Immigration Bill to treat American Citizens as Conquered Subjects
WIRED magazine so far is the only outlet to report on this nasty Creepy-State digital authoritarianism buried in the cosmically awful proposed Immigration “Reform”bill:
Biometric Database of All Adult Americans Hidden in Immigration Reform
….Buried in the more than 800 pages of the bipartisan legislation (.pdf) is language mandating the creation of the innocuously-named “photo tool,” a massive federal database administered by the Department of Homeland Security and containing names, ages, Social Security numbers and photographs of everyone in the country with a driver’s license or other state-issued photo ID.
Employers would be obliged to look up every new hire in the database to verify that they match their photo.
This piece of the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act is aimed at curbing employment of undocumented immigrants. But privacy advocates fear the inevitable mission creep, ending with the proof of self being required at polling places, to rent a house, buy a gun, open a bank account, acquire credit, board a plane or even attend a sporting event or log on the internet. Think of it as a government version of Foursquare, with Big Brother cataloging every check-in.
“It starts to change the relationship between the citizen and state, you do have to get permission to do things,” said Chris Calabrese, a congressional lobbyist with the American Civil Liberties Union. “More fundamentally, it could be the start of keeping a record of all things.”
….“The most worrying aspect is that this creates a principle of permission basically to do certain activities and it can be used to restrict activities,” he said. “It’s like a national ID system without the card.”
For the moment, the debate in the Senate Judiciary Committee is focused on the parameters of legalization for unauthorized immigrants, a border fence and legal immigration in the future.
The committee is scheduled to resume debate on the package Tuesday.
This provision is flatly unconstitutional, but the Bill of Rights is not held in high esteem by most members of Congress or the largest donors to the Democratic and Republican parties. Big Data corporations intend to make enormous profits helping advocates of Big Government transform the “normal” of American life into what formally used to be considered appropriate for inmates in a minimum security prison.
Could a far less intrusive scheme be devised to validate employment status? Sure, but that would not hand bureaucrats and stringpullers of the Oligarchy enormous leverage to use someday over every man, woman and child in the United States.
Imagine, you have offended some local worthy with your letter to the editor or your campaign donation to their opponent and suddenly….your debit and credit cards stop working, your employer can no longer issue you your paycheck, you can’t enter any public facilities (the biometric scan rejects you as a “security threat”), the local hospital can’t provide you with medical care (“Access to records denied”). Maybe your driver’s license is suddenly void and the authorities therefore remotely disable your “smart car”. In a keystroke, you can be cyberoutlawed.
To where will you go to escape a powerful person manipulating an omnipresent data system? Or fix a “simple” computer error that is putting your entire life on hold? Or if a hacker gains access to your biometric records? There are few good and reasonable uses for this kind of system, an enormous number of bad ones and none at all that justify being incorporated into an even a semi-free society.
The digital road to serfdom is being legislated one deceptively presented unread bill at a time.
May 13th, 2013 at 3:57 am
Zen:
The superzips coming up with a high tech cyber way to subjugate the flyover people is a new detail in a continuing trend. They are pretty aggressive in that respect. But since the world won’t be content to leave the US alone and will come calling no matter how good the multi-culturally sensitivity inculcated into the zips at the leading universities, I ask your opinion on something. I don’t think the zips are up to the task of dealing with the hard cases in the world, the men for whom killing is nothing much. The life of a zip is pretty insulated from the hard realities of life and they never come face to face with somebody who will only be dissuaded by violence or the threat thereof. Their reaction when faced with that is sort of a confused hopefullness combined with tough talk. A good example of that is our relations with Pakistan for the last decade and more. That won’t work when the really hard time comes. They are good at picking on us flyover people because they are basically bullies and know that in the domestic situation, they have the upper hand. But when it comes to the world’s hard cases they are basically cowards and will get us into big trouble. What do you think?
May 13th, 2013 at 2:26 pm
The last time I had to renew my drivers license, I was required to show my actual birth certificate along with the license I still had (which was still legal, unexpired.) I didn’t have my birth certificate with me, so I had to make a trip home, get my birth certificate, and return. Upon showing the birth certificate, I was informed by the civilian desk jockey that my birth certificate was invalid because the official stamp on it was the wrong color. I explained that I was born in a military hospital, this was my original birth certificate — I had no other — and, when told that this didn’t matter and the certificate was still invalid, a synapse in my brain snapped I did something I’ve never done before: cursing and yelling at them that “I’m an American Citizen!!! Am I still an American Citizen??!!?!?” So another desk jockey comes over, takes a look at it, then explains to the first that, well, some birth certificates with that color stamp are valid. I pretty much dread having to go back in when it’s time to renew again.
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Worse, the reason I went to renew that day was that I wanted to open a new bank account and was told by the bank that I needed a new drivers license — for some reason I don’t remember, although it might have been a change to the design of the license.
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So that’s how close I’ve come to being de-citizenized.
May 13th, 2013 at 3:04 pm
I would note how this post ties into the Boston Bomber post about super-empowerment.
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The systems, policies, and so forth that empower regular citizens also empower non-citizens, resident terrorists, immigrant terrorists and criminals, and so forth — maybe not uniformly, but nonetheless. Similarly, what dis-empowers regular citizens may dis-empower non-citizens and malcontents — although not necessarily uniformly.
