Justin writes:
No, I want the right to fair use of material I buy. If someone sells DRM-only material, I won't buy it at anything approaching non-DRM prices. In some cases, I won't buy it at all.
Well, that's fine, nobody's forcing you to buy anything. But try to think about this from a cypherpunk perspective. "Fair use" is a government oriented concept. Cypherpunks generally distrust the collectivist wisdom of Big Brother governments. What fair use amounts to is an intrustion of government regulation into a private contractual arrangement. It is saying that two people cannot contract away the right to excerpt a work for purposes of commentary or criticism. It says that such contracts are invalid and unenforceable. Now, maybe you think that is good. Maybe you think minimum wage is good, a similar imposition of government regulation to prevent certain forms of contracts. Maybe you think that free speech codes are good. Maybe you support all kinds of government regulations that happen to agree with your ideological preferences. If so, you are not a cypherpunk. May I ask, what the hell are you doing here? Cypherpunks support the right and ability of people to live their own lives independent of government control. This is the concept of crypto anarchy. See that word? Anarchy - it means absence of government. It means freedom to make your own rules. But part of the modern concept of anarchy is that ownership of the self implies the ability to make contracts and agreements to limit your own actions. A true anarchic condition is one in which people are absolutely free to make whatever contracts they choose. They can even make evil, immoral, wicked contracts that people like you do not approve of. They can be racists, like Tim May. They can avoid paying their taxes. They can take less money than minimum wage for their work. They can practice law or medicine without a license. And yes, they can agree to DRM restrictions and contract away their so-called fair use rights. One of the saddest things I've seen on this list, and I've seen it many times, is when people say that the laws of their country give them the right to ignore certain contractual elements that they have agreed to. They think that it's morally right for them to ignore DRM or limitations on fair use, because their government said so. I can't describe how appalling I consider this view. That anyone, in this day and age, could consider _government_ as an arbiter of morality is so utterly bizarre as to be incredible. And yet not only is this view common, it is even expressed here on this list, among people who supposedly have a distrust and suspicion of government. I can only assume that the ideological focus of this mailing list has been lost over the years. Newcomers have no idea what it means to be a cypherpunk, no sense of the history and purpose which originally drove the movement. They blindly accept what they have been force-fed in government-run schools, that government is an agency for good. That's one interpretation. The other is worse. It's that people on this list have sold out their beliefs, their ideals, and their morality. What was the bribe offered to them to make them turn away from the moral principles which brought them to this list originally? What was so valuable that they would discard their belief in self ownership in favor of a collectivist worship of government morality? Simply this: free music and movies. The lure of being able to download first MP3s and now video files has been so great that even cypherpunks, the supposed defenders of individual rights and crypto anarchy, are willing to break their word, violate their contracts, lie and cheat and steal in order to feed their addictive habit. They are willing to do and say anything they have to in order to get access to those files. They don't feel the slightest bit of guilt when they download music and movies in direct contradiction to the expressed desire of the people who put their heart and soul into creating those works. They willingly take part in a vast criminal enterprise, an enormous machine which takes from the most creative members of our society without offering anything in return. And this enterprise is criminal not by the standards of any government or legal code, but by the standards of the morality which is the essence of the cypherpunk worldview: the standard of self ownership, of abiding by one's word, of honoring one's agreements. This poisonous activity has penetrated to all parts of internet based society, and its influence has stolen away what honor the cypherpunks once possessed. Its toxic morality ensures that cypherpunks can no longer present a consistent philosophy, that there is nothing left but meaningless paranoid rantings. I challenge anyone here to answer the question of what it means to be a cypherpunk. What are your goals? What is your philosophy? Do you even recognize the notion of right and wrong? Or is it all simply a matter of doing whatever you can get away with, of grabbing what you can while you can, of looting your betters for your own short term benefit? Is that what it means to be a cypherpunk today? Because that's how it looks from here.
Well, I agree with the general gist of this post though not it's specific application. OK...a Cypherpunk ultimately believes that technology and, in particular, crypto give us the defacto (though, as you point out, not dejure) right to certain levels of self-determination and that this 'right' is ultimately exerted indepedent of any governing bodies. In the end, most likely despite any governing bodies. Moreover, it has been argued (in general fairly well, I think) that attempting to exert one's 'rights' through a 'democratically elected' mob is rarely much more than mob rule. "We have voted to ransack your home." OK, that I think is well understood. BUT, an essentially Cypherpunkly philosophy does not preclude any kind of action in the legal/governing realm, particularly when it's recognized that said government can easily make it very difficult to live the way one wants. In other words, if Kodos is promising to start curfew laws and make possession or use of crypto a crime, I'll probably vote for Kang in the dim hopes this'll make a difference. Things get sticky when you start talking private sector...unlike most Cypherpunks I don't subscribe to the doctrine that, "Private=Good=Proto-anarchy"...Halliburton is a quasi-government entitity, AFAIC, the CEO of which 'needs killing' ASAP. In the US Private industry has a way of entangling it's interests with that of the Feds, and vice versa, so I don't see any a priori argument against establishing some kind of "rear guard" policy to watch the merger and possibly vote once in a while. With Palladium it's easy to see the Feds one day busting down your doors when they find out you broke open the lock box and tore out their little citzen-monitoring daemon inside, which they put in there working with Microsoft. With respect to TCPA, however, I happen to agree with you. IN particular, I think most people will put 2 and 2 together and remember that it was Microsoft in the first place that (in effect) caused a lot of the security problems we see. Watch mass scale defections from Microsoft the moment they try a lock-box approach...or rather, the moment the first big hack/trojan/DoS attack occurs leveraging the comfy protection of TCPA. -TD
From: Anonymous <cripto@ecn.org> To: cypherpunks@al-qaeda.net Subject: What is a cypherpunk? Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2005 22:12:16 +0100 (CET)
Justin writes:
No, I want the right to fair use of material I buy. If someone sells DRM-only material, I won't buy it at anything approaching non-DRM prices. In some cases, I won't buy it at all.
Well, that's fine, nobody's forcing you to buy anything. But try to think about this from a cypherpunk perspective. "Fair use" is a government oriented concept. Cypherpunks generally distrust the collectivist wisdom of Big Brother governments. What fair use amounts to is an intrustion of government regulation into a private contractual arrangement. It is saying that two people cannot contract away the right to excerpt a work for purposes of commentary or criticism. It says that such contracts are invalid and unenforceable.
Now, maybe you think that is good. Maybe you think minimum wage is good, a similar imposition of government regulation to prevent certain forms of contracts. Maybe you think that free speech codes are good. Maybe you support all kinds of government regulations that happen to agree with your ideological preferences.
If so, you are not a cypherpunk. May I ask, what the hell are you doing here?
Cypherpunks support the right and ability of people to live their own lives independent of government control. This is the concept of crypto anarchy. See that word? Anarchy - it means absence of government. It means freedom to make your own rules. But part of the modern concept of anarchy is that ownership of the self implies the ability to make contracts and agreements to limit your own actions. A true anarchic condition is one in which people are absolutely free to make whatever contracts they choose. They can even make evil, immoral, wicked contracts that people like you do not approve of. They can be racists, like Tim May. They can avoid paying their taxes. They can take less money than minimum wage for their work. They can practice law or medicine without a license. And yes, they can agree to DRM restrictions and contract away their so-called fair use rights.
