There's a Deleuze quote about this that I really like: “It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality”.
What I understand this to mean is that the nature of “rationality” is such that a rational person can rationalize anything. Nobody is saying “EXTERMINATE ALL RATIONAL THOUGHT”, obviously this is just you trolling, but to the extent that anything intelligent can be distilled from your reply, that's my response to it.
We can always rationalise anything, especially misdeeds committed by those in positions of power over us. Sometimes it's important to halt that process and stop and just say "this is definitely fucked up", and yes, not to question it any further. It can actually be really hard not to question it sometimes, especially if you trust, or have been conditioned to trust, those in positions of power over you who are abusing you. You want to find reasons to defend their abuse of their power, you don't want it to be what it looks like. And you can find reasons for it, you always can. You will. But abuse is still abuse. So sometimes you have to stop and just say “this is fucked”.
> Sometimes it's important to halt that process and stop and just say "this is definitely fucked up", and yes, not to question it any further.
In my opinion, there are few things more tragic than someone carrying out actions with serious consequences on behalf of a belief that they refuse to question.
I believe I understand your pragmatic concerns. It is hard to act passionately while simultaneously entertaining doubts about your underlying beliefs. Obviously one does not need to set a timer and rigorously question their beliefs every five minutes. However, it is important that one welcomes evidence to the contrary and is willing to engage with that evidence. To do otherwise is to risk becoming a slave to dogma.
In a way I actually agree with nearly everything you say, I just think you haven't taken what you say to its logical conclusion.
The thing you seem to be missing is that there are no “neutral” beliefs. There's no “middle” in terms of ideology. Doing “nothing” is de facto maintaining the status quo, and acting to maintain the status quo is a positive action just as much as acting to abolish it is. The belief that the status quo should be maintained is a positive belief just as the belief that it should be abolished it is. Right?
The thing is, by the very nature of ideology, those who wish to maintain the status quo rarely have their beliefs subjected to the same level of scrutiny as those who to abolish it. Therefore it is very easy for those who wish to maintain the status quo to believe that their beliefs and actions are sane, rational, reasonable, etc., because everything seems to reinforce that, while those who wish to abolish it are often portrayed as insane, irrational, “extremist”, etc., and as someone who does wish to abolish the status quo, it's very hard not to internalise some of that. Being constantly bombarded with that, having all of your beliefs constantly scrutinised from every angle inevitably manifests itself as incapacitating self-doubt that's very difficult to overcome sometimes. Sometimes the only way to cope with this is to temporarily suspend this constant questioning of everything you believe in.
It is far more common that people who wish to maintain the status quo are slaves to dogma than that people who wish to abolish it are. Often, the latter do not have a choice about whether or not their beliefs are rigourously questioned every five minutes. But the former can comfortably go their whole lives without ever having their beliefs rigourously questioned by anybody.
Edit: I think an NSA agent participating in these programs out of a belief that they are “serving their country” and who refuses to question what “serving their country” actually means is a slave to dogma. I do not think that somebody who believes that their communications should not be monitored or recorded without their consent and who refuses to question that belief is a slave to dogma.
Thanks for the measured response. I hadn't really considered the strain that status quo beliefs/narratives put on those with marginalized beliefs/narratives. I actually live with a number of kids who are into anarchism/radical politics, so I've gotten a lot of exposure to more radical narratives. It's really disorienting/fascinating to meet people whose world-views differ so thoroughly from the norm.
I guess I just figured that those with radical beliefs became kind of immune to mainstream views, having rejected them. But you bring up a good point; it can be taxing to be viewed as a fringe element when you feel like you're the one who's right. I can see that being really frustrating.
Anyway, I'm not entirely sure I agree with this:
> The thing you seem to be missing is that there are no “neutral” beliefs.
If one knows nothing about an issue (concerning some status quo behavior), it would be wise for them not to take an action on that issue without first learning more about it. But until they learn about the issue, would we really consider them to have a "positive" belief on the issue?
What about when they knew a few scattered facts but didn't necessarily have the whole picture? Again, we would not want them to take a stance. (Or, at least, I wouldn't.) Would that count as a "positive" action?
I'm not certain if inaction is necessarily endorsement. True, you are allowing something to happen... but you're allowing a lot of things to happen every day, things that perhaps should be changed or stopped but that you don't have the relevant knowledge of or the means to address.
Anyway, I'm generally with you on the NSA stuff... not feeling too comfortable with what they're doing. But radicalization and ideology kind of fascinate me (mostly from a philosophical perspective) so it's always interesting to explore these interactions (though they often devolve into flame wars, sadly).
EDIT: Perhaps you could claim one has a moral obligation to research and judge the impact of the social/economic system(s) they participate in. That feels like a separate (but related) discussion altogether.
If doing nothing is a 'positive action', than the words 'positive action' have no meaning. If think you mean to say that the effect doing nothing is to support the status quo, and morally equivalent to positive action supporting the the status quo, I still disagree, but you're on firmer ground.
Apart from that, all you need to do is thematically replace privacy rights & surveillance with class struggle & worldwide revolution and this is pure Bolshevism.
