I suppose it’s only logical – in that twisted, perverse way unique to the state – that if the president can now detain citizens indefinitely without trial for suspected terrorist activities committed on U. S. soil, the government would be able to arrest them for merely talking about suspected drug activities abroad:
The House Judiciary Committee passed a bill yesterday that would make it a federal crime for U.S. residents to discuss or plan activities on foreign soil that, if carried out in the U.S., would violate the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) — even if the planned activities are legal in the countries where they’re carried out.
(At this point it should shock no one that the sponsor of this bill is Lamar Smith, the Republican senator from Texas who also backed the free-speech-crushing Stop Online Piracy Act.) So that means if you casually mention to someone that you can’t wait to go to Amsterdam to try some hash – which is completely legal there – you might find yourself detained by DEA agents even before you’ve left the country. It would also conceivably apply to any publications, including blogs, which discuss future drug activity, or even advice about drugs aimed at overseas audiences (such as growing marijuana).
So now the country’s lawmakers are reduced to enacting thought-crime legislation, in the state’s futile attempts to prevent anyone from ever getting high. The only thing that surprises me is that they haven’t named it Whitney’s Law. Because nothing drums up popular support for terrible, unlibertarian laws like naming them after dead people.
Pretty much everyone knows–or should know–that many, and maybe most, of the points made by most politicians are of little value, amounting to little more than equine feces at best. A commercial I saw the other day illustrated that the same is true of TV commercials. (Yes, I realize that’s no discovery. But still…) The advertisement I saw featured a clean-cut young man making a pitch to “buy American-made gasoline at Kwik Fill” because doing so “strengthens our economy.” Do people believe that type of thing? The short answer is: Yes. How do I know? Because presidents–and presidential candidates–have been saying pretty much the same thing for close to 4 decades, beginning with Nixon and continuing right up through Obama.
I’m really happy with this way this article turned out. It is published at Crisis. The editor John Zmirak had initially sent me a piece by the legendary historian Christopher Dawson and asked me to respond. I generally avoid this sort of debate so I didn’t bother to look at the piece for probably ten days or so. In fact, I didn’t really accept the challenge.
Then I read the piece. It was quite incredible. Dawson sweeps his scholarly hand over vast continents and epochs and makes wild claims entirely abstracted from the real experience of humanity. Nowhere does he show the slightest interest in the plight of the common man and his quality of life. He is happy to declare the middle ages to be this wonderful time of faith and order and then proceeds to blast away all of the last several hundred years as hopelessly corrupted by materialism. His target is what he calls the bourgeoisie, and here he admits that his thinking is in line with Karl Marx. But there is a difference. Whereas the Marxists posited a hopeless conflict between capital and labor, his model posits a conflict between real faith and material provision. The two are irreconcilable.
The real danger of the Dawson piece is its erudition in big things and its deep disengagement with the small things that make life good, like clean clothes, medical care, running water, job opportunities, access to food to feed the children, and the like. He cares nothing for these things. He is content to simply praise the past for its Michelangos and Berninis and condemn the present for its Lady Gagas and Justin Beibers. It’s really a cheap trick and an obvious one: pick the best of the past and the worst of the present and you can paint a picture of relentless decline.
My response points to the dramatic change that took hold of the world in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a change that created what we call the middle class today. It gave life to hundreds of millions of people. Without the bourgeoisie and the capitalist marketplace they sustain, the world could not support seven billion. Surely a high-minded cultural historian like Dawson should care about things like this? Surely!
I noted previously a brilliant music video, “Death of ACTA,” by Dan Bull. (More on ACTA, which has unfortunately now been signed by several countries.) Now he’s back with a new one, in a very creative attempt to fight the evil Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA. As Mike Masnick notes in this Techdirt post (see below),
Perhaps even more interesting, however, is how the song and video came together. After deciding he wanted to write a song about SOPA, he reached out to his followers on Twitter, asking for “help with themes and lyrics.” After getting a bunch of ideas, and realizing he should do something different for the video, he went on Facebook and asked for volunteers to take photos of themselves holding up signs with the various lyrics… and tons and tons of people jumped at the chance. The whole video was put together over the last few hours, and the whole effort is pretty impressive.
Incidentally, Leo Laporte, host of TWiT, and Denise Howell, host of TWiT’s This Week in Law, in recent episodes have been heroic in opposing SOPA. In the most recent TWiT show, Laporte makes a strong argument in favor of Internet freedom and against limiting it in the name of copyright, in contradistinction to Nilay Patel, who takes a more mainstream and confused “balancing” approach. And in a recent episode of TWiL, where most of the commentators and guests tend to be anti-SOPA, lawyer Marty Schwimmer was invited on to defend the need for SOPA or something like it; Howell admirably dissents.
