Re: Vengeance Libertarianism
On Wed, Dec 31, 2003 at 01:14:01PM -0600, Harmon Seaver wrote: > On Wed, Dec 31, 2003 at 01:59:50PM -0500, Sunder wrote: > > If those are your beliefs, then by all means, set the first example, and > > go kill yourself. Better yet, sacrifice yourself to your goddess... By > > doing so, you'll also earn yourself a Darwin Award... unless you've > > already fathered kids... But from your tone of voice, I'd say you've > > probably castrated yourself years ago. > > No, I have offspring. But what makes you think I'm human? The painful banality and stupidity of the junk you're spouting is a good indicator. -- avva
Re: Release Saddam now
On Fri, Dec 19, 2003 at 01:17:28PM -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Saddam is being wrongly held by illegal invaders and occupiers. He > should be immediately released or turned over to legitimate > authorities, such as the international courts. Advocate for the > release of Saddam Hussein, and the withdrawal of the USurpers. Pass the > word. And here I thought the fuckwits couldn't get any dumber. Boy oh boy. -- avva
Re: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
On Fri, Dec 19, 2003 at 10:11:32AM -0500, Sunder wrote: > That all depends on your definition of sovereign. After all, "we" put, or > at least helped, that monster into power. Not really, no. > So, while he was our puppet, He was never out puppet. > he was the good guy, He was never the good guy, and was never called a good guy by "us". Well, except for the idiots who are now calling for his release, I guess. > and > no matter how many > he murdered, he was a benevolent leader. Not really, no. > Now, we'll put a different "democratic" government in place. Of course, > it won't be as free as the USA, nor have the same kind of constitution - > that would be a problem since we couldn't control it's oil. If all we wanted was to control its oil we wouldn't try to put a democratic government in place, with or without the quote. Gosh, the oil-conspiracy nutcases are so dumb, it's tiring. > Nothing new, nothing to be surprised about. Exactly, a bunch of lies from the usual quarters. A stream of revisionist history from useful idiots hell-bent on making it ALL OUR FAULT, ever and ever again. It's a movable feast. > The war on terror itself will go on for as long as the voters will > tolerate it, or until it's true goals succeede and it becomes impossible > for the voters to do anything but accept it - or be disappeared in the > middle of the night... Not much different than in Stalin or Hitler's > days. You don't know much about Stalin's or Hitler's times, do you? -- avva
Re: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
On Wed, Dec 17, 2003 at 04:46:51PM -0500, Michael Kalus wrote: > Nice, but the problem still remains: At this point it doesn't matter > what he has done (or we say he has done). Of course it matters. > This is not a punishment. > "Innocent until proofen guilty" anyone? This is the basis for the > "enlightened" western society, no? This is a principle of civilian life, not military conflicts. There's no "innocent until proven guilty" in military conflicts, surely you understand that. Oh, and BTW, do you know that in the enlightened western society (give up the sarcastic quotes shtick, it's died and its corpse stinks pretty badly) judges commonly allow or deny bail, or set its amount, based on hypothesised accusations against a detained person, when nothing at all has been proven, in the court of law or otherwise? Why don't you go and fight that grievious injustice? -- avva
Re: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
On Wed, Dec 17, 2003 at 12:12:55PM -0600, Harmon Seaver wrote: > > This isn't a ski mask burglary. We KNOW Saddam ruled Iraq. > > We KNOW what crimes were committed. Simple syllogism. > > No we don't. We only know what the propaganda mills have told us. Twenty years > ago it was a different story. Right. We don't know that he's a murdering son of a bitch, that's all propaganda, but we DO know that we've supported him in the past and IT'S ALL OUR FAULT. That is no propaganda, surely. There's never any need to qualify *those* kinds of assertons with the "propaganda mills" line. -- avva
Re: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
