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That is what I thought upon reading the title, however if you go through the document, you can see that the FBI was responding to complaints from the public...w

That is what I thought upon reading the title, however if you go through the document, you can see that the FBI was responding to complaints from the public...which actually is impressive, if you think about it. When I read the letter on page 13 sent by the parent complaining about, "lyrics so filthy that I cannot enclose them in this letter," - I imagine an FBI agent sitting at his desk, rubbing his forehead in frustration, scanning through this among a pile of hundreds of other similarly inane and paranoid letters from parents. Government workers just can't win sometimes - if they address problems brought to them by the public, it's deeply embarrassing that they are addressing such insignificant problems. If they don't address problems brought to them by the public, they are flagrantly defying democratic values. What's embarrassing is not that the government "are involved in" being morality/obscenity police, it's embarrassing that people ask them to be morality/obscenity police. It's not like they just, "got involved in it," out of no where. Squeaky wheels get the grease.

grandalf 9y ago
I agree that absurdities like this have their roots in the public's demand for backward things, but this is made easy by the consolidation of power at the Federal level for things like this. Imagine a world in which a concerned citizen contacted local or state level authorities with this sort of complaint -- it would not have the same sting of morality policing, in my opinion.
- philwelch 9y ago
  Conversely, imagine a world where concerned citizens could only contact local and state authorities about, for example, racial discrimination by the local and state authorities.
  - grandalf 9y ago
    While the prevailing narrative is that Federal intervention in this sort of thing is beneficial, I think that if you adopt the view that morality is largely a function of economic progress, most of the moral progress enforced top-down is largely inevitable over a 5-10 year time horizon. The same backward idea of causality that motivates neoconservative interventions in foreign governments motivates the aggressive use of Federal power to coerce lagging states into compliance. Driving through impoverished areas of the US is like taking a time machine back 30 to 50 years. In my opinion it is fairly arrogant to assume that an impoverished region's morality ought to be in lockstep with an affluent region, when only a few decades earlier the affluent region was unabashedly worse. The most harmful aspect of this is the idea that the average person in the affluent area is enlightened. By definition, the average person is never enlightened, he is simply average. Yet politically, the idea of a moral crusade is irresistable.
pnathan 9y ago
> What's embarrassing is not that the government "are involved in" being morality/obscenity police, it's embarrassing that people ask them to be morality/obscenity police. It's not like they just, "got involved in it," out of no where. Squeaky wheels get the grease. Strong agreement. But when you have the demos ruling, the demos want to be obeyed. Good argument for a republican form of government in my opinion. :)

grandalf 9y ago

I agree that absurdities like this have their roots in the public's demand for backward things, but this is made easy by the consolidation of power at the Federal level for things like this. Imagine a world in which a concerned citizen contacted local or state level authorities with this sort of complaint -- it would not have the same sting of morality policing, in my opinion.

philwelch 9y ago
Conversely, imagine a world where concerned citizens could only contact local and state authorities about, for example, racial discrimination by the local and state authorities.
- grandalf 9y ago
  While the prevailing narrative is that Federal intervention in this sort of thing is beneficial, I think that if you adopt the view that morality is largely a function of economic progress, most of the moral progress enforced top-down is largely inevitable over a 5-10 year time horizon. The same backward idea of causality that motivates neoconservative interventions in foreign governments motivates the aggressive use of Federal power to coerce lagging states into compliance. Driving through impoverished areas of the US is like taking a time machine back 30 to 50 years. In my opinion it is fairly arrogant to assume that an impoverished region's morality ought to be in lockstep with an affluent region, when only a few decades earlier the affluent region was unabashedly worse. The most harmful aspect of this is the idea that the average person in the affluent area is enlightened. By definition, the average person is never enlightened, he is simply average. Yet politically, the idea of a moral crusade is irresistable.

pnathan 9y ago

> What's embarrassing is not that the government "are involved in" being morality/obscenity police, it's embarrassing that people ask them to be morality/obscenity police. It's not like they just, "got involved in it," out of no where. Squeaky wheels get the grease. Strong agreement. But when you have the demos ruling, the demos want to be obeyed. Good argument for a republican form of government in my opinion. :)