley Manning episode reveals: you can't be handcuffed to goofy "nice" thinking when you're working with that sort of shit, or it will bite you in the ass).
Perhaps the real scandal is that we as a people seemed to forget that if the people you vote in have access to things such as this, it is incumbent upon the populace to vote in sane, ethical people (or a close proximity thereof) -- and in order to do that, you have to be a sane, ethical person, or some close proximity thereof, yourself.
PW
Bingo.
ReplyDelete