Tag Archives: government

Why we need guns, even in the wake of yet another school shooting.

17 Dec

With the advent of another school shooting, gun control is back in the spotlight.  The focus of much of the debate revolves around assault rifles and high capacity magazines. I’ve heard people argue that we should ban both high capacity magazines and assault rifles. The proponents of this argument reason that neither are used for hunting, but instead have the sole purpose of enabling someone to kill more people faster. While this is true, the proponents of the ban are wrong in their assumption of what the 2nd amendment was intended for. The 2nd amendment was not written for hunters, it was not written for collectors, it was written for a specific purpose. Here is a simple fact of life:

Government authority is derived from violence.

Like it or not, the government claims a monopoly on socially acceptable violence. (Whether they are justified or legitimate in doing so is another issue.) A government’s laws only have weight because they are backed by the threat of violence. This threat may be very well concealed by formalities like a bureaucracy, but ultimately, if you resist a chain of laws long enough, you will come face to face with an individual with a gun acting on behalf of the government who’s laws you are breaking.

Given that violence equals governmental authority, what happens to a government’s people when they are relieved of their ability to use violence?

They lose ultimate authority over their government.

It is possible for people to exercise authority over their government by voting, but this is not the same as ultimate authority. People can vote about something all they want, but if other people show up with guns, the ones with the guns are going to have the final say. I realize this might sound absurd to someone living in a first world country, but the reason it sounds absurd is because first world countries, by in large, have a relatively good track record when it comes to adhering to the will of their people when the people exercise their will through voting. This track record, however, has varying degrees of length depending on the country.  You only need to look at now first world countries during the various hot and cold wars of the 19th and 20th centuries to see governments repressing their people. (Franco Spain, Vichy France, DDR Germany) It can happen. It does happen. It currently is happening across the middle east. Syria, Egypt, and recently Libya are good examples of where the government swept away any illusions that ultimate authority rested on anything other than violence. It is also here that the people have attempted to reassert their ultimate authority through violence. When the 2nd amendment was written, the colonists in the newly formed United States had just thrown off an oppressor with violence. They had attempted various non-violent means previously, but fond them to be ultimately powerless. They used the last recourse available to them: violence. Having learned this lesson, they drew up the 2nd amendment to ensure that their people would never again be powerless in the face of an oppressor.

The 2nd amendment exists to ensure a people’s ability to use violence against the government.

It is for this exact reason that weapons like assault rifles and their extended magazines are needed. They are designed for you to fight a war scenario and kill people. When someone argues for banning assault rifles, high capacity magazines, and other implements designed specifically for war scenarios, what they are actually arguing for is the removal of a people’s final say over their government.

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Let’s not be coy about protests.

5 Nov

Last week Canadian lawmakers approved a bill making it illegal to wear a mask while protesting. There are similar laws here in the US, especially against the use of gas masks during protests.

Why?

Because ultimately, when you take away all the niceties and formalities,  the government wants to ensure its ability to crush you. You can’t hide your face because the government wants to be able to identify you and punish you for protesting. You can’t wear a gas mask because the government wants to be able to disperse or incapacitate you with tear gas and other weapons.

You can protest, but only as long as they remain in control, able to pull the plug when they’ve decided that you’ve had enough free speech for the day.

Many aspects of life are like this. It’s like running along in a video game and suddenly hitting a glass wall. You have the illusion of being able to acting out and making a difference, but ultimately, really ultimately, the government will make sure it maintains control. Anything that jeopardizes this control will be made illegal and squashed.

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Laws don’t determine what’s right and wrong.

30 Oct

This November 5th some members of anonymous are planning on marching on Washington DC, possibly armed, to arrest the government. As noble as this idea is, in reality they’re going to be arrested the moment they put their hands on any members of the government. If they bring guns, people will be shot because all government authority ultimately rests on the shoulders of someone with a gun. What they’re attempting to do, overthrow the government, is illegal but it isn’t inherently wrong.

However, I feel that if you asked the common Joe/Jane on the street, anything illegal is wrong. I imagine their reasoning would be something as terse as “Well of course it’s wrong! It’s illegal. Things that are illegal are bad!”

