your a hater and it's OK if Obama does it!

Welcome to America 2013!

Oh and I completely agree with your OP.

-p

They deploy it a lot, because they're the grown-ups in the room, dontcha know.

Sensible Liberals are furthermore cousin (or twin) to Imperialist Humanitarians and that most Sacred of All Creatures, the Actual Servant of Empire (employees of NSA, CIA, military, etc.). For some reason these most compromised of persons - the ones who actually live off the increasingly combined machinery of surveillance, homeland, policing and empire, and who have a material interest in making up excuses for it - are supposed to be highly qualified to speak with knowledge and authority, while all those who have not "Served Their Country&quot tm) are hopelessly naive, etc.

Imperialist Humanitarians? Ha ha.

Since the 19th century at least.

It's a civilizing mission.

Samantha Powers is a great example from today.

They've passed laws to justify unconstitutional acts and often criminal government. So do your more garden variety tyrannies. Very little that the Iranian or Chinese governments do is "illegal" in your sense, they pass laws too. So at least we know with whom you are willing to identify.

"They've passed laws to justify unconstitutional acts and often criminal government."

...drop the nonsense.

I don't think it is Jack Riddler who is demonstrating "non sense."

As I recall there was a stink to stop the massive data grab then....

Or else, we're going to hear how very much different and worse these programs (started by Bush based on predecessor capabilities, and expanded constantly since, including under Obama) were under Bush.

we will cease to even pretend to be a nation in which we enjoy a modicum of freedom, free speech, a free press (with reporters who can contact any source without surveillance), freedom of religion, freedom of association, right to a fair trial and to have a private and confidential relationship with our attorney, all kinds of freedoms that we were taught that we enjoy.

go back to sending out runners or leaving notes in a hole in the big oak tree in the park.

Funny in some primitive future dystopia movie. NOT SO funny in reality.

I think you are right--either we dismantle this or we give up on the idea of personal freedom in every aspect of our lives.

This is a crucial turning point in America. I don't say that lightly. There is a big choice to be made.

Not that some of them didn't deserve it for supporting Bush's ILLEGAL invasions based on lies. But still, to cal spying on the American 'legal' is stretching it don't you think?

Coping and survival mechanisms for dealing with things too horrifying to believe are actually happening to us. Such as the Obama administration's use of domestic terrorism against the 1st Amendment, peaceful Occupy movement.

(The use of force or threat of force against a civilian population to change their political position or actions.)

We now KNOW major government departments spied upon Occupy from the beginning and that DOJ consider us to be "low-level terrorists".

Most here are not rationalizing the Bush-Cheny security apparatus, just pointing out that current outrage over a manufactured RW scandal is as misguided as the outrage over the last four that fizzled.

and force him to do so? He's had how many years?

I'll contribute. That's not what this conversation has been about but better late than never.

providing for the indefinite detention of US citizens with neither trial nor representation? End the DHS? Corral the NSA? Cut apart the TSA? I'd like to see SOMETHING. ANYTHING.

I think they're perfectly good questions and deserve scrutiny.

here for the night and to instead do something productive

Cato has nothing to do with this story. For shame.

attacks the whistle-blower, and he is not the only RW to do so.

Not sure how a whistle blower pointing out an illegal, secret, gov program can be misconstrued as a direct attack on Obama... only by folks blinded by partisanship I suppose.

They are scooping up ALL of your communications. ALL of them. And they are storing them on a massive database. We will no longer have freedom of the press, freedom of association, freedom of speech....This is horrible. It is unAmerican, and it has nothing to do with propaganda, or the Cato Institute.

Thank God for the Snowdens of this world.

or so it seems at this point, although perhaps my ignore list is hiding some harassing responses

Last edited Wed Jun 12, 2013, 01:07 PM - Edit history (1)

People get off on playing generals and statesmen in their heads, adopting the perspectives of high-level cannibals while completely ignoring their own interests, effectively preparing to serve themselves up for dinner. That's naive. The idea that the dirty "strong" option is somehow automatically the superior one for "our" interest has been successfully ingrained in people through the "Machiavellian" mind set. It's bullshit. (It's also not really Machiavelli, but that's another story.)

General or statesmen? There is some irony in your statement that I think eludes you.

-Laelth

Do you mean with weapons?
Obviously elections don't matter "this has been the direction of USG development for decades. A president who resists it will be ground up. "
The laws, like the Patriot act, theoretically were passed by a Constitutional government and so could be overturned by that government. Are you saying they can't?

What a limited perspective. The most important political changes in this country in the last century have come through social movements. Everything that happens here is due to money power or people power. Time for the people power to come back to the streets, to civil disobedience, to self-organized centers, to strikes and "one big union" and broad, multi-issue coalitions.

Obama 2008 involved a very large social movement of its own, in fact, and immediately ended it: the order from on high was to go home (leaving a vacuum for the Tea Party), "we got this," and now look. All the Bush surveillance and police state programs have been developed five years further, and are justified as necessary and good.

