What is a cypherpunk?

[Steve Thompson]

 --- Justin <justin-cypherpunks at soze.net> wrote: 
> On 2005-02-15T13:23:37-0500, Steve Thompson wrote:
> >  --- "James A. Donald" <jamesd at echeque.com> wrote: 
> > [snip]
> > > As governments were created to smash property rights, they are 
> > > always everywhere necessarily the enemy of those with property, 
> > > and the greatest enemy of those with the most property.
> > 
> > Uh-huh.  Perhaps you are using the term 'government' in a way that is
> not
> > common to most writers of modern American English?
> 
> I think it's fair to say that governments initially formed to protect
> property rights (although we have no historical record of such a
> government because it must have been before recorded history began).

I think it's fair to say that governments were initially, and still
largely remain today, the public formalisation of religious rule applied
to the  civil sphere of existence.  It's more complicated than that, but
generally speaking, somewhat disparate religious populations (protestant,
catholic, jew, etc.) accepted the fiction of secular civil governance when
in reality religious groups have tended to dominate the shape and
direction of civil government, while professing to remain at arms-length.

'Fiction' is the operative term here, and I contend that nowhere is this
more evident in the closed world of clandestine affairs -- civilian OR
military.  Religion has always been about 'powerful' and educated in-sect
sub-populations organising civil and intellectuall affairs in such a way
as to mobilise the serfs to the advantage of the privilaged, all the while
presenting convenient systems of fiction to the masses that are expected
to suffice as the broad official reality of society; a reality fully
accessable to some who quite naturally use their position of possibly
intellectual privilage to order the affairs of the serf/slaves.

> They then developed into monarchies which were only really set up to
> protect property rights of the ruler(s).

If I'm not mistaken, it was in Germany where the concept of public
figureheads-as-leaders was evolved to a system in which the figurehead
(king, pontiff, leader) was presented as the soruce of state power, but
who in actuality was groomed, controlled, and ruled by a non-public
contingent of privilaged political and intellectual elite who, in general,
ran the affairs of state and/or religion from the back room, so to speak.

This way of organising the public affairs of government has, I think,
roots that date back to the ancient Greeks, but is also largely in favour
today.
 
> With the advent of various quasi-democratic forms of government, the law
> has been compromised insofar as it protects property rights.  You no
> longer have a right to keep all your money (taxes), no longer have a
> right to grow 5' weeds in your front yard if you live in a city, and no
> longer have a right to own certain evil things at all, at least not
> without special governmental permission.  There were analogous
> compromises in democratic Athens and quasi-democratic Rome.

It's rather different today.  
 
> When democratic states inevitably fold into tyranny, some of those
> restrictions remain.  Right now most states have a strange mix of
> property rights protections (e.g. the Berne convention and the DMCA) and
> property rights usurpations (e.g. no right to own certain weapons; equal
> protection).

Agreements and accords such as the Berne convention and the DCMA, to say
nothing of human-rights legislation, are hobbled by the toothlessness of
enforcement, pulic apathy to others' rights, and a load of convenient
exceptions to such rules made for the agents of state.  For instance, the
copyright on my computer software was blithely subverted by the fascist
ubermench involved and responsible for the surveillance detail that I have
suffered over the past two decades.  I listened to some of these people
make excuses for stealing my intellectual property, fashioning rumours to
lessen the wrong of their theft, or 'merely' applying pressure or making
plans to 'encourage' the release of my code in the public domain so their
prior theft could be buried.  Failing that, they have simply stolen all my
computer equipment and delayed my life, possibly so my code could be
`developed' by their own programmers and a history shown -- perhaps with
the partial aim of finally accusing me of stealing "their" intellectual
property after it is released in their own product.

These people are nothing more than jack-booted thugs, and whether they are
Nazis or not is immaterial to the fact that their methods and ideology
closely resemble a modernised version of it.   Whatever the EXCUSE
offered, it is a triumph of putocratic-fascist zeaotry in the sense that
nominally modern and democratic institutions and groups in this world have
acquired some of the memes that drove the Gestapo/SS/Abwher.  There is no
excuse, but since Orwellian political and intellectual abdications and
maneuvers are quite well in fashion today, it is obviously stylisn to
pretend that such things do not and cannot possibly occur.  Hence the
stupefying silence over what is bloody fucking obvious to anyone with half
a brain.

Have a nice day.


Regards,

Steve


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