October 2019 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

YouTube Bans Hacking Videos, Can Include Demoing Sudo Root Exploit
by grarpamp 15 Oct '19

15 Oct '19

https://youtube.com/watch?v=WkI1NZXs0os https://thehackernews.com/2019/10/linux-sudo-run-as-root-flaw.html testuser ALL=(ALL, !root) NOPASSWD: ALL $ sudo -u#-1 id -u 0 Ban me liek Perry Metzger u censor fuks.

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AltCensored Indexes YouTube
by grarpamp 15 Oct '19

15 Oct '19

https://www.altcensored.com/about/ YouTube limits access to videos that are neither illegal, nor violate their own Terms and Conditions or Community Guidelines. Limited videos are placed behind a warning message, cannot be shared, monetarized or easily found, and have likes, comments, view counts and suggested videos disabled. altCensored.com is an unbiased community catalog of 25818 YouTube Limited Videos across 4208 monitored channels, including deleted videos and removed channels. Please email admin(a)altCensored.com with new channels to monitor. https://www.altcensored.com/search?q=<search_term>

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Money: 2008 recap
by Zenaan Harkness 15 Oct '19

15 Oct '19

Exponential Freddie graph in original article. Underestimating 'Them' & Overestimating 'Us' https://www.zerohedge.com/political/underestimating-them-overestimating-us https://www.theburningplatform.com/2019/10/13/underestimating-them-overesti… “Do not underestimate the ‘power of underestimation’. They can’t stop you, if they don’t see you coming.” - Izey Victoria Odiase During the summer of 2008 I was writing articles a few times per week predicting an economic catastrophe and a banking crisis. When the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression swept across the world, resulting in double digit unemployment, a 50% stock market crash in a matter of months, millions of home foreclosures, and the virtual insolvency of the criminal Wall Street banks, my predictions were vindicated. I was pretty smug and sure the start of this Fourth Turning would follow the path of the last Crisis, with a Greater Depression, economic disaster and war. In the summer of 2008, the national debt stood at $9.4 trillion, which amounted to 65% of GDP. Total credit market debt peaked at $54 trillion. Consumer debt peaked at $2.7 trillion. Mortgage debt crested at $14.8 trillion. The Federal Reserve balance sheet had been static at or below $900 billion for years. During 2007, a risk averse senior citizen couple (my parents) who had accumulated $200,000 of retirement savings over their lifetime of hard work, could generate $10,000 of interest income in a Vanguard money market fund yielding 5%. This supplemented their modest Social Security income of $20,000 to $30,000 per year. The interest rate on savings during normal economic times was generally 2% above inflation, which hovered around 3% in 2007 according to the data manipulators at the BLS. As the summer of 2008 progressed, I felt more disconnected. I had been doing everything possible to support Ron Paul’s candidacy for president, but the masses weren’t ready for the truth or the reality of our situation. In my opinion the country was already off-course and headed towards a debt created disaster. But the average American was oblivious. The economy appeared strong. People’s 401ks were soaring. And homeowners in many markets had seen their homes double in value – on paper. I felt stupid as I had exited the stock market and bought some bear mutual funds and ETFs during 2007 and 2008. The stock market had more than doubled since the 2002 lows. The control fraud systematically implemented by the Wall Street cabal and their captured political hacks also drove home prices to astronomical heights, making the average home owner think they were richer than they were. Billions of home equity loans were used by delusional dolts across the land to buy luxury vehicles, take exotic vacations, and basically live far above their means. When that fake equity evaporated like a puddle in the Sahara Desert, the delusional masses found themselves living in those luxury vehicles, until the repo man showed up. The irrationality and insanity of the Wall Street created housing bubble was perfectly captured in Michael Lewis’ brilliant takedown of the Wall Street cabal in the Big Short. When Steve Eisman interviews a Florida stripper doing a pole dance and finds out she “owns” five houses and a condo, he realizes the housing boom is a complete fraud and goes all in shorting the exotic worthless derivatives created by the criminal bankers. September 2008 marked the beginning of this Fourth Turning, with the global implosion of financial markets, the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, double digit unemployment, six million home foreclosures, a 50% collapse in the stock market, the deepest recession since the 1930s, and shell-shocked consumers defaulting on credit card and auto loans to the tune of hundreds of billions. As consumer credit contracted, retail stores began going bankrupt in vast numbers. Mall operators were left with 50% or vacancy rates. They couldn’t make the loan payments on their debt. By March of 2009 the country was in a full-blown crisis. My storage area in my basement was filled with food, cases of water and other emergency supplies. I was sure we were at the beginning of an economic period, similar but worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s. I certainly overestimated my forecasting ability and underestimated the abilities of the ruling class to take outrageously reckless steps to retain their power and manipulate