-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Jim Choate wrote:
However, it appears that part of the problem with the remailers is that nobody uses them. We should be making a concerted effort to do so, and not just for cpunk traffic. We should use them for everything. It won't take that many people to reduce the message delays substantially. It will also advertise the remailer network to our friends who may not yet be cypherpunks.
The tools exist to do this.
Yes, but why would I?
- From "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" by Milan Kundera Part 4, Section 2: It was a program about Czech emigration, a montage of private conversations recorded with the latest bugging devices by a Czech spy who had infiltrated the emigre community and then returned in great glory to Prague. It was insignificant prattle dotted with some harsh words about the occupation regime, but here and there one emigre would call another an imbecile or a fraud. These trivial remarks were the point of the broadcast. They were meant to prove not merely that emigres had bad things to say about the Soviet Union (which neither surprised nor upset anyone in the country), but that they call one another names and make free use of dirty words. People use filthy language all day long, but when they turn on the radio and hear a well-known personality, someone they respect, saying "fuck" in every sentence, they feel somehow let down. "It all started with Prochazka," said Tomas. Jan Prochazka, a forty-year-old Czech novelist with the strength and vitality of an ox, began criticizing public affairs vociferously even before 1968. He then became one of the best-loved figures of the Prague Spring, that dizzying liberalization of Communism which ended with the Russian invasion. Shortly after the invasion the press initiated a smear campaign against him, but the more they smeared, the more people liked him. Then (in 1970, to be exact) the Czech radio broadcast a series of private talks between Prochazka and a professor friend of his which had taken place two years before (that is, in the spring of 1968). For a long time, neither of them had any idea that the professor's flat was bugged and their every step dogged. Prochazka loved to regale his friends with hyperbole and excess. Now his excesses had become a weekly radio series. The secret police, who produced and directed the show, took pains to emphasize the sequences in which Prochazka made fun of his friends - Dubcek, for instance. People slander their friends at the drop of a hat, but they were more shocked by the much-loved Prochazka than by the much-hated secret police. Tomas turned off the radio and said, "Every country has its secret police. But a secret police that broadcasts its tapes over the radio - there's something that could happen only in Prague, something absolutely without precedent!" "I know a precedent," said Tereza. "When I was fourteen, I kept a secret diary. I was terrified that someone might read it, so I kept it hidden in the attic. Mother sniffed it out. One day at dinner, while we were all hunched over our soup, she took it out of her pocket and said, 'Listen carefully now, everybody!' And after every sentence, she burst out laughing. They all laughed so hard they couldn't eat." Part 4, Section 4: She came out into Old Town Square - the stern spires of Tyn Church, the irregular rectangle of Gothic and baroque houses. Old Town Hall, which dated from the fourteenth century and had once stretched over a whole side of the square, was in ruins and had been so for twenty-seven years. Warsaw, Dresden, Berlin, Cologne, Budapest - all were horribly scarred in the last war. But their inhabitants had built them up again and painstakingly restored the old historical sections. The people of Prague had an inferiority complex with respect to these other cities. Old Town Hall was the only monuyment of note destroyed in the war, and they decided to leave it in ruins so that no Pole or Germans could accuse them of having suffered less than their share. In front of the glorious ruins, a reminder for now and eternity of the evils perpetrated by war, stood a steel-bar reviewing stand for some demonstration or other that the Communist Party had herded the people of Prague to the day before or would be herding them to the day after. Gazing at the remains of Old Town Hall, Tereza was suddenly reminded of her mother: that perverse need one has to expose one's ruins, one's ugliness, to parade one's misery, to uncover the stump of one's amputated arm and force the whole world to look at it. Everything had begun reminding her of her mother lately. Her mother's world, which she had fled ten years before, seemed to be coming back to her, surrounding her on all sides. That was why she told Tomas that morning about how her mother had read her secret diary at the dinner table to an accompaniment of guffaws. When a private talk over a bottle of wine is broadcast on the radio, what can it mean but that the world is turning into a concentration camp? Almost from childhood, Tereza had used the term to express how she felt about life with her family. A concentration camp is a world in which people live crammed together constantly, night and day. Brutality and violence are merely secondary (and not in the least indispensable) characteristics. A concentration camp is the complete obliteration of privacy. Prochazka, who was not allowed to chat with a friend over a bottle of wine in the shelter of privacy, lived (unknown to him - a fatal error on his part!) in a concentration camp. Tereza lived in the concentration camp when she lived with her mother. Almost from childhood, she knew that a concentration camp was nothing exceptional or startling but something very basic, a given into which we are born and from which we can escape only with the greatest of efforts. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQEVAwUBNDGcUD7jyGKQlFZpAQGv1ggAg9Vmgpmai4eVBzeA0XwJSaKrnkvCJdKI KzqNNi/HUaxCMMReCR0xRLZlLz0IXfK71zCOEZib9UbuTWE84X2x2KlpcQgBRrex IoRXkT5mQ+4GSTvG6CX4ZvLYohiVO+sKXX7m8RQcOqfo1IPYwqikNMixc1Yw4U3l hO0AMxPz/gE/2beYXBNFuDRU7PIRINhHCmoOtX+xxbQDEK8d/BRUwTBhS0XnY6Ek 6e1yNsEOaGZxR9NLNo3sYaaTpAcOZCDF4WQkfywpFXcyVyHWd5HSi9Oo5r2opnvK evH9JaLE2OO7iaqEuVYay4Tv9OB6YegUNmBhp3sSmQgzrVdvtfFZiQ== =Fawj -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----