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Nuclear Radio-tagged Gay Gorillas, and the Wall of Separation
More RFID Stupidity - from JWZ. A good little commentary on the latest RFID news, about the switchover from normal credit cards to less safe cards that can be scanned without leaving your hand (including by crooks who walk by you and run a scanner past your pocket...). I'm not amazed that RFID is spreading so widely into our lives, but I'm absolutely shocked at how quickly this is coming about. Just a couple months ago I began ranting about proposals to use it for inventorying in warehouses, and the possibility of function creep. It hasn't even started mass implementation for these seemingly innocuous uses before the function creep began. The wider the use, the quicker it comes, the more dangerous this technology is to our privacy. It is not always governments that restrict freedom.
The Atomic Holocaust - A rather political exploration of the atomic bombings, but we damn well need to be reminded what happened, where the real history of "weapons of mass destruction" lies and what it can teach us. At the same time, though, I am reminded that the firebombing of Japan (where buildings were often made largely of wood and paper) caused far more devastation and death than the nuclear bombs. One of the American generals who made the decision to firebomb later said that if we had lost the war, he would have been tried as a war criminal for that mass murder of hundreds of thousands of innocents. An important lesson, that - the winners can get away with atrocities at the same time they condemn the losers for their atrocities. The fact is, in war, both sides are the bad guys. One just gets away with it.
So Great a Cloud of Witnesses - An important personal story, found via Alas, A Blog. I already posted it on my "What I'm Up To" list on the right, but this one deserves a more permanent link. Read it, please, because people need to understand the real importance of the issue of gay marriage, when George Bush and his allies are fighting for a Constitutional Amendment (!) to restrict citizen freedom to marry (and state freedom to allow it). Echidne points out that "[t]he federal government will spend $1.4 billion during the next six years to promote and support marriage, a move that opponents and supporters agree is an unprecedented bit of social engineering." We need to be vigilant now more than ever and not let the government expand its power to dictate our lives and our love.
Finally, some links on the church-state issue, which came up recently on a message board I frequent:
Okay, now back to studying for finals. *siiiiigh*.
I've also went through and added permalinking to all my entries (including the archives), so now every single post on my site will be individually linkable.
Let me know if you experience any problems getting either new function to work. Thanks.
See also: Anarchism and Other Impediments To Anarchy, offsite, also by Bob Black. This guy's becoming one of my favorite writers. (On an unrelated note, I also stumbled recently upon this article by Black about his experience with a daughter with Down's Syndrome, and the problems that arose from the professionals rather than Morwenna herself).
And a couple more offline links by Kerry Thornley (aka Ho Chi Zen, aka Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst):
Zenarchy, a full book online. "Zenarchy is a way of Zen applied to social life. A non-combative, non-participatory, no-politics approach to anarchy intended to get the serious student thinking."
The Principia Discordia, the Discordian Bible, er, unbible. Hit and miss, but some damn brilliant stuff in there; a must-read for those serious about ludic living. Also, as always, I highly recommend Robert Anton Wilson's The Illuminatus! Trilogy for a great fictional introduction to Discordianism.
Now this doesn't mean I have access to these things (I can ask though). Like I said, no MySQL for sure; I'd have to ask about PHP or Perl, but it doesn't say anywhere that I *don't* have access to these ones.
Anyway, given this information, can anyone suggest a server-based (not remotely hosted) comment system for me to try out. Free is preferred, but I'm happy to pay a little money for stability. I want something that works, and I want something that can be reasonably integrated into my current setup by a novice like myself.
Also, I use an FTP program (WS_FTP95) to upload files to my host. I don't know how to do things with Unix, nor have I figured out how to change permissions to executable (for CGI files, e.g.) using my FTP program.
Maybe there's nothing that will fit my needs, and I'll just have to give up on comments or find a new server and pay a bunch of money for Movable Type to be installed for me (but I'm unsure if it will give me the freedom that my own simple HTML design has). But if anyone has any ideas or program references, I would appreciate it very much.
