And of course all of the action hits this thread on the night when I get slammed at work.
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Originally Posted by Sil_liS
You are from the US so you may not realize this, but according to Wikipedia there are 17 countries with a population of less than 15000 people. How many is a bunch?
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You might not realize this Sil, darling, light o' my life, but Americans -- even former Canadians like myself, who now live in the States -- are aware of it when someone like yourself decides to be inversely jingoistic: pimping their own country or region by heaping insult on another.
In attributing cultural myopia to all Americans, you're not striking a blow against Americanism, you're reducing your own status to that of another gassy patriot.
Yes, it really is possible for an individual from any country to be aware of vast geographic and demographic differences. In attributing this lack of awareness to every American you encounter, you reveal your own potentially crippling lack of scope.
Secondly, your question "how many is a bunch" is as pointless as it is irrelevant. Let's review but a few of the reasons:
1. You've failed to recognize my metonymic of the use of the word
country to denote places of undue power and importance. It is not ignoring the existence of every country to speak of the need to influence the most negatively influential. The worst effects of the most negatively powerful comprise the point.
2. You're setting up ridiculously literal controls for a rhetorical parallel between the population/political machinery of a corrupt country and the comparatively smaller numbers in a political group within it. You might as well be responding to the phrase, "The grass is always greener" by saying, "No, it isn't. It's always the same color."
My point is obvious to the meanest intelligence: Those who lack the numbers and influence to change the course of a national election can still effect change through the smaller groups they join and support. Anonymous looks like one of those groups, but it doesn't deserve our support. In its absence, more responsible groups would grow to replace it. Hacking as an act of strategic resistance to fascism would regain credibility instead of becoming an argument for tighter government controls even among the sympathetic. I don't think Mr. S. L. Jordan is wrong to predict that particular outcome.
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So it's in the world's best interest to stay fascinated with them.
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Again, you're choosing a literal and rhetorically tone-deaf mode of attack (which I hope is deliberate on your part). To invest my rhetorical statement -- Anonymous is only appearing to be constructive because people are watching -- with the least likely inference -- that, therefore, people should keep watching them so that their actions remain partially constructive -- is to ignore the actual meaning and context of what I said.
Again, the point was clearly this:
That we should ignore the facile good deeds of Anonymous and renounce the bad ones because the smaller the numbers of and power behind the group that represents our interests, the more selective we can be about which groups deserve that privilege.
If we're not dependent on bad politicians, as most Marxists and optimists I know would assert; if even the most pernicious regimes could be ousted overnight if citizens united in significant numbers despite the pressure of ulterior powers; then it's certainly within our means to support some groups and not others. It's certainly possible to support hackers who instill a sense of chaos in corrupt systems without showing themselves to be sadistic and corrupt.
We live in an age of hyperbole and hypocritical finger-pointing, an age in which people rant about the evil corruption of Obama while supporting Cameron, Newt Gingrich or even the CEOs of Goldman Sachs. It isn't constructive to fail to make moral distinctions when our judgment could actually affect other people's lives.
To earn people's support, Anonymous didn't have to be pure or never do anything wrong. They had simply to stay focused on speaking truth to power rather than slaking a thirst to abuse momentary power. They could have used sabotage and exploits, but only to effect social change. It isn't supportable for them to steal people's identities and ruin their credit at all, less so for personal gain or, even worse, "the lulz."
Anonymous claims to back Occupy Wall Street, which is about ordinary people standing up to those who bully and steal from them. But how can their support have any weight if they themselves steal from and ruin ordinary citizens on a smaller scale? They don't simply humiliate and ruin ordinary people's lives for fun. They also ruin the credit and lives of people whose only crime is being vulnerable.
To be credible supporters of OWS, their aim would have to be not to exploit or ruin anyone with a history of being economically or socially victimized by corporations and governments. That's what OWS is about, but Anonymous isn't about that at all. The popular imagination isn't going to make that distinction and we know that: The worst thing you can do on the internet is to take yourself to seriously and -- hey, look -- the cool guys who comprise Anonymous don't do that.
But guess what: The con man who considers himself the only worthy human and his marks cattle epitomizes self-importance at its worst. Grand-scale thievery in the guise of subversiveness can look like street art, but the mindset behind it is as trite and narcissistic as that of a Twilight blog by a schizophrenic who believes the main characters are speaking to him personally about his godlike status among the ants.