"betrays free speech...a gallingly backward understanding of the value of free expression."
This from the corporation that held the story about domestic telecom surveillance and Presidential violation of the Constitution until after the 2004 election - at the request of the Bush Administration!
Read as a piece of projection*, this editorial is a chillingly accurate description - of the NYT: The NYT's "collaboration is appalling...shows how much they care about the power of information to liberate the world."
*Projection is when we attribute to others the motivations, behaviors, and characteristics that are too psychically devastating to accept as the reality of ourselves. These are projected by the ego upon the other so the ego can safely (to it) experience these features of itself, as part of the ego's effort to become whole. This is a continuous process, the fundamental nature of ego perception. One can measure the degree to which any characteristic is of psychic influence in oneself by the degree of emotional affect associated with it. The greater the degree of emotion one feels, positive or negative, the greater the energy of the feature in one's own psyche. This is how people fall in love (see Arthur C. Clarke) and countries go to war (see any nation's political pronouncements about the nature of "the enemy").
Though that raises a question: does the human get the award, or the data? Perhaps in these cases the human is just the means by which the data offs itself, like being the soda machine that crushes to death the cheap, stupid, thirsty guy. We don't give the award to the soda machine (well, at least not the Darwin Award:-) ).
Maybe there's just some sets of 1's and 0's that can't take being Microsoft code anymore. I could understand that.
"I'm Microsoft Bob. For the love of God, please kill me."
You know, it's pretty easy to tell legislation's bad when it would make the Founding Fathers enemies of the State.
HR 1955 may be the most dangerous piece of legislation I've ever read, precisely because it's both so broad and so vague. "Broad and vague" coupled with "corrupt and guns" is a bad mix. (If they want to look for a cause of homegrown terrorism, they could start there.)
The other big problem with this, as with all "terror" legislation, is that it's the entity that's terrified that's making the decisions. And by definition, a terrified entity is operating under the control of their limbic system - which means by definition they're not thinking rationally.
And you know what terrifies governments most? Independent thought and change.
So now we have "broad + vague" + "corrupt + guns" + "irrational + terrified of independent thought and change." Regardless of the stated intentions, how could anyone think any good can come of this?
The Internet is named as a terrorist tool in the same sense that airplanes are terrorist tools, which lays the legislative ground for restricting access to the Internet the same way as access to airplanes. No-access lists, screening, content searches, all of it. Internet TSA, anyone?
But it gets worse.
The Act (since I have Read The F*cking Act) defines three terms:
"Violent Radicalization" - "adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating ideologically based violence to advance political, religious, or social change."
"Homegrown Terrorism" - "the use, planned use, or threatened use, of force or violence"......"in furtherance of political or social objectives."
"Ideologically Based Violence" - "the use, planned use, or threatened use of force or violence"..."to promote the group or individual's political, religious, or social beliefs."
And the problem is that any idea or behavior, from someone's point of view, fits those descriptions. And again, the people making that decision are the terrified, irrational ones.
So you wanted to march in an antiwar protest? Terrorist. Organize a boycott of a dangerous product? Terrorist. Simply suggest in a public forum that the people elect a different government? Say, terrorist, you and your online forum collaborators would look good in orange jumpsuits. (And remember, we already eliminated habeas corpus.)
While this Act simply establishes a Commission (though one with unlimited data gathering powers and operating explicitly outside any oversight), the biggest problem is that the Act is essentially a political lemma, in that it asks that all agree that all of these things are always bad things. So in the future, when real criminal legislation is proposed with real, criminal consequences for any of these behaviors, the essential preliminary of discussion of "why do we need this at all?" never happens. We've all already agreed that all these things are always bad, and we'll have a permanent Commission and a "university-based Center of Excellence" always reminding any doubters that all right-thinking persons must believe this is obviously so.
If you want to know why this bill is so dangerous, make this helpful symbolic substitution: replace "violent radicalization," "homegrown terrorism," and "ideologically based violence" with "independent thought" and "change."
Then read it again.
