Ignoring Our Will.

(1) Electronic Harassment. Disreputable businesses insist on pushing popup ads at unwilling visitors to their websites. Popup-blocking programs try but fail to block some of these ads. In the struggle or in the execution of code to evade popup-blockers, our computers are frozen and useless to us until the popup trumphs, 30 seconds, 50 seconds later. There's no way we should put up with that. Legislators should regard willful freezing of people's machines and the imposition of unwanted advertising upon them as seizure of people's machines (multiply every 40-second seizure by millions a day, and you're talking about a lot of time stolen by advertisers) and make it a crime punishable by a fine to be imposed for every single occurrence, and by imprisonment of the executives and programmers who work to evade popup-blockers.
+
I have had it with this crap. So when it happened today when I tried to read an article that the New York Post's emailed newsletter mentioned, I went to unsubscribe from that newsletter. At the unsubscribe screen, there is an optional fill-in box as to reason for unsubscribing. I typed:

You insist on inflicting popups on us. The popup blocker and your popup program fite, and freeze my machine for 30 seconds and more each time. I won't put up with it. If nypost.com insists on popups, I insist on avoiding nypost.com.

And then I clicked on "Unsubscribe". But I got an error message that that order did not go thru. 'The webmaster has been notified.' A lot of good that does me. I'll try later. But surely there is a provision in existing law that when a business is told to stop sending unwanted email and they continue to send it anyway, they are guilty of an offense. Government needs to punish nypost.com, which does not have the right to refuse to unsubscribe people and pretend it is a computer problem. The New York Post is part of Rupert Murdoch's publishing empire, which just paid $5 BILLION for The Wall Street Journal . Surely it can pay to fix the unsubscribe feature at nypost.com. Or it can pay fines to Government to lower our taxes a tiny bit.
+
(2) Democrats Go Over to the Dark Side. President Bush this week signed into law the so-called "Protect America Act of 2007", which authorizes Government to spy on Americans without warrants. The Democrats approved that legislation! Supposed "liberals" like Dianne Feinstein voted for it! The American people voted Democrats into the majority to save us from a lawless White House, but the Democrats turned around and enlisted in Bush's campaign to exterminate civil liberties in the name of "security"!
+
No one does what the people want them to do anymore. Voting doesn't matter, because neither of the present major parties will obey the people. What do we do about that? Is it possible for existing tiny splinter groups, like the Expansionist Party, Green Party, Libertarians, and Socialist Labor Party, to create a viable third party dedicated to protecting the people from Government but instead using the power of Government to eradicate poverty, ignorance, and curable disease everywhere on this benited planet? Or are the programs of minor parties too different for them to form even an ad-hoc alliance to destroy the primacy of Tweedledum and Tweedledummer? Is the only viable third party likely to be the one created by multibillionaire NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who will hire the people necessary to create a third party because he can't inspire them to work for free? If a multibillionaire is the only realistic hope of a third party, of what conceivable use to the people would such a third party be? Will we then have Tweedledum, Tweedledummer, and Tweedledummest?
+
If third parties, perpetually starved of funding and volunteers, cannot achieve anything in the mass society in a time when mass media dominate public discourse, what chance is there to get the political process and government to do what the people want done?
+
If we cannot build, can we at least destroy?
+
That is the thought process many people must be going thru. Building an alternative is prohibitively expensive and difficult. But destroying is a lot cheaper, faster, and ultimately more cost-effective. If, for instance, a lone gunman were to shoot Dianne Feinstein dead for betraying her constituency and turning against civil liberties, would the replacement that California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger appoints until a special election can be held, dare to take the same stance against civil liberties that got Feinstein killed?
+
If, again, a lone gunman, wearing body armor and armed to the teeth with automatic weapons, invaded the U.S. Capitol Building and machine-gunned 160 Republican Representatives or 40 Republican and 15 Democratic Senators, wouldn't that achieve enormous change instantly? Even if they didn't all die (but we can hope they would, assuming it was the right — sorry: Right — 15 Dems), there would inevitably be massive change in the attitudes of Congress after the resulting turnover. The media would finally talk about the rage building in this country as scores of millions of Americans are crushed into hopelessness by debt and the unwillingness of Congress or the Presidency to do anything the people want them to do. Improved "security" would not be the only response.
+
Building is hard. Destroying is easy. Building takes a long time. Destroying can occur in seconds. And sometimes you cannot build until you first destroy. Thus the explosive demolitions (misnamed "implosions") of old buildings in dense city centers to make space for new buildings.
+
If we cannot get term limits and we cannot get public financing of campaigns — oh, we'd also need a gunman to kill every member of the Supreme Court — but must continue to permit the rich to buy Congress and the White House, maybe we can achieve thru violence what we cannot achieve by voting. A few gunmen in key lobbyists' offices, for instance, could also work wonders. How about a lone gunman killing everybody in the offices of the NRA, making sure to shoot first lest the staff is armed, and making sure they are all dead before leaving for the next lobbyist, say, the tobacco lobby or oil lobby or anti-public-financing lobby or ISRAEL LOBBY. Simultaneous assaults on all those offices and Congress, the White House, and Supreme Court could achieve massive change in a single bloody day, with minimal loss of life.
+
This is "extremist" thinking, to be sure. But what is "moderate" thinking? "Moderates" have given us a war in Iraq in which thousands of Iraqis die every single month. "Moderates" have given us the best Government money can buy, and elections that cost billions of dollars but produce no change. "Moderates" see 410,000 Americans a year die from tobacco and 30,000 die from guns but do nothing to outlaw those killers. "Moderates" have consented to have huge swaths of our cities turned into violent hellholes too dangerous to be out in at nite.
+
"Moderates" run on campaigns to get us out of Iraq and undo the assault on civil liberties being carried out by the present Administration, but then fund the Iraq war and approve even more sweeping assaults upon civil liberties.
+
What if the deaths that occur every day in Baghdad occurred instead in Washington? What if instead of innocent Iraqi men, women, and children going to the market to buy food for dinner, or waiting in line for gasoline or a job, it were the President and Vice President of the United States, a few hundred Congressmen and Senators, nine "Justices", and a few hundred lobbyists who died in the next four weeks? Same death toll. Much different result.
+
Ah, but that's pie-in-the-sky "extremist" thinking. We Americans are moderates. Permitting mass slauter in Iraq, and from tobacco, guns, and drugs at home is moderation, much more sensible. We mustn't think about violence as the solution to our problems at home. We must pretend we're opposed to violence, even as, each day, 4 Americans and 60 Iraqis die because our invasion — fully funded by the Democrats — continues, and dozens of young Americans are slautered on the streets in drug-related violence at home. To think that the same number of deaths, of the right people, could end the deaths of the wrong people is madness. Or is it?
+
(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,683. In addition, media announced yesterday that the death toll for American contractors working in Iraq passed a thousand, to 1,001. So the death toll of Americans in Iraq is now a bedrock minimum of 4,684 — for Israel. That's what "moderation" gets you.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:33 PM