fascism_begins_at_home birdmad headed for room 101 orwell is knocking at my door 021114 ... in chiidi i trust the effects of the "homeland security act" as described by William Safire (you know it's got to be a bad deal if even arch-conservative republican commentators like Safire think it's a shit-scary idea) Safire describes it as such: “Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend — all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as ‘a virtual, centralized grand database.’ ” if this was America once, it sure isn't now. 021114 ... pilgrim Hmmmmm. Sounds like the Only People that will Enjoy any Privacy are those that Live Outside The Law. 021115 ... birdmad and those who seem to be placing themselves above it 021115 ... chiidi (pointing my finger in the general direction of the Beltway and Capitol Hill) 021115 ... guitar_freak time to drop out of "society" www.crimethinc.org 030220 ... peyton if the patriot act is what you relate to 1984, then you really need to reread the book, and the patriot act. 060227 ... birdmad (c/o the ministry of love) Ok, so maybe the metaphor is a bit strained if i only apply it to the Patriot Act. But if i apply it to the behavior of the Administration as a whole, then it's a tad closer to the mark. **What had been Department of Justice's "Total Information Awareness" program which was meant to be a large scale DOMESTIC data-mining operation on the scale of what Wm. Safire was speaking against and which met with much controversy from various quarters (Libertarians, privacy and civil Liberties advocates such as the EFF and ACLU) was discontinued in name only back in 2003 and subsequently moved under a number of different names to one of the less visible branches of the Dept of Defense. **Operation TIPS: Junior Spies, anyone? ** most of the people who now support this president do not do so under any principle of conservatism, but because they have now become little more disciples of a cult-like authoritarian mentality... Party Orthodoxy ** FOX News, regardless of the extent to which they try to deny their role as the publicity and information organ of The Party, is the Telescreen and the Two Minutes Hate rolled up into one **The provisions for "extraordinary_rendition" and all that it entails contained within The Act...What else would you call that but Room 101? **WAR IS PEACE: Ignoring all of the contributing factors of why America is not well-liked in the Middle East, little Georgie chants his mantra of "they hate us for our freedom" and launches an ill-defined "war on terror" in which he and the people who help him cook his batshit-crazy policies assume that this is a Zero-sum game in which if they kill X number of "terrorists" (i.e. whatever brown people happen to be in the blast-radius) then eventually there will be no more terror. Even though this ignores causal factors in place before the "war on terror" and those incurred as a direct result - do you even want to imagine how many of the relatives of some of the innocents who died as a result of "collateral damage" now have axes to grind with us, and what percentage of them are just angry enough to do something about it? Ss far as those causal factors go, are you familiar with what happened in Iran one day in August of 1953? The CIA, under Eisenhower, overthrew the democratically elected PM, Mohammed Mossadeq and replaced him with the monarch/dictator known until 1979 as the Shah when he was overthrown by the Islamic Revolution The ayatollahs who led the revolution were only rebel faction of the Iranian population who because of the degree and strictness of their dogma and discipline (and there are few scarier combinations) were organized enough to survive the Shah'sz tyranny (google the word SAVAK) FREEDOM IS SLAVERY: A large mesure of our economic stablility is reinforced by exploitative labor practices both domestically and abroad. Until it was pulicly mocked by a member of Congress, the Department of Labor under Bush-appointee Elaine Chao wanted to go so far as to reclassify fast-food employment as "manufacturing" so as to pad DoL estimates of Manufacturing Sector jobs. This was after the reclassification of amy job descriptions by the DoL to Management to cut down the number of people who could legally qualify for overtime pay. The same politicians who talk tough about immigration are usually the same ones who will gladly and willingly endorse oursourcing as a profit mainentnce issue or trade agreements that favor investors and CEO's at the expense of workers themselves IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH: The majority of appointees to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq after the removal of Saddam Hussein were not chosen because they had any diplomatic knowledge or understanding of the people and politics of the reqion, they were almost all fresh-out-of-college interns from Administration-friendly "think-tanks" like The Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. As a result they hadn't nearly as many ideas about how to go about catually rebuilding the place as they did about making sure that they could try and impose their ideologies on the legal process ****************************** Everynow and then i listen to the talk-radio jack-offs like Limbaugh and Hannity and so-on and I find it highly amusing that the same people who argue against interpreting the 9th Amendment, in conjunction