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The trick of empowering citizenry is to find a way to do so without empowering those who would do harm. The trick of dis-empowering malcontents, law-breakers, potential terrorists is to do so without dis-empowering the regular citizenry.
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Our systems tend toward post-crime punishment (reactive) rather than pre-crime punishment (pre-emption) for the very reason that pre-emption in practice may tread too heavily on law-abiding citizens. Whole-cloth measures are feared as a dangerous infringement on not only present but also all future liberty.
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The one factor making all this juggling more difficult and dangerous (however the balls fall) is modernity’s general excess of empowerments. General economic and technological empowerments, which are potentially quite great for most individuals, may often go to waste when the average citizen does not leverage all the powers available to him; but they nonetheless exist and motivated malcontents tend to be proactive is leveraging those empowerments.
May 14th, 2013 at 1:19 am
In related news, anybody seen this yet? To quote:
“The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news. The records obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, for general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and for the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP. It was not clear if the records also included incoming calls or the duration of the calls….
“There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters. These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP’s newsgathering operations and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know,” Pruitt said.
The government would not say why it sought the records.”
May 14th, 2013 at 1:53 am
Carl,
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I basically agree as a broad generalization. there are some exceptions but not a whole lot and some of them are ppl who came up the hard way rather than were inculcated into this mindset from birth. The third generation (or more) elite coming hitting their early 30’s and 40’s pretty much are what Polybius and Ibn Khaldun predicted they would be..
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“So that’s how close I’ve come to being de-citizenized. ”
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Curtis – we need to remember your concept – it will become a common problem
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T. Greer – saw it, that and the IRS scandal have evolved fast today, heading toward select committee zone if it continues
May 14th, 2013 at 1:11 pm
Culled to fit preconceived notions intelligence in the run up to the Iraq war, a curious blankness in the official 9-11 report (not a truther, don’t worry, just wondering about the supposed redacted pages), a “what me” approach to Abbottabad (let’s focus on the success that it represents, and not the failures of a strange sort of clientitis), a bloated internal US security apparatus, an untrue cover story for Benghazi, a politically snooping IRS, and, now….
….snooping into AP phone records.
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Fabulous. Well, whatever word is the opposite of fabulous and connotes distrust, skepticism and utter disgust.
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That word. Which might not be printable on a family blog.
May 14th, 2013 at 1:13 pm
Whatever that perfect word is, it should go in front of every post you’ve ever written on the out-of-control oligarchy, Zen.
May 14th, 2013 at 1:17 pm
@ carl:
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Oh, not it’s not just against flyover people and it’s not just superzips administering. The oligarchy has many zipcodes and exist in many places as part of a very strange attitude toward governance, duty, and civic responsibility. The attitude is a sort of credentialed “meritocratic” mine mine mine! If it was just superzips, it might not be so bad.
May 14th, 2013 at 1:29 pm
@ carl:
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I should add this to a different discussion over at SWJ;
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On Pakistan, the little darlings of our foreign policy apparatus (and chunks of the military world, you have to retire and sell weapons after all) have gotten themselves (our nation) into a pretty little mess. The fault is ours due to arrogance, greed and stupidity. The contempt of Pakistanis makes sense, actually.
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The real blow back from the 80’s wasn’t just terrorism, it was nuclear proliferation. Well, no one has an answer to be fair. Still, we didn’t have to be idiots about it.
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Generals testifying that, ‘why, why, why, my tough as nails colonels watch that money like a haw!. No way does it contribute to proliferation.’
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The word fungibility ring a bell? How about, if you give up the cash you can’t really track it? Well, to be fair to the Generals, they do what they are told.
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They are afraid to let go, the serious ones, I mean, while the unserious have personal contracts related to the region and want to make money, or are really naive and believe they are masters of the universe and can change ground realities with just the right plan.
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Given what we’ve ignored and what we’ve paid for–against our own guys–I don’t blame the Pakistanis for being distrustful and completely contemptuous.
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My hope is that the election (really inspiring to watch so many people turn out!) will start the process that needed to happen some time ago. May the region know peace.
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They would most likely get there without our interference but that is the one thing that cannot happen if you make a living professionally meddling.
May 14th, 2013 at 1:31 pm
They cannot engage, they cannot employ, they cannot empathize: they can only manage our files. Not a very impressive century so far for America’s, uh, best and brightest.
May 14th, 2013 at 1:44 pm
Justin, you put in a few words what I tried to do in an emotional rambling mess of serial commenting. Bravo.
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Perfect and pithy.
May 14th, 2013 at 7:02 pm
Madhu:
To me the oligarchy are the superzips. That come from Charles Murray’s book Coming Apart. The observation is the oligarchs tend to cluster in just a handful of zipcodes, hence superzips. I think the idea has much merits and superzips or zips writes and sounds better. Figure it like this. There a lot of zips in Boston, not so many in Birmingham. A lot in Manhattan, not so many in Indianapolis. We are talking about the same group of people in any event.
One of the very bad things about the zips is they aspire to be an aristocracy, and have all the trappings of an aristocracy except one. They won’t fight. They don’t really believe in the US. They only believe in themselves and their class which they figure extends beyond national boundaries so they figure they can always make a deal with the other high fliers. Sometimes they can. But when they run into really hard cases like the Jihaists or the CCP who know a lack of backbone when they see it, the zips are helpless. That wouldn’t be so bad except that it is us who will take it in the neck for the zips. Their young relations won’t die or spend a decade in a PLA prison camp. Ours will.