the masses into believing extreme abnormalcy was actually normal. The first outrage perpetrated by the oligarchs was passing the $700 billion TARP bailout of the feckless Hank Paulson lied and threatened to protect his billionaire buddies. The turning point occurred on March 16, 2009 when the pocket protector wearing spineless weenie accountants at the FASB were threatened by Bernanke and his henchmen into overturning their mark to market rule and allow the criminal Wall Street banks to value their worthless mortgages at whatever they chose. Citicorp, Bank of America, AIG, GE, Goldman Sachs, and most of the other “Too Big To Trust” goliath banks were bankrupt. They should have been liquidated using the bankruptcy process, with their good assets sold to banks who did not undertake fraudulent risks, and their executives and investors suffering the consequences. The fear mongering and fake accounting propagated by Bernanke, Paulson, Geithner, and their corporate media fake news propaganda machines had the sole purpose of shifting the fraudulently created Wall Street private losses to the taxpayers through deficit funded handouts, free money, accounting fraud, and throwing senior citizen savers under the bus. Wall Street became richer than ever while Main Street got fucked again. As a Ron Paul, Austrian school of economics believer, myself, along with many other logical minded rational thinking people, believed a short violent recession where bad debt was expunged from the system through liquidation and the economy was reset based on corporations and consumers acting conservatively and living within their means – using debt sparingly for long-term purposes, was the best road going forward. I overestimated the intelligence, critical thinking skills, self-restraint and math aptitude of the masses by believing they had learned their lesson after experiencing the second Fed induced market crash in an eight-year period. I thought the American people and their leaders would come to their senses and realize the parabolic increase in debt since the 1990s had to end. I underestimated the level of fear amongst the Fed, financiers, politicians, mega-corporations, and billionaire oligarchs when just a leveling off of credit market debt resulted in global financial implosion. And I clearly underestimated the illegal lengths Bernanke and his fellow puppets would go to in order to save their Wall Street owners and corporate, political and media parasites reliant upon the ongoing Ponzi debt scheme being sustained. If I had only believed in the power of massive debt issuance, nine years of zero interest rates for Wall Street banks, $3.6 trillion of Fed QE to relieve Wall Street of its bad debt, hundreds of billions of debt financed corporate stock buybacks, luring millions into 7 year auto loans, and allowing Wall Street hedge funds to buy up the millions of foreclosures and rent them back to those who they had booted onto the street. If you told anyone in 2007 the national debt would go from $9.4 trillion to $22.8 trillion in twelve years, they would have called you a loon and laughed you out of the room. Now the national debt is 105% of GDP and consumer debt exceeds $4 trillion. Millennials are enslaved with $1.6 trillion of student loan debt, up by $1 trillion since 2009. The ruling class and their propaganda machine have convinced the masses $1 trillion annual deficits are normal and sustainable. Nothing bad has happened – Yet. Our so-called leaders have implemented the exact opposite “solutions” to a debt crisis than what was required. Of course, this is true only if our leaders were interested in the long-term sustainability of the nation and its unborn future generations. If the ruling class is only concerned with their wealth, power and control over the masses, then their actions make complete sense. If I hadn’t underestimated the evilness, greed and egocentricity of the entrenched establishment oligarchs, I would have stayed invested in the market, reaping the 300% returns since the 2009 lows. It has certainly paid to bet on the continued treachery of the traitorous central bankers, politicians, mega-corporation executives, and the fake news media. Only truly devious, deceitful, demented wizards of financial fraud could drive total credit market debt from $54 trillion to $74 trillion as the solution to a debt crisis. After eight years of emergency level financial suppression, the latest Fed puppet, Jerome Powell, dared to raise rates above zero and suspend the continued buying of government debt. If we were really operating in a normal economic environment, market rates would be in the 4% range. But, miniscule .25% increases over a couple years pushing the Federal Funds rate to 2.25% was too much for Wall Street and the president to handle. They have both been throwing hissy fits for the last year, intimidating and threatening the weak-kneed Powell into cutting rates with unemployment at all-time lows, the stock market near all-time highs, and the economy in its tenth year of expansion. Powell’s cowardly surrender is proof the Fed is nothing but Wall Street’s bitch, subservient and pliable to pressure from its owners. “They’re keeping the rates down so that everything else doesn’t go down. We have a very false economy. At some point the rates are going to have to change. The only thing that is strong is the artificial stock market. The U.S. economy is in a big, fat, ugly bubble. I will get rid of the nation’s more than $19 trillion national debt over a period of eight years. I’m renegotiating all of our deals, the big trade deals that we’re doing so badly on.” – Donald Trump, September 2016. ...

