Sorry about sending the last message to the whole list. wanted to send it just to Chris Troutner but I forgot to remove the list's address
On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 5:03 PM, Chris Troutner <[email protected]> wrote: > Actually, it has a lot to do with hardware. They have a lot of support > from the Debian community, but they don't seem to have any focused > support from the hardware community. I have seen anything from Freedom box about actually building a decentralized alliterative to the internet(IP4 for you imbeciles out there) We need a Disruption-Tolerant Networking protocol so that the /Internet/ doesn't get taken out by politicians(US's Internet kill switch. great wall firewall of China. Australia's black-list) or thugs(Egypt and Libya) or hardware fault http://www.space-travel.com/reports/The_Internet_A_Fragile_System_Threatened_By_Natural_Disaster_999.html People need to listen to Douglas Rushkoff not to --- Old media, such as terrestrial radio and television, were as distributed as the thousands of stations and antennae from which broadcast signals emanated, but all internet traffic must pass through government and corporate-owned choke points. That's why President Hosni Mubarak's regime had so little trouble shutting down his citizens' networks when he wanted to. One phone call to each of the four internet service providers in his country was all it took. And while we might like to believe that couldn't happen in the United States, we should remember that all it took was a call from Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Connecticut, to Amazon for the corporation to shut down WikiLeaks' website recently. Meanwhile, UK's Vodafone complied with Mubarak's orders first to turn off cell phone use in Egypt, and later to flood cell phone users with incendiary pro-government messages. More virtual ink was spilled in the United States about Vodafone-partner Verizon's version of the iPhone than on Vodafone's utter complicity in the violence fomented by the commands it promoted through its networks. Although Vodafone continues to apologize publicly for its ongoing policy of serving the goon squads of a dictatorial regime, it has also continued to follow that regime's orders. If bottom-up networks are this dependent on the good graces of top-down authorities for their very functioning, then how bottom-up are they? While in the United States we may have policies protecting free speech and open communication, it is these laws -- and not some feature of our internet -- that prevent the kinds of censorship we are witnessing in Egypt. And, as we saw when push came to shove over WikiLeaks in the United States, how quickly this very same authority can be used to cut off "enemies of the state" from access and funding." --- http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/02/05/rushkoff.egypt.internet/ The right to free speech is the right to say any thing as long as the authorities don't find it objectionable. "No restrictions may be placed on the exercise of this right other than those imposed in conformity with the law and which are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security or public safety, public order (ordre public), the protection of public health or morals or the protection of the rights and freedoms of others." > "Taken together, these appliances will afford people around the world > options for communicating, publishing, and collaborating that will > resist state intervention or disruption." ...as seen recently with > Egyptian ISPs, but yeah, it's nice, but has little to do with hardware. > First we can return to the kind of life and society we had before the war, go back to our peaceful pursuit of a living, or local social betterment, or political importance, or psychotherapy as the case may be. We could probably count with luck on fifteen years, or even twenty, of peace if we do that, but those occupations would be completely futile as we would be taken over and enslaved, literally, and our comfortable social developments thrown into the discard by a "Master Race" to whom we would appear weak and unrealistic and not fit to run our own lives. Every present indication is that the next time any self-styled master race is allowed to prepare and make such an attempt it will succeed. If our future concern is just the reestablishment of the pre-war society, slavery is absolutely inevitable. We were before the war the kind of people who allowed the Germans, Italians and Japanese to prepare openly for war for years and to pick their own time and place to attack us. If we go on being that same kind of people we are indeed not fit to survive. We will have proven clearly our lack of ability to learn from even the most painful experience - biologically intolerable condition. The second possible course is to prepare earnestly for the next war, recognizing its inevitability, training our children from infancy to live dangerously, to be able to fight effectively with ever more efficient, ruthless and terrible weapons. They must be trained to strike first because there may be no second blow in the wars of the future. Constant alertness and ruthless killing of all potential enemies will be the price of survival if we go on as we always have. The third possible course is to find and take sure steps to prevent wars in the future. While this possibility seems obviously preferable it is something that has never yet been undertaken successfully. Perhaps it can be said that such a course has never been undertaken at all. Perhaps there is no way of preventing wars; if so we must decide whether to be slaves or ruthless killers, but before accepting either of those uncomfortable alternatives let us at least explore possible ways of preventing war. Before exploring such possibilities however, we should first consider war in relation to the human race so that we may be assured that it would indeed be good for the race to prevent future wars. ... Can we identify the reasons, why we fight wars or even enough of them to perceive a pattern? Many of them are easy to list-prejudice, isolationism, the abil-ity emotionally and uncritically to believe unreasonable things, excessive desire for material or power, excessive fear of others, belief in a destiny to control others, vengeance, ability to avoid seeing and facing unpleasant facts and taking appropriate action. These are probably the main reasons we find ourselves involved in wars. They are all well known and recognized neurotic symptoms. The only