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Ever wish there was a bunch of douchebags actually worse than libertarians/ancaps? Oh boy have I got something for you 

"Exactly what sort of monarchy they'd prefer varies. Some want something closer to theocracy, while Yarvin proposes turning nation states into corporations with the king as chief executive officer and the aristocracy as shareholders."

http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/22/geeks-for-monarchy/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=FaceBook

Okay.
So about a year ago I stopped posting here because of technical issues I was having at my parents' place in Jerusalem, where I was staying at the time.
This was about a month after I moved back to Israel (where I grew up) from Germany (where I lived for five years and studied and stuff.)

Herein are the (kinda) abbreviated tales of my exploits since then.

IN DECEMBER I met a woman my age (24 at the time) with some psychiatric issues (depression and anxiety) and we had a very intense, very short relationship, with a lot of sexual chemistry and a whole lot of really pointless fighting. It ended after about six weeks (late January). By then, I had gotten a room I couldn't afford in an apartment in Tel-Aviv (which became urgent once sex was in the picture). The roommate turned out to be a bit of an asshole. When that mini-relationship ended I went into the last phase of mourning for the real, 3-year relationship I had had in Germany, which ended just after I moved back.

LATE JANUARY was also time for national elections here. Woohoo! Very depressing results. After much debating I went with Da'am, a small revolutionary Marxist party and basically the only party with serious prominent Arab candidates other than the corrupt old Arab parties. We got about 3.5k votes, or about a 50th of the votes needed for a seat in Knesset.
On election day I decided I think this party is the only hope the Left here has in long run, so voting for them is not enough and I need to get active.

Shortly after election day I started working at last, at a vegan fast food place. The boss was utterly insane. The co-workers were sparkly, lovely, sweet-hearted hippies.
I lasted about a month. Because of the boss. I kept the hippies for a while. Moved on to my first real office job. Doing QA on translations of very repetitive material. (We're in March now.) It got pretty soul-crushing, pretty quickly, but the people were decent and the pay was sufficient for sustenance.
By then I had become a member and activist in Da'am (that party I voted for).
In April the social justice protests started again (as they do every summer. Yes, April is practically summer here, it's insane, I know.) I got really into marching and shouting at least once a week.

In May I fell head-over-heels for a funny and smart and cute woman I met on OKCupid. However, she suffered from depression [pattern? me??] and serious intimacy/closeness issues and it ended before it even really started (she might have also not been that into me, I never really understood). I was surprisingly quick to recover. Then it kinda started again but fizzled out and I had no expectations anymore so I was all like, whatever. We kind of stayed friends.

Also, at the end of May I moved out of the apartment with the douchebag roommate (he was just a douche and noisy at night and kinda desperate for friendship and quick to blame.) Moved in with my sister, who is one of the most awesome people in the universe. We had wanted to move in together since before I moved back so we were very happy when it worked out. I still live there – it's me, the sister, and another roomie I get along with more or less.

In June I turned 25 but I don't think much else really happened. Except that that week I had the worst depressive episode I've had in a long time, leading me to take three sick days. It happened just as a good friend from Denmark was visiting, he helped me out of it, and I bounced back like nothing ever before, right into months of cheer and good energy.

In July and August I was in Europe a lot. First on a family vacation, then at a conference (of the NGO I was involved in before moving back) and giving a workshop. I had a lot of time to read and think. Had a lot of thoughts about what I want to do, revolution-wise. Then I read "The Dispossessed" by Ursula K. Le Guin and it gave me a feeling of centeredness and of being pretty damn okay. And stuff. Highly recommended reading, if you ask me.

Anyhoo I came back all serene and focussed and motivated and stuff.

THIS IS WHERE STUFF GETS INTERESTING
Then IN SEPTEMBER Da'am (the party), started up its municipal election campaign, really, really late (elections were October 22nd) and I got asked to help out with some Facebook stuff. Which very quickly turned into me getting hired full-time as the campaign manager's assistant or something. It was pretty awesome but very tiring. I did short days at the translation company until the end of September, before switching to only doing campaign work.

At some point in September I met The Redhead. She kinda hit on me via Facebook after I was really awesome in a thread in a feminist FB group oriented towards sensitive dudes. We had a nice chat and met up that night and talked for hours and ended up doing sexy stuff. It was all awesome and stuff but actually I wasn't that into her, physically/visually.

The way it was with her kind of reminded me of The Ex, whom I also wasn't all that into in those respects when we met, and in that case things kept going for three years and I always harbored an ambivalence. This got me thinking about a few things. One very important thing I realized is that I had always been afraid of commitment, but I rushed towards commitment due to a need for validation. In conjunction with all this, I started realizing my relationship with my gender is more complicated than I thought. I do and will continue identifying as a Dude (I think), and I'm still basically only really into wimminz ( ), but I feel like I've always made an effort to pass as straight, and decided I have to stop doing so.

Things kept going with The Redhead, because it was fun and nice and interesting. But pretty quickly it became clear that she was more seriously into me than I into her. This was all during the campaign, but a week or two after I met her I came down with the flu and was out of commission for about a week. We saw each other a lot that week, being neighbors. At the end of that week, on my way back to campaign stuff at last, I started a difficult conversation.

Basically, I told her that I really didn't know where we were going but I worried she wanted things to go in a certain, serious, monogamous direction and that that was kinda freaking me out. I said I wanted to be polyamorous (which I did), I felt that was something I needed to try out in order to learn more about myself, and because it would conveniently allow me to continue doing with The Redhead whatever she was up to, while still barking up other trees and stuff. A little surprisingly, she was okay with it all.

The end of the campaign was pretty damn difficult and The Redhead and I didn't see each other much, let alone have time for deep conversations. But quickly after the campaign ended (oh, we totally lost again, lol) we ended up having another conversation like that. By now, she was already part of my extended clique, in part because her best friend is my best friend's girlfriend. "My Boys" – Best Friend and his roommate, my old best friend, whom I will dub the Cuddly Czar – actually did an intervention on me, telling me I had to reach a decision and had crossed the point of no return, as far as hurting The Redhead.

The next day, when she and I met up, she actually started the relationship talk because some stuff I had said, poking fun at her a week or so prior, had really hurt her. I apologized and clumsily tried to rationalize my shitty behavior. And then brought up my concerns. For some reason I decided (after a LOT of thought) it would make sense to lay all my cards on the table and actually tell her that I felt she was more attracted to me than I was to her. Needless to say, this was hurtful, but I told her I was trying to lay all my cards on the table and stuff, and we were okay pretty quickly. She basically again agreed to keep things going as they were. We did some of TEH SEX and she left with both of us feeling really good about the situation.