"Sec. 899B (5): Understanding the motivational factors that lead to independent thought and change is a vital step toward eradicating these threats in the United States."
It doesn't become any harder for them legally, I agree. It becomes harder for them politically.
I think our difference is that while you consider whether the SCOTUS may rule (and the Congress and Executive may act) in a way consistent with the Constitution a different question, I believe it to be the very heart of the question.
Assuming Constitutional behavior on the part of any of the three Branches seems an unwarranted supposition these days (the three Branches and a free press exist precisely because it's never warranted), and so the more information available to the public, the greater the likelihood of either Constitutional behavior initially, or a Consitutional remedy post facto.
In general, the deterioration in what one might call the general quality of government (Constitutional behavior and so on) is the natural and necessary precursor to a more informed and involved populace. So while I lament what I see as the death of the government, I look forward to living in a country where it isn't a structural assumption that the people must be governed. At some point one outgrows the need for parents and we've reached it, whether we like it or not, and for both worse and better. I hope my observations here can be seen in that light, as the willingness to accept my own mortal responsibilities, and forgive the mortal weaknesses of others (as well as the other way around;-) ).
It seems like it's a race to see if the Ninth can rule definitively on the culpability of the telcos (AT&T in particular) before the Congress rewards the telcos (and by implication the Bush Administration) with immunity.
There remains the question of whether the SCOTUS will overturn any pro-citizenry ruling the Ninth makes anyway.
But the more that comes out before the Ninth, the harder it will be for Congress/SCOTUS to completely immunize the telcos and the White House.
I hope the clerks in the Ninth make sure the judges don't choose this month to switch to decaf! (There's an amusingly twisted Ninth-Circuit-judges-meet-Lloyd-Bridges-from-Airplane! visual in there somewhere....):-)
Keep believing the right things will happen and act accordingly.
When your day job is wearing an S&M Minnie Mouse costume and pretending to solve matrix equations on a whiteboard while applying anal electro-stim to a juggling guy wearing a bra and diaper and riding a unicycle, what do you do for kink?
I tried a search, but "I'm Feeling Lucky" just redirects to Google.
I can never be too sure whether they're hiding something.
I mean, what if they knew where a terrorist had hidden a nuclear weapon that was about to destroy a major American city? Oh, they may say they don't know anything, just going on and on with their "Daddy, Daddy, please stop! Why are you hurting us? *gurgle*", but are you willing to risk the lives of millions of innocent people?
Being President is hard work, but somebody has to do it.
Everyone in the Executive Branch effectively serves "at the pleasure of the President." So if they continue to serve, then their actions, including torture, must please the President.
And don't overlook that the Bush family has a lineage almost as long as the FBI, with Bush the Elder running the CIA (drugs, assassinations, coups, wars), and Prescott Bush and George Herbert Walker collaborating with the Nazis.
Or that as Governor Dubya personally oversaw the execution of over 150 human beings, any of whose lives he could have spared, going so far as to sneeringly mock Karla Faye Tucker's request to spare her life: "'Please,' Bush whimpered, his lips pursed in mock desperation, 'please, don't kill me.'"
(Paging Congressman Stark...Congressman Stark, white courtesy phone.)
Suggesting the FBI taught Dubya about corruption is like suggesting the Generals taught the Globetrotters about basketball.
It's really very simple: Dubya claims the authority of the Presidency, he gets the responsibility along with it. They're not separable - or even separate.
"With all things considered, did Apple make a serious mistake by delaying Leopard's release until October? I don't think so."
This seems mostly a case of a poorly punctuated column headline. Given the author himself concludes Apple made the right choice in the face of limited resources, a more clear headline would have been "Leopard's Release Date a Serious Mistake?"
BushCo don't really give a rat's ass about Congress, except when they've been tied up and begging for abuse a little too long and someone from the Administration has to go to the Hill and spit on them.
The courts, however, especially at the level of the Circuit Courts, are a different story.
The telco immunity provisions in this legislation are to keep the White House from being found (as part of some telco trial) to have broken the law. It's got little to do with protecting the telcos other than as a way to sell it to the public.
