Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Dreck!

After using the word dreck to describe two movies in the previous post, I was inspired by the appropriateness of the word to look into its etymology. It almost sounds like a exclamation one would make when exposed to dreck, and sure enough it seems that in the earliest quotation in the OED (in Ulysses?!) it was used in this sense:

[a. Yiddish drek (G. dreck) filth, dregs, dung, [...], Ult. origin uncertain but connection with Gr. [...]

Rubbish, trash, worthless debris.
1922 JOYCE Ulysses 511 Farewell. Fare thee well. Dreck! 1947 Horizon Feb. 90 The anonymous countryside littered with heterogeneous dreck. 1965 E. LACY Double Trouble v. 58 Drek your dolls are!.. I wouldn't stick my customers with such junk! 1966 E. WEST Night is Time for Listening i. 13 ‘You are dreck,’ she said. ‘I hope you are killed.’ 1967 O. HESKY Time for Treason v. 38 Meat better than the usual drek we get.

I solemnly vow to never watch the following movies:


  • Titanic: From what I can gather, a mawkish special effects extravaganva. Combine this with the then-ubiquitous Celine Dion theme song and you have my own personal Kryptonite.
  • The Passion of the Christ: I'm not a big fan of gore-fests. I especially don't like them with anti-Semitic overtones.
  • Fever Pitch: The shock and disgust I felt seeing Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore celebrating on the field after the Red Sox won the World Series has not left me to this day.
  • The Da Vinci Code: Any movie based on such ridiculous and ridiculously popular source material must be dreck. I shudder to think of what a movie version of Angels and Demons would be like.


Also, in light of the release of World Trade Center, I also vow never to see any fictionalized account of the events that occurred on September 11. However respectful the treatment may be, I feel that such an effort can only subtract, not add. It's been said that the only comparable event in American history is the attack on Pearl Harbor. I fear that in 50 years, moviegoers of the future will be subjected to the September 11th equivalent of dreck such as Pearl Harbor. A revolting thought.

Tuesday, August 08, 2006

The right to privacy


A popular response is: "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear."

By that reasoning, of course, we shouldn't mind if the police were free to come into our homes at any time just to look around, if all our telephone conversations were monitored, if all our mail were read, if all the protections developed over centuries were swept away. It's only a difference of degree from the intrusions already being implemented or considered.

The truth is that we all do have something to hide, not because it's criminal or even shameful, but simply because it's private. We carefully calibrate what we reveal about ourselves to others. Most of us are only willing to have a few things known about us by a stranger, more by an acquaintance, and the most by a very close friend or a romantic partner. The right not to be known against our will - indeed, the right to be anonymous except when we choose to identify ourselves - is at the very core of human dignity, autonomy and freedom.

If we allow the state to sweep away the normal walls of privacy that protect the details of our lives, we will consign ourselves psychologically to living in a fishbowl. Even if we suffered no other specific harm as a result, that alone would profoundly change how we feel. Anyone who has lived in a totalitarian society can attest that what often felt most oppressive was precisely the lack of privacy.

But there also will be tangible, specific harm.

The more information government compiles about us, the more of it will be wrong. That's simply a fact of life.

[...]

But if our privacy becomes ever more systematically invaded by the state for purposes of assessing our behavior and making judgments about us, wrong information and misinterpretations will have potential consequences.

If information that is actually about someone else is wrongly applied to us, if wrong facts make it appear that we've done things we haven't, if perfectly innocent behavior is misinterpreted as suspicious because authorities don't know our reasons or our circumstances, we will be at risk of finding ourselves in trouble in a society where everyone is regarded as a suspect. By the time we clear our names and establish our innocence, we may have suffered irreparable financial or social harm.

Worse yet, we may never know what negative assumptions or judgments have been made about us in state files. [...]

Decisions detrimental to us may be made on the basis of wrong facts, incomplete or out-of-context information or incorrect assumptions, without our ever having the chance to find out about it, let alone to set the record straight.

That possibility alone will, over time, make us increasingly think twice about what we do, where we go, with whom we associate, because we will learn to be concerned about how it might look to the ubiquitous watchers of the state.

[...]

The bottom line is this: If we have to live our lives weighing every action, every communication, every human contact, wondering what agents of the state might find out about it, analyze it, judge it, possibly misconstrue it, and somehow use it to our detriment, we are not truly free. [Bold mine]

That sort of life is characteristic of totalitarian countries [...]


All here.