I think you guys desperately need to create and develop a couple of different, credible, political parties. Your democracy very badly needs some.
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Their system is only really open to two parties, so Bernie’s approach is the only way: a coup on the Dems.
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That’s right, Kimmono. We have already had TWO coups on the R’s: the tea party freaks and the Trumpeters. We need one on the D’s ASAP.
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That’s a shame. Even one more would keep the other two from getting too comfy with themselves. Make them look over their shoulders from time to time. Like the NDP does up here with the Conservatives and Liberals. It’s certainly not perfect but it helps.
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Hey Nick,
I’m going off topic here, but wanted to say I always appreciate your appearance on the Cyberlaw Podcast.
For the on topic part, I wish more of the debate over 702 reached the general public.
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Not quite. I haven’t read Tim Weiner’s book on the FBI (the one on the CIA was depressing enough) but he mentioned on the Daily Show plug for it, that Hoover broke with Nixon when Nixon asked him to tap not just “suspected radicals” but their friends and families. This is tapping everybody within even more degrees of separation. Oliver Stone’s version of the Snowden story showed the linkages branching way out and all of it under The Eye.
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And that ‘blue wave’ will act like conservitives because that’s what the voting public that screams the loudest is most wanting.
I have a question. What do democrats stand for? Not what they stand agaisnt. What do each party have as their core ‘we are about this’?
Republicans seem to be racism and kicking the shit out of people when they’re down.
What’re democrats? GIving corporations blowjobs and chasing republicans going ‘we’re not those guys vote for us’?
Why should i vote democrat when for the past seventeen years they’ve been chasing the right going ‘we’re like him except not racist.’
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You know what is supposed to be the core of Democrats already. It’s liberalism, which is being open to new ways, ready to shut off or change the old ways that are mean spirited or murderous or disenfranchising, etc. Just get out the two party platforms and read them side by side. No one can claim the parties are just the same if you read these documents side by side.
But that’s the theory…
In practice…
Depends on the level you want to talk about… Federal, state, county, city, etc. They aren’t all functionally the same, either.
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Folks are often surprised that politicians on the (nominal) left don’t oppose mass surveillance. It seems like such a clear-cut case of authoritarianism vs. human rights, it’s hard to imagine how Democrats could fail to oppose it at least in principle.
But from what I can see, politicians on the left have always supported mass surveillance at least as much as those on the right, if not more so.
- pinkos naturally tend to prefer strong intelligence services to military force
- and many of them fear being painted as terrorist-lovers
- pinkos essentially believe in the state as a vehicle for good; like, when the UK’s Blair government was pushing for a system of ID cards linking together every government database, any suggestion that this amounted to an uncontrollable hyperweapon of state surveillance was met with “baroo?” and a quizzical head tilt
- since the public doesn’t care, the only politicians willing to expend capital on this are libertarians, and they’re only a problem for right-wing parties
I’m sorry to say that I don’t think there’s any way to improve this situation by voting. If it were the only thing you cared about, you could vote for your local Rand Paul (or David Davis), but if you care about anything else then you should vote for your local left-wing candidate, and expect to be disappointed on this particular front.
Hoover just didn’t like being told what to do by that pea-brained moron in the oval office. Or the loud mouthed, name calling senator Joe McCarthy. The point is that Hoover set up the systems by which the next wave of surveillance could grow. Hoover was the initiator, the CIA took it and ran with it in parallel during the cold war, and then everything else we are talking about now. To claim it all started with Clinton is missing something huge. The surveillance state project had broken ground long before the 90s.
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I don’t know where the Clinton thing comes from (five Presidents after NIxon?) but since I was just quoting from a Daily Show interview, I suppose I should read Weiner’s book. No question that Hoover was a lawbreakin’ anticommie, of course…
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State government? Local?? I want to shake my fist at the heavens, not talk about potholes!
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Virtually any story on BB related to surveillance is guaranteed to be flat-out false and a paranoid fantasy, honestly. Thank you for injecting some actual facts.
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Sound your barbaric yawp? I am not stopping you. By all means, sound away!
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Let’s not run all the way to the other side of the spectrum with blanket statements. There is a kernel of truth in many of the articles, and some authors tend to be more hyperbolic than others. Speaking to this article, it is unfortunately fast and loose with the facts.
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Just here to remind everyone that congress does not have the power to pass these laws. The 4th clearly prohibits the government from doing warrantless and generalized searches. This data collection is illegal and the laws supporting it are illegitimate and IMO treasonous.
If they would like to have these powers, they will need to create a new constitutional amendment getting rid of the 4th.
Yes, a kernel of truth that one can unearth by sifting through the facts and realizing which parts are completely invented and which are actual truth. Personally, I think people should report actual facts rather than make them up, but I guess that’s unpopular on The Internets.
I guess that’s unpopular on The Internets.
Very broad strokes there, sir or madam.
Sorry, that was me. I pointed out that you might want to point the finger at Clinton who started the whole “Shock: Democrats voting like you’d think Republicans would!” thing. I wasn’t talking the surveillance state in general, but the fact that the shock of Democrats having no moral or policy leg to stand on was old news before I was even born.
Sure. It’s called exaggeration for effect; being facetious.
The point is that people like high-alert alarmism. It gets clicks and drives traffic and generates a lot of comments, partially from people saying “HEY THAT’S NOT TRUE!” BB isn’t a news source and it isn’t the AP; it’s a blog that can say anything it wants, and like other places reporting the horrorshow in Washington (like HuffPo) it tends to exaggerate and shock and say things in broad bold strokes.
I don’t get my news from BoingBoing any more than I get my news from a tabloid reporting about Bat Boy, but it often alerts me to go elsewhere to get the actual information about a breaking story.
