You know which phone calls and e-mails seem really likely to me to have whatever key words (or key patterns, or whatever) the system is set up to filter for: those of American citizens who are having discussions about domestic security policy. This would be equally true if you were, for instance, a domestic security policy guru for the Democratic party. Do we really want to trust that those calls will be selected by teh filter and then not used by the current Republicans in any political way?
Which is a long way of saying that there is a real lesson in the saying, "If men were angels, we wouldn't need government."
It's something that needs saying at length.
Study: 100 Percent Of Americans Lead Secret Lives
I think everyone volunteering us for the new transparent society get to go first.
Kaus' commentary is simply a long, moderately polished way of saying "Well if you're innocent then you have nothing to hide, right?" It's ridiculous the things that get published as political commentary these days.
But that argument is pretty persuasive to a lot of people, Jeremy (and I don't think that's all Kaus is saying).
while cell phone conversations get picked up by amateur scanners.
This is the kind of misleading statement that detracts from his entire argument.
First off, eavesdropping on a cell phone conversation is completely illegal, except for the government with a warrant and Bush who is above the law.
Second, it used to be fairly simple to hear parts of cell phone conversations, but with the modern cell phones this is much, much harder.
So to imply that we don't need to worry about privacy because our neighbors can switch on a radio and legally listen in on our cell phone calls is disingenous.
I suppose it is silly for banks to use vaults because locks can be picked using instructions from the internet, too.
Jeremy,
"Well if you're innocent then you have nothing to hide, right?"
The people who find that argument persuasive are making a very big and always unspoken assumption. The full statement should be:
"Well, if you're innocent and you trust your government and all the people in power then you have nothing to worry about, right?"
(and I don't think that's all Kaus is saying)
Hm. I'm not seeing anything more there -- what do you mean? I guess he qualifies "I have nothing to hide" with "and if I did have something to hide, I'd be pretty stupid saying it into a cell phone or the internets, where it could be decoded by snoopy neighbors" but this does not seem to me to add much substance.
And talking about "blogs and webcams" is just stupid -- publishing a blog or a webcam is something a person can choose to do, it's way different from having somebody else track you and keep a diary of your actions, or put a camera in your bedroom, unbeknownst to you. How difficult is that to understand?
The issues of technology and privacy are vastly larger than the current question, though. It does seem invevitable that in not too long -- and I do tend to mean by that in this sort of context, "within 20-50 years at most" that privacy will be well, I won't go so far as to say technologically possible, since blocking/defense tech will, of course, also be developing similarly, but, hey, how many people will be able to afford the latest in hi-tech privacy defense?, but I'll say that there's no reasonable expectation on the horizon in that timeframe for our ability to acheive privacy to not be drastically different than it is today.
As I said yesterday at ObWi, David Br/n can be a jerk, and I don't agree with various points of his, but arguments -- which others make as well, of course, are hard to ignore.
kaus may be right as far as he goes. but as usual, anytime he ever argues anything, he's probably ignoring something far more important to focus on an obsessive nitpicking detail.
in the privacy area there is serious danger of mission creep. if we have massive surveilance already for one purpose where it may be justified, its a small step to arguing we should be able to use information we already have to enforce other laws.
so why not let the dea, the atf, the fbi, and the other acronym brigades in? lord knows it would help them do their jobs. don't we want our laws enforced? shouldn't the war on terror keep an eye on illegal black marketeers in drugs and child porn and illegal software in case they're funding our enemies?
but that point is also too small. the real issue is the one you linked to kevin making below, that "War Powers" means the executive decides what is proper to do, and the point of using the democratic deliberative process is out the window. thanks, ogged, for the "men not laws" point, and i'd like to see it more, at the very least until it penetrates the american consciousness to the extent of, say "flip flopper" (thanks mickey). maybe every non-powerline blog should make that their header and replace "reality-based community."
i think that's been getting lost for all the details lately. each abuse is somewhat problematic, but you can justify a whole lot of them individually a la kaus. which makes sense, b/c for him, our entire government is a high school cafeteria, and about the personality foibles of the cliques. ours is a government of men, not laws. harvard law must be something else.
