New Jersey Governor Chris Christie sought to vault ahead of Donald Trump's media-savvy campaign to be the Republican nominee for president with a statement that immigrants ought to be treated like FEDEX packages.
With data mining, the government is already colluding with major corporations to track people. The voters of the United States have never come to terms with how 9/11 and threats to our national security fundamentally rearranged the ability of government to spy on people without reasonable supervision.
In fact, George Orwell was right about the dystopian future, only a few hundred years too early.
It is the reason the 2nd Amendment fury has always been paradoxical to me. The aim of pro gun activists -- to ensure citizens can arm themselves to defend our freedoms -- is a fiction and has been for some time. The real issue the NRA should attach itself to is a new constitutional amendment to prohibit government from abusing technologies to track the movement of people, whether on the internet or real life. Instead, what the NRA has done is to throw up barriers to gun registration, including requirements for paper and not computer trails where applicable. In other words, rather than address underlying threats to peoples' liberties, the NRA comes out on the side of a silly odd-ball future that looks a lot like Terry Gilliam's 1985 comedy, "Brazil".
Back to tracking immigrants: it is a lousy, awful idea that will probably happen because Americans are too disorganized to mobilize against the threats of technology. It may not even happen first, in the United States.
As a result of brutal combat over scarce resources in Africa and the Middle East (cf. global warming), millions of refugees are on the move. Germany is expecting 800,000 refugees to arrive this year, mainly from Syria. Based on relative population size, it is as if the United States accepted more than 3 million refugees from our southern border this year.
The difference between today's much more serious immigration crisis and World War II to which it is being compared is that there was an end to World War II: with today's turmoil in Africa and in the Middle East, there is no end in sight. If you care to know how well walls have worked to solve geo-political problems, just check out the Gaza strip.
The conclusion is that our politics on immigration have to shape up and quickly, because Christie and the candidate he is chasing, Donald Trump, take us to a deeper, darker and more forbidding place. The knee-jerk reaction to our immigration crisis; building walls and putting FedEx labels on people's backs, sends us in a bad direction. If the United States can't find a way to compassionately, reasonably deal with immigration reform and the application of technologies to track the movements of people, then which of our allies will in a crisis that shows no signs of ending.
"At any moment, FedEx can tell you where that package is. It's on the truck. It's at the station. It's on the airplane," Christie told the crowd in Laconia, New Hampshire. "Yet we let people come to this country with visas, and the minute they come in, we lose track of them," he said. "We need to have a system that tracks you from the moment you come in, and then when your time is up ... however long your visa is, then we go get you. We tap you on the shoulder and say, 'Excuse me. Thanks for coming. Time to go,'" Christie said.Technologies do exist to track immigrants or any other subset of human being including but not limited to environmentalists, homosexuals, Jews, Baptists, followers of Charles Manson, people with visible freckles, or men who didn't have their foreskins cut, or women with breasts of unequal sizes: I think you know where I'm going with this.
With data mining, the government is already colluding with major corporations to track people. The voters of the United States have never come to terms with how 9/11 and threats to our national security fundamentally rearranged the ability of government to spy on people without reasonable supervision.
In fact, George Orwell was right about the dystopian future, only a few hundred years too early.
It is the reason the 2nd Amendment fury has always been paradoxical to me. The aim of pro gun activists -- to ensure citizens can arm themselves to defend our freedoms -- is a fiction and has been for some time. The real issue the NRA should attach itself to is a new constitutional amendment to prohibit government from abusing technologies to track the movement of people, whether on the internet or real life. Instead, what the NRA has done is to throw up barriers to gun registration, including requirements for paper and not computer trails where applicable. In other words, rather than address underlying threats to peoples' liberties, the NRA comes out on the side of a silly odd-ball future that looks a lot like Terry Gilliam's 1985 comedy, "Brazil".
Back to tracking immigrants: it is a lousy, awful idea that will probably happen because Americans are too disorganized to mobilize against the threats of technology. It may not even happen first, in the United States.
As a result of brutal combat over scarce resources in Africa and the Middle East (cf. global warming), millions of refugees are on the move. Germany is expecting 800,000 refugees to arrive this year, mainly from Syria. Based on relative population size, it is as if the United States accepted more than 3 million refugees from our southern border this year.
The difference between today's much more serious immigration crisis and World War II to which it is being compared is that there was an end to World War II: with today's turmoil in Africa and in the Middle East, there is no end in sight. If you care to know how well walls have worked to solve geo-political problems, just check out the Gaza strip.
The conclusion is that our politics on immigration have to shape up and quickly, because Christie and the candidate he is chasing, Donald Trump, take us to a deeper, darker and more forbidding place. The knee-jerk reaction to our immigration crisis; building walls and putting FedEx labels on people's backs, sends us in a bad direction. If the United States can't find a way to compassionately, reasonably deal with immigration reform and the application of technologies to track the movements of people, then which of our allies will in a crisis that shows no signs of ending.
2 comments:
I hate/love it when I actually agree with you.
Before I read this I was walking my dog and thinking that maybe i should send the addresses of my two grandparents that were not born here graves and they could dig em up and send them back.
The best thing about Trump is that these other doozies are really showing us how scary they all are and the news outlets are too happy to comply.
Someone a while back developed a microchip for your relative that has dementia- for wanderers. Look here its already being done. Microchops for Grampa. http://www.oasisadvancedwellness.com/learning/alzheimer-microchips.html
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