A couple days later, without us having had a chance to see each other again, she broke up via text, wishing me a nice life. I wasn't surprised about her ending it (I was actually a bit relieved, shitty old me) but I was shocked at her cutting off all contact like that. I suggested meeting to talk and she never replied. The Redhead and me then became the topic of the first fight ever between Best Friend and his g/f, whom I hereby dub Babyface.

The next day, I was feeling really down, and after a Halloween party we had at The Boys' place, I asked Cuddly Czar for some one-on-one time because he usually tells me I'm not an awful person, and because Best Friend had Babyface to stick around with.

The Czar basically explained to me what exactly was shitty about the way I treated The Redhead and really did not offer me too much in terms of consolation or support. But at least then I understood how douchy and exploitative it was to keep someone around when she was clearly interested in more and kinda just say "well, get used to less."

The Czar said I should apologize, and I was going to, but when I talked with Best Friend the next day, he said he and Babyface had heard of this notion, and she said to tell me not to contact The Redhead for a month, period, and that apologizing might make me feel better but it wouldn't help her move on. So I kept quiet and spent days feeling like a very bad person.

Then The Redhead published a blog post about Feminist Douchebags, using mainly examples from stuff with me to illustrate. This was pretty damn harsh for me to read, even though the examples were almost all distorted one way or another and I wasn't mentioned by name. It was obviously written out of pain, and I tried to take it as valid criticism, but found myself mainly nitpicking it in my mind. When I shared some of the nitpicking with My Boys, the Czar was first dismissive and then exploded. (The consensus later on was that the article was altogether crappy, not actually about me, and didn't even mention the things which I actually did wrong.)

Basically, it turned out the Czar had had a bone to pick with me for almost this entire year. Right after I came back, we got to discussing Feminism, and I was armed with a whole lot of information from the Feminism Wars here on PDCOM (which must have been about a year and a half ago). I don't think I was very active in them myself, but those threads deeply affected my world view, boys and girls!
Anyhoo, I got preachy on him at some point. He started seeing me as all holier-than-thou, first about Feminist Issues and later about Socialism too. He mentioned it at some point way back then but said it wasn't a big deal anymore, and I said I'd make an effort not to get preachy. And I thought that I did.

So, we're both a bit fuzzy on how it started, but basically for several months the Czar thought I was kinda insufferable, thought I was critical of him and oblivious of my own shortcomings, and basically stopped actually being my friend and started kinda just playing along instead. Drifting away while I would talk and shit. On my part, I was on the one hand pretty shitty too – when he moved to Tel-Aviv a few months back, I just kind of assigned him a role and decided it was fine to include him in my and Best Friend's long conversations about Class and Racism and Feminist Issues and Revolution and Free Society and stuff; because I allowed myself to assume he was basically on board ideologically (all the while kinda knowing he wasn't) I allowed myself dry, cynical, Leftist humor which was sometimes at his expense. I didn't mean to be mean but I really was. On the other hand, I was making a conscious and much-announced effort to make my friendships closer and more full of TEH FEELZ, and the Czar played along.

But then after The Redhead's blog post, the Czar couldn't hold it in any longer, he blurted out some of the hurt, and we sat down for a conversation. Oh, and by the way, at this point something romantic was starting off between him and The Redhead. The only reason it bothered me was the constant image of them talking about me and him agreeing with the stuff she wrote in that post.

This is getting WAY too wordy so I'm gonna zoom out a little for the last part.

Basically, the Czar and I have had a few heart-to-hearts. I have been depressed a lot of the time. Oh, and as I mentioned elsewhere, I stopped smoking tobacco (right before the second heart-to-heart, almost two weeks ago). A few days ago, Babyface thankfully forced me to talk about my feelings regarding the Czar and myself and The Redhead. A lot. She and Best Friend have given me some support. The Czar and I are working on rebuilding our friendship. He and The Redhead have something going on and it sounds like it's going well. There was stuff that came up in both of their criticism, and stuff that only the Czar raised, which has given me a lot of thought. I had become a bit arrogant and know-it-all-ish. My humor had become a bit nasty.

During all of this drama more or less, my sister has been really busy or abroad. She's coming back tomorrow and will probably be an angel and tell me I'm a good person and stuff. Not having her here has made me pretty isolated while my inner circle is in turmoil over my ill deeds.

Now that the dust has basically settled, I'm left struggling with a bunch of issues. On the one hand, trying to alter my behavior, to be less of a pain in the ass and more of a kind individual who treats people respectfully. On the other hand, trying to figure out my gender stuff, which is confusing because I don't feel like any label fits me better than "straight dude" but I hate that label and don't feel comfortable with it or at home in it.

All this crap with the Czar has really shaken me up. One of my big issues is that I almost always have a feeling of being unwanted or unwelcomed, like people secretly wish I would just leave but don't have the heart to say so. Having one of the few people I thought really knew me and really cared about me tell me that if he had met me now, he would have steered far away from me, really makes me pretty unsure about everything. A lot of the time, I feel like I shouldn't interact with people, because they don't really want me to and I'll probably end up hurting them without noticing.

So, that sucks.


Think I got most of the important details in here. Too many, anyway. YOUR THOUGHTS PLEASE.

No idea if it's already been mentioned here, but this site is intriguing, and might conceivably be a place for gentle trolling and/or recruiting:
http://atheismplus.com/

Atheism+ is a safe space for people to discuss how religion affects everyone and to apply skepticism and critical thinking to everything, including social issues like sexism, racism, GLBT issues, politics, poverty, and crime.

Heard about it from this vice.com article.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlwilbVYvUg&feature=plcp

It's some weird crazy remix of the first presidential debate, with lipdubbing and pure incoherent insanity. I haven't laughed this hard in a while.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/10/julia-gillards-misogyny-speech.html

Germany's centre-left Social Democrats kicked off their election campaign with what was described as a declaration of war on the banks, sparking fears in the sector that it could force the conservatives to follow suit.

http://www.thelocal.de/national/20120925-45185.html

[tl;dr / what it comes down to:]

So as I've mentioned here and there, I'm moving to Israel (where I grew up) for about half a year sometime soon. I figured since there's a few wise and experienced people here, I might get some useful input on a dilemma I have.

