+2

This is getting a bit beyond a joke now, and it's telling how willingly personal data is handed over when the right person asks for it...

I would not describe it that strictly. The US is constantly balancing between

- "freedom" and "security",
- and between what it claims and was meant to be by its founding myths,
and what it actually is in reality.

The difference between the latter often gets refused by America, and the balance regarding the first got lost after 9-11.

There is also a huge difference between the "altruistic global model" that America claims to be when serving the global needs, and the reality of often brutal egoism that it actually is driven by. After all, states are the coldest of all monsters (Nietzsche). And I never believed in the idea of "friendship" between nations. There never was one, and there never will be something like that - just interests that are shared for a temporary time.

I think that more and more often we will see in the future the former superpower hitting blindly at all directions while it realises that its former economic, financial and military dominance is waning. After all, it is an empire in decline. That decline will not take just some months or years, but another 10, 20 years or maybe more. But the culmination point definitely lays long behind.

But if Big Brother the Government can demand personal info about basically everyone based on a personal grudge against one certain foreigner, it's gone much too close to Stalinist USSR.

The problem is, I don't know if the alternatives for a "world leading nation" are much better. Putin? China? No thanks. EU? Hasn't got enough power.

Good point....I wouldn't want to be extradited to the US if I were him.

Latest Wikileaks news:

Cables reveal that Israel considers Turkey to be lost a lost "partner" for the West, and American diplomats agree, saying that Erdoghan hates Israel with all his will and dreams of a neoi-ottoman dominance in Europe and in the region. A further dramatic radicalisation of Islam in Turkey is expected by both. Turkey, having aligned with Iran recently, more or less openly supports the Hamas (an Iranian proxy) and raises fundings for it.

The Palestinian government is totally pissed by the Turks. (!!!)

link

America estimates the damage from Wikileaks as a nuisance, and to be embarassing, but not as threatening or really damaging. Nevertheless it planned to exaggerate the "threat" in public in order to form as tough as possible a front against Wikileaks.

No harm no foul

I've never heard of them doing that before, how strange.:har:

Yes, it is a big surporise, isn't it. :D I didn'T mean it serious when I reasoned that they would do like this some months ago, in this or another thread. I was just kidding. :haha:

The thing I find strange is that they have no problem call him the nearest thing to Osama Bin Laden, whom they would simply pick up and short or take to Guano Bay and yet they still haven't gotten a legal case together that they know will stick, otherwise they would have asked the UK to hand him over months ago.