The Red Line

Studying history makes the scholar aware that a major event often has unexpected causes. The pattern that follows after a “black swan” event, though, is intelligible looking back, but was nothing obvious when moving forward. Many civilization have crossed a red line without knowing it, although everyone acts “as if” they do somehow, someway.

I believe the Charlie Kirk shooting was one of those events, and though I am probably shouting into a void where no one else is likely to care or pay attention, (which itself is indicative of having crossed the event horizon of badness) I’m gonna say it anyway on the off chance someone is still paying attention.

Turning Point

Turning Point, the political entity that Kirk founded, is really where the thirty-somethings gained footing in 2016. Kirk was part of that crowd and was doing something I, a not now thirty-something, have done in the past. He went around engaging in the old-school Greek debate style. This kind of debate is confrontational and is designed to develop a person’s logic and rhetoric so that an argument can be considered on the merits of its constituent pieces and axioms. If anything is Democratic, which is, after all, a Greek word in origin, it is debate. This style of debate sits at the very foundation of the Athenian ideal and schools of philosophy that underpin the concept of nation states that represent the voice of the people. The banner of “Change My Mind” is exactly what a debator is supposed to suppose—that an opposite party has a strong case that might make the person hold a different position than the one they enter the debate carrying. This is what Kirk did. He was good at it. Whether or not anyone ever changed his mind, I do not know, but then, the purpose of old debate often led to slow changes. A good example of this in American history are the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Did those debates change anyone’s mind? I cannot say for sure, but I know the bullets that flew in the Civil War changed more than a few minds into compost.

Charlie’s Situation

The contrast for Charlie Kirk against say, Alexander Pretti, is that Charlie Kirk was not armed with anything other than a microphone and the freedom of speech that goes along with having the right to it that the American country says it is founded upon. Pretti, by contrast, was carrying a Sig Sauer in the middle of what is called a protest despite the fact that what he actually was at was a law enforcement action. Traditionally, if you protest say, a tank in the middle of a square in a given country, you probably are going to get a very good view of the underside of the vehicle as your skull cracks while the treads mash you into an undesirable meatloaf. You do not, in any other country I have seen, get to call police interference a “protest”. Whatever Alexander Pretti thought he was doing, he was coming armed for a fight with bullets. Not so with Kirk. For that, we all got treated to seeing the artery in his neck opened and his blood flow out on the stage he was sitting upon. Then, after a funeral, everybody sort of just went back to being “normal”—like seeing a man murdered on live television for speaking is just another youtube vid. Now, of course, the world is awash in the vile contents of the Epstein files, which, if you have known me at all in the past, you probalby have some recollection of conversations I had discussing the kind of material contained in those files and the corruption behind it. Where are all those people I talked to about such things? Also, it would seem, asleep.

What Can We Do?

That’s the question I’ve heard about a zillion times in the past six or seven years. It is a question cowards pose. It is a question that people with no imagination for solving a problem pose. If you can figure out how to spend a lot of money to have fun, you can also figure out how to spend a lot of money to address these kinds or problems. Also, you can get involved with other people who are trying to solve these problems, and support them. Of course, time has taught me this is not now the typical response. Instead, people see something like Charlie Kirk, and usually they do indeed find their own “turning point”, but it isn’t toward meaningful action but toward a kind of mind-numbing tedium that forgets all about what was just witnessed. Instead, the dialog shifts to a joker—an Alexander Pretti—and about his rights to carry a weapon. The guy who did not carry a weapon other than the microphone and the realm of ideas? “Ah, screw ‘em! He got what was coming to him because he said some stuff that upset people, right?” The hypocracy is astounding, and the churches and their congregations are not doing a better job by preaching about penitence and the End of Days while driving about in SUVs in slightly under a million dollar homes. These are fake Christians, and I’d argue that the people who debate about Alexander Pretti but dismiss the clear example of Charlie Kirk are fake Americans and are probably also fake human beings.

Post Truth

When I say all the above, though, I don’t expect to change anyone’s mind. For that, you had the messenger of Charlie, and he was several degrees nicer than me. No, I do not really even expect anyone to read these words and consider them. I certainly do not expect anyone to read this and to try to contact me and talk about the contents of what I’ve written. That time is gone. We are in a post-truth world. I write only for one purpose—at least in this case—and that is to condemn the complacent world. When you go before the Throne of the Holy One, you won’t be able to say that you did not know better or have any other kind of voice out there that offered a different narrative that provided, at least hopefully, some clarity. You will instead say you chose the dark because you wanted to be deaf and blind because that is a better state to be in to enjoy all the luxuries of the world than to have to feel like you might need to take action to solve the problem outlined here. If anything, my blog is a billboard of problems no one wants to solve, think about, or hear. While one might think such a conclusion is an intolerable world in which to live, consider that you are all ready living in it. You just haven’t fully realized it yet. Of course, maybe if you do, and enough other people do, you might change things. You might, to quote Charlie’s org, hit some kind of turning point.

Super Bowls

Tonight, of course, Turning Point is putting on an alternative half-time show, and that’s cool and all, but I hardly give a damn about a game in the middle of a war, and I surely do no care about the entertainment it offers. A dude was murdered right on TV, and four months later (nearly five now), people basically remember him as an afterthought in the middle of a game played for amusement. Butts fill the TV rooms and the couches, but not so many fill the pews. More than a few that fill the pews spend their time planning the next big football party with their friends when they should be repenting to God and asking sincerely for His mercy on a completely backwards nation. That’s the new “game”. That’s the new “fun”. All those other kinds of amusements become not a priority at the point a nation and its people become insane. The wrath of God is not, by any account, entertaining.

But I’m an Atheist/Hedonist/Whatever

Look, I’m gonna reason squarely with you on these points, I don’t care what you are. If you don’t want to be shot in the neck because someone doesn’t like you, then you better pay attention to what happened to Charlie Kirk. No, gun control is not going to solve the problem of someone shooting you in the neck. It just changes who might be the one doing it. What changes this dynamic, if anything can, will be an outpouring of spirit of God. You, though, since you don’t believe in any of that, just don’t get shot in the neck as easily. Others also won’t. I would classify that as a “good deal.”

But I’m Lazy And Don’t Care About People Getting Shot On TV

Great. Use that at the Throne of Judgment. At least, though, you are getting honest.

The Red Line Has Been Crossed

It was a line painted with the blood of someone trying to use their right to reach the minds of others to think about why they believed what they believed. The future is assuming the next consequence from the action and lack of action around this event. It has all ready hit the point of no return, and nobody is really listening. For these reasons, I shout into the void. Of course, I’d rather go into a void shouting than saying nothing at all. Who knows who might accidentally hear? If no one does, then at least I know God heard it. Perhaps He is my only audience. I cannot think of a better one, in any case.

The Marvelous World of The Technological T Square

In astrological analysis, there is often discussion around the concept of a T-Square. A T-Square is a configuration where the aspects of a chart are under stress. The stress often culminates in solutions that are hard-won.

A British Astrologer, Robert Currey, says that he believes that a cluster of tech pioneers were born under an arrangement of this aspect.

Microphone Drop

Right about here in this article, I know several things. I know most the people reading this article, if they are religious, are probably dropping out because they believe astrology comes from the devil. Some others coming by likely knew me previously from sometime, someplace else, and are satisfying their stalker confirmations about me likely because they know that our last interaction became such that they are too chicken to ever contact me in person. Still others are generally satanists or occultists who are doing some deep study on some aspect of astrology hoping to control the world. More than a few pop the door open here from a search engine in exactly the same way one opens the bathroom door to discover it is occupied only to quickly slam the door in embarrassment. Then, likely in the single digits, are people who actually read the article. What I wonder, though, in all these cases, and especially those who knew me from somewhere else, do they really believe I have no idea they are here? Do you think I am that oblivious? Maybe you are right where I want you…

Indeed, all the above computer pioneers made their careers trying to fix some aspect of communication. Let us quote the article on Currey, however:

The astrologer believes a more compelling explanation involves a rare generational line-up of the planets Uranus and Neptune with Chiron, a comet-like body that is orbiting the sun between Saturn and Uranus. The configuration formed what astrologers call a T-square, and in every case was strongly aligned with personal planets in birth charts of the information age innovators.

Here is the thing about a T-Square with Uranus, Neptune, and Chiron. Uranus is an awakener, or a revolution starter. Neptune is spirituality and dreams and inspirational visions along with sleep. Finally, Chiron is the “wounded healer” or a kind of injury that refuses to leave a person—the object of which is that they are supposed to reach for something higher than themselves to achieve some kind of transcendence.

Steve Jobs, who the article goes on some length about, did get into transcendental meditation. He also lived on commune farms and wrote, among other things, astrology software. He even utilized a Vedic astrologer for the timing of his Apple product launches. This creates a unique problem for the religiously-minded people who object to astrology on the grounds of it being the work of the devil. What about that iphone? What about that Android? What about all that technology in your car like Bluetooth than looks like a Norse rune? You think all that stuff is coming from the land of “moral goodness and heavenly intent”?

The answer is, of course, it is not on its own. The T-Square in Job’s chart is formed by the top half of Uranus being in opposition to Chiron. The bottom half of the T is formed by Neptune. Wanna guess what that means? It means that injury in the ego of a group of people comes from awakening them to mother Earth and justice. Know anybody that was hanged on something in the shape of a T for the Earth and the people on it? I’ll give you a hint, it was NOT Steve Jobs. All those pioneers were trying to invent silicon saviors of humanity while usually making rafts full of money all to enable communication from a wound brought about by being spiritually asleep. How is that for a deep irony? All of um were doing something like Ash Wednesday without the church or the ash, or really even understanding the Wednesday.

