Friday links: Not trying to scare you edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links, Uncategorized 6 Comments
I'm not trying to scare you, but Joe the Plumber is still pretty famous.

I’m not trying to scare you, but Joe the Plumber is still pretty famous.

I’m not trying to scare you, but it’s worse than people know. Put together all of the problems you can think of: that, by definition, is the realm of the known, and how things are is worse than all of that put together. I’m not trying to scare you, but the sum total of all the bad things in the world, plus your imagine, almost certainly underestimates how bad things really are due to the limiting factor of awareness. Right now, people you don’t even know about are doing bad things in secret. I’m not trying to scare you, but however scared you might be at this moment is almost certainly insufficiently scared, although we just don’t know. Today is Friday, and every shadow teems with grues. Won’t you stumble around in the dark with me?

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Friday links! Bounds of realism edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 0 Comment
Trevor Goodchild confronts some dilemma or another in the "Thanatophobia" episode of Aeon Flux.

Trevor Goodchild confronts some dilemma or another in the “Thanatophobia” episode of Aeon Flux.

This country used to be well written, but I worry that we’ve jumped the shark. The soft-authoritarian security state plotline was interesting when we started it in the early part of the millennium, but it was the characters that made it. I liked watching everyone struggle with their new identities, whether they were willing to sacrifice freedom for security, and the hating/becoming hipsters B plot was fun. Lately, though, I feel like we’ve transgressed the bounds of psychological realism. “America” is becoming another sci-fi melodrama, with the principal characters veering off into behavior that just isn’t believable. Today is Friday, and what started as national character has become caricature. Won’t you turn a critical eye with me?

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NSA to stop spying on foreign leaders, continue spying on you

By Dan Brooks in Fascism 5 Comments
German Chancellor Angela Merkel describes the ideal bratwurst.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel describes the ideal bratwurst.

The New York Times reports that President Obama plans to ban NSA spying on heads of allied governments, because the Germans are upset. For those of you who do not surveil all electronic communications, the US government was embarrassed last week by revelations that the NSA had monitored the phone calls of 35 world leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The President totally didn’t know about it, though. Or at least he said he didn’t, which makes a lot of sense.

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Friday links! Will of the people edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 3 Comments
Problem solved.

Problem solved!

As Winston Churchill once remarked, democracy is the second-worst system of government, after security-state corporatocracy. The problem with the will of the people is that people are dumb. They’re especially dumb compared to your average NSA cryptographer, Fortune 500 CEO, US senator or anyone else who might reach a position to decide whether the governed should govern much themselves. But democracy never had a chance like this before. For the first time in human history, we can know the opinions of ordinary people from all over the world almost instantaneously. Today is Friday, and the will of the people is better known to us than ever. Won’t you marvel at its inanity with me?

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Police body cameras in Rialto reduce use of force by 60%

By Dan Brooks in War on Terror 2 Comments
A fun dog

A fun police dog

According to the Times, the police department of Rialto, California randomly required half of its patrol officers to wear body cameras each week of last year. During that period, officers used force 25 times, as opposed to 61 times during the previous year. Officers wearing cameras accounted for only eight uses of force. Knowing someone is (or will be) watching appears to make interactions between police and civilians less violent. I don’t want to draw any unfounded conclusions, but it’s possible that public scrutiny encourages law enforcement to adhere to its own rules. In unrelated news, a secret federal ruling from 2011 rebuked the NSA for repeatedly misrepresenting its domestic surveillance operations to the FISA courts.

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