Reply #12: the government doesn't care if you order a pizza. The Bushie Totalitarian "government" [View All]

[tom_paine]

DOES care about Total Information Awareness, about creating a whole picture of you. And yes, your eating habits are part of that picture, as are your buying habits, your medical history, and your financial history.

Were you not paying attention when the Bushies, in a rare moment of candor, allowed their true intentions to be revealed (not that anyone heard about it or saqw it on our de facto State-Controlled Toady Media), when Poindexter said, "We are going to eiliminate the stovepiping" between industrial and intelligence collection, way back in '02?

It is the same principle as Bushiganda, essentially. Inverted Totalitarianism dares not used any of the brutal tools of Classical Totalitarianism, such as death-squads or overt brutal intimidation (except in small doses where Plausible Deniability, the mother's milk of tyrants since the dawn of history, abounds), it simply slithers it's velvet chains around our collective necks, unobtrusively. So long as we prisoners do not test the bars of the cage, we can believe we are free.

In the same way that the Bushies could care less about your specific ordering of a pizza, yet they care very much about creating a full picture of who you are and what you believe...are you free or a slave? Do you pose a threat to them or will you help round up the "disloyal" (i.e. freedom loving Americans with a love of the Constitution and Bill of Rights) when Inverted Totalitarian reverts to it's Classical Form. This, I suspect will happen when the "comfortable cage" is no longer possible to maintain. After a few more years of looting the nation, Peak Oil, and Global Warming, I suspect the hothouse of the "comfortable cage" that allows Inverted Totalitarianism to flourish in Amerika, Russia, and China (they are the least inverted, and the most classical, yet they are our Sister Nation because at heart we both have the same surveillance state, a curious fusion of capitalism and authoritarianism, regardless of what the Bushies or Chinese call themselves).

But I digress. The simple fact of the matter is that Total Information Awareness is real and it is ongoing. Project Genoa is real and is ongoing, likely under another name, as the Bushies did with TIA. Due to the exponential leaps in computing power, none of the things mentioned in the article are the least bit beyond our technological capabilities, right at this second, let alone next year when computing power will exponentially leap forward again as it has virtually every year since computers were invented.

You can claim it is a weak argument, but I disagree. It is simply reality as it stands today and I guarantee you if we knew half of what was being done with our data, how it was being stored and used against us, we would, well, we would...ummm, keep watching TV and doing as we are told?

Yes, that's about right. The principal charateristic of the Amerikan Imperial Subject is slack-mouthed apathy and obedience. Don't blame the messenger because reality sucks.

Even IF what you asserted about data mining being abused in this way was true, in spite of the growing reports and evidence to the contrary, in a lawless nation such as we have become, the potential for abuse is not a possibility, it is a dead certainty (99.99% chance).

That, Mercutio, is the difference between Free Nations and nations like our Amerika. Nations that have the Rule of Law have the potential of dissuading abuses by fear of being caught and perhaps imprisoned. This does not guarantee abuses won't happen, but does tend to inhibit them.

In nations like Amerika, where the heads of the law enforcement agencies are criminals themselves (and it doesn't matter how many honest underlings are following their orders, history has shown) dedicated only to their own survival and that of their Bushie/Nazi/commie/Authoritarian Masters, there is no such impediment.

Like the Bushie who mailed the anthrax? You think he didn't know from MOMENT ONE that he was eminently safe from invetsigation and prosecution for following Bushie Orders?

You think he didn't know that any Bushie FBI "investigation" was going to be purposefully tanked and himself go free free FREE? You think he didn't know that, if there were any honest FBI agents pushing to find the truth wherever it lay, they would be ordered off the investigation, demoted, fired, or otherwise silenced?

He knew, all right. But I digress. In the end, Mercutio, you remind me of Sebastian Haffner's father in the book "Defying Hitler", which I would highly suggest you read so that you know that not only is their nothing new under the sun, but that the Nazis and the Good Germans were not all that different (except in the areas of violence and overt racism) from the Bushies and the Good Americans of today.

In early 1933, Haffner could see it all clearly from the very beginning. He could see it so clearly that when his book was found published by his son in 2000, many thought it was a forgery because how could he have predicted so much so accurately.

In any case, Haffner was freaking out, and who wouldn't? His father, a stolid old liberal Prussian bureaucrat, kept counseling him, same as you counsel, Don't get hysterical. It's not that bad. You're taking the argument to the extreme... and so forth.

But as time went on, it became clear that the "ravings" of the son were far more accurate and prophetic than the calm musings of the father.

You might argue that the Nazis were atypical, but THAT is a weak argument. ALL totalitarianisms share vital characteristics with the Nazis, not the least of which are the shamless use of propaganda and the shameless repetition of the Big Lie. From Bush and Pinochet to Pol Pot and Stalin, they are all vitally similar at their core, regardless of whether they are as violent as Pol Pot or as relatively nonviolent as the Bushies are (for the moment).

No, at times like these in Amerika, and 1933 Germany, and 1920 Russia, and 1975 Cambodia, it is not the time for timid words and measured phases. It IS time to princippa obstis, finem respice (resist the beginnings, foresee the ends) and to do whatever we can to wake the larger populace up before it is too late, futile as history shows that to be.

Can I make my disagreement more strongly known?