One of the saddest things I've seen on this list, and I've seen it many times, is when people say that the laws of their country give them the right to ignore certain contractual elements that they have agreed to. They think that it's morally right for them to ignore DRM or limitations on fair use, because their government said so. I can't describe how appalling I consider this view. That anyone, in this day and age, could consider _government_ as an arbiter of morality is so utterly bizarre as to be incredible. And yet not only is this view common, it is even expressed here on this list, among people who supposedly have a distrust and suspicion of government.
I can only assume that the ideological focus of this mailing list has been lost over the years. Newcomers have no idea what it means to be a cypherpunk, no sense of the history and purpose which originally drove the movement. They blindly accept what they have been force-fed in government-run schools, that government is an agency for good.
That's one interpretation. The other is worse. It's that people on this list have sold out their beliefs, their ideals, and their morality. What was the bribe offered to them to make them turn away from the moral principles which brought them to this list originally? What was so valuable that they would discard their belief in self ownership in favor of a collectivist worship of government morality? Simply this: free music and movies.
The lure of being able to download first MP3s and now video files has been so great that even cypherpunks, the supposed defenders of individual rights and crypto anarchy, are willing to break their word, violate their contracts, lie and cheat and steal in order to feed their addictive habit. They are willing to do and say anything they have to in order to get access to those files. They don't feel the slightest bit of guilt when they download music and movies in direct contradiction to the expressed desire of the people who put their heart and soul into creating those works. They willingly take part in a vast criminal enterprise, an enormous machine which takes from the most creative members of our society without offering anything in return. And this enterprise is criminal not by the standards of any government or legal code, but by the standards of the morality which is the essence of the cypherpunk worldview: the standard of self ownership, of abiding by one's word, of honoring one's agreements.
This poisonous activity has penetrated to all parts of internet based society, and its influence has stolen away what honor the cypherpunks once possessed. Its toxic morality ensures that cypherpunks can no longer present a consistent philosophy, that there is nothing left but meaningless paranoid rantings.
I challenge anyone here to answer the question of what it means to be a cypherpunk. What are your goals? What is your philosophy? Do you even recognize the notion of right and wrong? Or is it all simply a matter of doing whatever you can get away with, of grabbing what you can while you can, of looting your betters for your own short term benefit?
Is that what it means to be a cypherpunk today? Because that's how it looks from here.
Anonymous wrote:
I challenge anyone here to answer the question of what it means to be a cypherpunk. What are your goals? What is your philosophy? Do you
In this day and age, do you realy expect anyone to answer questions like that openly and honestly? Really. There's a similar and simple label that gets used and abused by people who might either be technically competent engineers, or merely script kiddies: hacker. These days, being a hacker is nearly enough the moral equivalent of being a Communist in California during the Fifties. Or a leper. Note how the term 'hacker' is normally used, as a perjorative, in writings and speech found in the mainstream media. If a journalist for Time Magazine uses the label 'hacker' in a perjorative context, chances are that a letter-writing campaign launched in earnest for the purpose of reclaiming the defintion preferred by engineers, will at best produce a tiny correction buried in a corner of a subsequent issue. And then some other writer will make the same mistake later. The same applies to the term `cyperhpunk', only the term is rarely used outside of the Internet. Quite frankly, I couldn't care less what label applies to me. I'm somewhat knowledgeable on issues that are said to be characteristic of the focus of 'cypherpunks', but I don't pray every day with a reading from the Cypherpunk Manifesto.
even recognize the notion of right and wrong? Or is it all simply a matter of doing whatever you can get away with, of grabbing what you can while you can, of looting your betters for your own short term benefit?
Depends on the person, I guess.
Is that what it means to be a cypherpunk today? Because that's how it looks from here.
Perhaps a comprehensive survey should be done. A comprehensive questionaire in the form of a purity test might do it, as might something like a geek code for 'cypherpunks'... Do you read Applied Cryptography? Have you ever generated a 16 kbit RSA key? Do you have a picture of Ralph Merkle hanging on the wall in your bedroom? etc. Face it. You aren't going to get straight answers to questions from highly technical internet sophisticates, even if you ask politely. They have better things to do than to justify and explain their ideologies when in fact such is easily read from the body of their work, and implicit to their writings. Regards, Steve ______________________________________________________________________ Post your free ad now! http://personals.yahoo.ca
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- "Cypherpunks generally distrust the collectivist wisdom ..." Yes, but Big Brother governments are not the only way such "wisdom" gets imposed. Bill Gates came close to imposing it upon all of us, and if it hadn't been for Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds, we might all be suffering under that yoke today. The genius of Bill Gates is in knowing that most people don't notice or care that to agree to a EULA is to make a vow of ignorance, and not being ashamed to stoop to their level. The true danger of TCPA is not that "free" MP3s and movies will become unavailable, but the de facto loss of privacy as non-TCPA gear becomes unavailable or prohibitively expensive. D. Popkin -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3ia Charset: noconv iQBVAwUBQgaySPPsjZpmLV0BAQHEhwIAiv9N+F0GSYVB7xXE3Vftiyxgi7PYqNNP FnAN/nh1CdoLKG0lymhGEOGW8ZAZsKRAzv5FZSal7QUSWRzzZ8qo4w== =jsCx -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
On Sun, 2005-02-06 at 19:18 -0800, D. Popkin wrote:
The true danger of TCPA is not that "free" MP3s and movies will become unavailable, but the de facto loss of privacy as non-TCPA gear becomes unavailable or prohibitively expensive.
Agreed, in part. I don't think it'll fly too well if any hardware manufacturer builds in TCPA such that only a Microsoft-certified OS will run on it, for one, it's a bad idea to piss off the geeks (and certainly there's a higher geek to ordinary user ratio in the free software world), and also this would be a great way for Microsoft to piss off even the current (far-right Republican) administration. I would expect the setting to disable the TCPA chip to be present in new hardware for as long as TCPA lasts, and indeed, there may be cases where even an ordinary user would want to disable the TCPA chip. I personally don't trust Microsoft at all. They had their chance to keep my trust, and they blew it, big time. -- Shawn K. Quinn <skquinn@speakeasy.net>
-- On 6 Feb 2005 at 19:18, D. Popkin wrote:
Yes, but Big Brother governments are not the only way such "wisdom" gets imposed. Bill Gates came close to imposing it upon all of us, and if it hadn't been for Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds, we might all be suffering under that yoke today.
There is nothing stopping you from writing your own operating system, so Linus did. If, however, you decline to pay taxes, men with guns will attack you. That is the difference between private power and government power. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG IQOesrdAqVhLdsZtGiFJzVPm4eKemvE0rvMznIRG 4e37sO5HcxzRajhvHvVBldBgvI0YdW75A0FNQwWi9
On Wed, Feb 09, 2005 at 09:09:56AM -0800, James A. Donald wrote:
There is nothing stopping you from writing your own operating system, so Linus did.
Yes. Corporate lawyers descending upon your ass, because you -- allegedly -- are in violation of some IP somewhere. See you in court.
If, however, you decline to pay taxes, men with guns will attack you.
If you ignore a kkkorporate cease & desist, men with guns will get you, too. Eventually. Corporations can play the system, whether they hire bandits, or use the legal system, or buy a politician to pass a law.
That is the difference between private power and government power.
There is no difference. Both are coercive. Some of the rules are good for you, some are good for the larger assembly of agents, some are broken on arrival. We need smarter agents. -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]
--- Eugen Leitl <eugen@leitl.org> wrote:
On Wed, Feb 09, 2005 at 09:09:56AM -0800, James A. Donald wrote:
There is nothing stopping you from writing your own operating system, so Linus did.
