Stephen Walt points out how scaremongering about terrorism has become the easiest way for the government to accrue more secretive power, which is the kind they like best because it is unchecked. [Read more…]
Mr. Deity explains why this is so in an episode riddled with clichés and bad puns.
(Via Machines Like Us.)
In thinking about many issues, especially those that involve foreign policy, I like to apply the ‘switch test’. This is where I reverse the roles of the participants to see what the reaction might be. It is a good way to see if people are basing their thinking on some universal principle equally applied or in a partisan way and judging an action purely on the basis of who is doing it to whom. Sadly, it is often the latter attitude that predominates. [Read more…]
The Snowden revelations keep coming faster that the efforts by the Obama administration and supporters of the national security state to downplay them. Their claims that they had access to ‘only’ the metadata and not the content of the messages themselves, while bad enough, has been exposed as a lie as the extent to which the NSA and Britain’s spy agency GCHQ collaborate and share data is revealed. [Read more…]
A recent survey by the WHO of 81 nations reveals that domestic violence against women at the hands of their partners is occurring globally at shockingly high levels of 30% of all women. The study also gives the variation by regions, but not by nations. [Read more…]
Edward Snowden is being charged by the Obama administration with espionage under the 1917 Espionage Act that was introduced to criminalize dissent against World War I. Up until the Obama administration, a grand total to three people had been charged under this act for leaking information, including Daniel Ellsberg. Obama alone has now prosecuted seven people. So according to Obama, we are now having an epidemic of spying, far more than during all the years of actual war and the Cold War combined. [Read more…]
The head of the NSA Keith Alexander has asked Congress to pass legislation that would give blanket immunity to companies that commit illegal activities at the request of the NSA. Alexander explains it this way, “If the government asks the company to do something to protect the networks, or to do something and a mistake is made, and it was our fault, then they should have liability protection for that.” [Read more…]
When it comes to issues of morality, I take the attitude of live and let live. If people are not harming others, then I think that they should be given a great deal of leeway for their actions. Similarly, consenting adults who are of sound mind should be allowed to live their lives as they wish. Since this approach to morality does not use as its basis religious texts written by men thousands of years ago when standards of morality were less enlightened than they are now, it is bound to come into conflict from time to time with the moral standards of religions. [Read more…]