l9.
The Criminalization of Everyday Life
171–180 of 347 posts
Re: The Criminalization of Everyday Life
#172I wish people would move beyond 1984 and quote more Foucault's Discipline & Punishment [1]. There is a much deeper-rooted problem in society than mass surveillance or militarization of police. It's the question of why we all let this happen without any resistance. We accept and welcome our controllers. Foucault wrote about the effects of prisoner mindset in society in the 1960-70s. Our subjugation and tolerance to au…
FWIW, you linked to a book format which has embedded technological controls that contribute to being at the mercy of authoritarianism.
Looks like a bog standard, non DRM, PDF, no?
Re: The Criminalization of Everyday Life
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whats wrong with a police department having a tank? I'd say it's a waste of money, but if it's completely free there's no downside.
Are you serious? Do you not understand the implications of arming a local police force as if they were the military? That's terrifying.
Yes, I'm serious. Swat teams have been around forever, this isn't anything new. An armored vehicle of all things isn't particularly harmful. I would react differently if they gave them, say, a minigun or a guided missile or whatever. It's just a bullet proof truck.
Re: The Criminalization of Everyday Life
#174I wish people would move beyond 1984 and quote more Foucault's Discipline & Punishment [1]. There is a much deeper-rooted problem in society than mass surveillance or militarization of police. It's the question of why we all let this happen without any resistance. We accept and welcome our controllers. Foucault wrote about the effects of prisoner mindset in society in the 1960-70s. Our subjugation and tolerance to au…
mass surveillance =/= authoritarianism 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…
>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.
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.
Re: The Criminalization of Everyday Life
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whats wrong with a police department having a tank? I'd say it's a waste of money, but if it's completely free there's no downside.
It's not completely free. They need to pay to store it, insure it, run it. They need to have staff (diverted from their other tasks) to maintain it and operate it and bureaucrat it. 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…
>It's not completely free.
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.
Re: The Criminalization of Everyday Life
#176I can't say I'm exactly surprised. If you ran a police department, you're not about to turn down a free tank -- I mean, how cool is that, toys for the boys?!?! 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 t…
Whats wrong with a police department having a tank? I'd say it's a waste of money, but if it's completely free there's no downside.
>Whats wrong with a police department having a tank? I'd say it's a waste of money, but if it's completely free there's no downside.
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...
Re: The Criminalization of Everyday Life
#177The usual internet twaddle. How many commenters on this thread have bothered to look up incidents of this nature in their districts, neighbourhoods or whatever, and called their councilman or congressman?
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.
Re: The Criminalization of Everyday Life
#178This article is not about police tanks. (Even though it's horrifying that if the tanks were about to roll into America's equivalent of Tianeman Square, our American Tank Man would just be tasered, at best.)
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.
Re: The Criminalization of Everyday Life
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
quote more Foucault's Discipline & Punishment 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 h…
That critique of Foucault is much too cheap. To any halfway competent theory hacker, it will sound like "But Python uses significant whitespace, and Guido van Rossum's knowledge of language design is dubious at best." It's hard to base a serious discussion on that type of argument. To me, one of the major takeaways from Foucault is his renouncement of the "repression hypothesis". In a nutshell, he proposes to underst…
Speaking of control, I think an interesting way to conceptualize what's happening here is a cybernetic/organicist model (a tradition that goes at least as far back as Hobbes).
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.
Re: The Criminalization of Everyday Life
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
That critique of Foucault is much too cheap. To any halfway competent theory hacker, it will sound like "But Python uses significant whitespace, and Guido van Rossum's knowledge of language design is dubious at best." It's hard to base a serious discussion on that type of argument. To me, one of the major takeaways from Foucault is his renouncement of the "repression hypothesis". In a nutshell, he proposes to underst…
Speaking of control, I think an interesting way to conceptualize what's happening here is a cybernetic/organicist model (a tradition that goes at least as far back as Hobbes). 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…
You might enjoy "Protocol: how control exists after decentralization" by Galloway.
A lot of it is very similar to this, building on top of Deleuze's "Postscript."