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from the anyone-who-expects-to-give-up-freedom-for-security-will-get-neither dept.
Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept writes A Response to Michael Kinsley
Kinsley has actually done the book a great favor by providing a vivid example of so many of its central claims. For instance, I describe in the book the process whereby the government and its media defenders reflexively demonize the personality of anyone who brings unwanted disclosure so as to distract from and discredit the substance revelations; Kinsley dutifully tells Times readers that I "come across as so unpleasant" and that I'm a "self-righteous sourpuss" (yes, he actually wrote that). I also describe in the book how jingoistic media courtiers attack anyone who voices any fundamental critiques of American political culture; Kinsley spends much of his review deriding the notion that there could possibly be anything anti-democratic or oppressive about the United States of America.
But by far the most remarkable part of the review is that Kinsley--in the very newspaper that published Daniel Ellsberg's Pentagon Papers and then fought to the Supreme Court for the right to do so (and, though the review doesn't mention it, also published some Snowden documents)--expressly argues that journalists should only publish that which the government permits them to, and that failure to obey these instructions should be a crime.
I can't say I want my government to have its fingers in what is and what is not reported.
See also: Cory Doctorow's review of Greenwald's book at BoingBoing
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Thursday May 29 2014, @05:24AM
The fundamental issue here is with a debate that I became aware of while I was in college in the late 80s, specifically, is the Constitution a "living document" (meaning it can change with the times) or should it be read very strictly (immutable unless amended). The liberals in the 80s, who at that time could actually be considered liberals rather than what poses as liberals today (read that as "Democrats: The New GOP") were rather in favor of the living document perspective while conservatives, not what poses for conservatives today (read that as "Old GOP: Parody of Itself"), were in favor of a strict reading.
25 years later, we are seeing the fruits of that debate, and it is clear that old guard conservatives lost -- actually, they had been losing ever since the drug war's inception because drugs are small, easy to hide, and the 4th Amendment has taken a massive beating because of this fact ... in the present time of course, the NSA and Congress' recent legitimization of its processes by passing a doublethink entitled law called the USA FREEDOM Act, put the last nail in the 4th's coffin.
Obviously it won't stop with the 4th. Every other provision in the bill of rights that notes rights that people have is under a full assault, by both Democrats and Republicans (calling these groups liberals and conservatives does violence to the English language -- these are groups of power hungry statists where the only discernible difference between them is on the hot button issues of abortion and gay marriage). Both parties have taken the "living document" approach to heart and both parties are working toward a common goal (the complete evisceration of the Constitution and its values) by attacking different portions of it -- Republicans are after the separation of church and state, Democrats after firearms, and both after the press and the right to be left alone.
I have always considered myself a liberal, and in my 20s I thought the "living document" arguments were persuasive, but I see now that it was a trick, and that as a legal perspective on the Constitution, it has served only to attack the classically liberal values contained in the Constitution. At this point though, there is no turning back. The Constitution is dead and we are on a path that leads to some pretty dark places -- there is no way to turn this around, the forces at work are too large and too well funded and the corruption in DC is too well entrenched.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bradley13 on Thursday May 29 2014, @01:46PM
The debate is much older than that; put another way, we've been sliding down this slope so long that no one still remembers what the top of the hill looked like. I just recently read Starship Troopers: and it raises a lot of the same issues, and was written in 1959. George Orwell's 1984 was written ten years earlier than that.
Read reminiscences of people raised 60, 80, 100 years ago. They enjoyed freedoms that we cannot even imagine today. Just as an example I recently ran across boys taking their rifles to school (that they were shooting cans with), but being asked to leave their rifles at the classroom door. Can you imagine what would happen today, if a boy brought even an unloaded gun to school? [freerangekids.com]
Sixty years ago, the government was much less involved in people's lives; there were fewer regulations. And yet, strangely, life was possible even without the benevolent intervention of government ensuring when and how people lived every moment of their lives.
Of course, it is all so very well meant. That new law might save a life - surely it is worth a small loss of freedom? Isn't it?
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Thursday May 29 2014, @03:53PM
Sixty years ago, the government was much less involved in people's lives;
That's not really true. Back in the 1800s, different states actually had state religions, and the Bill of Rights was thought to only apply to the Federal government. 100 years ago, the government worked with business owners and Pinkerton to violently oppress protesters for worker's rights. Many localities had laws requiring people to have someone walking in front of their car waving a flag to avoid scaring horses. Sodomy and homosexuality were illegal until only recently. Lots of places have had laws forbidding oral sex, or even sex with the lights on, until recent years. Drinking (or producing) alcohol was strictly forbidden for about a decade. Producing or consuming various recreational drugs has been illegal for less than a century, and still is for the most part.
What you're seeing is that some freedoms people had decades ago are now gone, while other things which were forbidden are now legal. Marijuana was legal in the 1800s, but was banned in the 1930s or so, and is now being decriminalized or legalized in select jurisdictions. Alcohol was legal in most places until around 1920, then forbidden for about a decade, then legalized again, in most places (but not all; there's some dry counties still).
Don't forget that 160+ years ago, black people had no freedom at all in part of the US, and had less freedom than white people until the 1960s.
In a nutshell, freedoms come and go.