Links and Commentary...

Link and Link

Short summary: The NSA's activities don't just stand to compromise the privacy of ordinary citizens.  They also stand to compromise the privacy, and thus the integrity, of government officials.

Legislators.  Judges.

Generals.

How many prominent government officials who have publicly opposed the administration have had personal scandals thrown into public view in the past few years and been forced out of office?

The problem is that this isn't a conspiracy theory - the problem exists regardless of whether or not the conspiracy exists.  The integrity of every level of our government has just been thrown into question.  As long as these programs exist, the integrity will remain in question.

What Odds...

...would you place on a local police department knowing places they can go if they want to find dead bodies?

That is, in more clear language - how likely do you think it is that any given police department is ignoring murders that aren't explicitly brought to their attention?

I place the odds pretty high.  Indeed, it would surprise me if any police department with more than a handful of employees (that is, any non-rural police department) -didn't-.

Random Quote

"There comes a point in most men’s lives when you realize that you’re perceived as public property. Maybe it’s the moment you set eyes on your Selective Service Registration Form and realize your life belongs to the state, or maybe it’s when the manager at your part-time job asks you to carry the heavy boxes again while the women stand around looking bored." - Judgy Bitch, The Gold Digger Press: Understanding the Female Media Gaze.

This... is disturbingly apt.

Cruelty

There is nothing so cruel our society has done but to convince our children that we live in Civilization, and that they don't have to fight for their lives anymore, and to keep insisting this to them while they face the truth every day.

And society blanches when those of us who possess the capacity for violence use it in defense of the essence of our being.  We leave our children, carefully declawed, to the tigers and have the audacity to be horrified when some of them come back with teeth bloodied from the moment they chose to bite back - but worse, we're horrified that they come back at all.

Response to Popehat...

Per Link, Ken makes a very eloquent argument about how stupid some butthurt PUAs are for complaining about censorship from Kickstarter because censorship is a more important concept than "They refused to support our speech".  He argues that it's just asshattery to compare a business refusing to act as a platform for your speech with censorship, a concept generally used to describe government stopping speech altogether.

Only issue?

As far as I can tell... none of the PUAs in question actually complained about censorship.  None of Ken's quotes, as unpleasant as they are, mention censorship.  The links he provides don't mention censorship.

...given his harsh criticisms of them for diluting the concept of censorship...

...didn't Ken just do exactly that?

Seriously, guys, I respect you.  But this post is, as far as I can tell, an excuse to say something bad about the PUA crowd.  If you want to criticize the PUA crowd, at least criticize them for behavior they're actually -engaging- in.  And if you do this nonsense again I'm going to stop taking you seriously.

Sheeyit.

Also, I disagree with Ken on the matter for other reasons.  I don't think the word "censorship" needs to be reserved specifically for cases where the first amendment applies.  But that argument doesn't even begin to matter when there doesn't actually appear to be a factual basis for his post to begin with.

A Snarl

Ladies and gentlemen, we don't live in a civilized society.

A civilized society isn't silent while it commits the crimes our society commits on a daily basis.  A civilized society doesn't get to condemn men to punishments it doesn't even have the courage to acknowledge.  A civilized society certainly doesn't get to laugh and chuckle about it.

We don't get to condemn men, women, and children to facilities in which it is a certainty a high percentage will be raped, battered, and killed, while pretending we are only submitting them for prison.  We don't get to imprison the fathers of an entire race of people, to turn them into effective slaves.  There are black men in prison today, in prison because they were ordered to pay more to ex-wives than they made in a year.  In prison, where they are raped, beaten, where they lose all autonomy of self.  The way we treat black men in this society today is worse than the way we treated them a hundred and fifty years ago - we have made them -less- than slaves, because at least we -acknowledge- that we're forcing slaves to work.  We don't get to imprison the users of drugs that harm nobody but themselves, to systematically ruin the lives of people in the name of protecting them from the ruination of their lives by their own bad decisions.

We don't even get to submit the worst scum of our society to this punishment.  No matter what somebody has done, they deserve at least one thing - to get the punishment we prescribe them for, for the punishment our society imposes upon them to be -acknowledged-.  If we're going to put people in rape-mills, we don't get to be silent about it.  If we're going to deprive people of medical treatment until they face amputation, we don't get to be silent about it.  If we're going to let despised criminals such as child rapists be murdered in prison, we have to fucking acknowledge that we're sentencing them to death.

It's disgusting that we live in a society in which we don't think we have to, that we live in a society in which everybody knows what is happening to the Jews and laughs quietly to themselves that it serves them right.

I'm honestly surprised there aren't more murders in this country.  Too many of us fucking deserve it.

What is the Internet?

The Internet is not a network.  It's not a collection of information, a graph of computer nodes, or anything like that.

The Internet is a limb.  A sense.  As integral to my generation as eyes were to the generation previous.  In a very literal sense, my generation would be blind and helpless without it.  In a very real sense, all generations prior to the current ones -were- blind and helpless.  The Internet isn't the computer I use to access it, or the hardware and software that permit it to be - it's an extension of self.

The reason the public is so defensive about the internet isn't that they're merely fond of it.  It's that, in a very real sense, any intervention in the government is an assault on their person.  Government censorship of the Internet feels no different from the government coming into our homes and cutting our fingers off.  When a state institutes a sales tax on the Internet, they're changing the character of the Internet - they're invading something very personal to us.

We're not giving it up without a fight.

And there's a fight coming.  The government has been rendered increasingly obsolete; the mechanisms of its power are becoming increasingly irrelevant.  The NSA scandals don't surprise me.  I expect far worse is going on.  The government has lost control of its creation.  The central struggle of the last twenty years has been between government and the Internet, and government has slowly been losing ground.  Don't expect it to go down without a fight.

Tor and The Silk Road demonstrate clearly and conclusively that government as we know it will never exist again.  Without raising a gun the world is revolting against the government-that-was.  What will replace it?  The next decade will decide that.

Don't make the mistake of assuming that the Internet cannot be used against us.  It has been, and it will be.  Right now we're winning because the model of government is at odds with the model of the Internet; a centralized authority cannot win in the decentralized world of the Internet.  A decentralized authority -can- win.  And is capable of horrors you cannot imagine.  Don't make the mistake of assuming the war is won.  It has just begun.  Institutions of power are already seeking to control the character of the Internet; Facebook has capitulated and is now shutting down critics of Feminism, one of many institutions of power at play in the world today.  This is the kind of informational warfare that will characterize the next decade.  And if we permit it, we are doomed.

We're at war.  Recognize this - those in power already do.  It's a war we can win - all we have to do is not surrender.  The Internet is as my eyes, my hands - and I at least will not surrender it without a fight.

Not Every Stack Needs to be a Platform

Okay, Google Chrome - what the hell happened to you?

I already know the answer to that.  Platform-itis.  The tendency for every technology stack to become a technology platform.  Everybody wants to run the iStore, or Steam.

Listen, people.  This -isn't helping-.  In a past era this was called bloat.  If it hadn't been named then, I don't think today it would have a name, so ubiquitous is the issue.

It's become the trend even in games - more and more games that come out aren't complete, aren't games in themselves, they're just platforms for modding.

Developers?  Knock it off.

And now I have to find a new browser.  Internet Explorer isn't it.  Neither is Firefox, which I abandoned when it started installing malware to my computer without any intervention on my part from -advertisements- on webpages.