My email is evalramman25(at)hotmail(dot)com [with obvious replacements].
Thanks!
The article starts out interesting enough. He proposes that by 2020, a huge segment of the service sector will be replaced by robot labor, leading to extreme unemployment that won't be easily self-corrected. Rather than giving people new levels of freedom and allowing an overall cut in average hours worked ("We would have to reverse a number of trends to move our society to a 30 hour work week, and corporations will resist these changes every step of the way"), he suggests that the efficiency of the robot labor is likely to just continue benefiting the CEOs, leading to an ever more extreme concentration of wealth, while the unemployed people are out of luck. The economy simply won't be able to create enough interesting, high-paying jobs that can't be done by robots.
He calls it Turbo Capitalism. He suggests we need to build a strong, steady economy, which we do by increasing consumption. To do this, he suggests giving every citizen a $25,000 per year stipend to free them from normal labor and allow them the freedom to experiment (create new products, start their own businesses, go to college, etc.). Where does this money come from? He suggests the government should create a gigantic fund out of which every citizen would be paid equally. To fill this fund he gives a laundry list of ideas, like the following:
With these dubious methods, he proposes we will find enough money to pull in the 7.5 trillion or so dollars a year that this program would cost, and in turn that means everyone will have enough money to get by and poverty will be completely eliminated (!) in no time.
I'm skeptical.
First off, we've got enough ads. People already complain about billboards clogging up every city street, and I doubt they'd go along with putting way more everywhere else (how safe are ads littering streets? Do you really want some guy talking on his cell phone to be looking at the enticing Coca Cola ad while he dodges through traffic?). Lottery money and court fines are already applied to other programs, and these programs would have to find new sources of funding (maybe we could just sell more ad space?). It's bad enough that corporations are raping the environment and taking control of the radio spectrum - why put even more power in their hands? Copyright laws are already well beyond the bound intended by the founders - should we really allow corporations with deep pockets to take over the public domain? Higher taxes for rich people has been proposed before, and while I'm not sure it's a terrible idea, it would likely be shot down (especially since rich people tend to have a little extra sway). The government stock idea is intriguing, but I'm not sure how it would work in reality, and in essence it's just another big tax which would probably make it harder to start new businesses (whereas one of Brain's big goals in giving people their $25,000 is so they can start new businesses). I think he's grasping for straws here with funding proposals.
However, even if we could find some way to pay for this huge program (even with drastic cutting of "defense"/war spending and using all of the current social security and unemployment money, we would come up extremely short of target), I'm not sure it would have the grand effects he thinks it would. "We will give every citizen the money he or she needs to be independently financially secure," Brain says.
Yet how many citizens will do the same thing they did with Bush's "tax rebate" and just go spend the money on a new big screen, high-definition T.V. or a new car? People always live as close to or as far beyond their means as possible, and giving them a bonus check from the government each year isn't likely to convince them to quit their jobs if they still have one - because they'll want to have *more* money so they can get better *stuff*. If we are trying to give people a stable assurance of the necessities (as opposed to the current limited unemployment system, which Brain thinks doesn't cut it), then why not provide free food and reasonably minimal housing with this money. In essence, why not let everyone live a minimal life on this new uber-welfare and make working for excess wealth optional, rather than letting them waste it on crap?
Of course, what we're still talking about is finding money somewhere and giving it to people. Since government budgets are already pretty strapped, and taxing the rich isn't likely to be enough to pay for it all, chances are this money is going to come mainly from corporations. Now, under Brain's vision, these corporations are already profiting big time from robotic labor, so what he's basically arguing is that this extra robotic profit should be distributed back to the people - through the government - rather than going to the companies. The same amount of goods are being produced as when people worked, and people are still buying them, they just don't have to work for those goods thanks to the robots. It sounds nice, but I'm not sure how well it would work to impose this extra burden on corporations while still working under a capitalist system.
