American Big Brother: A Century of Political Surveillance and Repression
cato.org
cato.org
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.
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.
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.
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 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...
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...
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?"
Just in case, I suppose.
I guess those that have power are also quite sensitive to losing it. But yeah, Burning Man?
> 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_language#The_gossip_...
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.