So the latest right-wing meme is, "there's no difference between what the Murdochs did and what Wikileaks did."
Uhm, excuse me? First, let's look at what the Morlocks did. They hacked into the voice mail of a child kidnapping victim so that they could create a more sensationalist story to use to scare people into accepting tyranny in order to "keep the children safe". They also hacked into the personal phones of the Royal Family, attempted to hack the phones of 9/11 victims, and otherwise hacked into the phones of ordinary people. Furthermore, all this was being done for profit. Profiting from the tragedies of others is what jackals, hyenas, and vultures do -- and you'll note that none of those critters have good PR.
Meanwhile, whoever leaked those cables to Wikileaks leaked information that already belonged to We The People, that was being kept from us by people who had no right to keep that information from us. Those cables were between government officials who were supposedly representing We The People. Furthermore, whoever divulged these cables did so not for profit, but because he believed that We The People deserved to know what our government was actually doing, as vs. what it said it was doing. Divulging information that we already own as a public service is a quite different thing entirely from invading the privacy of ordinary people for profit.
Why do right wingers continually bring up these false equivalencies? It's as if you're talking about cars, and suddenly they say "it's not true that a Jeep is the best offroad vehicle, because a burro will go places that a Jeep won't go." Uhm, yeah. But we were talking about cars, not critters. Just as, with the Morlock stuff, we're talking about spying on ordinary people, not about divulging information already owned by We The People. Apples. Bicycles. Just sayin'.
-- Badtux the Equivalencies Penguin
The four cornerstones of the conservative brain are ignorance*, prejudice*, magical thinking and, generally stated: negation of reality.
ReplyDeleteI used to think of the latter as simply false choice. What you have demonstrated here is false equivalence.
But conservatism relies heavily on all manner of falsehood, from cheery-picking to distortion and misrepresentation to just making shit up.
It's all the have. Knowledge, clear thinking, rational data analysis and factual presentation are not on their side.
* I am not making this up. I comes from the first few pages (as deep as I could ever get) of THE CONSERVATIVE MIND by Russell Kirk - and he takes pride in it.
WASF (I was going to stop saying this, but things just keep getting worse),
JzB
"Excuse me" well no shit. Thanks for explaining that penguin. Now if only the stupids were forced to read it.
ReplyDeleteIf penguins are carnivores, does that mean they are raptors too?
ReplyDeleteWhen the reich-wingers say shit like that, it doesn't reveal as much about reality as it does about the tightywhityrightys' mindset. THEY think spying on the phones of murdered children is the same as leaking info about government murder squads. Or they can be easily persuaded that those two are equivalent, because they will swallow anything in service of their ideology. Faith trumps reality. My only consolation is that when the Collapse comes, reality will reassert itself with a vengeance, and people who don't operate in the real world will be more likely to be crushed. Many days, my best motivation for living is the hope that I will be around long enough to see the people I despise fall before me.
ReplyDeleteI saw a Rethug pundit spewing something like this:
ReplyDelete"What's the big deal about hacking? This place got hacked, that place got hacked... and now News of the World..."
Equating committing the crime to being an innocent victim. Nice.
I can't imagine the actual reality of all these thousands of people who show up at work every single day and say to each other, "How are we going to lie and cheat today? How will we hide the horrible crimes of our betters, so they keep paying us? What innocents can we slime and destroy today?"
Years and decades of this as a career... what else can you possibly turn to after a career like that?
Crap! The comment I intended to post here got posted under yesterday's rant because I was laughing so hard when I read it that I forgot where I was. Maybe, if I hit that bowl one more time . . ..
ReplyDeleteThanks for illuminating the difference between an on-going criminal enterprise and one of the last vestiges of a functioning democracy.
ReplyDeleteThere is a reason that "The Fourth Estate" is the only private enterprise referenced in The Constitution--I think I'm correct in stating that--and that is that they were acknowledged by the signers of said document to be necessary as a governor to the anticipated excesses of government, and were expected to bring SUNLIGHT to the legislative process.
With Noosecorpse the expected disinfection is actually a very virulent, worldwide infection.
England is now experiencing the fallout from cowtowing--for personal, political benefit--to an institution they were supposed to be regulating.
Oh, Fuck. I said the "R" word.
In this country the R. Morlock (I like that a lot; I also loved his performance before the Parliament, where he beautifully played the doddering Don: "I don't know, I wasn't there, can I go back to sleep now?" which we are all so familiar with) was not, as a foreign citizen legally entitled to own more than 25% of any media enterprise in this country. Certainly not 100% of the Fox enterprise here (he did not become an American citizen until after said purchase ... making it illegal. And the FCC of the moment complicit in wrongdoing/NO NEW NEWS HERE.)
Ben Bagdikian's "The Media Monopoly" is the beginning of these observations; my 6th edition is outdated, but nonetheless a wake-up call.
When you welcome a surveillance state--because you have allowed them to incur some sense of fear--of the "Other," be it female, brown, black--then you deserve what you get.
The NSA violates the Constitution every second we type, or talk, or breathe; and there is 1 degree of separation between that agency and the kleptocracy that rules this country.