The background situation is this:
-I've basically just finished my undergraduate studies here in Germany (getting my degree some time soon)
-I've been DOING SCIENCE for a few months no, writing an article I was supposed to finish months ago, and which I was paid for through July – but the end of the work (which I really want to finish and see published) is finally very close
-It's getting cold here, and I don't want to be here in the cold months
-I'm fairly confident I can get paid working for some NGO or something like that, and if that fails I can almost certainly find lucrative work in high-tech or translation
-Once she finishes her MA thesis, my girlfriend will be joining me in Israel for some of December and most of January,
-Me and the g/f have the apartment we share here until the end of November, and I've agreed to pay my half of the rent (200€/month) until the end, no matter when I actually leave
-I'm basically broke, even though I have some savings here (which I get some government bonus on if I don't break them open until 2014) – but I can borrow money at around 10% p.a. as authorized overdraft, which I expect I can pay off pretty soon (if I can't make enough to do so in Israel, I'll move back here anyway)
-Getting unemployment benefits here is basically a non-option at this point because I'll be gone before they kick in

Right now, I'm finally getting anxious to leave, and starting to look forward to it. But it turns out that as of October 1, when I am no longer a student, I have to sign up for the same socialized healthcare I get now, except it's called "voluntary health insurance" (hint: it's not), costs more, and I have to keep it until the end of 2012 even if I leave the continent – unless I quickly get a job that comes with normal socialized healthcare ("legislated health insurance") – which is any job paying 401€/month or more. I basically have three options now:

1: GET NO JOB, BUT GET "VOLUNTARY" INSURANCE
I can sign up for the "voluntary" insurance starting October 1, which will cost me about 150€/month for as long as I'm here, and which I can't cancel before the end of 2012. The insurance company will only charge me 50€/month for the period of time when I'm out of the country.

Upsides:
Can focus on finishing my research, selling all my shit, packing, and spending time with my friends;
Can most probably be outta here before the end of October;
I'm covered in case something happens.

Downsides:
A few more weeks without an income;
Paying for German insurance while on another continent.

2: GET NO JOB AND NO INSURANCE
I can just let my normal insurance run out and not sign up for "voluntary" insurance. When I move back here, I'll have to pay for the time I was here uninsured, retroactively, but nonetheless, if I need to see a doctor while uninsured, I'll have to pay out of my nose.

Upsides:
Can focus on finishing my research, selling all my shit, packing, and spending time with my friends;
Can most probably be outta here before the end of October;
Don't have to pay for German health insurance while on another continent.

Downside:
A few more weeks without an income.
Could be really shitty and extremely expensive if I need to see a doctor.

3: GET A JOB
In this scenario, I get some mind-numbing work, starting later this week, which lets me keep normal insurance. The insurance runs out the day I leave the job, and if I de-register with the city on the same day then that's that.

Upsides:
Income! Yay!
Don't have to pay for insurance I'm not using;
Get to work in actual blue-collar work, which I've never done and am curious about.

Downsides:
Might still be here come November, since I'll have less time and energy for all the selling and packing and stuff;
Won't get to spend as much time with my friends before leaving;
Higher likelihood of getting stressed out, which tends to trigger my (mild) depression, especially when it's cold and cloudy.


I tend to think I should either get a job, or get "voluntary" insurance – being uninsured is a scary prospect, and I'm pretty confident I can pay away the overdraft even if I don't get a job.

tl;dr / what it comes down to:
Should I do the financially wise thing, get a job, pay less for healthcare, but end up spending more time here while wanting to leave, enjoying that time less or possibly being outright miserable;
OR should I take a risk, pay a bit more for healthcare while continuing to have no income, but spend a few sweet weeks of research, packing, and friends, then work off my modest debt (which will be in the vicinity of 500-1000€) in Israel surrounded by family and friends (and military, threats of war, the occupation, and lynchings)?

COUNSEL ME, O WISEPOPES OF DISCORDIA!

http://lesswrong.com/lw/elg/new_study_on_choice_blindness_in_moral_positions/

Seems to me this might be a factor in the lack of outrage over politicians not doing what they promised they would after elections. If part of our brain sometimes/often just rationalizes any choice we appear to have made without really remembering the choice,  that suddenly makes a lot of sense.

So I posted a pic that sparked a nice debate about religion on FB.

(My last name, and the last names and pics of all non-pseudonyms are redacted. Which was a total pain in the ass to do.)

First time I ever openly argued from a Discordian perspective on FB, methinks (and only in my last comment.) 

Sometimes I think about an aspect of ethnic cleansing, a side-effect really, one that pales to utter meaninglessness in comparison to the actual mass slaughter of innocents. But this side-effect, the destruction of the victims' culture, brings tears to my eyes.

I think about the life of Eastern European Jews, in their shtetls and ghettos. I think about the life of German Jews, like my grandmother and her near-dozen murdered siblings – a Jewish culture that was as cosmopolitan and Western as could be; they were even proud German patriots and often refused to the end to accept that this required hating their own kind. I think about the life of pre-Columbian indigenous North and South Americans, dozens if not hundreds of different cultures, interconnected and isolated from the Old World. I think about the Armenians, the Kurds, the Palestinians. There are other "cleansed" cultures I know less about all over Africa and East Asia.

In most of these cases, the cultural cleansing was never total nor complete. Cultures die hard. German Jews laid down the cultural foundations of Tel-Aviv, and those still alive today often meet in groups to talk German and discuss literature and politics, like their parents did in salons that were later expropriated by the Authorities. Armenian ceramics, in their lush colors and fantastic patterns, are a staple of Jerusalem tourist trinketry to this day. On the same tiny fleck of land, Palestinians still make and sell the simple but delicious traditional food their parents and grandparents would make before the Holocaust survivors came with Western trauma and Western guns and expropriated their land and autonomy.

But while cultures rarely disappear without a trace – even when a majority of their hosts have been slaughtered – no culture can survive ethnic cleansing.

The sharp, cynical humor of shtetl Yiddish culture no longer informs a whole literary tradition. It is instead collected in glossy-covered anthologies, with English or Hebrew transliteration and translation, and recited with an American or Israeli accent by young enthusiasts trying to keep it alive.

Drug- and booze-ravaged, impoverished Reservation Indians can only hope to imitate a vague, near-forgotten shadow of their cultural heritage – and forget about the inter-tribal cultural traditions that once connected dozens of cultures in trade, across vast swathes of land and language families.

Palestinians usually don't bother to create anything new anymore – their culture has been reduced to traditional food, a religion they share with most neighboring countries, a stubborn refusal to be starved, and the endless wait for freedom and autonomy. But waiting while reproducing tradition is not culture, in precisely the way that a zombie is not alive.


At the heart of any culture is a grid, a way to interpret reality. Attached to that are a bunch of customs, recipes for food, and for remedies, and for relationships. Also attached are societal hierarchies and memes to support them.

Grids are easily replaced by those the conquerors use.

Old societal hierarchies become irrelevant when your entire society is shattered is subjugated.

All that remains in the end are the customs and recipes, a standing reminder that something beautiful has been lost forever.

Umm, this:
http://gizmodo.com/5942294/the-next-industrial-revolution-starts-in-a-20+foot-shipping-container
Pretty damn amazing. 

[Parents save son by each giving him a hug]

Parents save son by each giving him a hug

I was intrigued, so I clicked through, only to find out I had misread it.

I should probably sleep more.