with the 4th and 5th as a generic Right to privacy, always say that "if you're not guilty of anything, than you have nothing to fear" - completely ignoring Limbaugh's Oxycontin issues and Dick Cheney's refusal to disclose his Energy Task-force documentation. Besides the various "slippery slopes" which the Patriot Act pours grease upon, my worst gripe with it remains that in truly orwellian fashion, the legislature pretty much passed the act sight-unseen at the arm-twisting behest of Ashcroft's DOJ...WHILE IT WAS STILL BEING WRITTEN Once upon a time Saddam Hussein was Ronald Reagan's pet monster (And Bush the Elder's too) and many of the crimes that the pro-war crowd cited as reasons to depose him were committed with the blessings of the patron saints of their new Republcan Authority Cult, but that was all conveniently forgotten when Bush the Younger reminded us that we have always been at war with Eurasia and Eastasia has always been our ally 060227 ... peyton I hope you know that I think you're brilliant birdmad. I just disagree. That's all. I read each of your examples, and they're well thought out and labeled. However, in the interests of brevity, I will say that they, like even my own, are skewed through the looking glass that is the individual. If you are looking for particulars that prove your conceptions, in a spawling system that is our beautiful country, then you will certainly find it. There are too many moving parts for me to say that none of them are black and evil. But as a whole, as an institution, I cannot believe that the U.S., as a whole, is a sinister force dedicated to ideal of a boot on a human face forever. The analogy is absurd to me. I've seen too many thankless deeds done and too many lives benefited by string free handouts to condemn this country. I love this country. I would die to defend it. And that means I am obligated to love its leaders too. While my faith still lingers, I must. It is the only service I am still able to readily render. 060228 ... Seminary drop-out Birdmad don't get me wrong, i love my country, just not the current cadre of assholes at the wheel of the bus and the frequency with which they snow people into letting them back into power the thing i find most aggravating is the tendency to conflate these people with the country itself... to potray them as the literal, transubstantiated embodiments of America itself, both by their apologists as well as our enemies it goes back to why i refer to most of this administration's supporters as having a cult-like mentality... in those cases, the operant philosophy seems to be the insistence that "the land and the king are one, as God has ordained" which insulates the spologists from having to brook any criticism since they can then write it off as a mixture of treason and heresy all in one convenient package ...these same people, these so-called leaders who have been so staunchly supportive of intervention in the more oil or other resource-rich nations of the world have been oddly silent about "Moral Clarity" and "The Rule of Law" when the starving,suffering haven't had aignificant resources to cash in on.... Darfur in this decade, Rwanda in the previous...the same people who demand unconditional support for this current underataking were the same ones who had an odd streak of rebellious dissent and pacifism in them when the decision was made to intervene in Kosovo but going back to your points: Are we frequently a source of good in the world? Yes, despite the dogmatic, knee-jerk tendencies of some to say otherwise. Is much of that good tempered or countered by things that come off as hypocritical at best and abominably evil at worst? Yes again. To wit; In my previous job, one of my friends and former co-workers was born on the Navajo Reservation back during the time when kids were taken away from their parents and sent to boarding schools where they were basically indoctrinated to reject their own culture... forced to adopt whichever sectarian christian denomination was running the school and subject to punishment for reverting to their native language...and this was still true all the way into the late 60's and early 70's one of my greatest fears as someone who expereinced an inversion of St. Augustine's epiphany (I was deeply religious until a string of big moments in my life led me to reject my old beliefs, where St. Augustine was a raging party-hound until he felt the touch of the divine), is that the same people who wave the idea of a Muslim theocracy as the thing to be afraid of have done their own share of maneuvering to insititute a Christian version of the very same thing. 060228 ... Sonya *sigh* Peyton you know I've always admired your faith in our countries leaders, but how can you say that when you did not vote for the current leader in office??? By exercising your right to vote and voting for his opponent you are stating you do not have faith in the way the current president is running this country. It is that right -- the right to criticize and exercise a DIFFERENCE of opinion and not believe everything we hear/read that I think the people on this blather are trying to defend and protect. There are ulterior motives being put to work and the expenses are the lives of soldiers/former soldiers like yourself. Do you think that does not hurt the American people to know those people (like yourself) and their valor are being exploited because of some ridiculous political agendas? You used to be an isolationist... that was a long time ago but I remember a lone soldier serving a tour he did not really believe in saying we should keep our greedy mits within our own borders. The system may not have appreciated what you have done for us, but I always have and will. I will remember you, and Boyle, and Jason, and everyone else for it. No one here is saying they don't love their country... they are saying they don't always like what this country has done and so long as they continue to cry out against the things they perceive to be wrong, the real idea behind America is still alive. 