That’s basically my point, but the context where that’s made is that the state pretty ill at this point in time. So where does that leave us? As doing something wrong obviously. We’re not there to maintain the state. Well you are, I think you’re an extremely good citizen doing a lot of people rational services. But - well yes. We are the state.
We are the state but most of us are disavowing the state. When parts of the body begin to disavow the body, that’s bad for the body and it can’t maintain the other parts anymore.
I fundamentally agree with this. But what do you do in the case of a nation that isn’t a community, and is encouraged to have completely different sets of values? We’re approaching a point where our relationship to State authorities is purely financial.
The problem here is that as a conservative, the value of a transparent state (along with every other political value) isn’t pure. It’s nice to have a transparent state, but it’s also nice to have an effective intelligence/counter intelligence/law enforcement mechanism, and one conflicts with the other. This issue, and issues like it, are an example of those two values being in conflict, and by definition there’s not going to be a simple or objective answer. A person can SAY “I don’t give a shit about security, so the answer is this,” or “I don’t give a shit about privacy, so the answer is that,” but both of those people are just being foolish ideologues.
That’s sort of been my point here, or at least the idea motivating my points, in these discussions- if you deny the US Gov’t the ability to spy on citizens’ telecommunications, you are most likely denying them access to what is going to be THE single most important sort of intelligence, which every rival agency is going to be using against us.
Yes, it is an Absurd Law but absurdity is relative.
Most state laws are absurd.
The real problem with the secret data collection is very rarely discussed: blackmail and defamation.
The data is collected to secretly coerce anybody and everybody.
The state is an illusion.
The reality is that secret thugs can control (politicians, judges, you and me) through their ability to blackmail, to destroy reputations by falsefying the World Wide Web and to disappear people.
Our achilles heel is technology: every single mobile device whether it is on or off is sending our individual geographic position on Earth and time to the data centers. Every where you have been and will be in the future are documented and discoverable in real time.