I love these kids, and I am certain they're sincere. Unlike most of my own generally worthless generation, enough of them give a shit not to cancel them out like us generation x-ers have done to ourselves, in our pathetic, jaded narcissism.
But enough about people I used to hang out with in college (not you, Chris!)...
Polls show that most Americans are taking the reactionary route with online activism--groups like LulzSec and Wikileaks. They don't get that--like it or not--there aren't going to be too many secrets in the future among the powerful. Scoundrels of every stripe are running scared right now and doing the predictable overreacting, going so far as to pass laws that enact police state policies. These are the dumbest reactions imaginable since it's not going to work, technology is Pandora's Box, you can't close it.
That's what bullies do. The problem they face is that people are beginning to tire of their bullshit, their lies, and their secrecy (really an excuse to hide criminal activity a good portion of the time) at everyone's expense.
Now, people are beginning to push back, and that scares the crap out of the people with the power, the people who have been abusing it since day one. This is coming to a real watershed moment where people are going to get hurt, but that's how human history works, it never ends, and eventually there will be no sidelines to park one's ass on, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, no rationalizations that are going to float anymore.
LulzSec have now hacked the main computers of the Arizona State Police in order to derail that state's obviously racist and unconstitutional anti-immigrant laws that will allow racial profiling. Arizona already has a bad reputation with race going back to its earliest settlement after the Mexican-American War and the law is political pandering and strategy by the Republican Party since most Hispanics (and blacks) don't vote for them historically.
Add to that a moronic segment of the population of the state that has played into their hands and pushed their agenda.
Businesses that employ "illegales" also stand to keep benefiting from a continuation of the status quo (with some ramping-up for show) where they can continue to blackmail illegal immigrants into working for even lower wages for what can only be described as the conditions of peonage. But really, the racist cops also get to take out their bad childhoods on Mexicans, they get a blank-check to profile and target them for legal harassment, no probable cause necessary.
So, today, and I really mean it, a little "fuck you" to Arizona law enforcement who have the same fixation they do in Maricopa County with brown people:
She has become Ligeia, every simultaneously living and dead character straight out of Poe's short stories. The press disagrees all over the place: She's alive, she's dead, she's in critical condition--no, no, wait, she's dead, really, we mean it this time, really.
Welcome to the (mis)information age. One story has it that she's alive one moment, the next, that she is dead. No one needs to be told to jump to conclusions when the press has already done it for them in this era of instant gratification.
Nothing is true, everything is permitted--under copyright law. Welcome to the 19th century, it's back, and everyone's an expert on anything you can name, regardless of whether they have any credentials or not.
Breaking News: Gabrielle Giffords is undead, undead, undead, undead...
http://news.google.com/news/story?hl=en&q=Arizona+congresswoman+dead&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ncl=dyWPwW5FGhNgspMMUxFOa5u4-U5_M&ei=vMkoTZ6OOISq8AahufT8AQ&sa=X&oi=news_result&ct=more-results&resnum=1&ved=0CBkQqgIwAA
