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First and foremost we must not meet the gaze of the SS officer.
The wetness of the eye, the ability to judge, this is what tempts to kill. One has to be smooth, not interesting, already numb. Everybody is carrying their eyes in front of them like a hazard."The human race"
An efficient and valuable man does what he can, whether the community pay him for it or not.
I swear, you can predict the quality of a law as the inverse of how good the name sounds.
If this law were going to limit sex trafficking, it would have a name like "Revisions to the Prosecution of Certain Interstate Crimes". But no, it's got a big, gaudy name that poisons the well on any opposition whatsoever. So, predictably, it will either endanger innocents or restrict basic rights. It's like god damn clockwork.
If so few female geniuses are found in history, it is because society denies them any means of expression."The Second Sex"
People are angry, frightened, desperate. This is actually pre-Trump. 40 years of neoliberalism have left the victims of this assault angry, resentful, isolated, contemptuous of government. It's in Europe, it's in the United States, you see it everywhere.
That's fertile territory for demagogues who can say "I can save you, follow me." It's also fertile territory for conspiracy theories. People want some understanding of what's happening; they're not getting it from the media, they're not getting it from the intellectual classes, they're certainly not getting it from the government. So they search around for something that'll explain it. Why is this happening to us? That's the kind of situation in which you do get conspiracy theories. [..] When you're living in an intellectual environment in which there are no answers, no coherent answers available, you're suffering, you don't see why, you turn to, you grasp on to something.
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It's happening all over, and I think you can trace a good deal of it to the effects of neoliberalism. It had a goal, remember: the goal of neoliberalism was the transfer decisions, authority, away from the public to the hands of private power, and to atomize the population. You'll recall Margaret Thatcher, there is no society, just individuals tossed out into the market that somehow survive for themselves.
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The first acts, first acts, that both Thatcher and Reagan carried out was to demolish labour unions. First move, [in] both cases. Reagan went as far as authorizing scabs, you know, strike-breakers. Illegal in every country except, at times, South Africa. Did it right away. The labour unions had been smashed in both countries. Why? Well, it's one of the very few ways in which people can organize to protect themselves, so we've got to get rid of them. Eliminate public schools, but do it by underfunding, don't give enough funding so they don't work, then support private schools as an alternative. All throughout the society, eliminate the means for people to organize, act collectively, make decisions. Transferred into the hands of private power. And the results are predictable and perfectly plain.Noam Chomsky
Iâm a Christian. I was christened as a Christian. I used to go to Sunday school. I never took much interest in it because ⊠I didnât. My idea of heaven is feeling good. A place where people are alright to each other. This world scares the shit out of me. Weâre all living on the tinderbox. Itâs like thereâs some maniac somewhere trying to devise a new means of destruction. It always amazes me that mankind always goes to find the biggest, powerfullest means of destruction before they find anything good. Itâs always the negative things they find first. Since Iâve had kids Iâve thought, âWhat are we leaving these people? Nothing.â What a future weâve got for mankind.
The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them - words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller, but for want of an understanding ear.
You rarely get the satisfaction in intellectual life where the person who is wrong has to acknowledge and grow from the experience of having been self-deceived for so long.
Most wars in the 20th century have started as a result of lies. Amplified and spread by the mainstream press. And you go, well that is a horrible circumstance, that is terrible that all these wars start with lies. And I say no, this is a tremendous opportunity, because it means that populations basically don't like wars and they have to be lied into it.
Suppose that humans happen to be so constructed that they desire the opportunity for freely undertaken productive work. Suppose that they want to be free from the meddling of technocrats and commissars, bankers and tycoons, mad bombers who engage in psychological tests of will with peasants defending their homes, behavioral scientists who can't tell a pigeon from a poet, or anyone else who tries to wish freedom and dignity out of existence or beat them into oblivion.
I think Tech took a weird turn somewhere around 2010. Things became more homogeneous, designes became bland without rough edges, literally with rounded corners. Options were removed, defaults became simpler and dumber. Dev tools are more about saving programmers from themselves rather than pushing things to the limit.