We certainly should be trying to find a way for everyone to benefit from robot labor (through decreased work, if nothing else), but this proposal seems to be a long shot, and it seems to fall back on the same old ideas brought up in non-robot contexts: it relies on pretty traditional fundraising ideas (why haven't they been used already if they are so effective and safe?) and it looks toward the government to redistribute wealth from the rich to the masses. There isn't much here about directly taking advantage of the new robot labor aside from the program being prompted by the sudden increase in unemployed.
He does briefly mention a robotic labor tax (that is, a tax on businesses who benefit from robotic labor), but I have trouble imagining that could possibly bring in the revenue he thinks it will without placing such a burden on companies that they would rather hire cheap human labor just to avoid the robot tax.
Surely there must be a better way to take advantage of automated labor, especially as it becomes more able to do diverse tasks, but I'm guessing it's going to take a bigger change in the system (and by that I mean the ideology and assumptions of people as well as the actual bureaucratic structure of society) than just adding a new government welfare program.
He claims the ability comes from a (goddess-given) abnormal condition: a hole in his palate, through which drops of water filter. While there might be possible traditional explanations (if he had really done this for decades, why did he lose a little weight?), this really does seem to be a new and intriguing phenomenon. Whether or not his ability was really goddess-given, he does appear to be testament to the amazing feats of the human organism. We tend to take for granted that which is normal, and assume that anything else is impossible; but perhaps our bodies are more versatile than we give them credit for. Only time, and more observation, will tell.
Meanwhile, a rare few people with virtually no brain are leading normal lives, one even attaining an honors degree in mathematics.
Sometimes we can't give these activities up easily though. Occasionally it may be due to an actual addictive dependence: in the case of "jogger's high", joggers get so used to the endorphins released from the activity that if they don't jog, they have a sort of withdrawal and can be grouchy or depressed. But more often it is a more subtle dependence, and it is usually balanced by the fact that the activity is still desirable even while we wish we could better control the time or energy we spend on it. Abyssal Mind tackles blogging in this sort of light:
At the same time, as the linked article suggests, we come to better understand which parts of the activity still hold the most importance for us, and which parts we might be better to give up. In other words, we straighten out our priorities by taking these habitual activities out of auto-pilot and resuming full control over them again.
Now, obviously this isn't going to turn into a serious investigation (can you imagine the citizen outlash if they tried prosecuting such a popular artist for lyrics?). They're just doing their job, however silly it might be at times.
But what if the lyrics had been spoken by an Arab Muslim immigrant artist who isn't hugely popular? Is it possible the government would actually consider prosecution? Maybe the lyrics would have to be more explicit. Say, the song might mention Bush by name. It might say the world would be better off if he was shot. It might even give a fictional account of the president's assassination. Yet all the while the artist may not wish any actual harm on Bush, and certainly the lyrics alone wouldn't possibly suggest a real plan to kill Bush or cause his death; such a song is more likely nothing but a form of political speech, an artistic way to express outrage at the president's policies.
And the problem is, a government that gets to decide what political speech is or is not appropriate, whether a piece of political art is or is not appropriate, seems to be in direct violation of the First Amendment. Sure, we may make exceptions for crying fire in a crowded theater, but is wishing the president dead (in a song, no less) really the same sort of thing? Not by a long shot, unless someone could make a really good case that the artist was trying to get other people to actually physically kill the president. However, in the right circumstances - say after another big terrorist attack inside the U.S. - it isn't that hard to imagine someone (especially of the right background) being arrested for song lyrics alone.
Yes, the secret service is just doing their job, but sometimes events like the plane hijackings in 2001 can cause otherwise reasonable people to do their jobs unreasonably; and we've certainly seen the government curtail cherished freedoms and civil liberties in the name of false security. Maybe it could happen.
Let's face it: Bush (and most presidents before him) have, through their actions, led to countless innocent deaths, certainly more than died in New York in September, 2001. The world probably would be better off if Bush died. Though I don't think I could ever be happy at someone's death, I would probably breathe a sigh of relief if the president died. These are simple and true facts - and probably the case for a growing number of Americans these days - but that doesn't mean they imply a desire to see the president killed, nor intentions to kill him or incite an assassination. It just means I hold strongly critical views of the current president, and expresses the opinion that the world probably would indeed be a better place without George W. Bush. Should I be arrested or (more likely today) spied upon because I express these views? Will the secret service be stopping by to talk to me after I post this blog entry? Nothing would surprise me these days.
