Maybe I am just having trouble seeing the point of "see I was right all along"? Why would we be upset at the newcomers to the ranks of the enlightened? I would prefer to just nod, point to the preexisting evidence, instead of driving people away with unproductive "I told you so" hostility.
That being said, I can also imagine how frustrating it must be to be a person who's spent years (maybe decades) worrying about something that's really happening, only to have their concerns dismissed with a wave of the hand or marginalized as "tinfoil hat" conspiracy theories. It's not hard to imagine how that could sour the disposition of even the sunniest person.
I agree completely. We need more education on the subject as opposed to back patting, and we definitely don't need to attack the very people that need to hear and understand the reporting most, as the person you are replying to is doing, by calling them naive. A bit sad imho.
My issue with the conversation now that this has gone "mainstream" is that people are now allowing the media to shape their viewpoints (like everything else that seems to blow up in peoples minds who are normally distracted with reality tv or how awesome they think their life is[personal experience from family members/friends/how I lived for some time]), without digging further beyond what people are talking about at the surface.
The emotions are most likely to be anger and disgust of having their sense of reality shattered, inciting most people who feel powerless to change their habits, to go and protest. And as we all have seen around the world and even within the united states, protests can get pretty hairy, pretty quickly and not in the favor of people who want to live peacefully…
Outside of the issue of inciting the masses to act out physically, there is very little public "mainstream" acknowledgement that corporations are collecting and sharing the same types of data (and more) between one another, where issues surrounding any type of morality become selling points for products. So then the theoretical situation becomes: Government agrees to stop its dragnet programs, non governmental entities will continue to do so as long as people use their services… where's the protest for that (and when that comes they'll hire private contractors to protect them and their interests [remember OWS 2011])?
I posted this a while back on information asymmetry and the surveillance state [0], which lays out simply what is going on now in the minds of people and what is at the core of the issue people are talking about. I also propose an idea about the direction I feel would be more beneficial for the energy to be placed on my post as apposed to the logical conclusion of where all the anger will be placed by people who are now willing to enter the conversation from recent "mainstream" exposure [1].
