On the Nature of Things | Forum

noddy wrote:

Enki wrote:

noddy wrote:while(1) domesday_book++

off topic but related - i dreamt up silly little black comedy with no clever tact in it that had a dual strand story - one of the scientists and keepers in the zoo and their challenges to keep the animals healthy and stimulated, the other strand our beloved elites and the masses in highrise apartments and they had exactly the same scripts.

a total oliver stone cheese fest.. ends with some poignant looking at each other through glass moment, string orchestra blazin.

I think it would work best if it culminated in one of the bureaucrats confronted with one of the zookeepers in some sort of black swan event at the zoo that turned his afternoon frolic into serious business that challenged his perception of how the world is constructed by putting him in a situation that could only be caused by the construction of the world in such a manner, but totally and completely violates the fundamental precepts of that world's order.

thats why you are a writer and my main artistic releases are music and photography, both of which speak without words

you got me thinking though - i like the black comedy idea of the zookeepers having the perception insight and allowing the animals a pathway back to free whilst the human bureaucrat moves in the opposite direction and the big poignant ending is the animal on the outside of the glass cage watching the human.

This is what is so objectionable about people like Berzer, who after the fact come in pointing fingers but will do nothing to do the actual donkey work of doing things one day at a time, one step at at time, one brick at a time. When you elect Republicans whole scads of government oppression goes off the table, socialized medicine, taxes, government regulation, constitutional rights, on and on. Half the stuff that the GOP does that it shouldn't is to pacify the MSM into not calling us child starvers and racists. The other half can be dealt if the Democrats had been erased and the MSM broken, and a new party naturally emerging. Then we can pick and choose between those two parties. This option was rejected by people like Berzer stupidly, and it will never present itself again. Now he cheers as Christians are put on rail cars. It's good for them.

The Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut

Once upon a time on Tralfamador, there were creatures who weren't anything like machines. They weren't dependable. They weren't efficient. They weren't predictable. They weren't durable. And these poor creatures were obsessed with the idea that everything that existed had to have a purpose, and that some purposes were higher than others.

These creatures spent most of their time trying to find out what their purpose was. And every time they found out what seemed to be a purpose of themselves, the purpose seemed so low that the creatures were filled with disgust and shame.

And, rather than serve a low purpose, the creatures would make a machine to serve it. This left the creatures free to serve a higher purposes. But whenever they found a higher purpose, the purpose still wasn't high enough.

So machines were made to serve higher purposes, too.

And the machines did everything so expertly that they were finally given the job of finding out what the highest purpose of the creatures could be.

The machines reported in all honesty that the creatures couldn't really be said to have any purpose at all.

The creatures thereupon began slaying each other, because they hated purposelessness above all else.

And they discovered that they weren't even very good at slaying. So they turned that job over to machines, too. And the machines finished up the job in less time than it takes to say, "Tralfamador".

Demon of Undoing wrote:You are all now officially fucked.

I rest my case. Probably on everything I've said for the last seven years.

Ibrahim wrote:You've got more faith in technology than I do.

Demon of Undoing wrote:

Ibrahim wrote:You've got more faith in technology than I do.

Lost my faith in the spirit of man over machine on the Somme.

Demon of Undoing wrote:You are all now officially fucked.

I rest my case. Probably on everything I've said for the last seven years.

Juggernaut Nihilism wrote:I only read the first post, so forgive me if any (all) of this has been covered.

There are two sides to the evolution and application of technology and tactics. First, you have the use of new technology by the prevailing institutions of power to preserve and expand existing control; second, you have wider availability to the general population of disruptive capabilities. Each stage of evolution tends to favor one or the other, and I disagree with DoU on which side is favored today.

This pendulum has swung back and forth throughout history and has had a determining influence on the structure of power institutions, the relationship of the individual to those structures, and even the psychology of people living under those structures.

When expensive charioteers and knights were dominant on the battlefield, worth a dozen or more footmen by themselves, aristocratic values and concentrated or feudal power structures tend to predominate. In the time of the Greek phalanx, where every man with a spear was as valuable as any other, and the success of the unit depended on each individual playing his role, the people involved took a different, more empowered view of their place relative to the state. When pikemen, and then especially gunpowder, made heavy cavalry obsolete, making the common man as effective a soldier as a knight with a fortune in his kit, Europe began to trend toward ideas of the more empowered individual.

Today, we are still in an age in which it takes massive institutions to wield the most powerful weapons of war. No pike is going to allow a common citizen to threaten an aircraft carrier. But you don't have to sink aircraft carriers to render them obsolete.

The question is not whether any individuals or group of citizens will ever be able to take on and defeat a fully-equipped nation state. It is whether the nation state's lumbering reactions to their distributed power will exhaust it until outright defeat is an afterthought. We've spoken many times of the fact that a few men with box cutters can spend a few thousand dollars for flight training and fake documents, and cause the United States to spend trillions of dollars and thousands of lives and untold morale and political capital in response. And "cause" is the right word: a giant political organization is slow-moving and constrained to only a few possible responses to any provocation. As Osama bin Ladin mocked, he can send two men with AK's to a random spot on the globe, and the United States seems to have no choice but to send the entire 7th fleet after them.

