The Criminalization of Everyday Life
tomdispatch.com
tomdispatch.com
We're not just afraid to be anti-authoritative, we're institutionalized since our birth in schools and the concept of control is in embedded in every aspect of life (such as in language found in politics, school work, or newspapers).
Mass-surveillance is just a more direct implementation of "panopticon" [2] applied to everyday life, existing at all times. Having committed a crime is no longer the requirement to be imprisoned, whether physically or mentally.
http://www.amazon.com/Discipline-Punish-Birth-Prison-Vintage...
Why, and how did we let this happen? Look no further : http://www.digitaltrends.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Holl...
'War-nography', islamophobia, narco-phobia... and the script goes on. When the masses believe that they are in danger, they will stand behind those in power for protection.
There's surprisingly little difference between Joseph Goebbels and Hollywood.
Why is it that those movies attract capital?
Even the most mainstream of Islamic voices tend to espouse positions on women's rights, sexual identity and tolerance which would be pilloried and decried if they came from our typical WASPy overlords.
There is an incredibly fractional chance that Sharia will take hold. That's what the OP was saying.
It's not a real threat.
Which, depressingly, might be true. :P
Foucault's style is (possibly deliberately) obtuse, and his knowledge of history dubious at best, per Keith Windschuttle's book The Killing of History: http://www.amazon.com/The-Killing-History-Theorists-Murderin... .
It's the question of why we all let this happen without any resistance
Because it's easy, because most of the time it doesn't affect us, and because it's hard for one voter to fix the problem. Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter is very good on this subject. Most people (and voters) don't even know how many Senators their state has, or their terms, let alone why complex subjects like privacy are important. Based on Caplan's book, I think ignorance is a more reasonable explanation than a fear of being anti-authoritarian or an institutionalized mindset.
a) that fully rational voters instating representative politicians into power will result in good policies (that benefit voters)?
b) that it's possible for voters to become less ignorant and more rational on average, within the current system, in order to reach the outcome of a)?
But, there is a machine dedicated to disinformation. In the aftermath of Citizens United, we are seeing the rise of dark money to the point where billion dollar campaigns are imminent. Combine that with the consolidation of media, the fall of investigative journalism, and a 24 hour news cycle which has devolved news into infotainment, and it is little wonder that the populace is woefully ignorant. Actually, ignorant is too generous. They are actively misinformed, in that they think they know.
So, I would say no, the current system makes it all but impossible for voters to make rational choices, or even to identify what the real choices are.
The solution is bankruptcy, to be able to start over from scratch.
I believe it has more to do with the unfettered rise of the military-industrial complex (including banking/finance), which has siezed near complete control of our political machinery. We have become a corporate state, wherein politicians are fully purchasable and policy is made for a narrow set of interests vs. for the people.
If this is not changed, then these same powers will sieze control again after a bankruptcy reset.
USSR bankruptcy caused plenty of revolutions in the whole region.
People are calm and don't care - exactly like the article implies - till there are three missing meals. Hungry stomach makes them go to the streets and revolt. Not another news about the Government going crazy.
To me, one of the major takeaways from Foucault is his renouncement of the "repression hypothesis". In a nutshell, he proposes to understand power not as a binary relation between oppressors and the oppressed, but as a much more molecular system that spans all sectors of society, and whose modus operandi is not primarily repression, but rather motivation (making someone speak, articulate desires, etc).
Deleuze's "Postscript on the Societies of Control", (https://files.nyu.edu/dnm232/public/deleuze_postcript.pdf, also linked a bit further down), written in the late 1980s, can serve as a very lucid short introduction to (and escalation of) that idea. Worth the read, it's really just five pages.
Deleuze's postscript... "metastable states coexisting in one and the same, like a universal system of deformation."
That's your counter-argument?
Every discipline has technical terminology. It always sounds weird to those who aren't involved.
Disclaimer: I'm moderately obsessed with Deleuze.
I agree that there are lots of things that are worth understanding but can't be expressed in rigorously logical terms. Things like the subjective experience of falling in love or laughing at a joke or the value of behaving toward others with compassion. Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.
And I really wish postmodernists would stop hiding behind the banner of "the humanities". Analytic philosophy, history, classics, religious studies, and art history are all capable of making meaningful and even true statements from time to time, and most of them can be made comprehensible to the typical person.
As for the humanities thing, yes, I agree. Just as physicists can make many clear statements that resonate with people who don't even know math, there are many aspects of the humanities that are accessible and clear to people who have never studied theory. Your disdain for higher level theory would also make it difficult for you to enjoy certain texts by people like Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel, none of whom are "postmodernists".
I don't think you can categorize a philosopher/historian in such crude terms. For one, this pressuposes that there's some "modern practice" of history, which makes it incompatible or difficult for practical reasons to use Foucault's theory anymore. That's not the case in the least -- modern academic discourse in such matters refers to Foucault all the time.
(And even if the comparison was apt, I'd still take SmallTalk over, say, Java that replaced it, any time of day).
>That's your counter-argument?
No, his counter-argument is a lucid essay, of which you extracted, out of context (and cut in half), a small, non characteristic, phrase that you find troubling. Might as well extract some oneliner from type theory full of heavy math notation to "prove" that Haskell is impossible to learn.
In fact, the paragraph the excerpt belongs to is crystal clear, wether you agree with it's contents or not.
What he says in that part is that in older societies (those based on disclipline), a person moved from one place of instilling discipline to the other (from school, to army service, to vocational education, to the factory, etc). In contrast to that, in modern societies, all those distinct places and stages have been merged (the school is also like a prison, the workplace is also like the army, etc).
The nation-state can be thought of as a superorganism, and this requires complex systems of feedback and control. We have resource inputs, which are processed via the churn of economic activity (this is analogous to cellular respiration). This activity sustains the citizens (cells) while also providing resources via taxes to the government (the executive control / brain / etc). The government, in turn, uses those resources to sustain itself and exert control over the body-state, as well as powering the police/military for internal and external defense (somewhat analogous to the immune system).
So this is all a very complicated machine, the nation-state feeding off resources and in turn providing for its own sustenance and protection. It is, as Hobbes noted, basically a giant form of life.
Of course, this idea can be taken much further (the NSA is essentially a somatosensory system) but I'll just leave it at that for now.
I know that's satisfying to some people. But it seems like not the useful insight given a state the clearly has asymetrically greater power than the populace?
To come back the original article, how the heck does "everything is power" illuminate a situation of Campus Security are using a fricken armored personnel carrier when their job is stopping underaged kids from drinking???
Is your assumption true? That is, leaving aside the fact that the police are ostensibly part of the populace, how would some police and a single APC pacify even a couple of blocks of citizens without the cooperation of those citizens?
Personally, and I realize that this is opinion, I do not believe your assumption is true, and as such is a pretty good example of why the ideas you are critiquing are useful- it is difficult to see the larger system of power described by the ability or inability to motivate people.
Assuming that the police have no restriction in the use of force, it would be very simple for them to pacify a rather large area with an APC and Police. All they have to do is kill a few people who are out of line, and the rest will cower.