Yes. Corporate lawyers descending upon your ass, because you -- allegedly -- are in violation of some IP somewhere. See you in court.
If, however, you decline to pay taxes, men with guns will attack you.
If you ignore a kkkorporate cease & desist, men with guns will get you, too. Eventually. Corporations can play the system, whether they hire bandits, or use the legal system, or buy a politician to pass a law.
That is the difference between private power and government power.
There is no difference. Both are coercive. Some of the rules are good for you, some are good for the larger assembly of agents, some are broken on arrival.
We need smarter agents.
Too late. Stupidity is an entrenched aspect of the system. If you try to remove stupidity (assuming for the moment that it could be done in principle) stupid men with guns will hunt you down and shoot you in order to protect their jealously guarded stupidity _and_ ignorance. For as we all know, and particularly in non-trivial fields of knowledge, knowledge often implies or demands action of a particular kind, according to the logic of the situation. Strategic ignorance is therefore extremely valuable -- particularly to corrupt government and corporate officers. Regards, Steve ______________________________________________________________________ Post your free ad now! http://personals.yahoo.ca
-- James A. Donald wrote:
There is nothing stopping you from writing your own operating system, so Linus did.
Eugen Leitl wrote
Yes. Corporate lawyers descending upon your ass, because you -- allegedly -- are in violation of some IP somewhere. See you in court.
Corporate lawyers did not descend on Linux until there were enough wealthy linux users to see them in court, and send in their own high priced lawyers to give them the drubbing they deserved.
If, however, you decline to pay taxes, men with guns will attack you.
If you ignore a kkkorporate cease & desist, men with guns will get you, too.
You live in a world of your own. In civil court, the guy with no assets has a huge advantage over the guy with huge assets -because the guy with huge assets *cannot* send men with guns to beat him up and put him in jail - he can only seize the (nonexistent) assets of the guy with no assets. So what we instead see is frivolous and fraudulent lawsuits by people with no assets against big corporations, for example the silicone scam. It is in criminal court where the guy with no assets goes unjustly to jail, and that is the doing of the state, not the corporation. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG LHaZt4XXRKhPMhtKPS5CggL+KGd7QTAqTuygm1P1 45bORHg+DoDEtRSoju+baDDEgsaWOIrgPHd/pMAuj
On Wed, Feb 09, 2005 at 04:58:22PM -0800, James A. Donald wrote:
Corporate lawyers did not descend on Linux until there were
Corporations never saw Linux coming. Now that FOSS is on the radar screen, you'll see lots of very obvious ramming through of IP protection in software. You haven't noticed the software patent charade happening in EU right now? It is not at all obvious who's going to win.
enough wealthy linux users to see them in court, and send in their own high priced lawyers to give them the drubbing they deserved.
You're misinterpreting the events. Industry has so far been fighting with propagada only. Outside of FOSS IP wars are the rule.
If, however, you decline to pay taxes, men with guns will attack you.
If you ignore a kkkorporate cease & desist, men with guns will get you, too.
You live in a world of your own.
In civil court, the guy with no assets has a huge advantage over the guy with huge assets -because the guy with huge assets
What a nice boolean universe you live in. Fact is that FOSS can be easily DoSed by lawyers of a party with deeper pockets (basically, any party with deeper pocket than a couple of bearded hackers).
*cannot* send men with guns to beat him up and put him in jail - he can only seize the (nonexistent) assets of the guy with no assets. So what we instead see is frivolous and fraudulent
Excellent strawman. Where are you getting these? I need to order a couple.
lawsuits by people with no assets against big corporations, for example the silicone scam.
It is in criminal court where the guy with no assets goes unjustly to jail, and that is the doing of the state, not the corporation.
Again, neither state nor the corporate has your wellbeing as optimization criterium. It does frequently happen that superpersonal organization units result in a better world than the alternatives. Then, quite often not. We need smarter agents. -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]
-- James A. Donald:
Corporate lawyers did not descend on Linux until there were enough wealthy linux users to see them in court, and send in their own high priced lawyers to give them the drubbing they deserved.
Eugen Leitl
You're misinterpreting the events. Industry has so far been fighting with propagada only. Outside of FOSS IP wars are the rule.
What has happened so far is that "corporate lawyers" have lost, and linux has won - that is to say, corporations using linux have successfully defended their right to do so. Compare with what happens to tax evaders. The state is your enemy. The corporation is your friend. It was corporations that defended linux in court, and created substantial parts of linux - for example a lot of linux was written by IBM employees on IBM salary - presumably as an anti microsoft measure. Corporations deal with competition by creating stuff, governments deal with competition by shooting it. The corporation is free and voluntary association. The alternative is state imposed association. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG mCPvNIMCElEgaF3RT8krDyySbf6TRivdp5TOTL3/ 45fmEJA1E7SZ6GhiXjBjgr5i6tT7dfRXf3teVziId
On Wed, 2005-02-09 at 09:09 -0800, James A. Donald wrote:
-- On 6 Feb 2005 at 19:18, D. Popkin wrote:
Yes, but Big Brother governments are not the only way such "wisdom" gets imposed. Bill Gates came close to imposing it upon all of us, and if it hadn't been for Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds, we might all be suffering under that yoke today.
There is nothing stopping you from writing your own operating system, so Linus did.
Linus Torvalds didn't write the GNU OS. He wrote the Linux kernel, which when added to the rest of the existing GNU OS, written by Richard Stallman among others, allowed a completely free operating system. Please don't continue to spread the misconception that Linus Torvalds wrote the entire (GNU) operating system. -- Shawn K. Quinn <skquinn@speakeasy.net>
On 2005-02-09T22:38:05-0600, Shawn K. Quinn wrote:
On Wed, 2005-02-09 at 09:09 -0800, James A. Donald wrote:
-- There is nothing stopping you from writing your own operating system, so Linus did.
Linus Torvalds didn't write the GNU OS. He wrote the Linux kernel, which when added to the rest of the existing GNU OS, written by Richard Stallman among others, allowed a completely free operating system. Please don't continue to spread the misconception that Linus Torvalds wrote the entire (GNU) operating system.
I think everyone who reads Cypherpunks knows what Linus did and did not do, and that "operating system" in JAD's post means "kernel". -- Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter. --Hemingway, Esquire Apr/1936
James A. Donald wrote:
If, however, you decline to pay taxes, men with guns will attack you.
That is the difference between private power and government power.
But in most places at most times the state is run at least partly by and for the rich and the owners of property and supports and privileges their continuing private power. And there are circumstances where private individuals send men with guns to attack you if you cross them. Quite a lot of them, from the feudal barons, to drug-dealers in modern cities, to just about anywhere out of easy reach of the state's police. And there are places where corporations do that as well. Even well-run respectable British or American corporations that have annual reports and shareholder's meetings. State power and private power are different but not distinct, and everywhere more or less mixed up with each other and involved with each other, and in most places the same sorts of people have both. Economic power is a kind of political power.
-- James A. Donald wrote:
If, however, you decline to pay taxes, men with guns will attack you.
That is the difference between private power and government power.
ken wrote:
But in most places at most times the state is run at least partly by and for the rich and the owners of property and supports and privileges their continuing private power.
