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Spooked By His Sci Fi, FBI Looked Into Asimov As Possible Communist Tipster
v3rgEz writes "By September 14, 1960, Isaac Asimov had been a professor of biochemistry at Boston University for 11 years, and his acclaimed "I, Robot" collection of short stories was on its seventh reprint. This was also the day someone not-so-subtly accused him of communist sympathies in a letter to J. Edgar Hoover. They ominously concluded that "Asimov may be quite all right. On the other hand . . . . ." The "tip off" wasn't given much credit, but it didn't matter since Asimov's science fiction writing alone was enough to warrant FBI monitoring, particularly as the FBI hunted for the mysterious ROBPROF, a communist informant embedded in American academia. MuckRock has Isaac Asimov's FBI files in full, and a write up of the more interesting bits."
See this, then remember that the NSA is currently monitoring us all. Your phone is a gps tracker. They have access to your mail. They are reading your personal papers without a warrant (Google Drive). Orwell's vision of the future seems more accurate.
Typos in both headline and submission. Well done slashdot, well done.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
Today, it's all about being labeled a "Terrorist", and the government continues to go crazy against civil liberties -- only with much more ability to snoop.
What the FUCK is going on with this country?
Just do as you're told. We'll take good care of you.
It might, depending on what you think, the meaning of that phrase is. If "promoting general welfare" means — to you — people need to be subsidized to be "well", then, yes, you are a Socialist, willing to rob the productive Peter to console the idle Paul.
Not true. The apparatus you are talking about exists and is scary. I'm talking about all the federal and state bureaucrats working on dispensing the taxpayers' monies to the "less fortunate". Their comfortable jobs — which give them the pay, the benefits, and the daily reassurance, they are better than others (their visitors) — would all be at risk, if the number of recipients went down. Obama Administration, for example, goes to great length to sign-up new recipients of Food Stamps, spending millions of dollars per month just on the advertisements for the program — something unthinkable, when it was originated. Why, if you need to be "encouraged to sign-up", then you don't really need the assistance — it is only for the truly desperate. Are you going to pretend, it is done out of sincere concern for the poor? No, it is because feeding those people — at someone else's expense — is a source of comfy jobs.
Sadly, their efforts — in what FDR once called "administering a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of human spirt" — are successful.
No, not at all — some recipients are decidedly against the existing setup. (So much so, they are being ridiculed for "hypocrisy", when, in fact, it is just the opposite — their willingness to abolish the program that benefits them shows their sincerity.)
The majority of voters are being tricked into thinking, the programs do good to people in real need. Yet, the stories of people selling their food stamps (including on facebook, which, BTW, reveals their ability to afford a computer and Internet-access) constantly give a lie to the lamentations about "food insecurity".
Simply put, a politician, who is elected on the promise to "fight poverty" has a conflict of interest — what is he going to run on next time, if he succeeds in destroying poverty today? The Military-Industrial Complex, at least, produces something. The Welfare-Industrial Complex is completely parasitic.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
you are a Socialist, willing to rob the productive Peter to console the idle Paul.
Classic Marxist socialism is, in fact, the reverse - "robbing" the idle Paul, who happens to own capital which pays him rent, to pay the productive Peter who gets almost nothing because most of the wealth he creates he has to give away to Peter in rent for using his capital to do something productive.
There is no "idle capitalist" — not in an environment, where there are other capitalists competing with him, being idle is a losing proposition.
This is trivially disproven just by looking around. Any person that owns enough stocks that they can live on the dividends is such an "idle capitalist".
From this he concluded, that the "hard-working" proletariat were "robbed" (never mind their completely voluntary joining)...
Did you miss that entire part of human history where worker strikes were suppressed with machine guns and gallows in most countries?
"Voluntary" is a funny word... if, between me and my friends, we control all the industry in the country, then as an industrial worker, you are free to come and work for us, or to go and starve to death. No-one's forcing you at gunpoint, so it's free, right?
Marx' definition of value was completely wrong — he proposed to value the work based on the effort put into it, not the results.
This is a popular misunderstanding of his interpretation of theory on labor. First of all, he did not "propose to value" anything - in The Capital, he was studying how economy works, not giving directives on how to fix it. His theory of value attempts to explain why the market values certain things higher than the others, and where the higher value of goods compared to the raw materials that they're made from comes from. In doing so, he did indeed consider labor as key, but only productive labor, not just any application of human effort. He was well aware of the broken window fallacy.
But, as Heinlein put it, there are only three categories: makers, takers, and fakers — there is no fourth choice. If you aren't making, you must be one of the other two and anybody proposing, you be fed (and sheltered, and entertained, and educated, and, most recently, treated) at the expense of the makers — is either soft in the head or, worse, expects to personally profit from the "wealth redistribution" he advocates.
As noted earlier, socialists wholeheartedly agree with the division into "makers" and "takers" - they just disagree with you on which is which. So, from their perspective, the existing arrangement is the makers feeding the takers at their own expense, and that's something that they have set out to fix.
Coincidentally, that's why modern progressives aren't socialists. They, as you say, are driven purely by empathy towards the "less fortunate"; they don't actually want to upset the existing arrangement of makers and takers, only make the takers take less to slightly improve the makers' lot.