Micah White at The Guardian writes of the growing danger of ecofascism or environmental authoritarianism. Some environmentalists, like James Lovelock and Pentti Linkola, want to put democracy on hold and/or return humanity world-wide to a primitive state of existence in order to combat global warming. Ironically, his proposal to fend off this growing danger is itself an example of the very thing he fears, though perhaps his proposal is motivated not entirely by environmental concerns but also by an independent dislike of consumerism.
White’s solution is to end the culture of rampant consumerism in the West. How does he propose to do this? Ah, now there’s the rub.
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From CNET via Boing Boing, we find out something which should be shocking to no libertarian: the federal government lied about not keeping images from the body scanners installed in airports.
For the last few years, federal agencies have defended body scanning by insisting that all images will be discarded as soon as they’re viewed. The Transportation Security Administration claimed last summer, for instance, that “scanned images cannot be stored or recorded.”
Now it turns out that some police agencies are storing the controversial images after all. The U.S. Marshals Service admitted this week that it had surreptitiously saved tens of thousands of images recorded with a millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of a single Florida courthouse.
And to think that some people actually trust the government enough to despise Wikileaks and even support the death penalty for people who reveal state secrets. When you are dealing with a known liar, trusting the word of a complete stranger is probably preferable. And the state has the same relationship to truth that a prostitute does to chastity. Both will tell you whatever you want to hear, but only an idiot would take them at face value.