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Legal circumvention to facial recognition?
by Steven Schear 15 Oct '19

15 Oct '19

"By wearing this mask formed like a lens it possible to become unrecognizable for facial recognition software and because of it’s transparence you will not lose your identity and facial expressions. So it’s still possible to interact with the people around you." http://jipvanleeuwenstein.nl/

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UK: "problematic" views on consent "rectalfied with mandatory consent classes"
by Zenaan Harkness 15 Oct '19

15 Oct '19

New UK university students forced to take mandatory consent classes: - "you could harass someone even if you had no such intention" - "looking at someone could be rapeing them" - "it was a joke between me and my friend" is no exculpation for victims who are harassed by your words - "harassment is in the eyes of the accuser" - deviations from rigid view are "‘problematic’ view of consent that has to be rectified" Thought police on campus: What’s behind ‘consent classes’ at British universities https://www.rt.com/op-ed/470562-consent-classes-uk-universities/ ... A handful of universities already demand that prospective students take an online consent course before enrolling. Should they fail to comply with this requirement, their application becomes void. ... For years activists have waged a scaremongering campaign to force universities to clamp down on an alleged epidemic of sexual harassment. Through the constant widening of the definition of harassment they have succeeded in creating the impression that universities are an unsafe place for women. Consent classes have been at the forefront of gaining acceptance of the myth of an epidemic of sexual harassment. Throughout the Anglo-American world, campaigners promote the message that “you could harass someone even if you had no such intention.” ... Take the UK’s National Union of Students Consent Workshop Facilitator Guide. It promises to provide a “safer space where people feel comfortable to explore topics, definitions and myths.” But the discussion it advocates, is anything but exploratory. ... it is something of a paradox that in many universities, advocates of consent workshops wish to make them compulsory for all students. Consent classes are about policing the thoughts and behavior of young people. They are also about gaining acceptance for the idea that universities are facing an epidemic of sexual harassment. That students have no choice but to submit to this myth turns the idea of consent on its head. By Professor Frank Furedi, sociologist and author. His book, ‘What Happened To The University’ is published by Routledge Press.

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Cryptocurrency: Displacing Pollution with Crypto
by grarpamp 15 Oct '19

15 Oct '19

https://www.projectcensored.org/2-us-department-of-defense-is-the-worst-pol… Not only do all FUD papers about cryptocurrency energy consumption completely fail to add up all the global energy consumed by the world's Fiat systems in their entirety, and discover that Fiat uses more than Crypto... Not only do all the worlds entire militaries use more energy... all the worlds polluters... all the worlds Governments... yet all of those nasties will trend towards zero as use of crypto rises, starved out by private transactions. "The US military is responsible for the most egregious and widespread pollution of the planet, yet this information and accompanying documentation goes almost entirely unreported. In spite of the evidence, the environmental impact of the US military goes largely unaddressed by environmental organizations and was not the focus of any discussions or proposed restrictions at the recent UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. This impact includes uninhibited use of fossil fuels, massive creation of greenhouse gases, and extensive release of radioactive and chemical contaminants into the air, water, and soil."

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Cryptocurrency: G7 and US Threats that Cryptocurrency and Gold are Better Than Fiat System, OpenLibra, Bankers
by grarpamp 15 Oct '19

15 Oct '19

https://old.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/dhbv5z/ama_with_us_congres… "Everyone should have the right to privacy--and by extension--the right to use privacy coins. I would compare this to the use of cash. Today, we can go into a store, pay for something in cash, and not leave a trace about our identity. That should still be possible with digital money." https://www.openlibra.io/ https://mashable.com/article/openlibra/ https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/11/20910330/mastercard-stripe-ebay-faceboo… https://www.bbc.com/news/business-50037223 "Stablecoin" cryptocurrencies like Libra pose a risk to the global financial system, warns a new report by the G7 group of nations. The G7 taskforce that produced the report includes senior officials from central banks, the International Monetary Fund and the Financial Stability Board, which coordinates rules for the G20 economies. It says backers of digital currencies like Libra must be legally sound, protect consumers and ensure coins are not used to launder money or fund terrorism.... The draft report says: "The G7 believe that no stablecoin project should begin operation until the legal, regulatory and oversight challenges and risks are adequately addressed...." The draft report outlines nine major risks posed by such digital currencies. It warns that even if Libra's backers address concerns, the project may not get approval from regulators... "Addressing such risks is not necessarily a guarantee of regulatory approval for a stablecoin arrangement," the report says. US Senators Threaten More FHOTI FUD against Crypto https://www.schatz.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Signed%20Letters%20re%20Libra%2… https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-10-10/short-bankers-traditional-institu… https://www.economist.com/briefing/2019/10/05/the-stockmarket-is-now-run-by…

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MakeUnixGA, DOS Games, Dead Philes, China Spies Roots You and Your Data and HW
by grarpamp 15 Oct '19