Jeez. So much for that proofing resolution (my only defense: still feeling crappy/woozy/spacy today [and that came out "spacey," but I'm not actually a Kevin, or even The Kevin).
"and I do tend to mean by that in this sort of context, 'within 20-50 years at most' that privacy will be well, I won't go so far as to say technologically possible,"
:et's try "and I do tend to mean by that in this sort of context, 'within 20-50 years at most' -- that privacy will be, well, I won't go so far as to say technologically impossible,"
And "achieve." Wish I weren't out of coffee.
"...but as usual, anytime he ever argues anything, he's probably ignoring something far more important to focus on an obsessive nitpicking detail."
I hate it when I hear that Kaus and I have something in common.
The diff between Gmail and the NSA, aside from the fact the Gmail does not have the power to detail you, is also that one can choose not to use Gmail. Also that one knows that Gmail is scanning your messages.
Moreover, even under the "if you're innocent, you have nothing to fear" argument--or the more convincing (to me) "given how many billions of phone calls get made, it's highly unlikely that anyone is paying attention to yours, personally" argument--the problem is that there is a history of supervision of perfectly legal organizations using the excuse of protecting the nation. Whether it's monitoring the NAACP in the 60s or monitoring Greenpeace and PETA now, the fact is that any given administration has a certain conflict of interest: safeguarding the nation vs. safeguarding their political party. Even if we want to trust them on the first one, democracy demands we not trust them on the second.
amen, bitchphd. after seeing what happened to o'neil, dilulio, dick clarke...personally, i just don't trust that the administration even bothers to separate the notion of the purpose of government and consolidating their power over it. i'm sure that's been the case to some extent w/ every admin ever, but i've never seen any evidence of one that seemed to care so little about the ends of government beyond controlling it.
After the recent, powerful meme that dissent=treason, I'm far from being comfortable with allowing other people to decide whether my conversations with friends and family constitute treason and whether I should be secretely jailed because of them. I don't think we're close to that sort of government right now, but recent events have shown that it's not impossible that we'd go there, or that such a possibility is as far away as I'd like to think. And besides dissent to the war in Iraq, there are people, politicians and demogogues, who call for the restriction of all sorts of things. Usually these calls violate the first amendment, but, a supreme executive can get around that. That Kaus would imply that privacy concerns are trivial because he doesn't mind someone filtering his calls and emails displays a naivete that is downright unprofessional for a pundit.
The other problem with the "nothing to hide? don't worry" is that if the laws aren't reasonably stable and public, it can be difficult to know that you actually did have something to hide. Imagine donating, unknowingly, to a charity/activist group on a watch list because you support their publicly stated and legitimate goals, and, rather than being informed of what the group was really up to and given the opportunity to withdraw support, you get prosecuted for funding illegal activities.
Also, can we get a Diaper Award for people talking about how great the terrorist threat is? I am really worried about the prospect of nuclear terrorism, but back in the day the USSR had lots and lots of nuclear weapons and controlled a lot of territory. If Kaus is going to say that the terrorist threat is so overwhelming compared to our interest in privacy, I'd like him to come out and admit that that was true from 1945 to 1989 as well.
The counterargument is that the Soviet Union had the kind of stable and reaching state structure that could control the deployment of its own weaponry. So we had to worry about their leadership, not shadowy figures sneaking around beyond the reach of state security agents.
The counter-counter argument is that the Soviet Union really could have destroyed us. Terrorists can cause a hell of a lot of death and suffering, but not totally assured destruction.
Another counter-counter argument is: shouldn't keeping track of nuclear materials, particularly in the former Soviet Union, be a higher priority?
I am really worried about the prospect of nuclear terrorism
I'm not. The technological bar - even for a crude "dirty bomb" - is so high that its likelihood approaches zero.
"even for a crude 'dirty bomb' "
What's hard about wrapping a bunch of isotopes (once you've got them) around a bomb?
I think #14 and #17 are really very good points. Just wanted to say that.
And I think I agree with Gary, if I'm reading him right. In I think dramatically less than 20-50 years it won't be (only) the government we have to worry about listening to/reading all of our private correspondence, but rather private entities with the (increasingly easy) means and economic incentive to do so.