On Wed, Dec 17, 2003 at 05:06:55PM -0500, Tyler Durden wrote: > A thread that started out quasi-interesting has descended into > non-Cypherpunk levels of triviality. I thought it was trivial all along. > The original point stands, and is valid. The Islamic world and, in > particular, the Arabic part of the Islamic world, are probably going to > forget their dislike of Saddam when they see those newreels of the great > Dictator being rubbergloved and de-loused. Oh please. They (well, many of them) sure didn't forget their dislike of the US when they saw those newsreels of the twin towers tumbling down. > For them it's almost certainly > going to resound as a symbol of how we've systematically manipulated and > fucked them over all these years. Actually, they mostly systematically manipulated and fucked themselves over, with occassional help from different factions in the rest of the world. And they already have a "symbol of how we've", etc. - American military presence in the most holy of Islamic countries, Saudi Arabia. That's one of the largest reasons for Al-Qaeda growth in recent years. Compared to infidel military bases somewhere near Mecca and Medina, whatever's done to some dictator who has presided over a mostly secular regime is insignificant. And American military presence in Saudi Arabia is actually subsiding now because Iraq is no longer a threat. > They're not going to respect our "Power", > they're not going to care much that WE supported Saddam in the first place. > They're just going to get angrier. This is just so much armchair psychology. Most of it is silly theoretising that has no grounding in reality. One side says: look, we had to humuliate him publicly, because those Arabs only understand power, they only respect you if you clearly show them who's the boss, bla bla bla. The other side says: we shouldn't humiliate him, because the Arab culture is built around the all-powerful concept of pride, and they'll never forget how we hurt their pride, bla bla bla. Both sides are spewing idiotic garbage with some marginal relevance to reality, which is much, much more complicated than that. You can't predict what "the crowd" will say, and the Arab "crowd" is no more symplistic than the American one. It does "work" somewhat differently, and does display different "mentality", whatever that means, but none of it is exploitable with any useful degree of certainty by cheap armchair psychologising. > Look for bin Laden to grow in status > until he's just a notch or two below Mohammed. This is inane. > That Saddam was a cruel, butchering dictator will > soon be nearly irrelevant. Truth is always relevant. -- avva
Re: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
You wrote on Wed, Dec 17, 2003 at 03:19:43PM -0500: > Jim Dixon wrote: > > > > >I have gazed into the abyss and seen a man having his teeth checked and > >getting a haircut. :-| > > > > > > And how would you have felt to be the one who got your teeth checked and > get a haircut with the whole world watching? If I had record like Saddam's on me? Gee, I'd be real happy I wasn't shot on the spot, or maybe cruelly tortured and then shot, the way I'd behaved to people I'd captured. Or maybe torn into pieces by a shrieking mob. Instead of doing any of that, they check my teeth and give me a haircut in front of the cameras? Boo fucking hoo. I'd be real happy about millions of bleeding hearts all over the world jerking their knees in unison, ready to cry a fucking ocean over this unbelievably cruel haircut and medical check-up I'm being given. Fucking tools. -- avva
Re: (No Subject)
On Wed, Dec 10, 2003 at 10:10:03PM -0600, J.A. Terranson wrote: > > > With the USA > > > becoming the world's most totalitarian state in disguise... > > > > That's a pretty silly thing to say. > > Sure you don't want to educate yourself on those other states in the > > world? > > It's not silly at all: look again. He said "becoming". And it is. Fast. No, it's silly because he said "becoming". Had he said "is", it would've been criminally stupid. For example, the US has a long, long, long, long way to go before becoming anything remotely like North Korea, in terms of totalitarianism. Of course, North Korea is a radical example; there are many countries much more totalitarian than the US and extremely likely to remain so in any foreseeable future. All the Patriot Acts and increased surveillance and whatever else has been happening in the US lately is a drop in the ocean of difference between the US and those other countries, in that respect. -- avva
Re: alt.anonymous.messages
On Wed, Dec 10, 2003 at 02:07:33PM -0800, James A. Donald wrote: > -- > On 10 Dec 2003 at 18:22, Anatoly Vorobey wrote: > > alt.anonymous.messages has a healthy amount of traffic. > > Google Groups says they have a bit more than 200 messages in > > it on December 9, for example. I assume nearly all of it is > > from remailers posting to Usenet (or remailers sending mail > > to mail2news gateways), otherwise there's little point of > > using it. > > You do not need to use remailers to take advantage of > alt.anonymous.messages. If someone posts directly to > alt.anonymous. messages, still the adversary cannot tell who he > is posting to. (Assuming his recipient sets his newsagent to > always download all new messages) Oh, that's true of course; but the adversary would be able to know that you posted something (given that he's monitoring your traffic). That's already something, and frequently more than you'd want to give away. I did inspect a few random messages and they all came from remailers. -- avva