The Pak Army/ISI should contemn us. The zips are our leaders after all. But that just makes the general sahibs the second stupidest group in the world instead of the stupidest. They after all created and sustain the jihadist creature that will kill them. They could have used our money for good. Instead they just bought a stronger rope.
There is something about the composition of the zips that I solicit comment on from anybody. Many of them are show people. In the history of the world, show people haven’t had much influence. They have actually been looked down upon. But money talks and modern tech and legal arrangements have combined to give show people a whopping amount of money which buys influence. So we have a polity in which show people have a lot of influence. I don’t think that does us a lot of good. What do other people think?
May 15th, 2013 at 2:56 pm
Sorry carl. I completely messed up understanding your point. I think I am wasting my time making the same comments over and over on these subjects without moving forward in any concrete way.
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My time on the lowest rung of the superzip ladder seems to be a permanent feature of my psyche at this point.
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Recently got David Rothkopf’s Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power.
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It’s an odd feeling to realize that the love of departmental power understood through my childhood in a small college town is simply a more modest version of what happens at the highest levels of society.
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Or so it seems from a far distance.
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Strange creatures, the lovers of power and ambition. You just hope some genuine sense of service is buried in there somewhere. And sometimes a-holes do good things in spite of themselves because they have drive – which is a shocking realization.
May 15th, 2013 at 2:58 pm
So we have a polity in which show people have a lot of influence. I don’t think that does us a lot of good. What do other people think?
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An interesting point, do you mean the modern showmanship of campaigning or as a bloc or lobby?
May 15th, 2013 at 3:59 pm
I am skeptical of any talk utilizing the totem, “superzips.”
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Especially because, for me, its use seems to drip with ressentiment a la Nietzsche: the weak see the strong as the cause of all of their problems, their weakness — deficiencies are externalized — and find a convenient epithet meant to represent the strong as vaguely as possible, the better to scapegoat.
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If the whining ever came with constructive solutions, the conversation about superzips might strike me differently. As it is, I often wonder if I’ve somehow been whisked back to France circa 1789 and the anti-superzip agitators (even those who do not use that specific term) really mean by their “arguments” to be shouting Liberté, égalité, fraternité! Recent discussion on this very site alluding to the, erm, utopian nature of 19th C. America also brought to mind that war cry. I put “arguments” in quotes because the agitators are often speaking for rhetorical effect only, presumably hoping that someone else (an equally abstract & vague class of person) will do something about those “superzips.”
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None of this is to say that inequality does not exist, nor that elites are angelic creatures. But the targeted demons are only targeted by tedious vitriol. The fact that said demons have achieved their positions by leveraging systems permeating American society — economic, political, cultural, religious, technological — and that actually doing something about these demons would require modification to those systems, seems to be beside the point for these agitators. One gets the distinct impression that, for these agitators, a guillotine in every town and city square would do.
May 15th, 2013 at 4:53 pm
@Curtis Gale Weeks – this is a broader problem with anti-elitism right now. A rentier, plutocratic elite is a reality. And they are driving the country down into the tubes. But if got rid of them all, what would we have? We do not have a better replacement, and in all likelihood the chaos of struggle would land us with something, much, much worse. 44 BC all over again.
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If things are ever going to change then the citizenry needs to change first. Sheep will be sheparded until they are sheep no more. (I have emphasized this dual nature of the problem – that the republic is no longer governed by the people and that the people do not wish to govern, in several of my writings. See here and here and here.)
May 15th, 2013 at 10:48 pm
T. Greer, when it comes to politics and power, nature abhors a vacuum. Maybe accuracy requires that pithy statement be revised to “people abhor a vacuum” instead. There have always been elites, and as long as the systems of a society permit an unbalanced leveraging of available powers, there always will be. Even if we could revise the systems of empowerment to ensure 100% equal access to all levers of power, the “sheep” (so-called) who don’t make use of those levers would end up being led by the sheep who do.
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Nietzsche actually described this two-tiered system of sheep being led by sheep who recognized the sheepishness of those they led and leveraged it. The leader-sheep could, for instance, tell the other sheep how terribly weak they are, how terribly dangerous the landscape is — The wolves! The wolves! — and thereby soften them up for being easily led away or astray. I suppose the supersheep could use this same tactic on those leader sheep leading the other sheep. (Some putative elites can be scared into being led, after all, by other elites.) This is another reason I don’t quite like The Superzips! form of argument, btw.
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“Sheep will be sheparded until they are sheep no more” is interesting, if vague, but my first impression is that I wouldn’t depend overmuch on being able to change the citizenry as a first step.
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“the people do not wish to govern,” — I’m far from being certain that they can govern, even if they wished to do so. I’ve approached that question here. With complexity and an ever-increasing population, there are severe limits on what any individual can do, can know/understand, etc. Plus, an “informed citizenry” requires the existence of experts and those who would disseminate what those experts say on any given issue — i.e., knowledge elites, critic elites, media elites, and so forth.
May 16th, 2013 at 12:33 am
Madhu:
Long ago I worked at an amusement park and they had people there doing live shows, singing, dancing, instruments, that kind of thing. They were an odd lot, to the extent that all one employee had to say to another was “live shows person” and the idea that that was an oddball was immediately conveyed. Not all of them of course but enough that the phrase had meaning to all the employees.
