Well, the media are doing their work.
And not just outright propaganda. Take any good thriller series, e.g. "Persons of Interest". The authorities routinely have all the surveillance information about anyone, track phones, etc. This is seen as normal, accepted, and desirable.
> she's going to vote. I'm not.
BTW why? "The only winning move is not to play"?
Also note how vocal minorities with clear goals achieved in the past some serious shifts in mass consciousness. Black rights, women rights, gay rights — these things were not lead by establishment, or even by excessively huge groups. These were lead by vocal, unrelenting activists, initially seen as idealists and nuts. Exactly like RMS looked 20 years ago, and Snowden looks now.
Maybe. My mom values security and social order above all else, much like most Americans. But she didn't get those values from the American media--she lived in Bangladesh until her late 30's.
> BTW why? "The only winning move is not to play"?
Because I'm quite happy with where the country is headed. Gay marriage is the law of the land, we've got Obamacare, we will probably have a woman President, and there is little real risk of overturning Roe. I think we are on the verge of real reform in the drug war. I'm not worried about a "V for Vendetta" future any more than I am worried about nuclear winter.
All it really would take to plant such an idea in the public consciousness is mentioning the technology one wants to control in the same breath as an existing boogeyman, and the people will do the rest. Look at how authorities were so quick to blame encryption and Snowden for Paris when there was no evidence supporting that blame.
[1] I think once certain conduct creates the risk of a harmful social effect (e.g. drunk driving), society is entitled to intervene. It does not have to wait for that harmful social effect to actually come to pass (e.g. an actual accident caused by drunk driving).
For example I like outdoor sports like kayaking or climbing. If I am killed or seriously injured doing so, it will harm society in a variety of ways--my insurance companies will impose the cost of my care on others, if I can't work then overall economic productivity is reduced, if I'm permanently disabled then Social Security will have to pay for my care, if I die or can't earn a living then my family might need various government aid programs.
Now you might say that these are not really harms, because they are planned for in advance. Insurance companies and government programs employ statisticians to help predict costs and set their rates accordingly. But the same is true of addictive drug use--not everyone will choose to use addictive drugs, and private and government programs can use statistics to predict the level of treatment and assistance they will need to provide.
Or you might say that you're only thinking of direct physical harm, like a drunk driver killing people who are themselves acting responsibly. But there's a difference between regulating the use of dangerous equipment under the influence, and regulating drug availability in general. For adults, alcohol is generally available with little restriction. So the question is, why not other drugs, too?
It seems like the more that we create shared services to help each other out, the more that individual risks become accountable as risks to society, and therefore create opportunities to regulate behavior.
It sure would be nice to have some sort of consistent framework for what gets outlawed and what does not. Right now we have ridiculous situations like: cigarettes are legal but demonized, pot is illegal but tolerated, and alcohol is legal and celebrated, despite being in many ways more dangerous than cigarettes or pot.
And this does not even get into the nascent social battles over food, nutrition, and weight. Which is worse for society, a high-functioning cocaine addict, or an obese person on Medicare who does not manage their diabetes properly? Is drug-testing welfare recipients a means of practical program management, or an offensive intrusion into personal decisions?
I think society has the right to regulate lots of different things that create externalized risk.[1] That does not mean that society should ban anything that creates risk.
[1] Note that certain things, like insurance arrangements, are not externalized costs.
Even if I totally agreed with you on those issues it would be incredibly naive of me to think that those issues are the sole indicators of "where the country is headed" beyond the fact that there are issues beyond the social questions du jour that need settling... don't forget financial and national security problems that both sides of the aisle are very concerned about (with cause or not). Also whoever wins this election is very likely to determine if we go to war in the Middle East again, so unless a non-deterministic state of simultaneous war and peace is your objective you still have a bone in this fight.
"we've got Obamacare" So the government's ever-increasing power now includes what products we /have/ to buy, and here that compulsory purchase is part of a completely broken system that's essentially the worst of it's kind in the developed world
"we will probably have a woman President" Any woman right? Doesn't matter who
"little real risk of overturning Roe" We can keep murdering innocent defenseless babies in the womb unimpeded that's great!
The government spying on everyone all the time isn't the future it's the present.
There is no reasonable interpretation of the facts that can lead you to a conclusion that the civil rights and gay rights movements were outsider movements.
They both started out, and spent large amounts of time, as outsider movements: they are both, therefore, examples of how outsider movements can shift the public consciousness (and, in doing so, stop being outsider movements.)
If you reject that something was an outsider movement by the fact that it eventually achieves success, then, sure, by definition outsider movements can't succeed. But that's a definition which robs all meaning from the discussion.
No, it doesn't, at least in any way relevant to the immediate discussion.
> It's also illogical to single out a movement for being small, given that every movement starts small, and most movements fail.
It might be, but no one is doing that. What is being argued is that examination of the success of particular movements distinct from other movements that also start out small shows the ways in which movements which start out small can manage to avoid the usual result of failure. What they are being singled out for is distinctions like (in the upthread post) clear goals, strident and unrelenting leadership, etc.