Re: (No Subject)
On Tue, Dec 09, 2003 at 04:20:20PM -0600, Declan McCullagh wrote: > We have anonymity in Web browsing (more or less, thanks to Lance & > co). It's not NSA-proof, but it's probably subpoena-proof. > > We have anonymity in email thanks to remailers (to the extent they're > still around). > > We have anonymity in publishing, and to some extent, document > retrieval, thanks to Freenet. > > We have anonymity in one-way communications/dead drops thanks to > remailers gatewayed to Usenet newsgroups (if any still even do that). alt.anonymous.messages has a healthy amount of traffic. Google Groups says they have a bit more than 200 messages in it on December 9, for example. I assume nearly all of it is from remailers posting to Usenet (or remailers sending mail to mail2news gateways), otherwise there's little point of using it. -- avva
Re: Speaking of Reason
On Wed, Dec 10, 2003 at 08:26:22AM -0500, R. A. Hettinga wrote: > Unfortunately, if you want to read Tim, you have to read his evil twin > Skippy, too. > > Living in *his* killfile, on the other hand, and if he actually uses it, > can be useful. Try it, you'll like it. So what you're saying is that we need a remote-plonk mechanism to insert oneself into another person's killfile (merely entertaining this thought makes me a loathsome Bolshie, I'm sure). -- avva
Re: whitehouse.gov/robots.txt
On Wed, Dec 10, 2003 at 12:56:24PM +0100, Eugen Leitl wrote: > Can somebody with a webspider crawl these documents, and put it up > on the web? > > http://www.whitehouse.gov/robots.txt All or nearly all of them are duplicates of same documents elsewhere in the directory tree; "X/text/" and "X/iraq/" are supposed to be copies of "X/", with images removed in the first case. I suspect that downloading them all would just confirm that. -- avva
Re: Anti-globalization
On Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 06:41:21PM -0500, Miles Fidelman wrote: > On Mon, 8 Dec 2003, Tyler Durden wrote: > > > However, I don't see the strong support for Soviet or Maoist-style state > > control these days...these are vaguely romantic notions once in a while, but > > they don't have any deep ideological support like they might have in the > > 60s. > > I don't know about that. Today's corporate oligarchy behaves an awful lot > like the old Soviet oligarchy. Just the names and titles are different. Do you expect to get in real trouble for publicly saying that? -- avva
Re: Got.net and its narcing out of its customers
On Tue, Dec 09, 2003 at 01:57:00PM -0500, Duncan Frissell wrote: > > Then one of them claimed he had arranged to have my account yanked, for > > "violation of the DMCA." He claimed he had sent copies of my "criminal" > > admissions to Got.net, to the RIAA, to "law enforcement" (shudder!), > > and so on. > > I gather that the denizens of alt.video.dvd have yet to read the Betamax > case. Perhaps they should expand their reading before they opine on the > state of IP law. He was just trolling, being intentionally vague so that they'd assume he was copying from one DVD to another. Which they did, and which they raved about. There isn't any profound insight to be derived from a tired old picture of a newsgroup being provoked by trolling. -- avva
Re: (No Subject)
On Tue, Dec 09, 2003 at 12:47:27AM +0100, edo wrote: > With the USA > becoming the world's most totalitarian state in disguise... That's a pretty silly thing to say. Sure you don't want to educate yourself on those other states in the world? > As far as I'm concerned, true anonymity in finacial affairs (and secure communication > channels) is the only real method open to peacefully combat the all seeing, > all powerful government. You can't combat an all-powerful government, because it's all-powerful. And you can't manage anonimity against an all-seeing government, because it is all-seeing. -- avva
Re: Got.net and its narcing out of its customers
On Tue, Dec 09, 2003 at 04:37:44AM +, Michael Shields wrote: > In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, > "James A. Donald" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> Searching GG on "don frederickson got tim" is maybe more reliable than > >> pasting this URL. > > > > For long urls, compress with tinuyurl.com > > > > http://tinyurl.com/yc3s > > If you do that, you have to rely on both the Google URL not changing > and on tinyurl not going away. I usually convert a Google Groups URL to a query using only the Message-ID: before posting it publicly. E.g. in the case of the message Tim May referred to, that'd be http://groups.google.com/groups?oe=UTF-8&as_umsgid=%3C220820032357238678%25timcmay%40removethis.got.net%3E Then the URL won't be _too_ long, and if Google changes the URL scheme or is replaced by some other archve, you've got the original Message-ID, the best identifier you could hope for. -- http://www.livejournal.com/users/avva/