Unfortunately, I feel a lot of people in our society have this mentality when it comes to laws. It extends from a view of morality instilled in us from childhood:

Mother and father say something is wrong, therefore it is wrong. Mother and father say it is wrong to break the law, therefore anything illegal is wrong.

The problem is that the law is not some perfect measure of good and bad. It’s written by other human beings, human beings who often have ulterior motives. Governments are living organisms, hive minds, composed of a plethora of smaller beings. All living organisms have a survival instinct. As such, one of the first things made illegal by any government is the overthrowing of that government.

There was a legal academy where I went to high school. Basically, it was some extra-curricular courses students could enroll in if they were interested in going to law school after high school. The idea was to give them foundational knowledge of the American legal system to help better prepare them for law school. The types of people who joined this legal academy were the type of people who loved to watch crime dramas on television, to read about crime mysteries in books, and enjoyed crime fighter comics like Batman and Judge Dredd.

I’ve noticed that later in life these type of people tend to be more conservative and had an obsession with crime and punishment. Their black and white view of right and wrong and over eagerness to punish perceived rule breakers always irritated me. They’re like some annoying self-righteous asshole kid on the school playground that always has to run and taddle on you, desperate for praise and recognition from the authority figure.

The big problem then becomes: What if the people writing the laws write unjust and wrong laws to protect their own misdeeds? What if the right thing is made illegal? Of course this happens all the time in real life. Coercive governments the world over write laws that protect their own interests and attempt to sanction their own crimes. Businesses with enough means bribe governments to write laws to manipulate the market and protect their own interests. It’s common practice.

So how do these crime and punishment types deal with this reality? They don’t. The compartmentalize it, ignore it, or rationalize it away with the just world hypothesis. Such complexities are not within their limited and comfortable range of comprehension.

And so this coming Monday those members of anonymous that march on Washington will experience the government’s monopoly on violence and will be branded criminals by the very people they’re trying to help. Never mind that their crime was trying to do the right thing.

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Money destroys democracy

17 Jul

Equality is at the core of a 1 person, 1 vote democracy. Your vote is a unit of direct political power. It doesn’t matter who or what you are, your vote matters just as much as the next person’s. It doesn’t matter what title comes before your name, or what your bank account statement says, at the end of the day my vote is just as powerful as yours. Without this equality democracy couldn’t function.

Unfortunately, things are not as simple in reality as 1 person, 1 vote. Is money speech? Is it a form of your free speech to choose to give your money to a political cause? If money is speech, does that mean those with more money have more speech then those with less money? What if a small group of people pool their resources so that they have an inordinate amount of speech compared to everyone else? What if they use this inordinate amount of speech to affect politics? Now you no longer have 1 person, 1 vote system. Money = speech = power; money = power.

 

At this point democracy starts to crumble. A person’s vote becomes irrelevant when there are much larger units of power in play. It’s similar to the difference between an arithmetical increase and an exponential increase. A large group of individuals can coalesce around a cause, but if another group has more money, they will have more influence and power. Congratulations, you’re now on your way from democracy to oligarchy.

The degree to which you’re an oligarchy depends on how much big money is involved in politics. This issue has always been around since the start of democracy, however, only relatively recently have we’ve seen the advent of super PACs and corporations pouring millions into politics in order to twist the law in their favor. The more money in politics, the less democratic those politics become.

“Well what’s the problem with that?” some might ask. If you’re fine with some people having more power than others, then you need stop your flag waving and acknowledge that you don’t support democracy. While you’re at it, stop using democracy as a buzzword completely. Democracy as a term has become as debased and valueless as liberty, freedom, and terrorism have in the past decade. They are cheap, gilded terms devoid of any real meaning.

“Why shouldn’t the rich have more power? They have more stuff and thus more of a stake in society.”

No. The amount of material objects you possess doesn’t matter. We all have the ultimate stake in society, our lives. When someone dies for their country, we say they paid the ultimate price. It is the most valuable thing we have as individuals. Your fancy cars, houses, and trust funds are drops in the bucket by comparison.

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Online petitions and small scale protests

25 Feb

Back in high school I was very politically active. A starry-eyed firebrand I’d join in protests, wage road sign wars, and eagerly engage in political debates with other high-school students. I later realized the party I would have at one point died for was just as fucked up in its own right as the party I loathed with every fiber of my being, but that’s besides the point. I just wanted to start off by saying I’ve been there, I used to be one of the people I’m about to discuss.