One can argue about whether or not there is sufficient evidence that these traits are the right ones on which to pin their eventual success, but nothing about the argument rests on singling out a movement for being small.
Also note how vocal minorities with clear goals achieved in the past some serious shifts in mass consciousness. Black rights, women rights, gay rights — these things were not lead by establishment, or even by excessively huge groups. These were lead by vocal, unrelenting activists, initially seen as idealists and nuts. Exactly like RMS looked 20 years ago, and Snowden looks now.
First, the idea that civil rights is a movement originally led by "lead by vocal, unrelenting activists, initially seen as idealists and nuts" assumes facts not in evidence. In fact, a huge portion of the US population sympathized with civil rights and the vocal leaders of that movement even before the civil war: civil rights supporters weren't even seen as nuts when Africans were still chattel slaves in the south!
Second, I'm sure there are successful movements led "by vocal, unrelenting activists, initially seen as idealists and nuts." But that also describes the Michigan Militia, the antivax movement, and Branch Davidians.
My argument is simply that we cannot assume anything about the legitimacy of a movement by the outsider status of its early adherents. The onus is on you to show that we can.
For example, the idea that black people should be the legal equals of white people was indeed seen as nuts by most Americans before, during, and even following the Civil War. There existed a huge gulf, even among abolitionists, between the idea that black people should not be property, and the idea that black people are entirely equal. The movie "Lincoln" touches on this a bit--even while arguing in favor of the 13th Amendment, every political leader agreed publicly that black people could never be equal with white people.
That gulf has essentially collapsed now, so it's hard to appreciate how large it actually was. And it collapsed progressively. First, people weren't property any more. Then they were citizens and deserved equal treatment under the law. But then it took 100 more years before Americans broadly agreed that federal law should protect their right to sit where they wanted on a public bus.
Likewise in the gay rights movement, which saw its first public airing in establishment settings at the beginning of the AIDS crisis. There weren't reporters asking President Reagan (or any previous president) about gay rights, but they did start asking questions about AIDS, which at the time was thought to only affect gay people. But if you go back and read the transcripts, not only did the Reagan press secretary publicly mock being gay, the reporters played along with the jokes, even while asking pointed questions about AIDS. Being gay had such low social currency, even among liberals, that it took a massive public health crisis to even elevate it into broad public conversation.
I agree with you that the mere fact that a movement starts "outside the mainstream" does not help predict that it will succeed. But let's not forget to take off modern glasses when looking at the cultural environments in which the movements we know today as successful, started.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_To_Read
Just as developers think their security-conscious coworker is nuts until their site gets hacked, people sometimes think those with the extreme long-term outlook are nuts because the people can't see that far ahead.
This man has to be charitable, "issues" and it's hilarious the lengths people go to excuse his behavior.
I've found that the average person's views on this issue can actually be quite strange. For example, several of my relatives have told me that they think the NSA is doing a good thing, and that they are perfectly fine having the NSA perform it's activities because they have "nothing to hide". They then tell me that the thing that actually unnerves them is being served targeted ads by companies based on their search history etc. If I try to tell them that these two things aren't easily disentangled, as the NSA gets a lot of their data from these same companies, they can't process it.
And thus you admit to being part of the problem.
I can't even begin to explain how frustrating it is to be blamed for "the problem" when I tell someone I don't plan to vote. In Philadelphia, it's "Democrat" vs "Democrat" - there hasn't been a serious Republican government in power in 50+ years - and while I tend to lean left, a lack of competition has left a trouble, corrupted government. In PA, we're presented with pre-vetted candidates to choose from. In national elections, if there were 1000 of me it wouldn't matter, our electoral votes go to the Democratic candidate and has since 1998.
Voting is a pointless waste of time for me. There isn't actually a candidate that thinks like I do, and even if there were, I hope they're in the pre-selected party. I don't find the least of evils to be anything but useless to any cause to have government be actually representative or "work for the people."
Participation in a corrupt system can be seen as granting it legitimacy.
I think that's pretty unambiguously true, but voting is free and relatively easy.
All of these media are going to inform them about recently past, near future, historical, or hypothetical terrorist attacks, and how bad they are. There are no popular pieces currently which emphasize the dangers of totalitarian surveillance or dystopian government, and if there were a few, they'd still be drowned out by the above.
As far as believing that the government isn't working for the people... it's much too long for a single comment to capture, which is also part of the problem. "Terrorists are bad and terrorist attacks are bad" fits in Twitter, but even a simple understanding of how the government prioritizes its own enrichment and power over that of the citizens is quite complicated and has many details, most of which require a historical complex and understanding of the underlying social and political theory.
Guilty until proven innocent.
Indefinite detention without a trial.
Vote suppression.
Taxation without representation.
Search and seizure without probable cause or a warrant.
I don't have any evidence that the government is doing anything other than what people want with regard to surveillance.
Keep in mind that the composite median voter is basically my mother: thinks the world would be chaos without authority; thinks drugs make people morally bankrupt; wants a big SUV; wants to ban guns; is nearing eligibility for Social Security and Medicare, etc. She loves Hilary Clinton. And of course, she's going to vote. I'm not.