lamp-post-form

Incredible. Big brother indeed. However I still find it difficult to balance the needs of security in today's world and that of privacy. Where do we draw the line? And how?
 

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Thanks for your comment, Jacques. Good to hear from you, as always.

This is why it is crucial that we stick to fundamental questions, to focus our energies not on the effects but on the underlying causes, the radical roots. We need more postform thinking. Otherwise, our subsequent actions are likely to be (they already are) far worse than that which we fear and use to justify our own violence and repression, directed abroad but increasingly at home, too, against the citizenry our government officials have sworn to serve.

Why are there individuals who are desperate enough in their suffering to, literally, end their own lives in order to destroy the lives of others whom they see as their oppressor? Why are there individuals who are desperate enough in their greed (suffering) for wealth and power to end not their own lives but to destroy the lives of, literally, countless others (100,000, 200,000, 300,000, ... ) whom they see as mere collateral damage?

US and UK foreign and domestic policies are the primary focal points of my political activism, inquiry and writing, not for nationalistic reasons in that I am an American living in the UK with my British wife and our British-American daughter, but because these nations wreak, and have wreaked throughout their sordid histories, so much death, destruction and suffering the world round.

No serious inquiry into Middle East terrorism, for instance, can ignore that terrorists do not attack us because of our freedoms, but because the US and UK have willfully destroyed and precluded the freedom of so many in the region.

But, in neither the US nor the UK does the media facilitate a full understanding of the situation at hand. No, the American and British publics must remain ignorant as to causes. They must learn to face, to fear, only the effects which must forever remain faceless and vague so as to haunt our darkest depths and empower our worst atrocities for ends not sought for these respective publics, for they would never dream of such ends, but for pathological politicians, their propagandists (the media) and the major corporate shareholders which they both ultimately serve.

If the US and UK governments were serious about the "war on terror" they would act immediately to undermine the causes; yet, instead, they seek to inflame them.

Let us, first, seek to relieve the suffering for which these governments are responsible. They have long failed the peoples of the world and, yes, us at home. Let us tend to the seeds of democracy in our own garden and perhaps we'll achieve it, an historical first. Let other peoples decide for themselves how best to organize their respective societies. Democracy, as many of us knew long ago, cannot be inflicted upon another; it must develop within. But, again, we must stick to the fundamentals, democracy was never meant to be, in Iraq or at home.

All people want happiness. All of us suffer. This is universal.

Let us nurture our natural sense of compassion, for ourselves and for others, and terrorism will cease to be, the problem of how to deal with it will be annulled. While this, I know, sounds idealistic, anything short of this approach, I think, is infinitely more unrealistic. On the other hand, any act of compassion will immediately bear good fruit, we need not await the fulfillment of some far-off future ideal.

Let us act rightly as individuals and organize our own rightful governments, and let us let others do the same.

Sean (iNoodle.com)
 

Let's all be honest to ourselves: Privacy does not exist.
 

Happy New Year, Kenneth ...

While I understand your expressed sentiment and scepticism -- and I agree that our privacy is most certainly under attack from many directions -- I believe your statement is a dangerous one to the extent that we, then, consider the struggle to maintain and build upon our current levels of privacy as lost causes.

I've pulled up your profile and your blog, and look forward to reading more of your writings. You seem an amazingly perceptive and articulate eighteen-year-old university student. I wish you well in all endeavors.

Sean (iNoodle.com)

P.S.

I'm a former Gibson Les Paul owner. After I made the ethical decision to leave behind my career as a management consultant, I was, literally, so short of cash to feed my family that I did that which I had sworn when I bought the guitar in 1986 never to do, and sold my treasured Les Paul Deluxe, the body of which was made of two-tone natural wood (unpainted). I now make do with my acoustic guitar, but which I have grown to treasure equally.
 

I admit that my comment was perhaps too crude as I was in a hurry and didn't have much time to elaborate.

I was mainly referring to the recent uproar in the USA concerning the National Security Agency's wiretap program, this particular case of vehicle surveillance in the UK (and I think I had read somewhere that such a measure is also being considered in the USA), and to a local controversy which was in the headlines a couple of months ago (unfortunately the articles are no longer available in the archives of The Times of Malta site) concerning wiretapping and the storage of telecommunication data.

As Jacques wrote in the first comment, it is very difficult to draw a line between security and privacy. Although I cannot consider myself to be competent in either the legal, political and practical aspects of the subject at hand, I do believe that most of the times the prevention of terrorist attacks is simply a red herring purposely used by governments to carry out their domestic privacy intrusions without much public concerns.

PS. I'm sorry to hear you had to sell off your Les Paul, but there are some priorities in life which are to be observed.
 

"Although I cannot consider myself to be competent in either the legal, political and practical aspects of the subject at hand, I do believe that most of the times the prevention of terrorist attacks is simply a red herring purposely used by governments to carry out their domestic privacy intrusions without much public concerns."

Do not underestimate your competence or your general understanding of the topics you raised. I think you're absolutely right, or as close as one can come in this world of epistemological probabilities. How you have managed to reach this point in your thinking, and in your reasoning and writing skills, in just eighteen years is remarkable.

As I have told many others along the way, my educational process -- both informal and formal -- has been one of peeling off layers of societal deceit rather than adding new knowledge. What I knew at your age, but was perhaps not as able to communicate as well or to draw on as explicitly, turned out to typically be the case. We have much inherent wisdom, if we learn, as it sounds like you have done, to listen to our inner voice. I think of my lifetime process of learning as a sort of peeling off the layers of an onion, little by little getting to the core. Or, like an onion, is there perhaps no core at all? I wonder.

In fact, I have just returned from a cool, misty walk with my wife around our village, and as we were walking and talking about how we are feeling less and less weighed down by what we're traditionally told to feel is of utmost importance (e.g., Christmas, New Year's) the freer we are.

The metaphor I used to describe this feeling to Rebecca, and which I told her I would paint if I could execute the materials, was considering myself to be a person who was once covered in layers of gossamer-like fine threads which felt, collectively, as if they were a sort of woven straightjacket, but which, once you realized you could begin to untie, one by one, the tiny knots which keep each of the threads bound to us, become easier and easier to loosen and begin, at last, to fall off en masse. The painting in my mind would have this androgynous, futuristic looking person, me I suppose, with his chest out and his arms stretched back (like one would see a carving or casting of a beautiful woman atop the bow of an old wooden ship), beginning the process of bursting from the ties that bind us, like a butterfly, perhaps, breaking free of its silk cocoon.

Formal education, the last several years of which have come relatively late in my life, has for me been, again, more a confirmation that the important things in life of which I was already inherently aware turned out, indeed, to be the case and held up extremely well to more formal intellectual inquiry.

In short, don't underestimate yourself and your understanding of the world, not one iota.

Be well, Kenneth ... and you're absolutely right, again, with regard to guitars and their proper place in life.

Sean (iNoodle.com)