Show me the Law(s) that makes it so. \0x On 9/21/16, Razer wrote:

On 09/21/2016 11:20 AM, Xer0Dynamite wrote:

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Like Lessig's "Code is Law". LAW is also CODE: it's the Operating System for your Government. Presently: bloated and with a few design flaws. Fortunately, it's Open Source. Muhahhhwhahaaa

\0x

But the hardware it runs on, the the Judicial-Industrial complex and it's activating mechanism the Law Enforcement-Industrial Complex, are closed source.

"Muhahhhwhahaaa"

Rr

On 09/21/2016 12:03 PM, Xer0Dynamite wrote:

Show me the Law(s) that makes it so.

\0x

Guns make it so. Law enforcement owns about 99.9% of all the military style weaponry. Have you ever seen this bit @Popehat: In 1776, when the height of military technology was a musket and a cannon, both of which you could make by melting down church bells, there might have been something to it. When the contest was little more than numbers of guns you could drag through the woods, and how to play the weather, the government probably did need to worry a bit about insurrection – and that might have kept them a bit more honest. However, the first time someone tried that kind of thing, it didn't work out so well. In fact, Shays' Rebellion just led to Constitutional tweaks to make the federal government that much stronger. The Civil War led to even more, with harsher consequences. If 13 states, with the assistance of at least one superpower, didn't manage to get their way through armed insurrection, what the hell makes anyone think that armed insurgency is going to preserve our right to … whatever … not have affordable health care, or to coffee cups that say "Happy Birthday Jesus" on them? Ok, fine… lets come up with a cause worth fighting for. Lets say that Obama refuses to step down in 2016, and he not only declares himself dictator-for-life, but he also starts dressing like Ghadaffi, decrees that the national religion shall be Islam, the national language will be Klingon, there will be an efficient rail network in the United States, the writ of Prima Noctae is now in effect, and there shall be martial law to enforce all of the above, as well as any other laws that the President invents, on a daily basis. We managed to preserve our right to keep military grade rifles and machine guns, so we all muster down on the Town Common with our guns. We tried voting. We tried protesting. This is a reasonable time to start with the armed insurrection stuff. So, you, me, all our neighbors, hell our entire city builds a perimeter around it. We fill sandbags, we all have ammunition, we all have food, water, supplies, and most importantly, we are all unified and in complete solidarity. And we stand there, resisting whatever it is the government was going to do to us. And then they fly over with one jet, dropping one FAE bomb, and roll in with three tanks, and in about 12 hours, our "resistance" is reduced to a few smoking holes. The Tree of Liberty will get its manure all right, but it will be the manure that you shat out as you ran for cover, as long range artillery rains down on our town, as we get carpet bombed from 35,000 feet, and as the sky goes black with drones and cruise missiles. We're screwed. So… if the 2nd Amendment's "right to revolution" implication is real, both practically and legally, it must also include a right to possess tanks, jets, rocket launchers, etc. Your puny AK-47 is useless. So, we need to have at least some of our volunteer resistance show up with Stinger missiles, some anti-aircraft batteries, maybe a submarine or two? Oh, you can't afford that? That's ok, we have some patriotic citizens who can. Who? The same billionaires who already own the government, that's who. So what do they want to "resist?" I could only see them wanting to resist checks on their own power. So, if the Second Amendment implies a right to resist the government, then that would mean that we need our billionaire friends to start stockpiling these weapons now. We need a Koch brothers airfield with a few fighters and bombers, and Adelson should have a fleet of tanks somewhere, and I guess that George Soros would bring his collection of nuke-armed submarines up to date, right? So lets drop the crazy scenario of Obama-cum-Ghadaffi, and just think about something we were really likely to see upset us. Do you think for a moment that you, living in some apartment in Salt Lake City, or a house in Wyoming, or a condo in Boca Raton, would be ready to go to war with the Federal Government over the same shit that would get the Koch Brothers to fuel up their private stock of A10 Warthogs? Really? Because you know what the billionaires want the government to stop doing? They want it to get out of the way of their becoming trillionaires. If you think that the Second Amendment means what the Supreme Court said in Heller, and you believe that is a good thing, because it gives you the ability to resist the government, you might want to play out the long game in your head. The long game here is this interpretation leads to private armies, raised by limitless wealth, all of which looks at our quaint little republican form of government as nothing more than a paper justification to have a flag waving over a few national parks." Yes... There's more: https://popehat.com/2015/12/07/you-are-not-going-to-resist-the-government-wi...

