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"Throughout our country’s history, the federal government has used the fear of threats – real or perceived – to conduct surveillance on domestic groups and peop

"Throughout our country’s history, the federal government has used the fear of threats – real or perceived – to conduct surveillance on domestic groups and people who look or act different. Civil rights and anti-Vietnam War activists in the 1960s and 1970s, American Muslim civil rights leaders and academics post-9/11, and the FBI’s recent, expansive racial, religious, and ethnic mapping program are a handful of examples. Modern protest movements speak, associate, and organize through social media. Their tweets, blogs, protests, marches, and die-ins are the trumpets by which they call for reform and social justice. Government monitoring of activists’ protests – simply because these activists dissent and without any evidence of wrongdoing – threatens to discourage them from speaking, associating, and expressing as is their right under the First Amendment. Surveillance of #BlackLivesMatter protests also opens the door to racial profiling because the movement is Black-led." https://www.aclu.org/blog/racial-justice/government-watching-blacklivesmatter-and-its-not-okay https://www.aclu.org/blog/racial-justice/government-watching...

tristor 7y ago
I agree with you that those things happen and are wrong. However, they don't meet the bar of "suppression". Suppression is an action, it's an active thing. When China arrests doctors for posting on social media about a new disease or when they fire tear gas at people and beat them with clubs while they are protesting peacefully on the streets in Hong Kong, THAT is suppression. It's also a problem that we live in a massive world of surveillance enabled by commercial entities and exploited by governments, but that is not in itself a form of suppression. If you were to consider this suppression, then technically we are all suppressed in our everyday lives from nearly any activity or statement which dissents from the norm. Meanwhile, over here in reality I'm well known among friends and coworkers as being a cranky guy who dissents about nearly everything for good reasons that most people are too busy with their lives to care about. Hanlon's Razor feels like it's necessary to be invoked, or at least a corollary here. No shadowy conspiracy makes protest movements in the US ineffective, what makes them ineffective is that the average American is /just, barely/ comfortable enough in their daily life to not consider it worth it to join. Even when people are uncomfortable, they fear losing what little they have on a slim promise of change if they join a protest movement. My statements are not to laud the state of the US or the actions of our government, just to defend the sanctity of meaning behind our words.

tristor 7y ago

I agree with you that those things happen and are wrong. However, they don't meet the bar of "suppression". Suppression is an action, it's an active thing. When China arrests doctors for posting on social media about a new disease or when they fire tear gas at people and beat them with clubs while they are protesting peacefully on the streets in Hong Kong, THAT is suppression. It's also a problem that we live in a massive world of surveillance enabled by commercial entities and exploited by governments, but that is not in itself a form of suppression. If you were to consider this suppression, then technically we are all suppressed in our everyday lives from nearly any activity or statement which dissents from the norm. Meanwhile, over here in reality I'm well known among friends and coworkers as being a cranky guy who dissents about nearly everything for good reasons that most people are too busy with their lives to care about. Hanlon's Razor feels like it's necessary to be invoked, or at least a corollary here. No shadowy conspiracy makes protest movements in the US ineffective, what makes them ineffective is that the average American is /just, barely/ comfortable enough in their daily life to not consider it worth it to join. Even when people are uncomfortable, they fear losing what little they have on a slim promise of change if they join a protest movement. My statements are not to laud the state of the US or the actions of our government, just to defend the sanctity of meaning behind our words.