Nearly 30% of people under 30 support gov't surveillance cameras in every home | Hacker News Reader

Nearly 30% of people under 30 support gov't surveillance cameras in every home

cato.org

20 pointsmhb41 comments

I wouldn't take a survey from the Cato Institute seriously. They're the propaganda arm of Charles Koch. Interesting fact, Charles Koch's father Fred Koch started the John Birch Society: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_C._Koch#Political_views

Planned Parenthood was founded by people vocally in favor of eugenics. Does that affect the organization's credibility today? Or should we judge them based on what they're doing now instead of the past?

Shouldn't that affect it's credibility? (I only learned this from your comment and don't really have an opinion about them because I don't know anything about them). But if that's true, I'd want to st least understand what the motivations in starting it were, and if they are being achieved, of there's been a split, or if they were benign to begin with.

I do agree that intent is irrelevant, it's what's actually happening that matters.

Birth control is also rooted in eugenics. From 1909:

"The Family and the Nation" by Arnold Gessel is published. In it he expresses the intentions of the The American Birth Control League that:

"society need not wait for perfection of the infant science of eugenics before proceeding upon a course which will prevent renewal of defective protoplasm contaminating the stream of life."

He also advocates for "eugenic violence" in dealing with inferiors. According to him, "We must do as with the feebleminded, organize the extinction of the tribe."

Arnold Gessel wasn't Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood.

Here's what Planned Parenthood says about Margaret Sanger: https://www.plannedparenthood.org/files/8013/9611/6937/Oppos...

Sanger's views were not that of the mainstream eugenics movement. Eg, she writes "Eugenists imply or insist that a woman's first duty is to the state; we contend that her duty to herself is her first duty to the state."

Further, Planned Parenthood writes:

> Planned Parenthood Federation of America finds [the views Sanger shared with 'the "progressives" of her day'] objectionable and outmoded. Nevertheless, anti-family planning activists continue to attack Sanger, who has been dead for nearly 40 years, because she is an easier target than the unassailable reputation of PPFA and the contemporary family planning movement. However, attempts to discredit the family planning movement because its early 20th-century founder was not a perfect model of early 21st-century values is like disavowing the Declaration of Independence because its author, Thomas Jefferson, bought and sold slaves.

This is repudiation of those views of Sanger.

What's the equivalent for the Cato Institute and Charles Koch?

Yeah, I wasn’t trying to imply that they are the same. As a Catholic we don’t condone artificial birth control (or believe in divorce!) so it’s very different than the general 20th century perspective on things.

I do think it is important to historically understand where things most people take for granted come from because sometimes it can be pretty eye-opening.

There are many aspects of the modern world (birth control and related issues are just one) that were invented by people with intentions I think 90% of people would strongly disagree with if the they understood them.

You said "Birth control is also rooted in eugenics." That is a tough argument to make.

Eugenics and birth control have been around for a very long time. Eg, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_birth_control and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics#Origin_and_developmen... .

Galton, an early eugenicist, coined the term in 1883. I'll use ~1880 as the start date for that strain of eugenics.

The history of birth control page points out "The Malthusian League was established in 1877 and promoted the education of the public about the importance of family planning and advocated for the elimination of penalties against the promoters of birth control.[38] It was initially founded during the "Knowlton trial" of Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh in July 1877"

It also points out how "In the United States, contraception had been legal throughout most of the 19th century, but in the 1870s the Comstock Act and various state Comstock laws outlawed the distribution of information about safe sex and contraception and the use of contraceptives".

Which means birth control, and family planning, predate Galton, so cannot be rooted in eugenics, in the way you likely mean "eugenics" to mean.

Modern statistics was invented by eugenicists and "race scientists", like Galton.

Uh, I would consider something called the “Malthusian League” close enough to eugenics from my point of view.

But you are right, birth control itself predates modern era eugenics. What I meant was “modern” birth control.

