Mencken once said that many Americans, due to their Puritan roots, live in "The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."
This surveillance and its informants, such as are discussed in this article, seem to me to be the embodiment of this fear.
Many people, for whatever reasons I will never be able to fathom, seem to get some sort of thrill on snitching on the activities of others whom I guess they feel are enjoying themselves too much.
Maybe its envy...maybe its some authoritarian streak... I don't know, but it sure exists and many of my old friends have been bitten by its ugly bite.
The business about the puritans is a cute intellectual toy based on trivia and truly ancient history.
There is no relationship between a centuries-old minority subculture, and the bestial, militarized nuclear power that projects power into orbit, throughout the skies and across oceans today.
There's enough porn on the internet (mostly originating from the United State) to prove that with an accidental twiddle of your fingers into any search engine.
You misunderstand puritanism, it has many tentacles that have stretched to many corners of american culture. It still has a strong presence in our standards of media "decency" where abominable violence is fine but naked bodies, eroticism, or rough language is clamped down on to an extreme degree. It also has lots of little weird echoes and side-effects. Consider, for example, the way that overly happy, "bubblegum" pop music is denigrated, especially by those who think that valuing "sophisticated" and "mature" music (whether it's classical, prog rock, speed metal, or what-have-you) is important. Or look at the legal prohibitions against drug use and sex work. Or look at the modern trend, especially online, of ironic detachment.
There's very much an undercurrent of looking at pure, unfiltered exuberance, enthusiasm, and enjoyment through a skeptical, dour, or peevish lens. The fact that people enjoy looking at porn in private doesn't change that.
While I'd agree that the modern espionage-industrial complex is not motivated by old-fashioned Puritanism in the historical sense, it certainly does have roots in the sort of naive moral authoritarianism (which we call small-p puritanism) that political and religious figures have exploited to great effect in American society since Anthony Comstock and before. The creation of US security services like the FBI and CIA and the cultures they engendered owe a great deal to people like J Edgar Hoover who had a keen sense of this kind of puritanism, and accumulated a great deal of power by leveraging it.
Does "Puritanism" here reflect more a parochial understanding? The English have their own espionage-industrial complex, including one CCTV camera for about every 10 people, and a native author, Orwell, who famously wrote about near universal surveillance in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
There's also the Five Eyes of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States, wherein an espionage agency in one country can route around laws which restrict surveillance of citizens by simply asking a foreign agency to get the information and share it with the former.
This might be based on a 'naive moral authoritarianism', which in the US might include 'puritanism', but I don't think puritanism captures the basis for the multi-national, espionage-industrial complex, any more than attributing it to some sort of 'Anglo-Saxonism' might.
I think part of the problem in the US is the culture where eg police departments compete for resources basically to make their own department bigger. One of the ideas in the Ron Paul movement was that governments needs to be smaller. Of course, in the real world it probably should not go as far as Ron Paul suggests, but....
The main cultural problem in the US is the acceptance, but the white majority at least, that police behaving like they do is part of the job and acceptable.
I refer to the fact that you can be tased, shot, beat, arrested, held down by 4 policemen, beaten etc 10 times more easily than you can in Western Europe -- and people think that's OK, or what "the police is supposed to do".
Even the fact that getting out of your car when stopped by a traffic cop (something totally OK in 99% of the world) means you can be shot in the US...
I don't think the white majority finds that behavior acceptable either. Twice as many white people are killed by cops every year as black people for example (and yes, I understand the population ratios, my point is it's still a lot of white people also being killed by cops). I think it's primarily a question of: how to stop it, what reforms to make, where to start?
>I don't think the white majority finds that behavior acceptable either.
Acceptable at least in the sense that there's not widespread revolt against it.
A couple of US style incidents in other western european countries would have toppled the government or at least the justice minister -- and yet tons of them happen in the US with little to no protest (aside from special activists and groups).
Acceptable also in the sense that it's the prevalent wisdom: "don't do this or that, or you'll might get shot/tased/etc", which people have internalized, instead of considering something rare and outrageous.