In the old days, show people were all live shows people. They sang the song, acted in the play, told the joke and that was the end of it except in memory. They didn’t make much money and didn’t have much influence. That has changed. You record the song and the money comes in forever, even after you are dead. Same for acting in the movie or being on the sitcom. They are still quirky live shows people in my view, but they have oceans of money. The actors, singers and jesters haven’t had that much money in the world’s history before now. But now we have group of quirky people with a lot of money and hence a lot of political influence that haven’t had political influence before, ever to my knowledge. That doesn’t mean good things for us in the long run I think.
May 16th, 2013 at 12:39 am
T. Greer:
As you say the zips are driving us down the tubes. But to say in effect they are irreplaceable because the replacement would be worse doesn’t make much sense. You never want to provoke the god of “it can’t be worse” but if we are circling that drain it is probably worth taking the chance. (Now if I could only figure out how to do it.)
May 16th, 2013 at 1:34 am
Thanks, carl. Ours is a large, complicated and rambunctious society. There are so many groups, lobbies and media to turn the heads of the governing class this way and that. It must be disorienting.
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BTW, I “know” carl from his regular commenting at another blog and he keeps very close track of the Afghan campaign. Given how few Americans pay attention, this is a credit to him. He also mentions at that blog that he speaks to his elected officials about various issues of concern. Again, a credit to him and an example of an engaged citizen.
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No sheep (what a condescending term) here.
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I pick the blogs that I do because I learn from something from each one and the audience is often an interesting and potentially influential audience.
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Commenting can be form of theater. The “whining” may to draw attention to a subject; a leveraging of new media.
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I have seen this phenomenon play out in interesting ways, topics on blogs read by journalists moving-or seeming to move-into their blogs or articles. I saw that at an old South Asian blog called Sepia Mutiny. Interesting phenomenon.
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Real live flesh and blood people comment here. It is impossible to tell from a comment box how involved each person is in real life.
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Due to time constraints, I rarely include the sorts of detailed links to newspaper articles, journal articles, book excerpts and other findings from personal research here. I think in the future I should make sure to do that. But it takes a lot of time and is a lot of hard work being a non-whining non-sheep.
May 16th, 2013 at 1:40 am
No group of elite, no matter how elite, can have all the knowledge needed to govern all aspects of society. Here, the engaged citizen personally involved may help mitigate potential dangers.
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One thing I learned in the Ivy League is that marginal people are sometimes hired at other elite institutions because that is just what they do, hire their own. There are lots of talented people out their and we need the input of everyone possible to make sure we navigate these complicated waters.
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Anti-intellectualism is no good. Neither is a hubristic elite. What if the solution lies outside your circle? If you lack intellectual curiosity or empathy, how the hell would you find the solution outside your elite circle? I sawl this all the time in Boston, a place that I left of my own accord. No one asked me to leave. No denial of tenure here.
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Sometimes the strong feel for the weak because of the very nature of being strong. When you are inside the circle, you begin to understand how constricted the charmed circle is in reality and you empathize with the weak.
May 16th, 2013 at 1:45 am
No, I take that back. I don’t like the terms strong and weak in dealing with individual human beings. Each person is precious. It seems that the further we as a society move from that idea–that human life is precious and each individual life a miracle– the more likely it is that terrible things happen.
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Zen, I’ve finally been shamed into ordering writing books. In my defense, have you seen the writing of most doctors? Good luck with that. Apparently, we are notorious among editors. Intelligences vary, eh?
May 16th, 2013 at 1:49 am
@ T. Greer – The hope would be to replace the credentialed elite with a true elite, one with some humility and a sense of service. One practical way to do this is to pay very close attention to what they do and shine a light on it, every time, and in every way. Sunshine as a disinfectant.
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I’m familiar with the examples from the civil rights movement.
May 16th, 2013 at 1:51 am
Responding to a question by Senator Jim Webb (D-Va.), Gen. James Mattis said he was satisfied with the tracking of the U.S. funds, which are aimed in part at helping Pakistan combat extremists within its borders.
“I’ve got some of the most aggressive colonels and majors you can imagine in Islamabad, working under my vice admiral there, who track this, and routinely we reject requests from [the Pakistanis] for reimbursement. So I know it’s not where they just walk in with a bill and we pay it,” a press release quoted Mattis as saying at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. – NTI.org, Global Security Wire
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Nope, not saying anything was wrong, would just like to note that this received little attention in the Western press but was covered quite extensively abroad.
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Non-whining non-sheep pay a lot of attention to details of all sorts.
May 16th, 2013 at 3:06 am
There are elites and there are elites. Some have more power and more purpose than others.
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I like to compare America of today with its antebellum incarnation. I do this so often because my knowledge of antebellum politics and society is extensive, but also because I feel like antebellum America is a very good example of democracy actually working as the enlightenment claimed it could. What is notable about the elites of that period is how limited their power was and how connected they were to average folk around them. They were clearly superior to the average guys in terms of education, intelligence, and wealth. But they did not live so different from them. They were intimately acquainted with neighbors not like them. They attended the same churches, were part of the same rallies, and were linked together by the many social institutions that mark that era. Part of this is simply a matter of population ratios; there were not nearly as many Americans back then as there are now and those Americans were widely dispersed.