No single or small group of citizens in the US really has the ability to stand up to even a single measly APC. The firepower required to stop one is beyond what anybody outside the US enforcement structure can realistically obtain. You may be able to limit its movement with well constructed roadblocks, but harming the vehicle or its passengers with an assortment of shotguns, handguns and IEDs is not reasonable to expect (given they were explicitly designed to withstand these threats).
This is one aspect of sort of complicity with power that's being discussed. Sometimes, people decide en masse that a certain way of life is worth dying for, so we know there are other responses to armed pacification.
Not that this is always a bad thing. It's pretty great that most of us obey the state's injunction to not wantonly kill each other.
But on the other hand I think it's more salient to understand that, say, the students shot down at Kent State were murdered and the general population of the country was on the side of the National Guard.... that's the kind of complicity that most people live under, the same complicity that believes people executed by police for non-compliance deserve their fates.
On one hand, it probably really is a good thing that we are generally aligned toward lawfulness, but at the same time it does make us complicit when the people charged with upholding that law use it towards criminal ends-- which is quite common in the US.
If you actually read the thread up your position on it, you'd know that you were equating an unwilling to challenge tanks rolling through your streets due a fear of getting shot with an approval of such tanks rolling through your streets.
It seems to me that intellectuals spouting this kind of nonsense wide-up complicit to power and not in a it's-OK-cause-everyone-is, kind of way.
Campus police don't "just kill a few people".
No, it's not true. The state has vastly inferior power compared to the populace at large, at least in the U.S. However, the state is able to, in most cases, choose when and how it engages it's enemies so that it faces an inferior force on it's own terms.
Further, what you call "cooperation" I think would largely would be a lack of organization. The ability to organize can grant immense power, and when people talk about the power of large crowds like this I think there's usually an unstated assumption of "if they were to spontaneously act in great--or at least adequate--coordination." I don't think it's fair to assess power in terms of something like a body count, and to ignore the power granted by organization.
Because that's not a credible threat. Nuclear weapons are antithetical to the goals of a government in conflict with it's own people.
I generally agree, but my larger point is that it isn't a good idea to assess power in terms of firepower.
That critique is not even worthy of an answer -- it's basically a conservative "oh, all these new fangled lefty theorists have ruined our field" cry.
If someone were to write and (crucially) popularize a version that reads the way people explain Foucault, things would be different.
Foucault was French. French (and Europeans that are non British in general) do not write theory and history the way anglosaxons do. At least most of them doesn't. If you want to learn from them, you have to study their idioms. You cannot just point at it and say it's unquotable or alien (or, well, you can, but it's not fair).
It's like living all your life in C like languages, and being put off by functional programming and parentheses in LISP or Scheme. It's another way of doing things. If you had started with that, you'd find it perfectly normal. Since you didn't, it takes some time adjusting and absorbing the material and culture.
For me, a European, those are perfectly fine and understandable. And I also understand the use of metaphor and poetic language they often use to make a specific point. The anglosaxon idea for that is that you should write in a way that the local butcher or stock brocker can also understand -- which constraints you to only writing for issues that a stock brocker can fathom (or only handling extremely elaborate issues at that level of discourse).
To put it in programming terms, the anglosaxon way is like the C way -- they don't like "magic", unfamiliar notation, higher level code, and DSLs. And they feel that "worse is better". Which, I guess, makes the European way more LISPy.
I think the key difference here is that code actually has to compile, so no matter how clever your lispy magic gets it's still grounded by that reality. Foucault (and Barthes, Saussure et al) are unencumbered by the constraint of their prose actually having to be parseable by anyone. Their prose is better thought of as an artistic performance than a functional machine.
Nail on head. The relationship between the words of the above and reality is similar to the relationship between a painting of a landscape and the real landscape. It's not that the painting is not valuable in itself, but it would be a mistake to think that it says anything about how the landscape actually works
The label Anglo-Saxon is an absurd, racist simplification which undermines your argument. There is no coherent Anglo-Saxon way - except as it exists in the imagination of the French intelligentsia as a foil to their clearly more sophisticated approach. There is more to the world than is dreamt of in that philosophy of opposition of thoughtful Europe against shopkeeper Anglo-Saxons.
Trick question. Every state has the same number of Senators - 2.
(In contrast to congressmen, where the number changes with population.)
(And yes, I can believe, unfortunately, that not every citizen knows this.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Senator
did we all forget that every state has a Senate as well?
> A state senator is a member of a state's Senate, the upper house in the bicameral legislature of 49 U.S. states, or a legislator in Nebraska's one house State Legislature.
I'd rather draw parallel to Ancient Rome and its citizens. As long as there were "Games" in town and bread for free nobody cared. Once the Rome was on fire they woke up. For some time.
The situation is hopeless. The only solution is when US runs out of money. Goes bankrupt. Which is quite possible. Once USD isn't the world currency, the country defaults. And then there is no money for wars, no money for swat teams in every little town, no money for surveillance. Those things will still be there but on much lesser scale.
The US has currently the biggest debt of any empire in the history of the world. Impossible to repay. Once the world currency status moves from USD to Yuan, the Government will try to use all that military/police power to "maintain order", the thing is the policemen and soldiers won't have money, there will be no gas even for military, etc. Exactly like USSR when it collapsed -- bankrupted by all the wars and stupid policies.
Why would it? The US dollar not being the world currency wouldn't drop the value of US industrial output, but it would (presuming that it dropped the value of the dollar due to reduced global demand for US dollars) reduce the value of US debt.
Which would be bad for entities with incomes or assets denominated in US dollars, but good for entities with debts denominated in US dollars, and neutral for entities whose income was dependent, say, on US output.
> The US has currently the biggest debt of any empire in the history of the world.
In absolute terms, maybe, but relative to the size of its economy, its not even the largest of countries in the world today.
> Impossible to repay.
This is neither true nor meaningful; as long as the debt can be serviced, it doesn't actually need to be repaid (and could, in fact, grow in absolute terms over time without limit without harm so long as output was growing apace.)
90% of all USD in circulation isn't even in the US borders. Isn't used for the needs of the US industry/economy. Thanks to this the FED can print, print, print into the oblivion, getting back just 10% of inflation it created, while the world gets the 90%. Ever heard the famous: “The dollar is our currency, but your problem” by John Connally, President Nixon’s Treasury Secretary, to a delegation of Europeans worried about exchange rate fluctuations?
Now the ponzie scheme grew (as they always have to) so it is not only Europeans, but also Arabs and Asians, but the days of the USD debt ponzie scheme are counted. There are just these many losers on the planet to buy into it.
Now, just imagine these additional USD coming from all over the world to the US. Hyperinflation?
And just a single simple event could cause that: Chinese tying their Yuan to gold. Who on Earth will want your t-bill backed by the most indebted government on the planet, when they can get it backed by gold and the biggest creditor government in the world?
>Which would be bad for entities with incomes or assets denominated in US dollars, but good for entities with debts denominated in US dollars, and neutral for entities whose income was dependent, say, on US output.
