Snowden DU Cognitive Dissonance Syndrome

[frazzled]

20. For me the cognitive dissonance is about ...

The past 11 1/2 years. I've been following these issues since the beginning with TIA, when we first learned about metadata and such. Then TIA was scuttled because it was rogue and scary, and the operations were transferred into the intelligence agencies. We knew all that. But the Bush administration refused to accede to much oversight or any warrants altogether. And we knew there were government presences at Google and such. We knew all this. It was pretty disturbing then; and yet the hue and cry here was ten times less than we're getting now.

Then, in 2008, when the Democrats took the House, a lot of changes were made, fairly positive ones. (Read Nancy Pelosi's recently released chart detailing the improvements made by Congress:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/148767817/Chart-On-Surveillance-Oversight-Prepared-By-Nancy-Pelosi-For-Democratic-house-Members

In addition, towards the end of the Bush administration I began to realize that nothing bad had really happened on a large public scale as a result of this spying. We didn't turn into a fascist state where people were being imprisoned for their beliefs. Sure, there were a few bad calls and cases, but I'm talking about the kind of police state activity that would make us feel like we were living in Argentina during the Dirty War, when masses of ordinary citizens were disappeared, and tortured or killed. For their beliefs.

What Snowden has revealed is not new to me and should not be new to anyone who's been paying attention. And that anyone should be surprised or shocked that the United States intelligence agencies ... um, actually spy on other countries. Well, that's just stupid: that's what they do.

The outrage seems more manufactured--a sort of crazy amalgam post-Occupy aspirations, Tea Party "give me liberty" libertarianism (really, DU feels like Rand Paul Underground more than Democratic Underground these days), romantic notions of Tahrir Square, and the whole Anonymous, Wikileaks hacking culture.

And here's what I feel: I'm way more scared of these wholly nontransparent, outside the law hacking outfits and individuals than I am of anything the government is doing here at home. I don't see them as whistleblowers or heroic in any way.

The cognitive dissonance I feel has to do with the "yay Russia and Venezuela, boo America" attitudes I see all over the place here. I mean really, are you freaking kidding me?

Maybe it's all because I remember how enthused with this kind of political romanticism I was when I was younger. I wore a Mao button everywhere on my lapel and thought the Cultural Revolution was swell. Until I met people whose lives had been decimated by that regime and its policies. I felt ashamed at my naivete, and I swore to be much more circumspect and not to led ideological factors sway my responses. No, I'm not one whit more conservative than I was then: I'm just as liberal, but more realistic, more cautious in hewing to romantic ideological trappings.

What saddens me here is that I see so much wrongheaded, mixed up, misinformed grandstanding lately, and so much illiberal thought that thinks itself to be the epitome of liberalism. I'm dumbfounded by it. Fortunately, out in the real world, I'm not seeing any of this romanticism about l'Affaire Snowden at all.