No I am not saying the government could not overturn this system. I am saying they won't, they are bought, they are implicated. They won't, without people power demanding it. Rather than asking me questions that make little sense, how about you discover some justified outrage at this machinery of repression and go encourage your neighbors to do the same?

It is hard to create a mass movement that operates by intimidation and actually works. You claim we have an authoritarian surveillance state, I don't. The government of the US is composed of our fellow citizens, some elected, some hired. I refuse to see them as some sort of enemy. When we vote them out of office, they leave. They are pretty damn submissive authoritarians.

administrations come and go but the surveillance apparatus stays and remains mostly unaffected.

are no longer there either. How many nation-states don't have a security (surveillance or whatever) apparatus? Can you name one? That's rhetorical, because you and I know that there are none.

does not exist as such at all.

There are many agencies.

The NSA, CIA, Pentagon and other arms of imperialism are not my friends. More importantly, I judge by what they do, not some imagined essential "fellow" quality. And when did you get to vote the NSA out of office? When did you get to vote the CIA out?

govern those agencies. You can vote against your representative. You get to vote for the President. You get to vote for your Senator. Unfortunately for your views the voters overwhelmingly disagree with you.

When a secret state is tolerated, the voters end up not knowing shit.

Democracies can also rot. National security establishments can keep up a nice little democratic front, no problem. They also vote in Iran, you know. It probably makes more of a difference than it does here.

You said
"They also vote in Iran, you know. It probably makes more of a difference than it does here."
to repeat-you said
"They also vote in Iran, you know. It probably makes more of a difference than it does here."

As an active political organizer outside the parliamentary system I consider myself a lot more "in charge" than those who serve up the kind of passive pro-system nonsense you've got going.

I'm sure you'll have an explanation for why money in politics is also democratic? After all, the lawmakers whom the money is buying voted for it in the first place, and the people voted for them, so... it's all good! Only whiners complain. Once there's a majority, everyone else must shut up!

Voting is at best a start, not an end.

You don't even know what our system of government is. That is pretty funny. Iran does have a parliament, and I'll bet they don't have nearly the money in their politics that we do.
you said
"They also vote in Iran, you know. It probably makes more of a difference than it does here."

Parliamentary can refer generally to parliamentary and presidential systems. The Congress is also a parliament. Seizing on trivialities of terms is all you got?

The funny thing is you think I give a shit how many times you're going to repeat the sentence I was perfectly aware I wrote. I hope you make it your sig line, attributed to me, long as you link to my journal.

Your grim clinging to American mythology has convinced me that in Iran, when they vote, it makes more of a difference than it does here. Because they figured out that the policies are fixed regardless. So it's a higher state of awareness they've achieved than you are displaying.

"Parliamentary can refer generally to parliamentary and presidential systems. The Congress is also a parliament. Seizing on trivialities of terms is all you got?" You really don't know the difference, that is not just funny, it's damn close to hilarious.
"A parliamentary system is a system of democratic governance of a state in which the executive branch derives its democratic legitimacy from, and is held accountable to, the legislature (parliament); the executive and legislative branches are thus interconnected."
Do you understand what interconnected means? The USA does not have a parliamentary system and no politically involved American would be dumb enough to assert that it does.
What country are you from? Don't lie, I know it's not the USA.

You are proud you said "They also vote in Iran, you know. It probably makes more of a difference than it does here."

I might be angry if I believed that here was the USA. We both know it isn't.

The Tea Party, really?

You're a "progressive"? A "Democrat"? And all you can think of as a history of social movements is "intimidation" and the "Tea Party"? You need some history and some perspective outside this little country, but you're so obviously not interested.

No I think of your brand of politics as intimidation (or at least you'd like to intimidate) which has no place in a democracy.
I was just tying your brand of politics to it's most recent manifestation, the tea party. I am a Democrat, in both meanings of the word.

You said
"They also vote in Iran, you know. It probably makes more of a difference than it does here."

They also vote in Iran, you know. It probably makes more of a difference than it does here.

I'm serious, I have met no American who would confuse our government with a Parliamentary one.
If you're from here, you are a first.
And very few Americans would say "They also vote in Iran, you know. It probably makes more of a difference than it does here."

Sad sack.

you think we have a parliament and want to tell us what's wrong with our government.
I suspected Iran because you said "They also vote in Iran, you know. It probably makes more of a difference than it does here."

Why not just admit you aren't American and stop pretending.

Shame on you.

I don't care about foreign elements, Jack. I do care when people lie about who they are.

For whatever reason, yours came up as a new post.

and I buy your explanation.

or just practicing.
BTW Believing the US has a parliamentary system and doubling down is really not the same as not knowing.

----

Together we have power.

If they will lie to us about anything then they do not deserve our trust ...period!