So it is not the absolute ability of an individual (or small group) to cause damage; it is their ability to amplify their capabilities by leveraging existing power structures. And I think we are currently in a period of transition, where individuals and small groups disruptive abilities are going to outweigh the capability of existing power structures to efficiently respond. When a perceptive person can bomb al Askari mosque and cause all of Iraq to burn; when a hacker in his mother's basement can cost an economy billions by taking down a power grid or a stock exchange for a few days; when two dipshits with pressure cookers can force a giant metropolitan city to go into military lockdown for days, you can be sure that the nation state is fighting a desperate battle.

Programs like Prism are not signs of confidence and power. They are signs of desperation. They are the tech equivalent of New Orleans police officers shooting citizens after Katrina: the system cannibalizing itself like an immune response run rampant and killing off the organism it is designed to protect.

For now, the power to read your email is in the hands of the NSA. It won't stay that way. We have already seen the flow of information going in the other direction (Wikileaks, Snowden, etc) and that's only the beginning. If the government can hack your brain, people will find a way to hack the president's brain too.

I have no doubt that we will eventually see levels of tech tyranny that would make where we're at now look like anarchy. It's a matter of time before another tower falls somewhere, or a Senator is targeted, or someone figures out how to weaponize a bacteria or toxin in his garage. When that happens, when a suitcase dirty bomb ruins Omaha, all bets are off. The majority of people will forget their unease and welcome their conquerors. But it will still be a sign of the tide going out.

Now, this is not cause for celebration. Giant nation states are on the wane, but tyranny sure ain't. That's a common mistake a lot of anti-government libertarians make. They think that if you starve the state, there won't be anyone left to oppress you. All you have to do is look at any part of the world with a weak state to see how much water that idea holds. The Congo is hardly a libertarian utopia.

I think we're headed toward a world in which inflexible power institutions like the current nation state are diminished. They will be replaced by much smaller, less meaningful governments that are essentially market makers, service providers, etc, and the relationship people will have with them will be more like users/customers. There will still be guys with guns making you do what they say, but they might not wear a uniform.

Demon of Undoing wrote:It's recognizing the implications of present things things that make one a prophet.

No, Ib. You are soon to be the rat. They won't need Newspeak. Whatever you are thinking, they won't care. You simply will be unable to do anything about it. You're looking at a new world. No machine gun checkpoints. No Jersey barriers. No bars. As processing power+miniaturization+decreasing cost plays its game, you will be just as susceptible to whatever parameters they decide to inflict upon you as you are to being bombarded by radio waves right now. The guys with the tinfoil hats are literally correct.

This entire line of technology was inevitable and will inevitably used, and it has only one use. The tendency of tech society is tyranny

Demon of Undoing wrote:Let me make one thing perfectly clear, that to me seems implicit but was not originally explained:

Government is not the highest seat of tyranny. Absolutely not. There are larger structures that will simply use governments as tools. We see this now, where the return on lobbying is akin to hitting the lottery. In theory, there could arise structures even larger than corporate syndicates, but it would have to be either aliens or an interconnected global hive mind that fully realized the idea of the people tyanizing themselves. Big Brother is you and all.

No, at this point, I actually believe that a) the vast majority of data collected is simply garbage and uninteresting, and b) the people collecting it really are still the good guys ( mostly). Not always the best- directed and policed, but mostly good guys. Policy, oy, don't get me started.

I would agree that a huge and possibly losing defensive effort is being waged by many states. I think a more corporate internationalism is right behind it.

Enki wrote:We are reaching a place where even the top tier wealthy 1% masters of the universe elites are relegated to being simple cogs in the machine.

First, some happy news: Bild Zeitung, the German tabloid with the power to make or break politicians, is 65-years-old. Hurrah! Ein Tusch! Due to the joyous event, every household found a Bild in its mailbox. What did we find in there? Half the pages were advertisements and the rest were German politicians, businessmen or other contemporary idols telling us how wonderful our country is, and that we should constantly accept refugees, who will contribute to a better future, etc.

Our chancellor, Mrs. Merkel, tells our happy citizens that Germany stands, above all, for two things: eternal responsibility for the Holocaust and the integration of immigrants. Maybe one needs not wonder why the circulation of Bild-Zeitung has dropped 50% in the last 15 years. Of course, we are told that this was the fault of the bad, bad internet, which makes people more stupid, hateful and misinformed.

While Bild Zeitung was just doing its job of keeping people REALLY dumb and misinformed, our Minister of Justice, Heiko Maas, was also busy. Last Thursday, Maas’ wet dream was achieved when the Bundestag decided on a new law for more surveillance of online and messenger services. Germans are now calling it the Lauschangriff [Bugging Operation].