060301 ... peyton but how can you say that when you did not vote for the current leader in office??? I flipped a coin, remember? One was spineless and slimy, the other confounded and surrounded by self servers. Those two evils, combined with my stalwart belief in fate, allowed me to use random chance. So that makes this ---- By exercising your right to vote and voting for his opponent you are stating you do not have faith in the way the current president is running this country. --- Not applicable. It is that right -- the right to criticize and exercise a DIFFERENCE of opinion and not believe everything we hear/read that I think the people on this blather are trying to defend and protect. I'm not sure what this means as far as the context of the conversation. There are ulterior motives being put to work and the expenses are the lives of soldiers/former soldiers like yourself. As I tell everyone who tells me this.. I was fortunate to see those good deeds done to Iraqis and other arabs done first hand. Yes, innocent people died on both sides. Yes, they will continue to do so. If someone somewhere is getting rich because of it, I don't care. We're doing real good over there. Just because the sensationalized media of this country (the right as evil as the left, and make no mistake, they are both wildly inaccurate as they are deliberately misguided and inflamatory) decides not to report it as such.. well frankly I don't care. I was there. I saw it. I know too many many finer soldiers than I say that they felt like they were helping real people. You cannot formulate an argument to take that away from me. I don't care if we wring the country like an oil soaked sponge. I'm not getting rich off it. The country, as a whole, wanted to help. Still we do. It is my responsibility to put my faith in the system, because if I do not, then I am becoming a stone on the path to any sort of progress at all. All I can do is hope that the system established by the constitution, the one very much still active, will work well enough to keep me reasonably on the path to good deeds. I certainly don't wish to take away anyone's right to speak. I took an oath once to serve until death to protect that right. But I don't agree with what the majority of this country is saying about the intent and the delivery of what we're doing over there. I refuse. Too much PERSONAL experience tells me otherwise. Most of these people have never left the borders of this country. They have no real concept of what poverty or restriction is. They've never seen it. They just don't know what it is they're comparing when they say things like "Nazi" and "1984". You used to be an isolationist... that was a long time ago but I remember a lone soldier serving a tour he did not really believe in saying we should keep our greedy mits within our own borders. I was once an isolationist. But I didn't say anything about "greedy" anything, and I certainly didn't say we should be confined to our own borders. The world economy alone would collapse. No one here is saying they don't love their country... they are saying they don't always like what this country has done and so long as they continue to cry out against the things they perceive to be wrong, the real idea behind America is still alive. Agreed. My point is, and has been, just make sure you know what you're talking about before you start talking. Go see it for yourself. Then make an opinion. If you're interested in loving your country, then go serve it. 060301 ... from a Wall Street Journal interview "well, I have to admit i bristle every time i hear things like that, every time i hear that we aren't getting out more of the good things that happen, because seriously, let me put it to you this way, if there were five car-bombs and fifty kidnappings going on every day in New York City, am i gonna cover that or am i gonna do a front page piece on the school that got painted around the corner?" with a group of reporters in Iraq 060302 ... birdmad I enlisted at age 17, but since the Army's Intelligence division seems as though they would rather be the ones to teach you how to torture people, since i was still under 18 and made quite the otherwise good impression on the screeners, they gave me three options once they found out just what a deviant i can be: Take a lower, non-secure MOS (which seemed like a titanic letdown after seeing as how the recruiters at my MEPS and all of the early security screeners built up the program), go to Leavanworth on a perjury charge for not telling them ALL of my dirty secrets or take my chances with finding a way to get myself kicked out. When i found out later that same day that my dad had only a few weeks left to live, i contrived to wash myself out with a general discharge (2-C) since