15 Oct '19

https://www.bell-labs.com/var/articles/celebrating-50-years-unix/ http://www.peteradamsphoto.com/unix-folklore/ https://linuxreviews.org/HOWTO_make_Linux_run_blazing_fast_(again)_on_Intel… https://blog.archive.org/2019/10/13/2500-more-ms-dos-games-playable-at-the-… https://onezero.medium.com/the-death-of-the-computer-file-doc-43cb028c0506 https://www.wired.com/story/plant-spy-chips-hardware-supermicro-cheap-proof… https://it.slashdot.org/story/19/10/13/1833233/invisible-hardware-hacks-all… https://www.chinalawblog.com/2019/09/chinas-new-cybersecurity-program-no-pl… https://www.newamerica.org/cybersecurity-initiative/digichina/blog/chinas-c… https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3030563/big-data-expert-ta… https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21241712 " the main goal of the new system is to provide “full coverage”. As explained by Guo, “It will cover every district, every ministry, every business and other institution, basically covering the whole society. It will also cover all targets that need [cybersecurity] protection, including all networks, information systems, cloud platforms, the internet of things, control systems, big data and mobile internet.” This system will apply to foreign owned companies in China on the same basis as to all Chinese persons, entities or individuals. No information contained on any server located within China will be exempted from this full coverage program. No communication from or to China will be exempted. There will be no secrets. No VPNs. No private or encrypted messages. No anonymous online accounts. No trade secrets. No confidential data. Any and all data will be available and open to the Chinese government. Since the Chinese government is the shareholder in all SOEs and is now exercising de facto control over China’s major private companies as well, all of this information will then be available" Coming to your very own shithole soon.

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OpenPGP Mozilla to kill Enigmail, Elliptic Crypto, XRay Decapping, Exhausting CD Ripping Structures, Nuclear Farts
by grarpamp 15 Oct '19

15 Oct '19

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:OpenPGP:2020 https://neomutt.org/ https://www.mailpile.is/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claws_Mail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnus Horde-IMP, SquirrellMail, RoundCube https://fangpenlin.com/posts/2019/10/07/elliptic-curve-cryptography-explain… https://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoclast/semiconductors/design/xray-tech-lays-ch… https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21181889 https://byuu.net/compact-discs/structure https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21185897 https://www.newsweek.com/methane-boiling-sea-discovered-siberia-1463766 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21199317

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Paul Graham 2004: Essay, What you can't say.
by Zenaan Harkness 14 Oct '19