What I Mean To Say Is…

If we ain’t talking, and you come here to read what I have to say, you probably avoided some aspect of waking up and you are still stuck in your own dream of what you thought I said or meant but have figured out, much to your own displeasure, that you were wrong. Rather than owning up and apologizing, though, you come here instead. The great thing about technology is that I can actually use it how Jobs and the rest were drawn to without having to fall into the trap of wearing black turtlenecks and starting a “cult of Apple” while making enough money to make Scrooge McDuck envious. You already ate the apple. Where that happened became a walled garden—just like the Apple phone app ecosystem. You need to wake up, and dial the creator, and stop using plastic as a substitute for that relationship.

If you are a Satanist or Occultist coming here, you too are asleep, and working for the losing team.

If you are one of the few people who come here seeking knowledge, well then, know that the Tav which is the cross which the Messiah hanged on for the sin of the world shows up in many forms. This is one. Humanity responds, though, in very strange ways.

There. Now you can end the karmic loop you have generated with your interaction with me, or lack of one, and go do something else worthwhile. Play time is over.

Now that the Roman calendar has rolled on over to 2026, it can only mean one thing. Time to check in with the Quarto project to see if that glossary function is ready yet:

Awww man! Jack Squat has happened other than this famous encounter where I was banned and some valiant attempt by a scientist to make the code work utilizing what appears to be an LLM. So, let’s count the number of years it has been since the request. That would be 1…2…3…4 years of doing nothing toward making sure a glossary works for “academic writing software”. Of course, there is plenty of love for the “hard position” cscheid finds himself in of doing nothing to get this particular job done, but it is like, totally on the map! My former post though, well, we can’t have “code of conduct violating” posts up and about while we are doing nothing. Better to look like we at least are doing some moderating. That’s good for the community. They eat that stuff up! Kinda reminds me of Trump’s “do-nothing” Democrats, though to be sure, I’m positive working on a well-funded open source project must be VERY HARD AND TIRING—what with making it consistent with something textbooks could do 90 years ago. (I’m talking about having a glossary, of course)

However much fun it is to show this level of hypocrisy, it is not, contrary to what readers here might think, my main goal for this post. Instead, I’m going to talk about something else—radical abandonment. Do you want to know what that is? I’m glad you asked!

A lot of my life has involved moving about trying to “fix” one thing or another. However, I’ve learned something after all this time of trying to solve problems. People actually do not want the problems solved. They are not really too different from cscheid. They kick the problem down the road for a year, and before you know it, you look up, and four have gone by. A current example illustrates the point. People extend this “internet is broken” vibe out as though it also wants to be fixed. The internet was not broken but people got on there and have made it what it is now which people summarize as “broken”. It does not want to be fixed. Not really. Your best bet, instead, is to radically abandon it. What do I mean?

There are many layers to the web. There are other search engines out there that are not your “main” search engines. There is an entire Indy web movement too. If none of that tickles your fancy, there are also retro-webs and everything in between. The relevant point here is that the visible web is only one part of the web, and indeed, one can argue that it is a burning building. If you give that up, along with the idea of meaningful interaction happening there, then you become free. In other words, the glossary does not matter not because cschied is extra busy, but because cscheid should not be assumed to actually want to fix the problem. The entire interaction is a kind of humanity honey-trap since git has a place for opening tickets to deal with problems. The reality, though, is cscheid is more concerned with exercising his power over the narrative and other people than actually doing anything about the problem. Does that make him a bad person? Probably not. He’s likely very average—maybe above so since he tries to fake some kind of accountability in an ass-covering maneuver. Many people will simply ghost you instead. You don’t get to see a reassurance that establishes a false-hope with no accountability as clearly as you can in that thread. The problem is bigger, though, than silly Quarto and community-protecting cschied from the JB git-posting-menace. The issue is that the internet is not running under a paradigm of good faith.

It is like having a place, for instance, to whistle blow, but instead of assisting the whistle blower, you kill them instead. If you assume instead that the whistle blowing place is actually a honey-trap and nobody actually wants to fix the problem, then you become free of the entire discussion. You radically abandon the idea that anyone is actually listening or wants to understand a perspective other than the one they are all ready holding. The only ones who might care about the problem at all might just be you and God. Sometimes it might feel like God tech support isn’t listening, or is moving slowly, but what makes that support different is that it always fixes whatever the problem is. And really, that might be the broader problem. The internet is not always known for having God as a focus and instead has many individuals prancing about trying to play God for everybody else while most often telling people how such a thing as God is silly to believe in. The natural outcome of that would be a tremendous kind of honey-trap of bad faith since no promise, without a divine imbuement, is ever going to come to be from the standpoint of a moral good. Why? Because the definition of the good IS God. Without any understanding of what is good, you just get a bunch of people together acting on what they agree is good. Of course, people agreeing on what is good is prone to failure. Sometimes, people decide ethnic-cleansing is “good”. I’m not talking about the kind of “ethnic-cleansing” where someone wants to relocate a group somewhere else either. I’m talking about the kind that wants to murder a particular group of people because they don’t like ‘um. That sometimes includes relocation, and sometimes just involves killing them where they stand. This kind of hatred is another problem that does not REALLY want to be solved. It does, however, like to be noticed.

Poverty and homelessness is another problem that really does not want to be solved, since if you do not have poor people, you might, pretty soon, not have rich people either. People get their power, most often, from lording it over someone else. A king with no subjects is not much of a king. People want money and status more than they want to care about their fellow beings. The internet, as social media demonstrates, is a wider example of this process. We are more connected, sure, but we care even less than we did before we were.

Therefore, I say to you that I am radically abandoning the internet at large. We are breaking up. We have irreconcilable differences. Whatever problems it has are going to become someone else’s to fix—along with the people who claim they can fix them as well as the ones who want fixes. The play action or charade that takes place after this, well, it will not be a problem for ME to solve or to indicate anything about what needs solving. Go to cschied for that. In four years, you might get some interaction. Or, you might just get censored, shut down, and ignored while the problem remains. Either way, that’s the web everyone agrees on, and I surely wouldn’t want to go against the wishes of humanity—far be it from me to do such a thing. After all, we wouldn’t actually want to fix anything and move on, would we?

P.S. If you are wondering why this post is on the main internet, it actually is not there for that reason. Instead, its chief audience in the author’s mind are the netizens of the Indy web. If anyone else sees it on the normal web, well then, this piece really isn’t for you—or maybe it is in the sense that you are likely more of the problem and less of the solution.

Packages Not For Holidays

I have been watching, with interest, the progression of the Rust debacle in the Debian community. The linked article describes the kerfuffle succinctly, but for the habitually lazy, it can be distilled into a single sentence. Apt, which is the Debian package manager used to install software for the entire Debian operating system, is going to be using Rust—a language that deals with eliminating nasty computer bugs like buffer overflows that cause memory leaks and unexpected crashes.

The problem with Rust though, is that it is harboring a kind of mind virus in its very existence—the political “woke” virus. In case what that means is not clear, you can head on over to their Code of Conduct where you can uncover this prize:

We will exclude you from interaction if you insult, demean or harass anyone. That is not welcome behavior. We interpret the term “harassment” as including the definition in the Citizen Code of Conduct; if you have any lack of clarity about what might be included in that concept, please read their definition. In particular, we don’t tolerate behavior that excludes people in socially marginalized groups.

Does Rust then purchase computers for people who cannot afford them so they can possibly contribute to the Rust community? What does it mean to demean, insult, or harass someone? While there are clear examples of these behaviors, there are also people’s feelings, which do not necessarily have a basis in reality. The bigger question, to me, though, is why on EARTH does a programming tool require any of the above? I am going to tell you why.

Be Nice Or We Won’t

Nowadays, everything suffers from an implied agreement in the technology world. Gone are the days where you could use a tool, disagree with the makers of the tool politically, and build something. An analogy might be that if you purchase a Craftsman ratchet, you ALSO have to agree that you will engage in certain behaviors consistent with the Craftsman brand of being whatever it is to be a “good human being”. If you don’t do that, well, you might still be able to use the ratchet, but if it breaks you are on your own since community guidelines dictate no aide will be given to someone who has violated whatever the community standards are. In this analogy, the ridiculousness of the situation is apparent. Nobody needs a political creed to use a ratchet to solve a problem. The ratchet simply needs to be a good ratchet. That’s it.

Now, we might like for the mechanic to be nice. However, what we really need from the mechanic, should we have a problem, is the ability for the problem to be fixable by the mechanic. I don’t need to like the guy/gal or agree with them on massive political issues. I don’t need to get their opinion on Rwandan genocides in a country neither of us live in nor really know all that much about. What I need is for them to fix whatever is wrong with my car using their tools and expertise. They do that, I pay them, life goes on.

Somewhere along the line, though, a bunch of tech people have decided that is not good enough even though nobody who programmed in C had to sign any kind of special conduct agreement to start programming in it. In fact, people were often very talented and mean and we still were able to learn something about programming from them—even if we otherwise hated their guts. In fact, many good teachers are often people that a student hates to deal with because a good teacher is going to make the student work and then, therefore, learn. That is, after all, their function. Nobody has to believe anything in common to learn from anyone. So, why then is technology so keen on making sure that if you use the tool you have to tacitly approve of the politics behind the tool?

Special Snowflakes?

There are whispers of “it’s a millennial issue.” While I’m not one to typically attribute problems to a generational gap, it does seem to me that the younger programmers out there are often misguided about what constitutes progress and what is really just some dipshit idea that was all ready tried a million times that all ready didn’t work. A big portion of that problem is that millennials are often sure of themselves without having any specific reason to be. It’s a false confidence that courts disaster.