then, i'm just a couple weeks away from being 34 and between the various avenues of experience, i have become a diabetic, and i don't know if DOD has lowered their acceptable recruit standards to include folks with diabetes. but like i said to Sonya on another blathe here about 3 years ago: even though i opposed the action in Iraq, if i was still capable of going off and doing it, i would... on my more altruistic side, so that someone else might not have to go , and to satisfy the darker urges of the criminal that i sometimes am, i think it would be interesting to have the legal sanction to kill someone if it came down to it. and so you know, between what my neighborhood became when i was in college and situations i have gotten myself into, i do know what it's like to have to duck from automatic fire and what it is like to have the power of life and death over someone, which is more than can be said for the people here who, oblivious to anything but their own ideologies, were so relentlessly in favor of this course of action. 060302 ... birdmad (16 was the age when i gave up religion and hooked up with "the bad kids") i have been a student of politics since i was 8, during the Reagan vs Carter election. I remember watching the hostage crisis unfold in Iran, I remember watching my religion teachers try to reconcile the agreement of their conservative personal morality with the Reagan administration to the larger more starkly contrasting issue of their committment to social justice, which was something that the Reagan admin seemed to regard with no small amount of Contempt and, yeah, no offense, but before you deign to tell me to know what i'm talking about before i start talking, ask National Intelligence Director John Negroponte what he knows about Honduras and what it has to do with flying nuns other than the one played by Sally Field (that is if being thrown from helicopters counts as flying), learn about the Salvadoran Army's Battalion 316, what they did at El Mozote and what their relationship is to Ft. Benning Ask Henry Kissinger if Sept. 11, 1973 rings any bells and if it has anything to do with why they'd likely arrest him if he ever flew into Chile ask SecDef Rumsfeld about the picture here: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/ Who is/was Efrain Rios Montt and did his campaign of attempted genocide against the Maya Indians have any correlation to the increase in the military aid his government received from the US at the time? google: Islam+Karimov+Uzbekistan+boil+in+bag educate me, tell me more about the meaning and implication of the phrase "extraordinary rendition" 060302 ... bird oh, and poverty? thanks to a combination of shit luck, personal mismanagement and bad investments, though it was largely my own fault, i managed to end up homeless from december of 1997 through may of 1998, and since i've never been the type to beg, i had to get by more than a few times during that period on stuff that makes the worst MRE taste like haute fucking cuisine, boy. and I didn't bring up the word Nazi, but while that's on the table now, you do realize that Emperor Monkey-pants' grandfather Prescott Bush built a very large percecntage of his family's fortune in the late 30's and early 40's doing business with a pro-Nazi German financier named Fritz Thyssen... which doesn't make him or his family Nazis per se, but does speak of a certain degree of comfort and ease in doing business with monsters. Boiling it all down to the simplest briefest terms, like me, this country and it's leadership walk a fine line. I've done my share of good and bad deeds, but i'm not about to say that any or all of my most selfless acts absolve me of my worst sins, only that they offer at least a measure of redemptive counterbalance 060302 ... bird and maybe only a small measure at that. 060302 ... peyton My point was, the general reference of the Patriot Act and the book, the work of fiction, 1984. Let's not stray too far here. Regardless, I've seen the picture of Rumsfeld before. Strangely, it was taken twenty years before the Iraqi conflict. Ideologies change. Allies change. There are few people who are the same person they were twenty years ago. The picture is irrelevant to anything. Even if it was of Rumsfeld and Saddam getting high together in college, it wouldn't mean anything to me. 1973 was the Chilean coup, if I remember correctly. An overthrow of a communist government that was sponsored by the U.S., during the cold war. Citing that as an offense is similar to saying that the cuban missile crisis was the U.S. meddling too much in the hobby of its neighbors. Are there worse atrocities going on in the world than Iraq? Sure. Should we have done something about those first? Absolutely. Was oil a motivating factor? Almost certainly. Wars have been fought over natural resources for thousands of years. Does it mean that what we are doing over there is better than the reign of a known genocidal dictator? You better believe it is. I wish we'd have done something else, but we didn't. So I support the decision, because overall, it has the potential to greatly benefit the population. Declining popular support isn't helping anyone. What's done, is done. You can't unstart the war. And you just can't leave them conquered either. We make it our business to rebuild. So that's what we're doing. And almost 2,300 people are kidnapped in America each day. Iraq seems like a far off place to go if that's what you're interested in reporting. I'm not calling you an idiot. I said that your analogy, though common with millions across this country, is faulty. The rhetoric just doesn't fit. Let's call the facts what they are, and stop using sensationalized analogies. 