The Nooz: They're WATCHING you!@

The pearls and the panties of the mid-scream press and the progressive blogosphere have been twisted into absolute KNOTS over the news that Prez. LowBar authorized the NSA to surveille USer electronic communications. Which he did, in re-authorizing a policy that had been in place since 2005. There was some other guy president then, we called him the Chimperor.

The metastacization of the Security state has been steady and inevitable for more than a decade, now. In Woody'z aho, the effect, finally, of the terror acts of 9/11 has been to " legitemize" the official viewpoint that every citizen--every person--is a suspect for SOMETHING. 

Prez LowBar is no more guilty of encouraging or acting upon this epistemic tendency than has been any other President since the mid-19th Century. 

I'm no defender of Prez LowBar, but all he's doing is showing that he's no different than anyone else in that position. He's doing what he's told. The only difference I see is chromatic. It only bothers you now when there's a BLACK guy frontin' the mob? Really?

Modern states, like those in US, Russia and, Europe, hadx ALL instituted national, internal intelligence and surveillance bureaus in the 1880s. It was necessitated by the "discovery" of the "Masses" by sociologists like Weber and Durkheim. 

The "Mass" (of people-qua-undifferentiated-social-factota) was the unexpected, and potentially rogue side-effect of the Industrial Revolution. The "masses" weren't like the "peasants" or the "vassals." There were more of them, more concentrated.The sociologists and their paymasters recognized immediately what a threat the Masses posed to established authority, and so everyone immediately directed their efforts towards discovering ways to regulate the Masses without appearing to do so. This has been the constant telos of the "human sciences" for the last 200 years. Foucault called it the "carceral state."

We do it with media--the whole, vast panoply of human ideation, imagination, and creativity, condensed into 6 Boardrooms. We welcome our jailers gladly; we're happy to see O'Reilly/Stewart every night before we retire...

They've taken it only but also JUST as far as they technologically are able, as has EVERY previous regime since the end of the Civil War.

That's one of the reasons people talk skeptically about technology, yaknow? It always already contains the seed of its own frustration.

Who ever expected that the state would NOT take all available measures to protect itself, even from within? That's just naive.

The State functions within a discourse which is mostly immune to personal appeal, anyway.
Each of us is one-three-hundred-seven-MILLIONTH of the State's problems.
1/307,000,000.

You don't have to worry much about what people think, if you can pretty well regulate what they think about, and the frames they use. 

Look, a Benghazi tornado@!