The fact that a cop can shoot someone (black or white) just like that, and that it happens tons of times a year, is not much different to my European sensibilities than still having the segreggation. Or still having the death penalty -- oh, wait, they have that too...
Whenever I pause to think about surveillance and other activity of the sort that is aimed at stifling peaceful, ideological movements and groups it gives me a chill.
At those points it becomes clear that the predomimant interests that we are serving are not those of "the people", as it is the people who are being targeted. This leads to the obvious question "whose interests are we serving and at what cost?"
There's a lot of truth to the information in the posting, but remember this is from the libertarian think tank Cato Institute, which has ties to Koch industries. They often like to use examples of bad government for justification to roll back government programs that help the average citizen in favor of corporate rule, not just the bad ones that hurt everyone.
You mean the Koch brothers, the same ones in favor of: ending police militarization, ending mass-incarceration, ending our military adventurism, and are in favor of gay marriage? Sounds pretty great to me.
Sexual surveillance and repression goes back to the dawn of civilization and the origin of language. Everybody wants to know who is having sex with who. This is, I fear, the ultimate question of Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide trilogy. It is difficult for a human being to resist the temptation to ask who is having sex with who, especially after spending decades building a system that is designed to answer exactly that question (a.k.a "artificial intelligence" or perhaps "artificial gossip" would be a better term).
> Gossip, according to Robin Dunbar in his book Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, does for group-living humans what manual grooming does for other primates — it allows individuals to service their relationships and so maintain their alliances on the basis of the principle: if you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. Dunbar argues that as humans began living in increasingly larger social groups, the task of manually grooming all one's friends and acquaintances became so time-consuming as to be unaffordable.[51] In response to this problem, humans developed 'a cheap and ultra-efficient form of grooming' — vocal grooming. To keep your allies happy, you now needed only to 'groom' them with low-cost vocal sounds, servicing multiple allies simultaneously while keeping both hands free for other tasks. Vocal grooming then evolved gradually into vocal language — initially in the form of 'gossip.'[51] Dunbar’s hypothesis seems to be supported by the fact that the structure of language shows adaptations to the function of narration in general.[52]
> Critics of this theory point out that the very efficiency of 'vocal grooming' — the fact that words are so cheap — would have undermined its capacity to signal commitment of the kind conveyed by time-consuming and costly manual grooming.[53] A further criticism is that the theory does nothing to explain the crucial transition from vocal grooming — the production of pleasing but meaningless sounds — to the cognitive complexities of syntactical speech.
Q: How many people that have been a part of my life are having sex at this moment?
A bit disappointing if so, but it would at least satisfy those mice's desire for a salacious topic to tour the galaxy's talk show circuit.
To the second part, it doesn't seem like that theory of vocal grooming would need to be the genesis of syntactic speech.
Complex verbal communication could have come about for completely other reasons, and, as we standardized around words and sentences and the like, vocal grooming likewise could have grown from simple noises to these similar more-complex mechanisms.
Trust a Cato article/infographic/whatever to totally ignore the red scare and rightist motivation for virtually all political surveillance and repression.
1. The political compass is oversimplified and not taken seriously by political scientists
2. This has nothing to do with his argument. In the US, surveillance is largely the product of moral panics, primarily 1. The red scare 2. The race scare 3. The drug scare, which itself is really just a synthesis of 1 and 2; the drug war was essentially invented to attack black and Latino communities as well as anti government "subversives." Maybe that's not true in EVERY state that has used mass surveillance, but it is true in the specific case of the US.
This surveillance and its informants, such as are discussed in this article, seem to me to be the embodiment of this fear.
Many people, for whatever reasons I will never be able to fathom, seem to get some sort of thrill on snitching on the activities of others whom I guess they feel are enjoying themselves too much.
Maybe its envy...maybe its some authoritarian streak... I don't know, but it sure exists and many of my old friends have been bitten by its ugly bite.