14 Oct '19

Apropos in today's zeitgeist. What You Can't Say http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html January 2004 Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and been embarrassed at the way you looked? Did we actually dress like that? We did. And we had no idea how silly we looked. It's the nature of fashion to be invisible, in the same way the movement of the earth is invisible to all of us riding on it. What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they're much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed. If you could travel back in a time machine, one thing would be true no matter where you went: you'd have to watch what you said. Opinions we consider harmless could have gotten you in big trouble. I've already said at least one thing that would have gotten me in big trouble in most of Europe in the seventeenth century, and did get Galileo in big trouble when he said it—that the earth moves. [1] It seems to be a constant throughout history: In every period, people believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you would have gotten in terrible trouble for saying otherwise. Is our time any different? To anyone who has read any amount of history, the answer is almost certainly no. It would be a remarkable coincidence if ours were the first era to get everything just right. It's tantalizing to think we believe things that people in the future will find ridiculous. What would someone coming back to visit us in a time machine have to be careful not to say? That's what I want to study here. But I want to do more than just shock everyone with the heresy du jour. I want to find general recipes for discovering what you can't say, in any era. The Conformist Test Let's start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers? If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you're supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn't. Odds are you just think what you're told. The other alternative would be that you independently considered every question and came up with the exact same answers that are now considered acceptable. That seems unlikely, because you'd also have to make the same mistakes. Mapmakers deliberately put slight mistakes in their maps so they can tell when someone copies them. If another map has the same mistake, that's very convincing evidence. Like every other era in history, our moral map almost certainly contains a few mistakes. And anyone who makes the same mistakes probably didn't do it by accident. It would be like someone claiming they had independently decided in 1972 that bell-bottom jeans were a good idea. If you believe everything you're supposed to now, how can you be sure you wouldn't also have believed everything you were supposed to if you had grown up among the plantation owners of the pre-Civil War South, or in Germany in the 1930s—or among the Mongols in 1200, for that matter? Odds are you would have. Back in the era of terms like "well-adjusted," the idea seemed to be that there was something wrong with you if you thought things you didn't dare say out loud. This seems backward. Almost certainly, there is something wrong with you if you don't think things you don't dare say out loud. Trouble What can't we say? One way to find these ideas is simply to look at things people do say, and get in trouble for. [2] Of course, we're not just looking for things we can't say. We're looking for things we can't say that are true, or at least have enough chance of being true that the question should remain open. But many of the things people get in trouble for saying probably do make it over this second, lower threshold. No one gets in trouble for saying that 2 + 2 is 5, or that people in Pittsburgh are ten feet tall. Such obviously false statements might be treated as jokes, or at worst as evidence of insanity, but they are not likely to make anyone mad. The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true. If Galileo had said that people in Padua were ten feet tall, he would have been regarded as a harmless eccentric. Saying the earth orbited the sun was another matter. The church knew this would set people thinking. Certainly, as we look back on the past, this rule of thumb works well. A lot of the statements people got in trouble for seem harmless now. So it's likely that visitors from the future would agree with at least some of the statements that get people in trouble today. Do we have no Galileos? Not likely. To find them, keep track of opinions that get people in trouble, and start asking, could this be true? Ok, it may be heretical (or whatever modern equivalent), but might it also be true? Heresy This won't get us all the answers, though. What if no one happens to have gotten in trouble for a particular idea yet? What if some idea would be so radioactively controversial that no one would dare express it in public? How can we find these too? Another approach is to follow that word, heresy. In every period of history, there seem to have been labels that got applied to statements to shoot them down before anyone had a chance to ask if they were true or not. "Blasphemy", "sacrilege", and "heresy" were such labels for a good part of western history, as in more recent times "indecent", "improper", and "unamerican" have been. By now these labels have lost their sting. They always do. By now they're mostly used ironically. But in their time, they had real force. The word "defeatist", for example, has no particular political connotations now. But in Germany in 1917 it was a weapon, used by Ludendorff in a purge of those who favored a negotiated peace. At the start of World War II it was used extensively by Churchill and his supporters to silence their opponents. In 1940, any argument against Churchill's aggressive policy was "defeatist". Was it right or wrong? Ideally, no one got far enough to ask that. We have such labels today, of course, quite a lot of them, from the all-purpose "inappropriate" to the dreaded "divisive." In any period, it should be easy to figure out what such labels are, simply by looking at what people call ideas they disagree with besides untrue. When a politician says his opponent is mistaken, that's a straightforward criticism, but when he attacks a statement as "divisive" or "racially insensitive" instead of arguing that it's false, we should start paying attention. So another way to figure out which of our taboos future generations will laugh at is to start with the labels. Take a label—"sexist", for example—and try to think of some ideas that would be called that. Then for each ask, might this be true? Just start listing ideas at random? Yes, because they won't really be random. The ideas that come to mind first will be the most plausible ones. They'll be things you've already noticed but didn't let yourself think. In 1989 some clever researchers tracked the eye movements of radiologists as they scanned chest images for signs of lung cancer. [3] They found that even when the radiologists missed a cancerous lesion, their eyes had usually paused at the site of it. Part of their brain knew there was something there; it just didn't percolate all the way up into conscious knowledge. I think many interesting heretical thoughts are already mostly formed in our minds. If we turn off our self-censorship temporarily, those will be the first to emerge. Time and Space If we could look into the future it would be obvious which of our taboos they'd laugh at. We can't do that, but we can do something almost