June 12, 2015

Bill Maher's New Rules on the price we're paying for the lack of privacy in America, whether it's the NSA, or the telecoms or social networking and what should be done about it.

MAHER: And finally, New Rule, the ad slogan, 'What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas" must be expanded to include the entire country, and then written into the Constitution as a proclamation that we are tired of everyone watching us all the time. [...]

Now, there's an old saying that character means doing the right thing even when no one is watching. Well, if that's true, people growing up today will never know if they have any.

After discussing what took down the likes of Donald Sterling and Dennis Hastert Maher continued.

MAHER: Now of course it's easy to point to a Hastert or a Sterling or a Weiner or a Spitzer and say "Oh look, we caught a guy doing something bad. Isn't surveillance great?" No. There's a price. Ask anyone over forty how thankful they are that they got their first job at a time when not every stupid thing you ever did was recorded and uploaded to the Internet for all eternity.

I don't blame today's kids for being overly medicated. If I knew there was a video out there of me twerking to Nickelback or passed out with a cat taped to my nuts or something, I'd be on Zoloft too. We're not just changing how we live. We're changing human nature itself, because, you know, when everything is recorded, there isn't any right and wrong for its own sake.

It's just caught or not caught, and perhaps even worse, there's never a moment when we can let our guard down. With everything always recorded, everyone starts altering their behavior for the camera -- except for the cops. They could still give a shit.

While I agree with Maher's overall sentiments here, it would have been nice for him to pick some better examples than Sterling and Hastert. It's not like there's any shortage of them.

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