This from Mangan just now, regarding the NSA phone-surveillance revelation:
As I’ve said, oh, about a hundred times already, the best way to prevent terrorism is to prevent the terrorists from entering the country. Had the Bombing Borat Brothers not been allowed refugee status, that whole episode would never have happened. Sure, we get a few “domestic” terrorists, like that Palestinian guy in the Army who telegraphed his intentions for years and no one did anything. (Even now they’re not doing anything.)
Of course this way, the government gets the best of both worlds: diversity and domestic surveillance! It’s a win-win for them.
The more immigration we get, the more our domestic freedoms erode. Did you know that the Obama admin is suing a trucking company because they fired two Muslims who refused to carry alcohol?
Right, of course. I would quibble only with this: there’s no reason that immigration per se should exert a corrosive pressure on liberty. It is only the kind of immigration that sharply increases Diversity — i.e., mass importation of poorly assimilating people from cultures that are radically dissimilar to America’s founding, and still ambient, Anglo-European, Judeo-Christian culture — that does this.
21 Comments
At least the Bombing Borat Brothers are Caucasian. You can’t be much more Caucasian than someone from the Caucasus.
Pete! We’ve missed you.
My business has been entering escape velocity, and I have been uncommonly busy. (I would note that I did build that.)
Hence I have had to limit my Internet distractions to a bare minimum. Regrettably, I have to leave it to others to stand up for Truth, Justice, and the American Way.
Not to worry, Pete, I’ve got it covered. Glad to hear that your crops are coming in!
Actually I went to your site after a long hiatus because I was curious to see whether you are aligned with Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, Bernie Sanders, and the New York Times in opposing the NSA’s data mining programs. I didn’t see anything, but if I have some time later today I will scroll down and see if I missed anything.
Generally, I am. (Even stopped clocks are right twice a day). Maybe I’ll get a post up on that.
In brief, the question is: how much power and liberty do we want to cede to the State in order to buy a little safety? Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm. (Nor are they today.) Every power we grant the State has the potential to be abused, and if it can, there is no doubt that it will. (See Lord Acton.)
The simplest way to deal with the threat of Islamic terror (and I consider terrorist violence to be a relatively small part of the general threat that Islam poses to the West) is simply to stop importing so much Islam. Quarantine is far less costly than hospitalization — and as we are seeing, once the disease has taken hold, the cure is a torment of its own.
Not surprisingly, I take the opposite view, which was ably expressed by Tom Friedman yesterday. While there is plenty to fear from government abuse, there is more to fear from Al Qaeda. It is amusing to see those who slammed Obama after his terrorism speech a few weeks ago for having a “pre 9/11 mindset” adopting a pre-9/11 mindset when it comes to actually doing something to prevent terrorism.
The government already knows how much money you make, what kind of cars you have, if you are married or divorced, and whether you have a dog – all for legitimate reasons. Private companies know a lot more (I’m looking at you, Larry and Sergei!). In my view, collecting metadata from call logs and Internet usage is a negligible and incremental incursion on privacy, and (reportedly) has been successful in preventing terror attacks, including one on the New York City subways.
Those who oppose the programs would be the first to criticize the government for failing to “connect the dots” if a second major terror attack occurs on the homeland. Friedman asks what the reaction would be in the aftermath of such an event if the President were to inform Americans that he did not use all of the tools at his disposal which could have prevented it.
I completely understand the arguments against the program and the possibility of sliding down a slippery slope. I cheerfully concede that there is a huge ick factor. However, I would prefer to assume the risk that the data mining is misused or abused to the risk that a preventable tragedy occurs, leading to mass casualties. The fact that the data collection is broad and (apparently) universal is a regrettable necessity to preserve human life. As somebody recently said: if you are going to find a needle in a haystack, you have to start with the haystack.
That’s good, and I can’t deny its truth. I suppose the point I’m making is that it might not be worth destroying the haystack to find the needle; there was a reason that somebody went to all the trouble to stack up that hay in the first place.
I’m not an absolutist about this, but I think I worry more than you do about tyranny. I for one would NOT be among those who you imagine shrieking at the government for failing to prevent a terror attack; what I’m saying is that I realize the risk is there, but a) I fear abuse of power, and b) as I mentioned above, if the West were to get its immune system working again (which it shows heartening signs of doing), it would see that there are other, better ways of ameliorating the risk — ways that deal, at the same time with other, more serious existential threats.
I suppose the common thread in all of your comments over the years is that you have far more trust in the benevolence of government than I do.
As you know, I have complete faith in the benevolence and wisdom of our hard-working public servants.
If you stipulate that these programs prevented Najibullah Zazi from detonating a bomb in the subway, then it becomes very difficult to argue against them. A bomb set off in the Times Square station during rush hour could easily lead to carnage as bad, or worse, than 9/11. To argue against data mining requires placing greater value on the potential risk of government abuse than the lives of thousands of innocents.
