Good Versus Good

NPR's Ombudsman investigates a story from 2011, and doesn't like what he finds.

For me, the point of interest of this story is the collision between two groups of people who both likely believe that they're doing the right thing, and being opposed by someone who knows that what they're doing is wrong. When one looks at the NPR investigative staff on the story, and the South Dakota Department of Social Services workers who were a part of the story, it's unlikely that, standing in their shoes, you'd be able to find anyone who set out to be a villain. Yet it's likely that each regards the other as having committed some level of intentional wrongdoing.

It's the great tragedy of many conflicts, large and small, the world we live in. Each side sees itself as the good guys, and has difficulty understanding why others don't see them that way. Often, they settle on intentional animus as a reason, and a cycle of accusation and recrimination begins. Instead of looking for the good ideas that underlie the bad actions, we start to look for bad motives. It has yet to lead to anything constructive. So one wonders why we haven't broken the habit yet.

Insecurity

[Omar Farouk Abdulmutallab] was able to fly all the way from Europe to Detroit with a viable explosive device hidden in his underpants, a massive failure of intelligence and security.
Why al-Qaeda in Yemen scares the West

"A massive failure of intelligence and security?" Why? Is it really reasonable to expect that our intelligence apparatus will pick up every plot and that any security regime can detect ever possible explosive device? And even though the device was considered "viable," the device didn't go off as planned, and Abdulmutallab failed to bring down the plane.

The idea that we can protect everyone in "the West" from every "Radical Islamist" who intends to do harm strikes me as not only as impossible, but driving an expanding security state that increasingly jumps at shadows, yet must make each of those shadows into a deadly threat in order to maintain itself. Yet it must also be strangely selective in what threats it takes on. The murder rate in the United States has dropped to 50% of what it was in 1980, and still, Americans are much better at taking each other's lives than al-Qaeda has been.

Why the more mundane annual homicide toll in the United States, which is several times more than even that from the destruction of the World Trade Center towers isn't also considered "a massive failure of intelligence and security" is strange, and points to the odd dichotomy that it's possible to protect hundreds of millions of people from the rest of the world, but not from themselves, where, in theory, the authorities have more control over things.

This is, I think, an unhealthy way of looking at the world - as a looming threat, yet one that can somehow be completely neutralized. It's not possible to be completely "safe." I don't know that it's wise to imply that it is.

Mismatched

What do you mean, "Popcorn's not period?"

Some people are more concerned with authenticity than others...

A Mantra

There is nothing about me that is so lacking that I should be willing to privilege myself above others to obtain it.

Something Hidden

This had started out as a post concerning an increasingly common aversion on the part of police officers to being photographed or videotaped during the performance of their duties by the public - or the media. I'd planned to highlight two things that I'd remembered reading about online at some point or another in the past - police concerns that citizen videos or photographs would be taken out of context and law enforcement officials claiming that anyone with nothing to hide needn't be worried about being surveilled.

But my Google-fu is weak, and I had a difficult time tracking down any concrete examples. I found a news article from Minnesota where a police department claimed that a video of an officer roughing up a suspect didn't provide "complete context," and a story from LA, where the police department said that Justin Bieber should be willing to answer questions about a possible traffic violation if he had nothing to hide, but hardly anything that backed up the large point that I was attempting to make.

Being unwilling to go to war on straw, I kept digging for a while, and started to realize something. The cliché, "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear" seems to be rebutted far more often than it is actually said. In The Chronicle of Higher Education I came across an excerpt from Daniel Solove's "Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff Between Privacy and Security," wherein Mr. Solove quotes a number of people talking about how common the argument is, and speaks to having heard it several times, but the closest that he comes to actually quoting anyone actually saying it is noting that the government of the U.K. used it to sloganeer for closed-circuit television cameras in public places. I quickly began to wonder if the whole turn of phrase existed mainly as something attributed to the Nazis and/or the Oceanian Ministry of Love, the thoughtless prattling of random Internet comment board denizens or bloggers hoping to prove their right-wing anti-terrorism bona fides.

Which, of course, is not to say that it isn't a serious concept, or one that needs addressing. But I do wonder if it really come from as high up in the food chain as we seem to think it does.