Everyday on my way home from work I pass by the South Carolina state capital building, and almost everyday there is a small group of anti-war protesters huddled around some signs. They look even more beleaguered in the cold, freezing their butts of waving around their little signs.

Seriously, what’s the point? Stop it.

Wait, hold your rage and comments for two seconds and hear me out. I fully 100% support what they support. I think the wars in Iraq are a horrible waste of lives and money.

But seriously, what’s the point of protesting here in South Carolina, the angry redneck conservative capital of the US. This was, after all, the first state to declare war on the US and secede. It’s conservative heaven.

I know the standard response (I was one of them once, remember?). It goes something like “Well, we’re out here doing this even though it seems pointless because it is important to let people know that there are people who will stand up against such things.” I can see the merit in that argument, but I’m not sure it’s actually that effective in reality. In reality I get the feeling that people look at you like just a group of idiots whooping and hollering in the cold with your stupid signs.

A small group of people standing around with signs never really does anything. A large group, yes, but a small group just seems to accent how fringe you are to the rest of the people in the community. Also, keep in mind this IS South Carolina. You have no chance in hell of changing anyone’s mind. They are, and forever will be, stuck with their heads so far up their asses they’ll never see the light of day or reason. If you were in a swing state, sure, but here? Fuck no.

Also, online petitions….to put it bluntly they are pointless. Absolutely pointless. “Click here to save the _____________” You’re little electronic signature doesn’t do shit. If you want to actually support a cause, get off your ass, leave your house, and go volunteer. Clicking a button on the computer is a worthless gesture.

The only time petitions actually work is when they are signed by a large group of people, in person, on a local scale. The only power a petition has is the threat of losing all the below signed names as voters. This only really has an effect in a small arena where every vote is important. Online petitions lose this power because A) There is no real way to confirm that the person signing is an actual person and not just some dick signing it over and over again, B) Even if they are a real person, the internet is global, not local, and so the vast majority of people who sign do not have enough collective voting power to threaten the politicians who are the recipients of such petitions. C) You can erase an entire petition by simply clicking “delete”.

“Oh but GP, it shows how many people support/oppose an idea!” I’ve got some bad news for you: the politicians don’t give a shit. It doesn’t matter how many people support/oppose something. It’s not about them and it’s not about the issues. It never has been, that’s just the guise everything operates under. Local petitions threaten local politicians and their access to local money, that’s the only reason they work. Global petitions don’t have any teeth with which to threaten a politician’s money supply and so they’re pointless. *delete*

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What is your “better world”?

23 Feb

Everyone, be they liberal or conservative, want a better world for their children, they just disagree on how to go about achieving that. At least that’s what everyone says, but I feel there is a fundamental semantics issue here. What exactly does one mean by “a better world”? That saying assumes we both want the same thing in the end and that we just differ on the paths, but I think that is a wrong assumption to make.

What do I mean by a “better world” coming from my liberal atheist point of view? Well my better world would be a world where people don’t tolerate corrupt politicians who lie to them, where war truly is the last resort and not the first option. In my perfect world people’s lives would not be dictated by their neighbor’s religion. The government would not institutionalize bigotry, homophobia, racism, xenophobia, or impose religious doctrine. My perfect world would be a place where race, age, gender, sexual orientation, religious preference, etc would not matter. Sure if people wanted to take pride in some aspect of their identity that would be fine, but discriminating against someone for that identity would not be tolerated. My perfect world would be a world in which people were guaranteed the things needed to survive, like food, water, shelter, clean air, and medical attention, but where the safety net was not so comfortable as to encourage living off of it. My perfect world would be a world where people were able to speak their minds without censorship. My perfect world would be a world where the government did not try to control your body, be it what drugs you put into it, or when you decide to start a family. In my perfect world the government would work towards improving the lives of its citizens through a strong public education system and strong environmental protection. In my perfect world the rich would not be punished for being rich, but the poor would not be left to die either.

Those are some of the things I have in mind when I think of a “better world”.

Yet when I listen to conservatives, their “better world” seems so….evil to me. I know it’s not nice to paint it like that, but it just honestly does feel like the antithesis to everything I hold to be good and right.

