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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?
The F.B.I. has a file on EVERYONE. In most cases, they are NOT ACTIVE until there's an intercept.
Yours In Space,
Kilgore Trout
Just do as you're told. We'll take good care of you.
L. Ron Hubbard was the accuser...
Former Navy linguist here. Many of my fellow cryptologic technicians - interpretive were born in another country, even still had relatives or property there, and nonetheless managed to hold the TS/SCI clearance required for the job. If your foreign origin has endowed you with a skill that the US needs, like mastery of a foreign language, then of course you can get a clearance.
The case of Wen Ho Lee, a Taiwanese-born scientist who held a security clearance and was erroneously prosecuted for violating security norms, was a pretty public affair especially in places like Slashdot, so you should have been aware that your claim here is bogus.
The war on drugs appears to be escalating, too http://www.policestateusa.com/2013/innocent-man-given-anal-cavity-search-colonoscopy-after-rolling-through-a-stop-sign/
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
Leverage over a SciFi author? Were they afraid he'd give them the secret launch codes to his imaginary alien super weapons?
Subtle variations in spelling and grammar in Slashdot posts are the only means we have left to conceal communications from the NSA.
Have gnu, will travel.
If you read the whole report, the most suspicious things they have on him are that he's an academic in biology like this spy they're looking for codenamed "ROBPROF," and he wrote reviews for a defunct magazine that had a similar name to a defunct communist publication.
Then in the last page they say that even though none of this really matches up, they should still consider that he could be ROBPROF and they should keep an eye on him because his "background contains information inimical to the best interests of the United States" 8-(
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
But today you are actually rewarded for being a socialist.
This is only true if you think the statement "The government should promote the general welfare" immediately makes you a socialist.
The number of people able to make a living because they are socialists is (being generous) around 1000, and most of them not a particularly good living. There are some people that hold good jobs and also are socialists, but typically they hold those jobs because of their skills unrelated to their politics. What absolutely doesn't exist is a well-established and well-funded set of organizations with media outlets, think tanks, etc hiring bunches of people making well over $250,000 a year promoting socialism, whereas such organizations do exist for movement conservatism (some talk radio, Fox News, Heritage Foundation, Chamber of Commerce, etc), libertarians (some talk radio, Cato Institute, some Tea Party organizations), and to a lesser degree for the Democratic Party (MSNBC, Brookings Institution, AFL-CIO). But there's a giant gap between the Democratic Party and actual socialists: The Democrats want to keep getting their nice big donations from big corporations, so they shy away from doing anything that smacks of bona-fide socialism.
If you're thinking that the people receiving welfare are being rewarded for being a socialist, that doesn't make any sense, because welfare recipients receive their benefits regardless of whether they're a socialist or not. They are arguably benefiting from the majority of voters believing that a bit of socialism in the name of preventing people from starving or freezing to death is a good idea, but that's different from they themselves being socialists.
What is true is that being a socialist no longer destroys your career like it did in the 1950's.
I am officially gone from
To be fair, Asimov was one of the Futurians (if that was the name?), and a good chunk of the Futurians did attempt to distribute Communist pamphlets at the first Worldcon in 1939 (IIRC -- and the attempt was stopped by Worldcon organizers, who felt that non-sf politics had no place there). However, Asimov was also allegedly the Futurian who thought the pamphlets were a stupid idea as compared to Worldcon coolness, and quickly abandoned exile in the coffee shop across the street to return to Worldcon, hang out with non-Futurian friends, and watch Metropolis. Pretty soon they all trickled back across the street (IIRC).
(And strictly speaking, they weren't all Communists, but rather had some sort of idealistic idea about science fiction bettering world politics. But the group's "Cool Older Guy" was a Communist, so the club's politics ended up having a Communist and/or Trotskyist bent. At the time, Frederick Pohl and Donald A. Wollheim (later of DAW Books) were both Communist in their politics, among many others.)
However, it would appear that neither the FBI nor the informant knew about the Futurians thing. And a lot of sf fandom lost enthusiasm for Communism as history made it clear to them that Stalin was Not Good.
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.