Right. Your debt would vanish. I think that's the only good thing from the hyper inflationary perspective. The debt is USD denominated, so yes, it makes sense. Again, from China perspective, a little price to pay to have world reserve currency instead of the US having it.
>This is neither true nor meaningful; as long as the debt can be serviced, it doesn't actually need to be repaid (and could, in fact, grow in absolute terms over time without limit without harm so long as output was growing apace.)
If we use the official government formula of calculating inflation from Ronald Reagan years we are at 10% today. We've been for at least 3 years now. And what is the return on the t-bill? Again, it might be true, that at least you know you'll be repaid even if it means you'll loose. But t-bills are in fact in a bubble territory now. What will you do when interest rates rise? If interest rates are at 7% we're talking about more than 50% of tax revenue going just to service the debt. Just to pay the premium. Over 50% of the tax revenue! And what if we have to have it at the levels from the beginning of 1980s? At 18% ? We won't even be able to service it. And in 1980s most of the debt was hold by the Americans. So the money was going back to the US economy. Currently most of the debt is held by foreigners. Can you imagine the impossibility of a political situation were over 50% of the tax revenue goes to foreigners in the middle of a financial crisis? And it is just at 7% interest rates. The FED effectively can't rise the rates. There is no way they can do it. You think this is acceptable like forever for t-bills holders?
This is not why the Roman empire collapsed. In fact the term "collapse" itself implies some weird sudden event, rather then a gradual evolution over the course of hundreds of years into the various entities which became the forerunners of nation-states today.
The Byzantine empire - east Rome - has no definitive end, for example.
Like UK -- it has declined from an Empire Status, but did not collapse. I agree - the same with Roman Empire.
There are numerous other civilizations (for instance, dynastic China) that have suffered decline rather than outright collapse. Rome was not one of them though; the entire Western Empire broke apart. It's just not a good example.
And yet, I agree, there are historians who will claim that The Holy Roman Empire had nothing to do with Roman Empire. Still it is debatable. There is no correct/incorrect here. For me the Holy Roman Empire was the continuation of the Roman Empire.
It's sad/funny because this is the same answer for every state.
This is a false equivalence that keeps being brought up on HN. Yes, authoritarian government have mass surveillance, but the converse isn't necessarily true.
The only very clear example of the government getting more authoritarian is in the TSA. (where they now are fondling our balls for our "safety") and to a smaller extent the DHS, prison authorities, and NSLs - smaller in the sense that it has a smaller impact on society.
We're still a nation of laws, and just because the government knows more, doesn't mean it can actually do more.
Imagine for a minute that the president himself personally hated your guts and wanted to make your life miserable. Now imagine he also knows everything about you. What advantage does that really give him? Okay, if you didn't pay your taxes or something, then he could screw you over. But assuming you're law abiding, other than making your traveling an absolutely nightmare there isn't a whole lot he can do.
You can go into fantasy land and say he'll send the CIA to go blackmail you with information about all the tranny midget porn you watch - but lets stay within the framework of what is legal for the government to do.
People aren't afraid of surveillance because it has no impact on our lives. The government isn't actually misusing the data on a large scale. That's why we didn't know about all this NSA stuff for so long.
Ironically, now that the surveillance is out in the open "they" can try to become authoritarian. And my bet is that if they start trying people will go ape-shit. They'll all get voted out and everything would get rolled back.
Perhaps (which is still arguable). But that's not the case here, because we have both.
From the Patriot Act to the SWAT-ization of everyday police operations, and from the TSA to the massively increased legal overload (compared to 1960's laws and practices) and down to the rise of the huge (private) prison business and the constant wars, what more proof exactly do you need?
>People aren't afraid of surveillance because it has no impact on our lives. The government isn't actually misusing the data on a large scale.
They don't have to. It's enough for them to misuse those in a tiny scale to affect everybody's life. When the next Martin Luther King/Mother Jones/Rosa Parks/Harvey Milk/Aaron Swartz (and thousands of other, less known figures that fought for change) etc appears, they can crush him at will, and everybody will be poorer for it.
If you think the existing framework is flawed (and I would strongly agree), then definitely fight against it. Vote for people that support your view, and write to your representatives.
The fight against surveillance is essentially defeatist and fear mongering. It assumes the government will turn evil and it'll start trying to make your life miserable. It's all part of a collective psychosis. We think that it's an inevitability that one day the US will turn into an evil dystopian nazi regime.
"The fight against surveillance is essentially defeatist and fear mongering. It assumes the government will turn evil and it'll start trying to make your life miserable. It's all part of a collective psychosis. We think that it's an inevitability that one day the US will turn into an evil dystopian nazi regime."
I think that history disagrees with you. Have you ever heard the phrase: all that's required for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing? People questioning the reach of government surveillance are good people doing something.
There is nothing inherently evil in surveillance. In and of itself it's a neutral thing. It's what you do with it that is evil or good.
First I'd say that I don't really see how the NAZIs gain power because of surveillance. Hitler didn't seize power because the SA had some intricate intelligence apparatus. Nor was it the case for the the fascists in Italy, nor Spain. I would argue it was for them simply a tool for the consolidation of power and their fight against subversion.
Just like - in la-la land - if the US government were to turn evil, they would use surveillance to oppress the people. But at that point it's "too-late". The oppression comes first, and then the surveillance to back it up.
"I think it's rather more that the history of states turning fascist..."
I think maybe the larger issues is that the "cyclicality" of history is really more about people seeing patterns where there are none (and historians justifying their jobs). Virtually all the examples we return too are from the beginning of the 20th century. Somehow because of how horrible WW2 was we feel that this may happen again if we aren't careful.
But in reality, history doesn't really "repeat itself" as the old says goes. The NAZI arose during a period of extreme nationalism. There is no reason to believe that this will necessarily happen again. For instance it didn't happen before the end of the 19th century since nationalism is a relatively new concept. And we don't for examples anticipate the return of communism, or disco.
I think at this point in our cultural evolution a return to tyranny is simply impossible. We have so much precedent of the success of democracy and our thinking on human rights has evolved to a point where this is simply unsustainable
to close with some data:
http://thediplomat.com/2013/02/13/5-ways-china-could-become-....
"Statistical analysis shows that authoritarian regimes become progressively more unstable (and democratic transitions more likely) once income rises above $1,000 (PPP) per capita. When per capita income goes above $4,000 (PPP), the likelihood of democratic transitions increases more dramatically. Few authoritarian regimes, unless they rule in oil-producing countries, can survive once per capita income hits more than $6,000 (PPP)."
No it is not. Being watched changes the behavior of the watched. Dissent is less, if the incentives are that way, that dissenting hurts your future choices.
There are so much studies showing the dangers of a society being watched and of watchers not controlled, fueled by legal powers.
Historically speaking it was the way you described, that oppression came first, surveillance followed as a means to an end. Securing the oppressing leaders.
So surveillance is a dangerous thing even without oppressive governments using the data. Just being watched is enough to undermine healthy democratic dissent.