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Which is important. Because in a decentralized political system, the power of the elite class is much diminished. Often times the rich guy down the street or the county sheriff 5 miles over had a bigger impact on the average citizens life than those guys in Washington DC ever could. Elites nearby are easier to hold to account than elites far away. Part of the problem with our current system – both in the markets and in the state – is concentrated power. Huge concentrated power is the enemy. Eventually it falls into the wrong hands. Even if it does not, it makes a wonderful target for the corrupt who do not deserve it. (Lynn Rees wrote a wonderful essay on that a few weeks ago. Similar themes were suggested in my post on the far left and far right. And James C Scott wrote another very, very good essay on this that impacted my thoughts on this matter very much.)
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But what really makes the antebellum so interesting to me is not the elites, but the normal citizens. These guys took their responsibilities as citizens seriously. It was just part of the culture – part of “being a man” in those days. One of the most popular forms of entertainment was the lyceum lectures, mostly devoted to social or political topics. Many Americans were actively engaged in social and religious organizations (despite the very limited amount of free time they had in those days). Almost every hamlet had its newspaper. Most people (unique for the 19c) could read. Almost all men voted. People were very quick to solve their own problems and to leverage local communities to do the same. Those people were not sheep.
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And that is the problem facing us today. The American elite of today are very hard working. Almost all are in the top 1% of national IQ. They feel justified in their position because they can claim – fairly accurately – that nobody is able to take their place. Is that a good enough reason not to oppose them? No, as carl says, it is not. But what happens once the opposing is over? What is the next step? Caesar was killed, to be replaced by another. Louis lost his head and Bonaparte gained the throne. The American revolution worked because the American people were capable and prepared to govern once the British were gone. A similar thing could be said of the Indian separation movement. The people involved not only had an end game in mind – they had the human capital to make that end happen once the struggle was over. We just don’t have that today.
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We might be able to get it. America has had three broad grass-roots political movements in its history. The antebellum flurry of democratic expansion and philanthropic organizations are one. The creation of the Progressive movement at the end of the 19c is another. The civil rights movement is the third. The interesting thing about all of these bottom-up transformations is that their foundations were set a decade or so before in civil society. The 2nd Great Awakening provided the moral reasoning behind and the social networks of later antebellum political movements; the progressive movement swept across America only after the Boy Scouts, Rotary, NAACP and almost every other major social organization famous today was founded (and a bunch of other social capital stuff), and the leadership networks that carried the civil rights movement through its course were built up in black churches and associations before the movement began. In each of these examples large segments of American society went through a bottom-up values change and heavily invested in social capital, creating the type of networks that could bring real political change to pass. Without this leg work any change we want to enact in the American political system of today will come to naught.
May 16th, 2013 at 1:50 pm
Madhu:
The problem with what Gen. Mattis said is that money if fungible. Any money we give to the Pak Army/ISI has the same effect. It kills our guys. That is bad thing, even if those killed are mostly young flyover people.
May 16th, 2013 at 1:53 pm
Yeah, I made that point up thread. I meant I don’t think he was lying to Sen. Webb. The tenor of reporting overseas is different than in the US; heroes here are not presented as heroes abroad if you see what I mean.
May 16th, 2013 at 1:55 pm
Now I’ve probably offended some people. Look, it’s not hard to read this testimony and think back over the years of testimony during the 80’s and 90’s and find exact parallels.
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If others roll their eyes at the US when we talk about human rights, it’s because they know, intimately, what we accept toward our own people. No amount of IO or diplomacy finesse or USAID money is going to change what people KNOW.
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Oh, I’m preaching to the choir. Many of you feel as I do.
May 16th, 2013 at 2:38 pm
Madhu,
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RE: “No sheep (what a condescending term) here.” A) It is a metaphor, & B) Condescension may be the point.
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Of course these are humans, not sheep; and as with metaphors in general, the things being compared are not identical. (Incidentally, if they were identical, no metaphor comparing them would be possible!) Actual sheep do not often post comments on the Internet responding to blog posts and other comments. To say that there are no sheep here is to state the obvious by alluding to a statement of equality that was never intended by the metaphor. Unfortunately, metaphors might be slippery for the same reason and so abet dispute — maybe, disputation is the point of metaphor, or a central feature.
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Similarly, “weak” & “strong” may describe relative valuations that are largely abstract, biased. The problem may be that the sheep are sheep precisely because they believe they are weak, they believe that others are strong, and they react to conflict guided by these beliefs. As with real sheep, human “sheep” probably don’t spend all of their time thinking about their own weakness — consciously, they might even entertain thoughts of being strong (unlike real sheep, of course) — but when the chips are down and the metaphorical wolves are among them, their understanding of their own weakness guides them. Since humans are not actual sheep, they can consciously ruminate on their own weakness, and they may even plan ahead, projecting their weakness into the future: What will, and can, be done about those future wolves?
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Nietzsche’s conceptualization of the sheep included a consideration of “slave morality,” in which these who are weak (actually weak or perhaps who merely feel that they are weak) pretty much gain their own system of valuations from first looking at the strong and calling the strong Evil. The sheep band together, labeling all that they view in the strong as Evil and create an antithesis to it that they adopt, calling the antithesis Good. Being weak — meek — is Good.