A lot of the people who have shaped this cultural stuff are just very disturbed. In the past they were pretty open about their perspective before talking about it openly became somewhat taboo. As an example of the “Malthusian mindset” in 1954:

Nuclear scientist Harrison Brown publishes his book "The Challenge of Man’s Future". In the book Brown examines carefully the probability that the human carrying capacity of the planet is between 50 and 200 billion people, before summarizing the reasons this fact is best kept secret:

“If humanity had its way, it would not rest content until the earth is covered completely and to a considerable depth with a writhing mass of human beings, much as a dead cow is covered with a pulsating mass of maggots.”

Here is the papal encyclical “Humanae Vitae” by the way if you are interested in why the Church considers birth control to be harmful:

https://www.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/encyclicals/docume...

What informs your view? Because https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_League doesn't sound anything like the eugenics movement.

Modern birth control started in the mid 20th century with the combined oral contraceptive pill. Rice-Wray, from what I can tell, saw it as a way for poor families to be able to voluntarily plan the number of children they have.

I don't see how that's informed by eugenics.

What do you see as "eugenics"?

What do you see as '"modern" birth control'?

> As an example of the “Malthusian mindset” in 1954

"Malthusian" has multiple meanings. The Malthusian League Wikipedia entry says: "The organisation maintained that it was concerned about the poverty of the British working class and held that over-population was the chief cause of poverty".

This is in accord with what Malthus wrote. Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism#Early_history , Mathus' "criticism of the working class's tendency to reproduce rapidly, and his belief that this, rather than the exploitation of their labour by capitalists, led to their poverty, brought widespread criticism of his theory."

The Malthusianism page goes on to quote: "Though Malthusianism has since come to be identified with the issue of general over-population, the original Malthusian concern was more specifically with the fear of over-population by the dependent poor"

You quoting someone in 1954 doesn't mean it's the same as the goals of the Malthusian League some 80 years previous.

I have so many disagreements with the position of the Catholic church - sex outside of marriage, sex by teens, abortion, the role of women in the church, gay marriage, co-habitation, and so much more - that I don't see the point of trying to understand its official views of birth control.

If you get into the history of the late 19th century through the mid 20th century there is a pretty clear thread you can draw through:

- industrialization

- racial theories about immigrants

- birth control

- the birth of compulsory education (i.e. you must send your children to school to be “Americanized” or the police will arrest you)

- eugenics

- wealthy industrialists trying to consolidate their hold on power politically and economically through developing ways to control “the lower classes” through the “scientific management” of society.

Much of this involved domestic propaganda campaigns beginning in the early 20th century that the instigators were very open about at the time. Many prominent figures were also very explicit about using compulsory education as a tool to form a stratified society that would prevent “the poor” from being a threat to the utopian and “racially pure” world they wanted to build.

For example in 1901 Edward Ross published his book "Social Control" in which he states:

“Plans are underway to replace community, family, and church with propaganda, education, and mass media.. ..the State shakes loose from Church, reaches out to School.... People are only little plastic lumps of human dough.”

Or in 1919 Arthur Calhoun published his "Social History of the Family" in which he describes how the child was passing from its family "into the custody of community experts." He also predicted that in time we could expect to see public education "designed to check the mating of the unfit."

Where did the idea of eugenics come from? What other ideas were popular at the time that made it appealing to so many people?

From what I’ve studied about the time period, all this stuff, including eugenics and birth control, came from a literally racist and fairly deranged view of the world. They are all symptoms of the same mindset.

Large families are a powerful safety net for its members. When those families break down what happens? You have isolated and economically vulnerable individuals that are much easier to exploit and manipulate.

I understand that a random person on the internet probably isn’t going to change your mind about the Catholic church for many potential reasons.

That being said, I would argue that the Catholic church safeguards literally the only rationally consistent and ethically sound perspective of reality that we have.

There are teachings of the Church that are difficult to follow but, for the most part, that is because our modern world has organized itself around hedonism instead of loving God, serving God, and cultivating virtue.

As most people understood for thousands of years: cultivating virtue is actually the only path to the true freedom in life most people are looking for. Without pursuit of virtue the only alternative is to grow in slavery to a variety of hedonistic appetites.

To paraphrase St. Augustine:

The virtuous man is free even if he is a slave, the unvirtuous man is a slave even if he is a king.

