the term anarchist is frequently applied to many free thinkers to discredit them..and it usually works…

the stereotypical image of the “anarchist” throwing the bomb at the grand stand..of course buster keaton catches it (hysterical movie)..but the audience recognised what the bomber was..ignatz, the “anarchist” mouse from krazy kat (fantastic animation) always throwing bricks…this is the creation of iconography and it gets into the cultural memory, even if the transmitters have been forgotten, and bounces around like an armour piercing round.

my middle eastern friends are struggling with no less..it just lurks in shadows and under the breath.

I am in total agreement with your premise.

Murphy also said Walter + Murphy is uncommon
Murphy implied his bags went missing because he was on the list – my conclusion: he suffers from apophenia Is it possible the lumpen bag checker was messing with Murphy’s mind?

He is a conservative – he doesn’t like government intervention, but spying under the present circumstances is Ok, but then he doesn’t like the secrecy such that he gets caught up in it.

The obvious problem is to know whether an anarchist will be peaceful, in their rejection of government. If anyone is against spying, please put up a program that will prevent the ‘intelligence’ services from getting caught with their pants down again. (file ‘intelligence’ services under: Dark Star, Grateful Dead, jumbo shrimp)

This was a show about nothing – saved by the fact the producers found a balance of opinions that made it worthwhile.

The debt bomb – GL to those that think leaving the country will save you – when the US economy goes down, the US will take the rest of the world with it.

Like Hurley, I also enjoyed Chris’s comments about the kid in the background.

Joshua Hendrickson — I loved what you wrote, all of it, but especially about authority. I agree with you completely.

Elizabeth Kushigian — I’m sorry you had to go through this. Your comment was the one that really made my heart pound. It made me wish I could afford to leave the country. All the best.

Arrest isn’t enough, you want to impeach the child too?

Show concept: Someone said something to someone in line.

Karen DeYoung told us that the people checking your bags are clueless.

The logical extension of this story is that we need watchers watching the watchers – what a waste of a life for those people, good luck!

If the gov wants to put a chip under my skin voluntarily so they can know where I am – I will be the first to sign up.

Here’s why:
A detective in the neighboring town wanted to arrest me for a crime committed at a time I wasn’t in that town, at a place I have never been.

If I had that chip, I would never have been contacted by the idiot detective.

Btw, I didn’t have to meet that detective because, fortunately, I have the best attorney in the world and he told the detective to go screw himself.

lol

If, on the other hand, Murphy and others have been added to the watch list because they disagree publicly with the Bushist party line, we’re talking about harrassment.

In either case, the solution is to establish a second list of individuals who, though they may share a name with one of the people on the watch list, are NOT themselves on the watch list. Those who are victims of that “piece of bad luck” would have an out, and those who are victims of harrassment would have a legal handle to demand redress. Their inability to get on the “OK List” could be challenged in court, even if it has to be a FISA-like court.

An entire hour about nothing !

Actually Billionaires for Bush is a bunch of street performers who stay in exaggerated character, wear exaggerated clothing and carry exaggerated props as they meet and greet the public. The domestic spooks have already spent a tremendous amount of money chasing a troupe of clowns.

Sutter, I ask you:

WHAT HAS CHANGED ????

Bobo, I agree with all but your penultimate sentence. I don’t consider THE TRIAL to be an “extreme” example any more than I consider 1984 or WE (the great Russian dystopia by Zamyatin that influenced Orwell) to be extreme. They are all more than satires: they describe with great precision the mentalities of the modern state. Modern bureaucracy is LITERALLY meaningless; modern (and historical) authority is LITERALLY interested solely in exercising power for the sake of power.

Your point about “willing participants” is well-made and I certainly agree with it. But don’t forget about how the vast majority of Oceania’s inhabitants were fully willing participants in Big Brother’s society. The presence of dissidents–all led by the nose by the inner party themselves–was and is necessary to provide the emotional outlet in their (and our) society.

We are all criminals, we only haven’t been caught yet?

