Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[palsch]

Huh, I see...  but doesn't it still open the gov't to being able to use propaganda in the future?  Or is the legislation only opening this one thing up?

There are definitely explicit bans on Department of Defence propaganda in the USA (which doesn't cover military recruitment), but I don't think there ever were any blocks on State Department propaganda. The old act only covered BBG broadcasts anyway (technically the new one expands to all State Department departments).

The BBG could very well be used for propaganda, but that's very much a debate about the role and utility of the group themselves. Everything I've read from insiders argues they are more useful to the USA as a diplomatic tool if they aren't seen as a propaganda tool. That is, simply keeping an open and respected voice broadcasting globally is more valuable than having a raw propaganda counterweight to other nations' efforts.

I am actually okay with the BBG transmitting in the USA. It would be like PBS except it would be all news and political stuff so nobody would watch it. Either that or it eventually morphs into our very own version of the BBC. Which would be awesome.

Actually the VoA site has a fair amount of cultural stuff. They are meant to represent America to some degree... Their music section actually looks pretty interesting, especially if you like jazz.

[Another]

The way I heard this it was spun like for many decades Voice of America was forbidden to listen to in the USSR by USSR laws and in the USA by USA laws. It seems logical that common Americans should be able to listen to what their country is presenting as their voice if they wanted to. Of course during the Cold War some international propaganda lies could be uncomfortable to repeat in front of domestic audience.

[misko27]

Back onto the congressional secrecy debate, An interesting note is that far too many things in the government are actually currently classified, obscenely so, to the point where there are open secrets in the public that can't be mentioned in Congress. You know, if everything is a secret, then nothing is. For example, for a very long time the government wasn't allowed to say that Anwar Al-Awlaki (Whom, I might add, brings me great joy when pronouncing his name) was killed by a drone strike, despite this being common knowledge.


The Paranoia I mentioned, it applies to everyone.

[GlyphGryph]

"I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot."
http://boingboing.net/2013/08/08/lavabit-email-service-snowden.html#more-248396

This is just... ridiculous. It's incredibly insane.

[Moghjubar]

Saw that. You can donate to Lavabit's defense fund here: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=7BCR4A5W9PNN4

They are gonna need it.  At this point, I don't even think its going to help much though, the water is already starting to scald the frog.

[Max White]

So while I appreciate that I am most likely sliding down the slope towards paranoid lunatic... You really are terrifying me here USA. I mean seriously, the people calling the shots are dismissing objections out of hand as coming from hopeless virgins? It was gone from actual cover up into the realm of cartoon villainy. I really feel offset by how all this is going, especially in regard to public reaction.

Your government has outright declared they don't give a fuck about what you think and will hide information from you because doing what ever they want is more important than letting you make an informed choice. How are there not riots right now? How is it that Obama and others who knew about this shit still are in power? Why are people so complacent to let this fly?

It isn't even the mass surveillance, it is the fact that people are rushing to throw away their rights in the name of 'fighting terror'.

[MonkeyHead]

Paranioia is a powerful motivator that is easy to feed.

[SalmonGod]

How are there not riots right now? How is it that Obama and others who knew about this shit still are in power? Why are people so complacent to let this fly?

These have been my thoughts for several years.  I have four answers.

1.  The political system is very well balanced to keep the population divided and fighting among themselves, which prevents any movement from gathering enough momentum to be a true threat.  I think the culture war is our biggest obstacle.

2.  Someone has to get the ball rolling.  Someone has to make themselves vulnerable in order to gather people together to do something.  That person has to accept that in all likelihood they will be making themselves a martyr.  Few people want to do this without confidence that their sacrifices will amount to something, and our cultural issues here give plenty of reasons to doubt. 

Furthermore, the combination of surveillance and media makes it really easy for the powers that be to subvert the efforts of anyone who tries anything.  I'll just quote an earlier post of mine from another thread to elaborate on that point...

The battlefield is information, not guns. People are discredited, villified, and then locked away or killed after it's certain that not enough of the population will care about them to matter. There will be no obvious moment when a line is crossed and everyone knows it's time to spring into action. There will be a moment when you look back and see a vast but scattered array over years of people shut down by legal attacks launched over-zealously on the basis of petty technicalities, where the disproportionate application of the law (expanded to make any person alive eligible for identification as a criminal as soon as the overwhelming surveillance state recognizes them as an active dissident) was for the handful of people paying serious attention quite obviously motivated by challenges to legitimacy and ideology, and you will realize that no real conflict could ever possibly hope to begin under these circumstances.

3.  Everyone is so damn busy.  The average working American has very little free time to actually do anything meaningful outside of work, and most work environments are emotionally draining to the point that when you get home you don't want to do anything with your couple hours of free time but vegetate.  People like me face terrible choices.  I can continue to focus on supporting my family so that we can survive the present, even though my doing so guarantees the future will be a horrible place.  Or I can abandon the present to start building a better future, but then who knows if my family will even survive to see that future?