It's a matter of the additional power granted to the government... in exchange for what? An insignificant decrease in the likelihood that I am killed by terrorists?
"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. When there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws."
I think what you need to fight then is the absurd amount of laws on the books. I don't think we're close to the point you're describing. Sure cops overlook J-walking and driving 5 mph over the speed limit, but that's minor in the grand scheme of things. I think if the government found out ever law I'd broke... I'd probably have to pay a large amount of fines for all the stuff I've torrented, and maybe quite a few speeding tickets. But you've got to understand that if everyone that speeded and torrented was caught, the system of punishment would have to be completely different. The punishment - right or wrong - is scaled inversely to the chance that you will get caught. As an example: If they saw each time you went over 65 mph, you'd probably be dinged 5 bucks, not 100+.
In a sense it would make the system a lot more fair.
This is incorrect, surveillance (observation) is inherently participatory. It is not a neutral act.
The American right represented something totally different in the 1990s. So much so that when September 11th occurred, for a brief moment some speculated it could be right-wing terrorists.
The George W Bush administration through propaganda was able to transform those that had just years earlier been strongly anti-interventionist in to supporting interventionism. The same group that rallied for years on shrinking the government was suddenly applauding the addition of new federal agencies. The final term was capped off by a massive government redistribution of $1 trillion of wealth.
The exact same thing happened when Barack Obama was elected President. The left was so neutralized it appeared to have never existed.
Where to start? Target astro-turfing. Fake political organizations such as the elusive tea party and Barack Obama's Organizing For Action. These groups hijack causes for the purpose of gaining and holding political power. Voter mind share and physical effort are utilized as an engine that supports a fire hose of new laws and a highly profitable revolving door capitalism.
This question has been posed long before Foucault. For instance in "Discourse on Voluntary Servitude" written in 1552 and surprisingly contemporary.
The reasons acquiescence seems an acceptable behavior are:
1. Most people are rarely inconvenienced by arbitrary overkill. It is persons deemed "undesirable" (appearance or manner) that are subjected to disportionate punishment on a routine basis that makes the overkill seem acceptable to them. It is often shocking to learn what people have been forced to endure.
2. There is a modern concept that the government is the only legitimate holder of the absolute monopoly of violence, which necessitates compliant "good" people, which should be helpless and defenseless. This also requires justifying one's business and unlimited access to search physical person, property and digital life, so as to have "nothing to hide." But it's only the fool that hands over the keys to their own destruction by persecution by a voluminous and arbitrary legal bureaucracy.
3. The majority and privileged agree by consent through silence to the ends that the police are "correctly flushing society" of those they deem "undesirable." In their view: "If that's you, too bad (overkill is legitimized, and you're not important so it doesn't matter what we do to you anyhow).
What's bothersome is that a police department is allowed to do this. That DoD rules don't prohibit selling/giving military equipment to police departments. That state legislatures don't prohibit it. A police department, like any organization, is always going to amass all the power/capability it can. Where are the people who are supposed to be limiting and regulating it?
Now, what could be a workable approach...
Systems and results are surely quite important but we still have individuals in the picture, so we want to pay attention to them as well.
Or, in other words, stop blamming the system, and start making it work.
1) The positions you are atalking about really don't have all that much power, and 2) Assuming that the checks aren't magical external impersoal forces, the people doing the checking actually exert the real power.
I see the need of a society for people making harsh decisions. Sometimes the utilitarian greater good needs the suffering of the few to come into existence.
The problem is, when it is turned on its head, so that the greater majority suffers a little bit (financially, or otherwise) for the benefit of the smaller minority. And that is, what our current system of lobbying/economics/politics sadly seems designed to achieve.
Well, that's not too surprising. Every party along the chain that has the power to say Yes or No, from the weapon manufacturers, to the US legislature awarding funding, to the DoD, to the state legislatures, to the local police departments, have an obvious incentive to say Yes. The party that has the incentive to say No is the civilian population, but you're fooling yourself if you think they actually have political power. Maybe they should vote harder next time.
But you're indignation shall not brook political engagement! So that's...something.
Yet everyone else does vote and then wonders why their government doesn't represent them. What exactly makes that a better choice?
My little city has one of those tanks and used it down the street from my home a couple years ago. Couple broke up, guy goes out, gets drunk, comes home, mostly but not entirely passed out on couch, refuses to leave. There exists a deer hunting rifle in the closet, which never left the closet so far as I know, but she wanted him punished for his marriage transgression, so report goes out he's in the house, and there's a gun in the house. Next thing you know there's a swat team with a tank in the front lawn. Never turn down a good safe PR opportunity. Needless to say he's not leaving the house, he's not too happy about getting dumped and he's way too drunk to stand up anyway. They wait a couple hours until he passes out, then smash open the doors and windows and taze him repeatedly, pretty much just for fun, to be the bullies they are. Not the most inhumane thing imaginable but still pretty stomach churning to listen to his screams on the scanner. Those brave warriors sure had their "fun" with a semi-conscious unarmed drunk guy that day. Plenty of speeches later about defending the public and being tough on crime. This is not Detroit by the way... this is the second wealthiest suburb of what used to be the tenth largest city in the country (well, tenth largest a long time ago).
In the old days, the drunk driving would have been washed over, maybe, maybe not, and he'd cool off in the drunk tank overnight at jail. Probably a disturbing the peace ticket, unsure if the soon to be ex-wifey had a restraining order or not at that time. The modern way involves militaristic force and judge jury executioner style punishment. In all fairness the wifey got some punishment too as the cops smashed in "her" houses windows, and those aren't cheap.
I've also seen the tank used around town when serving warrants. It costs a lot to maintain, you need to use it as much as possible for budget justification. So here's your summons for skipping jury duty, delivered by APC. And I'm not kidding.
Its mostly an intimidation tool.
http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/2004-08-05/news/dog-day-after...
The first SWAT team was established in 1964. They have grown considerably in the past few years and with their growth they are being used more and more for very simple reasons, to execute simple warrants for example.
Example: http://www.salon.com/2013/07/07/%E2%80%9Cwhy_did_you_shoot_m...
This man had a SWAT team raid his house for gambling $2000 on a college football game, and he ended up dead. Was a friggin SWAT team needed for a gambling arrest!???
There's a hit to their public image too. When your home or car is burgled you don't want to see a tank.
And, as toomuchtodo hints at, heavily arming a police force leads to those guns being used. Ignoring "bad guys" for a moment, shooting innocent dogs of innocent people is probably a bad thing. Shooting innocent bystanders is probably a bad thing.
http://www.popehat.com/2013/12/05/nypd-baby-you-know-we-love...
Obvious Popehat bias, but still, it's pretty alarming.
True but it's really no different than a truck or existing police vehicles cost-wise. And it's free. In fact it looks pretty similar to police vehicles already in use: http://i.imgur.com/DQFJESy.jpg
>And, as toomuchtodo hints at, heavily arming a police force leads to those guns being used.