as good: we can look into the past. Another way to figure out what we're getting wrong is to look at what used to be acceptable and is now unthinkable. Changes between the past and the present sometimes do represent progress. In a field like physics, if we disagree with past generations it's because we're right and they're wrong. But this becomes rapidly less true as you move away from the certainty of the hard sciences. By the time you get to social questions, many changes are just fashion. The age of consent fluctuates like hemlines. We may imagine that we are a great deal smarter and more virtuous than past generations, but the more history you read, the less likely this seems. People in past times were much like us. Not heroes, not barbarians. Whatever their ideas were, they were ideas reasonable people could believe. So here is another source of interesting heresies. Diff present ideas against those of various past cultures, and see what you get. [4] Some will be shocking by present standards. Ok, fine; but which might also be true? You don't have to look into the past to find big differences. In our own time, different societies have wildly varying ideas of what's ok and what isn't. So you can try diffing other cultures' ideas against ours as well. (The best way to do that is to visit them.) Any idea that's considered harmless in a significant percentage of times and places, and yet is taboo in ours, is a candidate for something we're mistaken about. For example, at the high water mark of political correctness in the early 1990s, Harvard distributed to its faculty and staff a brochure saying, among other things, that it was inappropriate to compliment a colleague or student's clothes. No more "nice shirt." I think this principle is rare among the world's cultures, past or present. There are probably more where it's considered especially polite to compliment someone's clothing than where it's considered improper. Odds are this is, in a mild form, an example of one of the taboos a visitor from the future would have to be careful to avoid if he happened to set his time machine for Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1992. [5] Prigs Of course, if they have time machines in the future they'll probably have a separate reference manual just for Cambridge. This has always been a fussy place, a town of i dotters and t crossers, where you're liable to get both your grammar and your ideas corrected in the same conversation. And that suggests another way to find taboos. Look for prigs, and see what's inside their heads. Kids' heads are repositories of all our taboos. It seems fitting to us that kids' ideas should be bright and clean. The picture we give them of the world is not merely simplified, to suit their developing minds, but sanitized as well, to suit our ideas of what kids ought to think. [6] You can see this on a small scale in the matter of dirty words. A lot of my friends are starting to have children now, and they're all trying not to use words like "fuck" and "shit" within baby's hearing, lest baby start using these words too. But these words are part of the language, and adults use them all the time. So parents are giving their kids an inaccurate idea of the language by not using them. Why do they do this? Because they don't think it's fitting that kids should use the whole language. We like children to seem innocent. [7] Most adults, likewise, deliberately give kids a misleading view of the world. One of the most obvious examples is Santa Claus. We think it's cute for little kids to believe in Santa Claus. I myself think it's cute for little kids to believe in Santa Claus. But one wonders, do we tell them this stuff for their sake, or for ours? I'm not arguing for or against this idea here. It is probably inevitable that parents should want to dress up their kids' minds in cute little baby outfits. I'll probably do it myself. The important thing for our purposes is that, as a result, a well brought-up teenage kid's brain is a more or less complete collection of all our taboos—and in mint condition, because they're untainted by experience. Whatever we think that will later turn out to be ridiculous, it's almost certainly inside that head. How do we get at these ideas? By the following thought experiment. Imagine a kind of latter-day Conrad character who has worked for a time as a mercenary in Africa, for a time as a doctor in Nepal, for a time as the manager of a nightclub in Miami. The specifics don't matter—just someone who has seen a lot. Now imagine comparing what's inside this guy's head with what's inside the head of a well-behaved sixteen year old girl from the suburbs. What does he think that would shock her? He knows the world; she knows, or at least embodies, present taboos. Subtract one from the other, and the result is what we can't say. Mechanism I can think of one more way to figure out what we can't say: to look at how taboos are created. How do moral fashions arise, and why are they adopted? If we can understand this mechanism, we may be able to see it at work in our own time. Moral fashions don't seem to be created the way ordinary fashions are. Ordinary fashions seem to arise by accident when everyone imitates the whim of some influential person. The fashion for broad-toed shoes in late fifteenth century Europe began because Charles VIII of France had six toes on one foot. The fashion for the name Gary began when the actor Frank Cooper adopted the name of a tough mill town in Indiana. Moral fashions more often seem to be created deliberately. When there's something we can't say, it's often because some group doesn't want us to. The prohibition will be strongest when the group is nervous. The irony of Galileo's situation was that he got in trouble for repeating Copernicus's ideas. Copernicus himself didn't. In fact, Copernicus was a canon of a cathedral, and dedicated his book to the pope. But by Galileo's time the church was in the throes of the Counter-Reformation and was much more worried about unorthodox ideas. To launch a taboo, a group has to be poised halfway between weakness and power. A confident group doesn't need taboos to protect it. It's not considered improper to make disparaging remarks about Americans, or the English. And yet a group has to be powerful enough to enforce a taboo. Coprophiles, as of this writing, don't seem to be numerous or energetic enough to have had their interests promoted to a lifestyle. I suspect the biggest source of moral taboos will turn out to be power struggles in which one side only barely has the upper hand. That's where you'll find a group powerful enough to enforce taboos, but weak enough to need them. Most struggles, whatever they're really about, will be cast as struggles between competing ideas. The English Reformation was at bottom a struggle for wealth and power, but it ended up being cast as a struggle to preserve the souls of Englishmen from the corrupting influence of Rome. It's easier to get people to fight for an idea. And whichever side wins, their ideas will also be considered to have triumphed, as if God wanted to signal his agreement by selecting that side as the victor. We often like to think of World War II as a triumph of freedom over totalitarianism. We conveniently forget that the Soviet Union was also one of the winners. I'm not saying that struggles are never about ideas, just that they will always be made to seem to be about ideas, whether they are or not. And just as there is nothing so unfashionable as the last, discarded