Rick Falkvinge, founder of the Pirate Party of Sweden, wrote an essay calling for re-legalization of child porn a few days ago:
http://falkvinge.net/2012/09/07/three-reasons-child-porn-must-be-re-legalized-in-the-coming-decade/
It's long, and very cringe-worthy because of the subject matter, but thoughtful and reasonable.
The TL;DR he offers, from someone's else's Google+ comment:

It's not illegal to film a murder.
It's not illegal to possess a film of a murder.
But it's still illegal to murder people.
And it's illegal to initiate a murder for the purpose of filming it.
If you have taken part in a murder and have film of it, the film may be usable as proof against you.
I can't see that Rick suggests anything different here – i.e., I see no suggestions that it should be OK to molest children for the purpose of filming it. That's good.
In the end it's as simple as this: it should never be illegal to merely possess information, any information.

The German Pirate Party has painstakingly distanced itself from Falkvinge and he's rumored to have stepped down from something.

I think the Germans are right to do so, because they're a political party and want to have a snowball's chance in hell in coming elections. But I also think Falkvinge is basically right in all of his policy suggestions in the essay, and in the general lines of argumentation (though I have some issues with some of the specifics.)

Discuss.

Just a quick thought I've been having on the backdrop of our recent discussions of feminism etc.

Before I start, let me note that I will be making some generalizations about people, people whose experience I have barely a glimpse of, and I feel kind of uncomfortable doing so. Hence, a lot of attempts at e-prime. And I'm eager to hear the take of people who are more intimately familiar with what I'm talking about, meaning mainly anyone who's not a cis male. (It's not that my opinion is a-priori invalid, it's that I don't have some crucially relevant perspectives.)

It seems that with patriarchy, as with any other form of oppression (or, any other part of The Machine^TM), the dominant group and the memes that justify its dominance have an ally in something probably related to Stockholm Syndrome (you know, the thing where people who are kidnapped start identifying with their captor and feeling positive and dependent about them.)

Sticking to the feminist issue, what I have in mind is this: women, as part of a (relatively) oppressed group, are basically forced to choose, consciously or otherwise, between two lame options. Either they conform with the wishes of their oppressors (not all men, but an abstract The Man), in which case they are giving up on some potential individuality in favor of the comfort of being agreeable to the people in charge; or they refuse to conform, refuse to look and act the way they're expected to, and as a result can maintain individuality, but are both likelier to suffer abuse (from oppressors and conformists alike) and are likely to be stamped off as crazy/weird/bitter/ugly/etc., enabling oppressors and conformists to easily disregard their perspective. "You're just angry because guys don't want you", "don't listen to her, she's just crazy", etc.

This seems to be a pattern so prevalent that it might be useful to think of it as the essence of oppression. Either conform, or be marginalized. The more you conform, the less easy you are to marginalize. But this is where the Stockholmy stuff comes into play. It seems almost obvious, but it's worth pointing out that conformists tend to be the least likely people to realize they are taking part in oppression. I don't know what direction the causality goes in, but everywhere I look, I see conformists who are fine with things as they are and get angry when someone suggests they're part of oppression, and non-conformists who see the oppression and are fucking pissed off for being marginalized by it.

Women who conform to patriarchy, who constantly make huge efforts to be perfect decoration and "playmates" for the men around them, seem to actually want the kind of validation the patriarchy offers them, and look down on women who do not conform as much. And women who are conscious of the patriarchy tend to refuse to conform, at least in some ways, and to look down on women who do conform.

Because patriarchy is still a dominant part of The Machine – which implies that most people carry a bunch of patriarchal memes – and because of the principle that communication can only take place between equals, a majority of society looks down on those individuals who are aware and critical of the patriarchy. Because they look down on them (us), communication is impossible. And so The Machine lives on, and like any attempt to change it, feminism can at most hope to slowly shift the balance away from patriarchy, but never to dismantle The Machine as a whole.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/05/eritrean-refugees-at-israeli-egyptian-border
One of those days when I'm especially ashamed of what my home country does. Not sure if it's mentioned in the Guardian article, but last night some Israeli civilians tried to approach the fence to give the refugees some food, and the army refused to let them through or even pass the food on for them, apparently on official orders.

And people I know are defending this, or at least deflecting it with "yeah but why aren't you criticizing Assad for his atrocities?" or "but isn't Egypt even more responsible for this situation?".

Also, caffeine and nicotine withdrawal. Just kill me.

http://www.upworthy.com/a-tea-partier-decided-to-pick-a-fight-with-a-foreign-president-it-didnt-go-so-we

http://www.youtube.com/cveitch

If not, he should be. 

http://www.ted.com/talks/mitchell_joachim_don_t_build_your_home_grow_it.html


You know what the logical next step is, right? Engineer the house to grow a side of bacon out of the kitchen wall every morning.
YES.

http://www.thelocal.de/money/20100608-27715.html
Looks like some *serious* rolling back of the whole welfare state thing is going on here thanks to the recession. Discuss.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usS3SchXbFg
Looks like some Christian nutters think their god can get them control of the world media, so I'm in favor of Eris taking over the media in order to one-up them. Discuss.

(video via the Daily Dish)

Sup PDCOM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc&annotation_id=annotation_152651&feature=iv
I may just be tired but this video makes me feel stoned. And I haven't been stoned in over a week. (Ah, tomorrow!) I will have to watch it again when I am.
I saw another from the series (via the Daily Dish) and it looks like they're all kinda nifty.
Enjoy.

So I'm re-reading Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle and it strikes me as somewhat more than subtly Discordianesque. It was written in 1963, a mere five years after the first edition of the PD was first written, so it would have been non-trivial for KV to get his hands on it. But I wonder. Bokononism, a religion described in the book, seems like Discordianism infused with a tiny bit of humanist Christianity (to wit, the idea that God has a plan for individuals, combined with the sacredness of man [and nothing else]). There are many things that can easily be interpreted as winks towards Discordia (the first scene in which Mona Aamons is described, her clothing is bluntly described as "Greek", and she is - to me - a flesh-and-blood Eris; on a few occasions I noticed prominent mentions of LAWLO5S numbers such as 23; and other similar things.)

Of course it is very likely I am reading too much into this. Being a kind-of-underground writer in roughly the same time period as the inception of PD, the similarities may simply be the result of common background. But I wonder if there is more to it.

When the semester is over I might collect Discordianesque quotes from CC, if anyone is interested. Until then, does anyone have any theories about the KV-PD connection?

http://cominganarchy.com/2009/12/31/american-political-rhetoric-like-ships-passing-in-the-night/

Learn how:
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/pony

How doth it hang, o PDCOM?
I've been away for way too long! First I braved the cold northern land of Copenhagen, where I realized I had lost my mojo at some point in the past year. Then I went to the Middle East. Then I came back and have found my mojo anew! Isn't that great?
What did I miss?

