Who has ever heard of Bilderberg & other conspiracy theories

[mr_a500]

If you haven't seen "The Corporation", watch it now:

[vivalarevolución]

I also think that it will be destructive to our western societies that so many people today don't read newpapers (or news sites) or watch TV any more, but think that it is enough to let bloggers and twitterers think for them and believe what's hot on Twitter or even facebook.

I agree with this statement. I have noticed that folks that get most of their information from TV or word of mouth often don't have a clue what they are talking about. Cutting out television has been a great benefit to my life and communication with others.

[Muirium]

Before 2000, I used to think there should be a basic little multiple choice politics awareness test on the ballot paper. If you couldn't tell Ronald McDonald from Jacques Chirac, your vote wouldn't count. Randomised questions from a mind numbingly obvious public database of a thousand or so (to make cheat sheets cumbersome) and if you were ignorant enough to get it wrong, you'd be none the wiser anyway.

Then you-know-what happened in Florida and I was corrected about just how contemptuous political parties and elected officials are of our oh-so sacred votes.

Reality seems to exist just to spoil my cunning plans!

[vivalarevolución]

Also, sorry for getting on my soapbox a bit there. My work in government has gotten me more incised about politics than ever.

But yea, I love a good conspiracy theory. There is not enough evidence to prove whether the argument is wrong or right, so it always makes for an interesting discussion. And I love it when people get emotional about them because I can just egg them on until they get more pissed off.

[realex]

sleep and not give a fuck faction over here, represent!

[mr_a500]

This is a good site for news you don't normally see on mainstream media:

http://rt.com/news/

[webwit]

Google, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook share every bit with the NSA:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2 ... -interview

I once had an encounter with an undercover operation of the NSA in the Netherlands, in 2001, when they were implementing Echelon over here, and infiltrating companies like Shell (one of the most powerful entities in the world). Although N stands for National, they are quite international. They harvested my resume from Computer Futures, and were looking for new blood. I snubbed them after I learned it was NSA (they used a fake company selling internet monitoring to companies), but they told way too much. The guy I talked to was on coke or something, and we were stuck in traffic for some hours. I'll tell a bit more about that here later. I signed no non-disclosure.

I really need to pull out my server from the States. But were to move to? UK, Netherlands, Germany, France, it's all the same.

[tinnie]

I really need to pull out my server from the States. But were to move to? UK, Netherlands, Germany, France, it's all the same.

North Korea is the answer.

[kbdfr]

I once had an encounter with an undercover operation of the NSA in the Netherlands
[…] I'll tell a bit more about that here later. […]

I hope Geekhack is going to open a sub-forum for us when Deskthority unexpectedly crashes down

[Halvar]

Outside USA, wouldn't all you'd really have to do be to use SSL?

There still are important differences in legislation between the US and Europe, starting with European countries not having that absurd law allowing authorities to tap directly into servers without the approval of a judge.

[dirge]

Even when all the facts are there in the news but just not stressed enough people don't really give a shit.

Cameron's privatising the NHS under our noses. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_and ... e_Act_2012 & http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Lansley Lansley basically being bankrolled by Private Care provider. Hmmm didn't CareUK win a nice meaty contract? (BBC say... nothing... not on the arranged narrative)

It won't be until we're too far gone and the UK has a health system like the US that people will finally complain...

But it doesn't matter which lizard you vote for, the same will happen.

[davkol]

Conspiracy theories? Nope. There's an easy explanation to most of them: Illuminatus @ Abstruse Goose and Hanlon's razor

[bhtooefr]

I really need to pull out my server from the States. But were to move to? UK, Netherlands, Germany, France, it's all the same.

Russia.

[Peter]

Outside USA, wouldn't all you'd really have to do be to use SSL?

There still are important differences in legislation between the US and Europe, starting with European countries not having that absurd law allowing authorities to tap directly into servers without the approval of a judge.

Ever checked your OS's
Trusted Root Certification Authorities certificate store
??
SSL, (and also HTTPS) is based on a 'trust-chain' ..
WHY would anyone blindly 'trust' a root-certificate from Verisign or any other member of the Military-industrial complex ?