My main concern is to show that "Birth control is also rooted in eugenics" is false.

I think I have done that.

Eugenics requires birth control, but there's a long history of birth control for family planning reasons which predates eugenics. Because sex is fun, while having another screaming baby might not be so fun.

I do not think your understanding comes from a solid reading of history. I think your primary source contains dubious scholarship, which you accept with too much trust.

In addition to my earlier comment, the Calhoun misquote you just now gave also comes from 'An Underground History Of American Education' by John Taylor Gatto. https://archive.org/details/AnUndergroundHistoryOfAmericanEd...

1) Just by reading the quote, it's suspicious because how does someone from 1901 use the term "mass media", which wasn't coined until 1923? https://www.etymonline.com/word/mass-media#etymonline_v_5420... .

Here is Ross's 1901 book "Social Control", https://archive.org/details/socialcontrolas04rossgoog/page/n... (it's a collection of a series of articles he previous published, also under the name 'Social Control').

It does not use the terms "media", and uses the term "medium" only twice, neither referring to communications media.

2) The only place I can find the quote "church with propaganda, education, and mass media" is from Gatto's book. The few other sources which mention it, including "The Atlantean Conspiracy" (described as "the ultimate encyclopedia exposing the global conspiracy from Atlantis to Zion") pretend to quote the original source but are actually quoting Gatto.

We know this because a) the quote is identical, b) it includes 'mass media', which doesn't exist in Ross, and c) the only place Ross uses 'propaganda' is "Dr. Holmes, a delicate humorist, seemed born to preach the propaganda of the clean shirt" at https://archive.org/details/socialcontrolas04rossgoog/page/n...

3) Further, "plastic lumps of human dough" is a misquote. The actual text from Ross is:

> The schooling of the young is a long-headed device to promote order, and does not get adopted till the group wakes up. At first it is the rare thinker who sees anything in it, and his arguments do not always prevail. Down to the Reformation, only the Greek philosophers and the Jewish rabbis had set forth the possibilities of education in respect to social order. Men trust the policeman and the priest sooner than the pedagogue. To collect little plastic lumps of human dough from private households and shape them on the social kneading-board, exhibits a faith in the power of suggestion which few peoples ever attain to. And so it happens that the rôle of the schoolmaster in the social economy is just beginning. The technique of belief and religion has been understood for thousands of years; but the technique of education is the discovery of yesterday— or, shall I say, to-morrow?

This quote is now a simile, not a metaphor, and it refers to the young, not "people".

Anyone using "People are only little plastic lumps" are copying from Gatto's misquote, and not using Ross's original work.

> From what I’ve studied about the time period

What you've studied appears to one book containing many errors, and publications by the Catholic Church.

You are absolutely correctly that eugenics was a mainstream component of educated, white, well-off progressive thought in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and nearly all of them white supremacists and firm believers in male patriarchy.

That does not mean everything from that time period came from "the same mindset", as you claim without any evidence.

Birth control is a tool. The mindset comes in how you use the tool.

One mindset says it should not be used at all. That is your mindset.

Another mindset says it should be voluntary, for example, as part of family planning by informed adults. That is my mindset.

A third says it should be involuntarily - the state should mandate birth control and use it to weed out certain characteristics. That is the mindset of the negative eugenicism that Sanger was opposed to.

You can believe the latter two are the same mindset, but you don't have the evidence. Well, in a way they are, if the mindset is "don't follow the teaching of the Catholic Church".

> compulsory education

In the US, compulsory education started in Massachusetts during the colonial era. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_School_Laws , made a universal requirement in the state by 1852.

You mean, I suspect, national compulsory education.

There are enough lies and mistruths about the history of the US education system that I don't want to wade into that muck.

> that is because our modern world has organized itself around hedonism instead of loving God

Hahahahah! And Satan sits on the throne in Rome, spreading lies as the anti-pope.

And the halls of Shinto temples are full of hedonism.

I am an atheist. The Catholic Church is a male supremacist organization, and I am a feminist. I have no interest in understanding the haberdashery behind the Emperor's new clothes that don't even exist.