Once upon the time, I worked for an organization named "Department of the Citizens' Safety". It was in a different time, in a different country, and I had not had a chance to say no - I knew computers, a few Western languages, and had passed (or failed) a bunch of IQ and psychology test. I had barely gotten my first star, and had only a few missions under my belt when the government fell, and I found myself out on my ass, forbidden from holding any government jobs at a time when the only legal jobs were either government, or you had to create them yourself.
I'm fine now. I am neither dead, nor in organized crime, the way three quarters of my colleagues ended up. I know, now, that I was working for some pretty evil people, and what I was doing was pretty evil. I have pretended being a priest, and wiped my ass with the secret of confession, I have infiltrated literary clubs, and framed the most brilliant of their members for not-so-petty crimes, and I even killed in the line of duty once. It's all in the past, and I'm not even bothering to hide my IP - if you find out who I am, I'll just tell you that I was making shit up - on the internet, no one knows you are a dog.
That said. Never in my life, not before, not since, had I felt that my life was so simple, that what I was doing was so right, that I was going to bed with such a clear conscience. And of course, never have I felt as powerful and untouchable, but that's a much easier state to achieve.
When you work for this kind of organization, there is a support structure, a camaraderie, an atmosphere that insures that you are either out before you actually start, or that you are happy and confident with what you are doing, and the only real people are your colleagues. Well, at least it was for me, then. But I doubt the US NSA is testing, vetting, training and supporting their personnel less than my old country did in the late eighties.
Most civilization is based on cowardice. It's so easy to civilize by teaching cowardice. You water down the standards which would lead to bravery. You restrain the will. You regulate the appetites. You fence in the horizons. You make a law for every movement. You deny the existence of chaos. You teach even the children to breathe slowly. You tame.
It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.
From out there on the Moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, âLook at that, you son of a bitch.â
These articles scare me. Another one with exactly the same message: Things are worse than we thought, it was already bad, we are not coming close to doing enough to save us, there isn't even much of a plan.
And then I see most of the west handling covid-19 just like we handle everything: No clear direction, minimal effort, leaders asleep at the wheel, politicians trying to get the better of each other, rich people get richer.
Climate was an important theme in our last elections, but even the green party had no clue whatsoever, and the voters made it clear they did not even remotely care.
Now Covid-19 is easy stuff compared to the climate. I was hoping Covid-19 could serve as a wake up call for the cost of incompetence in our organisations. But that does not seem to happen.
Covid-19 has a pattern I also see in the climate: First, nobody cares for some theoretical crisis far away, then its in our countries but still not personal, and by now everybody knows about a specific person who died. Climate is a theoretical crisis far away for now.
So how do we proceed from here?
These are patent rules so high, if they'd existed in 19th century the US would be an agricultural producer today... What we now call "piracy" is the way the rich countries developed. There's a phrase for it in trade theory: kicking away the ladder. First you violate all the rules, then by the time you get rich you kick away the ladder so others can't do it too and you preach about "free trade."
You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.
The trick isn't that you have no freedom, the trick is that you think that is freedom. All your fighting is for... consumer products.
The fact that there is nothing but a spiritual world deprives us of hope and gives us certainty."Reflections on Sin, Suffering, Hope, and the True Way", #62
I should say a few words here about the curious way the protests are organized. The protesters learned in 2014 that having leaders was a weakness. Once the leadership was arrested, the heart went out of the occupy movement, and it lost momentum. So in 2019, there is no leadership at all. The protests are intentionally decentralized, using a jury-rigged combination of a popular message board, the group chat app Telegram, and in-person huddles at the protests.
This sounds like it shouldnât possibly work, but the protesters are too young to know that it canât work, so it works.
Under the guise of freedom of speech nowadays falsehoods, and even more critically just plain noise is pervasive; the freedom to shout nonsense is inhibiting the freedom to hear a reasonable and diverse set of opinions and facts. Most (loud and repeated) messages are by corporations and other groups too; because that channel simply has more resources - and that's unfortunate not because corporations are intrinsically evil (which they aren't), but because people are intrinsically social and groups of people often quite the reverse; so that corporate "speech" in the form of campaign finance typically is plainly corruption - albeit legal, even if most of its constituent individuals are reasonably moral people. In short; we know the evils of censorship and have robust traditions to at least oppose that; but we do not have similar traditions vs. overload and deception, and indeed our (entirely reasonable) protections against censorship make us more vulnerable to these rising problems. Is there a solution? Who knows; but any solution certainly is not on the public radar yet let alone nearby.