Sounds dangerously close to the concept of original sin to me… but there are many meanings to be gleaned from it, so I believe it has great value. Well said!

I’ll put it this way, as bluntly as I can:

If a fundamentalist fanatic with a suicidal bent tries to board an airplane while carrying a gun, a bomb, a knife, a box-cutter or anything else that could be seriously construed as a weapon, I say search them and stop them. But if a fundamentalist fanatic with a suicidal bent tries to board an airplane whilst carrying on their person nothing more deadly than a copy of their imaginary god’s speeches, I say let them on and I hope they enjoy their flight.

The real danger here is not necessarily that dissenters are being punished through an unregulated system of ‘justice’. The danger is that such a system exists. In a secret system of ‘justice’, one can never know what they will be punished for. There is no way for anyone to obey the law, because we don’t know what the law is. We are all becoming participants in Kafka’s Trial. All that we can hope to do to ward off government attention is to hire an advocate and devote our entire lives to being ‘good citizens’. Obviously The Trial is an extreme example, but the principal is the same. When Justice becomes arbitrary, everyone becomes a defendant.

What scares me more than the silencing of dissent is the random duplication of names. If people are being selected because they have the same name as someone on the list, it means that even if they agree with the government, they are still suspect. This is not reflective of an authoritarian movement (as the simple act of silencing dissent would indicate), rather it shows a move towards totalitarianism. We should not use the metaphor of ‘Big Brother’, rather we should use the metaphor of ‘The Trial’. After decades in power, Big Brother still had to exert control over the people. In The Trial there was no ministry of propaganda, no clever sayings (‘War is Peace’), no reconditioning. None of it was needed because everyone was a willing participant. This is what I see in the new justice system which the Bush administration is establishing.

But how can one fight totalitarian trends? If your name is on the list because of your political views, there’s nothing you can do about it. If your name is on the list by mistake, there’s nothing you can do about it. If you’re an actual terrorist, there’s nothing you can do about it. We participate because we have no choice. We want to fly, and they can decide whether or not that happens. So we bow our heads and move through the check-points, and those who are on the list are just as guilty as those who walk by without asking questions. We are all criminals, we just haven’t been caught yet.

I don’t mean to pick on him in particular. If he gets the nomination I will certainly vote for him in 2008, and I suspect he would be a better than average president. And yet….

Neither Obama nor any of the other Dems in the running are openly questioning the Global War on Terror. The GWOT is a hobgoblin accepted by all seekers of power, precisely because it promises a greater hold on power to the one who holds the reins. I don’t believe that any of the Dems (much less the Reps) have any sincere questions about the GWOT’s legitimacy. If they did, they probably wouldn’t have gotten as far as they have in the first place.

So yes, I’ll vote for Obama or Clinton or Edwards … but I’ll not stop questioning them, or dissenting from their continuing worship of GWOT.

I fully expect that if, say, Barack Obama becomes our next president, even a fairly liberal Democrat like him will be more than happy to continue the watchlist, the cordoning-off of dissenting voices at speeches/rallies into “free speech zones”, and other weapons against the voice of dissent. It’s not that I think Obama is a particularly underhanded or corrupt politician–it’s just that ANY seeker of power is inherently authoritarian by nature, and unlikely to refuse authoritarian tactics when those are made available to him.

Authoritarian means of government are the biggest, baddest dinosaurs left on the planet (only the totalitarian ones are worse, and the difference between the two is just a few pounds of flesh and sharper teeth); the real struggle of the coming century, aside from the one against ecological disaster, is to rid ourselves of our sheeplike love of authority, whether in government or religion or interpersonal affairs.

Mind you, I am not a mere libertarian or anarchist: I am in favor of the state pooling resources in the interests of equitable distribution of wealth and means; that’s what I think the state is for. I don’t think the state, or some imaginary divinity, should be creating laws to administrate our behavior. Those old ways of ordering society have outlived their usefulness, if they can be said to have ever been useful at all for anything except stratifying classes of human beings into the powerful and the powerless.