From: Dale Thorn <dthorn@gte.net>
Date: Mon, 17 Mar 1997 23:19:18 -0800 (PST)
To: Igor Chudov <ichudov@algebra.com>
Subject: Re: Technology and loss of freedom
In-Reply-To: <199703180600.AAA11976@manifold.algebra.com>
Message-ID: <332E41AB.34BD@gte.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Igor Chudov @ home wrote:
> Dale Thorn wrote:
> > There are tradeoffs between the old and new - in the old society,
> > say, the USA circa late 1800's to early 1900's, we were much more
> > violent.  The big stir about shooting 4 students at Kent State
> > would be severly dwarfed by the mass killing of 1200 in one day
> > in New York city in the anti-draft riots of the mid-1860's,

> Could it be due to excess of men?  Or lack of education?

Today we have to be much more subtle to drag the kids off to kill
and die, hence the Ken Burns-style poster at the U.S. Post Offices
which says "A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do", i.e., one of
the first lessons in logic courses is the unspoken lie in the quote.

In the old days, they didn't have to be so subtle - they could call
up all manner of demonic images of the enemy, or claim that God had
called them to slay the infidels, which was rampant as late as the
"Civil" War circa 1865.  There's a song "The Battle Hymn Of The
Republic", which was crafted to crank up the emotion to kill the
Southerners.  (It never occurred to king schmucko Ken Burns that
slavery wasn't against the law until 1863).

It actually surprises me (how naive, you say) that they could get
away with the Incubator Baby Scam in Congress circa 1991.  Funny
thing is, one of my young charges visited the Museum Of Tolerance
in Los Angeles recently, and there was an eerily similar account
of Hitler's men throwing Jewish babies out of the hospitals....

> > Personal (non-government) violence was rampant long ago - men and
> > women as parents routinely called up the Bible verse "spare the rod
> > and spoil the child" to beat the living crap out of their kids.
> > Don't even ask about the violence against women.

> > What did they do with the poor women?

Women would disappear for weeks at a time, from time to time,
generally to fix some "female problem" at the hospital (no need
for the kids to visit, better to have fun visiting aunts and uncles,
or have a nanny over for a couple of weeks) until the "problem"
was taken care of.

If you could allow me to use the freeways as a model for potential
violence, when there is a very stressful situation at hand, and
people are allowed to do things that they would never do outside
of the confines (and protection) of their cars, it is this:

At home in the old days, with a wife and several kids (families
were mostly larger then), you often had a boiling bot for stress,
and the (effectively) legal act of beating one's wife severely
would be covered up by the "family, friends, neighbors, and church".
Especially the church, the good old Christian church (my experience)
where God is a terrible God and the punishment for even raising an
eyebrow to His Agent on Earth (daddy) might be a body damaged for
life in some way.  The power and the temptations inherent in the
sovereignty of a man's home were too much for most people to
manage honestly and fairly, hence the heavy reliance on Bible
verses to cover up/justify the excesses.

This BTW is one of my most important reasons to distrust Libertarians
and other Right-Wingers, i.e., the sovereignty of the home principle.
It cuts both ways, you see...