I try to sleep, despite the light, despite the tweeting of birds without and hard-drives within. I try to think of it as "a bit like camping out", but it's been so long and that's hardly even a relevant metaphor anymore. Every couple of years I buy a useful piece of camping equipment -- hiking boots, a backpack -- imagining it will guilt me into getting up and camping again some time. It hasn't happened yet, but that's okay. The time, the place, the people need to be right anyway. It will come, because the urge to hike, to sleep in the desert or near some glorious hill, the urge is still there, and will likely never go away. Sure, it is often kicked back down by the urge to be online every waking second, never to abandon the network, the ubiquitous network... And a man is not an island... But a node that can't survive without the network is almost useless; the network has to get input from *somewhere*.... Not to mention, I need to get away from all this text if I'm ever to write again... How can I write with so much text in my ears and eyes? Hell, how can I even think!? There's always something, always a new message, new post, new tweet, new article -- something! But when you've become much more of a consumer than a producer of content, you ask yourself, or, well, I ask myself, where did I go wrong, why don't I write anymore? Coming right back to camping again, I used to think I should find some oasis in the desert and just spend a few days there, alone, hiking around in the afternoons and just relaxing and thinking the rest of the time, meditating, finding balance. But then, those are probably just an idealized concept... I would likely get bored, not to mention antsy, without my moving walls of text in front of me, without the constant distraction of music, networks and text. Nonetheless, lying there, I hear birds tweet and think of mornings in a sleeping bag, avoiding the summer sun and catching an extra hour of slumber before it gets too warm.

A friend of mine is terrified because she believes mankind will soon be wiped out by a lack of potable water. She claims that even though we can purify water, the material costs of doing so entail causing yet more pollution. She sent this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ikb4WG8UJRw
And this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQmz6Rbpnu0&NR=1
I argued that although a couple billion unfortunates may parish, this is far from an actual existential danger to mankind due to simple supply and demand politics; if water becomes more valuable, there is funding for all sorts of technology to purify or create H2O, meaning as soon as lots of people start dying rich people who don't want to die will solve the problem. She "countered" that water shouldn't be a commodity to be bought and sold like that, but I'm not gonna start arguing down that kind of sentiment... Anyway, what is you spags' take on this? Is this really such a major future problem or is my friend just fretting over a couple of YouTube vids?

So here's a quick though I had while reading this:
http://cominganarchy.com/2009/04/24/britains-watchful-eyes/
There's the theory that one of the defining aspects of the sovereign state is a monopoly on violence. With this whole surveillance thing and simultaneous anti-photography-of-public-places thing going on, could it be some states are trying to get a new monopoly - a monopoly on photography??

I posted the following over three posts in a Facebook comment thread. Thought it might be interesting food for discussion. It came as a response to this:

Morals evolved during our long evolution. Even lions have certain morals (lionesses don't kill their own cubs and take care of them completely, a squid mother would die taking care of its eggs, a lion would not attack their own children and lionesses and would defend them against outsiders...).

Yes, and the clue is that with these moral behavioral patterns, over an impressive test period of at least 2 million years (though likely much more), our species has managed to become by far the most successful on the planet.

Not everything that has been called "immoral" is really universally immoral - eating pork, for instance, has nothing whatsoever to do with morality (at least in comparison with eating beef) yet it has been construed as highly immoral by Islam and Judaism. However, there is a certain subset of behavior that is clearly, universally immoral for humans, including (but not limited to) killing and stealing. It is my impression that when universal immorality takes place on a more-than-small scale, the situation for everyone involved is less desirable than a moral situation. That is to say, sticking to the patterns recognized universally as moral isn't only good for your would-be victims, but for you and the people you care about as well.

But it's actually a moot point in the long run, because humans are hard-wired to *mostly* act in a moral way, and also hard-wired to break out in mass immorality (a.k.a "war", "genocide", "occupation", "subjugation", etc.) now and again - we've evolved to lead reasonably good lives most of the time, but be massively cold, vicious bastards a small portion of the time. In the long run, individual moral decisions have very little noticeable effect on the human condition as a whole.

As the bible so aptly quoted:
"Nothing is new under the sun"
-unknown

I suppose I should add, part of that hard-wiring makes it highly likely for people to either reject the above intellectual reasoning out of hand, or to accept it intellectually and still treat moral dilemmas as gravely serious as ever. Knowing it doesn't make a difference in the long run, doesn't make a difference in the long run.
(I, btw, am of the group that accepts this reasoning intellectually but continues to take moral decision very seriously.)


The above, like everything posted under the VERB` or St. Verbatim name, is kopyleft, in the sense that I relinquish any and all rights to its reproduction and place it entirely in the public domain (and kindly ask you to repost, distribute, edit, or otherwise reuse it if you ever see an opportunity to do so). This means you can do whatever you want with it, from now until forever. I like having my writing attributed to me, and I like it when someone tells me when my stuff gets put somewhere, but do whatever you want.

 
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/04/16/border-patrol-beat-u.html

So Cram's "Missions, Goals, Objectives" thread suggested making a little more info available to noobs, to give them a bit more of a chance to figure stuff out here (while probably still hazing them.) And I remembered that as a newb one of the most difficult things for me to figure out was what all the abbreviations were around here... If I hadn't gathered the testicular power to ask some people about a couple of them I probably would have despaired and forgotten about this place... Or probably I went out of my to ask because this place seemed too awesome to miss, making this whole concept somewhat unnecessary... But you know, why not just make a list of abbreviations and put them somewhere? It would be helpful to some people, and an opportunity to crack some wise-ass jokes. Here's a start, in no particular order:

AISB = Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria
MW = MysticWicks ["Pagan forum"]
TCC = The Celtic Connection ["Wiccan forum"]
RAW = Robert Anton Wilson [author]
PDCOM/PEEDEECOM = PrincipiaDiscordia.com
KYFMS = Keep Your Fucking Mouth Shut
TFY,S! = Think for Yourself, Schmuck!
LANAU,E,BUOTLFK = Long Abbreviation Nobody Actually Uses, Ever, But Included On This List For Kicks
LOL = Little Old Lady(ies)
IANAR = I Am Not A Rhombus ["poster"]
AKK = Ambassador Klok Kaos
BIP = Black Iron Prison (see www.blackironprison.com if you haven't yet)
PKD = Philip K. Dick [author] (the guy BIP was plagiarized from)
SCA =
MLA = MaybeLogic Academy


Or, you know, or not.

A while back I signed up for MindMeister, apparently one of the best online mindmapping tools. Now I received an email saying that since I haven't logged on in a while, they want to give me some codes for two free months of premium service... No idea if anyone here uses MindMeister, but on the off chance, I have five (!) codes, each for two free months of premium, and am glad to give them out. Email me at verb, at principiadiscordia dot com, if you want one. (Only one per account, by the way.)