If you read my post carefully, you'll notice that I put “nothing” in quotation marks. You're close when you guess that I mean that “the effect doing nothing is to support the status quo, and morally equivalent to positive action supporting the the status quo,” but you have the direction of causation backwards. What I was trying to get at is that it's actually impossible to do “nothing”: you're always doing something, and if you're not, you're dead. The thing is, many actions which act to reproduce and maintain the status quo are ideologically defined as “nothing”: they're so normal that they're invisible.
I don't understand why you equate class struggle and global revolution with Bolshevism, or the implication that there's anything Orwellian about those things. That's completely disingenuous. There are several well known political traditions which advocate class struggle and global revolution but which at the same time have always fiercely been opposed to Bolshevism. Anarchist communism, left-wing communism, etc...
"There's no possible reason for people to support these programs", the preceding comment says, "and so it is pointless and even harmful for us to talk about possible reasons".
> There's no possible reason for people to support these programs and so it is pointless and even harmful for us to talk about possible reasons.
I almost agree with this, were it not equivocating two different senses of the phrase “possible reason”.
There's no legitimate reason for people to support these programs and so it is pointless and even harmful for us to talk about possible reasons.
There are possible reasons to support these programs, but they're not legitimate or sensible or reasonable or good. And that's precisely why it is harmful to talk about possible reasons to support these programs. You make it harder for people to be sure in their own minds that they are as fucked up as they seem, which makes it harder to build resistance to them, which is an urgent necessity. It might sound like what I'm talking about is immaterial, but it's not. To build resistance you need morale, to have morale you need at the very least to have the surety that you're right. To participate in the endless repetition of half-baked, rational-sounding defences of the indefensible is to make it harder for those who want to attack the indefensible to believe that they're not crazy. But we need them to believe that they're not crazy.
So I agree with the article and I agree that NSA has gone too far. But your comment feels like you have bought a jump to conclusions mat from "office space". If, for example, during the process of obtaining clearance, you were to receive certain information that you don't have now, perhaps that would change your opinion of legitimacy of these programs from a binary 0 or 1 to a more nuanced probability distribution
This reminds me a bit of Russell's teapot[1]. Basically, you're saying, imagine if there existed “certain information”, which nobody can tell me about, but if they could, it would change my beliefs? Okay. Given what I do know, I think the chances of these programs being legitimate are about the same as the chances that there is “between the Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptical orbit”.
You have heard Iranians chant "Death To America" at their official rallies right? How do you know that the chance that they don't mean it is zero ? Based on what information? Even at the height of the cold war nobody ever chanted "Death To America" in the Soviet Union.
I feel like you're assuming that I'm American and that I don't want America to die. I think most people in the world will be delighted when the American empire inevitably collapses. Not just “Iranians” — as if there are “official rallies” for an entire country of people.
There are official rallies in Iran orchestrated by those who are in power and dictate policy and when they chant "Death To America", I don't think they are talking about collapse of the empire but literal death. In any case, most of us on this forum do not want the American empire to collapse. My personal opinion is the United States, for all its flaws is a force of good in the world. Often times, Europeans adopt holier than thou attitude, conveniently forgetting their own troubled history with colonialism and heavily relying on the United States for defence
..and while the intelligentsia are busy debating the theoretical possibility of the existence of said teapot, the powers that be are acting decisively and defining the reality.
If such information exists, why not just reveal it to a few influential and reasonably trusted individuals and groups (such as Schneier, EFF, EPIC, ACLU) to get the public off their backs?
Obviously there is no objective universal criteria for legitimacy or morality or anything like that. It will come down to what your personal politics are, a fact which will itself be hugely influenced by your material position in the web of power relations that structures your social reality.
How are "It could just be a challenge for them." or "They could just be 'blindly' patriotic" legitimate reasons? Of course everything has a reason, we live in a causal universe. Your comment implies someone claimed it's magic, and I for one haven't heard that yet. So you may call that rational or intelligent, but that doesn't make it so.
And then there's
> "It's entirely possible that there are some really horrific classified things that were stopped via similar spying activities, so intercepting some Gmail messages seems like a much less evil alternative."
"some Gmail messages"? How is this not belittling it? How is that, pardon my french, not a fucking joke to say at this stage to this audience?
And how is that list complete? Why does "sustaining power over domestic and foreign democratic interests" not show up in it? It's not reasoning to just throw out some things, two thirds of it being silly [in the context of legitimate reasons, which is what the post started out claiming to enumerate] and stopping with one nice thing that could be possible, while ignoring not so nice things that could also be possible. It's rationalization.
What I understand this to mean is that the nature of “rationality” is such that a rational person can rationalize anything. Nobody is saying “EXTERMINATE ALL RATIONAL THOUGHT”, obviously this is just you trolling, but to the extent that anything intelligent can be distilled from your reply, that's my response to it.
We can always rationalise anything, especially misdeeds committed by those in positions of power over us. Sometimes it's important to halt that process and stop and just say "this is definitely fucked up", and yes, not to question it any further. It can actually be really hard not to question it sometimes, especially if you trust, or have been conditioned to trust, those in positions of power over you who are abusing you. You want to find reasons to defend their abuse of their power, you don't want it to be what it looks like. And you can find reasons for it, you always can. You will. But abuse is still abuse. So sometimes you have to stop and just say “this is fucked”.