Now excuse me while I go crank up Offspring's "Kill The President".
First and foremost, spread the word about the deeper problems in the existing system - to people who you normally wouldn't talk to politics about. I'm not saying get into a hardcore rant in the middle of work, but this stuff is more fuggin' worthy of 'watercooler chat' than the latest episode of [Insert Shitty But Popular TV Show Here]. Let family and friends know. This is the kind of thing people should talk about, because it gets to the heart of our government and the dangers of not just this administration but any administration which would seek to stomp on the basic protections all civilized societies should offer their people.
The fact is, while a letter writing campaign or something traditional like that might have short term impact, it simply won't hold up to the onslaught of time (because these things keep on coming, and once defeated, they often slip by later in another form). The only way to really, truly change things for the better is to change peoples' perception, change the way they get and process their information. The mono-media certainly doesn't do it for us (look at the recent FCC decision on media ownership rules), so we need to find a way to wake people up to reality and try to get people to think for themselves - and that means spreading information. If you're going to have even the slightest tiny spark of hope for humanity, you have to assume that a lot of people out there are really potentially reasonable at heart - they just have to be woken up out of their thoughtless slumber, out of their brainwashing coma, and they will react reasonably.
Spread information and you break down the system that is built upon the control of information.
More importantly, I think those who really care about these things need to try to think of new ways to spread information. Letter writing can be helpful (be ironic: use the Bush Action Center tool against them - pop in your zip code and it gives you the contact info of all news/radio outlets in the area!), as is word of mouth (especially word of mouth - because many people just won't expose themselves to mediums that challenge them). But we need to find new ways. I definitely don't have all the answers, but I'm damn willing to keep calling for action in the hopes that someone does.
I think the Blogosphere has potential in the phenomenal speed of the spread of information as well as the ability to dissect and criticize 'official sources', to spread independent investigation and expose opinion to critical review (much like scientific peer review). Some of the shit I've seen go down in the Blogosphere recently just rocks my world. And I don't just mean the stuff linking to troublesome ABC or CNN news stories, but the stuff that actually digs down deep and finds hidden links: digs up FOIA documents, discovers campaign contributions no one noticed before, finds out who owns stock in what company, publishes information those in power would rather remain hidden (like executive policy memos), exposes the quieter workings of Congress, watches as Bush changes his past speeches and his aides quietly "update" the White House webpage history to reflect that. I mean, blogs have major fucking power. But then the internet has always had power; what blogs add is speed and involvedness. With blogs, this stuff can catch on like wild fire and lead to real and independent publicity, and thus real change.
What else? Television and radio campaigns would be cool, but there's not much money to be made in protecting freedom, just in assaulting it, so you won't find a lot of money laying around for these causes. But I think there's hope in culture jamming and subvertising. Anything to break down the system - the real world structure itself, and the isomorphic system in peoples' heads.
Again, this seems like small gesture stuff, but the more I think about it lately, the more I'm becoming convinced that that is the very key to real organization. It's why I like anarchic theory: in the traditional idea of organization (the statist mold, we'll call it; or the hierarchy paradigm) people organized based on threat of force and the occasion promise of reward. It's a fundamentally corrupt system at its very heart because people are acting on these base impulses, not reason - they may think they're acting in their own best interest, but game theory tells us that's not really the case.
No, real organization is the kind that's held together firmly by bonds of choice and responsibility (not enforced responsibility, I should clarify). "Anarchy is order" - the meaning behind this term is that real order can only come about by choice, not threat of force, not by coercion. "What is an anarchist?" Ursula LeGuinn asks. "One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice."
The point is, to get an effective system that isn't corrupt like all traditional ones have been, we need to throw out the idea of top-down, hierarchical, enforced organization. We need to get rid of the idea that order is something to be imposed by an authority at the top, something that individuals below have to conform to to avoid punishment.