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The others, the strong, do not first look at the weak to find an understanding of themselves — an identity — but have a system of valuation that comes from themselves; and Nietzsche labeled this outlook “master morality.” In the eyes of the strong, the weak may seem Bad in contrast but aren’t Evil. In the eyes of the weak, these strong would appear condescending to them. So the weak would label that condescension Evil and raise up a good that is its antithesis: “Each person is precious,” or to be equally valued.
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But why say everyone is equally valued and promote that assessment—if not out of preemptive defense? I.e., from a feeling of weakness, projected into the future while imagining all the future wolves who might not subscribe to that evaluation of equal preciousness. In a way, Nietzsche’s metaphorical sheep adopted the strong’s condescension of them, internalized it — this perpetual feeling of one’s own weakness — while being condescending of the strong; and, adopting that stance, the sheep rarely fail to view other sheep as sheep. I’m reminded a little bit of Animal Farm and the pigs who first fought the human hegemony only to adopt the human attitudes (Napoleon.) “All animals are equal!” — equally precious, eh?
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Of course, none of the above presents an “Answer” to the issues being debated here.
May 16th, 2013 at 2:45 pm
Curtiss Gale Weeks:
Whenever I see constructions like “with constructive solutions” or “suggestions of how to fix it”, I see a simple dismissal rather than an attempt to listen or make a counterargument, especially when combined with a pejorative like “whining”. It sort of reminds me of a passenger or crew member on the China Clipper telling the dozing captain that No. 2 engine is on fire and being told to go away unless they can come up with a good fix for it.
(Hey I like this analogy. I think I’ll keep going.)
And when I see the dismissal justified with the explanation that those proles are just jealous of their betters, that is like after the passenger shouts “We’re burning you idiot flyboy!”, the captain responding “What do you know? You’re just mad because I’m a captain and you’re not. Besides you called me a flyboy. I’m a professional aviator.”
Now we’ll leave the analogy and go into pleasant fantasy-the passenger then takes the crash axe, brains the captain, tosses him out the escape hatch and has the third pilot take over, the second pilot being paralyzed by fright into catatonia because there is absolutely nothing in the ops manual that covers this. The third pilot cuts off the fuel to No. 2 and the fire goes out. They land at their little used alternate, Shangra-Jima, where the handling crew are all beautiful island girls who dress as you would expect beautiful island girls to dress and everybody lives happily ever after. When the passenger and the third pilot are asked why they acted in such a unconventional way. a way that was completely contrary to the system, they reply “It seemed like the thing to do at the time.”
What does “ressentiment” mean?
Ah, back to earth now. Ok, one way, an unconventional one to take a little power from the zips is to stop the federal student loan program. Grants are ok, but loans are out. That program now is just a method to shovel money from the flyover people to the zips. 50 years ago you could work your way through college and get a math degree. Now you can’t because it costs too much. Has calculus changed? Nope. But a system has been constructed where by people have been convinced that they have pay way up for the same degree because that money is there. Or they have been convinced that they need a degree to get an entry level job at a hotel. Or they will get a job at all with that theatre arts degree. If that system were removed, more money in the pockets of regular people, hence more power. Less money in the pockets of zip academia, hence less power.
Mostly though what is needed is sort of a moral thing. A book I am listening to says one of the main components of the American identity is the belief that “I am just as good as anybody.” We are starting to lose that and should strive to bring it back. That I don’t know exactly how to do except by what we are doing right now, talking about it.
May 16th, 2013 at 2:47 pm
“But why say everyone is equally valued and promote that assessment—if not out of preemptive defense? ”
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That is exactly the point, to promote a check on the ego, on the self, on hubris, on know-it-all-ism, to serve in the mind of the strong as a brake on the abuse of power. It is not a message the abused need to here, they know the world is hard. The enchanted don’t know this and lead themselves into trouble.
May 16th, 2013 at 4:31 pm
Madhu:
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How are you going to target that? “To serve in the mind of the strong as a brake” — The problem, from a Nietzschean view, is that the sheep often war on the sheep; that this type of preemptive defense is from a feeling of weakness; and that putting those brakes on ego and know-it-all-ism means projecting that weakness onto all into perpetuity. The hope of turning all metaphorical “wolves” into sheep while reminding all sheep to remain sheep forever. [Incidentally, this para might be a call-back to the main post above…]
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Example of problem re: “The enchanted don’t know this and lead themselves into trouble.” From an Orwellian view, there always comes along a sheep who thinks that he, at least, is not enchanted, not one of the enchanted, unlike all those others who are; and like pigs, this superior sheep discovers a necessary revision: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
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In the mind, “All are equally precious” might sound like a winning strategy; but in real practice, it often serves as a feint.
May 16th, 2013 at 4:49 pm
Let me tell a story about Quantas and why they have never had (or almost) an accident. It has to do with the Aussie belief that he is just as good as the next guy no matter who he happens to be. It also has to do with the Aussie belief that that next guy is just as good as him. What that meant in the cockpit or in the hanger was that the guys lower down didn’t have any hesitation in telling the guys higher up that they were full of it and wrong. As importantly it meant too that the guys higher up weren’t full of themselves and listened when they were told that and considered it as coming from a good source. That meant that everybody was involved in looking, seeing and acting when problems were only just arising and could be dealt with before the wing fell off. That didn’t happen in other countries where the captain sat alone and ignorant in all his glory and the wing did fall off. It all had to do with the Aussie belief that each guy was the equal of the other guy when it came down to it. And that is the essence of cockpit resource management, which has done a huge amount to reduce accidents in this country and around the world (where they actually do it), that each guy is as an essential part of the crew as the other, from the mighty captain to the newest flight attendant.