This is all about closing off the courts to examination of Executive Branch violations of the Constitution. Which is why it's actually a much, much bigger deal than most people seem to understand.
That means a lot to me. Far more than I could express here.
I often wonder whether the time I spend crafting responses like these is worth it. It really does take a lot of time, for me at least, to try to clearly express in words my feelings and my experience of being human. And I wonder whether I ever truly reach even one other person, since that's my real desire.
Even though it may not have seemed like much to you, your response let me know the last ten years of my life, learning to express myself and what I hope are truths for many of us, was worth it.
And that you might see the world the same way I do, which is with deep love and great hope, lets me know that the rest of my life - reaching out and together making that love and hope a reality for all of us - will be worth it too.
In a wonderfully appropriate and deeply personal way your comment to me is exactly the right way to say to you what your comment means to me.
"This is quite possibly the best post I've ever read on this site."
Thank you, and all the people who liked this post, very, very much.
And you thought they just invented things like technology!
(I read that in the Secret Diary Of Sam Palmisano. Admittedly, it doesn't get a lot of traffic.)
Then watch *these* cops taser *this* guy to death
on
Stalling Cars Via OnStar
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I was going to mod in the thread, but had to post a response to this.
This is video of Georgia cops tasering a man to death.
The guy was having a problem with his epilepsy medication, so his wife called the cops for help. They proceeded to medicate him - first with billy clubs, then with tasers - repeatedly.
Because the wife also called the FBI afterwards, the local DA got pissy and softballed the case before the grand jury, which didn't even bother to watch this video before finding the police blameless.
When you're the guy in this video, then you can whine about people "screeching about tasers being overused."
P.S. When one's POV is that everyone is a person "who would kill or maime them in the blink of an eye," then naturally one "wouldn't hesitate to tase someone who i thought was going to turn violent on me."
But that's not seeing the truth of each situation, that's being caught in one's own psychosis and fear.
(Since consciousness is self-similar, of course we'll see this same behavior at the level of the person (in this case the poster, it seems, and the police) as well as the level of the nation (for example, our war in Iraq) ).
We don't get to hurt or kill other people just because we're afraid.
And the solution isn't to keep hurting or killing people until we're not afraid. Since the fear is an internal condition, and one that blinds us to the external reality, no amount of external violence and killing will ever stop it.
The solution is to stop, admit that we're afraid, breathe, and then notice we're still OK. And that takes a lot more balls than just beating or shooting or tasering or bombing everything that scares us.
Even though I can't imagine it being done much worse than it already is. Guess that "we're just maximizing shareholder value" line is simply another version of "the check's in the mail" or "we don't need a condom - I tested negative."
But damn, it would be awesome to go to a meeting and have some VP ask me "How may I give you excellent customer service today?":-)
Someone should have pointed out that TCP/IP, the basic protocol of the very Internet itself, is the acronym for "Transmission Control Protocol - Internet Pornography."
Sadly, I'd guess that the farmers in this metaphor do indeed consider each other gentlemen. After all, even the worst atrocities in history were carried out by people who believed themselves reasonable men. (And foxes don't usually imagine they own the henhouse.) So I think the metaphoric equivalent of foxes would be criminals - they prey on the chickens, and the farmer hunts them because they eat into (:-> ) the farmer's profits, but for all the threat to the chickens they pose no threat to the farmer or the farm.
I'd also say the farmers feel that way because I can feel the part of me that would feel that way were I in their position. And I don't reject it - I just don't let it be the one in charge.
"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."
Slashdot Mirror
This from the corporation that held the story about domestic telecom surveillance and Presidential violation of the Constitution until after the 2004 election - at the request of the Bush Administration!
Read as a piece of projection*, this editorial is a chillingly accurate description - of the NYT: The NYT's "collaboration is appalling...shows how much they care about the power of information to liberate the world."
