[Weirdad]

For discussion.

Stay alert!

[Mr. Mojo]

As long as they [Americans] are free to shop in department stores and have traffic in the streets (with automobiles burning oil stolen from dying Iraqi children),

LOL....what a loon.

[A Vast RightWing Conspirator]

Talking about 'total info awareness', does anyone know how I could find ALL the posts I made at FR?

[TomServo]

Already discussed here.

[dirtboy]

This was posted earlier and thoroughly dissected. But I'll tear apart this paragraph again for good measure:

Under the U.S. Homeland Security Act (our rights again given away freely by a bipartisan Congress), 22 U.S. agencies are combined in order to achieve "total information awareness" on every American citizen.

The Homeland Security Act mentioned NOTHING about TIA, and in many ways was a net positive for liberty, since it killed off TIPS, denied funding for a national ID card and created a privacy officer to ensure the new department complies with federal privacy laws. Which leads us to the next claim:

The government will soon be amassing a file on every American that includes every magazine subscription, credit card purchase, Web site visit, medical record, library record, bank deposit or withdrawals, every airline purchase, as well as judicial, divorce records, and so on. This will be recorded in a central data base, not by a publicly accountable authority, but by the Pentagon, which already operates in total secrecy from the American public.

No, it will not. First of all, TIA is just exploring the concept at the moment, and probably will not like what they find - to be implemented as envisioned by Poindexter, it would require EVERY business re-do their transaction processing systems and then send the data to TIA. Fat chance. Second, there would need to be significant changes in federal and state laws to allow collection of this data. And third, there is already significant bipartisan opposition to TIA, and it will probably either be killed or curtailed.

Rants just aren't as colorful when inconvenient facts are included...

[dighton]

The astonishing thing about this "land of the free" is that most Americans now have no effective rights and do not care.

For example, there's no First Amendment. The daring Professor Martin just got dragged off to Dachau, or will be at any moment.

Right?

[buffyt]

I thought college professors wanted a bigger government.

[beckett]

Martin is the president of of International Philosophers for Peace and an active member of the World Constitution and Parliament Society, both far leftwing organizations.

Martin is quoted on the Radford University website making the following statement:

"...What I know is that we have to do what’s right – not because we’re going to get something for it, but simply because it’s right. We have immense problems to deal with, but rapid transformations of human consciousness have happened in the past, and it’s very possible that we’re in the midst of one of those transformations now."

"Human beings are complex creatures, and within that complexity we have higher capabilities such as love, kindness and generosity, and lower functions such as anger, hatred and greed. There’s no reason why we can’t create a civilization based on those higher ones. A better world is possible."

In response to the Professor's position, a pardigmatic example of the what Steven Pinker calls the "Blank Slate - Noble Savage" school of thought which dominastes leftwing po-mo thinking in academic circles, I sent him the following email a few days ago, after I first read the above column:

Dear Prof. Martin,

I was very interested to learn in the informational essay posted on Radford's website about you that you believe humanity may be moving to a higher consciousness and that it is our duty to help that "transformation" succeed. You said that "we have higher capabilities such as love, kindness and generosity, and lower functions such as anger, hatred and greed."

In Darwinian terms, the division you make between higher and lower is very interesting in itself, and could make for lengthy exploration, but for the sake of our discussion here, let's say anger, hatred and greed are "lower" than love, kindness and generosity in human consciousness.

And now let us briefly explore the method necessary to "transform" humanity from the lower realm to the higher. How do we expunge hatred, anger and greed? Things start to get a little dicey here, because quite clearly no automated "expunge" program exists. So one must assume that you mean to lead by example on this problem, and by example show us what a consciousness free of hatred, anger and greed looks like.

Anger, of course, is a multifaceted beast, originally developed by evolution to provide protection from threat. Today it takes all sorts of forms, one of the most common of which among intellectuals is righteous indignation. Have you succeeded, dear, gentle Professor, in freeing yourself from righteous anger and indignation?

Well, let's see. If you make an obviously false comparison between Nazi Germany and the United States, and if you make the obviously false statement that the "victim state" of Afghanistan is a "living nightmare of human rights violations," clearly you have not yet expunged righteous anger from your consciousness, and in fact will use falsehoods to ratchet it up to another level and spread the anger around to others.

So even a consciousness like yours, one which is on the threshold of a breakthrough "transformation" in human consciousness, hits little bumps in the road now and again. Hmmm...this transformation of humanity thing is going to be a little tougher than we thought, eh, Professor?

Sincerely, etc.

[L.N. Smithee]

IN NAZI Germany at this time of year, people freely shopped in large department stores for gifts for family and friends. The streets were full of traffic. It was "business as usual" for most of the citizens. While in the colonial states conquered by the Nazis, and in the concentrations camps for Jews, gays and communists, life was a living nightmare of dehumanization and human-rights violations.

Don't forget the part about "The Final Solution," "the master race," and the wanton slaughter of those in the camps, Mr. Accuracy.

While in our most recent victim states of Afghanistan, Iraq under murderous sanctions, Argentina after engineering its economic collapse, and Colombia under U.S. military aid for repression, life is a living nightmare of dehumanization and human-rights violations.

Yeah, right. Afghanistan, Argentina, Colombia and Iraq are U.S. "colonial states." Afghanistan was an ideal democracy with a flowing economy before the USA went over there and bombed it for fun, Argentina doesn't experience a regular cycle of collapsing economies and governments, Colombian officials were always in control of heavily-armed cartels, and Saddam Hussein really wants to feed his precious babies, but he can't build palaces, jail and/or execute political opponents, and supply milk for the moppets, can he?

Someone alert David Horowitz. Another moron who thinks that the letters after his name entitle him to re-write history.

[ohioman]

Where in the hell is the barf alert? Thank God that this nutbag's opinion represents about .00008% of the population. Unfortunately, that equals to about 95% of all college professors.

[joesnuffy]

GLEN T. MARTIN is professor of philosophy and religious studies at Radford University.

I think I saw this colleges info-mercial the other night on late tv This guy has a terminal degree in colonosophy....he is well studied and spends much time on his subject

[the gillman@blacklagoon.com]

Victim states?

I see only one case where the US appeared to intentionally make a victim out of a non belligerent state. Serbia.

One reason out of a thousand why the Klinton administration should all be rope testers.