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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsRE: Walking back the PRISM Story...
Bill Buckley used to host a program called Firing Line. While I never did agree with Buckley's far right philosophy, I did enjoy the relative-to-today's-standards honest nature of the debates.
Anywho...
Bill would often accuse his opponent of using Jesuit Logic:
Accuse a Jesuit of killing a Man and his Dog and the Jesuit will TRIUMPHANTLY produce the Dog.
Expect a lot of dogs today.
Junkdrawer
(27,993 posts)The Jesuits, he (George Tyrrell) wrote acidly, score off the exaggeration of their critics. Accuse them of killing three men and a dog, they will triumphantly produce the dog alive.
madokie
(51,076 posts)the good folks of DU has ever had one. If I remember correctly we've had a few in the last 30 days or so. Benghazi, IRS, AP.
Yeah it sucks when many of the good folks here get all beside themselves with made of whole cloth outrage. Can't be reasoned with at all either.
Junkdrawer
(27,993 posts)reveal questionable journalism, don't answer my objections to PRISM.
madokie
(51,076 posts)I see it as I've stated several times here, I see it as made up big ass mountain out of a tiny ass anthill bullshit.
zeemike
(18,998 posts)That would make me feel better...but I don't let my feelings fool me.
This is a another step to a Big Brother world...and once we accept this more will follow.
And we know the right has always been cool with it, so what a better thing to do than to have a Democratic president be responsible for it so we will be forced to accept it as normal too?
It is all triangulation to move us further to the right, and it seems to be working.
Bluenorthwest
(45,319 posts)I trust my Senators for many reasons, including the fact that unlike Obama and your Coburn they never libeled my family while spouting bullshit about how Sanctified all straight marriages are, never claimed to speak for God against my loved ones.
Do you agree with Coburn about basic rights for those unlike yourself as well, or just on spying on your neighbors?
I could not believe my ears when the 'Sanctity of Rick Warren' politician said we should trust him. Trust a man who held public anti gay rallies with McClurkin and sneered at us afterward? I think not.
madokie
(51,076 posts)I don't know a soul who voted for coburn or inhofe. FYI. I live in district 1 not 2
emulatorloo
(44,182 posts)It is idiotic to assume Madokie or any other DU'er supports Coburn
You are not the only DU'er who uses this slimy tactic, but that doesn't make it any less slimy.
woo me with science
(32,139 posts)is NOT a tiny ass anthill.
It is an egregious violation of our Constitutional right to privacy and creates an infrastructure that can easily be used to preemptively target any American that a future government finds inconvenient
Buzz Clik
(38,437 posts)"I see it as an ass mountain made from a tiny anthill of bullshit."
Buzz Clik
(38,437 posts)1StrongBlackMan
(31,849 posts)big ass mountain out of a tiny ass PARTIALLY DISCLOSED anthill bullshit
Enrique
(27,461 posts)do you?
woo me with science
(32,139 posts)1StrongBlackMan
(31,849 posts)The previous 7 "scandals" were not be to believed; whereas, this "scandal" is to be believed, because ... well ... because OUR LIBERTY is at stake!
Enrique
(27,461 posts)is that the GOP is defending Obama on the NSA scandal. Which means it will go nowhere in the media, because all they know is Team D vs. Team R.
on point
(2,506 posts)(and I knew about it then) plus a few other things the NSA is doing which isn't part of today's outrage.
There was a time when one had HOPE that a constitutional scholar who claimed to be a progressive, once elected president would work to make a difference and roll back the dangerous neocons and their ilk.
His failure to do so is a different kind of outrage....
treestar
(82,383 posts)And declare his own new laws.
Constitutional law professors agree with you on everything - they wouldn't see any grey areas or issues.
ellennelle
(614 posts)gosh. well, here's the way i've tried to get some angle on this.
first, the program has been FOR SEVEN YEARS monitoring emails sent, addresses of recipients and senders, for the most part. no content. it seems this is roughly equivalent to the post office knowing my address, and actually handling my mail, seeing where it goes. not sure how we can get around that, but also don't recall too much gnashing of anyone's teeth about the post office. recording that info, another matter, tho perhaps the PO has been doing that for years, but i don't know. still, not as if it's info that is not out there.
