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There's a lot of good stuff here - maybe someone should invite this Mr. Ranum to look at Discordja?

Just wanted to say that in my opinion (which is based on experience) conversations that aren't viewed as a battle tend to go better.  I (and presumably the other party) learn more in a discussion than a debate.

There's the Western monotheistic "elightenment."  Being perfectly in accord with God however he/she/it is defined.

You actually make them into concealed plastic explosives.  Hexamine + nitric acid get you the explosive bit.  Just need a plasticizer.  Leave out the detonator, though - you wouldn't want anybody to get hurt now, would you?


If I see a news report about "suspicious eggs" being found in major national airports...

Sorry Cain, it seems that I made some unjustified assumptions.

But still, if you were trying to speak to the masses, you couldn't outright say that patriotism is bad.  You have to 'build a counter-image' for what Britishness is.  The end effect is that both the pro- and con- sides admit patriotism.  Both are infected by the meme, just different strains.

I see this more as a feedback loop then a strictly one-way feeding of bullshit from the 'elites' to the public.

My model for how all this nonsense gets going:

The public decides that a given meme (say, Britishness) is good to have.  The 'elites' can't let themselves fall short of the public's expectations.  If the public thinks Britishness is good, then the 'elites' better be even more British than the average person - he wouldn't be very elite otherwise, now would he?   At the same time, the people who are against that particular meme are ignored.  Especially in a democracy or republic, the threat of being ignored by the public is a very strong motivator for politicians.  In a free market society, the same applies to businesses like the media.

To use a US example, everybody important (media, politicians, etc) has to Support Our Troops.  Even the antiwar rhetoric is phrased in terms of Supporting Our Troops - we have to keep them out of harms way, for example.  No one has the cojones to stand up and say "Our military is fucking up Iraq!" - it's all about politicians mismanaging our Really Cool Army.  This even applies to you, Cain.  You're not saying that Britishness is bad; in fact, you love your British heritage!  You're arguing that Britishness means "rejecting overt displays of nationalism ... irreverence to authority, and eccentricity on a level other nations could only dream to reach..."

Of course, this feeds back onto itself.  When everyone takes as a given in a discussion that Supporting Our Troops or Britishness is good, people forget that it was ever an issue.  They don't need to think about it anymore; it's already been decided.  And then they propagate the meme through their actions.  A new observer, previously un-"infected" stumbles onto the scene and quickly picks up on the fact that the meme is good.  If it wasn't, somebody would be disagreeing with it, right?

Since everyone else is doing it,  .

I have an excellent conspiracy theory:

This whole PKLS thing is Cain pranking / trolling the PD.com forums.  Utter genius!  Nobody would see it coming.

Evidence:

1.)  Cain's response to PKLS's 2nd post is 3 minutes and 9 seconds after (s)he posted.  Even if he just happened to be on the forums at the time she posted, he would have also had to refresh the main screen or look at the "recent" posts almost immediately after she posted.

2.)  She isn't banned.  Does anyone else agree with Cain that it's okay to threaten reprisals on an innocent (in the sense that they haven't trolled us yet) third party but it's not okay to just prevent her from reposting?  The only realistic explanation for why (s)he hasn't been banned is either that Cain and the other mods want her here or that it would be too troublesome to keep banning a changing IP address.

3.)  The timing of her second post.  I mean, doesn't it seem a little convenient that the second PKLS post didn't come until well after everyone had established that she was a crazy stalker woman who deserved a good trolling, and people who didn't know what was going on were caught up to speed?

4.)

Cain, you've gone too far, at least I haven't given your real name online evil mad

Erase that now!

I can't seem to find where he's given PKLS's name anywhere.  It isn't in the OP of the ATTN Everyone thread, and there isn't a "Lasted Edited" underneath it.  Why bother posting PKLS's name if you know ahead of time that you're just going to have too later?