With Rust, the problem is easy to spot by paying attention to the NPM ecosystem:

Yet another npm account has been compromised with malicious code. Sadly, it isn’t the first time. So far I’ve never heard of a similar attack against crates.io . But is that because crates.io is fundamentally more secure, or just luckier? I’d like to believe the former, but I fear the latter. What can we do to prevent attacks like this one? cargo-vet is the best idea I’ve heard so far, but I think its uptake is low.

One is not simply adding Rust to Debian but also a reliance on the public repository of Rust packages which makes Rust an even more likely target than NPM since if one can compromise Rust one MIGHT also, in the future, be able to compromise the Debian Apt package manager.

So yes, Rust might solve some long-standing buffer overflow issue that has been around for 40 years or so, but it might also introduce a host of new ones since everything is being re-programmed in Rust while also opening the door for some kind of Cargo (Rust package manager) exploit.

Super Inclusivity At The Mushroom Cloud

At least before some foreign national nation/state gets in there and blows up all of our infrastructure from our good intentions, though, we will have the consolation of saying to ourselves “Yeah, but look how tolerant and diverse we were!” At least Rust solved that problem that no one asked it to solve.

Over at the FTC there is an RFC. (Sounds like the beginning of an Eminem rap song doesn’t it?) The short of what they are asking for input concerning is crypto regulation to catch criminals at a technological (banking) level. Weirdly, the very thing the RFC uses and asks for (that is to say anonymity) is precisely what is seeking to be removed when it comes to banking transactions that utilize crypto. Highly annoyingly, my comment was too long for the standard window, and required my attached comment to be in Microsoft Word format. Have we learned nothing from the past 25 years? I am inclined to think not–especially with the questions being asked in this RFC.

I am going to reproduce my reply here, even though it de-anonymizes me, for whatever that is worth. My idea in doing this is twofold—it gets more attention along with more potential comments on this RFC and it allows people who might not want to put their input on the RFC to have the discussion somewhere else since I will be re-posting this post in other channels where discussion is more likely than my mostly isolated blog. (cue appropriate sad country song about losing your dog, and house, and truck. I won’t require your reply to be in Microsoft Office format either)

Back in the Revolutionary War days this is the kind of discussion that might have happened in a pub. The anonymous part only played into matters when it was time for a tea party. In some ways, having to be anonymous to have a discussion at the request of the government is more a symptom of the problem than the solution. Potential recrimination is probably the reason for the precaution, or perhaps it acts like a hedge against liability. (for the government? The people?) Either way, if anonymity is the new pub, it makes even less sense to mess with it at the banking/crypto level. My more involved reply follows:

Blockchain technology offers addresses which are present on the blockchain. These addresses are the identity of the person or entity utilizing the blockchain. The precedent for understanding this system can be found in the US mailing system. Many pieces of mail arrive that have no specific identity associated with their delivery but only an address. If one needs to know who has received a given piece of mail, one would need a search warrant to find such an item in the place where a person resides. This then is the evidence that the person has received the piece of mail with no specific name associated with it. The address on it becomes entangled with the identity of the person at the location.

The blockchain contains all transactions associated with a given address. If one has a warrant and finds a hard drive that contains an address, then one can see all the transactions made to and from that address. The supposition of a criminal act supersedes utilizing the power to investigate what might be fraudulent. Monitoring at the banking level without a warrant or due judicial process—or for that matter at the level of the mail—creates a situation whereby the executive, legislative, and judicial powers are unbalanced. The banks or things defined to be banks become responsible, in part, for being police. This goes against the free market idea of those like Adam Smith since what might be an illegal transaction, can, as has been seen in the past five years, change drastically depending on what administration happens to occupy the Oval Office.

Using AI for this process is even more reckless as AI has been known to “hallucinate” and creating a digital ID system might be used to detect crime but can just as easily be used to create a surveillance state where it is illegal to be Mormon or Catholic. Likewise, relying on APIs places one in potential cooperation with Big Tech, which again, has been shown to be a serious problem. Technology for elections has shown that it cannot be trusted. While one can argue that it can be made secure, the fact is, it is easily made insecure and identity—that is to say people being who they say the are—can always be faked. It is a question of money and time.

On the other hand, crimes that are being committed is clear-cut. If someone is selling a kilo of cocaine, odds are they are also laundering money. If someone is a Christian, however, and they have been de-banked, odds are they might have some behaviors that also look like money laundering. Instead of coming after the anonymous side of cryptocurrency and trying to regulate or catch crimes at the transaction level, it seems to me it would be more expedient to catch actual criminals committing crimes, and then issue the standard warrants through due process. If one finds a Bitcoin address in the subsequent evidence, then one has all they need to trace where the money has been going. Whether or not things like AI should be used for catching crimes at an investigation level in coordination with police or federal bureaus is another discussion, but this question is asking for advice on something that really should not be done from a Constitutional standpoint since anonymity is not used only for committing crimes. This Request For Comments (RFC) is such a case where anonymity is utilized to have a discussion about the issues presented here. Should it also require a digital ID so we can begin to analyze language and word choice to stop criminals who respond to RFCs? The answer should be a clear “no”. Without the prior warrants and supposition of criminal intent, we wind up with more surveillance in a place it ought not to be since such a solution treats everyone as potentially guilty until proven otherwise by the AI algorithms or API inferences. Likewise, such monitoring would produce meta data about people, which all institutions have proven unable to handle or to be capable of being entrusted therewith.

In short, I am surprised the Trump administration is asking for comments on this topic after it has seen and experienced firsthand all the evils being outlined here. What is different this time that ensures that the kind of actions presented as options in this RFC will not be used against future political candidates like Trump? Might a political campaign contribution be flagged as illegal? Might one be hallucinated? Might some API from a given company be infiltrated by Chinese globalists? I fail to see how any of the questions asking about this specific solution prevent any of these events from occurring. What is obvious, however, is that unbalancing the executive and judicial along with the legislative is not going to bring about a better world with regards to reducing crime. It just sets up the next guy with a grudge to have better tools to screw over people that he or she happens not to like and for the common citizen to have little say in the matter. After all, everyone has to have a bank unless they want to stuff all their money in a mattress or coffee can.

It is my opinion that all these points are so prima facie obvious that to link to sources that confirm their self-evident truth would be an absurdity bordering on mockery. The only question one has to ask is whether one has been alive in the past ten years, and if they have been paying attention. Criminals find ways to commit crimes. Banks are not the place to police criminals as a primary aim. Neither is crypto a place for that. If anyone thinks otherwise, then we should fire all police officers and hire many more bankers or create many more coin exchanges and blockchains and drop the idea that the police can do any meaningful investigative work. That is, after all, what this RFC is indicating—unless I am missing something that “We The People” are not being told.

I guess you could say, then, that this is an RFC to the RFC for the people that want to have a more free-form discussion without all the requirements of the initial RFC. We are two tiers down in the dream now. Gonna take two kicks to wake us up, as per Inception rules.

Questions To Ask One’s Self

A question that is revealing to ask one’s self is where it is that the concept of an ideal comes from. When we look around at the world, it is clear that it cannot be the birthplace of the idea of an ideal because so much of the world goes against what ideals hold. Even if you decide to keep your focus on nature, it is not ideal that some animals must eat other animals–in some cases alive. We instinctively can imagine the situation presented, in such a picture, to be other than it is. This is a counterintuitive truth. If it were the case that we were only evolving on the plane of the Earth as it exists, then there is absolutely no advantage to having the seed of an ideal planted in our brain other than to make us more liable to be someone else’s lunch. Therefore, we must have that seed present from somewhere else other than from the evident realities the Earth presents. We are, ultimately, from some place else.

Plato And Forms

Plato, of course, put this idea forth long before now. The concept that there is a world beyond this one from which this specific world takes inspiration is not a new idea, though it finds its most complicated view in terms of the Heavenly Kingdom. What such perspectives point out, though, is that in either case, appearances on the Earth can be deceiving since one is aware of an ideal that often does not appear to be embodied. In the same way one can imagine a perfect circle and never see one, one can imagine perfect harmony, or perfect pitch, or a million different variations on what perfection is or perhaps possibly could be. This path, when followed to the end, creates a transcendental view. Perfection can never be fully reached, but then, there is something of a perfection in how the Earth does what it does. Each moment then, becomes an opportunity to comprehend the perfection that is as well as a more ultimate perfection that is immanent as a pre-existing condition to experience. The practice has some unusual consequences.

Renounce the World, Right?

The Biblical injunction is that one should “be in the world but not of it.” In other words, do not allow the logic of the world along with the Earth to delude you into thinking that is how things are and therefore that is how you ought to also be. Rather, you are passing through this place. When the world tries to control or entice you on the basis of its logic alone, you are to remember there is something more and to act on that reality–not necessarily the one in front of your face. Why? Because that other reality is your home. The world is simply a passing experience. If you want to return to your natural home, you cannot be confused and believe that the world in the form of the Earth is your ultimate destination.

The Logic of Thieves

Take as an example, a group of thieves. Thieves steal. It is in their nature to steal. They take advantage of trust, and exploit weakness in people most often for a material gain. They congratulate themselves on being clever, and believe the people who trust them to be stupid or dull. They take delight in depriving someone else of the thing which belongs, naturally, to them. Then, they rationalize why they deserved to steal in the first place. This a markedly different from the person who might take some bread because they are hungry but cannot afford a loaf. The second person would pay if they had the means. The first never does. The spiritual view of the first person is that such a person, no matter how much they steal or take, is still in spiritual poverty. They exist there because sin is where their pleasure lies. Sin is the source of taking this world to be the only one that exists and that there is no higher accountability or idealism or anything else that can enforce those constructs. Put differently, when a thief steals, it says little about the person who is stolen from, but much about the person who does the stealing. To a thief, this is a backwards thought.

