re: #7 Absalom, Absalom, Obdicut

This has been one of the most painful things about Wikileaks, Snowden, Greenwald, and the rest.

We have a nation where systemic racism routinely deprives blacks, Hispanics, and others of their rights. It is demonstrable, it’s not an argument: black people get longer sentences for the same crimes with the same criminal background than white people do. Black witnesses— as the Zimmerman trial showed— are less often believed. Policies massively affecting black people, like no-knock warrants and stop-and-frisk, affect literally hundreds of thousands of black people per year.

And yet the focus on ‘freedom’ and ‘privacy’ from the civil libertarians is focused on these vague, conspiratorial ideas of the NSA ‘crushing dissent’. It’s the discomfort of the privileged having privilege removed— or even just imagining what that’d be like.

This times infinity.