01-15-2017, 07:33 PM
(01-15-2017, 03:44 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: Just watched Patriot's Day yesterday, Hollywood's take on the Boston Marathon bombings. Did you know that you can't place a homemade pressure cooker bomb on a busy street without leaving a whole bunch of video images behind on surveillance cameras? Did you know that some people can view a police state with overwhelming surveillance technology as heroic?
But for the preventive surveillance to be effective, one needs an army of people watching the surveillance cameras. Surveillance cameras not so closely watched can catch something like a pressure cooker placed in a heavily-populated or heavily-traveled place only after the fact.
But what is an unattended pressure cooker doing where there is a crowd? Wouldn't someone unplug it? A pressure cooker with the vents closed makes an excellent bomb -- especially if it has sharp objects within it.
Quote:The world is definitely changing. It has been definitely changing since the Agricultural Age gave way to the Industrial. I see many crises as being driven in big part by new technology. If nothing else, new groups of elites who make money in a new way are apt to want to trim the influence of the old elites. As a broad rule of thumb, traditionalists attempting to suppress the new technology while clinging to old power structures often don't do very well.
Especially in wartime. Technologies of food production can feed armies and their absence can starve an army (Union vs. Confederacy). That is before one discusses logistics, battlefield medicine, and information technology (without which the British would have been just another nation defeated by the Devil's Reich).
Quote:Principled clinging to traditional standards will feel right for lots of folk, but...
... but will a reversion to the ways of the early-industrial age achieve prosperity or even economic equity? Not likely.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.