second, where a person visits - say online or thru calls - is not necessarily as 'protected' as you might want to believe, nor should it necessarily be so. when you step outside your home onto the sidewalk or street, your presence and comings and goings become not only public knowledge, but public domain. seems to me a similar case can be made about the phone and internet connections. tho these are technically speaking now not publicly owned like the sidewalks, but corporate owned, they are nonetheless publicly utilized, supporting public exchanges. what happens once you enter a private domain, just as when you enter someone's home, that should be private as long as both parties agree. so the phone conversations themselves - and i would submit net transactions, just as store transactions (which are not entirely private at all, really) - remain private. we live in our homes, and what occurs there is generally speaking private. but how much electricity you use, your address, your property value, taxes, all that stuff that the public utilities etc. pipe in to your home to support and sustain it within the community - NONE of that stuff is particularly private at all. nor should it be. even if you try to disappear to the wild and live off the land or whatever, you remain connected on some level. but hey, no man is an island; we are a social species.
third, there's been some pearl-clutching about how much info they gather about purchases and transactions and such. this is info the retailers gather, and i've long suspected they were as eager - if not more - to have a way to collect such customer targeting trash as the government. i tend to believe that's correct. nevertheless, such info that is already public - such as zip code, just for one instance - gives a boatload of info that is just out there, very legally public; voting likelihood, income likelihood, school attendance, etcetcetc.
finally (at least for this way overlong comment; apologies), as with all protected rights and privileges of being a citizen, there are limits. we will ALWAYS have to weigh our rights against our responsibilities to the community as a whole, our privileges against our priorities. bill maher's comments on how important it is to consider how easy it is for example to imagine NUKES being smuggled in and detonated in a public place prompts the support of a (pardon the expression) WELL-REGULATED intelligence agency that will do just that. we will not likely ever know precisely how many times deadly plans have already been thwarted by such efforts.
from the examples i have read about, there is no doubt we have teetered on the edge since WWII, and plummeted precipitously since 9/11. but i would submit that obama is doing the best he can to walk that fine line of protecting our rights while also protecting our existence. and while walking that line, he is also trying to walk back all that we lost in the terminal and eternal "war on terr'r." think for just one minute how you would make that call were you to hold both the safety and civil rights of the country in your hands; would you be the one to sacrifice the very lives of any citizens in order to satisfy the most extreme and absolute interpretation of those rights? whether with surveillance or drones, how do you actually execute that calculus?
i for one am not just a wee bit suspicious of the timing of this shriekout, soon after obama's doctrinal declaration that we will end that pseudo-war, and all the drone and gitmo trappings. call me conspiratorial, but "exposing" something that has been around for 7 years, and has since obama been brought back within legal boundaries (i tend to believe it has; could be wrong; and now he's trying to even walk back those legal boundaries to constitutional ones; see his speech), in the middle of the sick RWN determination to make a scandal where there is none - why, conjuring up this insanity that will turn even obama's base against him? sheer genius; evil, wicked, unamerican, treasonous genius. we must be very careful not to swallow anything like this.
do note most stories are now walking themselves back on all this, and cooler heads who actually know about the details and history are setting us all straight. mind you, i admire glenn greenwald in many respects, and we need as a society the extremely pure gadflies like him and chris hedges etc. in order to keep our ideals vividly on the radar in order to move the middle closer to that (instead of the other, obviously crazed direction). but we also must be realistic. and that is where perspective comes in handy. if this admittedly very long-winded diatribe (apologies again; i confess, it was stream of consciousness) does not convince you, please visit david simon's blog and bill maher's 2 cents on it, posted on DU.
i mean, folks, we really must all learn - in this age of media manipulation at the speed of the internet - to CHILL, stop, and reflect; reason is clouded and crowded out when we over-react and lose perspective.
for those of you who lasted this long, thx.
treestar
(82,383 posts)I was thinking too of how the same outragists will claim the corporations own the government, and this info came from huge corporations in the first place - when you've been on DU awhile you'll see this, so it's amazing these corporations are not getting any heat here.
There are also frequents demands to "prosecute the banksters" and yet wouldn't something like this be needed to do that.
And then people who talk on cell phones in public - how is that a private conversation, when I'm getting to hear half of it?
cliffordu
(30,994 posts)ellennelle
(614 posts)ok, folks. all that perspective just got re-perspectivized.
watch here
now what are we to think? could obama have this granular an understanding of what is going on? would the NSA actually tell him? and what would prompt him to perpetuate it, if he did know?
KoKo
(84,711 posts)I think I understood what you were saying and some here didn't.
Truth in that for sure...the "Jesuit logic" analogy. The "dog" has been seized upon. But no one can deny that the "murder or murders" still occurred. Instead we shall focus on the dog that lived.
Junkdrawer
(27,993 posts)against the wall to see what sticks, now is that time.
Hell, this post was mistaken as a "Hey, that could work" post.
Don't know whether to laugh or cry.