Instead, we need a world where the individuals at the bottom all make the choice, the conscious choice, to organize, to order. And that is why small actions - little things like informing people you know or subverting the system locally with culture jamming - work. They are at the individual level, they don't try to change things from the top-down (we've seen how well that works!). They try to change the world from the bottom up.
And that, I think, is the key. It jives with systems theory and all the cool work that's being done in science these days on how amazingly complex and successful things can come about from a conglomeration of simple individuals. Ant colonies don't succeed because queens issue orders of who needs to be where (the queen never even communicates with most of the ants up top doing the work) - they succeed because ants all have a basic behavior pattern built in and evolved to where from the simple rules of their behavior can emerge complex outcomes like a functioning hive. None of the individual ants is capable of ordering things around, there is no boss - yet things get done.
I'm not saying it's a direct analogy, but there's an important similarity there. From simplicity, even complex things can emerge. The world doesn't need an uber-designer to make complex organisms like humans - just some natural laws and a fair helping of time can build up to us (and further). Likewise, if we want to change society, we don't need to get in control (or convince those in control to act such and such a way) - we just need to change the rules at the bottom, and changes will build up to the top on their own. Theories of emergent complexity are huge in science right now, and I think they hold some powerful applicability to culture and society if only we'd start to recognize.
So in answer to the question 'what do we do?', I'd say we need to try to work on the individual level to subvert the old ways and offer new alternatives. Spread the memes, share the information, get people to think for themselves and inform themselves and become critical skeptics, and the pieces just fall together from there. Granted, it's important to work on a larger scale in concert with local work, but I think the real change will come from below, come from turning on peoples' brains all around us. Not just debating the people who are deathly opposed to us (that rarely gets anywhere) nor participating in circle-jerks with those who agree with us - but everyone. We need to bring critical politics and more importantly critical thought in general to everyone we know, because when every individual in society adopts a free mind, society itself will become free.
There, that's my idea. I'm not saying it's the end all be all of the subject, just some thoughts I'm throwing out there. I honestly don't know if anyone can change the world, make it better. Maybe it's all hopeless. But I've tried and I just can't resign myself to such a fate, so for now I'm gonna keep on trying to do something, to find some way that has some glimmer of hope, even if it's a long shot.
December 17, 2003 top
The Gorilla Foundation - The more I learn about our primate cousins, the more I'm convinced of our dire and immediate need to protect them from ourselves, to stop hurting them, to accept them as the family members of life that they are. These are creatures that can talk, that can feel emotion and love, that can raise and protect a kitten, that can make art with a natural love for the act of creation alone.
Permalinks Up and RunningPermalink ||
December 15, 2003 top
Comments appear to be working fine. A big thanks to Haloscan, who'll be getting a donation for Christmas.
Testing Offsite Comment SystemPermalink ||
December 15, 2003 top
Okay, I was burnt by enetations offsite commenting system, but I've seen some other popular blogs using Haloscan, so I'm going to give it a try and see if it works (at least until I find a comment system I can host locally). Please, please, please take a moment to test it out and try to post something. If you can't post anything, or don't see my test comment under this entry, or your own comments don't show up when you return, please let me know by email: evalramman25(at)hotmail(dot)com. Thanks a bunch, and thanks for your patience as I try to bring my blog into modernity.
Site UpdatePermalink ||
December 14, 2003 top
I added a new article to the politics section: My Anarchism Problem by Bob Black. It's a good little essay (actually excerpt from a book) on the problems that come with calling yourself an anarchist, including evoking some rather inaccurate associations (like the bomb-thrower, or the teenage rebellious punk rocker) and the assumptions by a lot of other anarchist groups that you agree with them.