normal motive is self defense, to protect ourselves from aggression, but surely we should be able to see the aggression coming long before it breaks out in warfare and take appropriate action to satisfy or suppress it. Even self defense may involve a neu-rotic reaction when it means defending one's own excessive material wealth from others who are in great need. This type of defense is short sighted, ineffective and inevitably leads to more wars. ... Let me repeat parts of this "The ability to size things up, make one's own decisions, is a characteristic of maturity," "A mature person . . . above all he has the qualities of adaptability and compromise." Can anyone doubt that enough people reaching maturity in these terms would not want to start wars themselves and would prevent other people starting them. It would appear that this quality of maturity, this growing up successfully, is what is lacking in the human race generally, in ourselves and in our legislators and governments, which can only represent the people. This fact puts the problem squarely up to psychiatry. The necessity to fight wars, whether as aggressor or as a defender who could have, but has not, taken steps to prevent war occurring, is as much a pathological psychiatric symptom as is a pho-bia or the antisocial behavior of a criminal who has been dominated by a stern and unreasonable father. They are alike irrational behavior patterns resulting from un-successful development and failure to reach emotional maturity. It is evident that this failure is usual in the whole human race and has been so throughout historical time. For a cause we must seek some consistent thread running through the weave of all civilizations we have known and preventing the development of all or almost all the people to a state of true maturity. What basic psychological distortion can he found in every civilization of which we know anything? It must be a force which dis-courages the ability to see and acknowledge patent facts, which prevents the ra-tional use of intelligence, which teaches or encourages the ability to dissociate and to believe contrary to and in spite of clear evidence, which produces inferiority, guilt and fear, which makes controlling other people's personal behavior emotionally necessary, which encourages prejudice and the inability to see, understand and sympathize with other people's points of view. Is there any force so potent and so persuasive that it can do all these things in all civilizations? There is - just one. The only lowest common denominator of all civilizations and the only psychological force capable of producing these perversions is morality, the concept of right and wrong, the poison long ago described and warned against as "the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil." In the old Hebrew story God warns the first man and woman to have nothing to do with good and evil. It is interesting to note that as long ago as that, "good" is recognized as just as great a menace as "evil." They are the fruit of the one tree and are different aspects of the same thing. We have been very slow to rediscover this truth and to recognize the unnecessary and artificially imposed inferiority, guilt and fear, commonly known as sin, under which we have almost all labored and which produces so much of the social malad-justment and unhappiness in the world. For many generations we have bowed our necks to the yoke of the conviction of sin. We have swallowed all manner of poi-sonous certainties fed us by our parents, our Sunday and day school teachers, our politicians, our priests, our newspapers and others with a vested interest in control-ling us. "Thou shalt become as gods, knowing good and evil," good and evil with which to keep children under control, with which to prevent free thinking, with which to impose local and familial and national loyalties and with which to blind children to their glorious intellectual heritage. Misguided by authoritarian dogma, bound by exclusive faith, stunted by inculcated loyalty, torn by frantic heresy, bedevilled by insistent schism, drugged by ecstatic experience, confused by conflicting certainty, bewildered by invented mystery, and loaded down by the weight of guilt and fear engendered by its own original promises, the unfortunate human race, deprived by these incubi of its only defences and its only reasons for striving, its reasoning power and its natural capacity to enjoy the satisfaction of its natural urges, strug-gles along under its ghastly self-imposed burden. The results, the inevitable results, are frustration, inferiority, neurosis and inability to enjoy living, to reason clearly or to make a world fit to live in. The crippling of intelligence by these bandages of belief, in the name of virtue and security for the soul, is as recognizable as that of the feet of the Chinese girl who was sacrificed to the local concept of beauty. The result is, in both cases, not beauty of character or of feet, but distortion and crippling and loss of natural func-tion. Intelligence, ability to observe and to reason clearly and to reach and imple-ment decisions appropriate to the real situation in which he finds himself, are man's only specific methods of survival. His unique equipment is entirely in the superior lobes of his brain. His destiny must lie in the direction indicated by his equipment. Whatever hampers or distorts man's clear true thinking works against man's mani-fest destiny and tends to destroy him. Man's freedom to observe and to think freely is as essential to his survival as are the specific methods of survival of the other species to them. Birds must fly, fish must swim, herbivorous animals must eat grasses and cereals, and man must ob-serve and think freely. That freedom, present in all children and ,known as inno-cence, has been destroyed or crippled by local certainties, by gods of local morali-ties, of local loyalty, of personal salvation, of prejudice and hate and intolerance-frequently masquerading as love-gods of everything that would destroy freedom to observe and to think and would keep each generation under the control of the old people, the elders, the shamans, and the priests. ... The Reestablishment of Peacetime Society The Responsibility of Psychiatr -- G.B. Chisholm M.D. Sincerely, Panthera Tigris Altaica _______________________________________________ Qi Hardware Discussion List Mail to list (members only): [email protected] Subscribe or Unsubscribe: http://lists.en.qi-hardware.com/mailman/listinfo/discussion