To clarify a little further on my theory:

Some of you claim to know PKLS.  I'm not saying that the person PKLS doesn't exist IRL, only that the PKLS forum account is a puppet.  Also, I'm not suggesting that Cain is acting alone in this.  Having someone else agree with him that the PKLS drama is real makes it that much easier for everyone else to accept it.  See the Asch Conformity Experiments.

To further create chaos and strife, he could even have a puppet account "out" him.  Such a puppet account would ideally claim to be an alt account from day one, so people would assume that the alt wasn't really an alt.  Ideally, the alt account would have some small amount of respect, but Cain would be too lazy to really pump the alt's post count.  Instead, he could have the alt contribute something that seemed useful.  Because the alt would have a very low post count, and his "outing" would be full of holes; other forum members might consider the possibility of a prank and then dismiss it based on the weakness of the alt's post.

Cain, I congratulate you on such a masterful scheme.

I think it really depends on 1) where you're looking and 2) how closely you're looking.

Take the internet example a little further.  With regards to file sharing we're definitely somewhere in between Confusion and Bureaucracy.  The blagosphere and Webcomics are in Discord.  Wikipedia is solidly into Bureaucracy, although there are enough intelligent people on there for it not to stagnate completely - yet.


As far as the US, I don't think we're anywhere close to Aftermath.  Sure, people are grumbling, but they always have been.  Our government has been very good at telling everyone that all this security is an inconvenience that just has to be dealt with, and that all the due process and search warrants flying out the window only apply to the Bad Guys.  Are there subversives?  Yeah, always have been and always will be.  But they're confused, and most of them are actually Sheep who just found a more interesting sheperd to follow.  The people are too good at pointing to stuff as the work of 'lone nutters' and 'evil.'  It's going to to get a LOT worse before there is a critical mass of people willing risk everything for change.  Voting for the Change Candidate isn't going to cut it - unless Obama really is as awesome as he sounds.  Hopeful, but not counting on it; I've been hearing too many whispers of a Chicago Politician.

The robot blurbs are the cabbage blurbs from 23 Things to Amuse You While You Wait.  Giving change to the machine is indeed from the memebomb thread.

Wiki account sounds fine, but wouldn't it be easier (for me) if you guys just put it up yourself?  And from a security standpoint, for a group that loves to troll other groups, handing out wiki accounts to someone with less than a dozen posts is kinda odd.  Are you just really trusting or do you know there is nothing I can do?

http://forget.the-aristotelian-telescope.com/omf_distributed.doc

These are some flyers I made for my college's coming postergasm.  Most of the ideas were lifted / inspired by the "One Sentence Meme Bomb" thread.  The "Student Council" series is to be cut into several individual strips and distributed.  Since we're actually having a student council election, I'm hoping they won't be taken down as fast.  The SOS thing at the bottom gets cut off, don't want it to be tied to the more obvious stuff.

The very last one is my reworking of the 23 Things To Amuse You While You Wait pamphlet, to be printed on cardstock, cut along the dashed lines, folded down the middle, and placed on cafeteria tables.  It's a common form of communication on my campus, only usually it's used for Darfur or Islam Awareness Week or a Lenten Movie Series or something.  (I greatly shortened the message and dumbed down the vocabulary.)

This is all Phase One stuff.  Phase two will feature more explicit BIP and weblinks.

Finally, I posted this one ( http://forget.the-aristotelian-telescope.com/SOLICITORS.doc ) on my dorm door, hoping to discourage all the door-to-door salesmen my college is afflicted with.  Comes with having one of the top entrepreneurship programs in the country, I guess.  So far, not a single solicitor has passed my door by, but a number of people were inadvertently mindfucked.  I'll take what I can get, I guess.


Thanks to nostalgicBadger for the bandwith +storage space.

So are you suggesting that people just start playing a new game, but try to rewrite the rules to avoid the current popular game's failings?

I think it'd be better to just play solitaire.  As in, prank the IRS buy giving them US Dollars instead of money.