fashion, there is nothing so wrong as the principles of the most recently defeated opponent. Representational art is only now recovering from the approval of both Hitler and Stalin. [8] Although moral fashions tend to arise from different sources than fashions in clothing, the mechanism of their adoption seems much the same. The early adopters will be driven by ambition: self-consciously cool people who want to distinguish themselves from the common herd. As the fashion becomes established they'll be joined by a second, much larger group, driven by fear. [9] This second group adopt the fashion not because they want to stand out but because they are afraid of standing out. So if you want to figure out what we can't say, look at the machinery of fashion and try to predict what it would make unsayable. What groups are powerful but nervous, and what ideas would they like to suppress? What ideas were tarnished by association when they ended up on the losing side of a recent struggle? If a self-consciously cool person wanted to differentiate himself from preceding fashions (e.g. from his parents), which of their ideas would he tend to reject? What are conventional-minded people afraid of saying? This technique won't find us all the things we can't say. I can think of some that aren't the result of any recent struggle. Many of our taboos are rooted deep in the past. But this approach, combined with the preceding four, will turn up a good number of unthinkable ideas. Why Some would ask, why would one want to do this? Why deliberately go poking around among nasty, disreputable ideas? Why look under rocks? I do it, first of all, for the same reason I did look under rocks as a kid: plain curiosity. And I'm especially curious about anything that's forbidden. Let me see and decide for myself. Second, I do it because I don't like the idea of being mistaken. If, like other eras, we believe things that will later seem ridiculous, I want to know what they are so that I, at least, can avoid believing them. Third, I do it because it's good for the brain. To do good work you need a brain that can go anywhere. And you especially need a brain that's in the habit of going where it's not supposed to. Great work tends to grow out of ideas that others have overlooked, and no idea is so overlooked as one that's unthinkable. Natural selection, for example. It's so simple. Why didn't anyone think of it before? Well, that is all too obvious. Darwin himself was careful to tiptoe around the implications of his theory. He wanted to spend his time thinking about biology, not arguing with people who accused him of being an atheist. In the sciences, especially, it's a great advantage to be able to question assumptions. The m.o. of scientists, or at least of the good ones, is precisely that: look for places where conventional wisdom is broken, and then try to pry apart the cracks and see what's underneath. That's where new theories come from. A good scientist, in other words, does not merely ignore conventional wisdom, but makes a special effort to break it. Scientists go looking for trouble. This should be the m.o. of any scholar, but scientists seem much more willing to look under rocks. [10] Why? It could be that the scientists are simply smarter; most physicists could, if necessary, make it through a PhD program in French literature, but few professors of French literature could make it through a PhD program in physics. Or it could be because it's clearer in the sciences whether theories are true or false, and this makes scientists bolder. (Or it could be that, because it's clearer in the sciences whether theories are true or false, you have to be smart to get jobs as a scientist, rather than just a good politician.) Whatever the reason, there seems a clear correlation between intelligence and willingness to consider shocking ideas. This isn't just because smart people actively work to find holes in conventional thinking. I think conventions also have less hold over them to start with. You can see that in the way they dress. It's not only in the sciences that heresy pays off. In any competitive field, you can win big by seeing things that others daren't. And in every field there are probably heresies few dare utter. Within the US car industry there is a lot of hand-wringing now about declining market share. Yet the cause is so obvious that any observant outsider could explain it in a second: they make bad cars. And they have for so long that by now the US car brands are antibrands—something you'd buy a car despite, not because of. Cadillac stopped being the Cadillac of cars in about 1970. And yet I suspect no one dares say this. [11] Otherwise these companies would have tried to fix the problem. Training yourself to think unthinkable thoughts has advantages beyond the thoughts themselves. It's like stretching. When you stretch before running, you put your body into positions much more extreme than any it will assume during the run. If you can think things so outside the box that they'd make people's hair stand on end, you'll have no trouble with the small trips outside the box that people call innovative. Pensieri Stretti When you find something you can't say, what do you do with it? My advice is, don't say it. Or at least, pick your battles. Suppose in the future there is a movement to ban the color yellow. Proposals to paint anything yellow are denounced as "yellowist", as is anyone suspected of liking the color. People who like orange are tolerated but viewed with suspicion. Suppose you realize there is nothing wrong with yellow. If you go around saying this, you'll be denounced as a yellowist too, and you'll find yourself having a lot of arguments with anti-yellowists. If your aim in life is to rehabilitate the color yellow, that may be what you want. But if you're mostly interested in other questions, being labelled as a yellowist will just be a distraction. Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot. The most important thing is to be able to think what you want, not to say what you want. And if you feel you have to say everything you think, it may inhibit you from thinking improper thoughts. I think it's better to follow the opposite policy. Draw a sharp line between your thoughts and your speech. Inside your head, anything is allowed. Within my head I make a point of encouraging the most outrageous thoughts I can imagine. But, as in a secret society, nothing that happens within the building should be told to outsiders. The first rule of Fight Club is, you do not talk about Fight Club. When Milton was going to visit Italy in the 1630s, Sir Henry Wootton, who had been ambassador to Venice, told him his motto should be "i pensieri stretti & il viso sciolto." Closed thoughts and an open face. Smile at everyone, and don't tell them what you're thinking. This was wise advice. Milton was an argumentative fellow, and the Inquisition was a bit restive at that time. But I think the difference between Milton's situation and ours is only a matter of degree. Every era has its heresies, and if you don't get imprisoned for them you will at least get in enough trouble that it becomes a complete distraction. I admit it seems cowardly to keep quiet. When I read about the harassment to which the Scientologists subject their critics [12], or that pro-Israel groups are "compiling dossiers" on those who speak out against Israeli human rights abuses [13], or about people being sued for violating the DMCA [14], part of me wants to say, "All right, you bastards, bring