Just watched an interview with the founder of the Lavabit secure e-mail service which the owner/creator chose to completely shut down rather than comply with a secret government order which would have forced it to basically violate the civil liberties of its users.
Is this the start of the game of whack-a-mole facism? What is the government going to do when a plethora of organizations offer offshore options for secure e-mail? The only option, if America continues along this fascist route, will be to have a nationwide block similar to China’s Great Firewall. Or perhaps they will cut off people’s Internet connection who use such services? Perhaps arrest them and put them in jail?
I am really sickened at what’s going on lately. I see crime all around me in the city I live, and see how law enforcement and the criminal justice system is barely able to deal with it. People are paying the price in blood for this. Yet while this happens, my government wants to waste billions of taxpayer dollars on shit like this while the basic functions of law enforcement, which do not involve such civil-rights violating measures, are not even being conducted adequately.
My understanding from reading about the 9/11 incident was that the FBI failed to do basic ground-level work which would have definitely flagged and enabled them to catch at least some of the hijackers well before the actual hijackings and plane-bombings occurred.
To see the rabid, ongoing justifications for more and more blatant disregard for Americans’ fundamental civil rights – guaranteed explicitly in the Constitution – for flimsy reasons while law enforcement organizations are failing even in basic functions is outrageous. These organizations are flubbing in their basic functions yet there’s this rabid justification to be giving them even more ability to spy on people.
Why does the government keep doing this? It fails miserably at dealing with illegal immigration for decades. The problem is so rampant – there’s so much INS fraud, illegal-border crossing, overstayed Visas, etc. – that the justice system can’t even begin to deal with it. But rather than fix it the response is to ignore the problem and then proclaim they want to implement a shiny, new system.
Why won’t American government deal with the present shortcomings and failures of the existing systems rather than always overlook severe problems and then try to push new measures down American’s throats which have severe consequences?
It seems clear the the US government is inept, bungling, and now also quite a bully of American citizens. It will not hesitate to blow taxpayer money for promoting private interests like the biotech industry or huge agricultural giants. But then it completely fails the functions it was entrusted with, all the while attempting to brutally violate the basic rights of citizens and force more draconian measures upon the public.
In the meantime, as an example, access to higher education is appallingly, shamefully lacking for many, many Americans. So many of the basic functions are failing yet we see things not being rectified but accelerating at ever-increasing speed in the wrong direction.
The city I live in is supposed to be one of the pearls of America yet the streets are filthy, crime is rampant, open-air drug markets extend for blocks, and the roads on the main throughways of the city are crumbling.
When you call the police you are lucky if there’s an answer within several minutes. And if you get through and your issue doesn’t involve something like a violent crime in progress you can be lucky if they will respond within three hours.
Consumer rights have become a joke. Its an open-field day on citizens for anything and everything when they have to rely upon a large company to provide any service. Need to have a bank account? Its an opportunity for massive companies to creatively fuck over consumers in continually changing, myriad ways. Need a telephone? Another opportunity for large companies to creatively fuck over consumers in myriad ways. The list goes on and on.
Need food? Well 98% of what gets sold and quite sadly consumed is basically shit. Sure there exist things like organic options, but much of this is just marketing bullshit and its just another cornered market. Orangic farmers are not allowed to sue when their crops get contaminated from GM crops, thus destroying their business for at least that season. What a fuck over. The federal government set up that system?
Need to breathe? What guarantees are there of the basic human right to breathe clean air? To force limits on the disgusting overconsumption and waste of fossil fuels? Where’s the 400% fuel tax for gas-guzzling vehicles like Hummers and Continental SUV’s? Why the fuck should I – an avid bicyclist and someone who has a small, fuel-efficient car and who drives minimally – have to pay for the sick waste of others?
Need to have peace? Where are the protections of the fundamental rights of humans to live stress-free? What happened to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”? Vehicle manufacturers deliberately make vehicles with loud exhaust. Idiotic fuckhead vehicle owners deliberately modify their vehicles to emit loud sounds. By the way, I never – not once – saw anything like this in Germany.
America cannot even stand up for the basic, fundamental civil rights of its citizens. We, the People, don’t get shit out of this equation and now you want to take away our constitutionally guaranteed rights for what? Bullshit based on flimsy justifications?
I want to ask America’s leaders to please wake the fuck up and start fixing America which means, at its very foundation, protecting the fundamental rights of human beings in every way possible.
Maybe if we did that we wouldn’t have all these supposed security threats and need to have all these wars.
If the core, fundamental human rights of people were respected and adequately protected, it would have far-reaching positive effects. It would extend into other things. Just protecting one basic right such as the right to physiologic soundness of body free from chemical, audial, visual, or other assaults is a huge deal.
Yet when these rights are insidiously and continually violated, the consequences are catastrophic and equally far-reaching. The solution is not to treat the symptoms but to treat the cause. But there’s such a powerful agenda to not deal with the cause that its a serious issue in America. Its killing America.
I’ve often asked myself, in a type of mental exercise, when considering the way things are, and wondering why they are so bad, the following: If someone wanted to intentionally design a system which was failing, what would it require? What types of people would it require?
The sad fact is, that if one were to intentionally design America to fail in all these different ways, it would in fact require exactly the types of people in prominent leadership and other positions we have today.
America is failing not in spite of the people in leadership and positions of power, it is failing precisely because of them. It would require the types of seemingly well-intentioned-but-always-inadequate hypocrisy which are the hallmark of the time. It would require the seemingly-well-intentioned-but-ultimate-indifference which is a hallmark of the time.
Look closely at many of the dominant things right now in the culture, and then see how things are failing not just arbitrarily while those things happen to be, but ultimately precisely because of those things.
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