Re: New Use for Sub-Woofer
- From: MooseFET <kensmith@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 12 Jul 2008 10:18:33 -0700 (PDT)
On Jul 11, 8:51 pm, mpm <mpmill...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jul 11, 10:18 pm, MooseFET <kensm...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I moved this up from the bottom because I am about to point out how it
could be a lot worse if engineered to be bad.
****
Why is everything so screwed up? I'm not even sure you could purposly****
engineer society to be this screwed up?
And now - morphing to something truly off-topic, but just as annoying.
...speaking of chalk on a blackboard - here's some more "noise":
I briefly heard a discussion on Public Radio yesterday about how
texting on a cell phone has no hope of supplanting proper written
language anytime soon. Nevermind that kids these days drop vowels
like hot potatoes (note, I spelled "potatoes" correctly, in deference
to Dan Quayle - but I digress..)
When the movable type was invented there was a great change in the
language. Spellings became much more regular. Hand written documents
before that contained many very creative spellings that are now
gone.
Texting is doing the same sort of thing to the language. It is not,
however destroying the ability to communicate as you seem to think it
may be. Various limitations on the actual freedom of speech would do
more harm.
To get a feel for what I am thinking of, imagine a country with only
one group in control of its entire mass media in all of its forms.
Such a place would have a hard time becoming or remaining a
democracy. The USSR fell partly because (or at least the timing was
set by) the government lost control over some forms of media.
The absurd justification for this was that a similar advance in
technology (namely, the telegraph) did not obliterate writing
overnight. Are you kidding me??!! The telegraph?!!
The printing press and the typewriter are a lot more like texting than
the telegraph. You can take some comfort in the fact that we did not
devolve back to the cave when they showed up. Good handwriting is a
lot less important today.
If you really want to imagine things that would mess stuff up consider
things that control the content of the message and not the form. I
think that the very american tendency to use euphemisms and sometimes
dysphemisms to hide the meaning of a phrase from the listener are a
greater risk to society than texting. Calling "retarded" children
"special" has made it so that we can't call a kid special anymore
without implying that you mean retarded.
There are of course many parallels to be drawn, and at first glance,
might even seem convincing.
But the argument completely fails to consider that nearly everyone has
a cell phone (and Internet) these days. That was not true for the
Telegraph.!!!! It's a MAJOR flaw in the argument.
Nearly everyone has access to a typewriter. It works better for the
comparison.
[....]
If you really want to engineer a more screwed up situation than we
have today it is fairly easy to imagine how:
First you need to work against the idea that we all share common
interest in the nation or society. You need to undermine everything
that is part of the "commons". Let things like the roads decay and
turn them over to private interests who can charge per use. For best
results you want the private owners to be very far removed from the
situation. Since we can't sell them off to the martians, we would
have to pick some folks on the far side of the world who don't share
in our culture and certainly not our language.
Those parts of the society that people feel that they can count on
when things go bad would be the next place to attack. You want to
ensure that people like the Red Cross are seen as massively corrupt
and that government agencies like the FBI and FEMA are staffed with
the incompetent and the corrupt. In a nation like the US where a
major part of the population believes in a religion with leaders that
you can access and corrupt, you can also corrupt this leadership.
This would also work in the Arab nations but not so well in Europe
since they don't seem to believe as strongly.
While you are removing these things that give people security, you can
do a couple of things to help set neighbor upon neighbor.
(1)
You need to find a part of the population that is about 10% and is
spread around enough that they are noticed but not so big that they
can defend themselves. This sector has to be made the scapegoat for
all that is wrong. Think of the Jews in Germany for an extreme
example. You also need to provide the "we" part of the "we vs they"
for this to work well. Some good chest thumping jingoism would work
for this.
(2)
To really lube the skid into chaos, you also want a bunch of armed
thugs in opposing groups. Rome did this by turning its armies into
mercenary groups of foreign nationals fighting for money not for
country. These armies eventually came back "home" and helped to
overthrow the country. Creating an armed force that is a standing
army with a sense of being "the other" would be a good way towards
repeating this. To do this, you need a war someplace for them to
fight in, so you can justify the formation of this army but you have
to make sure that the enemy isn't real enough to actually kill off
your band of fighters. Some little country in Africa could serve as
the "enemy".
Societies in democratic countries are hard to mess up so you would
also like to remove the democracy from the situation before you make
the attack on the society. Democracies are hard to destroy by direct
attack but there are ways to weaken and subvert them:
(1)
You want to make people lose confidence in the democratic process and
make them believe that it is a rigged game. Most democracies depend
on a recorded vote and not a public outcry. In those, attacking the
voting process and making it appear non-obvious and corrupt would be a
good way to undermine the confidence. Getting a pinball game maker to
make the voting machines would be one way to do this. Another
slightly less effective way would be to select a person or company
with a stated bias to make the voting machines. If you could find a
biased pinball maker, you'd be in great shape on this.
(2)
As much as possible, you want to move the functions and powers of the
government out of the hands of the elected and into the hands of
people who are not accountable to the voters. You want this group of
people who gain this control to be be fairly small. Setting up or
selecting corporations for this purpose, as has happened in Russia,
is a good way to cripple a democracy. Ideally, the heads of these
corporations should be somehow insulated. It is not as effective if
it is spread among a large number of people who live in the society
because they will tend to act too much like the average voters because
they have much in common with them.
(3)
What is often referred to as "the middle class" (but isn't under the
old definition) are the folks that create and maintain democracies.
These are the people who are not the powerful and rich nor the poor.
They don't feel like they have been dealt four aces and are thus
willing to call a "misdeal" and also have enough time and security to
do something about it. The poor are too busy getting enough to eat to
engage in politics. To the degree that you have the power to do it,
you want to reduce the size of this fraction of society and drive them
towards inaction. Pushing them down towards poverty is the best way
to reduce their numbers. Inaction can be partly gained by destroying
any organizations that they may belong to, that give them some
leverage over the rich. The task is the eliminate the jobs that pay
well enough to grant the time to engage in politics so that only those
with the wealth have this ability.
.
- References:
- New Use for Sub-Woofer
- From: Jim Thompson
- Re: New Use for Sub-Woofer
- From: MooseFET
- Re: New Use for Sub-Woofer
- From: mpm
- New Use for Sub-Woofer
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