I don’t know if they knew anything at all about Nietzshe.
May 16th, 2013 at 5:01 pm
Hey Madhu, I’ve got a question. I had sedated surgery recently and before the surgeon started he had a pre-operative brief with the other people in the room where he went over what they were going to do, how they were going to do it and what outcome was planned. Then he asked if there were any questions or comments and away they went. That all sounded quite familiar to me and I asked about it. He said that in the last few years medicine has adopted a lot of procedures that are common in aviation and it has helped. Do see that?
May 17th, 2013 at 12:52 pm
Carl,
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My specialty is lab based but it is my understanding that clinicalchecklists and other safety measures have been adopted. Or should be. Any other physicians reading?
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http://gawande.com/the-checklist-manifesto
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Curtis,
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Not to be flippant but Nietzche is no more.
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Moving from the theoretical to the applied realm requires a leap of imagination, a little faith, and the ability to be practical. Carl has provided a practical example of behavior meeting non-sheep behavior. T. Greer has provided several examples of non-sheep behavior. I have provided a practical example of non-sheep behavior, sunlight-as-disinfectant close monitoring of the foreign policy class.
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Will it work? When does anything ever work? But, rarely, if you keep trying, you never know….
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I can think of a million ways to “target that”. One is behaving as you wish others to behave (one I struggle with and always will. “I’m rotten” isn’t a #humblebrag, I really do wish I were a better person. I was much better as a younger physicians, sadly, although I’m mellowing with middle age and the students are responding appropriately. They seem to like my presence now, whereas earlier I put people on edge.)
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Another is having our supposedly elite institutions hire different kinds of people. When I sat–in my small and modest way–on committees, I sometimes argued for applicants that seemed different than the norm, came from a different school, had a different background. Of course, sometimes it is best to go with the standard applicant, the other way you could end up with a troublesome dud instead of dull dud. Real life, always hard.
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Instead of prioritizing an elite degree, a certain type of employer might look for examples of teamwork, friendliness, that sort of thing. It will never be an exact science in the real world and even Orwell wasn’t perfect.
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For example, two sheep seem to be doing a pretty good job poking back at the power dynamics of the “we are men who have read everything*” Zenpundit blog comment section simply by refusing to accept certain terms of argument and, instead, creating our own 🙂
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*You all get that I’m just teasing and have no problem with any of this, right? It’s fun, this place, the commenters, the bloggers, everyone.
May 17th, 2013 at 2:54 pm
Carl & Curtis:
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Madhu’s comment was held for “approval” and by the time I approved it had gone to the bottom of the list of recent comments in our sidebar, so I’m posting this to get this topic back up to the top of the list in the hope you two at least will see it…
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Best to all, C
May 17th, 2013 at 5:17 pm
Madhu,
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T. Greer had raised the metaphor of sheep. Given that the subject had already turned to elites/superzips/oligarchy, I thought that the unspoken or vaguely referenced counter to that class deserved as much attention. (You and Carl had already referred to the “flyover people” for example.) Any discussion of “sheep” or any putatively weak majority having to counter a small group of powerful elites naturally brings Nietzsche into the discussion. Carl may fantasize about a utopian Quantas brotherhood somehow magically appearing across the whole society (“fraternité!”), and you may fantasize about a society-wide change of heart that magically creates more diversity in elite institutions; but making those fantasies into a reality requires more than wishful thinking.
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Many may leverage their free speech empowerments via blog posts & comments, articles and opinion pieces, broadcast media, and in town halls to urge hiring outside-the-box and hope their arguments are sufficient to persuade large sections of society—so that committees accomplish your proposal—but other systems still permit funneling & culling that is not so progressive or adventurous. Many people will stick to “herding” that seems safe, congregating with others of like mind upon whom they can depend when their own backs need saving—and, who won’t turn out to be wolves hiding in their midst. They have a freedom to associate with whom they please; and, individuals in charge of hiring or appointing may trust their own biased valuations and limited knowledge more than they trust broad calls for fraternité!.
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Just look at this long thread of comments and see how much more closely you and Carl huddle than either of you huddle with me. Fortunately, Mark & Co. aren’t prone to censoring commenters who disagree with them — I have been on blogs that culled strenuously — and so you and Carl may have a wolf among you, or a black sheep, and your “herd huddling” is very mild in any case; but we are also geographically quite protected from one another. In the environment of the office, the faculty, the board room, and a presidential administration, where the stakes might be much higher, people are going to segregate and/or cull as long as they are able to do so.
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Systems can be changed to preempt the sort of natural culling that occurs, either enforcing diversity a la quota systems or minimizing in general structural ways the power to cull by limiting the influence that individuals might have over the process of hiring. But I would return to my original comments under this blog post:
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The trick of empowering citizenry is to find a way to do so without empowering those who would do harm. The trick of dis-empowering malcontents, law-breakers, potential terrorists is to do so without dis-empowering the regular citizenry.