Of course, that doesn't detract from the wrongness of what the government is doing now.
I haven't researched dirty bombs much but I think there might be more to it than, for example, using plutonium for shrapnel.
But maybe not.
I agree with apostropher. And one of the many weaknesses of the Bush counter-terrorism activities is that they didn't seem especially interested in safeguarding ex-Soviet nuclear material. If you take away the nuclear terrorism threat, the terrorism threat per se is manageable.
My feeling is that chemical and biological weapons have been big underachievers in the world of weapons, mostly because of delivery problems. For example, anthrax is curable with penicilin. As far as I can tell, anthrax is used as a weapon mostly because it's hard to diagnose until it's fatal, and because the spores are very durable.
In a dirty bomb, you have to vaporize or aerosolize the radioactive material to cause problems. If you just put some explosives inside some isotopes, you'll probably just have some large chunks of radioactivity that are fairly easy to clean up (unless they're liquid isotopes which are harder to obtain). Radioactive things tend to be heavy and dense and hard to break into really small bits with a conventional explosive.
Now please don't detain me and ship me to Syria for talking about this.
The nuclear threat isn't just about terrorism--it's about unstable nations getting ahold of nukes. Given the same problem as above--governments need to both safeguard the nation *and* safeguard their own political power--one of the threatening nuclear possibilities is someplace like North Korea using nukes against its own people, or (obviously) against South Korea, and starting WWIII.
That's part of the problem right there -- Bush seems uninterested in nuclear proliferation.
Well, yeah. Because it's both an actual problem and a complicated one.
"I haven't researched dirty bombs much but I think there might be more to it than, for example, using plutonium for shrapnel."
No. Jeebus, no. Would only that you needed something as relatively hard to get and rare as plutonium!
A fission device is hard to do in a backyard. No doubt about it. (Not for a non-poor government, on the other hand; in that case, it's just a matter of putting in the money, time, effort, and material, and having access to U238 to enrich, unless you already have your U235 or Pu from somewhere else, in which case you've cut out the time-consuming part; if you can build a major damn, you can build a nuke, assuming you have the trained personnel; you don't have to go to that nice Mr. Khan for plans, either, though those on his level of detail will let you go at zoomie speed, relatively speaking; there's no "atomic secret" and never was; just some engineering detail, which has long been in the public domain; the only remaining secrets are details of miniaturization, fine-tuning, and other pure frills that matter not at all to a basic Fat Man or Little Boy bomb.)
A dirty bomb is just a bomb -- anything from an M-80 on up, though naturally the bigger the better. Add any isotope that has enough particle emission to cause some significant damage in a reasonably short amount of time; the longer the half-life, the better, of course.
Plenty of medical, or other, isotopes found in thousands of labs and campuses around the world will do just fine. Dirty bombs are mostly terror, with non-huge death figures likely unless you've got something truly excelleng going.
But, yeah, wrap some sufficiently radioactice rags around a stick of dynamite, and you've got your basic small dirty bomb. Chaos will ensue.
That's why what the good apostropher said makes no sense whatever.
That there hasn't been a dirty bomb incident yet only suggests that al Quada poesses a deep and abiding lack of many folks with even slight technical skills -- "skills" in this sense meaning "knowing how to look up which isotopes have what level of emission, understand what damage that level would do, and know how to research where the stuff is" or the inability to mount a smash-and-grab than in many locations around the world -- most good universities, for instance; one's with a research reactor's are good, but they are slowly paying for mildly increasing security on them, or swapping them for new ones that produce less dangerous materials -- that in still many of these locations should be no more challenging than any major bank heist.
Give me ten competent thugs, and it's quite possible I can get ya yer dirty bomb, and so could a gazillion other people. (Note to NSA: I'm talking hypothetically; please do not come question me; thank you.) (Okay, I've never planned a bank heist; still.)
There was a British tv film, "Dirty War" earlier this year, by the way; I recommend it. It's a perfectly realistic examination of a dirty bomb in London. Not much death compared to a fission device, even the smallest. Mass chaos and fear just fine.