Taking Action On Things

Many people conclude then that a spiritual perspective says to take little to no worldly action. This is wrong-headed. One can undertake the action, but one must count on the promise of Heaven because the Earth, it turns out, can take a very long time in correcting certain wrongs. Therefore, you can take your case to court, but if you do not win, you surrender the matter to God. (You should really surrender the matter to God before even going to court) In other words, God has many honey traps in the form of His people. If you are a thief, and you think yourself clever, and you steal from one of His people, you are going to have a difficult time. In such a case it is not the person you have stolen from, but rather, the Judge who will be deciding your case. Pleading for mercy or ignorance will not fly as a defense. You are going to have to eat the full measure of the punishment in such a scenario.

In A Perfect World

In a perfect world, there are no thieves, but there were two thieves present at the crucifixion. One of those thieves repented and understood both thieves deserved what they got. The other thief, true to the thief-mind, still thought he should have been able to get away with his crime without the punishment. It is a curious thing that the thief-mind can live its entire life and still never entertain the concept that there will be consequence for the actions of having stolen. This is the true definition of not repenting–to persist in the logic of the world and hold yourself as though no portion of blame belongs to you. Of course, to do that, you have killed your ideals no matter how you justify it and so you are maiming the transcendental in yourself. Perhaps it is tantamount to murdering your own soul. In the end, the only one guilty of that will be found to be you–since the knife will only be in your hand.

Play The Long Game

In a world that rewards short term gains from a calculating logic be a long-term player and cast your eyes to eternity. You will find the baggage there lighter.

Qortal: The Next Generation of the Internet That Has The Same Problems as the Previous

Those of you who have kept up with previous articles here, might remember I mentioned the Qortal project as being a possible alternative for freedom of speech on the internet. Alas, this is not the article I was hoping to write about this project. Of course, people make decisions, and once those decisions are made courses are set. Since I joined the project as a kind of experimental reporter with few expectations other than what was experientially so, I am better able to give the practical version of the ideological slop that is presented as being indicative about this “community”. The short version of this after eight months of being more involved in the Qortal sphere is that Qortal talks a good game, and has a technological stack that has the potential to offer freedom. The reality, though, is that the leadership has a lack of focus and vision, cannot handle feedback, and refuses to truly relinquish control to the people using the system. This causes a person to focus on what good a system is that promises to give users freedom if there is no one around who can see what it is you produce as a result of that freedom? If you remember the trailer to the movie Alien, the tagline “In space no one can hear you scream,” applies. Why is this the fatal flaw in the Qortal System? Well, for that you will have to wade through the rest of this text. No pain, no pain, err…gain? Gain.

First, Let’s Examine Qortal

If you pop on over to the Qortal wiki you will find what Qortal is/does in their own words:

The Qortal wiki is an ever-evolving repository of information related to the Qortal blockchain Project.

Qortal is a completely unique, community-driven and developed blockchain platform that provides an alternative to the digital infrastructure of the world. Qortal provides a system that is:

Truly P2P in every way - no middlemen of any kind

Not able to be ‘stopped’ or ‘die’ like other projects, as trading is built into the network’s tools.

Able to publish data, applications, and websites on ‘Registered Names’ on the platform.

Able to provide feeless hosting for applications, websites, and data.

Able to provide means to create a truly individually sovereign digital future for the world.
Combined economic platform and digital infrastructure for communications, hosting, and blockchain-based security and authentication.

Unmatched by any other platform in the world. No other exists that can do what Qortal can, and no other exists that can provide what Qortal does.

Any user can create anything on Qortal, limited only by their imagination and intention.

These are heavy promises, indeed. Of course, we can make a certain allowance for bullshit in the name of marketing. The biggest potentially inflated claim is that Qortal is unmatched by any other platform in the world. A basic examination of the technology might shed light on why this is a grandiose statement.

Firstly, and perhaps most relevant, Qortal is programmed on clunky old Java–the very self-same Java that had everyone downloading applets back in the day to run things like Yahoo chat. Naturally, this “clunkiness” is present as it is with any Java app, but the gain is portability, so we might give it a pass except to note that Java is not the most efficient language in the world being that it is interpreted. What the “unique” feature of Qortal is that the above alludes to is that all users, when they run their own “Java Qortal Node” serve as a kind of encrypted CDN between them (they share data in other words). While you might think this means the CDN itself is on a blockchain, this is not the case. Rather, the hash of the data is stored on the blockchain instead, which is what makes the CDN “secured by the blockchain”. All the blockchain is storing is, effectively, a bunch of hashes. This kind of technology, hashes as correlated to storage/data, can be found in both IPFS and Linux distros like Nix. Likewise, the calculation of unique hashes applies to various secure boot schemes. Hashes are being calculated on a blockchain anyway independent of Qortal implementations.

Likewise, Ian Clark, in the original Freenet, made a kind of shared hard drive that encrypted communication among users of the network that worked similarly to the CDN. Users had their own secure key, and their own website, mail, and so forth. Another project that does this is I2P and of course Zeronet also did something not entirely dissimilar. Zeronet propagates user content by means of a torrent type of protocol, and it also shares this trait in common with Qortal. Likewise, Peergos encapsulates many similar characteristics. What none of these platforms do, by design, is incorporate a kind of crypto-blockchain for commerce into themselves as Qortal does. Communities like Utopia, however, do. In fact, Utopia is, in many ways, far ahead of Qortal and so the “unique in the world claim” is more like bluster. Of course, the Wiki is out of date, and is not regularly updated as far as I can ascertain for reasons that will be made apparent later. (Spoilers: It concerns people trying to keep control of the project) Whether this is unique ego-stroking or simple negligence, the bombastic speech does not add to the value of the platform.

First Impressions

When you fire up Qortal, you are contending with two components. One of those is the actual Java file for the blockchain to synchronize, and the other is the user interface. The user interface has recently changed to something called the “hub” which is supposed to be better, but appears to be missing certain functions that the “legacy” UI had. One of those features is the ability to upload your personal website. This could be signaling a kind of pivot toward the community moving in the direction of using Qortal’s blogging system, but of course this lacks a lot of granular control in presentation that being able to upload your own website naturally possesses. The upgrade to the hub is “forced” in the sense that the legacy UI isn’t working with many aspects of Qortal since Hub came out, and Hub of course is missing functionality of legacy as noted. Anyway, once you succeed in making your own key and getting everything synchronized, you are going to need some Qort if you want a unique username that is not some long, unwieldy crypto-key. This means, at least when I joined, that you have to go into the chat room and ask for some. I do not recall who gave me mine in part because you cannot speak quickly until you have a name and a certain amount of Qort, but when I logged back in someone had given me some and I was able to procure a name. That was cool.

Where Signaling and Qortal Meet

The biggest problem Qortal has, though, is that the content you put on there cannot be easily found. Generally, the only way you are going to let anyone know it exists is by using the Chat feature. Chat has many different groups, like General and so on, and these become your main ways to let people in the community know what you are up to. This proves to be a problem in several predictable ways. However, before we delve into that, an example easily makes the point. When I first joined, there was a developer who was very upset with the core team of people who make Qortal and claimed that they had used his work and then more or less began to “freeze him out” of the project and not take any of his further suggestions. It was clear he had devoted a lot of time to the project, and felt like the power structures present within the personalities of the dev team had been misused. Some of the devs would show up and answer some of his concerns, on occasion, and at other times they would mock and deride him. This created a negative impression, to say the least. While personality conflicts can happen, this was, without a doubt, a dumpster fire. It went on a steady blaze for probably four months, until the developer in question decided to make his own fork. He claimed he was being censored by the platform in certain ways which are up for discussion in this article later. He likewise suggested the platform was not all that interested in returning power back to the users and was more interested in keeping a small cadre in power within the system being developed. Most of his assertions, in my experience, proved to be true. While there are a small handful of people in the Qortal universe who actually understand what freedom of speech means, the vast majority do not. While this in and of itself would not be a problem, what is a problem concerns the signaling aspect of the chat being interwoven into the discovery of the platform. Simply put, if you can be messed with in chat, then your message is limited in possible reach. It turns out that, due to how Qortal is being utilized at the moment, this is a possible limitation that is used in a most peculiar way.

Pointing Out Some Odds and Ends

When I first got on Qortal, I intended to market my book along with the platform. The first post discussed this. However, I had an encounter with a dev in the chat that accused me of, among other things, “not doing anything to market the platform while having criticisms of it”. This, of course, was flatly wrong. However, not being in the business of correcting idiocy on the internet as an occupation, I did not bother to mention to this person what it was I had been doing. This accusation sprang from the fact that I had pointed out that the freedom of speech aspect of Qortal needed to be safeguarded in certain ways if Qortal truly hoped to be the “next generation of the internet”. I soon learned, however, that suggestions of this nature were not welcome. Not only were they not welcome, they were perceived as being an attack. Not only were they being perceived as an attack when I said them, but also they were being perceived as an attack when ANYONE said them. A big piece of safeguarded free speech is to protect the ability for the user to decide what and who they want to talk to. This implicitly means you cannot then, as an administrator of the network, barring illegal content, make some unilateral decision on behalf of everyone else and still say it is about free speech. Qortal however, had reportedly made the decision to allow some illegal content in the form of bestiality and seemed to be rather ambivalent about the prospect of the platform potentially hosting objectionable content like child porn. Users had the ability, however, to turn the “relay mode” to off, so that the only kinds of content a user would be participating in sharing would be the kinds they had all ready visited. This was a major problem in early Freenet and Ian Clark wound up leaving the country and going to Ireland over the potential problem of being accused of being a child pornography network since Freenet could not censor any content on its nodes. This absolute conception of free speech overlooks existing Supreme Court decisions that state that one’s free speech extends as far as their nose. In other words, you are not free to yell out the word “Fire!” in a crowded theater when there is no fire. Speech has consequences, and not everything that can be said should be said unless a person also wants the consequences of having said the thing in question.

