Update:
I watched the mass media take a page from Noam Chomsky in their hand picking of the usual expert suspects who were either former intelligence experts or politicos in a herd instinct to wrap themselves up in the flag, and of course the President who had a hand picked media outlet to provide a well rehearsed and studied ambivalence on the subject when it came to our pockets being surreptitiously picked.... There is no Edward R Murrow to make the case as he did with McCarthy to say enough of this paranoia as a fulcrum is enough.
The President citing balancing threats and freedom with secrecy,in perfect doublespeak as his own best apologist wanly defended his secretive mandate utilizing future unnamed threats in their blanket of garden variety intentionally covert deception that defies the illusions of ....individual liberty as a given... This was done without anyone even indirectly mentioning the more trenchant future threat of domestic intelligence and the dangerous precedent it is setting by secret courts weighing evidence which we have no legal access to. Who is the defense team? We are not "allowed" to know.
We will have brighter teeth and smell like a rose and live to be 120..and that's the point of freedom... isn't it?
“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”
― George Orwell, 1984
"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka
The last two posts concerned the melding of A Clockwork Orange and Fahrenheit 451, now Orwell can join the conversation along with Bradbury and Burgess...You are in the care (whether you endorse it or not) seemingly benevolent Big Brother who has your best interests at heart, keeping the wolf of Chaos from the door. As Gregory Bateson observed, "The concept of control is a pathology"
A case of lopsided transparency. We see you and you cannot see us. As simple as that and as clear as a one way mirror. Or, is it a house of mirrors? It as if we had accidentally arose from a torpor and found ourselves on stage, and wandering behind what appears to be our living room, and are dumbfounded to find stage hands rigging the lighting, technicians adjusting the sound, actors practicing their lines..all in the service of a sociological scrim. A scam by a self legislated mafioso in a protection racket with taxation.
Throughout most of modern history, revolutionaries carried guns, now perhaps they blow virtual whistles.
I remember a review of Marshall McLuhan.s first book, and the critic said it was if he were witnessing someone furiously knocking on a sleeping neighbors front door at 3am, attempting to tell them that their house was on fire.
.Bradbury's flat screen televisions that beckon the voyeur to one's own life participating in a cafeteria style menu of fantasies, over a thousand channels in high definition beckon the dangerous proclivities of idle minds that seek solace in a metaphysical WalMart in a corporatism of the mind.. within a hive.
He took a long drag on his cigarette, and mumbled to no one in particular, "It's the illusion of freedom..You are free as long as it fulfills our illusions and your own illusions are your own concern as long as we can pick your pocket."
Indeed.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/nsa-prism-verizon-surveillance/
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