Perhaps, but this is a vehicle, not a gun. It's just a big bullet proof truck.
First, it's not all about the money. Second, the tools you use, shape your practice ("If you have a hammer", etc).
Those tanks only reinforce the idea of the militarization of the police forces. Next time, they'll be tempted to use it to crack down some student shit-down or such. Or go bust some small time drug dealer. Perhaps killing a few innoncents in the process.
See, for example: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/08/swat-t...
The military spends a massive amount of money for maintenance - now the police can do that, too! Very cool, except you pay for it and they'll need more money.
APCs use a lot more fuel, have more expensive parts and need special training to operate = more money from the local budget (= more taxes).
Next thing, they'll be buying jets and drones for $10 each and spending millions on their maintenance.
If you have a tank, you don't need to negotiate a peaceful surrender.
Think about how Icelandic cops are wringing their hands over killing their very first person ever, in their entire history. Now think about American cops driving tanks over someone's family dog on the way to punching a hole in a house and using flashbangs and tasers indiscriminately on the people inside.
It was a mistake to give Barney Fife even the one bullet.
What's depressing is that it's starting to look like they were right.
Edit: from the downvotes, I can only assume that I've offended the Bigfoot fans.
Separately, as a karma strategy, it makes sense to upvote something that you reply to (regardless of whether you agree or disagree) as it tends to make your reply higher up (because the parent comment is higher up) and get more visibility which in theory should result in more karma.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richter_magnitude_scale#Example...
People have been well conditioned to believe that their governments are benevolent, do good deeds and that misconduct can be alleviated by stricter law enforcement and electing better leaders.
Anyone who doubts this is a "conspiracy theorist".
Ok then so how many "tinfoil-hat type rantings" have not come true?
It's easy to say "I had a feeling I should have bought that stock" without acknowledging all the stocks that you didn't buy that didn't go up in price. Or the ones you did that didn't go up in price.
A safe bet would be: many, many more.
But does that make the ones that have any less troubling?
Secret courts, secret prisons, bit of wiretapping, all part of everyday life.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112104/
Sure, X-Files had boogie men, big baddies, conspiracies. In Nowhere Man the evil was ubiquitous, bureaucratic, banal, and terrifying.
I think, "wow, this person is literally dupable without limit."
Suppose someone rises to power with little regard for legislative oversight and activates the sleeping military at home. It might start with a real (or faked) terror event coordinated across several major cities. It wouldn't take much at all, 5-10 cities, and suddenly: 1. Internet & cell communications are shut down 2. a national state of emergency is declared 3. A curfew is issued 4. Dissidents are squashed via a military police force with little recourse themselves. 5. Everyone is required to have location-aware implants "for safety."
With a little fear, a government could take full, permanent control of their citizens via aggressive laws and more aggressive enforcers. Would it even take two weeks?
Or do you really think that the police in the U.S. are equivalent to a disciplined, no-questions-asked unit of the Federal government?
(I don't think a majority of the military could be encouraged to act directly against the citizens of the U.S., never mind the police (preempting snide replies, against the people in a nationally organized manner))
It's an interesting hypothetical scenario which exploits the good intentions of the police and military to do evil.
I am not convinced it is plausible.
What happens next?
My thought would be that you just need the presidency and maybe six high ranking military officers. You then declare a presidential address where you announce that you're declaring yourself dictator for life. If anyone objects, you'll nuke Moscow. Of course, Russia will respond by annihilating the entire US, so objecting to the take over is essentially a death sentence.
Let the citizens have their guns. They can't shoot an ICBM.
The problem is, the newly-appointed tyrant would need everyone in the military to play along with the blackmail. All it would take is a few rogue Air Force pilots to shoot down that ICBM.
How does any tyrant do the things they do without enough people willing to go along with it?
Actually, your idea of rogue Air Force pilots shooting down an unscheduled launch of an ICBM is classic B-movie material. As long as there are three pilots and there's some love triangle sub-plot involved. Plus, one of them has to die in some meaningless and tragic way.
Queue complete bullshit speech by sufficiently aristocratic looking political figure about lessons hard learned and tests successfully overcome.
Swelling music, much tribalism, wow.
Roll credits.
At least that is what is happening today...
(Some other commenters suggest the police is more loyal to the local citizenry, in which case weaponizing the police could be seen as providing a counterbalancing armed force that could defend against a military assault on the populace)
Personally, I'm not concerned about either scenario.
Mysteriously, this didn't stop Saddam Hussein ruling for decades.
It should also be noted that most discriminatory and tyrannical regimes selectively arm or disarm segments of their populations, so as to effect greater control and stability. If one quickly examines the "Jim Crow" laws of the southern US states, it is easy to find many which were targeted at disarming the black population and others (, making the minorities vulnerable to lynching).
edit the DA dismissed the charges but the police chief thinks the arrest was justified.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/12/04/charges...
Interview with the coach (he seems like a really nice guy):
http://www.infowars.com/kids-arrested-waiting-for-school-bus...
Obey the cop and get suspended... or obey the teacher and go to jail.
Just leaving these kids in no-win situations. SOMEONE has to be willing to listen and hear the kids out.
Either the cop has to hear them out, and then say "OK, well I'll just keep an eye on you until your teacher comes."
Or the teacher has to hear them out, and then say "Well, OK, it was my fault for telling you guys to stand there so I'm not going to suspend anyone this time."
But you can't put kids in a situation like that and then say... "It's YOUR fault!"
That's insanity. This wasn't ANY of these kids' fault.
They were going to a basketball game not school so they probably wouldn't get suspended but they were expected to be there. Plus they wanted to be there. It was according to the coach the normal place they caught the bus for games.
Yeah... I guess that makes it a little worse for the cops.
My only point was that this is a problem that should have been settled between the teacher(s) and the cop(s). They should have communicated better. Now if the teacher TRIED to communicate and the cop ignored him... yeah... that's a problem too.
I mean, adults need to work together to solve problems where children are concerned... not get in pissing contests to see who's is bigger. This is an issue where, I would think, it's obvious that the schools and the police should be communicating about what's going to happen with respect to transportation.
But you can't set up transportation. Communicate the arrangements to parents and students. Then show up and arrest all of the students for following your instructions. That's just a poorly run school district AND police department really. Actually... probably more a poorly run city.
And to arrest the kids because of the bumbling ineptitude of all of the adults involved in the incident is unforgivable. People should be fired for that. Anyone who plays CYA by trying to pin his ineptitude on children should be out of a job.
Incidentally... you do get suspended for some number of games for missing practice or a game. At least, those were the rules in my day. And that's how most teams are run at the school I work with. Basketball, Volleyball, Football or whatever.
Only if you're black.
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/first-grade-boy-suspend...
"A 6-year-old was suspended from school in Canon City, Colo., after kissing a girl on her hand. School officials said the smooch was sexual harassment"
(From Atlas Shrugged -- Damn, it's bad when I of all people am quoting Ayn Rand).
The quote itself is apt.
It's very unfortunate because her writings were on the spot on about human behavior.
