Digby: Scarlet Barcode

I've been thinking a lot lately about how the busybody culture seems to be on the uptick. It's not just the Schiavo stuff, which is the worst of it in that it featured the president himself flying back to Washington in the dead of night to sign special legislation. It's more than that and it has to do with the religious right,corporations and government all working together (and sometimes using modern technology) to regulate personal behavior. I no like.

You have moral scolds and personal responsibility hypocrites and authoritarians and rapacious business interests that are determined, for a variety of reasons, to erase the idea of personal privacy on the one hand and the idea of redemption and reinvention on the other. Combined with a breathlessly intrusive tabloid media (dripping with hypocrisy and phony sanctimony) and you have a recipe for some very unpleasant social changes.