flirting with reality ([info]anansi133) wrote,
@ 2006-07-01 23:52:00
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what are 'we' at war with, anyway?
I know, I'm preaching to the choir here, but sometimes I find myself looking at the same old awfulness with fresh eyes.

The boingboing link is titled, Air Force to spend $450K datamining blogs for war on terror. And I looked at that, and thought to myself, 'how intellectually bankrupt are these people, that they're stretching 'war on terror' to mean, 'war on anything that scares us'.

I mean, if the military is afraid of something, that means it's got to be dangerous, right? People speaking their minds to each other in a free market of ideas sounds great in theory, but what if people say stuff that the military doesn't want to hear? It's got to be made into a legitimate target.

I guess the thing that gets me, is the idea that someone with bad political intentions is going to blog about it. Now if this evildoer is a homegrown timothy McVeigh/Unibomber type of guy, then they're conspiring to commit murder, one american to another. Doesn't the Posse Comitatus Act have something to say about the military doing law enforcement here at home?

And if they're from someplace else, why would the blogosphere be impacted in any way by their movements? You might just as well spend the money looking for terrorist patterns of trash disposal among the 'innocent' trash of the rest of us. Hell, it would probably do more good.

Note that I'm not protesting this on privacy grounds, thought there's plenty to be concerned about. I think it stinks because I don't think it's going to do any good.

...at which point my cynicism kicks in, and I remember all the other stupid stuff my tax dollars get spent on, in the name of national (in)security...

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[info]jamiam
2006-07-02 11:39 am UTC (link)
My question is... wait, the Air Force? That's like the Army spying on MLK. Come again? Shouldn't the NSA being doing that, or... hello? Doesn't sound like the old Department of Homeland Security is doing such a good job of encouraging information sharing and preventing in-fighting amongst the various branches and bureaus after all.

And something about tax dollars, yes. That.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

(Anonymous)
2006-07-02 05:04 pm UTC (link)
When I heard about the army having spied on MLK, it confirmed all my ideas about the confusion and paranoia of the era. (are we out of it yet? guess not.)

The rationale was that he was impacting their ability to fight the war.

The more I think about it, the more I question democracy. If a democracy is less likely to get into a war, if it's harder to conduct warfare in a democracy than in a fascist state, which do you pull away from? The war, or the democracy?

I keep coming back to the idea that none of these struggles are really about capitalism vs communism, or civil society against terrorists. What the struggle is really about, is the warrior class who would fight anyone who questions their agenda, versus everybody else.

This is not to say that all war is wrong, or that no one ever needs to take up arms to defend themselves. Just that warfare can become its own agenda, completely removed from the reasons for carrying weapons in the first place.

[this is anansi, posting from my secret bunker on the moon]

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]jamiam
2006-07-02 06:00 pm UTC (link)
What the struggle is really about, is the warrior class who would fight anyone who questions their agenda, versus everybody else.

Well, I don't think you even need to invoke "the warrior class"; it's just plain old Us vs. Them.

(It sort of makes you very cynical indeed about any stories premised on the age-old idea of a battle of Good vs. Evil...)

Democracy -- or rather the dissemination of information within the current model of democracy -- means that it's harder to keep a grip on ideologies which don't conform to the prevailing one.

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Re: Air Force
[info]wolfieboy
2006-07-02 08:52 pm UTC (link)
When I see such things, I remember that the logistics command was using a badly broken dbase II program in 1994 to manage their Central Supply. It's still scary though.

(Reply to this) (Thread)
Re: Air Force
[info]anansi133
2006-07-03 05:23 am UTC (link)
Yeah, I have an idea that when these big, computer-clueless institutions get paranoid about the technology that the average shmoe is using, it manifests as overreacting fear. The whole Steve Jackson kerfluffle stemmed from a confusion between what happens on a computer, and what happens in a card game about computers. That's not the sort of mistake that a computer-savvy group would do. I think it's the same with the air force: they've no idea about the psychology of blogging, so thinking of bloggers as terrorist comes naturally.

I'm more worried about mischief makers planting false leads in the blogosphere, and using that to bring down the heat on people, than I am about my privacy being invaded. Incompetence is more dangerous than malice.

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