The trickiest part is how they will often use the same words I do when trying to describe a better world, but by observing their actions and how they vote, I’ve come to understand that there is at the very best a serious semantics issue.

I will put this bluntly. Based off of my observations their “better world” appears as follows:

A place world where only landowners have the right to vote, a world where everyone is assigned strict gender roles and forced to conform to them, a world where white men dominate and control every aspect of society, a world where the power of big government is used to police your bedroom and your body. A “better world” where minorities and women know their place, serving white men; a world where the government is the tool of the rich and powerful and where the poor are left to starve off and die for lack of medical attention, shelter, food and water. A world where public education is non-existent and where all the taxpayer’s money is spent buying bigger guns with which to kill people different from the white men. A world of order, control, and conformity, not diversity, change, and uncertainty.  A world where superstition and religion reign supreme, where the existence of fact is denied. A world rife with sexual repression and discrimination. A world where the environment existed solely to be exploited for profit until it was destroyed.

I’ve acquired this impression of conservatives after having watched them fight tooth and nail against promoting equality among the sexes, races, and genders. Throughout history they have always stood against anything that gave power to people other than straight rich white protestant men. They always vote to cut funding for schools and art and to use that money to make bombs. They fight any legislation that would prevent businesses from raping the environment that we all must live in. They fight against anything that would give aid and comfort to the poor who desperately need it, yet they will die defending the richest millionaires in the country. They always seem to fight against immigrants and anyone who is not white. They fight to enforce and institutionalize discrimination, they fight to enable big government to tell you who to love, who to have sex with, when to have children, where to go to church, what to read/watch/listen to in the media, and what to put into your body. They do all this while chanting “personal liberties” with a straight face. They claim to love democracy and yet they cheer people like Joyce Kaufman when they say “If ballots don’t work, bullets will!” and people like Ann Coulter when they say “We need to put more journalists in jail!” A better world would be one where people resorted to murder if they lost an election; where freedom of speech was non-existent and journalists who disagreed with you were thrown in jail??? Sure Kaufman and Coulter are just two people, but they do not exist in a vacuum. Their ideas have sway with a large group of people in the conservative party.

It just feels evil to me, pure evil. I’m not saying that conservatives are evil, I know plenty who are honest genuinely nice people, but I’m very puzzled as to why they think this would be a “better world”. I feel like I’d end up trying to argue axioms with them like suffering is bad.

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A political blogger’s pledge

10 Jan

This is courtesy of GreenGeekGirl:

The pledge:

“As a responsible citizen, I pledge to avoid all inflammatory rhetoric and propaganda, including violent rhetoric, unfair comparison of people with whom I do not agree to atrocities such as the Holocaust simply because we do not agree (unless, such as in the case of the Arizona laws where immigrants have to carry their “papers” at all times, such a parallel is historically warranted), immature and childish name-calling, and to use a minimum of unnecessary sarcasm.

As an American, I pledge not to center my political blogs around conservative vs. liberal in order to avoid deepening the divide between political groups.  Instead, I will focus on ideas and not make mass generalizations about groups of people.

As a blogger and a writer, I pledge to do my best to try to see both sides of an argument, even if I initially think that the other side isn’t worth considering (and even if this conclusion persists through exploration).

As a friend and neighbor, I pledge not to let differences in ideology interfere with my ability to see other people as human beings, even when we disagree or when they start name-calling, using unnecessary sarcasm, or using bad logic.

As a person, I pledge to be as compassionate as I can.

I am human and humans are prone to making mistakes and forgetting pledges.  To anybody who is reading, if I break this pledge, I want you to call me out on it (but as Wil Wheaton says, don’t be a dick).

We may differ politically, but you are not my enemy.”

Overall I like this pledge, hence why I’m following GGG’s lead and taking it on my blog, though I do have a reservation. I’m really not sure how to say this, because I feel it will make people instantly think I’m a bad person, which upsets me, but I’m not sure I entirely agree with the bit:

“As an American, I pledge not to center my political blogs around conservative vs. liberal in order to avoid deepening the divide between political groups.  Instead, I will focus on ideas and not make mass generalizations about groups of people.”

