Biodun December 26th, 2007 at 9:56 am
73
In response to Christy Hardin Smith @ 65

And they no more get to define “patriot” as “militant nationalist” in the Pat Buchanon sense of the term or in the Dick Cheney sense than they do anything else.

And I’ll be damned if Frank Luntz or anyone else gets to control my vocabulary any more than they get to tell me what is or is not meant by the “rule of law” as it applies to their cronies.

Well put. I’ll summarize what I’ve said here before many times: Please don’t let the right appropriate and define and use terms and the US flag for their own ends and benefits.

Well, before riding off on our high horses here, I saw the program on
The Science of Propaganda (New York Public Library, Humanities and Social Sciences Library) with
* Luntz, Frank I. (Pollster, Republican Party)
* Lemann, Nicholas (Dean, Columbia University, Graduate School of Journalism)
* Lakoff, George P. (Professor, University of California, Berkeley, Linguistics)
* Westen, Drew (Professor, Emory University, Psychology)
* Szanto, Andras (Faculty, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, New York, NY)

Anyway, the takeaway message for me was that we don’t do ourselves any favors by using words that the majority of Americans associate with bad stuff. Take the word “liberal.” Now, I’m a proud liberal meself, but by sheer dint of repetition a gazillion times, Republicans have succeeded in rebranding liberals with such phrases as “tax and spend” and other misrepresentations that are false, but are stuck in the heads of millions of Americans. So, OK, while I agree with the plea to “Please don’t let the right appropriate and define and use terms and the US flag for their own ends and benefits,” in some cases we have to recognize the fact that with some words, the Rightards have already appropriated and redefined some terms for their own ends and benefits, and we just have to recognize when that is so, and work around it. Furthermore, we need to raise our own chorus to re-brand words we want to resurrect.

In other words, it doesn’t matter worth a damn if the dictionary definition agrees with our usage, if 100,000,000 Americans don’t know and don’t follow the dictionary definition, and instead “know” some other crap that has been funneled into their brains. Like Fritz Mondale said, it ain’t what they know that bothers me; its what they know that ain’t so.

Bob in HI

re ‘patriot’ — there’s connotation, denotation, Umberto Eco’s interpretation and over-interpretation and ‘the intent of the text’.

Language is funny — just think how ‘conversation’ and ‘intercourse’ reversed meaning from medieval times to modern.

I think there is also an element of reclaiming the word from the Republicans who have used it as a bludgeon against its perceived enemies, people who like Christy and many of us who care deeply about justice and have a love for our founding principles, our constitution, and the rule of law, which defines the essence of our country.

Having said this, I try not to make a blanket judgment about others who have positive feelings and for whom patriot brings up noble or uplifting ideas.

The list of DOJ cover-ups and White House Coverups complements of the law firm of Addington, Fielding, and Gillespie grows by the hour.

As Greenwald says there is “a cackling screed proclaiming “schadenfreude” (the very un-Christmas emotion of deriving pleasure from others’ misery) over the failure of the “Unhinged,” “Petulant,” “Back-stabbing” Democrats to stop the war in Iraq.”

It is being whole-heartedly embraced by both parties–the Republican lemmings and their Democratic facilitators to continue a dysfunctional bloodbath in Iraq where Americans are in the middle of a civil war that continues to rage.

Harry Reid, the so-called Democratic Majority Leader, is gearing up to try to crush Dodd and the few Democrats with enough spine to keep immunity out of S. 2248, which (and this is all but neglected everywhere) leaves a shitstorm of a bill that will essentially eliminate FISA which has been entirely a rubberstamp for UEDOJ and the administration since its inception, and will put UEDOJ and UEDNI in charge of watching Americans’ every move, data mining their bank accounts, emails, phone conversations, and health records and boggying them into endless matrixes to amass power over the citizens of “the U.S. Kingdom.”

Glenn Greenwald: Former Clinton Officials Lobby for amnesty for FISA lawbreaking

Reid and company target the true enemy: “Dodd and his allies”

As we welcome in the new year, we find the Democratic candidates mouthing platitudes, and the Republicans simply looking like mentally ill clowns and intrepid liars. Rudy 911 wants to push the Unitary Executive to extreme never before reached, and Romney lies everytime he draws a breath. The rest of the Republicans are purely parodies of an election, like something out of a George Bernard Shaw play gone sour.

The “I’m so full of Christ I can’t see straight” Republicans are totally frustrated because they can’t find a viable candidate who is right wing and full of blind religious hate who is extreme enough to suit them.

The bumbling, chain fuck-up FBI has been unable to revamp their computer program twice in the last six years, spending nearly 200 million of your dollars for each of two revamps that never got off the ground. Now abandoning constructing a working computer system, because they are too stupid to do so, they have decided to launch another screwup-palooza with a biometric program to ID all Americans by their shape and the way they walk, and to attempt to get iris readings.

The only problem, duh is that this program has as much as a 40% inaccuracy rate in ideal lighting situations, and an 80% inaccuracy rate at night. But then, all the attorneys who have ever been at DOJ strived to achieve a 20% on every exam they ever took, and want that for their children of course:

FBI Prepares Vast Database Of Biometrics

“In the world’s first large-scale, scientific study on how well face recognition works in a crowd, the German government this year found that the technology, while promising, was not yet effective enough to allow its use by police. The study was conducted from October 2006 through January at a train station in Mainz, Germany, which draws 23,000 passengers daily. The study found that the technology was able to match travelers’ faces against a database of volunteers more than 60 percent of the time during the day, when the lighting was best. But the rate fell to 10 to 20 percent at night.

To achieve those rates, the German police agency said it would tolerate a false positive rate of 0.1 percent, or the erroneous identification of 23 people a day. In real life, those 23 people would be subjected to further screening measures, the report said.

Accuracy improves as techniques are combined, said Kimberly Del Greco, the FBI’s biometric services section chief. The Next Generation database is intended to “fuse” fingerprint, face, iris and palm matching capabilities by 2013, she said.

In 2004, the Electronic Privacy Information Center objected to the FBI’s exemption of the National Crime Information Center database from the Privacy Act requirement that records be accurate. The group noted that the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2001 found that information in the system was “not fully reliable” and that files “may be incomplete or inaccurate.” FBI officials justified that exemption by claiming that in law enforcement data collection, “it is impossible to determine in advance what information is accurate, relevant, timely and complete.”

Privacy advocates worry about the ability of people to correct false information. “Unlike say, a credit card number, biometric data is forever,” said Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley technology forecaster. He said he feared that the FBI, whose computer technology record has been marred by expensive failures, could not guarantee the data’s security. “If someone steals and spoofs your iris image, you can’t just get a new eyeball,” Saffo said.”

MSNBC celebrated Christmas day and night by running Crime and Punishment shows for 24 hours. Is this a great America or what?

If we strive to keep this milieu going, we can all achieve the ideal of putting every American man, woman, and child in prison by the year 2015.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler……erner.html