The state was created to attack private property rights - to steal stuff. Some rich people are beneficiaries, but from the beginning, always at the expense of other rich people.
And there are circumstances where private individuals send men with guns to attack you if you cross them.
Compare mafia "extortion" with government "taxation". The mafia charges are small in proportion as their power is small. The Gangsta disciples charged drug dealers thirty dollars a month for protection, and, unlike the state, actually provided protection. The mafia cannot afford to seriously piss off its customers, because there is no large difference between customer firepower and mafia firepower. The government, on the other hand, can afford to seriously piss of its subjects. The federal government established its monopoly of force by burning Atlanta and Shenendoah. Al Capone did the Saint Valentine's day massacre. Big difference.
Quite a lot of them, from the feudal barons, to drug-dealers in modern cities, to just about anywhere out of easy reach of the state's police.
Again, compare the burning of Shenendoah with the Saint Valentine's day massacre. There is just no comparison. Governmental crimes are stupendously larger, and much more difficult to defend against. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG sE92+Z9bMSzulF42TGzG/hIjoDv+qod3IBzFehdT 4O/i5gQElpUPn6EYOMIETP8gkc9EP5DSN2QYuq83i
At 9:44 PM -0800 2/10/05, James A. Donald wrote:
The state was created to attack private property rights - to steal stuff.
"A prince is a bandit who doesn't move." -- Mancur Olsen Cheers, RAH -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "Camels, fleas, and princes exist everywhere." -- Persian proverb
James A. Donald wrote:
The state was created to attack private property rights - to steal stuff. Some rich people are beneficiaries, but from the beginning, always at the expense of other rich people.
More commonly states defend the rich against the poor. They are what underpins property rights, in the sense of "great property" - until the industrial revolution that was mostly rights to land other people farm or live on. Every society we know about has had laws and customs defending personal property (more or less successfully) but it takes political/military power to defend the right to exact rent from a large estate, and state power to defend that right for thousands or millions of landowners.
Again, compare the burning of Shenendoah with the Saint Valentine's day massacre. There is just no comparison. Governmental crimes are stupendously larger, and much more difficult to defend against.
True. The apposite current comparison is 9/11 the most notorious piece of private-enterprise violence in recent years, and the far more destructive US revenge on Afghanistan and Iraq. Which was hundreds of times more destructive but hundreds of thousands of times more expensive, so far less cost-effective - but in a a war of attrition that might not matter so much. Of course the private-enterprise AQ & their friends the Taliban booted themselves into a state, of sorts in Afghanistan, with a little help from their friends in Pakistan and arguable amounts of US weaponry. Not that Afghanistan was the sort of place from which significant amounts of tax could be collected to fund further military adventures. States can get usually get control of far larger military resources than private organisations, and have fewer qualms about wasting them. Not that it makes much difference to the victims - poor peasants kicked off land wanted for oilfields in West Africa probably neither know nor care whether the troops who burned their houses were paid by the oil companies or the local government.
-- James A. Donald wrote:
The state was created to attack private property rights - to steal stuff. Some rich people are beneficiaries, but from the beginning, always at the expense of other rich people.
On 14 Feb 2005 at 13:18, ken wrote:
More commonly states defend the rich against the poor. They are what underpins property rights, in the sense of "great property"
Observe that rich people around the world are hiding their money in America, despite the fact that progressive taxes, speculative lawsuits and money laundering laws show the American government is no friend of the rich. Still less is any other government a friend of the rich, or even the moderately well off, any more than a wolf is the friend of the deer. As governments were created to smash property rights, they are always everywhere necessarily the enemy of those with property, and the greatest enemy of those with the most property.
- until the industrial revolution that was mostly rights to land other people farm or live on. Every society we know about has had laws and customs defending personal property (more or less successfully) but it takes political/military power to defend the right to exact rent from a large estate, and state power to defend that right for thousands or millions of landowners.
For thousands indeed - but not for millions - which is why only massive state confiscation of property can create a society where landowners number in the mere thousands. The old west, and australian squatters, show that fairly large estates, texan size, can exist even in the face of active hostility from a state that refuses to recognize those property rights, and actively seeks to destroy them. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG NSa2rHCplLHx15v3Gnuif4Ikp13vGHgGAD4FsQ/L 4sfxn6VBdoXUsN8RPTiWcftpni6ER6qYlKqWLq0Ys
--- "James A. Donald" <jamesd@echeque.com> wrote: [snip]
As governments were created to smash property rights, they are always everywhere necessarily the enemy of those with property, and the greatest enemy of those with the most property.
Uh-huh. Perhaps you are using the term 'government' in a way that is not common to most writers of modern American English? Regards, Steve ______________________________________________________________________ Post your free ad now! http://personals.yahoo.ca
On 2005-02-15T13:23:37-0500, Steve Thompson wrote:
--- "James A. Donald" <jamesd@echeque.com> wrote: [snip]
As governments were created to smash property rights, they are always everywhere necessarily the enemy of those with property, and the greatest enemy of those with the most property.
Uh-huh. Perhaps you are using the term 'government' in a way that is not common to most writers of modern American English?
I think it's fair to say that governments initially formed to protect property rights (although we have no historical record of such a government because it must have been before recorded history began). They then developed into monarchies which were only really set up to protect property rights of the ruler(s). With the advent of various quasi-democratic forms of government, the law has been compromised insofar as it protects property rights. You no longer have a right to keep all your money (taxes), no longer have a right to grow 5' weeds in your front yard if you live in a city, and no longer have a right to own certain evil things at all, at least not without special governmental permission. There were analogous compromises in democratic Athens and quasi-democratic Rome. When democratic states inevitably fold into tyranny, some of those restrictions remain. Right now most states have a strange mix of property rights protections (e.g. the Berne convention and the DMCA) and property rights usurpations (e.g. no right to own certain weapons; equal protection). -- Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter. --Hemingway, Esquire, April 1936
At 9:40 PM +0000 2/15/05, Justin wrote:
I think it's fair to say that governments initially formed to protect property rights (although we have no historical record of such a government because it must have been before recorded history began).
BZZZT. Wrong answer. Governments first steal property, then control it. Property is created when someone applies thought to matter and gets something new. It is theirs until they exchange it for something that someone else has, or discard it. But property is created by *individuals*, not some collective fraud and extortion racket called a "government". Governments are "founded" when someone creates a monopoly on force. Actually, people use force against each other, and, in agrarian societies at least, the natural tend in force 'markets' is towards monopoly. We tend to get bigger governments (like political economist Mancur Olsen says, "bandits who don't move") when people become sedentary and there's more property to steal, and that hunter-gatherers are more anarchistic, egalitarian, than "civilized" people. But that's more a function of the resources a given group controls. The San bushmen, for instance, are much more egalitarian than the Mongols, for instance, because the San have fewer material goods to control than the Mongols did, especially after the Mongols perfected warfare enough to control cities -- which, I suppose, proves my point. Property is like rights. We create it inherently, because we're human, it is not bestowed upon us by someone else. Particularly if that property is stolen from someone else at tax-time. Cheers, RAH -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
--- "R.A. Hettinga" <rah@shipwright.com> wrote: [snip]
Property is like rights. We create it inherently, because we're human, it is not bestowed upon us by someone else. Particularly if that property is stolen from someone else at tax-time.