In order to understand her methods you must understand her epistemology. This requires reading her nonfiction systematically (and Peikoff's).
Here's a Reddit reaction to Rand's response to a letter: http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1reias/til_th... especially see this response: http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1reias/til_th...
She's completely misunderstood and misrepresented. There are countless examples of this.
In politics, she's seen as the epitome of all that is "right wing", whatever the Hell that means. Her ethics are disregarded as simple ignorant selfishness. It's easy to see why many would disagree with her.
Academia simply dismisses her. However, her ideas are becoming harder to ignore - they are important!
Highly recommend reading at least Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, and Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. Then pick up Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, Virtue of Selfishness, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, and the recently released Understanding Objectivism . UO is very good (it's useful/personal, down to earth), but requires familiarity with Objectivism.
There has always been terrorism in the United States. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States
As well as mass shootings. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/mass-shootings-m...
This current "era" isn't defined by the number or scale of these tragedies but by institutions' and the public's reaction to them. If we want to protect the lives and welfare of the average U.S. citizen our money and efforts would be better spent tackling some of the less newsworthy health issues.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_preventable_causes_of_d...
Also the time frame of the Sandy Hook Shooting was extremely brief. The shooter was believed to enter the school around 9:30 the first 911 call was made at 9:35 and the last shot heard was at 9:40 and the police enter at 9:44. The MRAP and other military artillery obviously wouldn't have made a difference due to time frame of the tragedy.
Does this kind of thinking still place me firmly with the tinfoil contingent?
There are many examples of covert malevolent acts in the halls of power throughout history, there was a list of confessed false flag operations on here just the other day. Look into any book about the history of military intelligence and you will find all sorts of nasty adventures. Then there's COINTELPRO, MKULTRA, the FBIs attempt to undermine the civil rights movement, it goes on and on. What would be truly irrational would be to believe that this stuff doesn't happen in the present.
So now I try to evaluate each "conspiracy theory" on its own terms, lest I blind myself to the one that turns out to be real.
(Note: I still don't actually believe in any specific tinfoilery. I just try to evaluate it honestly. Almost all of it, I still dismiss immediately. Most of the really juicy stuff is right there in the history books anyway.)
But you're probably right, this kind of thinking is largely self-indulgent.
EDIT: a little understanding of that kind of political history definitely gives useful context to discourse on current affairs, I think. It is helpful to consider how the events of the present might be seen in 30 or 50 years time, even without knowledge of what occurs between now and then.
To me, current US policing looks much like how the Brits patrolled Northern Ireland back in the day, with the army. Only thing the US is missing is check points and road blocks. Don't kid yourselves, the US does not have a police force, it has a domestic army.
Only hope Americans have is in the individuals who wear the uniform. Would American uniformed son and daughters, mothers and fathers turn on non uniformed Americans?
On the other hand.... If the main government got all evil and what not, couldn't this local police force defend the people with all this hardware? Aren't they all sort of independent, under local state or what ever control? I mean, it we are talking revolution and all that, its not a given who side the police would be on, is it?
Cops shoot dogs, taze people for fun, pretend to be badasses, and then go home to their families every night. It's the perfect profession for a bully. But serving in the military sucks, they do a better job screening out the psychopaths, and once you've been in combat once or twice you tend to take the whole organized violence thing a little more seriously.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_checkpoint#Sobriety_chec...
From 1969 to 1977 the Army in NI basically operated independently of the constabulary, with only informal liaison and co-ordination, whilst pursuing their primary mission.
But from then onwards the Army was seconded to Security Co-ordinating Commission and was re-orientated towards support of the policeman on the beat.
The UK Government had realised that soldiers having unregulated police-like powers over people was counter-productive, and the response was to re-establish the 'primacy of the constabulary' to give some faith in the justice system. If you were arrested, it was by a police officer with his number visible on his lapel.
This article is about the prison/police system becoming the fundamental axis of civil society. Schools are run like prisons, and increasingly with police presence. Minority groups are, as always, increasingly targeted for harassment and neutralization. If you get on the radar of the police state, you and your family will be hounded forever. If you are imprisoned, it's more likely than not that you'll be held in solitary confinement.
The article doesn't seem to answer the question I wish I knew the answer to -- how did we get here? What happened that made the United States this way? Was it always like this, behind the curtains, just a nest of HUAACs and J Edgar Hoovers?
Well, now the J Edgar Hoover of 2013 knows everything about everyone, he can arrest anyone for any reason at any time, and he can't be opposed by any means I'm aware of. That iconic picture of a hippy putting a flower in the barrel of a riot cop's gun could never happen today -- as soon as the hippy reached for the gun I'm sure his head would be blown off.
Fact is, if all this military equipment were sold on open market, no harm would come of it. Used to be available and wasn't a problem then, and the rather large paramilitary equipment market isn't a problem now. Question is: why is the government so afraid of its own citizens possessing such gear?
Is that the right question, considering that the tactical gear market is allowed to exist? I'm apparently too lazy to do it, but it would probably be instructive to look at the history of that ban on military-to-citizen sales.
In 1934, machineguns & "destructive devices" were hit with a $200 "transfer tax" and subject to tight paperwork regulations and severe penalties for violations. Given the products in question cost around $50, and the tax equaled some $3000 in today's US$, it was practically a ban. Inflation brought the tax down to affordable (cough) levels today.
In 1986, possession/manufacture of new machineguns was banned outright. Old ones could still be owned & transferred, but between the severely limited supply and accumulated $200 taxes, prices have increased about 25x over what they would cost unrestricted, making them desirable for investment and undesirable for mundane use.
When the US Army transitioned to "Humvees" replacing Jeeps, the contract included a clause prohibiting resale to civilians. Likewise other equipment cannot be resold, not so much by law but by contract.
As it is, the tactical gear market is "allowed" to exist mainly because there isn't much way to legally prohibit it. Most such gear is objectively indistinguishable from other common products (clothing, camping equipment, radios, hunting gear); the differences are significant in specialized use but nowhere near enough to be codified in law. As demonstrated during the now-expired 10-year "assault weapons ban", the marketplace will come up with all kinds of creative solutions to bridge any gaps caused by prohibition (10 round limit? get subcompact pistols or .50-caliber semi-auto rifles. Weight limits? superlight plastic/carbon-fiber guns.)
Do you know why this is? It sounds more like economic protectionism than a desire to keep them out of the hands of civilians.
BTW: MREs ("meals ready to eat") are likewise restricted, marked with warnings about resale.
Was OWS not your style? Do you think anti-capitalist critics that use technology are hypocrites? Are you waiting for someone to craft the perfect movement before you jump in? If any of these or those in their vein apply, it's time to change your MO, your way of looking at the problem.
You shouldn't compare your corruption with Ukraine's or other Soviet Bloc countries'. Those people have a place to run to, as hard as getting there is. You have nowhere to run.
That first step is a challenge but if you're the type who reads Hacker News you're better off than most. My green card application for Ireland was approved yesterday. (Yes yes Ireland has numerous flaws - I still vastly prefer life here).
http://www.pond-crosser.com/northern-europe/netherlands/dutc...