I think that dirty bombs have the same problems as chem and bio war, which is delivering the isotopes to enough people in enough quantity to make a big enough difference. Especially because radiation in moderate quantities works slowly. You'll end up with a bunch of people sitting around being panicky about dying before their time, but you already have that.
I don't take the Bush program seriously as a way of fighting nuclear terrorism, because he's not really trying.
"In I think dramatically less than 20-50 years it won't be (only) the government we have to worry about listening to/reading all of our private correspondence, but rather private entities...."
I'm thinking more about seeing into anyone's living room or bedroom, with sound, unless they have a defense up, or being constantly monitored wherever you go. Speaking of which. So how long does this system stay secure?
But I'm thinking more of tech that's sure to come, such as "intelligent clouds" of airborne micro-surveilance devices.
If you don't pay attention to nanotech, it's going to pay attention to you. Not now, but in your lifetime (unless you're, you know, unlucky). This is precisely as wacky as "rockets" were in the 1920s. What a silly idea they were!
"In I think dramatically less than 20-50 years it won't be (only) the government we have to worry about listening to/reading all of our private correspondence, but rather private entities...."
I'm thinking more about seeing into anyone's living room or bedroom, with sound, unless they have a defense up, or being constantly monitored wherever you go. Speaking of which. So how long does this system stay secure?
But I'm thinking more of tech that's sure to come, such as "intelligent clouds" of airborne micro-surveilance devices.
(Breaking the message, because now the 'ware is objecting to even four links. Is this really necessary?) (Okay, now it's objecting to three.)
If you don't pay attention to nanotech, it's going to pay attention to you. Not now, but in your lifetime (unless you're, you know, unlucky). This is precisely as wacky as "rockets" were in the 1920s. What a silly idea they were!
If you don't pay attention to nanotech, it's going to pay attention to you. Not now, but in your lifetime (unless you're, you know, unlucky). This is precisely as wacky as "rockets" were in the 1920s. What a silly idea they were!
And the middle part of this broken comment fragment, with the other two links, the main point, appeared to have posted, but it hasn't shown up. And I stupidly didn't save a full copy after it "posted." (Maybe it yet will show up.) Not so thrilled to have to reconstruct.)
And this. What the hell is going on with the software?
And it just rejected this comment.
Apparently now I have to close the comment box and re-open it, every time I want to post a comment. Assuming this works, and posts.
Bérubé quotes the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists suggesting that a dirty bomb is a bit more difficult.
Yay!
Okay, this is dumb: "The richest source of radioactivity is spent fuel rods."
Of course it is (well, short of unspent fuel rods; why cut corners when going for the best?). And the best sort of nuke is a fusion bomb. But if you can't build a fusion bomb, you build a weapon of terror, instead. Like, as I've said how many times now?, a low-level dirty bomb that doesn't kill all that many people, but brings a city to a screaming halt, at any level from killing 3 people to 3000 (that's over the course of days or weeks, of course), and is difficult to decontaminate.
Fuel rods are irrelevant. It's like saying you can't build an airplane because 777s are the best.
Michael Berube is a brilliant guy, but I don't notice him posting much about technology. If I posted about sewing, I would likely go all wrong because all I'd know is what I'd read in a couple of googled articles, and anything that sounded convincing would sound convincing to me, too. That's why I try to avoid posting about stuff I don't know a certain amount about.
(Will this post?)
Same article Michael quoted, and what he chose not to post -- these are the passages immediately before what he quoted -- so he was deliberately choosing to not mention this:
The components of a radiological dispersion device, at first glance, may seem obvious and easy to obtain. Building a dirty bomb requires a source of radioactivity, explosives, and someone to put the two together.
Although some materials from hospitals, research universities, and other facilities are radioactive enough to be lethal, it would be very difficult to deliver high doses to more than a few people. (On the other hand, an attack with such materials could create panic and might cause a great deal of economic damage.)See?
