Mintball wrote:
Good post.
To add, though: I think it helps to create a paranoid climate – not just in terms of 'security' and its supposed needs, but also in terms of the sort of comments about us having to accept that privacy is dead.
It seems quite extraordinary how many people are so easily lulled into the belief that (to whatever degree it is happening) widescale surveillance is acceptable: 'if you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear' etc.
I bet the same people still:
• think that the kind of surveillance operated (for example) by the Stasi in the DDR was wrong;
• wonder how people in the DDR (and other countries) could be lulled into accepting and going along with such levels of state surveillance.
Yep, along with the vilification of immigrants and Islam from certain groups and media outlets. As you say, the same kind of people who vehemently oppose, or say they do, the secret power of the state as evidenced by the Stasi etc. The same kind of people who will be strongly in favour of the death penalty. The same kind of people who would demand monitoring of people who look at any kind of pornography or anything "obscene" in case they might be paedophiles.
Ironically they're generally the first to defend Britain as a bastion of freedom and tolerance, yet that British culture is being destroyed by allowing the freedom of foreigners to enter the country and the tolerance to allow them to practise their own religion or culture.
Hypocritical idiots, I generally call them. Or Daily Mail readers for short.