HUGE DISCLAIMER
Pond-crosser is a site I recently started. Even so I can't imagine it being more applicable.
USA looks increasingly like a place that must exist and I'll need to visit from time to time, but I'd prefer for all the conferences and everything else to be somewhere else if possible...
Hell, even Switzerland.
The main problem is that Ukraine is not sure what kind of change it wants. And it doesn't understand the steps to take to get change. And too many Ukrainians want a magical solution that will sweep the problems away.
Point 1 - Signing that Euro agreement will not change anything. It only puts Ukraine on a path to make thousands of changes in their laws and their society that may or may not hurt the people. Then, after 10 or 15 years of this, they might be allowed to join the EU. Ask Turkey about how long you need to wait. And after joining the EU, Ukraine would be a substandard partner, for instance there would be visa restrictions for years to come that would prevent many Ukrainians from working in the EU. Quotas in fact.
Point 2 - Ukraine is already in an informal union with Russia. Given that Ukraine's largest trading partner is Russia and that Russia's largest trading partner is Ukraine, they can't help but be in a union. If Ukraine would only sign an agreement as a CIS member and formalize this relationship, the people of Ukraine would gain immediate benefits. For instance there would be a legal way for Ukrainians to go work in Russia, and since they are already fluent in Russian, they could get reasonable jobs and not dishwashing or hotel cleaning jobs like they get in the EU.
So what would be best for Ukraine?
Also, consider this. Russians are GREAT chess players. What if Russia is orchestrating this because it knows that if Ukraine joins the EU, then it will weaken the EU and open the door for Russia to also join, and then to dominate?
This page should make any U.S. taxpayer sick and any non-U.S. citizen worried:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_e...
All those crimes?! Jeeze, its sounds like they'd friggin' crucify him...
The country that seems to simply enacts laws and legislation that just mirror the US so they look like good little friends?
The country that assists the NSA as needed?
That Canada?
http://pencanada.ca/blog/on-backdoor-information-access/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement
They let the Americans do that for them.
But some of their speech-restricting activities are disturbing: http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/free-speech-eh-why-is-canada-pr...
And there certainly isn't anything like the militarization of the police like there is in the US, which is the focus of this article.
There was no culture shock moving from Canada to the US.
I don't know of anything that's not anecdotal. I also think that trying to fix things as an individual in a country of over 300 million, despite what people tell you, is generally a fool's errand for anyone who doesn't have enormous amounts of capital at their disposal. Best to find somewhere that suits you and enjoy life there.
From a right libertarian point of view, it is the government's responsibility to protect your rights, not to protect you.
From a left libertarian point of view, it is the government's responsibility to demonstrate that the good of enforcing a law outweighs the loss of individual freedom and other harm of enforcing it.
Drugs, immigration, fail those tests. Many sex crimes fail those tests. Seatbelt laws probably fail.
The police have to be so aggressive about these things because they never lent themselves to enforcement in the first place.
People go bouncing off the wall around this issue as if it were one having solely to do with owning guns, but the real purpose is arranging the real power in the government. The people reserve and are ultimately responsible for the use of lethal force in the United States. They can delegate that power to the government for certain things, like a defense department or law enforcement, but at the end of the day, it's everybody carrying guns that are responsible for social order. At least that's the way it was set up.
As we've drifted away from that principle, by assigning more and more powers to the defense department and police agencies, (gun control is part of this but not the only part), those folks have quite naturally started viewing themselves as the privileged few to hold the power to make things go boom. Then we got rid of the volunteer military, further separating the mass of the population from the things carrying lethal force.
So nowadays, if you want to become a specialist in the application of power tools to destroy people and things, you pick one of a few different career paths and become one of the chosen few. This is a VERY recent development. Not 50 years ago it was commonplace to know people who could operate machine guns, explosives, and drive tanks around. To those folks, cops were just another working Joe like them except they wore a badge. On the other side, cops viewed the population as a trained asset to have and use in time of crisis. It was not unusual to consider gathering up as many armed men as necessary from an area to conduct police operations.
But the professionals got involved, and having that kind of power was viewed as a terribly complicated responsibility that the average guy couldn't handle. This created a wall in society. On both sides now, it's us against them. We need MRAPS because, hell, anything can happen, and there's just a few of us cops in this county. We are no longer all in it together. It's not like if AQ comes knocking we can knock on doors and ask for help.
This is a self-fulfilling feedback loop: as the police arm themselves more and more with special gear, the average person really can't operate it. So even more specialized training is required. Same goes for military gear, where this divide originated.
I would suggest that what we need is some sort of ready reserve system where everybody is trained at reaching 18 on how to safely use most all common forms of police and military gear. I'd further suggest that local police departments be required to have a certain percentage of their patrols as civilian ride-alongs.
There are a lot of things that can be done here, and we don't have to argue gun control to make progress. But I think we do need an understanding of how we got here in the first place. This is a trend that has been a long time coming. The War On Terror just exacerbated it.
People will probably despise me for this, but why don't we have compulsory military duty in the U.S. like other countries?
It would give people some discipline. It would discourage us from acting arrogant, "lol! we should bomb them!" It would give people some skills. If it was equally applied, no one would have any disadvantage. It would make people feel much more secure, without delegating their security to others.
The real scourge is that in order to be economically competitive, we must all hyper-specialize and become experts in a single, narrow area. We can no longer lucidly judge others b/c we have less in common with one another.
A work buddy said in the 1950s in the U.S., teenagers would hang out with the police. He distinctly remembers hanging out in a police car, smoking marijuana, while the cops chided him because he said he couldn't afford real tobacco to smoke. I want to get back to that world. I want to provoke other nations less, so we're no longer a target of terrorism. I want us to get back to the business of making our lives leisurely through technology, rather than more awesome. "More awesome" means were doing more with the same energy as we exerted in the industrial revolution. I'd much rather see us getting less done with less energy.
It would lead to the US military becoming way too large, and given the prowess in media propaganda, you'll get tens of millions of people with a highly militaristic mindset with nothing to do - think current soldier worshipping x10.
The military reserves are certainly an option, but having a mandatory training+service aspect certainly seems ... interesting. Frightening, in a way, but it seems to work for Switzerland.
Yes, because when the entire male populace is effectively your military it's a lot harder for the military to do shady things. Also, as the original commenter points out there's a lot less division between your average joe and someone who is a professional police officer/soldier.
Meanwhile, in Russia, the place where the Soviet system used to be, they have moved in the opposite direction and dismantled most of the police state. In Russia people have more personal freedoms with respect to the state than they do in the USA. Of course one unfortunate side effect of so much freedom is that there was a great increase in corruption and the growth of the oligarchs after the fall of the Soviet Union. But Russia is dealing with this step by step, reducing corruption and reigning in the oligarchs. Their ideal seems to be the USA of the 1960s or 70s, but not the USA of today.
How it is possible for someone to reach such a stupendous level of confusion boggles the mind. Even if the Russian propaganda minister were to make such a declaration he surely isn't deluded enough to believe it to be true.
