Re: The Security Übermensch

Sat Sep 7 23:45:09 CEST 2013

I'm really sorry you've taken offence Paul. I wish I knew what offended
you, as I'm having a hard time relating your post to anything we've been
discussing.

- Andy_R

On 7 September 2013 22:08, Paul Maddox <yo at vacoloco.net> wrote:

> you know what, I can't believe some of the bullshit I'm reading...
> I had written a long response, but you know what, I'm above that now, I
> have better things to do in life than argue with someone who's just not on
> the same planet.
>
> I will say, that I strongly hope none of you ever have to suffer the loss
> of a loved one at the hand of someone else.
>
> The lack of "reality" in some of these comments is just astounding. Let me
> know when politics are banned from the bar and I'll rejoin.
>
> I wish you all the best in the world with whatever paths you chose to take.
>
> Paul
>
>
> On 7 September 2013 20:10, Andrew Robinson <andrew at bml.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> Madly busy here (and have allocated next week to doing music not
>> politics, before diving back into education to get a Masters degree after
>> that), but I'll throw in some observations...
>>
>> Political parties are heading into into a larger version of the post
>> Vietnam problem that America just just about stumbled through: For a period
>> of time, all potential presidential candidates were either too old, too
>> young, draft-dodgers or vietnam vets, any one of which made them unsuitable.
>>
>> The coming problem is that given the pervasiveness of the internet, any
>> sufficiently advanced surveillance system can blackmail all non
>> sociopathically boring people ("Nearly 300,000 "attempts to access websites
>> categorised as pornography" were made from computers within parliament in
>> the past year, official records show."-
>> http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/sep/03/parliamentary-network-pornography-websites-figures).
>>
>> This means that spying agencies have the potential to be scarily good at
>> self-preservation (conspiracy theorists are already attribute Obama's oddly
>> pro-surveillance state position to exactly this mechanism).
>>
>> Politics is an odd beast, and like publishing, music making and so many
>> other fields, computers will probably change it in unpredictable ways over
>> the coming years. Arguably Arab spring was partially the product of
>> disaffected people being able to find each other and organise things in
>> cyberspace.
>>
>> One of the oddest things in politics is that people ignore actual
>> candidates and vote instead for parties, even if their local candidate from
>> that party is hopelessly misaligned with that party, or even just plain
>> hopeless. I have no idea how this could be changed, but changing it would
>> lead to a drastic improvement in the quality of candidates from all parties.
>>
>> Wish I had time to write more...
>>
>> - Andy_R
>>
>>
>> On 7 September 2013 19:38, Jay Vaughan <jayv at synth.net> wrote:
>>
>>> An excellent and composed discourse on your position, Tony .. I respond
>>> to some points which struck me quite intelligent:
>>>
>>> On 06/09/2013, at 3:08 PM, Tony Scharf <entropymagnet at noisetheorem.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>> > By spying on the people from which the power to govern is derived the
>>> government loses all right to complain when it is in turn spied on.  In
>>> fact, they leave us little choice but to spy.
>>>
>>> I've never considered the fact that I have no clue whatsoever what the
>>> government is doing on a daily basis, to be very settling at all.  In fact
>>> from a very young age, I simply abandoned any interest in government due to
>>> the obscurity and obfuscation of the entire subject.  Its not some added
>>> feature to our society which I felt I learned about adequately and
>>> participate in properly, but rather an industry in and of itself, tied very
>>> much to every single persons' survival, yet at the same time, disconnected
>>> completely from the individual.
>>>
>>> Government is just 'out there', and I sort of trust this
>>> 'super-'organism to be doing its job. I guess someone is doing their job in
>>> the end, and a lot of very good government occurs along the way, let us not
>>> forget, because there are a lot of people out here in the world who are
>>> *not* killing each other, and who *do* get along just fine with managing
>>> their resources around them, such that everyone wins.  Somehow.
>>>
>>> And this aspect of this super-being/entity is something that I just
>>> don't perceive, in any technical sense, other than at the tip of the spear.
>>>  Must I really become a lawyer to be able to keep pace with government, at
>>> a simple level?  It seems so.
>>>
>>> So your suggestion that we spy on the spies rings for me.  Why do we
>>> not, in fact, just all have free and unwilling access to every single thing
>>> that someone does, in our names, with ease?
>>>
>>> Because government - like all human activities, always and forever - is
>>> continually being subverted.  Actively.  "Sub-"consciously.  By other,
>>> 'super-'entities, such as corporations, leagues, religions, countless forms
>>> of institution, association, and so on..
>>>
>>> The Open-Source politics in me suggests that we can actually fix this.
>>>  Its a technological problem as well as an ethical one.  I'm not sure that
>>> Liquid Democracy is the solution (Pirate Party), but its a start.
>>>
>>>
>>> >   I tend to believe that this is just an unintended consequence of
>>> creating what essentially becomes a primitive collective consciousness, an
>>> oversoul that we all tap into digitally at this point (though in the
>>> future, that connection may become much more complete and intimate).
>>>
>>> These 'collective consciousnesses' that you describe, or
>>> 'super-'entities, or 'hiveminds', or 'consumer market groups', or whatever
>>> we call them .. we have a lot of them running the planet right now.
>>>  They're all connected.  Its going to be very hard to defeat the people
>>> running the highly-destructive companies such as Monsanto and Raytheon, in
>>> an ideological sense, because there are a mighty *lot* of people working in
>>> that industry, and their ideology is *aligned* at the same time there are
>>> active procedures and methodologies being run on the social stage in order
>>> to *prevent* other alignment occurring, by other groups.  Witness the
>>> destruction of the Tea Party.  Witness the undermining of the Occupy
>>> movement.  Witness countless human-rights groups activities being
>>> dissembled, in industrial fashion, over the last hundred years - and even
>>> still today, we will find subversion occurring.
>>>
>>> Its a battlefield of ideology versus ideology, a massive sphere of
>>> interconnected mental activity, all boiling down to just a few small
>>> things: who has the food, and who has the bomb.  Who gets to sleep safe at
>>> night, and who simply die, unnoticed.
>>>
>>> Government is in the business of answering these questions, and that is
>>> the problem in my personal opinion.  Humans should never enslave themselves
>>> as products, but oh boy: we do it.  The mere fact that we are treated as
>>> consumers is the clue.
>>>
>>>
>>> > There is actually a book I read some time in the 90's by David Brin
>>> (?) called 'Earth'.
>>>
>>> Great recommendation!
>>>
>>> ;
>>> --
>>> Jay Vaughan
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>>
>>
>>
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