Besides the poor scholarship in Gatto's citations, another problem in depending on Gatto as your main source is that Gatto has blind spots. Take:

> In 30 years of teaching kids rich and poor I almost never met a learning disabled child; hardly ever met a gifted and talented one either. Like all school categories, these are sacred myths, created by human imagination. They derive from questionable values we never examine because they preserve the temple of schooling.

IMO, that's cherry picking the conclusion that there is a 'temple of schooling.' I believe "gifted" set up to give better schooling to middle-class white students at a time education was forced to be integrated. For example, at the time Gatto was teaching, and quoting https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00220620.2022.20... :

] The implementation of gifted programmes in the 1970s provided a way for school divisions to circumvent many of the aims of desegregated schooling as called for in Brown v. Board of Education. This study examines the implementation of one such system in a Southern school district that saw schools close rather than integrate in the years preceding the founding of a segregated gifted programme known as Quest. Additionally, the study situates the founding of this gifted programme in a national social and legal context involving fears of educational stagnation and white flight from public school systems. Using primary and secondary sources, this study highlights the attitudes of national policymakers at work in the 1974 reauthorization of ESEA, which significantly limited school divisions abilities to integrate while also providing funds for gifted classrooms that segregated ‘exceptional’ children using racially and socioeconomically biased measures.

The idea of the white race is indeed a myth, and one which needs to die. And it's also a myth concerning social control - the myth that whites need to be in charge! But Gatto doesn't see it.

Now I'm going back to my hedonistic lifestyle of re-implementing 40 year old code.

Good luck on your code!

I do appreciate your research and willingness to have a conversation.

I think to some degree you yourself are cherry picking isolated data points and taking them out of context to support your point. It’s a straightforward approach to rhetorically defend your perspective and of course I’m guilty of doing the same thing.

The only reason I’m bringing it up is just to say: history happens in a context. Ideas don’t come out of a vacuum. It’s really important not to take something like “birth control” (or “atheism” for that matter) at face value without trying to understand the genesis of those concepts in society and the motivations of the people who made them a standard part of the modern world.

I really do appreciate your corrections and I don’t want to be presenting misinformation. Obviously that just discredits any points I would try to make.

I didn’t present a very solid case that “birth control is rooted in eugenics” and you had fair rebuttals for the points that I made. Granted, even if I personally lack the ability to make the argument clearly that doesn’t mean that it’s not true. But I understand that you don’t have any reason to think it’s true and that’s ok.

I would say that there is a fourth mindset to add to your taxonomy which is: not to mandate birth control but to attempt to achieve the same goal by dishonestly manipulating people into choosing to use birth control who would not otherwise have used it. This is what I believe has happened on a mass scale.

I used to be an atheist too! I grew up with people that are still atheists.

I also grew up in a relatively anti-Christian environment and picked up a lot of negative assumptions about Christianity that in hindsight don’t make much sense.

My experience of being an atheist is that it was the most dogmatic and intellectually dishonest view of the world I have encountered. What I mean by that is that there is a dogmatic “orthodoxy” you are required to believe that makes numerous truth claims about reality (and morality) without sufficient evidence.

Ironically it always ultimately falls back on social proof instead of empiricism (i.e. “well no one else thinks that” or ad hominem attacks) and members are not permitted to ask reasonable questions that do not support atheist dogma.

It was a horrible, oppressive and depressing way to understand myself and the world around me.

Now, despite making extraordinary claims about reality and God’s intervention in the world the Catholic church is actually the most intellectually honest culture that I have ever been a part of (and there are literally thousands of years of sincere, good hearted and intellectually honest geniuses you can learn from).

Catholicism is not the same as any Protestant christianity you might have encountered. The Protestant reformation and the “Enlightenment” both split from the Church at around the same time and each rejected 3 basic claims about reality that the Catholic church holds to be true (this is why Protestant christianity and atheism both have to rely on assertions of dogma to maintain their views):

1. Man is an intelligent and morally accountable agent

2. The world around us is fundamentally intelligible (because we are intelligent)

3. Everything in the world has a “telos” meaning a purpose that it is directed towards.

This might seem irrelevant to your life but if you want to be self-aware and moral about your behavior and beliefs this kind of stuff becomes essential. I guarantee that “thinking what most people believe is true” is not actually an effective compass in that regard.

