Cultural shift in USA.

stoneill

Is the USA the new USSR?

Despite the rhetoric of Freedom and Democracy the USA is fast becoming the most restricted society in the world.
The surveillance of everyday activity, phone and e-mail activity being monitored, all in the name of freedom does bear the
hallmark of a totalitarian society.

The usual response is that if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear, however the is the erosion of personal privacy justifiable
for US National security? On a large scale view perhaps, but on a personal, individual level would you give up your privacy just so
you are “safe” from an terrorist act that is stark statistics would never happen to you in several lifetimes.

robp

stoneill wrote: »

Is the USA the new USSR?

Despite the rhetoric of Freedom and Democracy the USA is fast becoming the most restricted society in the world.
The surveillance of everyday activity, phone and e-mail activity being monitored, all in the name of freedom does bear the
hallmark of a totalitarian society.

The usual response is that if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear, however the is the erosion of personal privacy justifiable
for US National security? On a large scale view perhaps, but on a personal, individual level would you give up your privacy just so
you are “safe” from an terrorist act that is stark statistics would never happen to you in several lifetimes.

I am not sure it is unique to the USA. Several countries in Europe are at this too. I think the USA would have to go along way to beat China at this.

An Coilean

Its been a while since I watched it, but I think it is in this talk that Noam Chomsky goes through the concept that a culture of totalitarianism is much more a feature of a free society than one under the heal of a dictator.

The basic idea is that in a free society, those in power have to work very hard to control public opinion and set very tight controls on what can and can not be said publicly about the system in place because they are so constrained in what they can do to prevent active decent.

Conversly a dictatorship need not care about or seek to control public opinion to the same extent because it has access to a much wider range of tools to crush oppisition. You dont need to activly seek to prevent negative public opinion when you can simply arrest or kill those who activly oppose the system in power.

Torakx

The problem with a "free society" for me is that the majority do not comprehend what freedoms they have or are losing, because of said media control.
In a dictatorship you would clearly see what freedoms you lost and have and then at least know where things stand.
I consider that knowing to be freedom of sorts. At least coming from a "free society" not sure how differently I would think coming from the other perspective. Probably pissed off at some dictator, but at least I would know who is screwing me over for sure

For example, when I was still pretty ignorant of the world I had an employer try to screw me out of my redundancy. Having gone through the process of being screwed over and coming out the other end, I have learned quite a lot on court dealings and business in those regards.
Think of that as the dictatorship. I now feel more free and less concerned with those matters because I know how it goes now and back then I could see my aggressor.
In a "free society" people get screwed over, but in a way that makes them think they are getting something beneficial. Because the power structure needs to be really sly to get what they want.
We have sharpened their wits with the challenge.

Personally I'm for feudalism in some ways anyway.

As for the op on the USA, I do agree.
You can see many facets of American society that can seem very much like the Nazis and probably Russian society back in the day. Don't know a lot about Russian history really.

The Obama youth thing was kind of creepy as one that stood out to me. Nationalism is so creepy when taken overboard, looks like insanity to me, yet these people aren't in an insane asylum they are voters!