It was 25 years ago the supposedly conflicted Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich had the magical foresight to appoint a Silicon Valley bureau chief to the state-run Voice of America news agency, a full year before the wonders of Windows 95. But by all means let’s pretend tech companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and especially Google working behind the scenes with the feds dates back only to Edward Snowden’s employment with the NSA and the PRISM docs he later shared, not back to DARPA before he was even born.
I’ve discussed all of this before, but I feel a re-framing is always welcome. Personally while I do think that Snowden is a decent and congenial fellow, he isn’t necessarily a hero or a traitor, but rather a vessel. As noted with the Iran Contra affair, arming all sides of a conflict to grow the conflict is long-standing USA policy in a nutshell. And aside from the FIVE EYES tag-team and the Israeli government, no other nation-state on the planet had the tools to play the game of transitioning from nuclear battlegrounds to digital. Which I see as an unvoiced civil war explaining much of the inter-departmental conflict in American governance today, with old-fashioned, predominately Neocon nuke spooks vs newfangled, predominately Neolib digital spooks, all wanting to play the capitalist game of Highlander. The short-lived shadowbrokers were admitted insiders pushing bits of code somehow missed by Snowden. The Silk Road was FBI’d altogether, to further proliferate a digital arms race. The Intercept was somehow not wiped out by “terrorists” as with the French cartoon mag, Charlie Hebdo.
I sincerely believe these dots form a picture which the wealthiest folks in our country of recent long decades would never want to see realized. But it’s cool because I’ve no college degree, only love handles and severe halitosis myself. Every attribute of the official story, the party line, feels like Nth degree victim-shaming, golden showers as opposed to Golden Rule. Someone with a real platform needs to equate leftism with boomerangs, with karma.
Just as important as the argument for keeping church separated from state politics should be an argument for keeping industry separated from state politics, with nary reacharounds or revolving doors or privatized jerking of circles. Yet the basic premise that profit of any measure is considerably not a right or an entitlement is taken by growing numbers as a personal offense, in much the same way as the slightest suggestion of Judaeo-Christian faiths being barred from weaponizing legislation at the expense of outsiders is taken as a personal affront.
Likewise, those insisting antifa are terrorists have this in common with too many Christian groups in America, unsurprising as there is much crossover. The entitled refusal to grasp how obstruction to infringing upon the rights of others is not itself an infringement of any actual right.
If the masses want a democratic government of the people, by the people and for the people, the responsibility falls on its citizenry to safeguard basic human rights to life, liberty and pursuits of happiness go unimpeded by threats both foreign and domestic. But supremacy of any stripe is fundamentally undemocratic. No self-perception should be made status quo for the mass consensus, and the many voices wishing for exceptions to that ideal do not objectively believe that all men are created equal. Real strength is self-dependent enough to stand on its own without god or country or bias to hide behind, or strangers to dehumanize as there is no threat by others sharing equal rights in the crossed eyes of the law. Individuals have power over their own inferiority complexes. I find most special interest groups actually want special privileges rather than equality, wanting to wield a proverbial whip themselves than have it abolished altogether. Liberties are not finances, where for some to have then others must be deprived or connived into having not.
If we care to indulge this illusion of a collective society, then we are obligated not to diminish one another but to support each other, to allow equal opportunities to good education and good healthcare for all, because any chain is only as strong as its weakest link. We do not have to love anybody to enjoy liberties ourselves, but we also do not have to hate anybody to enjoy liberties ourselves.
All that’s required is honesty.