[bobtheborg]

I found many points interesting. Here's one:

Policymakers supposedly work for us/the people and they could have made surveillance ad tech expensive and thereby severely limited it, but

> "Policymakers failed us because cops and spies hate privacy laws and lobby like hell against them. Cops and spies love commercial surveillance, because the private sector's massive surveillance dossiers are an off-the-books trove of warrantless surveillance data that the government can't legally collect."

[nickff]

That point may be pithy, but it's unconvincing to any skeptic; those are characteristics of a polemic.

[_wire_]

Doctorow begs questions in the manner typical of self-hosted and/or expatriated journalists, who must be evangelists, but religious work tends to disregard the labor of research as it's hard work that doesn't pay and it might uncover a contradiction of the orthodoxy.

Let religious voices like Doctorow indicate places where we may examine policy and why we should be interested to look there, but sermons aren't vehicles to carry meaningful analysis.

Sermons must have a righteous tone and term "fascist", used correctly by Doctorow, has a long-standing colloquial connotation of teutonic allegiances during WW2, which emotionally overloads his diatribe.

Yet, he's correct to invoke it, even as his rhetoric is misplaced for audiences whose forbearers were sacrificed to the trauma of WW2, and whose generational scar tissues suppress remembrance that the patterns of evil which exploded across the Axis did emerge within our sacred bastions of liberty and freedom, and that these evils are fomenting again right now.

So I appreciate Doctorow's polemics even as I too regard the details of his claims with skepticism.