Bzzt. I call you on your bullshit. Supposedly by convention, individuals attach some of a set of symbol relations to physical objects and ideas and processes. Such relations, when observed consistently, confer rights of posession and use to groups or individuals. Individuals employed by governments, as well as special interest groups, are certainly no longer satisfied with a democratic arrangement of property rights and have manufactured consent, as it were, to establish a bunch of exceptions to property rights that allow for `legalised' theft. But as long as property rights are generally considered to be a tenet and characteristic of society, excuses for officiated theft, for instance, merely put a veneer of legitimacy over certain kinds of theft. I doubt that RMS will ever be framed, arrested and thrown in to the gulag, his property confiscated; but for someone like myself, that is certainly an option, eh? Regards, Steve ______________________________________________________________________ Post your free ad now! http://personals.yahoo.ca
On 2005-02-16T13:31:14-0500, Steve Thompson wrote:
--- "R.A. Hettinga" <rah@shipwright.com> wrote: [snip]
Property is like rights. We create it inherently, because we're human, it is not bestowed upon us by someone else. Particularly if that property is stolen from someone else at tax-time.
But as long as property rights are generally considered to be a tenet and characteristic of society, excuses for officiated theft, for instance, merely put a veneer of legitimacy over certain kinds of theft. I doubt that RMS will ever be framed, arrested and thrown in to the gulag, his property confiscated; but for someone like myself, that is certainly an option, eh?
Is there a difference between property rights in a society like a pride of lions, and property rights that are respected independent of social status? Or are they essentially the same? They seem to be different, but I can't articulate why. Obviously the latter needs enforcement, possibly courts, etc., but I can't identify a more innate difference, other than simply as I described it -- property rights depending on social status, and property rights not depending on social status. I don't think any society has ever managed to construct a pure property rights system where nobody has any advantage. Without government it's the strong. With government, government agents have an advantage, and rich people have an advantage because they can hire smart lawyers to get unfair court decisions. So maybe this is just silly, in which case I believe even more strongly that formal status-independent property rights are not the basis of government. -- Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter. --Hemingway, Esquire, April 1936
--- Justin <justin-cypherpunks@soze.net> wrote:
--- "R.A. Hettinga" <rah@shipwright.com> wrote: [snip]
Property is like rights. We create it inherently, because we're human, it is not bestowed upon us by someone else. Particularly if that
On 2005-02-16T13:31:14-0500, Steve Thompson wrote: property
is stolen from someone else at tax-time.
But as long as property rights are generally considered to be a tenet and characteristic of society, excuses for officiated theft, for instance, merely put a veneer of legitimacy over certain kinds of theft. I doubt that RMS will ever be framed, arrested and thrown in to the gulag, his property confiscated; but for someone like myself, that is certainly an option, eh?
Is there a difference between property rights in a society like a pride of lions, and property rights that are respected independent of social status? Or are they essentially the same? They seem to be different, but I can't articulate why. Obviously the latter needs enforcement, possibly courts, etc., but I can't identify a more innate difference, other than simply as I described it -- property rights depending on social status, and property rights not depending on social status.
I don't think any society has ever managed to construct a pure property rights system where nobody has any advantage. Without government it's the strong. With government, government agents have an advantage, and rich people have an advantage because they can hire smart lawyers to get unfair court decisions. So maybe this is just silly, in which case I believe even more strongly that formal status-independent property rights are not the basis of government.
Whatever. See the sentence I wrote last in my previous message. When you grow the fuck up, drop me a line. Regards, Steve ______________________________________________________________________ Post your free ad now! http://personals.yahoo.ca
On 2005-02-15T21:40:34+0000, Justin wrote:
On 2005-02-15T13:23:37-0500, Steve Thompson wrote:
--- "James A. Donald" <jamesd@echeque.com> wrote: [snip]
As governments were created to smash property rights, they are always everywhere necessarily the enemy of those with property, and the greatest enemy of those with the most property.
Uh-huh. Perhaps you are using the term 'government' in a way that is not common to most writers of modern American English?
I think it's fair to say that governments initially formed to protect property rights (although we have no historical record of such a government because it must have been before recorded history began). They then developed into monarchies which were only really set up to protect property rights of the ruler(s).
It seems I've been brainwashed by classical political science. What I wrote above doesn't make any sense. Judging from social dynamics and civil advancement in the animal kingdom, monarchies developed first and property rights were an afterthought. -- Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter. --Hemingway, Esquire, April 1936
-- On 16 Feb 2005 at 0:30, Justin wrote:
Judging from social dynamics and civil advancement in the animal kingdom, monarchies developed first and property rights were an afterthought.
Recently existent neolithic agricultural peoples, for example the New Guineans, seldom had kings, and frequently had no form of government at all other than that some people were considerably wealthier and more influential than others, but they always had private property. This corresponds to the cattle herding people we read depicted in the earliest books of the old testament. They had private property, wage labor, and all that from the beginning, but they do not develop kings until the book of Samuel, long after they had settled down and developed vineyards and other forms of sedentary agriculture: Judges 17:6 "In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes" Thus both our recent observation of primitive peoples, and our written historical record, shows that private property rights long preceded government. Our observations of governments being formed show that governments are formed primarily for the purpose of attacking private property rights. You want to steal something like land or women, you need a really big gang. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG of/pZSLkKATIjG0fWzPvEZnxIsBE/Q0Se80Gx178 4LGYWiIfc2+Us4l38hwPX8mK0CR7hBpVkJ952v8/D
--- Justin <justin-cypherpunks@soze.net> wrote:
On 2005-02-15T13:23:37-0500, Steve Thompson wrote:
--- "James A. Donald" <jamesd@echeque.com> wrote: [snip]
As governments were created to smash property rights, they are always everywhere necessarily the enemy of those with property, and the greatest enemy of those with the most property.
Uh-huh. Perhaps you are using the term 'government' in a way that is not common to most writers of modern American English?
I think it's fair to say that governments initially formed to protect property rights (although we have no historical record of such a government because it must have been before recorded history began).
I think it's fair to say that governments were initially, and still largely remain today, the public formalisation of religious rule applied to the civil sphere of existence. It's more complicated than that, but generally speaking, somewhat disparate religious populations (protestant, catholic, jew, etc.) accepted the fiction of secular civil governance when in reality religious groups have tended to dominate the shape and direction of civil government, while professing to remain at arms-length. 'Fiction' is the operative term here, and I contend that nowhere is this more evident in the closed world of clandestine affairs -- civilian OR military. Religion has always been about 'powerful' and educated in-sect sub-populations organising civil and intellectuall affairs in such a way as to mobilise the serfs to the advantage of the privilaged, all the while presenting convenient systems of fiction to the masses that are expected to suffice as the broad official reality of society; a reality fully accessable to some who quite naturally use their position of possibly intellectual privilage to order the affairs of the serf/slaves.
They then developed into monarchies which were only really set up to protect property rights of the ruler(s).
If I'm not mistaken, it was in Germany where the concept of public figureheads-as-leaders was evolved to a system in which the figurehead (king, pontiff, leader) was presented as the soruce of state power, but who in actuality was groomed, controlled, and ruled by a non-public contingent of privilaged political and intellectual elite who, in general, ran the affairs of state and/or religion from the back room, so to speak. This way of organising the public affairs of government has, I think, roots that date back to the ancient Greeks, but is also largely in favour today.
With the advent of various quasi-democratic forms of government, the law has been compromised insofar as it protects property rights. You no longer have a right to keep all your money (taxes), no longer have a right to grow 5' weeds in your front yard if you live in a city, and no longer have a right to own certain evil things at all, at least not without special governmental permission. There were analogous compromises in democratic Athens and quasi-democratic Rome.