Also, later in the piece:
There are millions of commercial radioactive sources globally, but only a fraction, "perhaps several tens of thousands, pose inherently high security risks because of their portability, dispensability, and higher levels of radioactivity," say Charles Ferguson, Tahseen Kazi, and Judith Perera, in "Commercial Radioactive Sources: Surveying the Security Risks," a report for the Monterey Institute of International Studies' Center for Nonproliferation Studies. Those sources include americium 241, californium 252, cesium 137, cobalt 60, iridium 192, plutonium 238, and strontium 90. Some of the isotopes (americium 241, californium 252, and plutonium 238) would pose health hazards only if ingested or inhaled; others would present both internal and external health hazards because the ionizing radiation they emit penetrates the outer layer of human skin. Even with "perhaps several tens of thousands" of commercial, high-risk radioactive isotopes throughout the world as potential contaminants for a radioactive delivery device, those dirty bombs "will have so little radioactivity as to pose little, if any danger to the public," Ferguson, Kazi, and Perera write.Relatively, if you have a low enough level source, yes. But the point of a dirty bomb, as is generally acknowledge, is not to cause mass death. Straw man. It's to cause terror and disruption.
And it's just not that hard to do that. More to the point, again, we're back to wrapping your ordinary car bomb (or backpack bomb, if you can't do better, but still want lots of fear and panic -- look what just three non-radioactive bombs did to London -- the simple word "radioactive" is almost as dangerous as some nice piercing emissions) with the low-level isotopes you swiped somewhere.
Refuting that "a likely dirty bomb will cause few deaths" is like pointing out that because more people die in Britain in a month by car crash than were killed by the London bombings, therefore no one should have been particularly upset by the London bombing. No one but an ignoramus would say that a dirty bomb is apt to kill many people. It's besides the point.
it doesn't work like that, nonethless.
No one but an ignoramus would say that a dirty bomb is apt to kill many people. It's besides the point.
Okay, you're right. You could make a bomb that would release some level of radiation. And I suspect it would create roughly the same amount of panic as Sarin gas in the Tokyo subway or anthrax in the US mail. To wit, some at first, until people realize that it isn't really that fearsome or effective of a weapon.
So no, I still don't really worry about it.
You don't even need to believe that Bush's administration is going to abuse this power in order to be rationally upset about it. If legalized or condoned, it's a precedent. You just need to be believe that some present or future administration will abuse it. And if they're essentially unaccountable, the probability of that approaches one.
Gary is of course right, but that's just the point: nuclear terrorism is worrisome because of the potential for mass casualties; regular terrorism (including dirty bombs) is not an existential threat and is therefore of lesser concern.
"...nuclear terrorism is worrisome because of the potential for mass casualties; regular terrorism (including dirty bombs) is not an existential threat and is therefore of lesser concern."
Sure. Though "lesser," is hardly none, of course. ObCite: WTC -- no nukes needed. Not something to cross off my own worry list, but not something to hide under my desk about, or ask the President to be God-King-Emperor over me, either.
Once again, by the way, Dirty War (which is, rest assured, not where I get my information; I've followed this stuff since I was a kid, literally) (the film has been on American PBS numerous times). Some outcomes:
In the Washington scenario a fraction of a gram of caesium-137 exploded with 10lbs of TNT would leave people in a five-block radius facing a one in 1,000 chance of cancer if they stayed put.
In the New York example nine grams of cobalt-60, with 10lbs of TNT, exploded at the tip of Manhattan would render the whole borough uninhabitable with a 1 in 100 cancer risk, assuming no decontamination and continued residence for 40 years.
Both scenarios would require decontamination of wide areas, which would be difficult if the materials used chemically bonded to building materials.And that's key. It think Apostropher and John Emerson may be seriously underestimating the economic and cultural damage if we have to seal of dozens, or even just a few, square blocks of a large city for ten or fifteen years, even if the attack only killed two people.
How about not being able to use the Golden Gate Bridge for that long? Use your imaginations.
It's a perfectly realistic examination of a dirty bomb in London.
Except that it included a ticking-bomb-torture moment. Dammit. Otherwise, it was very accurate.
As for the privacy issue: I just feel like saying "Well, I work for the government [which I do]. Kindly cc me in on all your emails from now on. What, you don't want to? Well, well, well."
If the point of a dirty bomb is to cause terror and disruption without necessarily killing anyone, than it's perfect for Bush's purposes. Because Bush needs hysteria in order to justify everything else he's doing in the supposed war on terror, such as lowering taxes and cutting foodstamps.