In his opinion, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote:

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. […] The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.

Schenck vs the United States

Not far behind the free speech absolutists existed another camp that believed an individual user should not block or censor anyone if they themselves did not want to be blocked–for the case under consideration–at a network level. This is a little like saying, “You should have let those people in your house if you didn’t want the President to ban you from the country.” This was exactly what happened with regard to quartering British soldiers which became the basis of The Third Amendment–except leaving the country was replaced with “jail”. A lack of familiarity with these issues and decisions and then speaking about the network supporting free speech is, at best, foolish. At worst, it is foolish and a rehashing of the same mistakes that were all ready made on the “first generation” of the internet. (What was the American Revolution? Generation 0.1?)

The Rejoinder

The common rejoinder to this discussion about free speech and consequence and being careful at a network level about blocking people usually generated a chorus of “run your own node! Nobody can censor your own node!” Of course, on Qortal, sometimes it also became about what you had done for the network. In the time I’ve spent there I uploaded videos, uploaded some content to the file sharing side called Q-Share, participated in submitting some issues to the onboard ticket system, Q-Support, placed my book up for sale at the Q-bookshop, uploaded my website, made a blog using the system itself, tried the trading platform out, used Q-mail, refined how my specific node booted, and submitted an App, eventually went through the process which resulted in my becoming, for awhile anyway, a minter, frequented some other Q-Shops on the network, and was working with another person to try to ensure the network was able to carry out its free speech aspect in a sensible way. That last part, particularly, was blocked heavily by one of the network admins. So, the idea of “run your own node” did not solve my problem, and no amount of doing “anything for the network” was enough to be able to say that it had issues. (Come to a thinktank meeting is another common one. Did that. Wasn’t impressed) I also saw this mentality present for people who had heavily donated to the original dev team–where other devs would come in saying that the person had “done nothing for the network” and also blocking those who had similar views to my own where free speech was involved. The blocking was accomplished technologically by limiting the reach of given people to speak in General chat.

Thing About Blockchains

The thing about blockchains and encrypted p2p information exchange, like in Qortal, is that it sucks, generally, for putting on a cell phone. A cell phone has a limited battery life, and so running a node on it slurps the battery down to nothing. What can you do? Well, the solution Qortal has evolved is to make a system of nodes that a user is not running themselves. That way, you can use the “public nodes” but not have a battery drain on your phone. You can also use them if you don’t want to run a node yourself. The problem is, though, they are under the control of one person who sees all of those nodes as his personal possessions. This is how the limit in reach, that I indicated, is accomplished. So, if the person who owns these nodes decides, as he did in my case, that the content you are posting in General chat “makes the project look bad” he might undertake to ban you so you cannot be seen by all the users that have to rely on these public nodes. This person had also said that should someone else be willing to take on the nodes he’d have been happy to outsource them out of his control–but he only said that AFTER blocking a person who was going to do that very thing and then had the temerity to suggest most people were only “all talk”. What the dev failed to take into account, though, is that for a person to want to take a risk on a network like Qortal, they have to believe it has a future. Otherwise, they are going to go spend their time and resources somewhere else where those efforts are more likely to be appreciated and yield fruit. For some reason, Qortal seems to think its users are its enemies and that if they are not showing the right kind of deference and gratitude for what has been made, they should probably just shut up or else build their own project from the ground up. To say that this attitude is toxic is a massive understatement. Eventually, when people ask you why you are still at the project if you have so many issues with it, the answer becomes obvious–well, I shouldn’t be. At least, not with the expectation of this being a truly free speech platform in a way that doesn’t partake of the mistakes that caused the rest of the net to fall into the abyss it occupies now. This dev’s reply, to me, when pointing these things out? “You sure talk a lot”.

What Does Not Make the Platform Look Bad

What is NOT blocked at the public node level, tellingly, is voluminous anti-Israel, anti-Jewish conspiracy material. It is one thing to try to expose hidden agendas, but this kind of material goes beyond doing that. The whole of General chat is, on a given day, literally, swimming in antisemitic bile which seems to forget that the Messiah was of the tribe of Judah and is therefore, Jewish. While not all Jews are good, it is certainly the case that not all of ANY ethnic group is. Qortal users often seem to be afraid of Biblical concepts like digital ID leading to some manner of economic impediment that is the Beast system–without believing in the Bible or the Beast system. There are several efforts, indeed, to bring AI into Qortal, which is amusing, since AI is the prime suspect for causing such a system to flourish. The app I uploaded to the place was a copy of the King James Bible since I looked around and did not see one. The entire network begins to take on the character of a clownish-quasi-Nazi-tin-foil-hat group that thinks it can somehow prepare for the end of the world without recourse to the very strikingly Jewish Messiah. It is truly a spectacle to see, but, for whatever reason, that does not make the Qortal network “look bad”. At least not bad enough to block those folks at a public node level. Nevermind the ideals of free speech and the “next generation of the internet” that is a “super special snowflake never seen before”. Please. “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?”

Being a Minter

I did undertake submitting a card to become a “minter” on the Qortal network. This allows you to mine a certain amount of Qort a day since your node is then participating in the tasks the Qortal network requires in terms of the blockchain. You make a card, and the existing minters and admins vote on whether you should get in or not. This was done to prevent people from coming in from places like China and farming all the Qort out. The Qort was just a bonus to me, since the crypto aspect in terms of the Qort coin is more a novelty since its value remains consistently rather low. The draw is and should be the freedom of speech and not the coin anyway. Once you are approved as a minter, you are plunked into a chat group full of minters. When I first started, there was no encrypted key on the convo, but later it was added and often this made that minter chat inaccessible as the key rotation caused some problems. Recently, however, I decided I did not really like the company of the minter chat nor did I wish to rub shoulders with everyone there, so I left. This, predictably, means you can no longer mine Qort. Of course, it also means you do not have to rub shoulders with people in a given group who are showing themselves to be your bitter enemies. Guess which one is worth more?

Qortal The Tech

The technology of Qortal sometimes hangs–meaning the blockchain freezes for some reason or another. Recently, an admin had called General Chat a cesspit of communication, but it was a primary place for helping troubleshoot why the node was hanging and how to get through it. By the time everything was stabilized, you would expect that the admins would have learned a very valuable lesson in how communication in a time of crisis affects everyone and it requires a team effort through many different channels to pull through, right? Wrong. Instead, everything returned right back to how people should not question the Qortal development team unless they have given a kidney to it so it can be hooked up to the network and used to mint Qort.

Despite All That…

Despite all of the above issues, Qortal is not a bad piece of technology if you adjust your expectations and ignore all the crap about it being free speech and empowering. Qortal is, at its core, a dirty whore that tells you it loves you and wants to marry you, but when you get it home you discover it is in bed with half the town. As long as you do not mistake the whore for the housewife, though, well, there are some things Qortal can do. It works quite well at being a backup P2P version of something like the Internet Archive. It is pretty okay to keep a backup of a website. Don’t bother spending much time in the chat channels, and do not think your input as a user is wanted or necessary. Oh, and don’t worry about Qort or mining, or adminning, or joining the development team. Remember, a whore is very good at lying. That is why they get paid to make you believe they enjoy what you are doing.

Slight Chance

There is always, however, the slight chance that the whore finds a Church and has a transformation or marries someone that actually has some real truth in the relationship. It is quite slim, but it does happen. In Qortal’s case, it is possible that some other technologies, like Reticulum, might take the decision making out of the hands of those that are trying to keep their fingers on the power levers. While that would be a very nice thing to see, one would still have the problem that unless the character of the community of Qortal changes, do you really want to spend a lot of time with the caliber of people that seem to flood it? Nah. Not really. That kind of company has a tendency to make a person “look bad”. We know that Qortal administration understands what has to be done should that be the case. I wonder how this article makes the project look? Oh right. I forgot. True free speech allows criticism to exist. A clown variety closes it down, and blames the speaker. That–is really all you need to understand about Qortal. What else is there to say?

Hate Speech and Hate

Reification is a term that means someone is taking an often intangible thing or quality and treating it as though it had a concrete existence:

reification
/ˌɹeɪəfəˈkeɪʃən/
noun

1. The consideration of an abstract thing as if it were concrete, or of an inanimate object as if it were living.
2. The consideration of a human being as an impersonal object. (programming) Process that makes out of a non-computable/addressable object a computable/addressable one.
3. (programming) Process that makes out of a non-computable/addressable object a computable/addressable one.

It probably should not be a surprise that the loftiest ideals are the hardest to define. For the purposes of the definition of reification, though, people speak of the fallacy in the sense of the definition of 1). Yet, in application, though they notice the fallacy of defining the thing concretely, they often perform the definition of 3). instead perhaps obeying the mysterical-magical law that if you can name a thing you can have power over it. In other words, something has been conjured from the void state of non-definition. Therefore, when it is spoken, the person means it entails the definition they have defined. Of course, this flatly contradicts definitional usage 1. You cannot treat the thing as a real, concrete, inanimate object while saying that whatever it is is not a real, inanimate, concrete object with which to start.

Hate is a case in point. How do you define hate? Before we venture over to the concept that there is such a thing as hate speech, we would need to define hatred. This proves difficult. If I say to Fred or Bob that I hate his tie, is that hate speech? I have literally used the word “hate” in that instance. It should be a cut and dried example if there can be one. Of course, in application we do not say that the tie, or Bob, or Fred, has suffered from hate speech in such a situation. Instead, we are expressing that the fashion-sense is not to our liking. We could have said, “I don’t like the tie.” Yet, we did not. We are indicating a stronger disgust, in theory, by saying we hate the tie, unless we are being ironic, which is another kind of communication all together that entirely contradicts the definition of what is being said. Someone might, for instance, say they “hate love”. We can wring some meaning out of that utterance, but it is inherently contradictory.