We’ve written about UK singer Dan Bull a bunch of times, highlighting his various songs that often cover copyright issues. His latest is an anti-SOPA song and video, called SOPA Cabana (take a wild guess what that’s a reference to). Check out the video here first, and read on below about the video and why it’s interesting (beyond the music/lyrics):
First of all, what strikes me as most interesting about this is that Dan’s not in the US, but the UK. But he recognizes how this law being debated in the US can have a significant and dangerous impact around the world. In talking about his reasons for doing a song about SOPA, Dan noted that “SOPA is abhorrent on three fronts:”
Firstly, it threatens the future of the internet, which is something far more valuable both commercially and socially than the entertainment industry ever has been, or ever will be.
Secondly, creativity is all about interpreting and re-imagining what you see and hear around you. The idea that creativity exists in some kind of vacuum, and that you’re not a real artist unless you can make something “completely original” is not only stupid, it contradicts the most fundamental axioms of how the universe works. Everything is influenced by something else. If we want a richer cultural landscape, we should embrace remixes, embrace mashups, and embrace sharing, not cling to ideas as pieces of property.
Thirdly, the internet is an amazing new forum for free speech and holding those in power us to account. The idea that governments and even private corporations can police the internet and decide what people on a global scale are allowed to say and hear is tyrannical.
Perhaps even more interesting, however, is how the song and video came together. After deciding he wanted to write a song about SOPA, he reached out to his followers on Twitter, asking for “help with themes and lyrics.” After getting a bunch of ideas, and realizing he should do something different for the video, he went on Facebook and asked for volunteers to take photos of themselves holding up signs with the various lyrics… and tons and tons of people jumped at the chance. The whole video was put together over the last few hours, and the whole effort is pretty impressive.
Dan Bull is a musician. The entertainment industry and the lobbyists supporting SOPA insist that they’re doing this to protect people like Dan Bull — but Dan is quite reasonably scared of what this law will do to his ability to succeed online. Dan Bull is as well known as he is because of the internet, and his ability to share his works wherever and however he likes. SOPA would make that a lot more difficult. It doesn’t “protect” Dan Bull. It helps destroy the careers of folks like Dan Bull by limiting their ability to create, promote, distribute and communicate.
J. Edgar, the new film directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, is making the news for dealing frankly with the decades old rumors concerning Hoover’s private life. But that’s not what makes the film immensely valuable. Its finest contributions are its portrait of the psycho-pathologies of the powerful and its chronicle of the step-by-step rise of the American police state from the interwar years through the first Nixon term.
The current generation might imagine that the egregious overreaching of the state in the name of security is something new, perhaps beginning after 9/11. The film shows that the roots stretch back to 1919, with Hoover’s position at the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation under attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer. Here we see the onset of the preconditions that made possible the American leviathan.
Palmer had been personally targeted in a series of bomb attacks launched by communist-anarchists who were pursuing vendettas for the government’s treatment of political dissidents during the first world war. These bombings unleashed the first great “red scare” in American history and furnished the pretext for a gigantic increase in federal power in the name of providing security. In a nationwide sweep, more than 60,000 people were targeted, 10,000 arrested, 3,500 were detained, and 556 people were deported. The Washington Post editorial page approved: “There is no time to waste on hairsplitting over infringement of liberties.”
Here we have the model for how the government grows. The government stirs up some extremists, who then respond, thereby providing the excuse the government needs for more gaining more power over everyone’s lives. The people in power use the language of security but what’s really going on here is all about the power, prestige, and ultimate safety of the governing elite, who rightly assume that they are ones in the cross hairs. Meanwhile, in the culture of fear that grips the country – fear of both public and private violence – official organs of opinion feel compelled to go along, while most everyone else remains quiet and lets it all happen.
The remarkable thing about the life of Hoover is his longevity in power at every step of the way. With every new frenzy, every shift in the political wind, every new high profile case, he was able to use the events of the day to successfully argue for eliminating the traditional limits on federal police power. One by one the limitations fell, allowing him to build his empire of spying, intimidation, and violence, regardless of who happened to be the president at the time.
(At this point it should shock no one that the sponsor of this bill is Lamar Smith, the Republican senator from Texas who also backed the free-speech-crushing Stop Online Piracy Act.) So that means if you casually mention to someone that you can’t wait to go to Amsterdam to try some hash – which is completely legal there – you might find yourself detained by DEA agents even before you’ve left the country. It would also conceivably apply to any publications, including blogs, which discuss future drug activity, or even advice about drugs aimed at overseas audiences (such as growing marijuana).
I’m really happy with this way 