X-posted from my blog: http://verbatim.baywords.com/index.php/2008/12/everything-will-not-be-alright/
Will X-post to Verwirrung if and when I get a contributor account.
---------------------------------

Murphy's Law holds always: "if anything can go wrong, it will". Internalizing this principle is the key to happiness and success; telling yourself everything will be alright is a mind-numbing escape from reality. If you expect the worst, you can prepare for it. Even if Murphy's Law is a mere matter of chance, of cognitive bias, "Law of Fives", it is dangerous to underestimate the probability that things will go wrong. If you focus on the probability that things may turn out okay, you will be left vulnerable to disaster.

Internalizing Murphy's Law does not imply helplessness or despair – quite the contrary. "If anything can go wrong, it will"... Reverse the Law and you see hope: "sufficient preparation averts disaster" – only that which can go wrong, will go wrong. Allow no plan the possibility to go wrong, and you'll be much better off than you would just hoping and praying. Murphy's Law does not leave you helpless – it is ignoring this Law that will. If things go wrong when you refuse to expect it, you have nobody to blame but your own dumb self – this is the epitome of helplessness.

To get the upper hand on Fate, acknowledge that things will go wrong. It will allow you to do whatever is necessary to prepare – to leave no room for failure.


There is no defensible alternative to Murphy's Law. To examine the alternatives, let us first clarify the Law. The Law implies: "one should expect all disasters to manifest in such a situation where they are possible". The opposite position would be "one should expect no disasters to manifest". Barring absurdist positions, any other alternative would boil down to "in such situations where disaster is possible, one should expect some disasters to manifest".

"One should expect no disasters to manifest" - this is quite a dangerous position. Disasters do occur; if one expects that they never do, one will not prepare for unfortunate eventualities, remaining entirely vulnerable to whatever Fate (or Eris?) throws his way. Sure, you'll feel all nice and cushy expecting the best...until you're proven wrong. Painfully. One must only think of the many unexpected disasters of history to refute this position. Of course, no reasonable person would hold this position in the first place – it is more of an oblivious emotional attempt to feel good about things than anything else. Most children learn at a young age that this position is false, and they learn it the hard way.

Halfway positions are far more seductive: "in such situations where disaster is possible, one should expect some disasters to manifest". This position is, first and foremost, deceptively reasonable. It is, strictly speaking, true – some disasters, possible and unprepared-for, fail to manifest (remember the bird-flu pandemic scare? The Y2K bug?). It is a fact of probability that some things will not go wrong. This does not, however, imply that one would know the difference. Disasters tend to happen when they are not expected – especially when they are not expected. But for whatever reason, we like to think we can tell that things will be alright. Understand this: when things go wrong, it is invariably the result of an unknown. If all the factors were clear and known, there would be no room for disaster. If you presume to know when things will go wrong for you, you presume to know the unknown. Snap out of it, you don't know the unknown. Some things may fail to go wrong, but one should not presume to know which things those will be.

The halfway position tends to collapse into meaninglessness. Despite our ability to reason, it is a rare quality, amongst humans, to see the bigger picture while tackling smaller issues. When it actually matters, we will rarely have the detachment necessary to make sense of the halfway position. This detachment, this ability to think reasonably and strategically while still catching all the details, is a mark of genius and responsible for making many of history's greats so great. Do not presume to possess this ability. Regardless of our reasoning, a halfway position will inevitably seduce us, in the moment of truth, into the comfortable complacency of the belief that everything will be just fine. Even those geniuses endowed with that amazing reasoning ability, such greats as Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte succumbed to complacency in the end, and it was the end of them.  It is a comfortable mental space to be in, thinking things will be okay – like a cocoon; like a womb. It will seduce you again and again. But the human brain is not designed to deal with probabilities. If you operate on the assumption that some things will not go wrong, you are likely to misjudge situations and neglect to prepare for the risks involved, at least some of the time – and it often takes only one good disaster to ruin things for a long, long time.


The events in my life this past fall really drove the point home for me. I had accumulated several months' debt in wishful thinking, and suddenly found collectors at my door. Again, and again, and again. I had told myself all kinds of things would work out just fine. One by one, they fell apart and failed to work out, in a glorious variety of different ways I had not entirely foreseen. I was left dazed and confused. Certainly, some things worked out just as I had hoped. I've had pleasant surprises. Some things worked out far better than I had dreaded. But always there were unknowns in play – I never really knew which thing could still go wrong. In almost every case, being more cautious and proactive, accepting the possibility of failure and preparing for it, could have saved me nasty surprises, stressful days and sleepless nights.

Instead, to appease my lazy side, I just told myself things would work out without my intervention. They did not.

But there is a lesson to be learned in such times. One must live with Murphy's law in mind always. One must prepare for the worst but hope for the best. Stop letting yourself get caught with your pance down, expect the worst, prepare for it – and everything will be alright.

What is it? Quick!

I desperately want to make my room more interesting. I'm also desperately not rich. (Not quite poor at the moment but that's just temporary)
I need good ideas for DIY projects that I can do on the cheap. Especially stuff relating to storage, which I do not have enough of in my room (thinking of installing a third desk because of my tendency to use desks to store everything in a semi-ordered kind of mess.)
Any particularly good ideas or websites with such ideas that you spags might recommend?

I just noticed I joined a Discordian group on Last.fm some time ago... Started looking at the members (129 right now) and found a guy in my city, so I messaged him... Gonna post something on the group wall now to get some attention for OMGASM or something. This should probably go on the list of places to spam when a new project starts...

U GUISE
I JUST HAD BACON FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE
IT WAS DELICIOUS
OH MY GOD
I AM ABOUT TO GET SO FAT

-end of transmission-

I need to choose courses for University. I will be studying English Language and Literature this year (because there was no room in Linguistics), so first of all I need to choose a literary analysis course, and I've heard of almost none of the pieces to be studies. So HALP ME PLZ. Which of these pieces would you guys recommend?

