Survey: Americans Broadly Support Surveillance Cameras
July 31st, 2007No measure of number of Americans who have fled the U.S., never to return?
Via: ABC News:
Crime-fighting beats privacy in public places: Americans, by nearly a 3-to-1 margin, support the increased use of surveillance cameras — a measure decried by some civil libertarians, but credited in London with helping to catch a variety of perpetrators since the early 1990s.
Given the chief arguments, pro and con — a way to help solve crimes vs. too much of a government intrusion on privacy — it isn’t close: 71 percent of Americans favor the increased use of surveillance cameras, while 25 percent oppose it.
Posted in Surveillance | Top Of Page
It’s funny how the number “70%” or “71%” keeps coming up when it comes to the poll number of Americans who tacitly support fascism…”70%” originally supported the Iraq War…”70%” originally supported Bush after 9-11…”70%” (and even now this is the number! After Bush even refuted it!) STILL believe Saddam backed “al Qaida’s” “terrorist” attack on 9-11! But then again, I know that roughly 2/3 of Americans are basically incapable of getting beyond what they have always been deluded by. I once saw a video of a black woman who, deciding that safety and security was more important than her rights (and don’t forget she’s black, so her rights have probably always been trampled on), told a camera person, “What good are my rights when I’m six feet under?” As long as 70% of Americans are convinced fascism could never happen here, they will continue to fall for fascist schemes.
Now is the time for those of us Americans for which leaving is not an option to head out of the cities and suburbs and head for the mountains and deserts (check out my website; click on my username).
Americans want a yoke, and they’re going to get a nice heavy one. Bummer.
Fools. Americans can be such sheeple. The power of The Mighty Wurlitzer never ceases to astonish.
“We cannot suppress our brothers’ liberty without murdering ourselves. We will stand together, as men, for human freedom and human dignity, or we will fall together, simians all, back to the swamp.
In this late, this very late hour, it is with solutions that we must be primarily concerned. I seem to be living in a nation that simply does not know what freedom is.
We believe that it is a word, a piece of paper–something we are told that we have–that we tell each other that we have. Indeed, it is far more–far more than that.” -John Whiteside Parsons
aargh… as an american college student, I’ve been waiting desperately searching for someone to prove me/all of us wrong… but lord knows that ain’t happening.
this is definitely a ‘grass is greener’ statement, but I’m convinced that being a (single) 20-somthing college student is the worst situation to be in at this time… the options are so starkly contrasted its extremely difficult to ‘make a move’… turn your back on everything, family, peers & all (even then where does the money come from to set up an independent subsistent lifestyle) or continue to walk through life like a zombie, w/ no one, peers, ladies et al understanding why your view of the future is so bleak, just waiting for 10$/gallon gas & 15$ gallons of milk….. I can’t even study a damn thing without thinking about its post-collapse implications (and no prof wants anything to do with such an idea.. & i’m at a world renowned ‘liberal’ institution)…
… to sum this rant up in ‘the parlance of our times’: Where are all the hot peaknik/TEOTWAWKI bitches at?
-till another day,
the bookman
I was discussing the surveillance situation in Britain with my parents and I mentioned that it would almost be acceptable if the footage from cameras was available on the internet for anyone in the community to peruse. My mother reacted very strongly against this, basically saying that it is alright for ‘the authorities’ to watch us but allowing the people the same privilege would be an unacceptable invasion of privacy.
My mother is not an unreasonable person (most of the time) but this little conversation has been symbolic for me of the full extent to which certain pernicious ideas and assumptions are buried deep in the psyches of otherwise reasonable people. Most people are not ready to be unplugged…
Meanwhile, I teach American college students in London. It’s not easy on my side of the fence either, desperately supressing the desire to shout ‘stop getting into debt! Learn to farm! Run for the hills!’ That said, i think if you are young, healthy and without dependents you are in no way in the worst position. If you keep in shape and pick up some portable skills, you have a reasonable chance of being able to walk away from trouble when it happens (if you spot it a week or so earlier than everyone else, of course!), and of being welcome as a useful extra pair of hands wherever you end up. The draft / rampaging mobs / national guard roadblocks notwithstanding, obviously. A farmlet would be better, but a high level of personal mobility is a good fallback position, I think.
@bookman:
Being a 20-something college student is the worst situation to be in at this time? Dude, unless you’re close to graduation and/or already have a ton of debt, you’re in the best possible situation re: mobility and opportunity! Want to move abroad to get away from the US? Find a school there and transfer! You don’t even have to tell anyone your real reason for leaving, you just say you decided to study abroad, and all your family/friends will say “Good idea!” and wish you luck and throw you a party and possibly even give you some traveling money. At this stage in your life, if you’re anything like I was, you’ve accumulated little that has any real value (I had a beloved rusty old truck, finally sold the rotting carcass before I got married) and everything that is really important to you can probably fit in a small backpack. Sure, you’d leave family and friends behind but internet cafe’s are available the world over to keep in touch – and I bet most of your friends are online anyway.
Pick a country, any country, and look for a school there that looks interesting. Apply to transfer, or at least for a “semester abroad”. If you don’t like it, choose another. At worst, you’ll not be able to transfer some of your credits. Sure, you’ll probably have to get a job (if you don’t have one already) but if you don’t buy lots of stuff you won’t spend a lot of money and you won’t have to spend a lot to store it and transport it, so being able to afford school and travel should be relatively easy.
There’s also the option of taking the odd semester or year off just to go “walkabout” and “find yourself” – the terms your friends/family will be somewhat familiar with, while your real goals will be to “get away” and “find a better place”.