I understand the sentiment, especially the second half about not making mass generalizations, though in practice avoiding generalizations is extremely hard to do. I think there are varying degrees of generalizations, some more appropriate than others. For example, the generalization “All republicans want to install a theocracy” would be very over reaching and inappropriate. Sure faith and religion are on average more central to republicans (that’s an ok generalization), however there is a very specific, albeit very large and powerful, group within the republican party that wants a theocracy. The rest of the republicans don’t.

I mentioned the problems with generalizations in an earlier post here, though that post was focused on religious generalizations. In order not to be paralyzed by precision, some degree of generalization is required. So can I in good faith pledge to avoid generalizations? I cannot. I can, however, pledge to try and not making unnecessarily over reaching generalizations.

Now on to the first part of the bit I have a reservation about:

“As an American, I pledge not to center my political blogs around conservative vs. liberal in order to avoid deepening the divide between political groups.“

Again, I lament that people might think me a bad person for saying this, but I honestly cannot agree to this. It is my firm conviction that liberals and conservatives are two groups with irreconcilable ways of perceiving the world. Now before you judge and condemn me, understand that I do NOT mean that liberals and conservatives can’t live together peacefully. I do NOT mean that one group of people is evil. I do NOT mean that there are no circumstances under which conservatives and liberals can work together.

All that I mean by that is conservatives and liberals put different priorities on different values. We both are capable of love and compassion, just as we are both capable of fear and hate. We both want our friends and family to live in a better world, however, we have fundamentally opposing ideas of what that “better world” is or how to get there. Liberals and conservatives have fundamentally different views on the role of government, the importance and deference to place on certain types of authority, how the constitution should be interpreted, personal and economic freedoms, etc.

While these views are incompatible, we by no means should we ever resort to violence as a way of settling the disputes, and that is the main sentiment of this pledge that I whole-heartedly agree with. While I may fiercely disagree with someone, I will never allow that to take away their humanity.

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Trying to understand the rules of the game

2 Jan

Natural selection is the engine that drives evolution, but within the heart of natural selection is a concept that is central to all of existence; there are rules to the game that determine who wins.

This concepts of rules exists in every aspect of our lives. The rules may change from scenario to scenario, but nonetheless there are rules. We are born into this game not knowing what the rules are for each scenario, and as we grow up we hope to uncover little by little what those rules are. In order to survive and prosper you must understand the rules of the game, for it is only then that you can manipulate and maneuver through them.

The most immediate and glaring example of the existence of these rules is in evolution, from whence we first discovered the concept of natural selection.

In evolution, the goal of the game is to survive and pass on your genes to your children. Nothing else matters. Anything that hinders you in this process will be phased out. A bird better adapted to catching a worm will survive and have children more successfully than a bird more poorly adapted to this task. Those are the rules. That which is most efficient in helping you achieve the goal of the game wins. There is no mercy or tolerance for anything less. Such is the brutality and indifference of nature.

One of the biggest challenges we face growing up is uncovering the true rules, the true mechanics of the game which are often hidden under the more palatable false rules.

For example: “Just work hard and you will succeed” portends that the most efficient and best way of achieving the goal of succeeding is by hard work. Surely the harder you work, the more you will succeed.  While hard work is definately needed in a lot of situations in life, this is a misleading explanation of the rules.

In 2010 Nike’s CEO Mark Parker made 13.1 million dollars. The average Vietnamese Nike sweatshop worker makes $.26/hr. In order for the sweatshop worker to make the same as the CEO, she would have to work nonstop for 5,748 years. Most of these workers are trapped in sweatshop jobs with the choice to either work 40 hours in overtime a week or starve to death on the street.  Obviously in this scenario the notion that “hard work equals success” is a delusion.

A less extreme example is in the American workplace. Yet again, as children we are told that the rules are “hard work equals success” and that knowledge gives us a leg up. While these are both true in some degree, we quickly learn that this is not how the game functions. In order to achieve the goal of getting a promotion and being “successful” it is more important who you know than what you know.