Ah, die Wunder der deutschen Sprache! My beloved mother tongue is full of clear and precise words, and there is also this wonderful German ability to call things by its real names. Just as with the Lügenpresse [lying press], we now have the Lauschangriff. A liberal or leftist who cares more for foreigners than his own people is dubbed a Gutmensch [good man]. Thanks to academics and media pundits, however, we now learn that only bad, hateful people use such terms.

Back to topic: The new law allows the state to secretly hack into computers, laptops, tablets, smart phones and messenger services, etc., to look into all electronic communication, in short, on the pretext of identifying terrorists, a most nebulous term, for any critic of the state may now be labeled a "terrorist."

Our police and secret services now have legal access to the private data of all citizens.

What a wonderful new world! When a similar law was introduced a decade ago, it was met by fierce resistance from the media and public. Not this time!

Yes, there is the possibility that our highest court, the Bundesverfassungsgericht, might yet decide that the new law is unconstitutional, and some in the press are complaining, but there are no street demonstrations or a serious debate about this manifestation of Big Brother. Zero, zilch, nix, nein. People are just too tired, wasted, kaput. They just want to have a good time. Let’s go clubbing or have a barbecue…

And it doesn’t end there, of course: the Bundestag also passed the Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz [Network Enforcement Law], which can criminalize online statements as illegal hate postings.

Great! The social media will be forced to delete hate speech immediately, but who defines hate speech? It’s a question for philosophers, not lawyers. In dubio pro hate speech. From now on, haters, baiters and Schlechtmenschen will have a hard time… Our Minister of the Interior, Thomas de Maiziere, actually declared, "It cannot be that there are areas where the state has no influence." He really said that!

Apollonius wrote:Linh Dinh is having trouble communicating with one of his German friends. It seems that both he and his friend's emails are running afoul of a new law.

Here's part of one that got through:



Die Lügenpresse und der Lauschangriff im Mutterland - Linh Dinh, The Unz Review, 27 June 2017
http://www.unz.com/ldinh/die-lugenpress ... utterland/

First, some happy news: Bild Zeitung, the German tabloid with the power to make or break politicians, is 65-years-old. Hurrah! Ein Tusch! Due to the joyous event, every household found a Bild in its mailbox. What did we find in there? Half the pages were advertisements and the rest were German politicians, businessmen or other contemporary idols telling us how wonderful our country is, and that we should constantly accept refugees, who will contribute to a better future, etc.

Our chancellor, Mrs. Merkel, tells our happy citizens that Germany stands, above all, for two things: eternal responsibility for the Holocaust and the integration of immigrants. Maybe one needs not wonder why the circulation of Bild-Zeitung has dropped 50% in the last 15 years. Of course, we are told that this was the fault of the bad, bad internet, which makes people more stupid, hateful and misinformed.

While Bild Zeitung was just doing its job of keeping people REALLY dumb and misinformed, our Minister of Justice, Heiko Maas, was also busy. Last Thursday, Maas’ wet dream was achieved when the Bundestag decided on a new law for more surveillance of online and messenger services. Germans are now calling it the Lauschangriff [Bugging Operation].

Ah, die Wunder der deutschen Sprache! My beloved mother tongue is full of clear and precise words, and there is also this wonderful German ability to call things by its real names. Just as with the Lügenpresse [lying press], we now have the Lauschangriff. A liberal or leftist who cares more for foreigners than his own people is dubbed a Gutmensch [good man]. Thanks to academics and media pundits, however, we now learn that only bad, hateful people use such terms.

Back to topic: The new law allows the state to secretly hack into computers, laptops, tablets, smart phones and messenger services, etc., to look into all electronic communication, in short, on the pretext of identifying terrorists, a most nebulous term, for any critic of the state may now be labeled a "terrorist."

Our police and secret services now have legal access to the private data of all citizens.

What a wonderful new world! When a similar law was introduced a decade ago, it was met by fierce resistance from the media and public. Not this time!

Yes, there is the possibility that our highest court, the Bundesverfassungsgericht, might yet decide that the new law is unconstitutional, and some in the press are complaining, but there are no street demonstrations or a serious debate about this manifestation of Big Brother. Zero, zilch, nix, nein. People are just too tired, wasted, kaput. They just want to have a good time. Let’s go clubbing or have a barbecue…

And it doesn’t end there, of course: the Bundestag also passed the Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz [Network Enforcement Law], which can criminalize online statements as illegal hate postings.

Great! The social media will be forced to delete hate speech immediately, but who defines hate speech? It’s a question for philosophers, not lawyers. In dubio pro hate speech. From now on, haters, baiters and Schlechtmenschen will have a hard time… Our Minister of the Interior, Thomas de Maiziere, actually declared, "It cannot be that there are areas where the state has no influence." He really said that!