hypewaders
02-22-08, 09:12 AM
I'm excavating this post from one of our many shooter threads (http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?t=77632&page=3), because it got buried with no response. I think it deserved some attention. Achtung!
In the USA, we're now in the process of an election that will have considerable global consequences. Because US politics remain uniquely vulnerable to another terrorism-provoked stampede toward reactionary militarism, toward unprecedented levels of public surveillance, and toward the undoing of due process, nothing is certain. Our often mindless reactionism is most conspicuously in evidence every time there is another violent episode in the USA. At a time when the USA has provoked retaliation like never before, we had better think some issues through before there is another highly-spectacular criminal provocation, or series thereof, designed to cause fateful measures to be taken without rational collective thought and debate.
I hate the ghoulishness of shooter threads. But sometimes, I have a deep need to strike at the belly of the Beast, even if I come up short. Read the whole post, and you may understand.
I'd like to second Nasor's thoughts (http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=1754716&postcount=86) about the overplaying of the shooter threat, and take the implications of magnified threat a little bit further. You may find this disturbing to follow, even if you've already thought seriously about what I'm hoping to relate here.
Something is emerging in USAmerican society that is infinitely more ominous than any imitative acting-out among young murderer-suiciders. US educational institutions are becoming the prototypes and incubators of a radically new society. There really is a New American Century struggling to be born, and it's unlike any that came before. Those of us who love freedom in the USA are heading for the fight of our lives, and the fight of our nation's life.
We are fast transitioning into new and Orwellian era on USAmerican campuses: A surveillance and security culture is emerging that is on track to surpass the profundity of the police states we loathed as our enemies, and the enemies of freedom in the last century.
This burgeoning security culture is changing our society more swiftly than the Iron Curtain did Eastern Europe. In Eastern Europe, a surveillance culture descended like an enormous weight upon freedom. Although popularly resented, the pervasive Soviet security apparatus gradually, but radically altered perceptions and relationships throughout every society in its shadow. Macro-psychological shocks administered directly by Soviet troops, the KGB, and satellite-state security agencies had a withering effect on free expression, on human confidence, on empathy, and on happiness.
A similarly profound change is right now getting underway in US society. But this societal shift is stealthier; more targeted. More effective. At the most formative time in early adulthood, young USAmericans are being immersed in a new way of life, where privacy is surrendered with hardly a second thought, and scarcely a whimper (much less outcry) of protest. Higher Education means highly suggestible times for young USAmericans. Post-9-11 is also a highly suggestible period for our country as a whole- we're still unbalanced by rational dissonance over perceived and media-amplified threats.
The USA is now embroiled in the fight of our nation's life that is certain to become as profound as the Civil War and the Civil Rights eras. Liberty has lost a lot of ground while few USAmericans have taken notice. In The Shock Doctrine (http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine), Naomi Klein describes how traumatic events serve as a vehicle for radical and abrupt societal change.
With every shooting, US institutions of learning are responding, and the implications are profound. A new security industry is booming, while the experience of coming of age in the USA is radically changing. Hardly anyone is taking real notice, or putting up any visible protest. If we continue a process of shock -> heightened security, without stepping back and examining how this accelerated culture-shift is reshaping us, we are going to lose our grip on open, freedom-cherishing society, all for the price of assuaging exaggerated risks and fears. A feedback loop can easily ensue, where every shock, and every downturn is popularly responded to with the welcoming of "enhanced" security, and the submission to incrementally smaller and smaller apportionment of personal privacy and freedom.
This is not a conspiracy. This is a spontaneous sociopolitical virus that has overrun many other societies before, and that has invariably resulted in tyranny and social breakdown. In our case, the virus has mutated into something even better concealed behind seemingly benign and rapidly metastasizing private and state security institutions. The shocks that ushered in the Soviet security state were World War 2, and then direct shock tactics applied by government policy upon the population. In our new mutation of the virus, the shocks are isolated perceptually from the government: Shooters; terrorists; illegal aliens.
Our defenses are compromised in the USA. We suffer from a deep-seated popular exceptionalist hubris, reassuring us that tyranny is what happens in the rest of the world, where people suffer the flaws the we don't share, of (fill in the blank with Liberalism, godlessness, backwardness etc.)__________________.
If you're a USAmerican who is not concerned about the trend I'm describing; if you don't believe it's happening, and you think I'm exaggerating the danger to freedom, I certainly don't want to be like you- but somehow I still envy you. If you see things similarly as I do, and you cherish freedom, then let's start putting our heads together, because we're going to find ourselves in the middle of one hell of a fight soon. It's not too late to fight, and it's not too late to figure out how to fight, before we find ourselves behind a gilded iron curtain.
