Booman recently posted an article on Booman Tribune titled More of This, Please, an appreciation of a letter sent by some Congressmen to a couple of members in good standing of The New Reality Gang…Michael Chertoff and one of his Homeland Security Intel flunkies, Charles Allen…regarding the ongoing attempts to legalize the use of spy satellites for domestic surveillance.
As if “legalization” was a primary concern for this group of criminals. Legalization? It just makes things a little easier. No legalization? That’s OK too. “We don’ NEED no steenking legalization!!!”
And stormkite wrote a nicely conceived snark response to this letter from said gang members that contained the pithy nugget-of-truth answer:
Fuck your moratorium, fuck your oversight committee, fuck your “privacy and civil rights concerns”, and fuck you.
I started a comment on this exchange, and it grew.
So…here it is.
Read on if you so desire.
This comment is snark of course, Booman.
TRUE snark, though.
What makes you, Booman, think that a letter…no matter how well written and/or how well meant…from some little U.S. Representatives is going to do ANYTHING to stay the course of the New Realities Gang?
I am not at all convinced that the greatest possible legal revolution that could possibly be mustered in the immediately foreseeable future…a brand new set of characters in the Executive office and a crushing Dem majority in the House and Senate…would have much effect on the ongoing rush of tech-driven Big Brotherism that currently resides in our near-term future.
It might slow that development down some…drive it further underground until the inevitable next crisis appears…but even in a best case scenario there would still be literally thousands of governmental, private enterprise and especially foreign spooky spook spooks going straight ahead with their intrusion into what we laughingly refer to as our private lives and damn the torpedoes AND those wimps in Washington, DC.
What do THEY know?
All you have to do is look at the surveillance system currently in the process of being set up in England to see our future.
Cameras on every street and highway, face recognition systems, people being tracked 24/7…it’s on the way.
Have you watched the recent apparently futile resistance of NYC taxi drivers…once one of the most anarchistic, independent, free enterprise bunch of worker/entrepreneurs imaginable…to the universal installation of GPS/credit card machines in their cabs?
So the drivers “struck”. And the Bloombergers calmly reiterated in their robotically monotonous media talking head voices that “This is for their own good. This is for the good of the customers. This WILL happen. Resistance is futile. This is for their own good. This is for the good of the customers. This WILL happen. Resistance is futile.”
Over and over and over and over again.
And…they are right.
It WILL happen.
It will happen because it is being driven by the media.
By things like that ad for Mastercard or Visa that shows happy credit card user after happy credit card user buying junk food or whatever with the use of the card in a superefficient, almost Chaplinesque Modern Times-like roboticized consumer assembly line until one poor dork actually plunks down some (“HORRORS!!! It’s not TRACEABLE!!!”) cash and the whole system comes to a (totally unacceptable) crashing halt.
Driven by the news.
By movies and TV series.
By the ongoing media glorification of hi-tech as a crime-fighting tool.
As a war-making tool.
Stop it?
Short of a Baghdad-like almost Luddite rebellion…hillbillies in retro-fitted pickup trucks and urban slum guerrillas fighting the armored, high-teched might of The United States of Big Brotherhood to a literal standstill…I don’t see it BEING stopped.
And I see no possibility of that kind of resistance arising in the so-called developed world, either. Organized resistance of that sort is dependent on tribal, racial and by extension religious and/or cultural affiliations, and these things no longer exist in the mediaized world where the only “affiliations” that are left are to media-promoted ideas.
Like the primacy of high tech.
Catch 22, another circle left unbroken and unbreakable.
Another self-fulfilling prophecy.
Thou shalt be surveilled.
The ONLY Commandment of the New Reality Gang.
Bet on it.
Now…this idea will eventually collapse of its own weight and inner contradictions, because new ideas can only develop in a system where there are cracks in the wall through which they can escape, a system that contains sufficient hidey holes, places where the new can grow unopposed by the mass mind. And without the “new”, you eventually have…
Well, you eventually have nothing but Republicans.
Who can do NOTHING well except sustain their place in power by brute force and by cheating.
And the system collapses due to its own inertia.
What ain’t busy growing is busy dying, and stasis is fleeting at best.
YOU know…
So there y’are, folks.
There WE are.
Until the fall.
The Fall.
Bet on it.
Later …if of course there IS any appreciable “later” for us…
AG