It's rather different today.
When democratic states inevitably fold into tyranny, some of those restrictions remain. Right now most states have a strange mix of property rights protections (e.g. the Berne convention and the DMCA) and property rights usurpations (e.g. no right to own certain weapons; equal protection).
Agreements and accords such as the Berne convention and the DCMA, to say nothing of human-rights legislation, are hobbled by the toothlessness of enforcement, pulic apathy to others' rights, and a load of convenient exceptions to such rules made for the agents of state. For instance, the copyright on my computer software was blithely subverted by the fascist ubermench involved and responsible for the surveillance detail that I have suffered over the past two decades. I listened to some of these people make excuses for stealing my intellectual property, fashioning rumours to lessen the wrong of their theft, or 'merely' applying pressure or making plans to 'encourage' the release of my code in the public domain so their prior theft could be buried. Failing that, they have simply stolen all my computer equipment and delayed my life, possibly so my code could be `developed' by their own programmers and a history shown -- perhaps with the partial aim of finally accusing me of stealing "their" intellectual property after it is released in their own product. These people are nothing more than jack-booted thugs, and whether they are Nazis or not is immaterial to the fact that their methods and ideology closely resemble a modernised version of it. Whatever the EXCUSE offered, it is a triumph of putocratic-fascist zeaotry in the sense that nominally modern and democratic institutions and groups in this world have acquired some of the memes that drove the Gestapo/SS/Abwher. There is no excuse, but since Orwellian political and intellectual abdications and maneuvers are quite well in fashion today, it is obviously stylisn to pretend that such things do not and cannot possibly occur. Hence the stupefying silence over what is bloody fucking obvious to anyone with half a brain. Have a nice day. Regards, Steve ______________________________________________________________________ Post your free ad now! http://personals.yahoo.ca
On 2005-02-16T13:18:16-0500, Steve Thompson wrote:
--- Justin <justin-cypherpunks@soze.net> wrote:
On 2005-02-15T13:23:37-0500, Steve Thompson wrote:
--- "James A. Donald" <jamesd@echeque.com> wrote: [snip]
As governments were created to smash property rights, they are always everywhere necessarily the enemy of those with property, and the greatest enemy of those with the most property.
Uh-huh. Perhaps you are using the term 'government' in a way that is not common to most writers of modern American English?
I think it's fair to say that governments initially formed to protect property rights (although we have no historical record of such a government because it must have been before recorded history began).
As I said, I think this is wrong. Mammals other than primates recognize property in a sense, but it depends entirely on social status. There is no recognition of property rights independent of social position. If a lion loses a fight, he loses all his property. Chimp and gorilla communities have the beginnings of monarchy. Yet they don't care about religion, and their conception of property rights still derives from their position in the social ladder. If not primates, do any animals besides humans recognize property rights independent of social position?
I think it's fair to say that governments were initially, and still largely remain today, the public formalisation of religious rule applied to the civil sphere of existence. It's more complicated than that, but generally speaking, somewhat disparate religious populations (protestant, catholic, jew, etc.) accepted the fiction of secular civil governance when in reality religious groups have tended to dominate the shape and direction of civil government, while professing to remain at arms-length.
I think it's fair to say that religion post-dates government, at least informal government. Maybe the first monarchs/oligarchs came up with religious schemes to keep the peons in line, but I would think that was incidental, as was the notion of property rights. Both property rights and religion depend heavily on the ability for communication, but monarchy can be established without it. All the monarch needs is a big stick and an instinctual understanding of some of the principles much later described by our good Italian friend Niccolo M.
'Fiction' is the operative term here, and I contend that nowhere is this more evident in the closed world of clandestine affairs -- civilian OR military. Religion has always been about 'powerful' and educated in-sect sub-populations organising civil and intellectuall affairs in such a way
I think it's fair to say that religion may be more important than property rights for keeping people in line. But I think they're both incidental.
When democratic states inevitably fold into tyranny, some of those restrictions remain. Right now most states have a strange mix of property rights protections (e.g. the Berne convention and the DMCA) and property rights usurpations (e.g. no right to own certain weapons; equal protection).
Agreements and accords such as the Berne convention and the DCMA, to say nothing of human-rights legislation, are hobbled by the toothlessness of enforcement, pulic apathy to others' rights, and a load of convenient exceptions to such rules made for the agents of state.
Okay. So it's fair to say, then, that we have compromises between property rights protections and other (perceived yet imaginary?) property rights protections. Which is really what it boils down to. There's no property rights usurpation without some motive behind it. And motives generally stem from wanting to redistribute property or deny it to another individual, group, or an entire nation. Sometimes that property is land (the excuse for such property redistribution or denial of ownership is called "self determination"), sometimes it is intellectual property (the excuse is "information wants to be free")... sometimes it's explosives (they're TOO DANGEROUS, and only terrorists have them... are you a terrorist?). -- Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter. --Hemingway, Esquire, April 1936
[snip]
Agreements and accords such as the Berne convention and the DCMA, to say nothing of human-rights legislation, are hobbled by the toothlessness of enforcement, pulic apathy to others' rights, and a load of convenient exceptions to such rules made for the agents of state.
Okay. So it's fair to say, then, that we have compromises between property rights protections and other (perceived yet imaginary?) property rights protections. Which is really what it boils down to.
Absolutely.
There's no property rights usurpation without some motive behind it.
Unless if it's by accident.
And motives generally stem from wanting to redistribute property or deny it to another individual, group, or an entire nation. Sometimes that property is land (the excuse for such property redistribution or denial of ownership is called "self determination")
Operative word: excuse.
, sometimes it is intellectual property (the excuse is "information wants to be free")...
Or like maybe the NSA needs to steal something that they can't buy because they "NEED" to conceal the project that requires the stolen item. Or maybe a wealthy interest has a commercial interest to protect and bribes an official to steal land that threatens said interest. Or maybe it's a Klan member who thinks that niggers shouldn't own property, and so he steals it. Or perhaps it's a Xtian who believes it's God's will to deny property rights to heathens, as a lesson in coming to God. Or maybe it's a bunch of fucking theives who use any excuse they have at hand to justify their own greed.
sometimes it's explosives (they're TOO DANGEROUS, and only terrorists have them... are you a terrorist?).
Sometimes it's a complete load of shit, and there's no real valid reason that will stand intelligent scrutiny as to why some people are allowed to do one thing that is denied to another people. Personally, I believe that the people who run the US, the dirty ones, are too well aware of the liabilities they have assumed as a matter of course in their history, and who will do anything rather than face paying the debt. Anything. And futher, this conclusion is not so foreign as to be beyond comprehension, but rather represents a problem that no-one is willing to deal with -- thus compounding the error. Since you still aren't bothering to address messages I write in good faith, I suggest that you should go fuck yourself. Regards, Steve ______________________________________________________________________ Post your free ad now! http://personals.yahoo.ca
-- James A. Donald
As governments were created to smash property rights, they are always everywhere necessarily the enemy of those with property, and the greatest enemy of those with the most property.
Steve Thompson
Uh-huh. Perhaps you are using the term 'government' in a way that is not common to most writers of modern American English?
