I will happily lay -500 that there is a front page NYT headline between now and November regarding the “findings” of the “investigation” into the Russia investigation.
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When I first heard of it, Homeland Security immediately struck me as a weirdly Orwellian name for a government entity. Same now except it’s less weird.
We have a WINNAR!!!
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This is admittedly a minor thing, but it tilts me so hard how obviously redundant all these new police state agencies are. “Department of Homeland Security”… like, isn’t the Department of Defense supposed to be securing the Fatherland? We have the FBI for internally securing the homeland? To quote The Office, what would you say you do here?
Ditto for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Like, we already have the US Citizenship and Immigration Service, we already have a Customs Service, what the fuck are you supposed to be doing? What do you do here, exactly?
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Office Space
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They deal with the goddamn customers!
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Not to disrespect George Orwell, but the man laid it on pretty thick in 1984. It’s not in any way subtle. Like, teenagers can and do read 1984 and understand what he was getting at with doublespeak and the Ministry of Truth and whatnot. It’s a great and prescient book on many levels, don’t get me wrong, but it’s also not hard to understand.
A thing that broke me after 9/11 was just how blatant and stupid the fascism was. They weren’t even trying. They actually fucking called it “The Patriot Act” when they created a bill to enhance police state surveillance. The Patriot Act. Like, Orwell would have blushed at that, it’s too stupid and on the nose for 1984. Teenagers reading 1984 would have rolled their eyes if he’d written about a Patriot Act that expanded domestic surveillance. America is dumber than your average 1984-reading teenager, that’s where we’re at now.
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Riverman was right
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You know, America used to have a War Department, but we renamed it to the Defense Department. See, that’s a clever little Orwellian shift. We don’t do the wars anymore, we just defend ourselves. I miss that kind of subtle fuckery.
But now it’s like, fuck it, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is gassing moms and clubbing veterans in Portland, Oregon to enforce immigration and stop smuggling or something. They don’t even care enough to provide a pretext that would pass the Orwell smell test. That’s dangerous.
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I don’t want to get in the way of a good rant, but your questions all have reasonable answers. E.g., we do not actually have a Customs Service any more, it was rolled into ICE as part of the DHS reorganization.
The stated purpose of this consolidation was improving coordination, cooperation, and communication between all the agencies in order to better prepare against another 9/11, etc.
So maybe the better question is why were the two agencies arguably most responsible for 9/11, and which would most benefit from improved coordination and communication (FBI & CIA), excluded from this bureaucratic restructuring?
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They interface with the customers, obviously.
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The Duker is correct as always, but even still, these guys popping off tear gas canisters at PocketChads and throwing refugees into camps don’t really seems to be improving coordination and cooperation between government agencies. Moistly it seems like they’re doing a lot of fascist police state bullshit. I dunno, I’m angry and ranting here.
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He wasn’t trying to beat around any bushes.
The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.
- Orwell from Why I Write.
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In a sane and just world we’d have a hearing with AOC and the Squad interrogating the heads of these agencies along those lines and concluding half of them were redundant, wasteful and morally reprehensible. The other half were just wasteful and morally reprehensible.
None of that matters except how many people you hire, what kind of people they are, and what equipment you give them. The Patriot Act hired a bunch of cops and gave them a bunch of weapons (physical and legal). The reorganization doesn’t mean shit.
Tru dat. Sometimes great art is very accessible. I still haven’t read Homage To Catalonia, so I don’t claim to be very sophisticated here.
Because neither of those organizations fall under the DHS, which was formed, ostensibly, to consolidate all of our immigration enforcement, domestic terrorism shit, and border patrol. FBI belongs to DOJ, of course, and while there’s no “Intelligence” cabinet department, the DNI is a cabinet-level official that is in charge of all of our foreign intel services, of which the CIA is one.
Until now, the FBI’s law enforcement function was decidedly different than DHS’s goons. Now with DHS jumping into the “crime solving” game (lol, I use that term loosely), a reorg could involve moving the FBI under DHS and consolidating some functions there. They didn’t do this before because until now, DHS overreach wasn’t nearly as big of a problem, though anyone reading the Patriot act(s) could see it coming years ago.
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You’re not wrong. I was nitpicking a bit and hadn’t seen your followups. The current state of affairs is horrifying and represents moral (and bureaucratic) failures from the very top. But I’d still say that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the Homeland Security Act is more defensible than the Patriot Act.
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