About That Interview – The Automatic Earth.
Michael Moore once famously – though by no means famously enough yet, because he was so dead-on – said that ‘you can’t declare war on a noun’. If only Americans had paid better attention. That would have shone a whole different light on, if not outright prevented, insane, expensive and terribly deadly concepts such as the ‘war on drugs’ and the ‘war on terrorism’. Now it looks as if John McCain is fishing for a fresh noun to declare war on.
Talking about Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg and James Franco’s ‘The Interview’ movie, and the hackers known as ‘Guardians of the Peace’ who made Sony Pictures pull the movie’s Christmas release, McCain told CNN’s State of the Union that “It’s more than vandalism. It’s a new form of warfare that we’re involved in and we need to react, and react vigorously.”President Obama earlier said the opposite, that it’s not war, but vandalism.
I’d say it’s neither, it’s a bunch of hackers who penetrated Sony’s digital systems quite deeply, encouraged by the apparent lack of true security used to protect the systems. In essence, I don’t understand what either Obama or McCain are doing talking about the issue in the first place. The FBI claims they are certain the hackers are North Korean, but they have provided no proof of that claim. We have to trust them on their beautiful blue eyes.
I think if anything defines 2014 for me, it’s the advent of incessant claims for which no proof – apparently – needs to be provided. Everything related to Ukraine over the past year carries that trait. The year of ‘beautiful blue eyes’, in other words. Never no proof, you just have to believe what your government says.