1101-2a          Übung: Introduction to Literary Analysis

Poems:           John Donne, P.B. Shelley, D.H. Auden
Play:            Joe Orton, Entertaining Mr. Sloane
Short Fiction:   Katherine Mansfield, "The Garden Party"
Novel:           Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea


1101-2b/2c       Übung: Introduction to Literary Analysis

Poems:           John Donne, William Blake, Ted Hughes
Play:            Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
Short Fiction:   Virginia Woolf, "Kew Gardens"
Novel:           Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit


1101-2d          Übung: Introduction to Literary Analysis

Poems:           John Donne, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Lavinia Greenlaw
Play:              Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Short Fiction:   Katherine Mansfield, "The Daughters of the Late Colonel"
Novel:           Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie


1101-2e          Übung: Introduction to Literary Analysis

Poems:           J. Keats, W.H. Auden, S. Heaney
Play:               John Arden, Sergeant Musgrave's Dance
Short Fiction: Rudyard Kipling, "The Judgement of Dungara"
Novel:           Ian McEwan, The Cement Garden


1101-2f           Übung: Introduction to Literary Analysis

Poems:           Thomas Chatterton, Alfred Tennyson, W.H. Auden
Play:            Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband
Short Fiction:   E.M. Forster, "The Machine Stops"
Novel:           Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid`s Tale


1101-2g         Übung: Introduction to Literary Analysis

Poems:         Christopher Marlowe, John Donne, Samuel T. Coleridge
Play:          Tom Stoppard, The Real Inspector Hound
Short Fiction: Roald Dahl, "Lamb to the Slaughter"
Novel:         Graham Swift, Waterland

More to come later! I NEED YER HALP!

I made a soup that is actually really good.
I will try and recreate what I did to make it. I made a big-ass pot and I don't remember the quantities but it doesn't really matter all that much.

You will need:
-some hotdogs/sausages (I used one full pack of Bratwurst because that's the cheapest kind here)
-lots of black beans or kidney beans or something like that (I used three 450ml cans of cooked kidney beans)
-a couple of carrots
-a couple of potatoes
-4 small onions or 1-2 big ones (no such thing as too much onions, really)
-a couple cloves of garlic (I used 3)
-beef stock
-one vegetable soup bouillon cube

What you do:
chop up the onions, sautee in olive oil. while they are sauteeing, chop up yer sausages and toss them in with the onions. sautee those mutherfuckers all together until they look good. meanwhile peel and chop up the carrots and potatoes. when the onions and sausages are almost done sauteeing, add in the carrots and potatoes. sautee for a tiny bit. then pour the beans onto them, with most of the fluids if they are in a can full of fluids. then add some boiling water. peel the garlic and throw in those cloves whole.
pour in the beef stock, add water until you have the amount you want. add a bunch of salt and pepper.
let it all cook for a while. an hour or two is enough. the potatoes and carrots have to get real soft. then take one of those handheld blender-sticks (like the one that trip loves so much), insert it into the pot, past the layer of floating sausages, THEN turn on (so you get no splatter). puree the soup thusly for a while, until most of the beans have disintegrated.
add bouillon cube. stir. cook another half hour.
EAT

nom nom nom

You can think of this thread as a child of Payne's opensource OMF discussion, or of Cram's thread about Discordia's relevance today. Or you can think of it as its own thread. It is a thread, that's for sure.

We are in a unique position in history, my friends.
We have something resembling a message, or at least an assortment of messages, and we are standing before what will certainly be a troubled time, and may well prove an era of rapid, violent change. If the world economy goes entirely pear-shaped, disillusionment and doubt will be widespread. It will be, to put it shortly, the kind of time when things change. It will in no certain terms be the Season of Aftermath.

The Great Depression gave birth to Fascism and Communism.
If we fuck this Meltdown hard enough, what crazy mutant child can it bring forth?

A friend sent me a link to this ages ago, and now I've finally watched it:
http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=8339

It's four hours of documentary but I feel it was time well-spent (even if it took me ages to find the time for it)... You can watch the first five minutes or so of part four to get a recap of it and see if it's worth watching...

The series brings up some bigger questions about democracy, but I found it fascinating to see all of what it presents put together in historical perspective...

Discuss.

Think of relationships as a kind of truce.

We build walls around ourselves. This is necessary, to a degree, because being perfectly vulnerable at all times is far worse. We cannot just be open to the world, because not everyone out there will be sensitive of how delicate we are, of how easy it is to cause us harm.

But once in a while, we find someone to whom our walls are nothing. We find someone who can make us happy by just saying a few words, or by giving us a smile. When this happens to us with a person again and again, we sometimes call this love.

We become dependant on this person. Our walls are there to help, but they are nonetheless restrictive. There is no greater solace than having someone with whom we can just forget the damned walls for a moment, and feel good. Feel like ourselves. Feel free. So we become dependant on such people with whom we have that kind of connection. It is a great thing, when it is mutual, but it is also a real problem. If a smile can set you soaring, a frown might just cause you to crash down, hard. If a few good words can make you happy, a few bad words may make you miserable.

Enter the truce, stage left. Having ascertained that one certain individual has broken through our defenses - and that we have broken through theirs, as well - it is natural to want to make this a good thing. But like we said, those who can make you happy can also make you miserable, just as easily, if not more so. A truce is in order. We agree to acknowledge our own vulnerability, and that of our loved one, and to try to be good. We promise it. We know it goes both ways - I won't hurt you, because I can hurt you, and because you can hurt me. But I won't, and you won't.

This is a blessing and a burden. It is a blessing, because we get to enjoy the freedom of a breached wall, and we get the security of a promise that this breach will not be abused. It is a burden, because we promise to watch our step, to be mindful of our partner's vulnerability. It's not an easy thing to do, and one need not think hard for an example of how this fails.

When such a truce fails it is rarely because of malice. Usually, it is because we did not correctly assess the potential pain involved, or because things have changed in ways that make it too difficult to uphold the truce. And oddly enough, it sometimes fails because we have raised new walls - or our partner has. No truce is necessary in absence of vulnerability. There are all too many ways for this truce to fail, though we rarely want it to do.

It can all be adorned in prettier words. Indeed, love deserves more than this. Saying this mutual vulnerability is beautiful would be an understatement. Calling the truce "nice" would be a joke. It can, nevertheless, be insightful to think of it in these terms, dry as they may be. That it does not paint the whole picture goes without saying. But please, think of relationships as a kind of truce, if only for a moment. It may prove interesting.

I have been following the state of copyright/piracy (in the past two years primarily via BoingBoing and Techdirt - way to get both sides of the story, I know!) for a while and find it very interesting. I am slowly becoming very much anti-copyright, in the sense that I think the law should not be used to protect business models made obsolete by new technology.

But it just occurred to me why this might actually be important for the state of our liberty in the long run.

You see, lots of people seem to confuse corporate interests with public interests, when it comes to copyrights and piracy. I see lots of people treating piracy as a societal problem. For instance, one user on Gamer.co.il (Israel's biggest gaming site, where I am on staff) opened a thread titled "how do we stop the piracy phenomenon?" which has received hundreds of replies, none of which I have read (just noticed the thread, that's all).

But it seems to me that it's not everyone's problem if the people producing content aren't making money the same way they used to. After all, this IS about money, and it's not a problem for society at large if some individuals or groups aren't making money the way they want to - that's their own problem.

But if this is a confusion of state and corporate interests, that's pretty fucking scary. The merging of state and corporate interests is a prime symptom of fascism (I read this somewhere, no idea where, and it makes a lot of sense when you think about it.) If that's what this signals, this issue may be more important than I thought.