*Projection is when we attribute to others the motivations, behaviors, and characteristics that are too psychically devastating to accept as the reality of ourselves. These are projected by the ego upon the other so the ego can safely (to it) experience these features of itself, as part of the ego's effort to become whole. This is a continuous process, the fundamental nature of ego perception. One can measure the degree to which any characteristic is of psychic influence in oneself by the degree of emotional affect associated with it. The greater the degree of emotion one feels, positive or negative, the greater the energy of the feature in one's own psyche. This is how people fall in love (see Arthur C. Clarke) and countries go to war (see any nation's political pronouncements about the nature of "the enemy").
Though that raises a question: does the human get the award, or the data? Perhaps in these cases the human is just the means by which the data offs itself, like being the soda machine that crushes to death the cheap, stupid, thirsty guy. We don't give the award to the soda machine (well, at least not the Darwin Award :-) ).
Maybe there's just some sets of 1's and 0's that can't take being Microsoft code anymore. I could understand that.
"I'm Microsoft Bob. For the love of God, please kill me."
It's called "The Texas Education Agency."
Timmy! I told you to stop petting that dinosaur!
You know, it's pretty easy to tell legislation's bad when it would make the Founding Fathers enemies of the State.
HR 1955 may be the most dangerous piece of legislation I've ever read, precisely because it's both so broad and so vague. "Broad and vague" coupled with "corrupt and guns" is a bad mix. (If they want to look for a cause of homegrown terrorism, they could start there.)
The other big problem with this, as with all "terror" legislation, is that it's the entity that's terrified that's making the decisions. And by definition, a terrified entity is operating under the control of their limbic system - which means by definition they're not thinking rationally.
And you know what terrifies governments most? Independent thought and change.
So now we have "broad + vague" + "corrupt + guns" + "irrational + terrified of independent thought and change." Regardless of the stated intentions, how could anyone think any good can come of this?
The Internet is named as a terrorist tool in the same sense that airplanes are terrorist tools, which lays the legislative ground for restricting access to the Internet the same way as access to airplanes. No-access lists, screening, content searches, all of it. Internet TSA, anyone?
But it gets worse.
The Act (since I have Read The F*cking Act) defines three terms:
"Violent Radicalization" - "adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating ideologically based violence to advance political, religious, or social change."
"Homegrown Terrorism" - "the use, planned use, or threatened use, of force or violence"......"in furtherance of political or social objectives."
"Ideologically Based Violence" - "the use, planned use, or threatened use of force or violence"..."to promote the group or individual's political, religious, or social beliefs."
And the problem is that any idea or behavior, from someone's point of view, fits those descriptions. And again, the people making that decision are the terrified, irrational ones.
So you wanted to march in an antiwar protest? Terrorist. Organize a boycott of a dangerous product? Terrorist. Simply suggest in a public forum that the people elect a different government? Say, terrorist, you and your online forum collaborators would look good in orange jumpsuits. (And remember, we already eliminated habeas corpus.)
While this Act simply establishes a Commission (though one with unlimited data gathering powers and operating explicitly outside any oversight), the biggest problem is that the Act is essentially a political lemma, in that it asks that all agree that all of these things are always bad things. So in the future, when real criminal legislation is proposed with real, criminal consequences for any of these behaviors, the essential preliminary of discussion of "why do we need this at all?" never happens. We've all already agreed that all these things are always bad, and we'll have a permanent Commission and a "university-based Center of Excellence" always reminding any doubters that all right-thinking persons must believe this is obviously so.
If you want to know why this bill is so dangerous, make this helpful symbolic substitution: replace "violent radicalization," "homegrown terrorism," and "ideologically based violence" with "independent thought" and "change."
Then read it again.
"Sec. 899B (5): Understanding the motivational factors that lead to independent thought and change is a vital step toward eradicating these threats in the United States."
Better hope the RIAA/MPAA don't hear about it, though, or in four years we'll all be dead....
"Silly bunt."
It doesn't become any harder for them legally, I agree. It becomes harder for them politically.
;-) ).
I think our difference is that while you consider whether the SCOTUS may rule (and the Congress and Executive may act) in a way consistent with the Constitution a different question, I believe it to be the very heart of the question.