If hysteria is the problem we're dealing, and the real enemy, then the warbloggers and the Bush administration should be doing everything they can to minimize hysteria. I find them to be doing the opposite.
No one but an ignoramus would say that a dirty bomb is apt to kill many people. It's besides the point.
Watch your language, asshole. It's certainly beside the point for anyone who share's Osama's goal of maximizing hysteria.
Australia has been dealing with depleted-ozone-layer skin cancer for decades now.
All these scenarios also depend on the caricature of the terrorists as mad dogs who hate us for our freedoms, want to kill all of us, and want to establish a US Islamic Republic.
But all the terrorist groups I know of have specific goals more limited than that. In Osama's case, for example, he wants or wanted to rule Saudi Arabia and as many neighboring areas as possible. In most cases it's just gangster types who want to supplant the previous gangster type.
Both scenarios would require decontamination of wide areas, which would be difficult if the materials used chemically bonded to building materials.
Considering that over four years later the people in my neighborhood are still arguing about whether the WTC dust has been adequately cleaned up, good luck with that.
A lot of people worry about stuff all the time already. There will probably be marginal increases in the extent and intensity of worrying, but then things will normalize.
This is a cliche, but a guy who's 40 lbs. overweight and drinks to much (e.g. me) is at definite risk of either sudden death or slow lingering death, but normally he doesn't think about it much. But if it's invisible alien toxins, he panics.
Or she, of course.
but normally he doesn't think about it much
Part of the American project is getting people to think about it a higher proportion of the time. In the future we will think about nothing but our own mortality, except for when we are eating, masturbating, or driving a new car.
The upside of this is that we will at last be able to masturbate without thinking about our own mortality.
55: I dunno, Jeremy. When I'm masturbating, I'm pretty focused on le petit morte.
"More to the point, again, we're back to wrapping your ordinary car bomb (or backpack bomb, if you can't do better, but still want lots of fear and panic -- look what just three non-radioactive bombs did to London "
They didn't do all that much. (I speak as one who missed the affected train by 15 minutes.) There wasn't much fear or panic. Anger, yes.
And if this "dirty bomb" will kill a similar number of people, should it ever materialise, (and wouldn't you think it would have by now, really, we have public-sector healthcare in England and lots of suspect minorites working in it with (a wingnut racist might say) no societal attachment to the English public-service ethos) there are only a few reasons to expect fear and panic - media and/or official hysteria, infantile and/or uninformed public.
Now where on earth would one find this? And in whose interest is it that it exist?
Speaking of suspect minorities, most of the airport security in Minneapolis seem to be Somalis.
A good choice in one sense, Somalis are the most charming, gracious people you'd ever care to meet, when not carrying AK-47's. They can diffuse a touchy system very well, up to a point.
So are the Serbs I've met. Is there a lesson here? Well, the 2nd amendment folks talk a lot about how a well-armed people is a civil people. They forget the key final clause, "up to the very moment that they start blowing away everyone in sight".
The subtext is, "If everyone were armed, the dykes, queers, hippies, liberals, and (non-Zionist ) Jews would learn to keep their big mouths shut real quick".
a well-armed people is a civil people
This is one of my very favorite stupid slogans (though the version I'm most familiar with is "a well-armed society is a polite society"). A polite armed society is a polite society. An impolite armed society is a society with a bunch of citizens full of bulletholes. See Switzerland versus Iraq for illustrative examples.
I meant "touchy situation". It did sound more scientific the way I said it though. "Somalia.... yes, a very touchy system there."
You probably also meant "defusing".
The subtext is, "If everyone were armed, the dykes, queers, hippies, liberals, and (non-Zionist ) Jews would learn to keep their big mouths shut real quick".
This is right.