If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.
1. Start with the set of all potentially serious journalists.
2. Filter out the ones who put forth arguments which downplay the dangers to the press of prosecuting Assange.
3. Filter out the ones who don't explicitly argue against prosecuting Assange on 1st Amendment grounds.
Follow the small group that survives #3 to get a variety of (probably) high-quality perspectives from serious journalists.
One mistake people make is pretending that every choice we make is a hard one with no good answers. Sometimes there are good decisions and bad ones, and we end up making bad ones even when the good ones are obvious. We often see this happen with individuals, it shouldn't be too surprising that this happens with societies as well.
A few years back when I looked at solutions to "cooking this planet" that didn't involve anything that would cause much disruption to most people's lives. The reason we're not solving the problem isn't because of the hard choices we have to make. It's because a few industries that might make less money if we fight climate change try to stop efforts to combat it, politicians who get money from these industries say climate change is a hoax, the public at large is largely too apathetic to remove politicians who don't act, people who oppose all collective action oppose collective action to fight climate change, the media doesn't report on it because it doesn't get ratings, etc.
Could we have everyone's standards are close to the current standards enjoyed by developed countries without destroying the planet? Maybe, maybe not. It's insanely premature to pretend that we know it's impossible. Not only have we not seriously tried to solve the problem, but a large part of the U.S. is actively opposed to even stopping the problem. "There's no solution" is an easy way to absolve us from our failures.
They [governments and corporations] take whatever is available, and in no time it is being used against us, the population. Governments are not representative. They have their own power, serving segments of the population that are dominant and rich.
Weâre all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesnât. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.
Political language - and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists - is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
Peace is not a relationship of nations. It is a condition of mind brought about by a serenity of soul. Peace is not merely the absence of war. It is also a state of mind. Lasting peace can come only to peaceful people.
The sad thing is that individuals interested in freedom, who make serious contributions to some things called free, don't notice that the massive imbalances of wealth today have produced a situation where simple "free choice" is made a mockery of.
I have 50 pink unicorns in this box. I can't show you because it would compromise their safety. I have them working on a cigarette that stops lung cancer.
You can do anything you want with an idea. It can be as big as you want. It doesnât have to solve a minor problem that nobody ever really realized was a problem. It doesnât have to fit into something the size of a button crammed into a âfolderâ the size of a button on a screen the size of a playing card. But everywhere I look, I see tiny little ideas, ideas that are almost petty in their inconsequentiality. And I come back to those cliches, and I think the real problem is in how little thought goes into the language these people use. When the language you employ to communicate your ideas is small and boring, your ideas are going to be small and boring. And when all your ideas are small and boring, your future gets dimmer and dimmer and more claustrophobic until itâs finally just a pinpoint of light on a dark screen, in danger of going out at any time.
I'm sick of reading internet arguments about polymorphism and browser monoculture and borrow checking and static linking. Someone please tell me where I can go on the internet to read biologists arguing about their favorite animals.
Power, like fire, can warm or burn. Thousands of years before we vowed "Never again," God commanded us: "Never, ever."
A person in a rented apartment must be able to lean out of his window and scrape off the masonry within arm's reach. And he must be allowed to take a long brush and paint everything outside within arm's reach. So that it will be visible from afar to everyone in the street that someone lives there who is different from the imprisoned, enslaved, standardised man who lives next door.
My dear,
Have you noticed how those who move, move fast? And those who donât, just stand still; motionless?
Yes, you can go ahead and rant to me about how an object in motion stays in motion, and how an object at rest stays at rest. But, I think thereâs more to this than physics.
I think those in motion have seen something the others have not; their imprisonment.
While those who do not move, do not notice their chains.
Truly yours,
Rosa Luxemburg
I could not find a source for this (yet)
Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.
God gave the righteous man a certificate entitling him to food and raiment, but the unrighteous man found a facsimile of the same in God's coffers, and appropriated it, and obtained food and raiment like the former. It is one of the most extensive systems of counterfeiting that the world has seen.