"If freedom and justice and democracy and transparency and humanity mean something, then the sad question has got to be, "Why are there so few of them?" Why aren't there more Snowdens, more Mannings? During the US invasion of Indochina, resistance to the essentially genocidal war eventually became widespread within the US military itself. There are several possible causes for why it's different today. So far."

...in the aftermath of this leak is watching people resort to hyperbolic prose while misrepresenting the facts. Here are some assessments related to challenging the program.

This is how you argue for indefinite detention, drone murders, and now unlimited, warrantless, oversightless executive branch surveillance of everyone's communications for any reason at any time: It's okay, SCOTUS is going to be for it too, so are other totally worthy institutions of this perfect republic, and after that we all need to accept and submit!

Thanks for quoting my money paragraph, though.

Civil Right (access to rights) and Civil Liberties (the rights themselves) are of one piece, of no honest and generally practical use without the other.

The debate on the need for probable cause and reasonable suspicion has been had, you just missed it by a couple going on 300 years, I suggest those that for whatever reasons want to re-open those multi-thousand year spanning conclusions come up with a rationale that comes pre-loaded with tangible answers to deal with why we placed such limits in the first place, which there clearly isn't beyond hope for the best people and some good fortune even then because no one is perfect.

Shit, we know that this Administration has been slapped back by the rubberstamp of rubberstamps for violating the present very weak to the point of deep danger interpretations of these limits on the government. God only knows what wicked insanity was going on under Bush.

This means that some things are too dangerous to be allowed because the best we can hope for, much less expect is a constant pushing up against and push back on limits. If you can't get your Constitutional Scholar, transparency in government, no lipstick on pigs Democrat to not undermine in secret then you can't trust it with even a lesser Democrat, much less the plausibility of another TeaPubliKlan who are largely worse in any discernible way than the last fucking monster we had.

Given any serious length of time there is a 99.999999999999999999999999 of this going off the rails and I'm not talking about any hundred years. There has been no evolutionary advance in humans that has happened that changes the game to allow such practices without great entropy. The terrorism is far safer, less resourced, and pervasive. The two are not even on the same scale as threats to our civilization.

Your "cure" is orders of magnitude more dangerous than the disease.

I'm not as a rosey thinker as some, it is my belief that against a determined terrorist movement of any magnitude that it is not possible to completely stop all attacks in anything even approaching a free society.

There is the distinct possibility that we no longer live in a free society either because measures so extreme have been taken that we have destroyed it in trying to save it or because such a threat was greatly overstated and flogged to justify such measures in a willful effort to subvert our free society.
Well...there is the possibility that such a thing was always more bullshit than anything else and if we aspire to such a thing we must be much less the sheep and carve it out from those that chain us in lies.

Somethings just can't be balanced because they consume or destroy balance by their nature. The balance is to accept the wise limitations and the dangers that come with that acceptance because to do anything else almost certainly creates an existential threat to the ability to have rights at all. Priority never winks out of existence in a compromise when a real human being makes a call a person cannot serve two masters.

DU was just starting to get overrun by, eh, a more conservative bent of "Democrat." Authoritarian ratfucker friends of the BFEE, IMFO.

I didn't need to guess what would be going on here with regard to Greenwald, Snowden, Poitras (who probably isn't even mentioned), et al. So I decided to drop in and say what needed to be said. But it's tiring over the long run.

This board should institute a policy that a) you have to disclose if you're speaking as a paid or volunteer/intern employee (or, ahem, military personnel) for any organization or anyone other than yourself and b) persona management will be searched for and not tolerated when discovered. There is a lot of corporate/agency PR tweaking going on, though of course groupthink and fan mentality do most of the work. It's sad but at least I've become immune to it.

You've always been greatness and I admire you, Octafish.

There are several posters whom I strongly suspect are working (paid or volunteer) as an on-line presense on behalf of organizations. Their posts reek of propaganda and lies.

I think most people have a love/ hate relationship with technology. Hi tech has been mostly in the hands of universities, military and government agencies until --relatively-- recently.

PCs came into the market in the 90s, and shortly after Bush got in, the War on Terror and Patriot Act changed the landscape and changed the rules right out from under us.

We love our machines, but the paradox arises when (like guns, nukes, or Internet) these tools are used inappropriately, against the innocent. The argument is not whether or not these tools or abilities should exist, but it is over their ETHICAL use.

I am not a legal scholar, but I think the public needs to be assured protection against the misuse of technology as well as by humans, because if it hasn't happened already, we will soon be faced with AI. It seems we are at an important crossroads.

We need to be a step ahead of research and development, not the other way around. Because now that we are faced with this challenge, to not address this important step in our development would be very naive. It's a good time to pause and reflect, despite the interests that wish to go full steam ahead with their toys.

Peace~~Felix

It's totally wrong if it's an "R"!

The sheeple are so busy cheerleading the D, they neglect to pull back the curtain to see who's really running the show.

"Yoooooou youuuuuu youuuuuu ....libertarian!"

Many are.

And they fancy themselves sharp and realistic.

Thanks all for the recs.