What is it with the paranoid right being obsessed with violent destruction of people who annoy them? Why do we have a country half-full of 14-year-old high school freshmen who get the tiniest pinprick and want to reach for their pump-action 12-gauge? This makes me nuts. Revenge fantasies galore. Is functioning as a member of American society so impossibly hard that a person needs to clench his teeth every five minutes and darkly intone, "One day, you will all be very, very sorry"? That some people must take every real or perceived sleight as an unforgivable breach in the carefully constructed edifice that is their manhood/personhood/straighthood/Americanhood/Christianhood? That some feel the need to tune in to the local radio bully in order to cheer the bullying that they feel too powerless to carry out themselves? Is the mere existence of someone with different thoughts intolerable in their world? I honestly think the most insidious threat to our society these days is an epic shortage of chill pills.
After watching Brokeback (MAJOR SPOILER ALERT!), I thought and thought about the violence at the end, and at the end of all that thinking, I still was no more clear on why two men kissing is cause for such horrifying brutality; how some men can seemingly be moved to literally beat others to death for the heinous crime of not liking pussy. I mean, wanting to beat someone to death is a very strong reaction. It's not something that wells up inside people on a normal day.
The above rant has little-to-nothing to do with Privacy.
Joe -- we all know Privacy is code for teh gay, so in a sense your disclaimer is unwarranted.
"In the future we will think about nothing but our own mortality, except for when we are eating, masturbating, or driving a new car."
It's hard enough just to do those three simultaneously. But fun! (I'm sure; I don't drive.)
"There wasn't much fear or panic. Anger, yes."
"Disruption" was the effect I had in mind. As well as worldwide attention.
"A polite armed society is a polite society. An impolite armed society is a society with a bunch of citizens full of bulletholes."
I entirely agree. Thoroughly. Emphatically. (And that's one of the many places where Heinlein, insofar as he believed it, was full of it, he said, crossing threads.)
My general observation to toss in is that there's no contradiction between agreeing with most or all of the words said in this thread about the effort, desire, and interest of the Administration to whip up as much hysterical fear and panic as possible, and noting that there do still, nonetheless, remain various threats worth paying attention to. Protecting liquid gas storage and transportation systems, chemical plants and storage facilities, storage or work sites that use significant radiological hazard material, and so on. And, keeping it in perspective, being prepared to deal with the various possible levels of a dirty bomb.
And, of course, that should be done rationally in proportion to the likelihood of the threat and its relative dangers, and so on. But seeing these things as black and white, either you're with us or against us, either you're cheerleading the current Admin by saying anything that could (and will be) picked up by them to use in their interest, or you're with us, poo-pooing everything that happens to be also something the Admin says, regardless of fact, is possibly neither the only option nor the most useful.
I do like the fact that us guys like to be reality-based, and not let ideology interfere with our appraisal of the facts. Truly.
"The upside of this is that we will at last be able to masturbate without thinking about our own mortality."
Masturbating while contemplating the mortality of others is so much more satisfying.
"I still was no more clear on why two men kissing is cause for such horrifying brutality"
Why do boys -- at least they did this in my day -- call others "you homo" and "faggot," and beat the crap out of the small, the weak, the smart, the easy target? I expect that some natural tendencies towards pack behavior and fear-dominance cycles, and the like, get channeled by learned behavior passed on by one generation to the next, although I suppose that's both facile and obvious.
I say that the solution isn't trying to stamp out the tendency towards dominance and violence; no, let's import some alien zombies that we can instead put on the lowest rung and beat the crap out of without guilt. Because who cares about alien zombies? Let us now hate alien zombies, sez me. It will unite us, and bring us together. In peace. Except for the alien zombies.
Would they be homosexual alien zombies?
"Living-impaired", please. Have some respect.
there do still, nonetheless, remain various threats worth paying attention to
I remember the 50's / 60's paranoia about homos, when it was official and mainstream. The commercial movies of the time were always looking for homos (Suddenly Last Summer, for example.)
It was pretty low-pressure where I lived. One of the guys who turned out in later life to be a homo was the quarterback in FB and point guard in BB. He was a finesse player, of course. Another one was a big, strong guy who went on to get a psychology PhD and write self-help books. He didn't do sports, though.
It was pretty low-pressure where I lived
In Minnesota, or Portland? (I am assuming not Taiwan.)
there was just something in the paper today about Rove vetoing Whitman's attempt to secure big chemical plants. The people poo-pooing the threat aren't necessarily the liberals. The Bush administration has a two-tier message -- the public message is hysteria, and the actual policy rsponse "no big deal, business as usual". We're still kissyface with the Saudis, no?