I wish you all the best and I hope you apply your willingness to seek the truth in a consistent manner!

> My experience of being an atheist is that it was the most dogmatic and intellectually dishonest view of the world I have encountered.

Well bless your heart. You've already implied I'm degenerate, and now you're implying I'm dogmatic and immoral.

Lol, I’m sure you’re a nice person! Not trying to attack or disparage you personally in any way.

Just trying (poorly) to share the things I wish someone had told me 20 years ago. My personal experience has been that there are a set of confusing belief systems in this world that many people are victims of. These beliefs are logically inconsistent, they cause a lot of real personal suffering, and they are intellectually challenging to disentangle oneself from.

My understanding of reality is that God created your soul out of nothing and He loves you so much that He would be willing to suffer and die horribly even if it meant redeeming and reconciling solely your one soul to Him.

You have free will and the freedom to believe anything you want. There are different roads to God and diligence about the truth (which you seem to have) is one of them.

God bless you and thanks for the conversation!

I think you have learned this incorrect statement from 'An Underground History Of American Education' by John Taylor Gatto.

What you described matches what's published at https://archive.org/details/AnUndergroundHistoryOfAmericanEd... .

However, 1) Arnold Gessel did not write "The Family and the Nation". That 1909 book was written by Whetham and Whetham - https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.22800/page/n7/... .

2) That book does not mention the American Birth Control League, though it is definitely in favor of eugenics.

3) Gessel's eugenics quote comes from "The Village of a Thousand Souls" in The American Magazine, October 1913, at https://archive.org/details/american-magazine/American%20mag... .

> ... there is a real possibility that the State will soon make a systematic attempt to secure a registration of the unfit and prevent the mating of the unfit. Only the rankest pessimists and believers in noninterference will condone the increase of feeble-mindedness and insanity which is occurring everywhere in the villages of the land. We need not wait for the perfection of the infant science of eugenics before proceeding upon a course of supervision and segregation which will prevent the horrible renewal of this defective protoplasm that is contaminating the stream of village life.

The entire article is a call for state-controlled eugenics, and proposing that what is now called "negative eugenics" should start soon, without waiting until the field of eugenics is fully fleshed out.

See also "ARNOLD GESELL’S PROGRESSIVE VISION: Child Hygiene, Socialism and Eugenics", August 2011, History of Psychology 14(3):311-34 at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ben-Harris-6/publicatio... for a biography, historical context, the effect of the publication, and the distortions Gesell made in his telling.

4) That article does not mention the American Birth Control League.

5) Because it couldn't ... Sanger didn't found the American Birth Control League until 1921. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Birth_Control_League How could a 1909 book or 1913 article refer to something that wouldn't happen for years?

6) Sanger was against the state-imposed negative eugenics advocated by Gesell.

This makes your source highly suspect, and strongly suggests you do not know much about the history beyond that source.

Yup, I did get a lot of this info from Underground History of American Education.

Thank you for the citations! I appreciate your research into the topic.

I mean society is instituting racism based on past injustices, so it seems par for the course

Their entire lives have been lived with little privacy. Cameras are just a part of their everyday lives - in and outside of the home. Many have had their entire adolescence recorded and displayed as their parents trophies. And that doesn’t even count how surveilled they are online by companies seeking to make a few pennies off their attention.

I’d love to be surprised by this, but I’m not.

Not only the pictures, but also the trackers on their phones so that their parents can watch their every move, and the helicopter parenting that sees a kidnapper's hands on every steering wheel. How many of them already have Ring cameras to feed the police as well?

I bet if they asked the same (contextually biased) question in Germany it'd be under 1%. Some lessons have to be re-learned by every other generation.

There's already the camera in the laptop, the camera in the phone, the camera in the TV, the camera in the doorbell, the camera in the vacuum cleaner...

by their own study it's 29% and the question was "Would you favor or oppose the government installing surveillance cameras in every household to reduce domestic violence, abuse, and other illegal activity?"

