But, but , but Mr. Obama is Mr. Transparency.
He said so.
One of the things President Obama has done for this country is to show us that whether the Republicans or Democrats are in office, we get a lot of the same policies. Not identical, but most of the foreign policy, national security, surveillance and domestic security policies are the same between the parties. Some choice!
Look, no matter how totalitarian we actually are, we will always pretend this is true. "America is the specialist most freest place in the universe" is an idea beaten into children's heads without qualification throughout early and middle childhood. It's my pet theory that this is the mechanism by which we get so many libertarians.
That just makes it all the more disillusioning when you figure out that it's bullshit.
For the safety of the country there are certain things that need to remain secret. Some complain our government doesn't do enough to protect us. Others see the boogeyman behind everything the government does. Criteria for no-fly list? I imagine there is an element of secrecy there and it would largely depend on intelligence generated through a number of sources. Are there mistakes made? Of course. Unfortunately the process is administered by human beings who are flawed vessels at best.
In a republic, the people must be able to hold their representatives accountable and ensure they are working in the country's best interests and obeying the law. Secret policies like the one governing the members of the no-fly list work against people wanting to know what their government is doing and why. It is not a matter of whether we are protected or not. It is a matter of transparency in a government by, of and for the people. That's not to say that the policy governing the no-fly list should be published in the New York Times. But if the government can hide behind the state secrets privilege to bar people from finding out why they are on the list and how they might get off it, they are denying those people their right to redress of grievances.
It is true that some things must be kept secret. But part of the issue here is that in order to be trusted with secrets, you must be that; trusted. Members of the intelligence and national security apparatus have been found lying to Congress, the judiciary and the public on numerous occasions. When they say we must simply trust them that they are doing the right thing, any thinking person should be skeptical. They have blown their credibility and have lost the trust of the people they are supposed to be protecting. That's not a good thing.
It should be noted that in the seminal case that established the state secrets privilege, United States v. Reynolds, the government used the national security argument to hide negligence. In the very first case that they used that argument, they used it to cover something up (lax maintenance that led to the downing of an aircraft). So it has been a dubious privilege from the start. Given their track record since, there is no reason to trust that the government is being honest in their invoking the privilege now. They may indeed be on the up-and-up. But that needs to be independently verified, and that should be the job of the court.
Now when I sign up with my ISP, I expect that, absent other agreements, they won't care about where my packets are address to or from, just if I'm exceeding their bandwidth limit I agreed to - the only terms they mention that would result in packet loss.
If they end up dropping packets on some other mean, I'd call that fraud. But fraud is not for the FCC to enforce, and it has little to do with one ideology vs. another.
What if they're throttling packets from another service you pay for? Is it really okay with you if you pay for Hulu and for your connection to Hulu, but your ISP purposely slows down your connection to Hulu? Why would that be acceptable?
I can see why some people considers communism to be evil considering that the attempts at implementation doesn't have a good track record. What really irks me is really those who go with socialist = EVIL. Not only does it disregard the Nordic socialist countries but it also speaks of an extreme ignorance of what a socialism is and that US fits that definition very well.
That is by design. The oligarchs in the US don't want the citizenry getting the idea that American Capitalism may not be the best way to structure things. That's why socialism and communism were so demonized; they are a threat to the dominant paradigm. If people were to get the idea that government can function to make everyone's lives better and make this a more equal society (equality of opportunity, not outcome) they might start to object to the accumulation of inordinate wealth and the power and privilege that comes with it. They might also wonder why the rich keep getting richer while everyone else has to make do with less and less. I think you can see why the
Marxism is probably preferable to the feudal society these guys are promoting.
A feudal society is one where the government owns all of the land and requires people to pay 30% of their earnings to their land lords for protection. That would probably be an improvement over the situation we have today - where our government requires people to pay ~50% of their earnings but instead of protection from real threats like invading muslim armies we get a fascist police state.
Don't worry. Under neo-feudalism we'd still have a police state.
Have you Americans *still* not gotten over this whole Marxist/Communist/Socialist = EVIL thing yet? Your government really did a good job with the propaganda during the Cold War it seems.
Why do you put that in the past tense?
The founders wrote the Constitution telling the government what it cannot do. It's quite a distinction from today's legislators in my opinion.
At the federal level the Constitution says what the government can do. Anything not explicitly allowed to the federal government is left to the states.
I think most people would agree net neutrality is a great idea in theory. You could say socialism is also good in theory. I don't mean to compare the two, but the problem with both is the practice and enforcement is done by people, who are fallible and often selfish.
I'd say that's a problem with just about any system. I think it's plain by now that American democracy and capitalism have the same problem.
With any government enforcement, how do you ensure full accountability that net neutrality is actually being followed and fair in enforcement?
I would say that without government enforcement there is no way to ensure net neutrality is being followed.
And what's to stop the government from "leveling the playing field," giving additional network resources to failing energy companies, state education systems in favor of Common Core, public companies who need to better compete against private ones etc. ?
That's not what Net Neutrality is. It's not that the government dictates who gets bandwidth. It's that the government mandates that an ISP cannot charge one customer more than another for bandwidth, or slow down one's connection because they don't want to pay more for the same service. It's actually about the government making sure your concern above does not happen.
Of course, there are third rail topics that one can't disagree with (such as the demand by the general masses for undying love for Snowden, Manning, and Ames), and mindless anti-US digs left and right, but all and all,
That's a main reason I continue to come to this site after all these years. The comments are often intelligent and worth reading. Contrast that with most other sites where people just get their stupid on.
We are becoming a country where the rich can do anything they want to everyone else.
Comcast and CenturyLink are corporations; they are not "rich" people, corporate personhood aside. More importantly, they are public utilities. Government has created corporations and offered privileges to utilities, so that's where the problem lies-- not with "rich" people.
True, but to be fair, the rich people have become a problem too.
I love these USofA stories where people are caught lying and then nothing changes. Next a lot of people say how this should not be allowed and is even illegal and nothing changes. Later some people will quote the consititution and then finaly nothing happens at all. Perhaps some likes on facepalm or an octothorpe will do something.
Anybody working with kids or dogs knows that unless there are consequenses for bad behaviour, the bad behaviour will not change. Instead it will become more persistant.
PS, if you clicked the link, hand in your geek card.
The whole country is whistling past the graveyard. Most of us know in some way that we're going down the tubes. We have a captured political system that is unresponsive to the vast majority of citizens. We have an economic system that can't provide for a huge swath of the population. We have an intelligence and law enforcement community that is interested in keeping closer and closer tabs on what everyone is doing, and arrogating unaccountable power. We have a media establishment that just delivers propaganda and entertainment and cannot take on serious subjects that might ruffle any feathers. We, as a society, can't seem to respond to problems like climate change and the need for clean, renewable energy.
We know we're hanging from a cliff, and we're afraid to look down and take in the magnitude of the height we are at. If we just keep pretending everything is okay, maybe it will all just work itself out. Things will have to get worse before they get better, because reality will have to hit us in the face hard enough that we cannot pretend it doesn't exist.
Living on Earth may be expensive, but it includes an annual free trip around the Sun.
