Just another trouble.net.au blogs weblog
…because it has to be said.
Preferably over and over again.
Security through obscurity is hiding your life-savings under a small rock in your front yard.
The Internet means that your front yard is permanently full of curious people.
…and they all know you stole those savings in the first place.
Everyone is laughing at you.
Reflecting this morning on the war in Iraq and the recent hanging of Saddam Hussein, it strikes me that Bastard Dictators From Hell seem to show up most often in situations where there are plenty of pre-existing tensions, i.e. racial hatred, extremes of poverty and wealth, massive corruption or organized crime so vast and entrenched that it rivals the government in sheer size.
It struck me that this might be a simple extension of the idea put forward in Fahrenheit 911, namely that ever-present fear is a great way of making otherwise rational people elect (and re-elect) conservative assholes, warmongers, and fascists; i.e, whoever most convincingly beats their chest and screams like a silverback.
If your surrounds are filled with the actual threat of imminent war, and people really are doing their best to kill you, burn your homes, rape your daughters and take your land, this kind of stunt is going to be much easier to pull.
I don’t know enough about the background and rise to power of (for example) Saddam Hussein to really make a cogent wrap of this: Did he gain power, even in part, because he made a convincing claim to be able to Keep The Peace(tm)?
Or, as is entirely possible, have I just been over-reading the shiny V for Vendetta comics that E got me for Christmas? 
As a general rule, I don’t stress about the disconnect between my vaguely communist ideals and my highly corporate-drone job, in an IT outsourcing firm of all places. I do my best to contribute according to my ability, whether compelled by work or not, and when what I receive is more than genuinely accords to my needs, I try to turn it to the cause of being more self-sufficient, or to tuck a bit of it away in some kind of regular charity donation.
On this particular occasion (two weeks prior to date of posting), however, I found myself feeling a bit uncomfortable again, feeling: this is grossly inappropriate, surely no-one really Needs this?
Where was I?
I was sitting in the ‘Promenade’ cafe under Veritas with the (all male) training group, with whom I was in the process of studying up on Veritas Storage Foundation at the behest of my employer, eating a needlessly large hot paid-for lunch, looking out through the floor-to-ceiling glass walls at the passing StKilda road traffic of expensive cars and expensive suits… and listening to the piped music: Money, Money, Money (a very angry and unhappy song by ABBA standards).
The training, in hindsight, was useful. The lunches were a nice freebie. I need to emphasize how grateful I am to my employer for these things, but still I am uneasy.
I’m a university-educated white caucasian male, living in the first world, with a job and a car and a nice IT job that pays far more than it would in any other industry. What justifies my existence, in a world where half the population lives on less than $2USD per day?
Right now, this is not a question to which I have an acceptable answer.
One of my more regular reads, more reliable in fact than any newspaper, radio or TV show, is BoingBoing. If this were my only source of news, odd opinions on world politics would come with the territory. Since I do absorb data from a few other places, it came as an enormous surprise to me to read another article about some poor schmuck being arrested for having a sense of humour, and to find that it was not news! Why? Because everything I have heard and seen about the USA in the past seven years has lead me to expect that America will eventually turn into Alan Moore’s Britain.
Now, when I hear that the American government is openly admitting that it maintains massive detention-without-trial facilities all over the world for the purpose of torturing anyone it damn well pleases, I nod in faint disgust, but somehow I am completely unsurprised.
Thus it is that I am forced to admit: I started thinking of the USA as a fascist police state some time ago. Not just in the paranoid trend-conscious sense, either. At some point in the past seven years, the vague bemused feeling that followed me to California when I travelled for work; that feeling that maybe I should have farewelled my loved ones, that I should be careful who I talked to in the USA, and what I talked about, has gone from being a joke to being a basic fact, something I take for granted.
I am no seer, no more able than the next person to forsee what is actually coming, so I won’t try. I am scared though: I see nothing to stop this juggernaut, and it is bigger than the puny little country I live in.
At least, I console myself, we don’t have any significant amount of oil.
Uranium, on the other hand… 
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