A Stronger Definition of Hate

A stronger definition of hate goes beyond mere disgust. Hatred, when it should be used in terms of speech, implies an action that a person is going to hypothetically take to make sure whatever is hated IS REMOVED–whatever that means. So, a person who says they hate a specific ethnic group usually means that they believe that the person or persons are not liked and are therefore undesirable to have around. This, in and of itself is not a bad thing as such an utterance. It is not good either. There are many people that other people do not want to be around for various reasons. When the speech moves to, “All of this ethnic group is bad, and I intend to make sure that they are not around by taking an action,” we have something that better meets the definition of hate speech. Therefore, “I intend to shoot you at 1 pm” is a kind of hate speech. “I am so mad I could kill you,” is not necessarily hate speech.

Disagreement

A disagreement is not inherently hate speech. If I say to you that my definition of a car does not include a Pinto, I am saying something about the qualities I find to be desirable to have in an automobile, and something about the absence of those qualities in the specific case of a Pinto. Someone else may disagree with my assessment, but they probably are not going to immediately resort to “Why do you hate Pintos?” It would be a weird jump to do that. I am not saying anything about my hatred of the car, but I am saying much about the car being suitable to the purpose of transportation. Simply put, it does not fit the definition. Likewise, if you tell me how well you like a certain Linux distro, and I say, “Yeah, not my thing”, you probably are not going to get upset about the interaction unless you are a Linux psycho.

Now, A Different Example

If instead of cars and Linux distros we are talking about the definition of marriage, and I define that as between a male and a female, it is not hatred. I am not saying you have to use that definition if you use the word marriage, but if you are talking to me, I am going to say if your definition is different that it does not fit the criterion. You can call clouds bubble gum, too. I don’t care. You are free to go around defining all matter of objects and qualities in bizarre ways, and I still don’t care. If you start passing legislation, however, I might start to care–especially if your definition is something whacky. If, for instance, you pass a law that no one can call clouds clouds and instead has to call them bubble gum, we are gonna have issues. “It’s the law,” is not going to work either. Bogus laws exist and have existed. Something only has legal force if it is a just law.

Critical Speech Also Is Not Hate speech

If you ask my opinion on something, and I tell you it is a dumb idea, and you are the biggest nitwit I have ever seen for having it, I still haven’t performed any hate speech. I’ve performed disagreement with a dash of a personal insult–but neither of those things rises to hate speech level. I’d have to toss in a casual “and I know where you live and because I do I am going to hunt you down” or something. The barometer is not simply feeling threatened because egos feel threatened all the time–falsely. Fear has been around for a long, long time, but fear is not the same as hatred. Fear might lead to hatred, but it is not a stand-in for it. If you think such speech fosters a hostile environment, well tough. Nobody said that speech had to make you feel warm and fuzzy. Not everything in the world is an emotional affirmation. Sometimes people are jerks and we have to get on with life anyway. If we ACT on the impulse to silence these people, however, no matter how difficult, at an administrative level, we have done something worse than hate speech. We are creating a kind of retributive environment where–since I have power and you do not–I might just use it on you so you better do what I desire. That is the road to oppression. At an individual level, sure, we might ignore a given person on a variety of annoyance factors. An individual is a different person than someone with the authority behind them on a given network to help administer it. If Joe the plumber ignores Bob, it is different compared to the head of the FBI using the powers of the FBI to silence and ignore Bob. Another example is there are many people I will not let into my home that I might see at the supermarket. I do not run out the door because I see that person while shopping for groceries. I go on with my shopping needs.

Ideals Do Not Define Well

The best that can be done, typically, on a given ideal, is to see qualities of that ideal against a certain background of existence. Loyalty in something like the military is different than loyalty to a corporation. Same thing with a relationship. Some qualities abstract out and are in common to all instances, but it is not concretely definite in a way that having a loaf of bread is. Why then do we expect hatred–a strong, not necessarily commensurate with reality, emotional state–to make any sense as a means to moderation of speech? The short answer is we cannot. It is too vague. We can really only start to examine it on the basis of action, and often the people doing the action are censoring those they consider to be hateful. Ironically, this might be the consequence of hatred instead of the prevention of it. The inmates sometimes try to run the asylum. Sometimes the most hate-filled people assume positions of power and abuse it. It is our job, though, to know better and to hold them accountable.

Lincoln Parables And Manifest Destinies

Lincoln told a parable between a wolf and a sheep. Rather than re-tell you that parable myself, I think it is better to allow someone else to:

The Wolf and the Sheep story, which would have reminded Lincoln’s audience of the parable of the Good Shepherd from the Gospel of John, comes from a brief, little remembered speech Lincoln gave in Baltimore in April of 1864. The setting itself is important. Maryland, a border state that had remained in the union, was at this time considering a new constitution that would include a provision ending slavery. So Lincoln went to Baltimore to support and persuade Marylanders to adopt the new constitution. The speech marked a rare moment for Lincoln, who seldom left Washington (he lived at the Cottage during the summer months of the war in part because he believed that, as Commander-in-Chief, he needed to remain in the district and in communication with the War Office). The venue where Lincoln gave his speech was a sanitation fair, which was essentially a fundraiser for the United States Sanitary Commission and the work it did on behalf of wounded and sick soldiers.

The speech itself is interesting for several reasons. Lincoln begins by reminding his audience that much has changed since the war began and that the people of Baltimore, especially, had seen much of that change. He alludes to the difficulty Union soldiers had in marching through the city in 1861 when they were faced with riots. Now, three years later, the citizens of Baltimore are raising money and urging support for those same troops. Lincoln goes on to explain that Baltimore has not only changed its view of Union soldiers but has changed in its attitude towards slavery as well.

It is in this context of change that Lincoln uses the Wolf and the Sheep parable. He starts off by explaining that “the world has never had a good definition for the word liberty,” and that in the midst of the Civil War, America is in need of a good definition. He goes on to say that everyone talks about liberty but that when they use that word they don’t all mean the same thing. Lincoln’s remark is surprising: “liberty” is one of the defining words of American history. The revolutionary generation called themselves the Sons of Liberty, so they presumably had a definition for liberty. Jefferson talks about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the Declaration of Independence, so he too must have had a definition for liberty. But Lincoln says no: in America, and in the world, liberty means different things to different people.

Lincoln goes on to give us two basic definitions of liberty. He notes that “with some, the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself and the product of his labor” while with others liberty is where men are free to “do as they please with other men and the product of other men’s labor.” He goes on to point out that these two definitions are incompatible. He also points out that each believer in one definition of liberty will call the other definition tyranny. Then, instead of explaining which definition he believes is the correct one, he presents these two definitions in the form of a parable.

Lincoln dives into his parable almost without warning. “The shepherd,” he says, “drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one.” He goes on to explain that his policy of emancipation is viewed the same way as the sheep and the wolf view the shepherd, even in the North. But he makes clear that it is the sheep’s definition that he believes is the right one. He goes on to say that the people of Maryland were “doing something to define liberty” and that their work has meant that “the Wolf’s dictionary has been repudiated.”

source: https://www.lincolncottage.org/the-wolf-and-the-sheep/

There is much to be said for the lexicon of a sheep versus that of a wolf. The big difference, perhaps obvious, is that sheep graze–and wolves eat meat–preferably rare. A predator mindset is not the same as the prey. Indeed, prey probably do not think about being in such a category, unless there is a predator around. People, however, with words, tell you which camp they consider themselves as members.

Manifest Destiny is one of those phrases that sounds cool. Heck, we still talk about “manifesting reality” today. (The ‘we’ here is used loosely, New Age folks who talk about vibes are usually the ones who use this phraseology–while I might speak of vibes, it ain’t like that) Back in the day, though, Manifest Destiny was the idea that America needed to expand westward to spread Christianity and the “right religion” to “all them heathens”. Usually, “them heathens” meant “injuns”. Generally speaking, the Whig party, of which Lincoln was a member, opposed the concept of Manifest Destiny, because implicit within all the Manifesting was taking slaves–something the Whigs were against.

Whether Lincoln opposed Manifest Destiny is debated–like most things Lincoln did–since his stances and later actions could support either position. It is clear, however, that he was aware of the differences between sheep and wolves. When wolves decide to go spread their new found wolf ways, disguised as sheep, problems happen. The spread westward was an early form of Replacement Theology in action which was disguised, for its time, as Manifest Destiny.

Native Americans And Westward Expansion

Christianity spreading to the Natives should have resulted in Natives experiencing Christian love, right? Well, some of them did not want that, it turns out, and no excuse was needed to then eliminate those who did not convert, since they were doomed to Hell anyway. Of course, the impetus had been money and land for many, and Manifest Destiny was only the excuse. How many Christian Natives do you see today? Where are they, generally, and what are their feelings toward white settlers in general?

Replacement Theology and Israel

Substitute the word “Jewish person” living in the land of Israel for “native” and “the church” for white settlers, and you have replacement theology. It is as spurious as Manifest Destiny was–in terms of being a valid reason to pursue a given action against a group of people. An article by Greg Denham does an excellent job of dissecting the issue. Despite the example of Messiah, and Paul outright saying Israel is not given up on or replaced, a large group of people are being persuaded that this false doctrine has validity–mostly–and this is important–because it allows them to hate Jewish people. A lazy application of selective theology as a rationale for hatred is not a good methodology for making life decisions–let alone spiritual decisions that influence one’s salvation.