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I am not the historian Mark is, but my impression is that most attempts to enforce fraternité, even when guided by a dream of liberté & égalité, have led to abuse and outcomes counter to the stated purposes. Quota systems either lead to a type of reverse discrimination or a limit on individuals’ rights to manage their own businesses and organizations as they see fit, or both. Structural changes intended to take some of the decision-making power away from individuals (who may well be biased and/or ignorant and/or malcontents in general), either hit all who would make those decisions — or end up concentrating the decision-making powers into the hands of some few in the community or government, because, well, decisions must be made.
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Mark’s use of the buried measure in the immigration bill also would serve as an example of an attempt to dis-empower law-breakers and potential malcontents through a systematized approach to culling them out, but one which could thereby also dis-empower the citizenry as a whole. (Oddly enough, referencing my very fist comment in this thread, I don’t remember Mark raising so loudly an alarm about the GOP’s 2012 attempt to de-citizenize large numbers of voters, an attempt which ought to be viewed through the same light.)
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And to tie the whole shebang together, I would say that my segue through Nietzsche seems relevant, from my own considered point of view, because of his notions about the consequence of slave morality. Because it inherently despises self-created systems of valuation and in fact calls those who would operate independent of any herd Evil, and operates from a feeling of weakness, those suffering from slave morality will put into place systems that tend to negate personal choice:
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A) In order to dis-empower all present and any future malcontents — their first and last impulse is to create a self-defense — the sheep will also continue to dis-empower themselves. Maybe they will use high-minded phrases and ideas to convince each other that their guiding principle is Liberté, égalité, fraternité!; and maybe some are able to imagine a future in which those ideas might actually work; but the practical steps taken will tend to advance them away from their imaginary utopias.
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B) Similarly, they might instead put into place systems that would empower all within a society, in order to insure liberty for all (rather than target malcontents with dis-empowerments)—but this “all” will also include those malcontents, who will only be too happy to use that empowerment to become super-empowered, superzip, oligarch, elite sheep.
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Incidentally, although you might be tired of reading his name, as long as you are forced to read his name it might be helpful to realize that Nietzsche formulated his idea of slave morality vs. master morality when exploring pre-history and the origins of morality. He also briefly (and vaguely) mentioned at one point that he thought that most modern humans (circa 19th C. at least) have a mixture of slave morality and master morality. He went into detail when describing the benefits of slave morality — how it has served a useful function, how it has accomplished some things efficiently. Although I haven’t delved too deeply into the scholarly analysis of Nietzsche, having mostly read him for myself, there are debates about whether he favored master morality over slave morality. My impression is, Yes, although he didn’t skimp on extolling some virtues of slave morality although he surely attacked it far more often, directly, and vehemently than he attacked master morality.
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The reason I have not myself offered up concrete “solutions” to the problems being debated here is three-fold:
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1) I’m not the one arguing that Something needs to change because we are all going down the drain!, because
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2) I’m not altogether sure we are on a pathway to hell and damnation, destruction; I wonder if our present history is merely “more of the same” or a historically natural swing of some pendulum that has been swinging for a long time — perhaps even a pendulum that is naturally coming to its eventual stop, and
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3) On the chance that something ought to change (I am not sure that all is well, because there are signs of potential danger or chaos ahead, even if these are naturally occurring results of the pendulum’s operation), understanding the framework of what is now occurring seems to be an important first step toward making change without shooting ourselves in the foot, or in the head.
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When it comes down to it, the whole present debate in this thread might be summarized in that pedestrian, almost clichéd way, in which it often is: How much disempowerment can we live with, and how much empowerment must we have, in order to insure that our future is one we can at least accept, or perhaps even enjoy?
June 3rd, 2013 at 7:41 pm
This is something I found over at Information Dissemination ( http://www.informationdissemination.net/ ). I put it here because I couldn’t think of a better place to put it. My opinion is that it is an almost perfect description of how many of the oligarchs, the superzips, view the rest.
“…they are apt to look at them as pieces of living mechanism, born to serve, to obey their orders, and administer to their wishes without complaint. This is alike a bad morality and a bad philosophy.”
The full quote follows. It was actually written by Samuel Leech, a RN sailor who served in the early 1800s, about the officers.
“But the difficulty with naval officers is, that they do not treat with a sailor as with a man. They know what is fitting between each other as officers; but they treat their crews on another principle; they are apt to look at them as pieces of living mechanism, born to serve, to obey their orders, and administer to their wishes without complaint. This is alike a bad morality and a bad philosophy.”
http://www.informationdissemination.net/2013/05/a-bad-morality-and-bad-philosophy.html
It is remarkable how well that describes the attitudes of the superzips towards themselves and towards others. Of course a big difference between our oligarchs and those RN officers of old is those officers, whatever their other faults, could and would fight, quite effectively.
August 23rd, 2013 at 3:24 am
[…] But in purposely blinding the state, we allow others within our borders to operate more freely, also, including terrorists and the aiders and abettors of terrorists. Look at the example of Al Harethi given above: If we had said “No!” to TRR-38, he might be out and about killing Americans right now. True, if we deny the state information, the state is not going to be able to analyze that information incorrectly and so won’t act in error from poor analysis; but it does not therefore follow that the state won’t act. It just won’t act on the basis of so much data. […]