Justin <justin-cypherpunks@soze.net>
I think it's fair to say that governments initially formed to protect property rights
Where we have historical record, this is not the case. Romulus was made King in order that the Romans could abduct and rape women. William the bastard became William the conqueror by stealing land and enserfing people. After George Washington defeated the British, his next operation was to crush the Whisky rebellion. You could say that he defeated the British in order to protect property rights, but his next military operation was to violate property rights, not uphold them. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG h5r7X0d4z7lq2vVpAOdecOCy2txrOnv9O/ymDY+3 4VE2saGBeSH+48fFJ9nuHVOypb45jH6pBBteu3f+Z
--- ken <bbrow07@students.bbk.ac.uk> wrote:
James A. Donald wrote:
The state was created to attack private property rights - to steal stuff. Some rich people are beneficiaries, but from the beginning, always at the expense of other rich people.
More commonly states defend the rich against the poor. They are what underpins property rights, in the sense of "great property"
More of the usual bullshit, SOP for the quasi-anonymised defenders of local trvth. State _workers_ attack property rights; state _workers_ act to aid 'the rich' in consolidating and concentrating property and property rights against 'the poor'. In exchange for a little job security, state _workers_ have passivly evolved a neat little system which may be exploited by knowledgeable insiders for their own malign purposes. Congratulations to the defenders of Truth, Freedom, and Democracy for in effect rolling back property rights (to say nothing of human and civil rights), in effect cancelling the legal advances brought about by the Magna Carta and succeeding documents. It is a testament to the success and current fashion of reality simplification that state agents may arbitrarily employ the tools of terrorism, appropriation and confiscation, arbitrary detention, and not insignificantly, micromanage _de facto_ slaves according to their whims, or at least those of their privilaged benefactors. This is accomplished by the strategic use of pretexts -- some secret, others validated by tenets of pop culture; none of which may be assailed by reasonable means -- to lend a veneer of legitimacy to the acts of violence. And in this vein I should not need to remind anyone of the fact that theft, as much as a boot to the head or back of the neck, is an act of violence; and no matter if it is perpetrated by seeming officiousness by way in some farcical one-sided and secret legal process, or by dint of a convenient and contrived necessity.
- until the industrial revolution that was mostly rights to land other people farm or live on. Every society we know about has had laws and customs defending personal property (more or less successfully) but it takes political/military power to defend the right to exact rent from a large estate, and state power to defend that right for thousands or millions of landowners.
Uh-huh. And what of the state of affairs where rights of property, for example, may be subverted by fraud and the means of legal redress (no matter how unjust, inefficient and ineffective they may be for practical purposes) are closed off, one by one, so that the victims of state violence are allowed NO OPTIONS or RELEIF, perhaps to start again from scratch, but more likely to whither and die on the vine, ignored except when it is necessary to reinforce the conditioning to ruin by the application of a periodic boot to the back of the neck.
Again, compare the burning of Shenendoah with the Saint Valentine's day massacre. There is just no comparison. Governmental crimes are stupendously larger, and much more difficult to defend against.
True.
The apposite current comparison is 9/11 the most notorious piece of private-enterprise violence in recent years, and the far more destructive US revenge on Afghanistan and Iraq. Which was hundreds of times more destructive but hundreds of thousands of times more expensive, so far less cost-effective - but in a a war of attrition that might not matter so much. Of course the private-enterprise AQ & their friends the Taliban booted themselves into a state, of sorts in Afghanistan, with a little help from their friends in Pakistan and arguable amounts of US weaponry. Not that Afghanistan was the sort of place from which significant amounts of tax could be collected to fund further military adventures.
States can get usually get control of far larger military resources than private organisations, and have fewer qualms about wasting them. Not that it makes much difference to the victims - poor peasants kicked off land wanted for oilfields in West Africa probably neither know nor care whether the troops who burned their houses were paid by the oil companies or the local government.
And you all may cluck cluck safely in your ivory towers at the sorry state of others affairs, pontificating (again, safely) at an intellectual remove from the ground that is in conflict and at issue. Obvioulsly the best way to seem comitted to change and a solution to difficult problems without actually risking engagement with the core matter. This list is becoming a chore to read. Would someone find out where Tim May and Detwellier (for a start) are hiding, and please recommend them back to Cypherpunks? When such as they were active, we could be assured of lively and entertaining debate. These days, the air is rather too thin to support vigorous and sincere exchange. Regards, Steve ______________________________________________________________________ Post your free ad now! http://personals.yahoo.ca
Apologies for introducing crypto-related stuff: RNG that reads minds and predicts future: http://www.rednova.com/news/display/?id=126649 Can This Black Box See Into the Future? DEEP in the basement of a dusty university library in Edinburgh lies a small black box, roughly the size of two cigarette packets side by side, that churns out random numbers in an endless stream. At first glance it is an unremarkable piece of equipment. Encased in metal, it contains at its heart a microchip no more complex than the ones found in modern pocket calculators. But, according to a growing band of top scientists, this box has quite extraordinary powers. It is, they claim, the 'eye' of a machine that appears capable of peering into the future and predicting major world events. The machine apparently sensed the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre four hours before they happened - but in the fevered mood of conspiracy theories of the time, the claims were swiftly knocked back by sceptics. But last December, it also appeared to forewarn of the Asian tsunami just before the deep sea earthquake that precipitated the epic tragedy. Now, even the doubters are acknowledging that here is a small box with apparently inexplicable powers. 'It's Earth-shattering stuff,' says Dr Roger Nelson, emeritus researcher at Princeton University in the United States, who is heading the research project behind the 'black box' phenomenon. 'We're very early on in the process of trying to figure out what's going on here. At the moment we're stabbing in the dark.' Dr Nelson's investigations, called the Global Consciousness Project, were originally hosted by Princeton University and are centred on one of the most extraordinary experiments of all time. Its aim is to detect whether all of humanity shares a single subconscious mind that we can all tap into without realising. And machines like the Edinburgh black box have thrown up a tantalising possibility: that scientists may have unwittingly discovered a way of predicting the future. Although many would consider the project's aims to be little more than fools' gold, it has still attracted a roster of 75 respected scientists from 41 different nations. Researchers from Princeton - where Einstein spent much of his career - work alongside scientists from universities in Britain, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Germany. The project is also the most rigorous and longest-running investigation ever into the potential powers of the paranormal. 'Very often paranormal phenomena evaporate if you study them for long enough,' says physicist Dick Bierman of the University of Amsterdam. 'But this is not happening with the Global Consciousness Project. The effect is real. The only dispute is about what it means.' The project has its roots in the extraordinary work of Professor Robert Jahn of Princeton University during the late 1970s. He was one of the first modern scientists to take paranormal phenomena seriously. Intrigued by such things as telepathy, telekinesis - the supposed psychic power to move objects without the use of physical force - and extrasensory perception, he was determined to study the phenomena using the most up-to-date technology available. One of these new technologies was a humble-looking black box known was a Random Event Generator (REG). This used computer technology to generate two numbers - a one and a zero - in a totally random sequence, rather like an electronic coin-flipper. The pattern of ones and noughts - 'heads' and 'tails' as it were - could then be printed out as a graph. The laws of chance dictate that the generators should churn out equal numbers of ones and zeros - which would be represented by a nearly flat line on the graph. Any deviation from this equal number shows up as a gently rising curve. During the late 1970s, Prof Jahn decided to investigate whether the power of human thought alone could interfere in some way with the machine's usual readings. He hauled strangers off the street and asked them to concentrate their minds on his number generator. In effect, he was asking them to try to make it flip more heads than tails. It was a preposterous idea at the time. The results, however, were stunning and have never been satisfactorily explained. Again and again, entirely ordinary people proved that their minds could influence the machine and produce significant fluctuations on the graph, 'forcing it' to produce unequal numbers of 'heads' or 'tails'. According to all of the known laws of science, this should not have happened - but it did. And it kept on happening. Dr Nelson, also working at Princeton University, then extended Prof Jahn's work by taking random number machines to group meditations, which were very popular in America at the time. Again, the results were eyepopping. The groups were collectively able to cause dramatic shifts in the patterns of numbers.