In the USA, we're now in the process of an election that will have considerable global consequences. Because US politics remain uniquely vulnerable to another terrorism-provoked stampede toward reactionary militarism, toward unprecedented levels of public surveillance, and toward the undoing of due process, nothing is certain. Our often mindless reactionism is most conspicuously in evidence every time there is another violent episode in the USA. At a time when the USA has provoked retaliation like never before, we had better think some issues through before there is another highly-spectacular criminal provocation, or series thereof, designed to cause fateful measures to be taken without rational collective thought and debate.
I hate the ghoulishness of shooter threads. But sometimes, I have a deep need to strike at the belly of the Beast, even if I come up short. Read the whole post, and you may understand.
I'd like to second Nasor's thoughts (http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=1754716&postcount=86) about the overplaying of the shooter threat, and take the implications of magnified threat a little bit further. You may find this disturbing to follow, even if you've already thought seriously about what I'm hoping to relate here.
Something is emerging in USAmerican society that is infinitely more ominous than any imitative acting-out among young murderer-suiciders. US educational institutions are becoming the prototypes and incubators of a radically new society. There really is a New American Century struggling to be born, and it's unlike any that came before. Those of us who love freedom in the USA are heading for the fight of our lives, and the fight of our nation's life.
We are fast transitioning into new and Orwellian era on USAmerican campuses: A surveillance and security culture is emerging that is on track to surpass the profundity of the police states we loathed as our enemies, and the enemies of freedom in the last century.
This burgeoning security culture is changing our society more swiftly than the Iron Curtain did Eastern Europe. In Eastern Europe, a surveillance culture descended like an enormous weight upon freedom. Although popularly resented, the pervasive Soviet security apparatus gradually, but radically altered perceptions and relationships throughout every society in its shadow. Macro-psychological shocks administered directly by Soviet troops, the KGB, and satellite-state security agencies had a withering effect on free expression, on human confidence, on empathy, and on happiness.
A similarly profound change is right now getting underway in US society. But this societal shift is stealthier; more targeted. More effective. At the most formative time in early adulthood, young USAmericans are being immersed in a new way of life, where privacy is surrendered with hardly a second thought, and scarcely a whimper (much less outcry) of protest. Higher Education means highly suggestible times for young USAmericans. Post-9-11 is also a highly suggestible period for our country as a whole- we're still unbalanced by rational dissonance over perceived and media-amplified threats.
The USA is now embroiled in the fight of our nation's life that is certain to become as profound as the Civil War and the Civil Rights eras. Liberty has lost a lot of ground while few USAmericans have taken notice. In The Shock Doctrine (http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine), Naomi Klein describes how traumatic events serve as a vehicle for radical and abrupt societal change.
With every shooting, US institutions of learning are responding, and the implications are profound. A new security industry is booming, while the experience of coming of age in the USA is radically changing. Hardly anyone is taking real notice, or putting up any visible protest. If we continue a process of shock -> heightened security, without stepping back and examining how this accelerated culture-shift is reshaping us, we are going to lose our grip on open, freedom-cherishing society, all for the price of assuaging exaggerated risks and fears. A feedback loop can easily ensue, where every shock, and every downturn is popularly responded to with the welcoming of "enhanced" security, and the submission to incrementally smaller and smaller apportionment of personal privacy and freedom.
This is not a conspiracy. This is a spontaneous sociopolitical virus that has overrun many other societies before, and that has invariably resulted in tyranny and social breakdown. In our case, the virus has mutated into something even better concealed behind seemingly benign and rapidly metastasizing private and state security institutions. The shocks that ushered in the Soviet security state were World War 2, and then direct shock tactics applied by government policy upon the population. In our new mutation of the virus, the shocks are isolated perceptually from the government: Shooters; terrorists; illegal aliens.
Our defenses are compromised in the USA. We suffer from a deep-seated popular exceptionalist hubris, reassuring us that tyranny is what happens in the rest of the world, where people suffer the flaws the we don't share, of (fill in the blank with Liberalism, godlessness, backwardness etc.)__________________.
If you're a USAmerican who is not concerned about the trend I'm describing; if you don't believe it's happening, and you think I'm exaggerating the danger to freedom, I certainly don't want to be like you- but somehow I still envy you. If you see things similarly as I do, and you cherish freedom, then let's start putting our heads together, because we're going to find ourselves in the middle of one hell of a fight soon. It's not too late to fight, and it's not too late to figure out how to fight, before we find ourselves behind a gilded iron curtain.