A poster on Digg offered this eloquent response to the article, Internet Censorship is On it's Way. The i-Patriot Act:
WHY THE FUCK ARE THEY CONCERNED ABOUT THE FUCKING INTERNET?!?!
I mean seriously there are much bigger issues in the whole fucking world then the internet. We cannot be in our on privacy doing our own thing without the people watching over us. I mean come on its such bullshit. Soon it will be like the movie Demolition Man and we will get fined when we fucking curse at home! We are slowly creeping into a government who has complete control over everything we do.
Censor the internet... Give me a fucking break.
My apologies for the language, but this impassioned question deserves an equally impassioned answer. Why, indeed?
In a fascist state, the last thing you want is for people to be able to express themselves and speak out against the government. It's all about control. And people who can speak freely can't be controlled. Neither can those who listen to those who speak freely.
Anyone who's been raptly paying attention to what's been going on in our country (particularly over the last 8 years or so) knows that we've been becoming a fascist state. But it's by our own choosing. We elected these people to power, either by choice or by sheer apathy. We refused to entertain the notion of deviating from a two party system, and we allowed them to strip us of our rights and freedoms. We did not cry out in protest when the Patriot Act was put into place; rather, many of us celebrated it, embracing it as a necessary evil in order to hunt down the vile terrorists who had dared to attack us on our own soil.
Thus, we surrendered our rights, our freedoms, our liberties in order to gain a false sense of security and chase after demons that never really existed. And from that day forward our government, whom we put into power and have kept in power, have continued to play upon our fears in order to further strip us of any vestige of the Constitutional rights we had before. They can do what they want, when they want, to whomever they want, and there is little that any of us can do about it.
But we chose this path. We elected it. Sixty percent of the population failed to vote in the last presidential election. It was far more important to watch reality television than it was to secure a meaningful future for our nation, and we allowed the same criminals to maintain their stranglehold on what was once a powerful, respectable democracy. But those same people maintain that their government fails them, that they have no rights, that the economy is in the toilet, that we're sending our troops to senseless deaths overseas in a war we should never have been involved in, and a myriad of other complaints. When asked, though, they'll tell you that they didn't vote because their vote didn't count. Of course it didn't. No uncast vote counts.
But we've learned nothing. Even now we entertain the absurd notion of effecting change by maintaining the status quo. We're going to elect either Obama or McCain. Yet another pawn from a two-party system. Neither will be able to revolutionize the country and restore what it was. Neither will break the back of the military industrial complex. Neither will do what must be done to fix what must be fixed.
That responsibility rests with you and me. Right here. Right now. Every day. But it means getting off our asses, turning off our televisions, and getting involved. We must DEMAND change, DEMAND our rights, and DEMAND the restoration of the Constitution.
You see? A fascist would never want words like these uttered on any medium. And the Internet makes it all too easy to make such statements in a forum where hundreds, thousands, even millions of people can read it.
1 comment:
Whether or not it is true that there is going to be an i-9-11 or an i-Patriot Act, any responsible writer would do a much better job of citing sources then either you or the author you cite did. For example, the article you cite mentioned something Ron Paul said with out ever saying when. He also used the "Oh come on" argument (not providing any evidence, but instead saying "oh, come on, this must be true") when trying to justify his position that the Patriot Act to combat terrorism was written sometime when the Cold War was at the forefront every one's mind. If the Patriot act had been sitting in a drawer for twenty years, that means it was likely drawn up by a Democrat controlled congress and the Carter administration, and I find it highly unlikely that Carter and Bush are secretly in cahoots.
As for your article, before you can claim that America is "becoming fascist," you should look at how bad it is in other countries. There is no free speech whatsoever in China. Socialist labor laws in Western Europe have made it hard to exercise the right to work. Despite whatever trends over the past decade in the US, real or imagined, we are no different now than we were ten years from now - we live in a Democracy, and so we must always live vigilant of both tyranny and demagoguery.
Computer Scientists, and Scientists in general, are different than other professionals in how they do their work. We site our sources. We use logic, not demagoguery to support our positions. The way to show people why they should care about Internet rights or why the two-party system is flawed is not by appealing to fear, but by using logic, and that logic will not come from the theories of a professor from Stanford but rather from someone who can show how it would effect the daily lives of our fellow Americans.
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