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Paranoia: Have they already won?
Thu, 04 May 2006

The following is for the paranoid post-modern who reads reactionairy web-news too much :)

Some folks I know have abandoned news websites and the daily paper altogether and they're probably happier for it. Myself, I love to sit back on the weekend and catch up with a good dead-tree newspaper. Heck, like everyone else I browse a few news websites every day or two - CBC, Slashdot, CNN etc - but usually come away with heightened blood pressure one way or another. Mostly I'm just relieved that in Canada our government is pretty lazy and so fewer problems erupt here - though I do fret knowing inevitably that any whacky Big Corporation Lobbied bills passing in US usually will gradully occur here. We must be vigilant to prevent the recording industry from making us pay to open our mouths, and to prevent the government from requiring cameras in our doormats. (Do I jest? Considering the FBI spies on vegetarians...)

We're hoping to take a vacation flight later this summer and I worry just a litte bit about the silliness that could happen. Fortunately I have a very common whiteboy name, but really, should we have to or face frustration? This isn't the 'everyone is innocent' and 'everyone is equal' political stance I was raised with. Worrying about eroding privacy and rights is so 1990 .. but .. should we? As that saying goes.. the first time they came for such and such, and the second for that, and when they came for me there was no one left to hear... does taking pictures of everyone as they walk off a plane really help? Finger-printing your grandmother at stopovers - does that catch a terrorist? Heck, folks are routinely told to show up at least three hours prior to boarding so security can do its thing. Three hours!

So much money spent to tighten down the hatches against... against us? ourselves? I guess the paranoid could view this as some Orwellian illusion, and pass it off as more or less harmless and useless. My concern is with the greater problem of national paranoia - the greater the paranoia (lets call it 'fear') the more we will demand protection. More protection = fewer rights as security is always the opposite of privacy and convenience. Ask anyone in a police state :)

While I'm over-thinking and wandering down this reactionairy path of thought, let us ask.. 10 years ago if polled and asked if you'd believe that in these great Free Countries people with funny names or brown skin would get held up an extra couple hours in the airport or crossing the border? Would you have believed Canadians would need birth certificates to get into Buffalo? That there would be cameras on street corners in London England? Did any of these things catch a bad guy or were they all caught before this legislation and expenditure came into play?

This national policy of paranoia is really getting out of control; I'm still annoyed by this whole "Hot Coffee" fiasco that Ms. Clinton brought about in the US because she has no clue and doesn't like videogames; sure, some naughty bad content was in a game, but that content was locked up tight and only available to people breaking the law and pirating/hacking the game anyway. Fine, slap that company and its publisher for being silly but its not a big deal. But tonight I was reading about a respectible company (Besthesda) who have made pretty responsible and cool stuff in the past from flight simulators to role-playing games - and its latest role-playing game being labelled 'Mature' (no children allowed) because it _could_ be altered to have nudity. Because it merely has the possibility. Like a colouring book and a box of crayons could. We're talking about getting the Sears catalogue and glueing boobies over the pictures and thus banning the Sears catalog. Man, I know as a kid I'd be happy about getting my calculus textbooks banned for all the things I wrote in the margins..

Heck, when I was a kid and running my own BBS system, I know I didn't have systems to scan for naughty words and send the matches to the FBI; I didn't have police reading my forums looking for pedophiles, though once in awhile I exposed idiot 14-year olds emails to the world when I was being a snot. Police monitoring chat systems... do we have police listening in coffee-shops yet?

Well, I'll tell you why I wrote all this hubbubary - I was walking by a schoolyard; I do it every day walking to work from where I park my car. Theres always some thousand kids laughing or cheering or wrestling or whathaveyou that kids do, and once in awhile I glance over to look since its cute and makes me smile; the other day I walked by and something caught my eye and I watched for a minute, and the attendant teacher on patrol came and gave me some shit and shooshed me away. God forbid someone look at some kids playing.. they could be ready to steal one of them away I suppose.

Frankly, I don't know why we let people out of the house anymore..

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