I disagree again. When they are illegally ordered to be silent, particularly in violation of the laws authorizing their organizations and positions, they ought to speak out. I also reject that they necessarily ought to do this in the public square. If the organization that the people are getting is the truth and it does not compromise national security, the fact that it is inconvenient to the president is irrelevant. We are supposed to be an open society. Once that ends, the rest of it is just nonsense. In the end, the right of the people to have the information they need to make decisions about how they vote, is paramount.
I'm all for strong protection for whistleblowers, but that's not the issue here. What we're dealing with here are high ranking federal officials involved in obstruction of justice, malicious prosecution, defrauding the courts, all sorts of intelligence abuses from illegal unmasking to surveillance of political opponents, and it's all politically motivated. If we want to remain an open society this kind of behavior cannot be tolerated.
The Immortal Goon wrote:But your "serious academics and journalist" example is the Lobster. Which while not illegitimate itself, traffics exclusively in conspiracy theories.
No it doesn't "traffic exclusively in conspiracy theories"(maybe you should try reading a source before criticizing it) and many serious academics and journalists write for it.
contributors have included:
Dan Atkinson, a British journalist and author
William Blum, American author and historian
Mike Carlson, broadcaster and writer for The Guardian and the Independent
Colin Challen, the Member of Parliament for Morley and Rothwell from 2001 until 2010
Kevin Coogan, American investigative journalist
Alex Cox, a film-maker
Richard Cummings, an author, playwright, theorist and critic
Mark Curtis, investigative journalist and author
Anthony Frewin, writer and assistant to Stanley Kubrick
Robert Henderson, British writer
Jim Hougan, author of Decadence, Spooks, and Secret Agenda
John Newsinger, author and professor of History at Bath Spa University
David Osler, a British author and journalist
Greg Palast, author and a freelance journalist
Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Professor of Global Studies and Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara
Dave Renton, historian and political activist
Paul Rogers, Professor of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford
Peter Dale Scott, a former English professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former diplomat
Michael John Smith, convicted of espionage
Giles Scott-Smith, Professor of Diplomatic History of Atlantic Cooperation at Leiden University.
Kenn Thomas, conspiracy theorist, writer, editor & publisher of Steamshovel Press
Meanwhile, the Guardian, Politico, Newsweek, CNN, the New York Times, and virtually any other remotely credible sources has dismissed the "Deep State" conspiracy theory as foolishness.
Most of those sources are establishment propaganda rags so on this issue at least they're definitely not the most reliable. But it's funny you should cite them because I know three of them, NYT, Guardian, and Politico, have all recently published articles saying the deep state is either a reality or at least a question of concern. I just posted the article from NYT in this thread.
So far as academics are concerned, I can only give a cursory view on JSTOR, unless you have something better to point in my direction.
Yeah, there's no shortage of work on the subject but it is interesting that a guy with such strong opinions on the topic hasn't read and isn't even aware of any of the many works on it. You seem to have more of a dogma here than an informed opinion. I'll make a thread on the deep state with links to books, articles, papers, documentaries etc.
It seems that the whole idea originates from Turkey, something inherited from the Ottoman Empire's fear of recently converted Jews not being that fully converted to Islam
I hope you're not trying to discredit the idea by linking it with antisemitism, that would just be super lame. Almost as bad as time you tried to debunk link analysis mapping by posting organizational charts of the illuminati. For an academic you sure do rely pretty heavily on fallacy. It doesn't really matter where the concept originated, the only thing that's relevant is its validity.
This was heavily promoted recently in the form of the Ergenekon, which is supposedly a secular cabal within the Turkish state.
I hope you at least understand that the only question here is whether the concept is applicable to the US, for most experts there is absolutely no question that countries like Turkey, Egypt, and Algeria are controlled to some significant extent by what is termed a deep state.
Similarly, the military-industrial complex is far more of a systematic relationship of various capitalist and governmental interests than one of a secret cabal of ideological-motivated mustache-twirling villains in a smokey room.
Your fallacious appeal to ridicule notwithstanding, the reality is vastly more complex than a systematic relationship of institutional interests. It can be constructively viewed through that lens but that hardly provides a complete picture.