060302 ... Sonya "Agreed. My point is, and has been, just make sure you know what you're talking about before you start talking. Go see it for yourself. Then make an opinion. If you're interested in loving your country, then go serve it." You have the impression that the only way to serve one's country is to join the military. You are sadly mistaken. I did a plethora of volunteer work in high school for the homeless and under privileged elementary kids who had nowhere safe to go home after school because their parents just weren't there. So do not tell me that the only way to "serve" one's country is to join the military and go off fighting wars. There are other avenues. When we met you knew damn well that I was not the person capable of picking up a gun and pointing it at someone - I refuse to back down from that. It is a principle -- so strong as the ones you hold dear to your heart in your willingness to die for this country. Do not insult me for having too much compassion. The massive, horrible message behind 1984 was that the gov't had far too much control over its people. The people who founded this country came here because they wanted to get away from oppression in their original homelands. And as a daughter of a father who came to this country with nothing but a shitty suitcase and 200 dollars who worked his ass off to make sure his kids had a shelter and food in a foreign land where English was not (and still is not) his first language I know what it means to love this country and be thankful for what I have. Some people are too scared to do what you have done Peyton and yes, that may be a fault, but for thousands upon thousands of years soldiers like you do what you do because of people like me - those who are too weak or too scared to do the dirty work of war. I never believed in war and I still do not. That might make me a fool because I still believe in the idealism that is so painfully above mankind right now. You cannot deny the fact that Bush wanted us to go there in the first place because of WMD's which we have not yet found. He has a responsibility to us, the American people for throwing us into a conflict like this on intelligence that hasn't solidified. There is something wrong with that picture. And you did say greedy mits though you probably don't remember. Maybe you just wanted to come home to the states - that's fine. But I remember distinctly the tones you used... people change, but some of us and our ideas do not. If you are okay with them tracking every little thing you do, then so be it, but some of us want a line to be drawn. At what point is it not okay for them to control and monitor everything??? Are we supposed to look the other way while slowly but surely they evolve into an Orwellian monstrosity? That's not what people want. You cannot fault people for that. 060302 ... blathe 3.02.06 refs birdmad doubleplus ungood It wasn't a change in ideology that estranged the US from Saddam Hussein's Iraq, it was bad table manners. Under George HW Bush's ambassador April Glaspie, the US gave tacit permission for Hussein to seize PART of kuwait to reinforce an old territorial claim. it became a problem and in international incident when Saddam decided to take the whole country, thus annoying those hereditary monarchs and oligarchs who run the some of those neighboring countries and necessitating our intervention. Had it not been for that, i'd be willing to wager that he'd have stayed on our payroll and given carte blanche to oppress his subjects so long as he continued to serve our interests without becoming too much of a political liability, which at times is the only real litmus test for how far we'll go to export that special brand of Freedom and Democracy (tm) Manuel Noriega was no different, we built him up and propped him up because of his anti-communist bona-fides, but we did so at the expense of him running rough-shod over his own people and at the expense of our own so-called "war on drugs" when it became to hard to just ignore that our dog had not just gone bad but had been so the whole time, we acknowledged the obvious and put him down (figuratively at least) The Allende administration in Chile was a democratically elected, left-socialist leaning regime that sought to nationalize a number of its resource interests to the chagrin of the American and European business interests that hed held sway up to that point. The Nixon administration, by way of Kissinger aided a military coup against a democratically elected leader and from that point until it fell in 1989, the US government propped up a military/fascist regime under Pinochet that was responsible for at least 3000** abductions and summary executions of its own people **this is the number that Pinochet's subordinates will cop to and that the Truth and Reconciliation committtee is willing to accept as a minimum, but others suggest the number may go as high as 17,000... freedom and democracy in action, eh? "Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It's merely a question of self-discipline, reality control." 060302 what's it to you? who go blather from