carnivorous
The following gig was published at the New York Times and stayed up on their site for about three hours.
Tim Barrus NYT (re: Government Secrets & the Hackers Who Hack Them)
Secrets, and secrets, and secrets. I am sure that this fetish for secrets, and their dissemination is a thrill-rush ride for the privileged because it separates them from the rest of us peasants whose access to information is a social media exploitation. Hackers want to embarrass the political class anywhere there are systems that deny it has a political class because democracies can be arrogant at the same time they discount the effectiveness of digital communication. I know ten little girls who do much the same thing in their clubhouse they built from cardboard.
The little boys who watch them assiduously understand that when the rains come, their clubhouse will disintegrate and the dolls will become saturated with mold.
No clubhouse in the woods is foolproof, and they must be constantly upgraded. The little girls have no interest in upgrading anything because they are focused on the competition that exists between themselves. Of course, bureaucrats are not snotty children whose focus is the competition between themselves for a hierarchal status that can be accurately described as dog eat dog.
Playtime and nap times become imposed by Miss Nanny who will box their ears. Miss Nanny whose real name is Zeus knows more secret secrets than anyone. I adore my children, but I would never allow them nuclear arsenals because they do not sport orange hair and their commitment to peace among the warring factions of girl clubs are carnivorous.
Then…
I was attacked by some guy in Poland who accuses me of being “idealistic.”
Whatever that means.
So I responded…
I am the least idealistic human being you could ever meet.
And I am not suggesting that I speak to or for or at idealism.
I never, ever write that word.
However, governments do astound me with their childish claims, behaviors, and fantasies like America is better that any other country.
No. My POV is not about “idealism.”
It’s about competition whether it’s contrived, ridiculous, or riddled with anxiety.
I just can’t play the spy game where secrets rule the world.
There is a class distinction.
The political, government class versus the class I belong to which is the endemically impoverished class where our very immediate concerns have to do with survival, and I do not care about the stupid secrets people take so seriously because governments come and go, but what is never ephemeral remains being a prisoner down here in the bottom of the less than aristocratic heap, where our colloquial anxiety is about having enough food to eat tomorrow. I do not care if China bombs us to smithereens or spies on us because it is not my world, and I cannot pretend that if America ultimately fails, and is destroyed from within or without, it would simply be another good riddance for me. I do pray every night that some foreign powers lobs enough secret missiles at us to put America out of its much deserved misery.
When someone wants to share a secret with me, I only pretend to listen.
My eyes to the sky.
Then…
For some reason the original missive from me was deleted from the site. But what is hilarious is that they kept my response to the guy from Poland.
My guess is that they read it again and got kinda queazypeezy, second thoughts about publishing it, and this would go back to my arguments with them that their definition of the word – CIVIL – remains a grade school caricature, fine for third graders, but a little simplistically nutty for the New York Times.
What amuses me NO END, is that they actually have no idea what it is they want.
So now what they’ve got – and this is a result of their own timidity – is a response to an original missive that is no longer there.
I am quite used to seeing publications make fools of themselves. It’s ordinary. But they always remove THE ENTIRE DIALOGUE.
They never publish a response to something that is not there.
But the New York Times didThis is called confused chaos, not publication policy.
They look like the Podunk Gazette and Weekly Apartments for Rent.
It makes no sense.
I have to admit it was kinda fun because what they don’t understand is that scum like myself get more traction when a publication does exactly what they did.
Duhh.
By 3:30pm, the mess they made was still up. I have no doubt it will get fixed as soon as some kind fool informs them that their gatekeepers seem a bit deranged.
It’s bittersweet. The New York Times was the one paper that never gnawed on my ass. They thought the literary scandals were absurd.
Then, they gave me NYT’s top ten most notable books of the year.
WTF, NYT, WTF.
You’re conflicted.
Welcome to the club.