From then on, Dr Nelson was hooked.
Using the internet, he connected up 40 random event generators from all over the world to his laboratory computer in Princeton. These ran constantly, day in day out, generating millions of different pieces of data. Most of the time, the resulting graph on his computer looked more or less like a flat line. But then on September 6, 1997, something quite extraordinary happened: the graph shot upwards, recording a sudden and massive shift in the number sequence as his machines around the world started reporting huge deviations from the norm. The day was of historic importance for another reason, too. For it was the same day that an estimated one billion people around the world watched the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales at Westminster Abbey. Dr Nelson was convinced that the two events must be related in some way. Could he have detected a totally new phenomena? Could the concentrated emotional outpouring of millions of people be able to influence the output of his REGs. If so, how? Dr Nelson was at a loss to explain it. So, in 1998, he gathered together scientists from all over the world to analyse his findings. They, too, were stumped and resolved to extend and deepen the work of Prof Jahn and Dr Nelson. The Global Consciousness Project was born. Since then, the project has expanded massively. A total of 65 Eggs (as the generators have been named) in 41 countries have now been recruited to act as the 'eyes' of the project. And the results have been startling and inexplicable in equal measure. For during the course of the experiment, the Eggs have 'sensed' a whole series of major world events as they were happening, from the Nato bombing of Yugoslavia to the Kursk submarine tragedy to America's hung election of 2000. The Eggs also regularly detect huge global celebrations, such as New Year's Eve. But the project threw up its greatest enigma on September 11, 2001. As the world stood still and watched the horror of the terrorist attacks unfold across New York, something strange was happening to the Eggs. Not only had they registered the attacks as they actually happened, but the characteristic shift in the pattern of numbers had begun four hours before the two planes even hit the Twin Towers. They had, it appeared, detected that an event of historic importance was about to take place before the terrorists had even boarded their fateful flights. The implications, not least for the West's security services who constantly monitor electronic 'chatter', are clearly enormous. 'I knew then that we had a great deal of work ahead of us,' says Dr Nelson. What could be happening? Was it a freak occurrence, perhaps? Apparently not. For in the closing weeks of December last year, the machines went wild once more. Twenty-four hours later, an earthquake deep beneath the Indian Ocean triggered the tsunami which devastated South-East Asia, and claimed the lives of an estimated quarter of a million people. So could the Global Consciousness Project really be forecasting the future? Cynics will quite rightly point out that there is always some global event that could be used to 'explain' the times when the Egg machines behaved erratically. After all, our world is full of wars, disasters and terrorist outrages, as well as the occasional global celebration. Are the scientists simply trying too hard to detect patterns in their raw data? The team behind the project insist not. They claim that by using rigorous scientific techniques and powerful mathematics it is possible to exclude any such random connections. 'We're perfectly willing to discover that we've made mistakes,' says Dr Nelson. 'But we haven't been able to find any, and neither has anyone else. Our data shows clearly that the chances of getting these results by fluke are one million to one against. That's hugely significant.' But many remain sceptical. Professor Chris French, a psychologist and noted sceptic at Goldsmiths College in London, says: 'The Global Consciousness Project has generated some very intriguing results that cannot be readily dismissed. I'm involved in similar work to see if we get the same results. We haven't managed to do so yet but it's only an early experiment. The jury's still out.' Strange as it may seem, though, there's nothing in the laws of physics that precludes the possibility of foreseeing the future. It is possible - in theory - that time may not just move forwards but backwards, too. And if time ebbs and flows like the tides in the sea, it might just be possible to foretell major world events. We would, in effect, be 'remembering' things that had taken place in our future. 'There's plenty of evidence that time may run backwards,' says Prof Bierman at the University of Amsterdam. 'And if it's possible for it to happen in physics, then it can happen in our minds, too.' In other words, Prof Bierman believes that we are all capable of looking into the future, if only we could tap into the hidden power of our minds. And there is a tantalising body of evidence to support this theory. Dr John Hartwell, working at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, was the first to uncover evidence that people could sense the future. In the mid-1970s he hooked people up to hospital scanning machines so that he could study their brainwave patterns. He began by showing them a sequence of provocative cartoon drawings. When the pictures were shown, the machines registered the subject's brainwaves as they reacted strongly to the images before them. This was to be expected. Far less easy to explain was the fact that in many cases, these dramatic patterns began to register a few seconds before each of the pictures were even flashed up. It was as though Dr Hartwell's case studies were somehow seeing into the future, and detecting when the next shocking image would be shown next. It was extraordinary - and seemingly inexplicable. But it was to be another 15 years before anyone else took Dr Hartwell's work further when Dean Radin, a researcher working in America, connected people up to a machine that measured their skin's resistance to electricity. This is known to fluctuate in tandem with our moods - indeed, it's this principle that underlies many lie detectors. Radin repeated Dr Hartwell's 'image response' experiments while measuring skin resistance. Again, people began reacting a few seconds before they were shown the provocative pictures. This was clearly impossible, or so he thought, so he kept on repeating the experiments. And he kept getting the same results. 'I didn't believe it either,' says Prof Bierman. 'So I also repeated the experiment myself and got the same results. I was shocked. After this I started to think more deeply about the nature of time.' To make matters even more intriguing, Prof Bierman says that other mainstream labs have now produced similar results but are yet to go public. 'They don't want to be ridiculed so they won't release their findings,' he says. 'So I'm trying to persuade all of them to release their results at the same time. That would at least spread the ridicule a little more thinly!' If Prof Bierman is right, though, then the experiments are no laughing matter. They might help provide a solid scientific grounding for such strange phenomena as 'deja vu', intuition and a host of other curiosities that we have all experienced from time to time. They may also open up a far more interesting possibility - that one day we might be able to enhance psychic powers using machines that can 'tune in' to our subconscious mind, machines like the little black box in Edinburgh. Just as we have built mechanical engines to replace muscle power, could we one day build a device to enhance and interpret our hidden psychic abilities? Dr Nelson is optimistic - but not for the short term. 'We may be able to predict that a major world event is going to happen. But we won't know exactly what will happen or where it's going to happen,' he says. 'Put it this way - we haven't yet got a machine we could sell to the CIA.' But for Dr Nelson, talk of such psychic machines - with the potential to detect global catastrophes or terrorist outrages - is of far less importance than the implications of his work in terms of the human race. For what his experiments appear to demonstrate is that while we may all operate as individuals, we also appear to share something far, far greater - a global consciousness. Some might call it the mind of God. 'We're taught to be individualistic monsters,' he says. 'We're driven by society to separate ourselves from each other. That's not right. We may be connected together far more intimately than we realise.' ===== end (of original message) Y-a*h*o-o (yes, they scan for this) spam follows: __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Easier than ever with enhanced search. Learn more. http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250
participants (11)
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James A. Donald -
Justin -
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Tyler Durden