Help Me Add CommentsPermalink ||
December 14, 2003 top
I want this blog to have comments really badly, but I can't seem to find a comment system that'll work. I know HTML (I do all the code for this site manually), but I know absolutely nothing about PHP, Perl, CGI, etc. I'm not sure what my host (at $5 a year) allows me to do exactly, but I can email them and find out once I know what to ask. I do know that I don't get any MySQL databases, nor subdomains. Under general server information on my host's control panel, it gives the following information:
Robot Workforce
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December 13, 2003 top
Marshall Brain (founder of How Stuff Works) has written an article called Robotic Freedom, where he talks about the coming changes when complex and able robots enter the economy and take over human jobs.
Permanent Fasting
As a society, and as a nation, robots give us a choice. We are entering an historic era that has the potential to completely change the human condition. Yet we enter it with an economic system that is unable to spread those robotic benefits to a large portion of the population.
This seems pretty much correct so far. If we get robots that can really replace the teenager behind the counter at McDonalds, McDonalds is likely to use such a robot; and it certainly won't benefit the people laid off, but rather the corporations themselves (those who "control the means of production", as Marx put it). How do we fix things then? Thankfully Marshall Brain has a plan. Unfortunately, it's a really bad one. Permalink ||
December 13, 2003 top
This has been going around the net for a while, but for those who haven't seen it: Fasting Fakir Flummoxes Physicians. A 70 year old holy man in India claims he has survived decades without any food or water. While the idea sounds preposterous, he has recently gone 10 days without food or water while under constant supervision in a modern hospital. While there, he didn't eat or drink anything, nor did he urinate or defecate.
Living In The Moment: Part IIPermalink ||
December 12, 2003 top
More Kitten Zen. [via Incunabula]
Activity FastingPermalink ||
December 11, 2003 top
There's a neat entry up at Abyssal Mind on "activity fasting". Most people have certain activities which they do over and over again for years of their life, and eventually those activities can become habit, or sometimes even worse, a mild addiction. Perhaps it's too much time spent on messageboards, perhaps feeling pressure to blog constantly, perhaps playing an online video game so much it interferes with life, or maybe it's watching pornography, or just watching television, or snacking all the time, or any number of things. If these activities start to take up a surprising amount of time (or have some other effect, like gaining weight from snacking), we may come to question their value and consider whether they should be given up or handled with more control.
Secret Service Investigating Unamerican Song Lyrics
Some things we do, especially ingrained habits, are done just because we are used to doing it. We often lose sight of the reasons why we started doing the activity in the first place, and after a while, we don't even know if those reasons still apply.
What really intrigued me though was the suggested solution:
Well, from time to time I like to do activity fasting, that is, refraining from an activity of which I am not completely sure of its utility. [...] Activity fasting allows us to sit back and clearly look at an activity to see if we still want to do it. And sometimes we will find that we are enjoying ourselves much better when we are fasting.
The entry goes on to analyze blogging in a way that resonates with the conclusion I came to a while ago to just let my website grow naturally, and never let it be a pressure or source of stress. The lesson here, though, is much wider. Activity fasting can be applied to any number of activities, like the examples I listed above, and this seems like a really effective strategy for gaining perspective and control over those activities. By taking something out of our lives for a while, we can learn more objectively what sort of affect it was having on us, and we may be surprised at finding ourselves happier when not held down by that activity.Permalink ||
December 07, 2003 top
The Secret Service is investigating an Eminem song to determine if any action needs to be taken regarding a lyric that may be a threat to President Bush. In a bootleg song, the rapper says: "Fuck money, I don't rap for dead presidents. I'd rather see the president dead."
So What Do We Do?Permalink ||
December 03, 2003 top
Well, I was recently bitching about the proposed VICTORY Act and ranting about the implications to civil liberties when a government has these sorts of powers, and someone asked me the simple but profound question: so what do we do? This was my answer:
Living In The MomentPermalink ||
December 03, 2003 top
A Lesson In Zen.
Stuff To Make You Laugh
(Dialup users beware, it might take a while; but then enlightenment was never the easy path).Permalink ||
December 02, 2003 top
Thanksgiving was nice and relaxing, which is just what I needed. So while I'm in a good mood, here's some fun stuff:
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