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Worth Reading: Trevor Pott's editorial on NSA PRISM and its real ramifications
Stoic Joker:
Okay... Since I had to Google all the Latin... I ran across this other quote that I found rather interesting:
Philippic (44 B.C.)
(Hannibal ad portas) Hannibal at the gates: a cynical expression made when Cicero was forced by Antony to attend a Senate meeting which Cicero thought was of no major importance.
That, Senators, is what a favour from gangs amounts to. They refrain from murdering someone; then they boast that they have spared him! From the Second Philippic Against Antony.
--- End quote ---
Kinda sounds like the gang in Washington to me.
wraith808:
Cicero is a great philosopher- one not spoken of in the same tones as Socrates and Aristotle outside of philosophy circles, but one that should be as his writings are more readily applicable to everyday life.
One of my favorites (and I'll have to quote it in English...)
Six mistakes mankind keeps making century after century:
Believing that personal gain is made by crushing others;
Worrying about things that cannot be changed or corrected;
Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it;
Refusing to set aside trivial preferences;
Neglecting development and refinement of the mind;
Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do.
--- End quote ---
Emphasis mine.
A great man.. I think it also telling that he was the first man in his family to become Senator. Sort of like the freshmen politicians of our day. The only difference being he didn't change as time went on, staying loyal to the ideal of the Republic rather than the temporal power he was offered, which leads to another of his quotes that I love:
What is morally wrong can never be advantageous, even when it enables you to make some gain that you believe to be to your advantage. The mere act of believing that some wrongful course of action constitutes an advantage is pernicious.
--- End quote ---
You can't say it any plainer than that.
Stoic Joker:
Cicero is a great philosopher- one not spoken of in the same tones as Socrates and Aristotle outside of philosophy circles...
What is morally wrong can never be advantageous, even when it enables you to make some gain that you believe to be to your advantage. The mere act of believing that some wrongful course of action constitutes an advantage is pernicious.
--- End quote ---
You can't say it any plainer than that.
-wraith808 (July 01, 2013, 12:12 PM)
--- End quote ---
It's no wonder he isn't very popular...^that's^ blasphemy, and almost seditious these days.
He sounds like our kind of people. :Thmbsup:
wraith808:
And PRISM takes a turn. I couldn't have predicted this. Really, I couldn't.
George W. Bush Defends PRISM: 'I Put That Program In Place To Protect The Country'
Holy crap... talk about blurring lines....
"I think there needs to be a balance, and as the president explained, there is a proper balance."
--- End quote ---
If even a year ago you told me that Bush would come to Obama's defense and would justify their shared unpopular program by referring to Obama's own words, I would have laughed.
One other tidbit... If you read released NSA documents and histories, you can find that Carter was the only president who raised the question of the privacy of citizens in discussions with top spy chiefs in NSA. It's mentioned in the Thomas R. Johnson , American Cryptology during the Cold War, 1945-1989. The book is classified top-secret Umbra, so the public version is heavily censored.
You can find it online in pdf form from: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB260/
Jimmy Carter- our last honest president. (And I say this as even though I disagreed with a whole lot of his policies, especially economic. But then we got Reagan after that, so...)
Tinman57:
And PRISM takes a turn. I couldn't have predicted this. Really, I couldn't.
George W. Bush Defends PRISM: 'I Put That Program In Place To Protect The Country'
Holy crap... talk about blurring lines....
"I think there needs to be a balance, and as the president explained, there is a proper balance."
--- End quote ---
If even a year ago you told me that Bush would come to Obama's defense and would justify their shared unpopular program by referring to Obama's own words, I would have laughed.
-wraith808 (July 01, 2013, 08:48 PM)
--- End quote ---
Yep, Bushy is the one that started all of this crap, and Obama pushed it even further. The news today was that Europe is having a hissy fit about the U.S. spying on European citizens. Well gosh, they're just now figuring that out? It's not like FISA didn't openly state what it was going to do, and the U.S. has been busted more than once for spying on our allies. Either way, I hope between the pressure we're putting on them and Europes pressure will resolve this problem, but most likely the U.S. will just keep on doing it secretly....
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