You Cannot Replace People You Actually Love

Despite the dubious wisdom of Beyonce, who seems to be someone consistent with doing witchcraft, you cannot replace those whom you actually love. A bigger picture than that is that you cannot replace people that YHVH loves. Do you think most people have any insight into who YHVH loves? Do you think most people have any idea who are “His people?” More concretely, how many people are passing the bar of Matthew 5:20? For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven. If you cannot get into the kingdom of heaven because your righteousness is not where it ought to be, what makes you a capable judge of anything? The answer is obvious: Most people are not anywhere near a category or state to be judging Israel, the United States, or Great Britain. If they intend to start judging, however, they ought to start with their own countries before deciding that another place is “worse” than their own country is. Put differently, the wolves are hungry and they are looking for shepherds that might protect the flock so they have something to blame later when things do not turn out the way they wish–or else to try to find common enemies to help them along their way. Nothing has changed since Lincoln’s time. His parable still holds.

Manifesting Destiny, Witchcraft, Sorcery

Doing one’s own will at the expense of others on any grounds is bad news. A church doing its own will no longer does the will of the Messiah. Whether it calls itself a church or not is by then immaterial. The authority the church held has evaporated in such cases, and it is only a matter of time until YHVH deals with such believers as they have dealt with others. Since such people will have become “A synagogue of Satan”, or at least a “church of devils and miscreants” they ought to understand the sequence of events that unfold against them.

The Crypto Cyber Punk Anthem

1n 1996, you probably were not going to find a bigger anthem than John Perry Barlow’s Ninety-five Thesis nailed to the Church door of public disclosure which was the burgeoning internet entitled A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.

I will re-produce it here for further discussion:

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

by John Perry Barlow, Electronic Frontier Foundation

https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don’t exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge. Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.

In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.

You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.

Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.

These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

Davos, Switzerland
February 8, 1996

source: https://goldenageofgaia.com/2018/02/11/john-perry-barlow-a-declaration-of-the-independence-of-cyberspace/

Like any good thesis, there are refutations. For the sake of thoroughness, I will reproduce one here:

A Critque Of Barlow’s “A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace”

by reilly jones
©1996 Reilly Jones - All Rights Reserved

Published in Extropy #17
Vol. 8, No. 2, 2nd Half 1996

Last February, responding to U.S. passage of the Telecommunications Reform Act, John Perry Barlow, writer, lyricist for the Grateful Dead, and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, disseminated on-line “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.”1 In this polemic, he declared cyberspace independent of external sovereignty. His assertion generated much discussion, pro and con, leading Barlow to respond publicly in Wired magazine.2 Although a federal court ruled that the Communications Decency Act’s content-based regulation of the Internet medium violates the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment, Barlow’s broad rejection of State jurisdiction over cyberspace remains in force and, as I will show, subject to criticism.

Malignant Political Universalism
Barlow’s “Declaration” contains a dormant intellectual malignancy that could grease the path to universal tyranny. That malignancy lies in expressions of political universalism, a recurring utopian urge that has only produced misery. His use of phrases such as “global social space,” and “Social Contract,” highlight an all too familiar affinity with the sorts of ‘universal rights’ that have left a bloody trail from the French Revolution down through the Cold War. Barlow proposes to form a global cyberspace polity, “where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs,” with impunity. He advocates the imposition of the American polity’s unique right to free speech on all the world’s polities. The creation of any global polity for the purpose of securing such a universal right, could act as a catalyst to the formation of a World State. “We will spread ourselves across the Planet,” Barlow envisions, “so that no one can arrest our thoughts.” In addition, Barlow’s “Declaration” undermines an already-weakened U.S. Constitution. As I will demonstrate, the Constitution’s polycentric principles, i.e., limited sovereignties of enumerated powers, offers our last line of defense to universal tyranny.

To begin with, set Barlow’s “Declaration” side-by-side with the American Declaration of Independence, a comparison that he expressly encourages. This comparison demonstrates the cultural and intellectual free-fall we have entered. A theme recurs throughout his “Declaration,” a temperamental adolescent complaint of, ‘You don’t understand me! I want a lock on my bedroom door!’ Barlow says: “I ask you of the past to leave us alone; You are not welcome among us; You do not know us, nor do you know our world; You do not know our culture; Our world is different; You are terrified of your own children.” Barlow only forgot to add “Don’t trust anyone over 30!” Will the hippie residue of the 60s never grow up? I guess the answer to that, is blowin’ in the cyberwind.

Adolescent emotivism crops up again: “You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.” No reasoning whatsoever backs up this outburst of feeling. Wait until the IRS, FBI, ATF, or another of the grown-ups’ three-letter agencies come after you, then see if you have true reason to fear. Barlow’s response in Wired doesn’t improve matters by invoking the equivalent of a high school ‘in’ crowd: “[I]t does seem self-evident that there is a Net culture, manifestations of which can be found everywhere in this magazine.” I suppose, by analogy, that manifestations of a TV culture could be found in TV Guide. Barlow’s self-evidence thus reflects mere self-selection.

Such self-selection prompts me to wonder: For whom does Barlow speak? “On behalf of the future” he writes, and “I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks.” Whose future? Whose liberty? Who granted him the authority to speak for the world’s future and the world’s liberty? When he speaks for universal cyberspace, and of it breaking free of all external sovereignty, does he really mean to exclude those in cyberspace who don’t mind some statist regulation? Would Barlow deny citizens of particular geographic communities the right to choose regulation of cyberspace-mediated behaviors that historically have proven harmful? Barlow promotes a rigid form of liberty: freedom for him and like-minded individuals alone.

His proposal to form a global cyberspace polity tills bloody old ground. “We are forming our own Social Contract.” Why would you and I want to follow this historically destructive Rousseauean model of polity formation and hew to their totalistic ‘general will’? “We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge,” he says. Whose ethics? Whose self-interest? Barlow can forge the commonweal only by eliminating incompatible individuals, a task that calls on either persuasion, or coercion. The cyberbureaucracy of the hippie residue will no doubt feature their own censor’s chair, mandating a mildewed day-glo atmosphere of political correctness. Suppose that we resist ‘re-education’ and refuse to join their ‘Social Contract.’ Must we be coerced?

Sacred Cyberspace
Barlow does not make clear, in “declaring the independence of cyberspace,” the nature of the boundary between the internal sovereignty of cyberspace and the external sovereignty of the rest of the world. “We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies.” Where does his virtual self end, and his physical self begin? Barlow’s confusion arises from his definition of cyberspace. In the Wired response, he tries to clarify the distinction between cyberspace and the rest of the world by declaring that only “thoughts” exist inside cyberspace, no physical “action.” Would child pornography, libel, slander, consumer fraud, traffic in insider information, theft of state and trade secrets, copyright violations, obtaining access to or tampering with personal records be legal as long as they are “thoughts” in cyberspace rather than “actions” elsewhere? Must one global cyberspace polity decide these questions and override the diverse answers from all other polities? Barlow’s proposal claims it must.

He attempts to transcendentalize cyberspace, even to sacralize it, to place it entirely outside of any jurisdiction. He imagines cyberspace as a timeless, spaceless realm, as “the new home of Mind,” and “thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave.” He reveals that “There is no matter here,” and “Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere.” Barlow’s cyberspace lives as well as cogitates: “It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.” No mere flight of fancy, this picture of cyberspace bolsters his central jurisdictional claim: “Cyberspace does not lie within your borders.”

In part, the fact that information has many uses explains Barlow’s confusion. Information about reality allows us to comprehend the actual world with clarity; information for reality allows us to increase the extropy in the actual world; information as reality allows us to escape the actual world and carries our vitality away with it.3 In this last form, as reality, information loses its materiality, offering the escapist a route to different realms. Jurisdiction could not possibly apply to this transcendent realm, to this heaven on earth! Perhaps if the States of the world don’t define cyberspace as Barlow does, he would at least settle for religious tax-exempt status.

Unfortunately, Barlow undercuts his notion of collective CyberMind in his Wired response. “Even if I wanted to, there wouldn’t be much I could do to call [the Declaration] back at this point.” This recognizes explicitly that matter ultimately controls cyberspace. Anything that goes onto the Net can land on someone’s hard drive, and might remain in storage long after the writer has changed opinion three times, gotten a new boss who dislikes boat-rockers, etc. Dare we post our deepest, most interesting thoughts? Who can be sure that our old content won’t be used against us in a New World Order ‘show trial’? Such concerns demonstrate that cyberspace constitutes a very solid, material object - not a transcendent realm.

Toward a People’s Republic of Cyberspace
Having diagnosed Barlow’s confusion about the nature of cyberspace, I have to wonder what - other than the fact that Barlow hangs out there - makes it more special than, say, a suburban shopping mall? Should we declare shopping malls to form a worldwide independent jurisdiction, transcendental agoras totally disconnected from the real world?

When Barlow rebelliously declares that “You have no sovereignty where we gather,” he stakes out just such an exclusive jurisdiction. Sovereignty, here, refers to the power of giving the law on any subject along with the power of punishment. Jurisdiction refers to which individuals exercise sovereignty in each particular case. Jurisdiction, a structural consideration, means more to liberty than the law itself, because stronger individuals make law for weaker ones. Strong individuals, with jurisdictional authority backing them, determine which entities qualify for inclusion in the human community, which are entitled to the benefits of citizenship, and which have the capacity to enter into consensual agreements. If cyberspace is institutionalized as its own unlimited sovereign, then its jurisdiction will grow at the expense first of other institutions, and if successful, at the expense of everyone outside of cyberspace. Hence Barlow initiates a new version of Marx’s class struggle.

If external sovereignty can only be exercised at the gate to cyberspace, and cyberspace is global in nature, then won’t declarations such as Barlow’s midwife the World Surveillance State? We already sense such a regime in embryonic form. Overlapping nets above us obscure our vision of the stars. First, the crisscrossing jet streams of its diplomatic, military and corporate overlords whizzing around to important meetings; then above them, an orbiting grid of spy satellites watching everything below. We sense the AI supercomputer scanning microscope examining our lives in detail; and we are mindful, in our laogai-gulag-holocaust world, of the totalitarian apparatus of informing on each other.

