AgreedOriginally Posted by Darcy88
Is there some overreaction to this new surveillance state considering the limits of its technological reach, intent, and capability? Probably. But that's a bad thing, why?? If history has taught us anything, it's that a little (or more likely, A LOT) "paranoia" of governmental, religious, and aristocratic power is well justified. Nothing scares me more than a sheeple/apathetic public...
better safe than sorry..... unless of course the paranoia starts ruining people's lives more than the govt.
“the sense of being which in calm hours arises, we know not how, in the soul, is not diverse from things, from space, from light, from time, from man, but one with them and proceeds obviously from the same source.... Here is the fountain of action and of thought....
To be fair, sheep can't really fight back that well, so it's a good thing they do have that fence or they'd get eaten.
I don't think the essence of the American surveillance scandal was that the American government was doing it, but that it was doing so without civilian oversight by elected officials. Furthermore, if we as a society determine that such surveillance practices are necessary, then their implementation should be debated in public so that there is accountability.
"If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia."
- Margaret Atwood
This. We need to know who exactly is going to be making the decisions so there is accountability. right now with the NSA, the president is blaming congress, congress is blaming the president, some people are blaming big business, others are blaming terrorists.
There is clearly a spectrum that we can only have one point on. On one end, there is privacy, on the other, there is security. Regardless of where the point lands, we need to know who is making the decision and why. Right now there's too much clouding.
“the sense of being which in calm hours arises, we know not how, in the soul, is not diverse from things, from space, from light, from time, from man, but one with them and proceeds obviously from the same source.... Here is the fountain of action and of thought....
Did anyone see The Daily Show last night? "I think you're misunderstanding the perceived problem here, Mr. President; no one is saying you broke any laws, we're just saying it's a little bit weird that you didn't have to."
John Oliver killed it too, love that guy.
Last edited by JuniperWoolf; 06-11-2013 at 06:18 PM.
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What a great concept. I wonder how many thousands of people understand at least some aspect of politics because of comedic shows like daily show and colbert, who otherwise wouldn't.
“the sense of being which in calm hours arises, we know not how, in the soul, is not diverse from things, from space, from light, from time, from man, but one with them and proceeds obviously from the same source.... Here is the fountain of action and of thought....
That's an interesting question that apparently hasn't been addressed by the posters so far...
I don't know whether or not we are conditioned from birth to accept state surveillance. We are biological entities that develop from birth to interact with our environments, and we have been doing that throughout our evolutionary history. During most of this history what you refer to as a "state" did not exist. We existed as small bands of hominids that pursued a hunter-gatherer existence. these bands consisted of small groups of (genetically) closely related individuals, probably much like the bands of apes you can read about in the reports of primate ethnologists like Jane Goodall... These "small societies" seem to have general rules that regulate (and enforce) the "correct" behavior of societal members, and these regulations seem to have some biological basis, in that they tend to improve the evolutionary "fitness" of the social group, ie, its chances for survival (in Darwinian terms). Sometime relatively recently in evolutionary time (e.g. within the past 10-12000K years or so), we began to live in larger more genetically diverse but geographically more stable societies (in villages and eventually cities and "nations") that depended for their prosperity on farming, animal husbandry, and commerce. These developments demanded a different sense of cooperation among societal members to succeed, than was required by the older "familial" and "tribal" societies.
"Cooperation" was certainly required for the older familial bands to succeed. And there had to be a mechanism to assure that, i.e. to reinforce cooperative behavior. One could imagine that very basic biological rules, based on things like genetic kinship calculations, would work to guide individual behavior so as to promote the survival of the kinship group. This seems to be the mechanism that guides the social behavior of apes and other social primates, as well as other social mammals and even social insects...
As to the question about whether or not humans are "conditioned" to accept behavioral surveillance, I think we can say that all animals that interact with their environment develop their behaviors at least in some way based upon the feedback they get from their environments. They may or may not "view" their environment as engaging in "surveillance." All they "know" is that they "behave" in certain ways and they experience certain things (positive or negative consequences), and they come to associate, somehow, their behaviors with these consequences.
In the "primitive" human condition, we could easily understand that members of a familial hunter-gatherer "society" would understand that they were under some sort of behavioral "surveillance" by their "superiors." Even in modern families, children somehow "learn" and "accept" the fact that they are "under the surveillance" of their parents, and it is sort of parental surveillance that establishes their behavior. In that sense parental "surveillance" is what leads to morality (sense of right and wrong behavior) and general rules of conduct. An extension of that, for a more complex society, would be the Ten Commandments brought down from Mt Sinai by Moses.
So the short answer to the OP is that humans do seem to have some sort of "expectation" that their behavior will be subject to some sort of "surveillance" by a "moral authority." For the OT Hebrews the surveillance was provided by God, who also laid down the "rules of conduct." It is entirely another matter to equate modern "State Surveillance" with "Devine Surveillance," or even parental surveillance. To make such an equivalence implies that the "State" is equivalent (morally and/or biologically) to God and/or your parents...Think about it.
It seems likely that
I wasn't implying that state surveillance and divine surveillance were the same, just that they are two of many forms of surveillance that we are subjected to.
I wonder what a person never subjected to any form of surveillance would end up like?
“the sense of being which in calm hours arises, we know not how, in the soul, is not diverse from things, from space, from light, from time, from man, but one with them and proceeds obviously from the same source.... Here is the fountain of action and of thought....
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