Small-town Minnesota. People are pretty mild-mannered here, and the level of heterosexuality and macho is pretty low, so someone could pass as just shy. (One of the weird things about the gay Boy Scout thing is that when I was a kid Scouts were not supposed to be heterosexual either.) But being in the closet was required.
But being in the closet was required.
Goes without saying.
Come to think of it, one thing that teachers really tried to do was watch out for bullying. A lot of homophobia is directly connected to establishing a violent pecking order among guys.
"Here's one for you."
JohnInDC seems to have a little reading problem.
"...including undetectable C-4 "
Pull my other one.
Right there in the part he quoted:
The missing material included 150 pounds of the plastic explosive compound C-4 and 250 pounds of undetectable "sheet explosives" - a DuPont flexible explosive material that can be hidden in books and letters - as well as blasting caps, the news report said.It's possible, of course, that this is deeply ambiguous, and only a close reading could uncover the meaning of "and."
I really hate it when people post about stuff without a clue as to what they're posting about (without saying so; that makes it possibly okay). "Undetectable C-4."
And "...a DuPont flexible explosive material that can be hidden in books and letters...."
Like, you know, C-4, fucktard.
It's not terribly hard to make moldable explosive in your garage, either, but I'm not splaining how.
"Did you get that?"
This is why I tend to avoid AmericaBlog (and many other popular blogs I could name). Half the time I go there, I see this sort of I-have-no-idea-what-I'm-talking-about-but-I-must -tell-you crap.
There's not shortage of people who know what they're talking about on the Internet.
Plain old explosive I'm not all that worried about, any more than I'm deeply worried about being shot under normal circumstances.
Not that I mind the tip, Apostroper. Thank you kindly.
"It was pretty low-pressure where I lived."
I grew up in Brooklyn, as you've perhaps seen me mention. "Homo" and "fag'" were heard multiple times a day at P.S. 99 in the Sixties (which was one of the better schools in Brooklyn).
I'm short; 5' 4" now, but I had a huge growth spurt at the end of my adolescence. I was always either the shortest kid, or second-shortest, smallest, in class in elementary school, unless we had a genuine dwarf, as happened on occasion. (At least I was thin, unlike now.)
And, oddly, I read all the time and talked like an adult. (We know about my geek thing; also, of course, glasses.) So it was my head clanging into the iron schoolyard bars with frequency, along with others. Let's not talk gym class.
It's truly a mystery why I'd be put off sports, when what it meant for me was being beaten up, treated as an object of ridicule, and constantly with the "you fucking homo! you fag!"
Which is why the Mineshaft-type jokes don't always, you know, go down so easy with me. But I just let it slide. I'm big that way.
"A lot of homophobia is directly connected to establishing a violent pecking order among guys."
Ya think?
And, of course, I simplify; I played in a peewee football league for a year, awful as I was at it; I could hit a baseball/softball fairly well, although I was crap at catching; I was a fairly fast runner, excellent at gymnastics, and an excellent swimmer. Hopeless at basketball, though. And a good target in dodgeball. And my one big fight at summer camp I won by using my brain, which is to say, knowing how to bluff, and deliberately make enough feints to convince the guy I was hopeless, and he dropped his guard and I socked him in the stomach with all my strength, and he went down, and didn't get up, and the fight was over; he was the Big Bully, too; it was my Childhood Triumph Over Macho, other than generally replaying the scene of Albert Brooks' character as a kid at the beginning of Broadcast News (one of my favorite movies, unsurprisingly).
And in school, I mostly avoided fights by various techniques, such as making them laugh, or learning how to be invisible and slip by, or talking really fast. But not hardly always. (I really trained up when the SP program which skipped us a grade, on top of the two grades I'd already skipped -- another factor in being smallest, etc., of course -- had its first year at an "annex" at one of the worse schools in Brooklyn, and every landing on every stairwell was franchised out to a thug to demand a quarter or more toll from you; so learning how to get past multiple thug checkpoints per day, every day, will really school certain skills, such as previously mentioned.)