We see the same thing in the dating world. From the onset guys are told that in order to succeed (ie, have lots of sex) the rules are “be sweet and caring.” Yet what it takes years for some guys to figure out, and others never learn, is that maximizing sweetness and caring in an attempt to maximize success fails because sweetness and caring equate to boring, and boring = death. Hence why aggressive asshole guys are more successful in having lots of sex because, while they might be assholes, they’re interesting.  (Now if the goal was to have a stable and healthy relationship and not just copious amounts of sex, then the rules would change and sweetness and caring would be more important)

Another great example of the concept of rules and false rules in action is politics. Ostensibly politics is about how to best lead the nation, how to best maximize the quality of life for the people who pay taxes and make up that nation. A naive person who still believed this would likely also believe that the rules would favor politicians and legislation best suited to this end. (I was once one such naive person) However, if you closely follow politics long enough, you will quickly discover that this is not the goal of the game, nor how the game operates. The game has never been about “the nation and the people who comprise it.”  That is just glittery lip-service every politician gives to half-heartedly mask the true mechanics of the game, namely the self-enrichment of the powerful players (the politicians) within the game.

In politics, as in much of life, those with the most money win. It is the cold and indifferent fact of the game, no different than the fact that the slower bunny will be dinner for the wolf. We may cheerfully delude ourselves with David and Goliath stories, but in the end the mechanics are what they are, irregardless of your strongest desires.

This is why nothing more than PR campaigns and package re-branding will ever be done about global warming until the problem is so severe it starts seriously hurting profit margins. (By which time it will be too late and our life sustaining eco-system is destroyed) This is why despite a 70% approval of a public option in healthcare the measure was defeated. Competition would have been bad for business for those who were writing the congressmen’s checks.  This is why America’s deficit will never be brought under control. Politicians will pay lip-service and feign outrage over the debt and then turn around and add $3.9 trillion in debt over the next 10 years by giving taxcuts to themselves and the other richest people in America.  That is the reality of the politics game and how it is played.

So the question then becomes “Is there a way to change the rules?” I honestly don’t know. The only example I can think of where we’ve changed the rules slightly is in basic survival. Over the centuries science has developed new technologies that increase our life span. Child mortality has fallen drastically in most parts of the world, and many people who normally would not have survived thousands of years ago do. Chances are you’re one of them. I know I am. I have poor eye-site; if it were not for the science of optics, I would be blind to everything 5 feet away from me.

Even if the rules pertaining to human survival have been tempered by technology, the rules regarding prospering and politics have not. Ultimately the rules regarding those two games effect the rules regarding basic survival. (Earlier I gave the example of global warming) So far we as a species have been unable to effect the rules governing politics and prosperity except by temporarily resetting them through violent revolutions.  ”Cruel leaders are replaced only to have new leaders become cruel.” I’m not sure if it is possible to effect a paradigm shift other than regularly tearing everything down. But I digress.

I just wanted to reflect on the existence of these rules that govern every scenario and how one task of growing up is discovering these underlying principles through experimentation and observation.

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Some thoughts on Anon, wikileaks, DDoS attacks

11 Dec

This has been an extremely exciting week. Some are calling it the first global cyber war. Unless you’ve been living under a rock you know that whistle blower group Wikileaks published thousands of secret government correspondences shortly after publishing thousands of classified documents on America’s wars in the middle east. These leaks infuriated governments all over the world and they in turn attacked Wikileaks by DDoSing their sites. (DDoS stands for Distributed Denial of Service. It’s when you get a bunch of computers to try and load a page, 10-100+ times a second. If a crowd walks through a door one by one, they get through, if they all rush the door at once, nobody gets through. DDoS is like rushing a website, which makes it become overwhelmed and crash for as long as the attack is continued)

What I find really scary is just how intense the attacks are on Wikileaks and it’s chief editor Julian Assange. At the pressure of many powerful governments, corporations like Paypal, Amazon, Mastercard, and Visa have tried to financially strangle Wikileaks by making it impossible for people to donate their money to Wikileaks. They are telling you that you cannot use your money to support this organization because they revealed the dirty atrocities your government was doing in secret. (Meanwhile, you still have the ability to donate to the Klu Klux Klan on paypal)

Meanwhile it seems like everywhere in the media people are attacking Wikileaks. The degree of this is really fucking scary. It’s like big brother swung into action and all the talking heads are regurgitating the press releases over and over. Even the local paper is condemning Wikileaks. We find out from these cables that civilian deaths in Afghanistan are 15,000 higher than what is officially released, and yet when people are confronted with information like this, they jamb their fingers in their ears, scream, and try to kick the shit out of you for telling them! They don’t care that the whole system is evil, they’re comfortable and they don’t want to know what their government is doing so long as they have food and E! Entertainment Tonight. It just makes me want to burn the whole thing down.