In case you are not familiar with how this works :
ANY CA in your OS's 'Trusted Root Certification Authorities certificate store' can create/sign a certificate that your OS
will accept as valid !

Also, in the EU we have something called 'The Data-retention directive '
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive

So, the difference between the USA and the EU is :
What NSA is doing, maybe illegally, is THE LAW of The EU !

[webwit]

Effectively, the Internet is broken. Kaput. Even if tomorrow they claim all harvesting has been stopped. It needs to get private point-to-point security built in on a whole different top level. Otherwise it remains a tool for fascists like Obama, Cameron and Merkel.

[Peter]

Effectively, the Internet is broken. Kaput. Even if tomorrow they claim all harvesting has been stopped. It needs to get private point-to-point security built in on a whole different top level. Otherwise it remains a tool for fascists like Obama, Cameron and Merkel.

You forgot Putin, Assad, Thorning-Schmidt, Le Pen, Silvio, salafists, red-necks, BNP, and countless others ..

In fact, the Internet is NOT 'broken', because it was designed that way .
It was even worse in the old yesterdays of hub-networks, where every node could easily read ALL traffic on the network ..

[kbdfr]

I think the use of the word fascists is way exxagerated for people like Obama, Cameron or Merkel, who hand over to a successor at the end of their term or when they have lost an election.

[Muirium]

Indeed. And in Obama's case: a potential much more aggressively vile successor, depending on how a few districts in Ohio feel in 2016.

If we called despicable but amateurish rubes like Berlusconi and Aznar fascists, what would we call the real genocidal freaks who still exist as future leaders if the people swing their fascist direction?

[Halvar]

WHY would anyone blindly 'trust' a root-certificate from Verisign or any other member of the Military-industrial complex ?

In case you are not familiar with how this works :
ANY CA in your OS's 'Trusted Root Certification Authorities certificate store' can create/sign a certificate that your OS
will accept as valid !

The fact that they signed your certificate doesn't mean that they can decrypt your traffic. It probably gives them certain other possibilities like man-in-the middle attacks, but that at least involves their active will to target you before the communication takes place.

Also, in the EU we have something called 'The Data-retention directive '
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive
So, the difference between the USA and the EU is :
What NSA is doing, maybe illegally, is THE LAW of The EU !

No. It's the law in the US that if the NSA asks Facebook or Google for access to about anything on their servers, the companies can't deny that and they have to keep the fact a secret, too. There's no comparable law at all in the EU. The data retention directive (that wasn't even made into a national law in Germany as of now) is bad enough, but it's not about communication content, rather about traffic data.

[webwit]

Calling them fascists it too kind. Worse than Honecker and Kim Il-sung combined. Secret complete and total monitoring of the population under their leadership. Total betrayal of the population.

[Halvar]

Indeed. And in Obama's case: a potential much more aggressively vile successor, depending on how a few districts in Ohio feel in 2016.

If we called despicable but amateurish rubes like Berlusconi and Aznar fascists, what would we call the real genocidal freaks who still exist as future leaders if the people swing their fascist direction?

Exactly. All this talk about that we're doomed anyway and there's nothing we can do and our future is bleak and "they" have already taken over the world, and our democracies are as good as dead and we have no choice when voting anyway is so very popular on the internet today, but I wonder if this mindset isn't actually making the problem worse.

In any case, it's just much more comfortable to adopt the view that we can't do anything anyway. After all, whoever comes to a different conclusion might even need to actually do something about it.

[Muirium]

Whoah! Easy now there, buddy.

[lal]

Raise kids, teach them, spread the word. That's what I do :)

[bhtooefr]

I vote for third parties, every time, even though I know it won't actually work. But, if I don't try, it definitely won't actually work.

[Muirium]

Famously, it was the liberal votes that went to Ralph Nader (Green) that got Bush close enough to be able to cheat the 2000 US Presidential election. Nader was a good man, but Bush was the real enemy. Gore wasn't exactly oblivious to environmental issues.

Another example: the present Tory government in Britain depends on Liberal support. (This is the first coalition here in a hojillion years.) Liberal voters are apoplectic with rage, especially up here in Scotland where they defected so hard in the following Scottish Parliament elections that the mainland is a Liberal free zone. The Liberals had spent the Blair years lining themselves up to the left, as both the most actually liberal and of course most innocemt party. Then the power fairy gave them the slimmest chance of a deal, they rushed into it, and the fairy kicked their teeth out. They're in real trouble. But at least they deserved it.