4.  You saw what happened to Occupy.

[Frumple]

Yeah... what exactly would rioting accomplish? We've already got fairly large protests, we've got plenty of signalers coming from the population they're not happy with things. Larger protests with added violence would do... what? Damage some infrastructure that would do jack shit to the people causing the problem and likely massively inconvenience folks who are just trying to get by? It'd get plenty of people thrown in jail where they wouldn't be heard from for years (or ever), it'd cause superficial infrastructure damage to infrastructure the corrupted parts of the system basically have no interaction with. Maybe it'd have a modicum of political effect, but... the kinds of pressure rioting puts out is pressure we're kinda' already exerting, just without (as much of) the useless (and possibly counterproductive) waste of resources and lives.

It's... hard to see how violence would improve the situation. Kick Obama out (and how the hell are we going to do that to begin with?) and... then what? Who goes back into his place? How do you stop the situation from going right back to where the hell it was?

What exactly is throwing a tantrum going to accomplish? Yeah, we're pissed. Yeah, most of us are pissed. Yes, the people in power are aware of this. Undirected violence isn't likely to accomplish much, if anything, besides put a drain on people and things that might actually be directed toward beneficial change.

As for complacency... it seems to me it's less complacency than it is lack of options, and lack of a means for the wider population to determine what the right path forward is. Confusion and a dash of impotency. Quite fortunately, most people aren't yet willing and/or stupid enough to just lash out, but the lack of other means of influence does seem to have led to a sort of decision paralysis. S'a lot of people just kinda' going, "What the hell do we do?" and holding off on doing anything until they figure that one out. And, of course, for many (most) people, "What the hell do we do" has that rider, "And how am I going to feed my family while doing it", which massively complicates things.

[Max White]

I'm not hoping for destruction. Riots aren't what I desire, or even think would be productive, yet they are what I would expect.

Turkey had national outcry that was sparked with only the destruction of a park, but it bought people out of their shell about what was happening to them on a wider scale. It seems part of the human condition that people will take action, even messy, ill founded action when you tread on their necks, yet everything seems so quiet. Nobody even seems to acknowledge there is actually a lot of outrage beyond 'communists, pedophile and virgins' apparently. It really does seem contrary to human nature that people are so willing to stay inside the guidelines given the situation.

[MonkeyHead]

I'm not hoping for destruction. Riots aren't what I desire, or even think would be productive, yet they are what I would expect.

Turkey had national outcry that was sparked with only the destruction of a park, but it bought people out of their shell about what was happening to them on a wider scale. It seems part of the human condition that people will take action, even messy, ill founded action when you tread on their necks, yet everything seems so quiet. Nobody even seems to acknowledge there is actually a lot of outrage beyond 'communists, pedophile and virgins' apparently. It really does seem contrary to human nature that people are so willing to stay inside the guidelines given the situation.

Democracy is mob rule. All you need is the right spark to set the masses off. That spark differs from one nation/culture to another.

[GlyphGryph]

Your government has outright declared they don't give a fuck about what you think and will hide information from you because doing what ever they want is more important than letting you make an informed choice. How are there not riots right now? How is it that Obama and others who knew about this shit still are in power? Why are people so complacent to let this fly?

It doesn't help what happens to protestors in the US - government plants are pretty much a staple figure, as we've discovered time and again. They often get in quite deep (there have been cases of them marrying and having children with important people in movement to better keep a tab on protest events), and they do what they can to discredit the movement from the inside (agent provocateurs are a pretty common thing, who initiate violence against random people or police to give the police an excuse to shut the whole thing down) while making sure the police are in the right place to stop things from getting to big by feeding them a constant stream of information.

Meanwhile, the government is quite good at pointing the finger and getting people to look at something else. As long as they can keep a tight lid on the protest movement and prevent it from building up much momentum, it's easy to keep the populace at large focused on threats from the outside (TERR'SM!) and threats from the "opposing" party (Libtards! Tea baggers!).

This has been helped by the arrival of "Free Speech Zones" - out of the way places where protestors can get that protesting out of the system but where the State doesn't have to worry about them getting anybody's attention or interrupting thing.

It's all pretty insidious.

(Also, whoever said they couldn't see the officials using the word "nefarious plot", guess what the quote in my local newspaper contained yesterday... yep, a reference to a "nefarious plot"!)

Democracy is mob rule. All you need is the right spark to set the masses off. That spark differs from one nation/culture to another.

Like building a fire, you need far more than a spark. It's not even the final piece. You need an environment on the verge of going up, and then you need some external force to fan the flames and make it grow.

[Max White]

Wait... The US government actually plants people within protest groups like that?


.
..
...
Fuck it, I'm stocking up on tin foil. Those crazies were right about everything else at this point, might as well remove my tooth fillings.

[SalmonGod]

Wait... The US government actually plants people within protest groups like that?

I'm surprised you didn't know... it's pretty much common knowledge among anyone who pays any attention to activism ever.  It's not even something especially unique to the U.S. or a modern development.

Serious activist groups even write manuals and teach workshops on recognizing and dealing with agent provocateurs.  They're responsible for violent behavior from protest groups... I don't know if I'd say a majority, but a significant portion of the time.  I believe I've seen leaked law enforcement manuals on the subject, too.

[GlyphGryph]

While I don't know for sure at the moment I'm pretty sure the police do that down in Oz too.