October 2019 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

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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Money: Dutch Central Bank DNB publicly blogs "Big Reset", moves its 615 tonnes AU to military facility
by Zenaan Harkness 14 Oct '19

14 Oct '19

Money: Dutch Central Bank DNB publicly blogs "Big Reset", moves its 615 tonnes AU to military facility. Central Bank Issues Stunning Warning: "If The Entire System Collapses, Gold Will Be Needed To Start Over" https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/central-bank-issues-stunning-warning-if-e… ... An article published by the De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB), or Dutch Central Bank, has shocked many with its claim that "if the system collapses, the gold stock can serve as a basis to build it up again. Gold bolsters confidence in the stability of the central bank's balance sheet and creates a sense of security." ... "Gold is... the trust anchor for the financial system. If the whole system collapses, the gold stock provides a collateral to start over. Gold gives confidence in the power of the central bank's balance sheet." Why this sudden admission of what goldbugs have been saying for years? Perhaps it has to do with the fact that on October 7, the bank announced it would soon be moving a large part of its gold reserves to "the new DNB Cash Center at military premises in Zeist." Almost as if the Netherlands is preparing for the grand reset, and is moving its most valuable asset to a "military" installation just for that purpose. As bitcoin.com tongue-in-cheek points out, "DNB is no stranger to playing along with the Keynesian, inflationary games of the global monetary system. A system which, according to some, is now more a Ponzi scheme based on force and blind faith than sound economic principle. That notwithstanding, the centralized financial powers of the world know the real score, and that’s why hard assets like gold are hoarded and locked down while everyday, individual residents of these geopolitical jurisdictions are encouraged to spend and spend, going further into debt to prop up ultimately unsound national economies." It is hardly a coincidence that in its preparation for monetary doomsday, the Dutsch Central Bank is also set to begin cracking down on crypto exchanges and wallets, stating that "firms offering services for the exchange between cryptos and regular money, and crypto wallet providers must register with De Nederlandsche Bank." ... As for the timing of the "great monetary reset", which other central banks have already quietly hinted at themselves amid massive repatriation of physical gold from the New York Fed to various European central banks such as Germany and Austria, we are confident that the trust-keepers of the current establishment - such as other central banks and the IMF - will be kind enough to provide ample advance notice to the citizens of the "developed" world to exchange their fiat into hard assets. Or, then again, perhaps not.

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Cryptocurrency: acceptable coinage/ currency/ money
by grarpamp 13 Oct '19

13 Oct '19

On 10/11/19, Punk <punks(a)tfwno.gf> wrote: > gold coins are a lot better than any form of > 'crypto currency'. As before, perhaps yes, until it is considered that no one really wants to be carrying around a medieval sack of metal all day, let alone figuring out how to shave it into exact change, nor dealing with proving assay against fake metals, getting robbed with not even a forced password in the way, etc. If their lifestyle, foolish or not, is digital and further involves carrying around a digital device (phone, which must admit the entire planet mostly already does), then the better form of currency for them is likely to be a distributed private cryptocurrency. It sure as fuck isn't Fiat paper, Facebook Libra, or any other centralized non privacy corporate or government coin. And you're not very likely to convince world of adopting metals before crypto, thus metal advocacy will add more time delay before government demise. Nor can you manage your [space consuming] hoard of metals in near as many creative ways as crypto. Etc. Use both (for when they shut the internet down), or one, or keep licking boots.

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Re: Richard Stallman Gets SJW'd
by Zenaan Harkness 13 Oct '19

13 Oct '19

On Thu, Sep 26, 2019 at 11:26:23AM -0400, Ric Moore wrote: > On 9/17/19 9:56 PM, Zenaan Harkness wrote: > > > RMS, founder and originator of the Free Software Foundation, did not > > have sufficient support for his simple and straightforward words > > about words used to conflate or mislead readers (or listeners) about > > Epstein or anyone else for that matter, and RMS has now resigned from > > the FSF. > > Would you trust RMS to babysit your 8 year old daughter? I bet not. His > biggest problem is that he has spouted off for way too many years without > being hauled to task for what comes forth from his mouth. He's an idiot, plain > and simple, for ignoring "convention" and separating himself from "polite > society". No need for me to go into detail, it's all just a google away. Ric Actually yes and without hesitation - I hosted RMS in Sydney some 20 years ago (spent a few days with him in total), and despite him being a little "conversationally confronting", including to me personally, he was principled, precise, and caring of other humans, all to a fault. He gets taken the wrong way sometimes and I get that - haven't we all? So I did a google for "rms stallman egregious" and came up with the below -- all I can see is talk of "precise", email, discussion, and -implications- therein. And some people got upset or felt confronted and ultimately hold that RMS "should be taken down" and that "it's good RMS lost his job at the FSF, who gives a rat's arse if he founded it". Neither robust, nor permitting of robust conversations, nor "intellectually honest", as far as I can tell! I believe it is NOT appropriate that we lynch anyone merely for differing points of view! This is freedom of speech at its absolute most basic. Either we hold to the principle, or we are sluts to safe spaces, cowering pathetically to the snowflakes of the world. No, thank you, but no. Really, no! That is not me. Here's to the right of not only RMS, but you, I and everyone else, to say and argue for and against, whatetever they bloody well choose to. This is the world -I- want to live in. https://www.reddit.com/r/StallmanWasRight/comments/d7v1kf/a_reflection_on_t… > While it is true we should not treat Minsky unfairly, it was > not — and is not — a pressing concern, and by making it his > concern, RMS signaled clearly that it was much more important > to him than the question of the institution’s patterns of > problematic coddling of bad behavior. RMS did merely take part in a mailing list discussion, it's the media that blew it up. It's not like he stepped on a pedestal, creating big signals. It's about as public as talking to people in a coffee shop with a journalist eaves dropping in the background. It's a shame really, we can only have those slick politician like lizard tongue PR people in leading positions. The most important quality today is being dishonest and persuasive at the same time, getting away with it. That's how we got the corporate landscape today, that late stage capitalism where politics, media and industry are all alike, all keeping each other in position rather than in check, all infected with the disease of our times. It's disgusting, one ticket to the moon please... [And the 3rd comment, most poignant indeed:] I don't understand why society has accepted this concept of "you said a thing I don't like so you don't get to have a job anymore". Like what does one's personal opinions have to do with their job, as long as they're doing their job why does it matter. [And perhaps most telling - the "ba da bing, ba da BOOM":] Per Wikipedia, this guy [A KEY RECENT COMPLAINTANT ABOUT RMS] was fired by Stallman in 2001 for failing to perform any work or respond to emails. Did he last speak to Stallman 18 years ago? If not, when? I'd take this account with a huge grain of very salty salt! https://www.reddit.com/r/badlinguistics/comments/cr2en6/i_generally_support… https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21055756 That's what makes me so furious at the morons who deplatformed RMS over some silly devil's advocate defense of Minsky on an internal mailing list. The guy has an important idea that he put most of his life into developing. In the process, he made programming much more inclusive than anyone could dream about in the days of proprietary operating system with compilers that sold for thousands of dollars. So even if having to deal with a difficult old man makes you feel a little less inclusive, it's not too crazy to give him some breaks. The kids who ran him out of town only know how to destroy, not how to create anything comparable to what he did. ... It wasn't just this incident. RMS alienated so many women from open source and free software over the last 30 years, and we've lost all of those potential contributions. He's been getting breaks for 30 years. That he has also done some very good things isn't a good argument for continuing to tolerate his harmful behaviour after he's been asked to fix it for literally decades, and hasn't. ... > Which things specifically, and in what way? Saying that we shouldn't call sexual assault "sexual assault", and implying that there's any way a rich, famous, 73-year-old man can "have sex with" (rape) a 17-year-old girl, whom he has extraordinary power over, and who, in in this case was his friend's trafficking victim. The idea that Minsky's "honour" is in any way more important than harm in what happened to Giuffre perpetuates rape culture. It perpetuates the idea that women are worth less than men, and that it's okay for famous men in CS to rape girls. That emboldens other rapists and makes CS very unwelcoming for rape victims. Minsky should have known. Implying there's any way what he did was okay creates an unwelcoming environment for women, especially young women and girls at MIT. (Background and links from https://medium.com/@selamie/remove-richard-stallman-fec6ec21... ) ... > implying that there's any way a rich, famous, 73-year-old man > can "have sex with" (rape) a 17-year-old girl, whom he has > extraordinary power over, and who, in in this case was his > friend's trafficking victim. ...what are the scare quotes for? Is "have sex with" not a definitional superset of "rape"? As far as I can tell, Stallman does not assert that Giuffre was not raped, only that Minsky would probably not have known. (As far as he knew, she could equally have been one year older and legally, voluntarily engaged in prostitution...?) You could argue that (and I think that if Minsky did indeed have sex with her, you would have a very good case) that Minsky was extremely naive and/or irresponsible to not suspect anything amiss in the setting, but sexual (or any other) assault, in the view of many people, requires intent to harm someone against their will. Here, it seems that the intent, and hence the primary guilt for the assault, most likely was squarely with Epstein and his associates: if a gun salesman takes you to his shooting range and tells you to fire a weapon at a target that he actually secretly tied a person to the back of, and you shoot that person dead, you are not on the hook for murder even if you should really have known that something is off and recall hearing muffled screams from somewhere at one point in hindsight. > The idea that Minsky's "honour" is in any way more important > than harm in what happened to Giuffre Where did Stallman claim that? [NEVER GOT ANSWERED]

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Ars Technica: AT&T and other carriers want to hide detailed 5G maps from FCC and public
by jim bell 12 Oct '19

12 Oct '19

Ars Technica: AT&T and other carriers want to hide detailed 5G maps from FCC and public. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/10/att-and-other-carriers-want-to-…

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Green energy math - Mtoe (million tonnes oil equivalent) / yr, and compare "Go Green"
by Zenaan Harkness 12 Oct '19

12 Oct '19

tl;dr: We start by converting the three main fossil fuels – coal, oil and natural gas – into a common unit: the “millions of tons of oil equivalent” or Mtoe. In 2018 the world consumed 11,743 Mtoe in the form of coal, natural gas and petroleum. The combustion of these fossil fuels resulted in 33.7 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions. In order for those emissions to reach net-zero, we will have to replace about 12,000 Mtoe of energy consumption expected for 2019. That's 30,000 of the world's largest oil tankers (there are 4 of them in the world) which hold about 3 million barrels of oil at a time. Such a fleet would stretch over 7,000 miles parked stern to nose. There are about 11,000 days between now and 1 Jan 2050, meaning roughly, we must deploy over 1 Mtoe, per day, every day for about 30 years, of "green energy", just to reach carbon neutral by 2050. And achieving net zero by 2050 means decomissioning over 1 Mtoe per day, every day, for those same 30 years. Nuclear energy? We must deploy 3 brand new nuclear plants (of carbon-free energy) every two days, for the next 30 years. At the same time, a nuclear plant's worth of fossil fuel infrastructure must be decomissioned every day, for 30 years straight, to get to that hallowed "carbon neutral". Wind energy? Try ~1,500 2.5 MW (megawatt) wind turbines, spread over about 300 square miles, every day, for the next 30 years. These stats come from last Tuesday, so now we're already 9 nuclear power plants behind in our rollout! Not gonna happen. And just as well, since plants need all that CO2, and we humans are up the food chain of plants, so we need plants to have lots of plant food (CO2). Getting Real About Green Energy https://www.zerohedge.com/health/getting-real-about-green-energy https://www.peakprosperity.com/getting-real-about-green-energy/

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Cryptocurrency: SEC Dictators, US Tricks, Cash, Econ Greta, Bakkt
by grarpamp 12 Oct '19

12 Oct '19

https://reddit.com/r/btc/comments/dgoix7/imagine_being_such_a_totalitarian_… https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2019-212 "Imagine being such a totalitarian dictator that you think you have the moral right to tell hundreds of millions of other human beings what they can and can’t sell without your permission. That’s the SEC." https://www.forbes.com/sites/billybambrough/2019/10/08/the-us-government-tr… https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-11/fed-to-start-buying-60b-… "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks" https://reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/dga44n/seen_in_scotland_people_someti… https://i.redd.it/cbwqylnj19r31.jpg https://reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/delc64/forget_greta_this_girl_should_… https://bitcoinist.com/bakkt-bitcoin-futures-trading-up-3100-since-first-da…

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You can't cuck the Tuck - Shepard Smith leaves Fox
by Zenaan Harkness 12 Oct '19

12 Oct '19

Shepard Smith Out At Fox News https://www.zerohedge.com/political/shepard-smith-out-fox-news ... Word of Smith's departure comes two weeks after a "war of words" broke out between Smith and fox anchor Tucker Carlson, after Smith called Carlson and legal analyst Joe diGenova "repugnant" in a daytime analysis of their reporting on the Democratically manufactured Ukrainegate scandal. ... Napolitano concluded that Trump's actions regarding Ukraine constituted "a crime" during the day on Tuesday. diGenova had called Napolitano a "fool" for his analysis on that night, to which Smith returned fire the following evening, stating that diGenova was a "partisan guest" who was "repugnant" for attacking Napolitano. “Apparently our daytime host, who hosted Judge Napolitano, was watching last night and was outraged by what you said and quite ironically called you partisan,” Carlson replied. Later, Carlson took yet another shot at Smith to conclude the segment: “It doesn’t seem honest to me when a host, any host on any channel, including this one, pretends that the answer is obvious. That’s not news, is it? That’s opinion. Why do we find ourselves in a situation where people aren’t willing to admit that their passions are guiding their news coverage? Wouldn’t it be better if we just said out loud you know this is what I think? For example you will never hear me criticize Rachel Maddow. I never agree with anything she says. But she is straightforward, it’s her opinion. Why wouldn’t it be better if we were all that transparent about what’s driving our shows? It makes people cynical when you dress up news coverage, when you dress up partisanship as news coverage and pretend that your angry political opinions are news, you know, people tune out.” And now Smith is out. *** Fox said in a statement (via Forbes): NEW YORK - October 11, 2019 — FOX NEWS Channel’s (FNC) Shepard Smith will step down from his role as Chief News Anchor and Managing Editor of the network’s breaking news unit and Anchor of Shepard Smith Reporting, announced Jay Wallace, President & Executive Editor of FOX News Media. This afternoon’s edition of Shepard Smith Reporting was Mr. Smith’s final show, during which he addressed his decision. A series of rotating anchors will host the 3PM/ET time slot until a new dayside news program is announced. ...

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Shysters thrive on preen, preaching and exaggeration.
by John Young 11 Oct '19

11 Oct '19

Stallman is petty example of ego gone rogue, then claiming to be misunderstood, drag out whines to smoke the air, Trump a prime polluter, but many others in centers of power in homes to holy sees. Adulterers and politicians excel at this but are joined by a host of haughty abusers in all fields. Even on this pure-hearted list shysters thrive on prejudice, preen, preaching and exaggeration. Quite common for the famous, infamous,notorious, obessed, drunkard, dope addict, rich, talented, to presume sexual privileges and monetary profits from those who admire them, their work, performance, braggardy, promotion, self-advertising. Faithful, fans, subjects, citizens, voters, revolutionaries, diehards, warriors, slaves, why even SM followers, are seduced to be screwed by imaginary promises of shared glory and belonging to movements and beliefs of confidence artists, priests, Ponzis, prevaricators, presidents. From royalty to religion to banditry to warmaking to profiteering to, god help us, coding, abusive randiness goes with abusive success, earned or stolen or faked, all the last.

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Nuke Inertial Nav, Ring Gyro, GPS
by grarpamp 11 Oct '19

11 Oct '19

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/30254/this-isnt-a-sci-fi-prop-its-a-d… http://www.tatjavanvark.nl/tvv5/platfrm.html Build your own cruise missles.

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