Barlow repeats the traditional formula for legitimate sovereignty: “Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Despite this theoretical ideal, in practice States require only the acquiescence of the governed. Contrary to Barlow’s claim that in cyberspace “[W]e cannot obtain order by physical coercion,” most order, or acquiescence of the governed, comes from coerced consent. This coercion consists of massive, coordinated, intentional fraud, coupled with a silencing of the truth. The Soviet state pioneered “disinformation” programs, forms of worldview warfare specifically designed to elicit the consent of deceived individuals. These have scientifically evolved into highly sophisticated techniques available to all advanced groups of influential and powerful elites. Citizens labor under a pervasive bombardment of false facts, false meanings and false values from the statist miseducation system, the shameless liars in the orthodox media and the virtueless reality of Hollywood’s image makers. This sophisticated fraud gives rise not simply to false judgment, but utopianism. Absent accurate, reliable facts, clarified meanings, and correct values, individuals find it hard to escape indoctrination. Instead, they remain caught in a closed ideological loop, a self-perpetuating strain of anti-realist thought. Barlow writes from within this loop, whether consciously or not.

The Utopian Conceit
Barlow writes classic utopian cant, an example of what Thomas Sowell calls the “vision of the anointed.”4 “We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace,” exhorts Barlow. “May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.” Governments make the world, and the world is inhumane and unfair? Then, by all means, through ‘permanent revolution’ in cyberspace, we will make them ‘wither away.’ Intentionally or not, Barlow evokes Marxism. “We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.” Can “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need!” be far behind? Apparently not; Barlow adopts as his underlying premise the view that we can create a heaven on earth by freeing our natural goodness from all external discipline through a transcendental cyberspace. “The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule.”

Members of the utopian ‘anointed’ appoint themselves shepherds over the ‘benighted.’ They want to institute emotivism as the world’s only ethical system because individuals who judge right from wrong via ‘feelings’ readily respond to being told how they should feel about things. I can see the future crowds yelling exultantly, “We are free!” then looking around and quietly asking, “Can we say that?” Cyberspace, in its aspect of information as reality, the appearance of freedom from the actual world, could offer the shepherds a perfect stockyard for managing the world flock. True to this form, Barlow indulges in escapist fantasy, “I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us.”

Next: A Cyberspace Constitution?
Constitutions represent theoretical expressions of a polity’s practical political life. To change a constitution, the practical political customs of a polity must change first. Before a world polity calls for a constitution applicable to the entire planet, the practical political life of every person of the world must reflect thinking in global terms. Declaring cyberspace free to develop its own political customs sans ‘interference’ from existing local polities thus represents a step toward developing a Cyberspace Constitution, applicable world-wide.

Our Western Culture has dissolved and its remnant civilization begun to fade. Yet where are the spaces protected from hostile criticism, from the urban rat race and prying eyes where new cultures can arise? A collectivized World State will leave little room for us to carve out our own havens of liberty. Each individual has little power to oppose the formation of the World State. Hence the need for mediating institutions between individuals and statist authorities. Mediating structures, as the threads of the web of public life surrounding the cells of our separate private lives, provide critical protection for individual liberties. Institutions providing private law arbitration, reputation markets, and technical communication standards must act as competing powers to thwart utopians’ constant attempts to consolidate world power.

This polycentric model allows the fluid formation of diverse polities of limited sovereignty in cyberspace, what I have termed “cybernexus.” These polities constitute wholes, with no split between “mind” and “body.” They include the social relationships and technological superstructure required to maintain the virtual communities in cyberspace. This creates a complex adaptive political system, one resistant to both egalitarian mobocracy and oligarchic tyranny. There can be no universal cyberspace. A total war between limited sovereignties and global tyranny lies before us. Will there be any new human cultures at all, let alone opportunities for posthuman speciation? I, for one, do not want utopian cosmic consciousness; I want to foster the seeking of a plurality of individual destinies.

Liberty and freedom represent different concepts. Barlow offers not just a declaration to be free of any existing governmental authority, but rather a statement of his desire for ‘vacant freedom.’ Such vacant freedom exists only after the overthrow of all authority - including truth and history. Without history, depletion of a large store of meaning and context in our lives occurs. Absent truth, lies and propaganda reign. Barlow thus encourages fraudulent revisionism and relativism, a violent form of worldview warfare.

Vacant freedom, in practice, unfolds as wars between gangs over turf. Liberty, on the other hand, arises when individuals in unresolvable conflict with each other, turn to law for resolution by judges to whom the parties have, by mutual existence in a consensual moral polity, accepted the method of choosing the judges and given them limited judging powers that they accept as valid. “For true liberty is not a matter of ridding oneself of external law,” Miguel de Unamuno wrote, “liberty is consciousness of the law. The free man is not the one who has rid himself of the law, but the one who has made himself master of it.”

If we have bad laws, such as the Communications Decency Act, let us, by all means, change them. But let us not throw out all of our existing polities. The historical lesson to be derived from the fall of the Roman republic to tyranny can still be found on the dusty shelves of used book stores. A contemporary observer of this tragedy, Sallust, prescribed the course of action that foils this fall, “It is better for a good man to be overcome by his opponents than to conquer injustice by unconstitutional means.”
Notes:

1. Web location, A Declaration of Independence

2. John Perry Barlow, “Declaring Independence,” 4.06 Wired 121-22 (June 1996).

3. Albert Borgmann, “Information and Reality at the Turn of the Century,” vol. 11, no. 2 DesignIssues 21-30 (Summer 1995).

4. Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy. (New York: BasicBooks, 1995).

source: https://www.reillyjones.com/critique-of-barlow.html *

In context then, Barlow is upset because of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and what he sees as failed government policy. His solution, it appears, is to be ungovernable and formulate some manner of internet global hive-mind and to ask all the rest of the world politely to sod off while he continues to pursue this activity. There are no kings in this telling.

The refutation produced by Jones, on the other hand, comes at the problem from standpoint of the body, specifically transhumanism, and points out that that there can be no such thing as a space without a sovereign and therefore a war necessarily follows. Either it is crypto-anarchy in a global space, or a limited monarchy warring over sphere of influence.

If Barlow is the 60’s, Jones represents the 1760’s. Both use a lot of words to outline positions that are, in essence, distilled down to the bifurcation of anarchy and egalitarianism, or governance and war.

In the words of Dr. Evil, though, there is another option. “How about No?”

Barlow’s idea that there should be no governance is incorrect, since people are always going to be governed by something or another. Living in a household with other people is enough to demonstrate this principle. There will be house rules or someone will likely be kicked to the curb. On the other hand, you cannot have a constant state of one house being pitted against another unless you want something like the Scottish clan system that resulted in most of those same families moving clear out of Scotland.

The answer was all ready posed to this dilemma before Barlow penned it in the Declaration of Independence 1.0. That specific document balances the will of the people against the will of those who represent them and makes the people sovereign. In 1996, it is true that this feeling was not high because the elections were generating problems between candidates that were not good against candidates that were worse. However, that has nothing to do with the Declaration and everything to do with the people being asleep at the wheel. What was needed was an awakening–which the internet certainly could and has served as a tool toward. It was almost as though by 96, everyone had given up on the actual land and moved into a digital territory to fight what was originally the cause of moving to the land of America with which to begin. Barlow’s solution of “Go Away!” seems juvenile. Jone’s analysis makes more sense, but comes at it from a transhumanist stance of insanity. Do you doubt that it is coming from such insanity? Fine. Let’s do this:

Transhumanist Philosophy is the quest to enhance life and liberty through speciation. It is piloting an ascending course between idealism and materialism: the Tao, the Logos, the living arrow of creation. The self-organizing honing in on a moving point of purposeful disequilibrium in a dynamic pattern of increasing complexity. In Isaiah Berlin’s words: “An unstable equilibrium in need of constant attention and repair…. an open future.” Berlin adds: “The glory and dignity of man consist in the fact that it is he who chooses, and is not chosen for, that he can be his own master.”

Consider the consequences of the concept that we are not one culture, that we are not one species, that we are not approaching one destiny, when thinking about the future… observe carefully the fences of a “one world order” philosophical stockyard that restricts our liberty, they are well camouflaged. Outside this globalist-open-borders stockyard, as J.R.R. Tolkien phrased it: “Resistance still had somewhere where it could take counsel free from the Shadow.”

The concept of cultural unanimity is antithetical to the natural convergence of the American polity’s right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; namely, the right to culturally speciate in order to physically speciate, or not. We cannot all culturally speciate equally at once; therefore, such speciation optimally occurs under conditions where excellence is the social ideal and not under conditions where equality is the social ideal. Another way of expressing this is that evolutionary adaptability is nature’s preferred upward social path.
source: https://www.reillyjones.com/

Not one species, eh? k. You go to your heat rock and bask. When you deal with the discussion concerning humanity and rights, though, I am allowed to call you a lizard. Whatever you say I will then consider in the light of lizardness. I will not allow you to pose as a human being, saying things that sound humanitarian, that actually server your lizard-kin. Gorns speak up for Gorns and people for people. It is the way of the Star Trek.

The fact I have to point this out, though, tells you the level of insanity all ready present in what many consider to be quaint pre-Q post(s) 1996. Normal was never there other than the Grace that God poured out on the time and the people to make it seem normal. These people were restrained then, and considered “weirdly academic” at best and “eccentric” at worst.

Speaking of which, John Perry Barlow is one of the Q posts that were made that seemed to predict his death due to a heart attack. Some of that content can be found on the original above source where Perry’s Declaration is quoted.