#1192 Narcs and Sarcs

Two steps forward and one step back. It’s the march of technology. Here’s a couple of steps I’ve found interesting lately.
Seems the big flap over the Chinese government hacking into Google to find out what dissidents were doing has an even weirder side.
As you’ve no doubt heard, Google is making noise about pulling out of China in response to the incident. They think someone in the Chinese National Security department hacked into Google’s innards and stole or monitored information about what Chinese dissidents were up to. From the Chinese government’s point of view, dissidents who want democracy are terrorists. Because the dissidents would like to overthrow the Chinese status quo.
From our point of view, the dissidents are reacting to their totalitarian regime. From the Chinese government’s point of view, it’s no different than the Obama Administration keeping tabs on teabaggers. Or Nixon keeping tabs on protesting Vietnam Vets.
And personally I wouldn’t concede either tab-keeping behavior. Unfortunately, the hole the Chinese hacked into was a hole created by Google itself. And they created it so our own National Security people could keep tabs on “suspected” terrorists.
That’s why I’m always so paranoid about internet privacy piracy. From lefties to teabaggers, we’re all going to be “suspected” eventually.
In other technological steps, you may have noticed in that last sentence I put quote marks around the word “suspected” so I could indicate sarcasm. I may not have to soon. A wily entrepreneur has invented a new symbol. It’s available for $1.99 and you can download it to your computer or smartphone. The guy is making a mint.
It’s called a sarc-mark. S-a-r-c-m-a-r-k-. When you use it, it indicates the last sentence or word was meant to be sarcastic.
Great¾a further degeneration of our writing skills brought about by new “communication”. In Twitter nation where every character is counted, sarc-marks will eliminate the need for, quotation marks, italics, and, God forbid, quality writing...
First our privacy and now our ability to communicate with finely wrought wordsmithery.
Will someone please invent an emoticon for despair?
America, ya gotta love it.