Alone on Outrage Island

Okay, yeah, the title of this post is overly dramatic.  Anyways, as of late I'm feeling overwhelmed with what I'm calling "authoritarianism creep".  I'm sure I'm not the first to ever use that term, but that's how it feels right now.

First, we've got this thing at Brooklyn College regarding their Political Science department's co-sponsorship of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) group, and the absolute shit-storm of pro-Israeli censorship that has come down on them from the likes of Alan Dershowitz and the NYC City Council.  The censorship of Academic Freedom is extraordinarily harmful, obviously, to the free exchange of ideas, both accepted and subversive.  Luckily, Karen Gould, the school's President, and Michael Bloomberg have successfully thwarted these attempts at censorship and it appear the NYC City Council has gone back to their respective caves.  Regardless, the fact that it takes an address from the school's President and the City's Mayor to allow for an unobstructed exercise in free speech to occur on a college campus is infuriating.  These are the types of things that should seriously worry any American worth her/his salt, and that's regardless of your position on the Israeli/Palestine conflict.

Second, we've known about the Obama Administration's penchant for carrying on with the policies of the Bush Administration that they once admonished (with the exception of torture - as far as we know, anyways), and we've been well aware of their penchant for the use of drones to kill American citizens once they started doing so in 2010 (see: Anwar al-Awlaki and his sixteen year old son), a white paper (legal memo) was released this week, and the news-world lost its fucking mind.  It's like they forgot this was going on for three years, and weren't actively working to shroud the Administration from criticism by not critically reporting on it.  Also, they were complicit in the burying of a story regarding the fact that the U.S. also has a secret drone base in Saudi Arabia.  Unfortunately, most people seem to be more concerned about Beyonce's Superbowl half-time show performance.  No big deal, folks, the Obama Administration has essentially claimed that the world is Battlefield, and if a high-ranking official thinks its okay to explode you with a drone aircraft from on high - well, them's the breaks.  No due process, no Constitutional protections, do not pass go, do not collect $200.  Folks lose their minds when you threaten to take away their guns, but their own government threatens to maintain the Executive right to kill them on the whim of a high-ranking official and there's barely a peep.

This is a terribly frightening road to be traveling down.

Add to that our Government's willingness to prop up the Too Big Too Fail financial industry, the worst economic inequality since the Great Depression, a continued Congressional fixation upon deficits instead of unemployment, and the list really does go on... it's hard to be anything but quite disillusioned.