Recently it was revealed that the government was collecting phone data from Verizon customers. Obviously this has caused many people to be up in arms about their civil liberties being violated by Obama personally going through their iPhones. People are angry at this blatant invasion of privacy that has been going on for at least the last seven years via the patriot act. You can bet money that people are going to be telling you to calm down. Some might even call this the biggest overreach in the history of American government that this particular president has the nerve to do something like continue a scaled down version of what the last guy was doing. Of course these same people tend to look the other way when it comes to every website collecting and selling their personal info to shady,foreign businesses and ad agencies. They'll look the other way on the actual physical following,profiling,stalking and harassment of many different minority groups. They don't mind the fact that there's probably an FBI agent in front of every mosque with a listening device in the middle of a residential neighborhood. Of course all of this pales in comparison to the government vaguely getting the numbers of people who felt like it was a good idea to pay Verizon over $100 a month just so they can look cool with an iPhone. I actually sat down and thought about why people were outraged about iPhone users being tracked but not so much about things like racial profiling, the house of representatives trying to deport children of undocumented immigrants and stop and frisk. The answer hit me right before I started typing this. I found out that you can't exactly get the iPhone 5 on discount cell carriers like Virgin Mobile or MetroPCS but you can on Verizon. What I mean by this is that iPhone users are generally more affluent and therefore much better Americans than those lazy blacks,disgusting Mexicans and shady Arabs. This follows the same pattern that I have seen my entire life. We can look at the TSA and their random searches as an example. People were totally fine with them searching mostly Middle Eastern looking people and other assorted minorities. It became a problem once they started searching the wrong kind of people. This pattern repeats itself over and over on every issue of civil liberties and supposed disrespect of those liberties. Maybe one day (white)Americans will get as upset about racial profiling and their black neighbors being beaten in the streets or their Latino neighbors constantly having their citizenship questioned as they are about not being able to get high on playgrounds without the government going through their iPhone.
On an even more personal level as someone who has been followed around stores,stopped by cops while simply walking down the street and falsely accused of crimes for fitting a vague description of being black on a Thursday, I have 0 problem with the government knowing that some woman out there has a picture of my package. I just hope that they enjoy the picture as much as I enjoyed sending it. I put a lot of effort into getting the picture just right. Also, I'd take that over always being followed every time I go across 8mile or too far up Woodward. Racial profiling,our broken education system and our unwillingness to find real solutions and Nancy Grace having an orgasm about a murder trial on live TV are things to be mad about. This NSA thing is irrelevant bullshit.
Thursday, June 6, 2013
Faux outrage
2 comments:
I agree completely. The perception of things is much more paid attention to than the substance.
The injustice in this country will drive this society to rebel. What form that takes, no one knows.
Thanks for this.
Mark
Perception is reality. No one really needs to know the facts,just how bad does it look in a soundbite.
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