Well, returning to your haystack analogy, it’s hard to give wholehearted support to a program that specifically excludes those part of the haystack where needles tend to be found.
Anyway, to cast this as a zero-sum trade-off between Orwellian surveillance and rivers of blood in Times Square is what Mr. Obama is fond of calling a “false choice”. My question would be: what the hell was Najibullah Zazi doing here in the first place?
I am deeply skeptical of this unsourced article, which has been the talk of Breitbart and IBD. It first reports that “high level approval” is required to surveil mosques, yet implicitly assumes that such approval is never granted. This could be nothing more than a bureaucratic box to be checked after numerous reports of harassment of mosques, so that some threshold of probable cause is reached before infiltrating them. Since the details of the data mining operations are classified and just coming to light, positing that they “specifically exclude those part (sic) of the haystack where needles tend to be found” is speculative at best, especially considering the universal nature of these programs. So Verizon, Google, or the NSA filtered out mosques? Really? In asserting that the Boston mosque was ignored before the bombing, the article flatly contradicts the sworn testimony given this week by FBI Director Mueller that the FBI had been to the mosque several months before the marathon. The article is redolent of other reporting which emerges from the fever swamps of right wing extremist websites, ricochets around the echo chamber, is debunked, and then forgotten.
I have always thought that Daniel Ellsberg is a hero, but I believe that Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden should spend the rest of their days in the Big House. I asked myself if there is a contradiction here. I think not, as one can draw a principled distinction between releasing information which is kept secret to avoid embarrassing the government and information whose release is likely to cause tangible harm or (in the case of Wikileaks) deaths.
The flaw in that argument is that it enables Ellsberg. in his sole discretion, to determine that releasing the Pentagon Papers would not cause tangible harm, but I think this is trumped by the benefits of putting a flashlight into areas where the sun don’t shine. It’s a question as interesting and as difficult as whether John Brown was a sinner or a saint.
I’m less skeptical, given things like this and this, and that this is an administration that repurposed NASA — NASA, for God’s sake — to have as its “foremost” mission Muslim outreach.
Yes, the IBD editorial quotes no sources, which doesn’t exactly burnish its credibility. We’ll see where the story goes.
I agree also that there are things that must be done in secret if they are to be done at all, and I do not see Manning and Snowden as heroes. This does not bear on the fact that governments often do things in secret that they arguably should NOT be doing; I’m glad that the sun now shines on the NSA’s telephone and PRISM operations.
Again, and this is what I keep coming back to as cutting the Gordian knot here: if we didn’t have such a blithe attitude toward the importation of Islam into the West, none of this would be necessary. Instead, we must surrender more and more of our privacy and liberty to manage the threat it has created, and it will just keep getting worse.
Yes, that’s exactly right, it does. Abusive governments were responsible for the annihilation of tens of millions of innocents in the last century; meanwhile far more people are killed each year by falls and drowning than by terrorism, or even by war.
Obama had a Hobson’s choice when the news first broke about the IRS “scandal.” He could wait until the facts came out (and be slammed for a “cover-up”) or he could come out swinging (and risk being proven wrong). He did what any politician would do: distance himself from a scandal he had nothing to do with.
Now that we know that the scrutiny of Tea Party groups originated with a self-described conservative Republican – and that political pressure had nothing to do with it – the right wing narrative completely falls apart.
I am sure that Peggy Noonan, Darryl Issa, Dave Camp, and the others who made false and reckless accusations about political vendettas and a White House “enemies list” will set the record straight with celerity, and apologize to the nation for wasting everyone’s time with their uninformed calumny.
We now know that the meme that conservatives were unfairly targeted by the IRS is nonsense, as progressive groups were equally targeted.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/25/us/politics/documents-show-liberals-in-irs-dragnet.html?_r=0
Apparently the reason why the IRS Inspector General’s report focused on the scrutiny of right wing groups is because former car thief Darryl Issa only requested information on IRS reviews of applications from right wing groups, and not all groups. His interest was not in oversight, but in a political witch hunt which led precisely nowhere.
So what was this whole scandal about? And when will those who made false and reckless accusations apologize?
I wouldn’t be a breath holder on that.
As the blind man said, “we shall see“.
Yep, nothing rotten going on at the ol’ IRS. All cleared up. Squeaky clean. Move along, please.
Oh, and: if there was nothing shady going on, why did Lois Lerner stage a planted question in order to deliver a prepared apology, and then plead the Fifth? Asking for a friend.
Oh, and wait! My heavens… look at this! Just in from TIGTA:
Sorry, but it seems that your little victory parade just got rained on. With all due respect, as an old friend: eat crow.
Oh, and meanwhile, there’s this.
I have an idea: let’s shut down the damn IRS, and start over. It is too big, too powerful, and it is tainted and corrupted beyond repair.