Assuming Constitutional behavior on the part of any of the three Branches seems an unwarranted supposition these days (the three Branches and a free press exist precisely because it's never warranted), and so the more information available to the public, the greater the likelihood of either Constitutional behavior initially, or a Consitutional remedy post facto.
In general, the deterioration in what one might call the general quality of government (Constitutional behavior and so on) is the natural and necessary precursor to a more informed and involved populace. So while I lament what I see as the death of the government, I look forward to living in a country where it isn't a structural assumption that the people must be governed. At some point one outgrows the need for parents and we've reached it, whether we like it or not, and for both worse and better. I hope my observations here can be seen in that light, as the willingness to accept my own mortal responsibilities, and forgive the mortal weaknesses of others (as well as the other way around
It seems like it's a race to see if the Ninth can rule definitively on the culpability of the telcos (AT&T in particular) before the Congress rewards the telcos (and by implication the Bush Administration) with immunity.
:-)
There remains the question of whether the SCOTUS will overturn any pro-citizenry ruling the Ninth makes anyway.
But the more that comes out before the Ninth, the harder it will be for Congress/SCOTUS to completely immunize the telcos and the White House.
I hope the clerks in the Ninth make sure the judges don't choose this month to switch to decaf! (There's an amusingly twisted Ninth-Circuit-judges-meet-Lloyd-Bridges-from-Airplane! visual in there somewhere....)
Keep believing the right things will happen and act accordingly.
When your day job is wearing an S&M Minnie Mouse costume and pretending to solve matrix equations on a whiteboard while applying anal electro-stim to a juggling guy wearing a bra and diaper and riding a unicycle, what do you do for kink?
I tried a search, but "I'm Feeling Lucky" just redirects to Google.
"Do the Goo"
I can never be too sure whether they're hiding something.
I mean, what if they knew where a terrorist had hidden a nuclear weapon that was about to destroy a major American city? Oh, they may say they don't know anything, just going on and on with their "Daddy, Daddy, please stop! Why are you hurting us? *gurgle*", but are you willing to risk the lives of millions of innocent people?
Being President is hard work, but somebody has to do it.
"We're no. -1! We're no. -1!"
Everyone in the Executive Branch effectively serves "at the pleasure of the President." So if they continue to serve, then their actions, including torture, must please the President.
And don't overlook that the Bush family has a lineage almost as long as the FBI, with Bush the Elder running the CIA (drugs, assassinations, coups, wars), and Prescott Bush and George Herbert Walker collaborating with the Nazis.
Or that as Governor Dubya personally oversaw the execution of over 150 human beings, any of whose lives he could have spared, going so far as to sneeringly mock Karla Faye Tucker's request to spare her life: "'Please,' Bush whimpered, his lips pursed in mock desperation, 'please, don't kill me.'"
(Paging Congressman Stark...Congressman Stark, white courtesy phone.)
Suggesting the FBI taught Dubya about corruption is like suggesting the Generals taught the Globetrotters about basketball.
It's really very simple: Dubya claims the authority of the Presidency, he gets the responsibility along with it. They're not separable - or even separate.
"With all things considered, did Apple make a serious mistake by delaying Leopard's release until October? I don't think so."
This seems mostly a case of a poorly punctuated column headline. Given the author himself concludes Apple made the right choice in the face of limited resources, a more clear headline would have been "Leopard's Release Date a Serious Mistake?"
BushCo don't really give a rat's ass about Congress, except when they've been tied up and begging for abuse a little too long and someone from the Administration has to go to the Hill and spit on them.
The courts, however, especially at the level of the Circuit Courts, are a different story.
The telco immunity provisions in this legislation are to keep the White House from being found (as part of some telco trial) to have broken the law. It's got little to do with protecting the telcos other than as a way to sell it to the public.
Glenn Greenwald over at Salon had a good interview with the EFF's lead counsel in the ATT/NSA/let's-just-snoop-the-whole-backbone trial that explains this quite well.
This is all about closing off the courts to examination of Executive Branch violations of the Constitution. Which is why it's actually a much, much bigger deal than most people seem to understand.
