roachboy

the way the telephone surveillance thing works, ace, is by way of a fairly crude oracle data-mining system that operates off of keywords. so if you were talking to your wife and used some of the keywords, chances are that your conversations would be monitored. who knows what these parameters are? if there's no fixed definition of "terrorist" they could be anything.
if the parameters were fixed early in this lovely period of soft authoritarian rule, during which there was no particular distinction between those who opposed the bush administration politically and "terrorist" then they could be most anything.

so it is entirely possible that you--or any of us---could have been or are being monitored.

but then again, maybe not.
it's just like that.
if you exclude questions of principle--which you do--that's what you're left with.

======================

it seems to me that the crux of your argument is: you are quite sure that the "terrorist" is a coherent category because whatever it may mean, it doesn't mean you.

this is the reverse side of your assumption of "good faith" everywhere amongst those who you support politically---which is, in turn, the reverse of your assumption of "bad faith" everywhere amongst those whom you do not support politically.

this may cut to a premise-level disagreement: speaking for myself, i never found *anything* compelling or even coherent about the bush people's notion of "the terrorist"....apparently, you imagine that term to have a meaning.

it is obvious that most of the folk who have a Problem with the wire-tapping actions also have at the least doubts about the coherence of the notion of "terrorism"...

if this is accurate, then all we are "arguing" about the theological question of whether you believe in the mystical power of the "terrorist" to be many and one, everywhere and nowhere and to redeem the republicans from certain disaster, all at the same time. if the center of your support for the bush people was "national security" then it would follow that for you fear of an Enemy is a central motivation for your politics.

i don't think there is an Enemy.
i think there are legions who oppose the united states for political reasons, and who often have every justification for doing so as a function of the various policy choices which have enabled the "amurican way of life" to metastasize as it has over the past 30 years.
you no doubt do not share this view.

this may lead to another underlying matter of whether you can relativize the "amurican way of life" or not, whether you can see it as an outcome of systems which are not rational in the main or whether you see it in the way you see the chair you sit on, as necessary and inevitable and given because your ass is in it.

reversed: the "amurican way of life" is necessary because it's given, or its a result of larger-scale choices that have particular outcomes, intentional and not, good and not, and so is something that can be thought about as a problem and not simply accepted as given.

but if this is the differend, there really is no debate happening.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite