Stupid CypherPunks, Negative Reputation Capital & A Warm Place To Shit (Was: Re: Sweden's Social Democrats Sterilize the Inferior / Was: DoJ press release on Bernstein case / Was: lack of evolutionary pressures / Was: Save the Children! / Was: Internet Content Coal. bars press from "news rating" mtg on 8/28 / Was: Welcome to Cypherpunks!) Declan McCullagh wrote:
From: David Boaz <dboaz@cato.org> Subject: Social Democrats Sterilize the Inferior
Surprisingly, the revelations about 40 years of forced sterilizations by the Social Democratic governments in Sweden generated only small stories in the New York Times and the Washington Post.
I forwarded a list of stupid CypherPunks to Swedish authorities today, asking them to see that the list was brought to the attention of whoever is currently in charge of resurrecting the concept of Eugenics. {Which has never actually left us, but has only been transmutated into a kindler, gentler, type of sterilization and euthenasia}. I was prompted to do so, not only in order to personally profit from having recently invested quite a sum of money in betting that my stock on the Futures Reputation Capital Market would dive to a new low, but also by the realization that the Great Threat To Freedom and Privacy (TM) is not the "stupid sheeple" who blindly follow the False Shepherds of Freedom (and cry out to the Pontius Pirates of Privacy to crucify the Constitution), who are to be decried as the Great Threat to Liberty and Human Rights. Neither is it the Intellectual Elitists who have decided to take it upon themself to decide "which" of our freedoms should be compromised "for the greater good"; or to decide "what" is news and what is *not* news; or to decide "who" has genetic traits which are a credit to the human race, and who has genetic traits which are a *debit* to human evolution; or to decide "why" one form of expression on the cypherpunks list is an "obscene flame" and another is "acceptable criticism." { "They came for the flamers and I wasn't a flamer, so I didn't speak up. Then they came for those who 'replied' to the flamers, and I didn't 'reply' to the flamers, so I didn't speak up. Then they came for the Last True CypherPunk, and even the lurkers remembered they were cyphperpunks, and they spoke up. - T.C.M in the year 1 BC/beyond censorship } No, the Great Threat To The CypherFreedom and CypherLiberty is CypherUs. (The 'u' in "us" is for 'you' and the 's' is for 'stupid') What *really* prompted this post was my seeing a short news blurb, at around 3 a.m. on the Swedish sterilization story above, and then not seeing it again despite flipping back and forth between all the major TV news programs, to get further details. What *really* prompted this post was spending over an hour on the InterNet, searching online news sources for details of the story, only to find a single, brief reference to it. (But finding tens of thousands of references to Nancy Lopez's progress in the Swedish Women's Golf Tournament taking place.) What *really* prompted this post was seeing the news on the Patel ruling in the Bernstein case, and knowing that it would be the focus of a great amount of press, and discussion, and analysis, and thought, and hyperbole, and...etc., etc, despite the fact that the government is laughing their butts off over a bunch of freedom-fighting dinosaurs dancing in the streets over their victory in tearing a small piece of concrete from a Wall that is being torn down slowly while plans are being finalized for replacing it with an ElectroMagnetic Curtain that can be built quickly under false pretexes while the netizen's are having their attention diverted with false issues which are nothing more than the decaying ruins of a previous civilization. Those who are doomed to believe (forged) history are bound to repeat it.
By JIM (BELL-)HEINTZ (57) .c The Associated (Bench) Press Sweden had as many as 60,000 of its own citizens sterilized between 1935 and 1976 (the year that Hitler finally died). Adults and children were singled out by doctors, school authorities or other officials and were pressured to consent to the procedures. (Keep in mind that these were Voluntary-Mandatory dehumanizations.) ... Though Sweden's sterilization program was a matter of record, it received little public attention, ignored in schoolbooks and hardly mentioned in reference works. (In other news, Nancy Lopez is kicking butt at the something-or-other golf tournament in Sweden, as 5,782,386.4 URL pointers show in Yahoo, Mountain Dew, and Alta Vista, the tangled web search engines.) A recent series by the prestigious newspaper Dagens Nyheter, however, has stirred national debate (but has managed to be covered up in most of the rest of the world by Nancy Lopez and Judge Patel).
We all live within our own set of "parenthesis". We used to think of them as 'principles,' but then we found out that others, sometimes very good people, had a different set of parenthesis, which enclosed thoughts and attitudes and beliefs which were different from our own, and which might be just as valid from the perspective of their position in life. Then we found out that our own personal parenthesis were not a whole lot different from the walls being built by governements to keep people apart; to keep people being enemies of one another. How did we find out about parenthesis, and walls--their effect on our lives, how they separated us from the good people on the other side of them? We found this out via information and the technologies which brought it to our attention. Word-of-mouth and sailing ships, newspapers and the telegraph, the wireless and airplanes, television and jumbo jets. And finally, we found out about parenthesis and walls when we set sail on a new technology and discovered a new world, with a new language; a world and language where technology and communication were becoming one and the same. We discovered a world of Communication Technology in which the Medium *was* the Message, and the Message could be whatever we decided it would be, because We could *control* the Medium. _We_ could control the _Medium_. We could *control* the Medium. We (whatever we conceived ourself to be within the bounds of our own personal parenthesis), could exercise...Free Speech...we could CONTROL the Medium by which we Communicated. We could "talk" to someone in Weber-Weber Land, using words, and when words were no longer adequate (You know who you remind me of? ...uhh, there's this woman, a poet...uhhh), then we could "talk" to them with pictures (here's a GIF, from me to you, of what she looks like), and we could "talk" to them with *complete* information (and I am attaching the poem I quoted here, so that you can read it for yourself, and draw your own conclusions from your own context, and hers, as well as mine). We could _emphasize_ words, or we could SHOUT! Or we could emphasize words in a way that made more sense to *us*, even though we could still see understand the emphasis that _others_ were trying to commmunicate. And when others said, "There's no need to SHOUT!"... Well, WERE WE SHOUTING OR NOT? It was pretty obvious. The new method of communicating changed what was _obvious_ and what was not; it changed how we could lie and what we could lie about (I'm only twelve, AND I AM *NOT* SHOUTING!!!); it changed what we could pretend to ourselves, and what we couldn't (I am a computer expert, and I will prove it just as soon as I manage to kick these hacker kids off my system and access my resume); it changed the rules of engagement and the structure of power (My congressman sent me and 10,000 others an email saying he would be introducing legislation to criminalize spam. I sent him back anonymous email telling him that if he did so, I would kill him.); it changed what was possible and what was not, in our own minds and in our own communications, if not in our immediate reality (Where am I writing this from? From the compound in Waco! I can see the .jpegs of the flames rising in front of my face. I can hear the .wav screams of the children as they burn to death. I can merge them with the tape loop of the government negotiator doublespeaking, "David, don't do this to these people." as the *governement* was doing it to them.) Most importantly of all, the new method of communication changed our control over the information we received. It changed the level of *access* we had to information. It *empowered* us to *seek* the information we wanted, in order to build our own personal belief systems and direct the encompassing scope of our perceptions. It empowered us to search for the word "Nazi" in our New World according to _our_own_ Order (using AND, OR, NOT, +, -, etc.) It allowed us to read about the Holocaust ~and~ Revisionism. It allowed us to read about the Death of Hitler ~and~ the Escape of the Nazi's to the South Pole. It allowed us to read about the liberation of the Death Camps ~and~ the Escape of Eugenics into the bowels of Planned Parenthood. It allowed us to read all of the things which were an accepted part of our normal reality ~and~ those things which ran totally contrary to our accepted reality ~-~AND~-~ everything in between, in a variety of combinations, according to OUR search/wishes/beliefs/perceptions. The new technology allowed us to "seek out" new communities where the netizens who passed through could share our sameness or learn from our differences. We could move from community to community, and yet always remain our own, separate, Community of One. To: Major Domo @ Dumbo_Homo_Rambo_MauMau . NET subscribe community@other.org <me@mine.com> end (<---a command. *my* command. *my choice. *my decision) We could join, we could unjoin. We could "subscribe," not to a belief system, but to a community with an individual mix of belief systems which were similar/disimilar to our own. If we had nothing to learn, and nothing to teach, we could "unsubscribe." We didn't have to be consistent. We could subscribe to the Holocaust Remembrance mailing list, the Holocaust Denial mailing list, ~and~ to the Holocaust Revival mailing list and Holocaust Prevention mailing list. {Or, if we had the extreme good fortune to be handsome, beautiful, witty and intelligent, as well as between the ages of <=zero and >=infinity, we could subscribe to the cypherpunks mailing list, get our ultrasecret magic decoder ring, an invisible Toad tattored on our over-imaginative forearm, and support the Remembrance/Denial/Revival/Prevention of the Holocaust, the Hallowed Cause, the Halloween Costume and, last but not least--Howard Cossell.} In short, the New World Communication Union allowed us not only the Freedom of Speech, but also the "Freedom of Communication." "FREEDOM OF COMMUNICATION!!!" Freedom to <whisper>. Freedom to SHOUT! FREEDOM TO SHOUT REALLY, REALLY LOUDLY!!!!! FREEDOM TO SHOUT F#!U$!C%!K^!(!I)!N-!G OBSCENELY! (Freedom to <quietly> object to the previous freedom being abused.) The New World Communication Constitution was a "we the people" to whom "Anything not standardized, is permitted." Freedom to Subscribe, Freedom to Unsubscribe Freedom to 'scribive', freedom to "Take me off this damn list NOW!" (freedom to do the above 200 times and wonder why it wasn't working) Freedom to write your own majordomo code so that it supports all of the standardized majordomo commands, plus adding support for those with agraphia to 'srivibe', 'scrumbive', and 'scumdive'. Freedom to remain on the mailing lists where good-natured humorists made light fun of disabilities such as agraphia, and to leave the mailing lists where jackbooted, intolerant rednecks make fun of *serious* disabilities, such as Tourette FUCK!COCKSUCKER! Syndrome. Freedom to start a private mailing list where you can control the issues discussed, the way they are discussed, and to ask people to refrain from certain discussions on the list because they are off-topic, or BECAUSE I SAY SO, AND I'M THE MODERATOR! Freedom to start a public mailing list aimed at supporting crypto- anarchy, and leave it up to those who choose to join as to how best to address, discuss, contend, manipulate, piss, threaten, shout, insult, debate, and personally decide both what issues are relevant to the list and which issues are irreverent to the list, ~and~ which 'issues' may be leaving those nasty stains in your shorts/panties/(both). Freedom to divide your time between mailing lists where you know exactly what to expect because the list deals with specific issues and the list members stay on-topic, and mailing lists where mad hatters/dogs&englishment/scientists ramble on endlessly about a variety of issues, non-issues, re-issues, forgotten issues, and the like, often losing track of what the hell it was they were even talking about, if they were talking about anything at all. Which reminds me... The point that I may be trying to make, might have something to do with the fact that, in attempting to find further details about a 10-second sound-byte/news-blurb which had piqued my interest, I was suddenly struck by the realization that the difference between sheeple and people might be defined as whether they are passively processing input supplied by the Great Machine, or whether they are actively seeking and organizing their own information/input. Passive Information is not Knowledge. Passive Perception is not Attention. Passive Acceptance is not Decision. Passive acceptance of perceived information is not Wisdom. Robots are not human. Sheeple are not people. Humans are not robots. People are not sheeple. In attempting to seek out further details about the news blurb which concerned tens of thousands of my fellow humans being declared by others *not* to be human--to *not* have the right to pass their genes on to a succeeding generation--I realized that the mainstream media had no interest in "providing" me with those details. I realized that it *was* very important for the mainstream media to provide me with the details of how well Nancy Lopez was managing to get the small, round sphere to drop into a hole officially designated as a "cup." When I found a single, short (English) newstory on the sterilization of a mountain of my fellow humans, and a pointer to a Swedish magazine series on the issue/evert, which I couldn't read, I realized that my knowledge of further details would come from a combination of my own efforts and those of other netizens whose brains and domains and interests encompassed English, Swedish, the InterNet, and Humanity. My mundane mind recognized that life and human nature are such that others interests lie mainly in providing *their* information, which is of interest to *them*, and that it is up to *me* to position myself to encounter and/or seek that portion of the available information that I need to satisfy my own personal interests. My paranoid mind noted that I had seen the original news blurb only once, after which this newsworthy event mysteriously disappeared and had to thereafter be 'sought' by myself, and I realized that someone, somewhere, had made a decision as to what information would be made available to me througt *their* media. (After which I consulted, *my* media--the InterNet.) My depressed mind noted that I had managed to find only a single piece of usable information on the issue/event I had searched for on *my* media, and realized that the reason for this was a combination of censorship, tragedy of the commons, comfort, and stupidity. of censorship, tragedy of the commons, comfort, convenience, laziness and stupidity. Comfort - I like to sit on my fat ass and watch TV. Convenience - It is easy to just turn on the Tube and take whatever it is that the mainstream wants to provide for me. ("Watch me and I'll bleed you, cause you eat the shit I feed you." -Zappa) Tragedy of the Commons - 25,000,000 Lakers fans named Bubba would much rather hear about one putt than about 60,000 forced sterilizations. Laziness - I didn't post or make available to others the single piece of information I found. Why should I expect that others will automatically share the information they found? Censorship - The Great Battle taking place on the InterNet is the battle over *ACCESS* to information. Who will provide it? Who will be allowed to access it? What will be provided? What will access be denied to? The Great War on the InterNet is over *CONTROL* of information. Control of perception and attention. Control of virtual reality. Stupidity - I think I'm human. I think I'm people. I think I'm *me*. I think I'm a CypherPunk. I'm not human, I'm a robot who turns on the TV to get news about what is taking place in my world. I'm not people. I'm a sheeple who laughs along with the canned laugh-track on the sitcom. I'm a sheeple who taps his foot to the "Hollywood Strings Play the Rolling Stones" muzak in the supermarket. I'm a sheeple who waits for more news about my fellow humans being sterilized against their will, and then sit through three replays of Nancy Lopez's twenty foot putt, becoming comfortably numb, and forgetting about the problems of 'others'. I'm not a CypherPunk. I didn't take the information source I had found and share it with the list. I didn't write code--I didn't take this information and past information, and use my knowledge to create a post which others on the list could debug and add their own ideas to expand and diversify my creation. I'm the 'nigger' in the joke that got the presidential campaign press plane jokester fired. I just want loose shoes, tight pussy, and a warm place to shit. (The Politically Correct way to tell that joke is to replace 'nigger' with 'citizen'.) I'm a 'stupid' CypherPunk who hopes that someday the InterNet will match the high ideals of Television in providing me with all the information that is fit to byte. Well, the foregoing may not quite be true, just yet, but it *will* be after the Great Bandwidth Crisis--or the Great InterNet Terrorism Crisis--or the Great InterNet [Your Crisis Here] Crisis--when the government is "forced" to step in and "protect" us from ourself. I will settle for the 'official' internet news from the 'official' internet news sources, because I know I will not find further details on the Swedish Sterilization issue. There won't be enough 'Bandwidth' to provide the details. The details will be censored, in the interests of preventing 'Net Terrorism.' The [Your Crisis Here] problem will make it necessary to censor the details, make them top-secret, change them, deny them, reconstruct them. The foregoing *will* be true after the bumper-sticker which says, "TV is REAL!" is changed to "WebTV is REAL!" 10th CypherPunk