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5
All that "chatter"? Turns out everyone was just discussing plans to get together for Eid al-Fitr. Seriously, it's like the British in 1780 saying "We appear to be intercepting a significant amount of correspondence suggesting that an event of some importance may occur during the third week of November."
(yes, I know the actual date of American Thanksgiving wasn't fixed until the mid-19th century. Humor me.)
Yeah, I was wondering about the Embassies re-opening during Eid. Are they really super-seriously open, or just "as usual" open, which in Abu Dhabi during Eid means for emergencies only.
Also, TGIE because I am fed up with the sanctimonious Facebook posts of my non-Muslim expat friends talking about fasting for Ramadan.
4
Speaking of imperialism and Anglo-American hypocrisy, during this whole NSA affair I keep going back to Orwell, namely his essays Notes on Nationalism and Politics and the English Language.
On Politics and the English Language I keep asking myself: What does "terrorist" mean? What is "chatter"? What does "national security" mean in any objective or measurable way? Wouldn't it behoove us to come to terms with a fixed meaning of these terms? Orwell says:
This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised (ed. note "terrorism"), the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse.
Or more succinctly:
What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around (ed note: X is terrorism because it causes terror, yet the government amplifies X, and is thus propagating "terror"). In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them.
Over the past 12 years since 9/11, the words have chosen the meaning, the meaning hasn't chosen the words. The totality of violence of this world would reduce 10x if we retired the word "terrorism" from our collective vocabulary. This would force us to explain violence instead of reducing it to a cartoon charter, and this would, by extension, make us question the cause and scale of our enemy.
From Notes on Nationalism I keep thinking of the passage:
All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side. The Liberal News Chronicle published, as an example of shocking barbarity, photographs of Russians hanged by the Germans, and then a year or two later published with warm approval almost exactly similar photographs of Germans hanged by the Russians.
Pretty much sums up today's liberals - they care about oppression and authoritarianism overseas but seem to scramble for apology when it's local abuses. I do think, on the whole, we'd all be better off if we targeted our moral outrage inward and projected less on others.
These times definitely call for more Orwell, but not in the cliche 1984 sense, rather we should examine his more targeted and - I would argue - more deeply prophetic political essays.
great comment, I wanted to say something but you said it all.
10
"The United States will reopen 18 of the 19 American embassies and consulates it closed on Sunday due to an impromptu and thinly-disguised charade of attempting to show the American public that the NSA is actually a really great and honest guy who can totally help you out once you get to know him, and yeah, terrorists."
3
Stop being such a wacko conspiracy theorist. Everyone knows only Republicans manipulate the instruments of power for cynical and short-term political gain.
4
No one is buying the bull.
4
I think what you mean to say is
1
18? Snowden was wrong, this whole terror threat-induced surveillance isn't unconstitutional, it's barely legal.
