• Week of 02.01.2017
The Roundtable Podcast 74
* Please note that in this podcast I incorrectly say that Robert Jago’s editorial,”Why I Question Joseph Boyden’s Indigenous Ancestry,” was published at APTN. It was in fact published at the Canadaland Podcast on December 24, 2016.
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TO UNEARTH SOME latent implications of Edward Snowden’s recent act of whistle blowing, and the landscape of surveillance it has brought to the fore, I propose the following thought experiment. You are to imagine a world in which the infrastructure of potential effective and total citizen invigilation by the state and its proxies is realized, and additionally in which the potential to abolish the private life of the individual is at hand. My question is this: do you think the people of that world should care?
ABOVE THE fold of October 4th’s Globe and Mail there was featured a piece by the fine journalist Steven Chase, “Military intelligence unit keeps watch on native groups.” A more candid and accurate phrasing (Chase, not a writer given to mealy-mouthing, is not responsible for the headline) would be “Canada is spying on indigenous people.”
Arriving at precisely the moment the quite probable hand of Mossad has been discerned murdering Iranian scientists in, as they say, broad daylight on the streets of Tehran, Tom Flanagan’s call for the assassination of Julian Assange is remarkable only for the lathered and laboured shock with which it has been received. If you doubt there is already an ad-hoc CIA cell at some point between prophase and telophase, just in case, you haven’t been paying much attention to real-world geopolitics. Julian Assange is a wanted man, and the people by whom he is wanted have much more than Mr. Flanagan’s meagre ounces to put behind the shove. Continue reading The Flanagan Slip
Journalism, Essays, Broadcasting, Books 