it on." The problem is, there are so many things you can't say. If you said them all you'd have no time left for your real work. You'd have to turn into Noam Chomsky. [15] The trouble with keeping your thoughts secret, though, is that you lose the advantages of discussion. Talking about an idea leads to more ideas. So the optimal plan, if you can manage it, is to have a few trusted friends you can speak openly to. This is not just a way to develop ideas; it's also a good rule of thumb for choosing friends. The people you can say heretical things to without getting jumped on are also the most interesting to know. Viso Sciolto? I don't think we need the viso sciolto so much as the pensieri stretti. Perhaps the best policy is to make it plain that you don't agree with whatever zealotry is current in your time, but not to be too specific about what you disagree with. Zealots will try to draw you out, but you don't have to answer them. If they try to force you to treat a question on their terms by asking "are you with us or against us?" you can always just answer "neither". Better still, answer "I haven't decided." That's what Larry Summers did when a group tried to put him in this position. Explaining himself later, he said "I don't do litmus tests." [16] A lot of the questions people get hot about are actually quite complicated. There is no prize for getting the answer quickly. If the anti-yellowists seem to be getting out of hand and you want to fight back, there are ways to do it without getting yourself accused of being a yellowist. Like skirmishers in an ancient army, you want to avoid directly engaging the main body of the enemy's troops. Better to harass them with arrows from a distance. One way to do this is to ratchet the debate up one level of abstraction. If you argue against censorship in general, you can avoid being accused of whatever heresy is contained in the book or film that someone is trying to censor. You can attack labels with meta-labels: labels that refer to the use of labels to prevent discussion. The spread of the term "political correctness" meant the beginning of the end of political correctness, because it enabled one to attack the phenomenon as a whole without being accused of any of the specific heresies it sought to suppress. Another way to counterattack is with metaphor. Arthur Miller undermined the House Un-American Activities Committee by writing a play, "The Crucible," about the Salem witch trials. He never referred directly to the committee and so gave them no way to reply. What could HUAC do, defend the Salem witch trials? And yet Miller's metaphor stuck so well that to this day the activities of the committee are often described as a "witch-hunt." Best of all, probably, is humor. Zealots, whatever their cause, invariably lack a sense of humor. They can't reply in kind to jokes. They're as unhappy on the territory of humor as a mounted knight on a skating rink. Victorian prudishness, for example, seems to have been defeated mainly by treating it as a joke. Likewise its reincarnation as political correctness. "I am glad that I managed to write 'The Crucible,'" Arthur Miller wrote, "but looking back I have often wished I'd had the temperament to do an absurd comedy, which is what the situation deserved." [17] ABQ A Dutch friend says I should use Holland as an example of a tolerant society. It's true they have a long tradition of comparative open-mindedness. For centuries the low countries were the place to go to say things you couldn't say anywhere else, and this helped to make the region a center of scholarship and industry (which have been closely tied for longer than most people realize). Descartes, though claimed by the French, did much of his thinking in Holland. And yet, I wonder. The Dutch seem to live their lives up to their necks in rules and regulations. There's so much you can't do there; is there really nothing you can't say? Certainly the fact that they value open-mindedness is no guarantee. Who thinks they're not open-minded? Our hypothetical prim miss from the suburbs thinks she's open-minded. Hasn't she been taught to be? Ask anyone, and they'll say the same thing: they're pretty open-minded, though they draw the line at things that are really wrong. (Some tribes may avoid "wrong" as judgemental, and may instead use a more neutral sounding euphemism like "negative" or "destructive".) When people are bad at math, they know it, because they get the wrong answers on tests. But when people are bad at open-mindedness they don't know it. In fact they tend to think the opposite. Remember, it's the nature of fashion to be invisible. It wouldn't work otherwise. Fashion doesn't seem like fashion to someone in the grip of it. It just seems like the right thing to do. It's only by looking from a distance that we see oscillations in people's idea of the right thing to do, and can identify them as fashions. Time gives us such distance for free. Indeed, the arrival of new fashions makes old fashions easy to see, because they seem so ridiculous by contrast. From one end of a pendulum's swing, the other end seems especially far away. To see fashion in your own time, though, requires a conscious effort. Without time to give you distance, you have to create distance yourself. Instead of being part of the mob, stand as far away from it as you can and watch what it's doing. And pay especially close attention whenever an idea is being suppressed. Web filters for children and employees often ban sites containing pornography, violence, and hate speech. What counts as pornography and violence? And what, exactly, is "hate speech?" This sounds like a phrase out of 1984. Labels like that are probably the biggest external clue. If a statement is false, that's the worst thing you can say about it. You don't need to say that it's heretical. And if it isn't false, it shouldn't be suppressed. So when you see statements being attacked as x-ist or y-ic (substitute your current values of x and y), whether in 1630 or 2030, that's a sure sign that something is wrong. When you hear such labels being used, ask why. Especially if you hear yourself using them. It's not just the mob you need to learn to watch from a distance. You need to be able to watch your own thoughts from a distance. That's not a radical idea, by the way; it's the main difference between children and adults. When a child gets angry because he's tired, he doesn't know what's happening. An adult can distance himself enough from the situation to say "never mind, I'm just tired." I don't see why one couldn't, by a similar process, learn to recognize and discount the effects of moral fashions. You have to take that extra step if you want to think clearly. But it's harder, because now you're working against social customs instead of with them. Everyone encourages you to grow up to the point where you can discount your own bad moods. Few encourage you to continue to the point where you can discount society's bad moods. How can you see the wave, when you're the water? Always be questioning. That's the only defence. What can't you say? And why? Notes Thanks to Sarah Harlin, Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Eric Raymond and Bob van der Zwaan for reading drafts of this essay, and to Lisa Randall, Jackie McDonough, Ryan Stanley and Joel Rainey for conversations about heresy. Needless to say they bear no blame for opinions expressed in it, and especially for opinions not expressed in it.

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