So whether you like piracy or not, separating the interests involved here is pretty important. The RIAA is not protecting anyone's rights - it's merely leveraging the legal system to extract inordinate sums of money from those who do not conform to its business model (the RIAA normally tried to get at least $750 per song, often more!). This is totally unacceptable to me. The music industry (and all other industries affected by digital piracy) should be figuring out ways to get money from people by giving them what they want.

iTunes is a great example of how this should work. Another is Tool selling cool physical, uncopyable things along with an album. Another is Radiohead's "pay as much as you want" gimmick which was a fucking monumental success (and quite possibly a one-time gimmick).

These industries should be thinking about ways to succeed without relying on the court system. And the public should not stand for its legal and political systems being hijacked by corporations. That is all.

http://www.paulgraham.com/lies.html
A nice essay aptly titled Lies We Tell Kids. At the end of it he calls the sum of childhood lies left over in adulthood "debris", which kind of sounds like shrapnel.
The essay is basically a solid examination of one particular mundane type of shrapnel.

http://wiki.offdev.org/Main_Page
This is either an elaborate mindfuck or something that will change the whole filesharing world.
Took me a bit of reading on their wiki to wrap my head around it, but I think I get it. Basically, the system breaks down any file you put in into 128KB blocks, but instead of these actually being parts of the file, they are random chunks that form the original blocks only when put together correctly using XOR. The blocks are distributed randomly across different servers. They are reused for different files (as one example puts it, if you have blocks A, B, C, A+B could be part of oopsididitagain.mp3 and A+C could be part of rootsrockreggae.mp3 - block A itself is meaningless) and the only person potentially prosecutable for copyright infringement is whoever actually assembles a copyrighted file off of the OFF system. The system is designed so you can "stream" distributed files without needing to create your own copy (it is a virtual file system.)

So basically, if this ever becomes the predominant P2P technology, it will be *impossible* for ISPs and RIAAs to catch people using it for piracy. Not difficult, actually impossible. The only way you could do it is by actually checking what is on people's hard-drives, and with the proliferation of high-grade HD encryption, that will soon become a rather impractical thing to do.

www.cwyohba.org/noexit/docs/PostergasmDE.doc
Dido and I ripped off a few of the Volume Dingus ones and translated them (with some of Dido's evil genius added on top). There are twenty-something of these in Berlin now.

Being only half aware of a problem is often as good as being entirely unaware of it. However, sometimes being half aware of a problem is half as good as being completely aware of it.

There seems to be a prevailing notion around these parts that most people are robots, and unaware of it. This is probably correct.
There are two concepts very often discussed in this context. One of these is the Black Iron Prison, the other is THE MACHINE™. The BIP is, in a sense, the personal counterpart of the social MACHINE™. It is also much more than that, but let us stick with this definition for a moment.

I propose that many people are, in fact, somewhat aware they are robots. They are half-aware of what we call THE MACHINE™. Think of it as a silent undercurrent in the collective experience of our era. The reason their awareness is incomplete, the reason they do not consciously grok the immensity of THE MACHINE™ in its entirety, is that they do not understand the concept of the BIP. They do not realize how limited, yet malleable, human brains are. And they do not realize this applies to them, personally. ("YUO")

The important thing is that a great deal of people alive today are, in fact, aware that they are robots. They just don't understand the problem in-depth, and do not understand how it applies to them personally. Thus, many feel powerless to do anything about it, and let themselves be swallowed whole by THE MACHINE™. They submit, and go back to sleep.

Some, however, manage to resist. The realization that we are all automatons shines through in the art of recent generations - from Pink Floyd to Mr. Bungle, from Soylent Green to The Matrix.

So what?

Well, it might just be possible to piggyback on the existing sense of hopelessness. Instead of firing brutally and wildly, we can take our aim very carefully and look for ways to help wake up the weary ones, the ones not yet resigned to sleep.

I have no idea how to do this. I'm just saying, there may be more awareness out there than we thought.
Or more than I thought, at any rate.

[we are all free to do as we will]

I used to tell people we live in an Anarchist Utopia. It was a kind of IRL troll in the days I used to hang out with activist-types. It was a lot of fun, because it is a very difficult claim difficult to argue against: we are all free to do as we will. You can smoke a joint in front of a police station - you just have to be prepared to deal with the consequences. You can do anything you can get away with.

It is very easy to confuse what we can't do with what we shouldn't do. It is all too easy to forget that we have the choice. The internet pirate, downloading and propogating stolen materials, he has the choice. And stopping at a red light, I had the choice to keep going and risk arrest or injury.

Freedom, in this its most basic sense, seems rather constant in human history across space and time. The only way people have managed to truly limit freedom in this sense is imprisonment of others - and this has always been applied to a small minority, even in extreme cases where entire ethnic groups were rounded up and confined.

So if we sense we are in a state of decreasing freedom, clearly the freedom we are referring to is not this freedom of choice, ever so hard to truly limit. The freedoms now being slowly taken away must be subtler ones - indeed, these freedoms must consist of our choices not being affected unduly by outside considerations. I should be able to write what I want, when I want, where I want, without this choice being affected by fear of retribution. Imposing this fear is a subtle encroachment upon my freedom.

But perhaps the easiest way to limit one's freedom is to make one forget this freedom ever existed in the first place. After all, why put a man behind iron bars when you can just train him to stay indoors? If you can convince The People that they should not do what you do not wish them to do, you save a great deal of energy you would otherwise spend actually stopping them from doing it. If you can convince them that they cannot do this, cannot go there, all the better.

It is good to remember once in a while that we are fundamentally free. We may have fears imposed on us by unjust rulers. We may have to face choices no free person should be forced to face. We may have to take great care to preserve our freedom. But we are free nonetheless, and the choice is ours. Merely knowing we are free is half the battle.

So, I have a birthday coming up and my parents are giving me a big-ass gift card for Amazon. Now I must decide what to get.

Which Nassim Taleb book would you spags recommend most? Is it worth bothering with more than just one?
Other than I3!, PR and QP, what RAW books should I definitely read?

Any other nonfiction recommendations?

Okay spags, my insatiable urge to edit anything comprising of or resembling Enlgish has come to a head. ITT you will say what you would like to see in a new, revised and expanded edition of the BIP pamphlet, and I will put it together, at least as far as text (I can do layout pretty well, in total amateur terms - any more serious volunteers, Net?)

I will not be making the pamphlet all that much longer. I might add a few pieces, but the idea is to produce a more complete, more interesting work - not a fucking novel. (For my so-called novel, see that other thread.)

I might however try to edit the current content rather in-depth. LMNO suggested in the criticism thread that the pamphlet should emphasize that each and every one of us is just as fucked and bound as the next cabbage - other ideas of similar nature are welcome.