Being offended at someone's assessment of a situation is a political statement. We should not be surprised to hear people making political statements about a political situation. None of this makes one person more right or another one more wrong.
Politics is very hard to figure out, and we should all be careful of making oversimplified statements. It's not as simple as Ukraine signs an agreement with the EU and then everything is rosy. Neither is it as simple Putin twisting Yanukovitch's arm. This is a bloody complex geopolitical problem and Ukraine is getting no support in solving it from anyone outside Ukraine. They have to work through it, accept the hard knocks, and ultimately reap whatever benefits that their decision brings. Cheerleaders on the sidelines have no skin in the game.
Articles like this (which I'm glad are being written) point out the flaws and injustice in the system, but don't discuss the presumed results "those in control" are looking to achieve by manipulating it.
From what I understand, the desired result is to minimize the autonomy of the general public and funnel the bulk of money, control, and power into the hands of a national elite. What happens next (an honest question, as I have some semi-paranoid theories but am curious to hear from someone who is a bit more educated on the topic)?
It's not a conspiracy. People who know things - and when you have wealth you have the ability to know things - tend to see that we have a period of incredibly instability coming involving a lot of dying and misery. In such a situation having a tight control of the masses and a control of resources in the hands of a tiny elite benefits that elite in ways that times of abundance make seem unnecessary.
I don't want to be "that guy" but I also don't want to be caught in the headlights if shit hits the fan (which it seems is inevitable). Anything to study to guide my thinking without going full-on bomb shelter?
On a serious note (though I really am getting the ranch) I would recommend reading John Robb's resilient communities blog - though his former defense-related work on Global Guerillas is brilliant too (he used to be a military strategist before realizing all these problems boil down to what I refer to above).
It's about resiliency. When things fail, and given our lack of investment in infrastructure, and coming challenges they will, it's important to be resilient and make sure those around you are too. After that it depends on how big you think the bottle neck is we all have to squeeze through to whatever is coming next. I worry it's quite narrow personally, but ymmv.
Finally... that edit to lifestyle is coming. It's just whether it's managed by you or you're managed by it.
Happy holidays.
I can't wait to stroll down the streets of Chiba like Case.
I can't wait to hack around in the Metaverse like Hiro.
I can't wait to explore the underbelly of prison-islands like Snake.
We just need a bit more authoritarianism, some advanced cybernetic implants, and just enough unrest for a Modern Wild West to be born.
Does anyone else plan on coming along for the ride?
HACK THE GIBSON! HACK THE PLANET!
Anyway you are probably kidding.
Yep! Well, mostly. I'd say 95%.
"And the mood is spreading. Take the asset bubble collapse of 2008 and the rising cries of progressives for the criminal prosecution of Wall Street perpetrators, as if a fundamentally sound financial system had been abused by a small number of criminals who were running free after the debacle. Instead of pushing a debate about how to restructure our predatory financial system, liberals in their focus on individual prosecution are aping the punitive zeal of the authoritarians. A few high-profile prosecutions for insider trading (which had nothing to do with the last crash) have, of course, not changed Wall Street one bit."
I think that the self-serving, damaging actions of those with a lot of power that affected the entire world's economy is worth looking into at least some prosecution, it's hardly in the same league as what happened to three innocent teenagers waiting for a bus. And if insider trading isn't related to the last crash, then of course prosecuting it isn't going to change anything.
To ethically prosecute people you have to competently and in good faith believe they have broken specific laws. And you need to know the actions, and how specifically they violated the law. An unfortunate outcome is not sufficient.
There are, however, Goldman Sachs people that lied to their own customers in order to make money, for example. That is the kind of behaviour that can be persecuted, mostly along the conflict of interest or fraud lines. Those are specific laws.
Oh, by the way, heard of the Libor scandal? Not specifically related to the crash, but interesting reading:
I have no problem with Fabulous Fab going to jail, although I don't thick it's quite as cut-and-dried as you imagine.
I'm familiar with the Libor scandal.
But in both those cases particular people did specific things which were actionable.
At the same time, the you don't see prosecutors going after the hundreds of thousands who lied to obtain mortgages they would otherwise not have qualified for. That is the real irony of the comprehensive settlement of the investment banks -- the banks are paying billions in fines because of borrowers misrepresenting themselves.
Oh I see, you're of the "blame the borrowers" mentality. All those slick willies/poor bums scamming the naive banks out of money. Not at all the banks packaging bad debt with full knowledge of the bullshit they were participating in, due to perverse personal incentives on their own staff trading off huge institutional risk for guaranteed short term personal gain. Nor them taking side bets on the whole system crashing so seeing a win-win either way (those of the GS variety). Not to mention the banks are supposed to know what they're getting into, they are after all the experts.
Last I checked the ones suffering after the crash are most definitely not the banks, but rather the middle and lower class who have not seen effective wage increases in 30 years and now have even more trouble finding a job. Wow they really pulled a fast one on the banks.
I do have an issue with the article though. My middle school did have quite a few young criminals in it, and a zero-tolerance policy would have been beneficial for everyone. Instead, quite a lot of physical violence and theft was dismissed as 'bullying' which resulted in escalation. I know for a fact that many of the students who misbehaved in less extreme criminal ways (and were allowed to get away with it) did enter into a life of crime before they were halfway through high school.
So there is a difference between militarization and despotic control and disciplining students enough to prevent them from becoming criminals.
I think that rather than worrying about harsh penalties for vandalism etc., take issue with the propaganda being fed to students and the lack of focus on problem solving outside of narrow domains.
I guarantee none. Spend less time online and more complaining to your representatives. You will achieve a lot more in turning things around, ie if you really want to, cowards.
Do any of you American citizens out there have the same opinion of your government?
Turns out that any laws that have loop holes will be abused and everyone is guilty. This is the definition of tyranny.
http://waterford.patch.com/groups/police-and-fire/p/waterfor...
And in reality, they're just preparing for social unrest that seem more likely by the day.
Why the hell does Ohio State need an MRAP. Are they going to actually tell us that the terrorists might roll in with tanks or APCs. Or maybe the terrorists will be running around with APCs in full combat? No.
Geez, is anybody even questioning these clowns about these acquisitions.
It's pathetic, but it seems to work.
What is a police dept to do, when the crimes are escalating? Its simple to chide Warren County (or whoever); but who are you to say the next bombing or public rage will not occur there? The others were in similar places; no place is safe.
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/05/07/gun-homicide-rate-...
Yes, America is safer primarily (presumptively) because it banned lead-containing antiknock molecules in gasoline and banned lead-containing pigments in paint. The dispersion of remaining lead contamination out of the urban environment over the years so closely tracks the drop in violence that it almost makes one believe the correlation is due to causation. Almost. Unfortunately, experimental confirmation would be grossly unethical.
I mean, there was that one bank robbery in LA where the perps had serious body armor and heavy rifles in the 90s. Other than that I'm really drawing a blank for how often this would be appropriate tactically.