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posted by
janrinok
on Saturday January 24 2015, @12:03PM
from the your-guess-is-as-good-as-mine dept.
from the your-guess-is-as-good-as-mine dept.
Politico Magazine asked 15 other big thinkers and doers for their ideas of what will change the world the most in the next 15 years. We got back lots of inspiration—from the transformative power of opening up national borders to the commercialization of the human genome—and one dyspeptic dissenter. Read on, for a sense of the possible in the world of 2030.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/15-big-breakthroughs-in-2015-114486.html
Would you agree with their predictions? What would surveillance be like in 2030? Would we have any freedoms at all, any privacy?
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All this time I've been VIEWING a RUSSIAN MIDGET SODOMIZE a HOUSECAT!
(Score: 2) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Sunday January 25 2015, @04:49PM
You have a really good method of surmise and forensic thought-experiment. It does me good to read, and prompts me further into thinking.
The reference is from a Ron Suskind article in the NYT Magazine, and the attribution is to an unnamed aide in the Bush administration. This can all be found in the Wikipedia article for "Reality-based community." [wikipedia.org]
What I think is more important than understanding it as a desired end-state, that this is the representative statement of those in positions of elite power. It describes the imperial world view of monarchal society, translated for the quasi-democratic and media-saturated current era.
How close we are to this end-state? A matter for argument. But some clue is by the extraordinary persecution of those, in recent years, who have resisted or even given a voice to an alternative narrative account. Most recently there is Barrett Brown sentencing. GCHQ has been classifying "investigative journalists" as a legitimate target for anti-terrorism targeting. Last Friday, Andrew Lack new head for the US Broadcasting Board of Governors, labelled the broadcaster RT as one of the main challenges to his agency, ranked equal to ISIS and Boko Haram.
So I do not believe that there is a conspiracy of a single cabal, with shadowy tentacles, enforcing this in every exec meeting and board room. But there is a defining ethic that is self-reinforcing and has incredible grasp official positions, media messaging and power to sanction with economic, criminal and military methods.
The "Reality-based community" statement neatly gives a form to that defining ethic, and renders sensible the state of a "west" with an incestous power elite - and a fifth estate that treats itself as a client of privilege - where four companies control the 147 others, that own everything". [forbes.com]
You're betting on the pantomime horse...