To sum up – you have the least to lose from leaving, and the most to gain. If the collapse doesn’t happen, you’ll have excellent resume fodder and talking points for job interviews, at the very least! If it does, hey, you’re already out of here.
It may seem to be the worst possible situation – I know I thought I had it real bad at times when I was in school, but it turned out I was too concerned with what others thought of me (be sensible!) to really be able to figure out what I wanted. At that age, in that setting, emotions are magnified and the least bit of seeming lack of power to change anything can be near paralyzing.
Take a chance while you still have little or no real responsibilities (wife, house, kid, etc.).
Good luck,
-cajun
“That said, i think if you are young, healthy and without dependents you are in no way in the worst position. If you keep in shape and pick up some portable skills, you have a reasonable chance of being able to walk away from trouble when it happens (if you spot it a week or so earlier than everyone else, of course!), and of being welcome as a useful extra pair of hands wherever you end up.”
Dude, noone will simply WALK away from a transition like the one that is going to happen. In a country with so little social cohesion and so many different classes/races living (peacefully for now?) together, you have to expect civil _unrest_. I look forward to something like the period of 1917-192x in Russia, where 10+ millions perished in a conflict of red vs white. And those people were 90% farmers and knew how to survive under harsh conditions.
My advice to all of you: be a good man, love thy neighbour, have a social network to fall back on, learn some craft.
Just my 2c, peace.
Bookman, I agree with Cajun. I’ve got a son in college and he’s planning on working abroad when he graduates. I have other attachments that keep me here. You’re just starting out, so you’re pretty much free to do what you want.
Cheeba, there is great irony in your mother’s attitude. The fact of the matter is that, by law, here and in the UK, if you’re in a public place you have NO RIGHT TO PRIVACY. That’s the whole basis that lets the authorities put these cameras up in the first place. ANYBODY who wants to can put up a camera in a public place and make it viewable on the internet. I can stand on a street corner and take your mother’s picture as long as she is in a public place. So what’s the difference if I can see what’s going on via a webcam instead of actually standing on the corner?
She has things completely backwards. Only the authorities can make this kind of surveillance comprehensive and use it to track you and monitor you and invade your privacy. Private parties have far more limited power to invade your privacy, and they can’t imprison you for 60 days on suspicion of being a “terrorist.”
Why believe this poll? Why believe any poll? 4 out of 5 dentists recommend that you cap your teeth. 6 out of 7 smokers smoke Lucky Strike.
70% of whom? Braindead Americans who fill up a Fox News televised Town Hall?
thanks for the responses! its very helpful to get other perspectives from people with similar understandings of our situation.
My family is big and very close. If/When TSHTF I will not let them deal with it on their own (i’ve always been the sibling who fixed everything, the one of eight who knows how to use a hammer). In a Darwinian sense it isn’t the best attitude, but I have my plan, I just wish I could buy the land & get started now… (a lot of pressure from the suburban ‘rents to graduate & get a ‘real’ job) I guess I should just ignore that & get started.
…Especially after tonight w/ the infrastructure in my hometown already collapsing (http://kstp.com/article/stories/S156329.shtml?cat=1)
[@kevin, sorry for the off-topic, self-directed posts… but you’ve got a helpful community here]
Bookman, I think if I were young and unattached, I would join an intentional community. If you join one that’s large enough, it could improve your social life. There’s one in Missouri that interests me–Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage, which was apparently set up by a bunch of refuges from an Eastern Ivy League college (I forget which one)–but I am neither young nor unattached.
I know there has been some talk on this site that ICs will be targets during a collapse, but some of them are in rather remote areas. And they tend to have a low profile, because no one is interested in them.
The only hitch to many ecovillages is that you need an income source you can bring with you. This is why so many ecovillages and ICs fail. But some have been around long enough that they are producing the necessary cash income. There’s one in the Missouri Ozarks that produces sorghum molasses as a cash crop.
One of my big regrets in life is that I’ve spent so little of my life among truly like-minded people–never did the “back to the land” thing in community, but kept trying to make it in the matrix.
Unless your soul mate is “a girl in a short skirt and a long jacket, touring the facility and picking up slack,” you won’t find her. You gotta go where she is. This is how I wound up married to putzes–you “settle” for someone who is nowhere near like-minded.
You should do something definite, before you wind up living in the ‘burbs with Barbie’s little sister, and selling insurance for a living.
I came back for more cos i imagined in my absence a feeding frenzy of people saying “what? WALK AWAY?” (Actually everyone has been pretty reasonable.) Obviously everything Kevin and others have said in the past about the inadequacy of such an approach still stands, and I felt I maybe understated that fact. But RELATIVELY speaking, there are many worse positions to be in than that of a mobile, healthy young person without personal debt or dependents. So yeah, get them skills on board (how much time do we have left? As i’ve been asking since 2005…)
hermesten, if you fancy a trip to the UK to explain to my mother how unreasonable she is, please don’t hesitate! No, really, it was just an example of how easy it is to forget that for most people, even otherwise intelligent and reasonable ones, the authorities are nice and good and better than us and are the only ones who should have access to secret information/weapons/the only bridge out of town. Maybe more so in the UK than the US, where there is still a bit of a libertarian streak and also some space not filled by people. For those fearing the great crunch on the other side of the Atlantic, here are the unfortunate figures: UK population as percentage of US – 20%. UK landmass area as percentage of US – 2.5%. Erk. Can I sleep on your floor when the shit happens?