Blog Articles 106–110
Published on Wednesday, July 10, 2013 and tagged with
police and justice.
Even after they realized they had just mistakenly raided the mayor’s house, the officers didn’t apologize to Calvo or Porter. Instead, they told Calvo that they were both “parties of interest” and that they should consider themselves lucky they weren’t arrested. Calvo in particular, they said, was still under suspicion because when armed men blew open his door, killed his dogs, and pointed their guns at him and his-mother-in-law, he hadn’t responded “in a typical manner.
— From an excerpt of Radley Balko’s book Warrior Cop. The county police department’s continued defense of itself and refusal to even apologize is mind-boggling.
Published on Monday, July 8, 2013 and tagged with
riedl.
I open my chat roster and see him. His name, his smile, his year-old status message. The presence indicator, an emblem fixed for days in unaltered yellow. Away. I don’t think XMPP has a code for ‘and unlikely to return’.
I check my day’s agenda and see his shared Google calendar, filled with meetings that will be missed. Parties that will carry on, short an honored guest.
Google Drive shows me a list of documents. Some have his name under ‘Last Modified’. Or ‘Owner’. Unfinished projects that will either languish or be carried on in his absence. In his memory.
Is this what grief, what remembrance, what loss looks like today? Pain, alloyed with memory of joy and fruitful collaboration, delivered via Google? The eighth layer, weeping, prodded and salted by the rest of the stack?
It is easy, in our present age of apparent gridlock and vitriolic talking points passing themselves off as reasoned arguments, to be discouraged about the state of political discourse in our great Republic. To think, perhaps, that there is no common ground in our political disputes, that we are doomed to talk past each other with no mutually-agreeable outcome. That there is nothing of substance about which the leaders or people of the land are in agreement on the best course of action.
In such times, it is important to remember that there is, in fact, wide bipartisan consensus on a number of important issues of our day. Obviously there are a few misguided individuals who obstinately refuse their consent, but the following points see little dissent from either side of the aisle in our present political landscape:
- It is totally fine, if not admirable, to be in a perpetual state of war against a nebulous, undefinable enemy (the ‘Bad Guys’).
- The national surveillance state is a good and necessary development to protect ourselves from aforementioned Bad Guys.
- Drugs are a great evil; to attempt to stop them, it is appropriate that the Land of the Free has the highest incarceration rate in the world.
- We must secure the border from people who wish to pursue gainful employment and thereby contribute to our nation’s industry and economy.
- Gasoline should be inexpensive, and the private automobile sustained as the principle means of transport.
- Our constitution guarantees criminal suspects the right to be informed of the charges against them and brought to a speedy trial, unless the President alleges the suspect to be a Bad Guy. In that case, there is no problem with locking them in jail until the world ends.
- Edward Snowden has betrayed his country and undermined democracy by alerting the people to the secret actions of their government. This has greatly aided the Bad Guys.
Published on Wednesday, June 19, 2013.
That post was written on May 13, 2003. It’s just a few thoughts on games. That’s it. Snowden made over 773 posts to the Ars Technica forums, and the one I shared above has nothing to do with anything, really. That’s how we act on forums, especially before Twitter. They were often a place to scribble a few thoughts, to jot a quick message to whoever was reading. Rarely do we think of anything we saw as being a part of who we are, or a manifesto leading to further actions. It’s a way to scream at the ocean, not to create a blueprint for our future selves.
— Ben Kuchera on our online pasts and chatting about games.
A common refrain in articles attacking Snowden for leaking the NSA documents is that he worked alone and didn’t go up the chain of command.
I beg to disagree. No, he did not go one or two steps up the chain of command. He knew what would happen — he would be red-flagged and stopped. His career would likely be over, with no serious discourse or change to show for it.
He went higher up the chain of command. The problem goes all the way to the President and Congress, so he went over their heads. He went, via the press, to the American people. That is exactly how representative democracy is supposed to work.