I guess you knew that

Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.

Sometimes our readers surprise me. I’ve got a pretty good sense for stories that will touch, inspire or enrage our readership, but sometimes I miss it by a mile. Here it is, Friday morning, and I’ve barely heard any comments about my essay that explored our country’s move toward fascism.

In retrospect, I get it. Of course people don’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to write about it. The idea made me feel queasy, and it felt like I was hiking into the nuttier area of the forest.

We deadline to the press on Tuesday evening. We are distributed on Thursday. Wednesday is like a temporal tea-time for us. Of course, Wednesday the internet blew up with anti-censorship anger.

And then came Thursday. Peculiarly, the Justice Department chose Thursday to take down the file-sharing site Megaupload with accusations of copyright infringement. It was a multinational sweep, with four people associated with the Hong Kong-based site arrested in New Zealand. And as near as I can tell, while there was an indictment on Jan. 5, there was no trial. The government just shut the site down. Doesn’t it sound like our government’s policy toward indefinite detention? Do whatever it wants outside a legal framework until it can come up with a legal rationale.

The takedown of Megaupload proved that our government already has tools to pursue pirates. And if our government already has the tools to achieve its stated ends for SOPA/PIPA, doesn’t that suggest its real goals are something else?

My friend Matt Becker says I’m not the kind of guy governments go after anyway. My freedom to spout my crazy ideas is the rule that proves we live in a free society. It’s the people outside the mainstream, middle-class, middle-age, white, male class who present really dangerous ideas.