I have read that the secret of gallantry is to accept the pleasures of life leisurely, and its inconveniences with a shrug; as well as that, among other requisites, the gallant person will always consider the world with a smile of toleration, and his own doings with a smile of honest amusement, and Heaven with a smile which is not distrustful â being thoroughly persuaded that God is kindlier than the genteel would regard as rational.
If your heart is broken, don't try to fix it, they work better that way.
[..] once you have prevented a murder, itâs easy to justify that you should be able to use the ubiquitous wiretapping to also prevent, say, rape and aggravated assault. No policymaker will protest that.
Once you are preventing serious violent crimes, itâs easy to justify that the NSA and the Police should use the ubiquitous wiretapping to prevent all violent crimes. People who protest that in the name of civil liberties will be shot down; âitâs a fundamental civil liberty to not be a victim of a violent crimeâ. And so, surveillance will be Newspeaked into civil liberties in televised debates by Big Brother hawks.
Once the wiretapping is preventing all violent crime, it will be repurposed to prevent all prison-time crime (described as âserious crimeâ), and from there, to prevent all crime. And those who speak up against this will be accused of âsiding with criminalsâ.
You have to remember that in democratic societies citizens talking with each other is very important. We've lost a lot of that with the mass media. Now we have an opportunity for citizens to create their own communications with each other. So when these big deals with the big companies and the big governments carve up this new territory, I feel it's very important that we keep a kind of "social green belt", that we keep the ability for citizens to talk amongst each other.
Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.
I cannot tell why the spokesmen I have cited want the developments I forecast to become true. Some of them have told me that they work on them for the morally bankrupt reason that "If we don't do it, someone else will." They fear that evil people will develop superintelligent machines and use them to oppress mankind, and that the only defense against these enemy machines will be superintelligent machines controlled by us, that is, by well-intentioned people. Others reveal that they have abdicated their autonomy by appealing to the "principle" of technological inevitability. But, finally, all I can say with assurance is that these people are not stupid. All the rest is mystery.
Only the free have disposition to be truthful,
Only the truthful have the interest to be just,
Only the just possess the will-power to be free.
Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.
After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.
Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones. I am not afraid.
I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed with much authority, by someone recognized wiser than oneself.
The past month was the 10th anniversary of the massacres in Rwanda, and there was much soul-searching about our failure to do anything about them. So headlines read "To Say `Never Again' and Mean it; the 1994 Rwandan genocide should have taught us about the consequences of doing nothing" (Richard Holbrooke, Washington Post); "Learn from Rwanda" (Bill Clinton, Washington Post).
So what did we learn? In Rwanda, for 100 days people were being killed at the rate of about 8000 a day, and we did nothing. Fast forward to today. In Africa, about 10,000 children a day are dying from easily treatable diseases, and we are doing nothing to save them. That's not just 100 days, it's every day, year after year, killing at the Rwanda rate. And far easier to stop then Rwanda: it just means pennies to bribe drug companies to produce remedies.
But we do nothing. Which raises another question: what kind of socioeconomic system can be so savage and insane that to stop Rwanda-scale killings among children going on year after year it's necessary to bribe the most profitable industry that ever existed? That's carrying socioeconomic lunacy beyond the bounds that even the craziest maniac could imagine? But we do nothing.ZNet forum reply, May 9, 2004
Some crimes can also be aided by whispered in-person conversation. Should we require all in-person conversation to be shouted near a government office?
The societal default used to be that substantially all conversations were inaccessible to the government except through testimony. Encryption does nothing to change the availability of information through testimony.
Previously, remote conspirators could collaborate through the post, and their conversations could only be accessed with a warrant specifically targeting those communicators. End-to-end encryption does little to change the availability of information in a targeted investigation; it just means it's a little more difficult to access the information than entering a phone number into XKeyscore. Investigators can install malware on the device, or microphones and video cameras in the suspect's home to hear or see what is being communicated.
Forbidding end-to-end encryption, in combination with our mass surveillance apparatus, changes the societal default to be that substantially all conversations are trivially and automatically accessible to the government.