On top of this, a lot of people are calling Assnage a terrorist. That’s right. The word “terrorist” is now completely worthless, just like the word “freedom,” because we apply it to whatever we want, making the word mean whatever we want for that particular moment. In this case a “terrorist” is anyone who does something that the US government doesn’t like. Some people are coming out saying we need to kill Assnage. Sarah Palin, not surprisingly, wants to hunt him down. Considering we still haven’t caught bin Laden, and that she can’t hit a buck that’s trapped, I think Assange is pretty safe. None the less, this is an extremely scary precedent they’re trying to set. Assange and Wikileaks did not acquire the information. It was presented to them by other heros who leaked it.

Do you know what they used to call these terrorists that published evidence of government wrongdoing? Journalists

But journalism is dead in America and largely around the world. Now we wait for the government to tell us the news in a press release where they decide what information we need, and how it’s going to be framed.

Now here is the exciting bit. Wikileaks is not alone. People are rising up to fight back against this free speech crackdown and attempts to police the internet. Perhaps you’ve heard of Anonymous:

Anon struck back earlier this week by launching Operation Payback, DDoS attacks against the corporations that caved to government pressure to police the internet. Within a few hours they crashed Paypal, Amazon, Mastercard, and Visa. They’ve been organizing by Twitter (I’ve been following them) and voting as a democracy on the next target. When the vote is finished, their twitter accounts name the target and time, and then once they send the tweet “FIRE FIRE FIRE”, thousands of computers attack those websites in unison. The main point is to send a message that we’re hear and we won’t tolerate these attacks on one of the last organizations doing actual journalism, or attempts to police the internet. (Paypal actually later released the money it had frozen from Wikileaks)  Meanwhile Twitter and Facebook are playing a cat and mouse game to try and shut down any Anon related account in an attempt to disrupt their ability to coordinate counterattacks.

That was just the first round. Now Anon has switched tactics to “Operation Leakspin”

But Anon is not the only one defending Wikileaks. The U.N. High commissioner, Navi Pillay, recently voiced her concern on government attempts to shut down Wikileaks. The Daily Show and Colbert reports have come out in support of Wikileaks. (It’s an extremely terrifying day when fake news has to remind real news how to do journalism) However, there is one other news group who has come out and sided with Wikileaks, The Young Turks.

The only thing that worries me is that a large potion of Anon (and thus the defense of the free internet) is made up of people from 4chan….

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Obama is a republican

9 Dec

You’re only kidding yourself if you still believe Obama is a democrat; he’s come out and made it abundantly clear that he’s a republican. Here is a short list of reasons why:

Tax cuts and unemployed benefits: Obama has fully taken up the republican position that the richest people in the country should be even richer and that poor people can go to hell. For the longest time republicans have been threatening to filibuster everything unless they got the 2 year extension of Bush tax cuts, essentially holding unemployment benefits hostage. (They can afford to wait, rich people don’t worry about paying the heating bill and putting food on the table with winter coming) Well along comes Obama and, not only does he completely side with the republicans, he gives them more than they could ever dream of. Obama’s tax cuts go much deeper than Bush’s. On top of the normal income tax cuts for people making over $250,000, the estate tax is lowered to 35% from 55% (something republicans have been trying to get for decades!) Secondly, the rich get the majority of their money from investments, not from a job salary, and under these new tax cuts the taxes on the major sources of that income will be 15% (Capital gains, dividend taxes, etc) This means the tax rate on the rich’s main source of income will be drastically lower than the tax rate for normal people. In return for ALL this, Obama gets unemployment benefits extended for a measly 13 months, a little over HALF the amount of time the rich got on their tax cuts. The sick thing is that Obama could have easily gotten much more for the poor had he stood up and fought. (For every $1 government spends on unemployment, it gets $1.40 back in economic activity since poor people turn around and spend the money quickly to buy food and other necessities. Tax cuts for the rich, however, only return about $.40 since they are more likely to save and horde their money during bad economic times)

I really have to admire the republicans on this. Their strategy is brilliant! They get Obama to publicly side with their policies and increase the deficit to make the rich richer, then they will turn around and destroy Obama in 2012 by saying “Look! That damn democrat drastically increased government spending and the deficit!!!!” at which point Obama will crumple into tears “Bu..bu..but I thought you were my friends?” Meanwhile, they have Obama attacking the democrats and doing all the leg work for them!