On 9/21/16, Razer wrote:

...

On 09/21/2016 11:20 AM, Xer0Dynamite wrote:

...

Like Lessig's "Code is Law". LAW is also CODE: it's the Operating System for your Government. Presently: bloated and with a few design flaws. Fortunately, it's Open Source. Muhahhhwhahaaa

\0x

But the hardware it runs on, the the Judicial-Industrial complex and it's activating mechanism the Law Enforcement-Industrial Complex, are closed source.

"Muhahhhwhahaaa"

Rr

On 09/21/2016 06:32 PM, Steve Kinney wrote:

The people in those Crown Colonies that became United States started refusing to pay taxes and surcharges, ignoring the orders of Crown authorities, and constructing their own systems of commerce and governance long before that "shot heard 'round the world." The Revolutionary War was more a response to a campaign by the Crown to take the Colonies back over, than a struggle to kick established rulers out. That is why the Revolutionary War had the necessary organization and mass public support to succeed.

There was no American Revolution. Revolutions are based on ideology. Greed IS NOT an ideology. ("...started refusing to pay taxes and surcharges, ignoring the orders of Crown authorities, and constructing their own systems of commerce..." That favored ***THEIR*** WHITE RICH MALE interests.) Rr

On 09/21/2016 08:34 PM, Razer wrote:

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On 09/21/2016 12:03 PM, Xer0Dynamite wrote:

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Show me the Law(s) that makes it so.

\0x

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Guns make it so. Law enforcement owns about 99.9% of all the military style weaponry.

Collusion between Legislators, Judges, Prosecutors and other attorneys make it so. Software code is interpreted by machines without conflicts of interest or hands out for bribes. Legal code is interpreted by semi-humans who chose "power over others" as their career path and invested a lot of energy and money in gaining that power .

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We managed to preserve our right to keep military grade rifles and machine guns, so we all muster down on the Town Common with our guns.

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We tried voting.

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We tried protesting.

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This is a reasonable time to start with the armed insurrection stuff.

A reasonable time to demonstrate the painful ignorance and delusional beliefs our rulers have given us, to assure that we stay ruled. Armed insurrection, before the revolution process has even started, is a gesture of suicide/surrender we have been taught to perform. Think of it as the ultimate act of obedience to established authority.

A revolution is won or lost before the first publicly acknowledged shot is fired. The shooting war is the last phase, its purpose to pry the fingers of a stubborn ruling class off the levers of power /after/ their rule has already been rendered obsolete and irrelevant by changes in the actual economic and social behavior of their subjects. Otherwise it's a coup, not a revolution. A revolution is "the world turned upside down." A coup just changes out the old bastards for a new set of bastards, usually worse ones.

The people in those Crown Colonies that became United States started refusing to pay taxes and surcharges, ignoring the orders of Crown authorities, and constructing their own systems of commerce and governance long before that "shot heard 'round the world." The Revolutionary War was more a response to a campaign by the Crown to take the Colonies back over, than a struggle to kick established rulers out. That is why the Revolutionary War had the necessary organization and mass public support to succeed.

I found the bits of this essay addressing the Revolutionary War very interesting, largely because I had not previously seen anything similar in print anywhere:

http://www.fragmentsweb.org/fourtx/dishist.pdf

:o)

On 09/21/2016 08:15 PM, Steve Kinney wrote:

Since Greed is about power, a political revolution has little if anything to do with ideology,

There's an ideological difference between communism and capitalism. Ideally communism should mean the elimination of greed as a driving force in a society. Including greed for power. However, as you described, the "American Revolution" was simply a 'transfer of pwnership of the levers of greed' from the Crown to rich white men settlers by partially force, and partially the isolation from Britain that made it simply too costly to pursue a full occupation, and perhaps forced removal of their errant subjects. If Britain wanted to, it could have sailed an armada into Boston Harbor and leveled the whole city. They didn't. There's a whole bunch of other things they could have done, including paying the Natives, whose toes were being 'stepped on', to say the least, very well, to slaughter every last guerrilla fighter hiding in the Green Mountains all the way up to Canada. There was no revolution. The same is true of India and the removal of the crown there. Rr

On 09/21/2016 10:50 PM, Razer wrote:

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On 09/21/2016 06:32 PM, Steve Kinney wrote:

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rulers out. That is why the Revolutionary War had the necessary organization and mass public support to succeed.

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There was no American Revolution. Revolutions are based on ideology.

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Greed IS NOT an ideology.

In my view, Religion is about ideology and Politics is about power. Since Greed is about power, a political revolution has little if anything to do with ideology, except in that ideological propaganda (emotionally charged fact-free bullshit) is always employed to persuade people to support and participate in revolutions - or to violently oppose them, as the propagandists' employers may direct.

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("...started refusing to pay taxes and surcharges, ignoring the orders of Crown authorities, and constructing their own systems of commerce..." That favored ***THEIR*** WHITE RICH MALE interests.)

Well duh. Before the American Revolution, holders of Crown land grants were the most wealthy and powerful people in the Colonies. After the American Revolution, former holders of Crown land grants were the most wealthy and powerful people in the States. The U.S. Constitution was written for the purpose of creating a Federal authority capable of stomping down popular uprisings against abuses of power by these same de facto rulers.

American racism was invented by the same fine folks, as a response to slave uprisings earlier in Colonial history: By granting White "indentured" slaves special privileges, they successfully divided the conquered. That process has continued uninterrupted, with adaptations to accommodate changing conditions, until the present day: In Obama's Amerika, any black person with a Master's Degree or above is as good as any white person - all others pay in blood.

Which is why we need more revolutions, beginning with establishing alternative ways of life that reduce or eliminate the role of today's rulers and the passionately held, completely false Truths they dictate to our own communities. Big job? The biggest. If not for the pending collapse of the global material economy, I would call it an impossible job - vs. one of the most important jobs anyone could be working on today.

On 09/22/2016 01:56 AM, Zenaan Harkness wrote:

On Wed, Sep 21, 2016 at 08:30:55PM -0700, Razer wrote:

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On 09/21/2016 08:15 PM, Steve Kinney wrote:

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Since Greed is about power, a political revolution has little if anything to do with ideology,

There's an ideological difference between communism and capitalism.

Ideally communism should mean the elimination of greed as a driving force in a society. Including greed for power.

You cannot eliminate human nature.

But it's absolutely VOLUNTARILY modifiable to suit. You believe in predestination too?

Greed and lust for power are tendencies of human nature.

To what degree? Are you entirely obsessive compulsive about it or is it less pronounced? (Do you use your superpowers for good or evil as measured by the rest of the tribe? And does it 'scale' from the tribe to the rest of the larger community, and that larger community..). There ARE societies on the Earth today that DO NOT put the individual first. Ofc NOT "Western Industrial Societies". A while back, maybe 5 or ten years ago, I read a story about an anthropologist working in an African village and he went and bought some candy for the kids... He, like a hyper-competitive westerner might do, made them race to a tree for it. When the winner grabbed the boo-tay the child started handing it out to the other kids. When the anthropologist asked why he didn't keep it all the child had a very simple reply. "But how could I be happy if all my friends are sad?" I don't think you're aware of how truly fucked up beyond all recognition (spelled out intentionally) industrial societies are. But you WOULD BE if bombs to get the oil and other resources to make the computer you and I use were falling on YOUR CHILD'S head. Dimitry Orlov's blogger friend responds to "How (not) to Organize a Community" with a post called "But what IS community". This is Orlov's Forward: "This is another guest post from Yevgeny, which he wrote in response to my article How (not) to Organize a Community. He poses what, to a Russian, seems an obvious question: “How (not) to organize a WHAT?” You see, upon close examination the English word “community” turns out to be all but meaningless..." http://cluborlov.blogspot.se/2010/11/but-what-is-community.html In the original piece he spells out in great detail how the outcasts of a society build a stronger, more resilient one. They're also likely to be marauders. That's the end result of cooperative societies ejecting the non-cooperative members. They band together like the psychopaths they are, and exact vengeance on the ejecting community. Mirmir and I had an interesting off-list chat about a group like that in US counterculture. The "STP Family" and concurrent "'A' Camp", the Bane of Rainbow Gatherings. In the larger context there are people making BILLIONS of dollars from the breakdown of cohesion, the social atomization, of humanity. They are my enemy. Rr

But perhaps it is possible to commoditize politics, rather than have politics be a tool for the wealthy and powerful?

(How? Good question - time to hack concepts.)

On Thu, Sep 22, 2016 at 11:06:17PM -0000, xorcist@sigaint.org wrote:

Greed is a fundamental problem of Capitalism. It is also a fundamental problem of Socialism. The Soviet chiefs in the Politburo weren't standing in the bread lines with everyone else.

On the other hand, greed is the primary driver which led us humans where we are today. Without it, we'd surely still be hunter-gatherer's living every day on the edge of extinction. So, fighting greed might not work. Tom

On Fri, Sep 23, 2016 at 05:34:05AM -0000, xorcist@sigaint.org wrote:

I'm not sure I agree with that assessment, but even if you could convince me, it's also then brought us full-circle: nukes. So we haven't really gained much, by that measure.

But then, try to live the life of some farmer in 730 a.d. or of a slave in 2.500 b.c. egypt, or that of a miner in 4.000 b.c. china. In fact, we're living in the best possible times humans have ever had. Surely there are lots of things which could be better, don't get me wrong. But one thing is for sure: past times, all of them, were worse than today for most people on earth.

And yet, you're also talking to a guy that enjoys jumping out of airplanes, and I can tell you that the edge of extinction is a rather lovely 45 seconds.

LOL :) Tom

On Wed, Sep 21, 2016 at 11:15:53PM -0400, Steve Kinney wrote:

Which is why we need more revolutions, beginning with establishing alternative ways of life that reduce or eliminate the role of today's rulers and the passionately held, completely false Truths they dictate to our own communities. Big job? The biggest. If not for the pending collapse of the global material economy, I would call it an impossible job - vs. one of the most important jobs anyone could be working on today.

<shhh whisper>New <ssshhhh> Hampshire

AK47's are useless? The Afghani's repelled the Soviets with manual-action rifles from WWI and WWI. Then took their AK47's and repelled NATO. And the Taliban is still there. So I think they'd take exception with this. But there are good points to it. The ability for insurrection is largely overstated. But nothing is impossible if you're willing to die.

On 09/21/2016 12:03 PM, Xer0Dynamite wrote:

...

Show me the Law(s) that makes it so.

\0x

Guns make it so. Law enforcement owns about 99.9% of all the military style weaponry.

Have you ever seen this bit @Popehat:

In 1776, when the height of military technology was a musket and a cannon, both of which you could make by melting down church bells, there might have been something to it. When the contest was little more than numbers of guns you could drag through the woods, and how to play the weather, the government probably did need to worry a bit about insurrection – and that might have kept them a bit more honest.

However, the first time someone tried that kind of thing, it didn't work out so well. In fact, Shays' Rebellion just led to Constitutional tweaks to make the federal government that much stronger. The Civil War led to even more, with harsher consequences.

If 13 states, with the assistance of at least one superpower, didn't manage to get their way through armed insurrection, what the hell makes anyone think that armed insurgency is going to preserve our right to … whatever … not have affordable health care, or to coffee cups that say "Happy Birthday Jesus" on them?

Ok, fine… lets come up with a cause worth fighting for.

Lets say that Obama refuses to step down in 2016, and he not only declares himself dictator-for-life, but he also starts dressing like Ghadaffi, decrees that the national religion shall be Islam, the national language will be Klingon, there will be an efficient rail network in the United States, the writ of Prima Noctae is now in effect, and there shall be martial law to enforce all of the above, as well as any other laws that the President invents, on a daily basis.

We managed to preserve our right to keep military grade rifles and machine guns, so we all muster down on the Town Common with our guns.

We tried voting.

We tried protesting.

This is a reasonable time to start with the armed insurrection stuff.

So, you, me, all our neighbors, hell our entire city builds a perimeter around it. We fill sandbags, we all have ammunition, we all have food, water, supplies, and most importantly, we are all unified and in complete solidarity.

And we stand there, resisting whatever it is the government was going to do to us.

And then they fly over with one jet, dropping one FAE bomb, and roll in with three tanks, and in about 12 hours, our "resistance" is reduced to a few smoking holes.

The Tree of Liberty will get its manure all right, but it will be the manure that you s

On Thu, Sep 22, 2016 at 03:12:11AM -0000, xorcist@sigaint.org wrote:

They were bloody well fed anti tank and anti aircraft rpgs and the like by the USA - that's how they took down the USSR occupation.

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Then took their AK47's and repelled NATO.

Your simplification may be useful to inspire, but more research by the wanna be AK47 wielder is most definitely required!

You really might want to look into this yourself. Western military analysts tend to see the introduction of the Stinger missles as the "turning point" in the war. Russian analysts see the decision much differently. Gorbachev had ordered the scale-down, and withdrawal a full year before the Afghans fired their first Stinger. And of course, no one was feeding them artillery during the invasion by NATO. But, in a way, you're right. It wasn't REALLY the rifle's that let them win. It was the mountains. Nevertheless, given the proper conditions and terrain it is not difficult to mitigate tanks and aircraft. It is not difficult to arrange a situation where an army needs to walk in, on foot. And once you get them to that point, it's all about the rifles. I don't know exactly what the terrain is like in some of the U.S. mountain areas, but I'm sure there are suitable areas. But it doesn't even matter. If you have the bodies? Grab rifles, walk into New York and D.C., and squat them. Tanks and aircraft are useless. They aren't going to use artillery on Manhattan or D.C. Three thousand or so "tourists" show up over the course of 6-8 months in each city. There are abandoned subway tunnels in NY might get overlooked. You'd need access to some hardware to break in, but if you can manage something like this, that is trivial. There may be something similar in DC. The problem isn't that artillery and aircraft are too difficult to avoid, and mitigate. Its that the people are too weak. Big difference. And in any civil war scenario, its quite likely you'll gain anti-aircraft missles, artillery, etc, very early. It is always likely that you'll inspire at least a partial military coup.

And TAKE NOTICE all WANNA BE INSURRECTIONISTS - our TLA 'friends' will always try to infiltrate, demonstrate and thereafter express authority, and finally cause your insurrection to launch waay too early, well before you have any chance of succeeding.

I don't know the whole story, but I read awhile back about some situation or another in the States where militias had a stand off with the Federal government, and the government stood down? If this is true, its a serious indication that the United States government is greatly weakening. Considering its importance to the west, generally, its good news all around.

Right. US military have trained heavily for this scenario, however.

So? That can actually play to your advantage. With heavy training, comes assumptions of what to expect, and an ingrained game-plan. If you know what they expect, you simply do something else, and cause confusion.

Well, too weak or not, far too few of them want freedom badly enough.

Yeah, the conditions for real insurrection are rare, and tends to involve a great deal of suffering. As a tyrannt, if you can keep the population fat, and entertained, you'll be alright.

That does seem to be a favorite tactic. But even if you take down the national government, it's police forces and National Guard units that would become feudal overlords. So armed insurrection seems pointless.

Nah, you're looking at it in a vacuum. If the conditions are right to get a large enough force together to do something like that, there is enough social support to get a majority on board. Read, or review, Che Guevara's work "Guerrilla Warfare" .. he makes a pretty compelling case for the types of conditions that need to be met in order to have an effective insurrection.

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If this is true, its a serious indication that the United States government is greatly weakening. Considering its importance to the west, generally, its good news all around.

Wishful thinking.

OK, so you made me go digging this up. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2014/dhs-report-... Federal agents has firearms pointed at them, and stood down. DHS subsequently predicted a rise in anti-government and anti-police activity as a result. They were right about that, it would seem.

On Wed, 21 Sep 2016 17:34:23 -0700 Razer quoted:

So… if the 2nd Amendment's "right to revolution" implication is real, both practically and legally, it must also include a right to possess tanks, jets, rocket launchers, etc.

Yes. And not because of some constitutional statist bullshit, but as a matter of natural rights.

Your puny AK-47 is useless. So, we need to have at least some of our volunteer resistance show up with Stinger missiles, some anti-aircraft batteries, maybe a submarine or two?

Oh, you can't afford that?

Actually, who says that you can't make D-I-Y missiles, chemical weapons and the like? You of course can, and so the rest of the article is bullshit. Now, the people who say that you can't are people who want you to be afraid of the kochs, and want you to believe that the government is bad, but the koch are worse, so you should thank the government from protecting you from the kochs after all. And funnily enough these people who claim to be against the koch are actually the kochs' best friends because the kochs couldn't do what they do if the government didn't back them.

That's ok, we have some patriotic citizens who can.

Who?

The same billionaires who already own the government, that's who.

So what do they want to "resist?"

I could only see them wanting to resist checks on their own power.

So, if the Second Amendment implies a right to resist the government, then that would mean that we need our billionaire friends to start stockpiling these weapons now. We need a Koch brothers airfield with a few fighters and bombers, and Adelson should have a fleet of tanks somewhere, and I guess that George Soros would bring his collection of nuke-armed submarines up to date, right?

So lets drop the crazy scenario of Obama-cum-Ghadaffi, and just think about something we were really likely to see upset us. Do you think for a moment that you, living in some apartment in Salt Lake City, or a house in Wyoming, or a condo in Boca Raton, would be ready to go to war with the Federal Government over the same shit that would get the Koch Brothers to fuel up their private stock of A10 Warthogs? Really?

Because you know what the billionaires want the government to stop doing?

They want it to get out of the way of their becoming trillionaires.

If you think that the Second Amendment means what the Supreme Court said in Heller, and you believe that is a good thing, because it gives you the ability to resist the government, you might want to play out the long game in your head.

The long game here is this interpretation leads to private armies, raised by limitless wealth, all of which looks at our quaint little republican form of government as nothing more than a paper justification to have a flag waving over a few national parks."

Yes... There's more: https://popehat.com/2015/12/07/you-are-not-going-to-resist-the-government-wi...

...

Show me the Law(s) that makes it so.

Guns make it so. Law enforcement owns about 99.9% of all the military style weaponry. [...] We tried voting. We tried protesting.

1) The protesting you've tried hasn't utilized the strategy of law, only appeals to emotions. 2) The government still relies on money from its citizens, if people don't give it money it won't be able to pay its military to shoot its own citizens, or buy the bullets in which to shoot them. 3) There is the DSM from psychiatry in which you can CLINICALLY diagnose America with several pathologies. This is enough to win a court case about giving money to the federal government. Anyway, you apparently still haven't thought about what I linked to you. It gets very tiring re-explaining myself (I've been assaulted four times already by the Establishment and abandoned those who are perfectly content with their coffee-shop lives). \0x

This is a reasonable time to start with the armed insurrection stuff. Your puny AK-47 is useless. So, we need to have at least some of our volunteer resistance show up with Stinger missiles, some anti-aircraft batteries, maybe a submarine or two?

Oh, you can't afford that?

On 9/26/16 11:35 AM, Sean Lynch wrote:

On Wed, Sep 21, 2016 at 11:20 AM, Xer0Dynamite mailto:dreamingforward@gmail.com> wrote:

Like Lessig's "Code is Law". LAW is also CODE: it's the Operating System for your Government. Presently: bloated and with a few design flaws. Fortunately, it's Open Source. Muhahhhwhahaaa

This is almost worthy of being called THE "Geek Fallacy." It is why people who seem otherwise smart are so often statists. They love systems and they make the mistake of thinking government is just a machine and that all it needs is better code. But that's totally false. Human organizations are NOT MACHINES, at least nothing nearly so simple as a computer. They are run not by code but by people responding to incentives. If you want to see what their programming is, look not at the laws but at the incentives people are responding to. "Programming" such a beast looks far more like biological evolution than it does like programming a computer.

This, by the way, is why our legislation is so complex. You cannot tell the goal of a piece of legislation by reading it. You can watch it in operation and see what happens, and you can try to understand the incentives of the people who wrote it and voted on it, but that's it. For the most part, if a law gets passed and then doesn't get changed, in all probability the intent of the law is precisely what its effect is.

All of that is still programming. Parenting is programming. Culture is programming. A speech is programming. Up to a certain age / experience / introspectiveness it is hard to see various things as programming people, but eventually it becomes obvious how much that is true. Certain people are naturally (or through happenstance become advanced) in understanding and manipulating others, or at least being able to if and when the need or desire to. Many use this sparingly and for the good of those people; others take advantage of others. The skill and related contexts are real. The TV series "The Mentalist" is completely about this. I generally agree about intent of laws, although some percentage of time unintended consequences, good or bad from various points of view, can lock in a law that ended up much different than the original intent. Some very good laws were partly passed after key provisions were added that were expected to be outlandish enough to kill it, but passed anyway. sdw

On 9/26/16 12:38 PM, Sean Lynch wrote:

On Mon, Sep 26, 2016 at 12:27 PM, Stephen D. Williams mailto:sdw@lig.net> wrote:

On 9/26/16 11:35 AM, Sean Lynch wrote:

...

On Wed, Sep 21, 2016 at 11:20 AM, Xer0Dynamite mailto:dreamingforward@gmail.com> wrote:

Like Lessig's "Code is Law". LAW is also CODE: it's the Operating System for your Government. Presently: bloated and with a few design flaws. Fortunately, it's Open Source. Muhahhhwhahaaa

This is almost worthy of being called THE "Geek Fallacy." It is why people who seem otherwise smart are so often statists. They love systems and they make the mistake of thinking government is just a machine and that all it needs is better code. But that's totally false. Human organizations are NOT MACHINES, at least nothing nearly so simple as a computer. They are run not by code but by people responding to incentives. If you want to see what their programming is, look not at the laws but at the incentives people are responding to. "Programming" such a beast looks far more like biological evolution than it does like programming a computer.

This, by the way, is why our legislation is so complex. You cannot tell the goal of a piece of legislation by reading it. You can watch it in operation and see what happens, and you can try to understand the incentives of the people who wrote it and voted on it, but that's it. For the most part, if a law gets passed and then doesn't get changed, in all probability the intent of the law is precisely what its effect is.

All of that is still programming. Parenting is programming. Culture is programming. A speech is programming. Up to a certain age / experience / introspectiveness it is hard to see various things as programming people, but eventually it becomes obvious how much that is true. Certain people are naturally (or through happenstance become advanced) in understanding and manipulating others, or at least being able to if and when the need or desire to. Many use this sparingly and for the good of those people; others take advantage of others. The skill and related contexts are real. The TV series "The Mentalist" is completely about this.

I generally agree about intent of laws, although some percentage of time unintended consequences, good or bad from various points of view, can lock in a law that ended up much different than the original intent. Some very good laws were partly passed after key provisions were added that were expected to be outlandish enough to kill it, but passed anyway.

My problem with viewing any of this as programming is that you can look at a computer's code and predict what it will do. You cannot do that with any of the other things you're calling "programming" there. The closest analogy might be trying to program a broken computer built by an insane genius in a language you don't actually understand but that looks like English. You know what the words mean but you have no idea what will happen when they're actually run. Oh, and by the way, there's a bunch of extra firmware there you have no access to and that's changing all the time.

Sounds like Windows programming to me... But, more to the point: Just because it is fuzzy, probabilistic, competitive influence programming doesn't mean it isn't programming. It's not simple, easy, shallow programming, but that's half the fun. This is also programming, somewhat analogously: http://deeplearning.net/ sdw