Vote for big parties: get reliable, predictable evil. Vote for little parties: feel good 99 times out of 100, but get swindled really badly when they do occasionally hold the balance of power. Democracy!

[bhtooefr]

Really, part of the problem is election systems that inherently give the balance of power to a concentrated group of elites.

And, in the 2012 election, I'm of the opinion that overall, we probably wouldn't have been any worse off with a Romney presidency than an Obama presidency, partially because the Republicans would stop trying to destroy things just to prove Obama wrong.

Both parties have gone to kicking-the-dog levels of evil, though.

But, working within the system doesn't work.

So, either fraud, force, or a combination may be needed to fix it.

[webwit]

The difference between republican and democrat is only the routes they take to get the vote from their targeted demographics, in order to rise to power. You'll find that those differences may be hotly debated by the public, but are in fact inconsequential in the bigger scope of things. Things like abortion, gay marriage or health care. These issues may be important to you, and take all your attention, but for the people that run your government, whether it is allowed or not does not make any difference.

[Muirium]

Abortion etc. are absolutely just puppets to keep the proles entertained. Even in America, the tide is against conservative tradition, and a generation or two from now these debates will be as icky to think about as when politics there revolved around whether “negroes” were truly human or not; and what to do about the “Irish question”.

In the 1990s I definitely agreed that there was no authentic difference between Establishment A and Eastablishment B. (There was a great Halloween 1996 episode of the Simpsons where the aliens Kang and Kudos abducted Clinton and Dole, impersonated them, and despite being outed on the eve of the election, still no one voted for Perot.) Blair's perfect impersonation of a Tory with a conscience for his first few years was even more proof of a "post partisan" age of the worst kind: literally zero meaningful distinctions available on the ballot at election time.

But then November 2000, 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Hurricane Katrina, and a cack handled recession that went out of control. George W. Bush, ladies and gentlemen. By Christ, what a tosspot. And the only mechanism by which he could have hoped to come to power: the evangelical Republican Party.

In most of our nations, its true, your vote doesn't matter. If you're American, though, consider a move to humdrum dull Ohio and voting Democrat like there's no tomorrow. Who knows if there will be, after two, three, ten more George Ws! Make no mistake, there's more like him. And almost half of America will vote for them automatically.

The ultimate hope, and why I said abortion, gay equality, etc. are inevitable is that young Americans are more liberal and less white than ever before. Ultimately demographics will steer the country and its politics right. (Namely left!) But we're still deep in the transition period, where back steps are just as likely. Some of them, like W., are enough to put the world in danger; no overstatement.

(Romney wasn't a problem. The Republican's big dogs were jumping over themselves not to run against Obama; who despite all their faux outrage, was always strong enough in the polls to be a tough challenge. Nate Silver called that, all right. So Mr. Default aka "I can't believe he's not Christian!" won, and duly lost. Well done, sir! Now, who wants a real chance at a vacant throne? 2016 is lined up to be a real decider, like 2000 and 2008.)

[webwit]

You seem to be obsessed with Bush, but Obama is a Bush who craps out shit for his voters about change and manages to win a Nobel Prize without doing anything, while bombing weddings by drone. Same kind of psychopath, only Bush is more transparent and Obama more cynical.

[Muirium]

Bush was my wake up call.

If Gore had won the presidency as well as the election, 9/11 would still have happened, and Afghanistan surely invaded in some form, and, yes, your devil dog drones would be zapping innocents like flies for dubious and irrelevant reasons. But Iraq wouldn't have been invaded, and so many more thousands of people would still be alive. Among them, possibly, Saddam Hussein but given the Arab Spring and his own minority position in Iraq, I suspect he'd be dead by now anyway.

Pointing out the egregious incompetence and hateful evil of the Bush years doesn't imply Obama's been perfect. In fact I doubt there is such a thing as a leader who could run America without collateral damage, let alone a saint who could be elected. But this is the world we live in. Still so close to the monumentally larger nightmares of the past, and still far from the future.