On the Today Show, David Axelrod, senior advisor to the president said of the democrats “If they don’t vote for this proposal, it will be borderline immoral.”  The Huffington post reports the white house is now blaming the democrats, claiming THEY are holding employment benefits hostage in order to deny a small group of rich people a tax break.  This is a massive and brilliant flip. Even though the republicans have been blocking everything democrats want for the past 2 years, and have been threatening to filibuster everything if they didn’t get their tax cuts, it’s now suddenly the democrats’ fault because they’re not caving to republicans fast enough. Fucking brilliant! At the same time Larry Summers, Obama’s top economic advisor came out and threatened “if the democrats don’t pass this bill within the next couple of weeks, it will materially increase the risk that the economy will stall out and cause a double dip recession.” That’s right, if you don’t give tax cuts to the multi-millionaire bankers that orchestrated the economic crash, then you’re responsible for when they do it again.

This one topic alone is a dream come true for republicans. Karl Rove just came out in praise of Obama’s recognition that republican policies were right. Just the other night Bill O’Reilly praised Obama on his segment “Talking points” saying he did the right thing for the country by siding with “us.”

But enough about republican Obama on tax cuts, what about Social Security?

Yep, Obama just helped put another nail in the coffin of Social Security. Obama came up with the wonderful idea to cut payroll taxes (which is the lifeblood of Social Security) for 6.2% to 4.2% ($120Bn cut). Republicans LOVE it because it helps undermine Social Security. Republican Senator Bob Corker from Tennessee astutely pointed out “Once something like this goes into place, a year from now, when it expires, it’ll be portrayed as a tax increase.” This is also brilliant on the part of the republicans! Obama gives them a tax cut from the life blood of social security (something conservatives despise) and they will portray the tax rate returning to normal as an increase. People won’t like that, and they’ll be able to permanently starve Social Security of that money. Brilliant!

Lets move along the list shall we?

No public option in healthcare. Despite 77% of people supporting a public option that would have increased market competitiveness, Obama sided with the big insurance corporations who didn’t want competition. Instead he let the companies practically write the bill themselves, guaranteeing millions of new customers are forced to buy their product, easily making up the cost and then some for the little concessions they had to make like not dropping you if you got sick.

Federal Pay freeze: Republicans love it! What did Obama get in return for agreeing to it? Jack Shit. (It could easily have been a powerful bargaining chip and he just flat out gave it to them.)

An absolute and humiliating farce of financial reform.

No prosecution on republican war criminals who lied about the reasons for going to war in Iraq, no prosecution on torture and waterboarding (for which we executed Japanese officers after WWII), in fact Obama CONTINUES to use these illegal “tactics” to get unreliable information.

No end to the prison at Guantanamo Bay, no end to “indefinite detentions” where people disappear into a black bag and are never heard from again.

No end to the secret prisons around the globe.

An escalation of the war in Afghanistan. Meanwhile 92% of Afghans have never heard of 9/11 and have no idea why we’re there. (They just attack us because we’re in their country.

Obama reversed his campaign promises and opened up new areas to off-shore drilling, despite the BP disaster.

Obama took a stance against LGBT rights. His administration even went so far as to appeal gay marriage rulings that were made in favor of LGBT rights.

Obama continued and expanded faith based initiatives, giving government money to religious organizations.

Obama just decided to delay EPA enforcement of pollution regulations.

I could go on, but doing this is getting depressing. I think you get the idea. There is no way in hell Obama is a liberal. He should just abandon all pretenses to being one and change the D by his name to an R. Perhaps then republicans will stop whipping him every time he does their bidding. Who knows, maybe he likes the punishment he recieves in the process of serving them. It’s too bad for him though, it looks like he’s ruined his chance of running as a republican in 2012 since so many of the republican base already are scared of him. (He’s doing what they want, but he’s still black, and that’s scary.) One thing is damn sure though: come 2012, throw his ass to the curb.

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