It's so sad that that's now the setup for a joke.
That means a lot to me. Far more than I could express here.
I often wonder whether the time I spend crafting responses like these is worth it. It really does take a lot of time, for me at least, to try to clearly express in words my feelings and my experience of being human. And I wonder whether I ever truly reach even one other person, since that's my real desire.
Even though it may not have seemed like much to you, your response let me know the last ten years of my life, learning to express myself and what I hope are truths for many of us, was worth it.
And that you might see the world the same way I do, which is with deep love and great hope, lets me know that the rest of my life - reaching out and together making that love and hope a reality for all of us - will be worth it too.
In a wonderfully appropriate and deeply personal way your comment to me is exactly the right way to say to you what your comment means to me.
"This is quite possibly the best post I've ever read on this site."
Thank you, and all the people who liked this post, very, very much.
- Bruce
And you thought they just invented things like technology!
(I read that in the Secret Diary Of Sam Palmisano. Admittedly, it doesn't get a lot of traffic.)
I was going to mod in the thread, but had to post a response to this.
This is video of Georgia cops tasering a man to death.
The guy was having a problem with his epilepsy medication, so his wife called the cops for help. They proceeded to medicate him - first with billy clubs, then with tasers - repeatedly.
Because the wife also called the FBI afterwards, the local DA got pissy and softballed the case before the grand jury, which didn't even bother to watch this video before finding the police blameless.
The man's last words?
"Don't kill me."
Here's the link to the video
The link to the (minimal) media coverage
And the link to the discussion over at Digg
When you're the guy in this video, then you can whine about people "screeching about tasers being overused."
P.S. When one's POV is that everyone is a person "who would kill or maime them in the blink of an eye," then naturally one "wouldn't hesitate to tase someone who i thought was going to turn violent on me."
But that's not seeing the truth of each situation, that's being caught in one's own psychosis and fear.
(Since consciousness is self-similar, of course we'll see this same behavior at the level of the person (in this case the poster, it seems, and the police) as well as the level of the nation (for example, our war in Iraq) ).
We don't get to hurt or kill other people just because we're afraid.
And the solution isn't to keep hurting or killing people until we're not afraid. Since the fear is an internal condition, and one that blinds us to the external reality, no amount of external violence and killing will ever stop it.
The solution is to stop, admit that we're afraid, breathe, and then notice we're still OK. And that takes a lot more balls than just beating or shooting or tasering or bombing everything that scares us.
made as "Anonymous Coward."
Don't ask about the jointly developed update to the Hitachi Magic Wand. Just don't ask.
Wheeee, fun time trading for somebody today.
Even though I can't imagine it being done much worse than it already is. Guess that "we're just maximizing shareholder value" line is simply another version of "the check's in the mail" or "we don't need a condom - I tested negative."
:-)
But damn, it would be awesome to go to a meeting and have some VP ask me "How may I give you excellent customer service today?"
Someone should have pointed out that TCP/IP, the basic protocol of the very Internet itself, is the acronym for "Transmission Control Protocol - Internet Pornography."
No, the solution is obviously to upgrade girlfriends.
;-) )
(I realize that around here, unlike the rest of the world, that's more difficult than upgrading to Linux.
I just read a story on the front page titled "Kremlin Seeks to Control Online Media."
/. )
(And yes, when I say "read" I mean "saw the headline of." I said it's
HD-DVD porn + Doom9 patch = XXXBOX
Sadly, I'd guess that the farmers in this metaphor do indeed consider each other gentlemen. After all, even the worst atrocities in history were carried out by people who believed themselves reasonable men. (And foxes don't usually imagine they own the henhouse.) So I think the metaphoric equivalent of foxes would be criminals - they prey on the chickens, and the farmer hunts them because they eat into ( :-> ) the farmer's profits, but for all the threat to the chickens they pose no threat to the farmer or the farm.
I'd also say the farmers feel that way because I can feel the part of me that would feel that way were I in their position. And I don't reject it - I just don't let it be the one in charge.
"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."