[lbo-talk] Fwd: Hands off my metadata

andie_nachgeborenen andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com
Fri Jul 5 07:07:16 PDT 2013


I wish I could be as optimistic as Woj, that the "creative classes" and "knowledge workers" are in general opposed to gov't spying. Anyway these facts are empirical.

A Pew poll of June 6-9 found that 56% of those polled thought the NSA program was ok, 41% did not. 61% thought investigating terrorism was more important than privacy, 34% vice versa. The approval for spring increased with age, 60% of older people (undefined in report of poll) approving of NSA spying, 51% of of younger people. The change in attitudes are highly partisan: 75% of Reps approved an NSA program like this in 2006 ( this must have been the total information control program proposed under Bush, only 52% do today. In 2006, Democrats disapproved of Bush's NSA program by 64% to 31%; they flip almost exactly with Obama's program, 61% yes, 34% no. Reported in Wash Times, June 11, 2013.

This doesn't give data by class or occupation, and it was early on in the scandal. But it suggests that the situation is a bit different from what Woj suggests. In addition, Woj makes two important analytical errors. First, America has no intellectual class. There are professors, most of whom are not intellectuals, but this is a tiny group. Lawyers and physicians are 99% not intellectuals. Most knowledge workers are middle class or pink/white collar workers, IT people, data entry people, etc. Second, suspicion of the government does not necessarily translate into cynical indifference or support of spying to stop terrorism. I suspect Woj is importing his impressions, not necessarily supported by data, of Communist Poland into a totally different recent US context,

Sent from my iPad

On Jul 5, 2013, at 7:47 AM, Wojtek S <wsoko52 at gmail.com> wrote:


> My attention seems to be going South again. I meant to say "Therefore it
> is only natural that most people fear terrorism more than government
> snooping, and embrace the latter as necessary to deflect the former."
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, Jul 5, 2013 at 8:44 AM, Wojtek S <wsoko52 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Marv: " most people would counter that pervasive state surveillance IS
>> about their safety, about reducing the possibility of a terrorist attack by
>> "any means necessary".
>> " it's mainly the political and corporate elites who are most concerned
>> about snooping."
>>
>> [WS:] You observation is right on the target. The great majority of
>> Americans have about the same probability of being harmed by government
>> intelligence gathering as being killed by a terrorist - that is, close to
>> nil. However, perceptions of terrorist attacks suffer from the
>> availability heuristic bias - they are vivid and colorful and thus
>> perceives as more likely than they really are. Therefore it is only
>> natural that most people fear terrorism more than government snooping, and
>> embrace the former as necessary to deflect the latter.
>>
>> It also shows how much liberal and leftist intellectuals are out of touch
>> with the "common folk." I suspect that their outcry about government
>> snooping is akin to the Arab masses being incensed by caricatures of the
>> Prophet in some obscure Western newspaper that prior to the incident they
>> did not even know they existed. It is all about blasphemy , desecration of
>> the sacred. For the Arab masses the scared is their religion and is
>> prophets, for liberal and left win intellectuals the sacred is the
>> information and the means of its dissemination (especially the internet).
>>
>> A materialistic explanation of this reaction is based on class interests
>> of intellectuals. Information production and dissemination defines
>> intellectuals as a class - so anything that looks like an attack on
>> information is synonymous with a class war on intellectuals. Hence their
>> knee-jerk reactions to freedom of speech. It is pretty much similar to
>> capitalist attitude toward property rights - they are sacred and anything
>> that even remotely appears to be undermining them is tantamount with a
>> class war.
>>
>> It is also interesting to note that working class activists don't think
>> much about spying on them, they take it for granted (cf. Bill's comments)
>> - it is only intellectuals who make big brouhaha about it.
>>
>>
>> --
>> Wojtek
>>
>> "An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."
>
>
>
> --
> Wojtek
>
> "An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list