Yeah this is a very weird headline.

it's the cato institute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cato_Institute

that's how tyranny works. if a large enough (like 15%) people are stupid enough to give up a basic right for a perceived safety, tyranny flourishes.

"would you oppose the government installing surveillance cameras in every househould?" me: Yes "but what if it were to reduce domestic violence?" me: STILL YES "but what if..." me: There is no BUTS, I oppose it for all reasons and forever.

as long as >1% of people are stupid enough to be willing to sell their basic freedoms for such a thing, the safety of my freedom is at risk.

What if government instituted an app, where if you didn’t regularly have your 24/7 tracking device on you with gps, gyroscope and speaker on you couldn’t enter any buildings or leave your house.

That was quite literally NYC, Ireland, and most of the “democracies” in the world the past few years.

What did you think that QR code pass was lol

My old man purchased a Huawei smartphone from China a few years back, I took a look at it last year as a potential hand-me-down and I noticed that a "Covid health" application system had been installed into the OS itself and couldn't be removed.

I had no choice but to junk it despite the excellent hardware underneath the hood.

Alternatively, when you pose questions using push-poll style phrasing, you get push-poll style skewed responses that are not necessarily indicative of how many people would really support specific policies being enacted. That's why push polls are generally considered bad practice and a tool of people more interested in getting their preferred answer rather than discovering what people really think.

This is the somewhat rare case of a push poll designed to elicit a response those running the poll think is bad, so they can complain about it, but the principle is the same. "Would you support X to prevent [Y that most people think is bad]?" is a garbage question, because saying "no" immediately suggests the person answering the question doesn't actually object to "Y". You personally may be comfortable implying to a stranger that you don't care about reducing domestic violence, but enough people are weirded out by the implication that they'll answer in a way that allows Cato to rile up their target audience.

Of course supporting actual policies can work the same way, but polls aren't really a good way to measure this because there is zero cost in answering a poll compared to actually supporting something like a new law. It's one thing to tell a pollster you support a measure designed to combat domestic violence because you don't want to give the impression you don't care about the issue, it's another to support the measure in reality because now you have to consider all the other implications.

Also this is hardly my biggest objection, but Cato predictably labels the Democratic party as "Democrat" in their results chart. In my experience this is remarkably accurate Shibboleth for obnoxious right-wing political actors and fundamentally unserious people.

> that's how tyranny works. if a large enough (like 15%) people are stupid enough to give up a basic right for a perceived safety, tyranny flourishes

Is that how tyranny works? Asking because I honestly don’t know. When the Americans rebelled against King James, was tyranny taking place because the majority of people were stupid and accepted safety by giving up some rights?

What about nazi germany? Did the German people support hitler because he provided them safety?

Or the original use of the word - did the Greeks accept tyrants as long as they provided safety?

As if that question makes the idea less insane.

Very slanted question which isn't surprising given that it's Cato. Focusing the question on the government aspect might get this kind of age-divided result but what came immediately to mind to me were religious 'shameware' apps used to spy on teens[1]. Nosy ring-doorbell neighbors and American Beauty style policing is popular in the US.

What is generational though is the acceptance of the upsides of transparency through tech. Smartphone footage has become pretty important in documenting abuse from all kinds of sources so I don't really find the shifting attitude among younger people so surprising. Camera surveillance isn't just seen as dystopian but more as a means to bring things to light.

[1]https://www.wired.com/story/covenant-eyes-anti-porn-accounta...

government camera: bad.

Big Tech conglomerate mega corporation camera: good.

Often that's the (false) choice being presented; and somehow "no camera at all" isn't on the menu.

Jesus fuck, what?! Please tell me 30% of people under 30 aren't that fucking stupid.

I doubt that this is true on the basis of how absurd it is. Who knows though, it would fit with and continue the theme of civilization being in-part the process of mankind domesticating itself.

I wouldn't trust a CATO study.

Demography is destiny

is this what they call dog whistle

What the 1984?!

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