badgenome said:
Well, it was rather hard to tell whether you were talking about overheated rhetoric or paranoia. To be honest, it's often hard for me to suss out exactly what you're talking about. But either way, both were on full display during the Bush years. If it's so unnerving to you that people suspect there are communists in the government (which there may or may not be, now that Van Jones and Anita Dunn are gone), were you equally unnerved when so many on the left constantly insinuated that the Bush administration was comprised of Israel-firsters who would declare war on the entire Middle East for Greater Israel or some such nonsense? Maybe it's just the examples you use, but your concern only seems to flow in one direction. Sharron Angle said the exact opposite of that, actually: that she hoped we weren't coming to the point where second amendment remedies would be necessary. You can interpret that as her suggesting that they are, in fact, necessary if you're so inclined - and you are, of course - but she said what she said. Keeping in mind the fact that the FRC was formed to regulate radio frequencies and how the FCC went far beyond that original mandate to become a content-regulating body, I don't think it's so out there to assume the same can happen with the internet. Or that the temptation will be there, at least; regulatory creep is inevitable from regulatory creeps. Even a net neutrality supporter should find it worrisome that the FCC ignored the courts' repeated warnings that the internet is none of their business and decided to push ahead with this on a 3-2 vote strictly along party lines. It's like the Department of Agriculture deciding that you really need to mow your lawn and forcing you to do so. |
In what I wrote, I was looking at, first, that there are people out there whose paranoia of the government is such that it looks like it is increasingly detached from reality. There are reasons to be concerned about things, but it looks liek a detachment. Beyond this, it looks like it is becoming increasingly trendy to pander to this. What happened last administration was that people who had "9/11 was an inside job" weren't pandered to by the media, or politicians. But now, we get everything else as pandered? And this is a thrust of what I am talking about. You have a political candidate saying that, if the current congress continues to do what what it has been, people will look for second amendment remedies? In short, they are going to get their guns, stage a revolution, and start mowing down officials in the government? These are Angle's own words. In the minds of people I speak to, Net Neutrality becomes the equivalent of the government rounding up people without arresy warrants and shipping them off to secret prisions. And Net Neutrality also gets fused with the stupid law that congress passed to give the president of the United States a "kill-switch" on the Internet to combat China. At a Tea Partty meeting I attended, both were blurred together as the same thing.
Anyhow, here is a clip that contains Angle's own words:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CU9GXil9Vm8
