My manifesto
So, lately I’ve been getting a lot of messages and updates in relation to this “one demand” thing. The Occupy Wall Street movement had one demand. Granted, now they have about 50,000 million demands, but in the beginning, there was the potential of one demand. And frankly, I don’t think one demand is all that bad an idea. Great things come from on demand. Arguably, John Rawls only had one demand, the be evaluated from a veil of ignorance. If you’ve read A Theory of Justice, you understand that one demand makes a hell of a lot.
So, to the point, I think It’s not an awful idea to have just one demand; actually, I think you can achieve quite a bit. It got me thinking, everyone really has a demand. And everyone has a base moral theory from which their demand sprouts. Rawls, Nozick, Kant, Bentham, Ranciere, Rand and any other philosopher you can name can be grouped into a single demand. People have asked me, what would my one demand be? What could possibly summarize everything I think and everything I want?
Simply put, my one demand is the recognition of a fundamental equality of persons. I demand the recognition that each person with an individual life has equal value, and that no arbitrary factor is able to affect this value.
Obviously, there are certain things that affect value. For example, if one is shown to be an ax murderer, there are obviously not granted the same right to walk through a crowded public park holding an ax. That would be ridiculous. But the fact that someone is less intelligent than another does not mean they have a dissimilar right to life, or health, or liberty. I hold that Steve Jobs had no more a right to anything than a hunter in Africa, or a political prisoner in Tibet. Each person did not sacrifice their right to be treated morally, and thus they each deserve the same moral treatment.
You can’t achieve equality. I can’t say, “Well, you have X amount and you have Y amount so you both deserve (X+Y)/2 amount of money.” There is no way to be equal. To force an equality would be to force a rigid boundary which cannot really be equality. If if force people to be equal, I subjugate one. Truly, the world must be created from a point of equality. For this, I adopt the Veil of Ignorance, which states the rules are discovered behind a hypothetical veil from which no person would know their position in life. From this, there can be nobody favoring themselves an unequal amount. There can be nobody who would dominate because they were strong. There would be a state of perfect equality in determining rules. From this, there would have to be a state of equality. The rules chosen from this point are the same rules which uphold equality, justice, and rightness
I imagine a few things. FIRST, there would be a solid welfare system in place, nobody would risk death from a veil. Nobody would deny themselves health care. People don’t risk their lives that much. Steve Jobs would donate a bit more of his money, and Warren Buffet would still be a saint. It’s easy to imagine what rules would be chosen, just imagine yourself in the place of the least advantaged. Benefit them, and you uphold equality.
So my one demand is to have a state of equality. My one demand is that equality be recognized. Occupy Wall Street has many demands, not all connected. But each individual has one. I think my reasons are highly logical. Clearly, I hold people equality as self-evident, although I will theoretically justify it if forced; however, I would prefer not to.
~Schima
Facebookers–Stop copying and pasting
This is something I posted on my facebook as a note. I’ve decided to post here too.
Before any of you start to protest, I’m talking about those serious ones about cancer etc, not comedically intended ones. If a status is meant to have some humorous value, that’s totally different.
Which actually feeds into reason one.
1) I don’t copy and paste because it takes alll the meaning out of the status. Every time I see some sort of canned status publically declaring one’s (love/hatred/mourning/anything) (of/about) ______instert cause or event here________, I think to myself that it’s cheapening the meaning of the idea. My willingness to repeating a statement doesn’t make me more committed to a cause, it makes the cause something I wasn’t willing to think about hard enough to really make a statement of my own. Alternatively, I am inexplicably too afraid to say something of my own so I copy someone elses words and let people attribute it to groupthink. Apparently, it’s bad do publically talk about a cause unless you(‘re) a. are trying to get others to repeat or b. are merely a part of a greater whole. People have this habit of coercing others into pasting the same thing. Which transitions into point two.
2) These all-too-often are a ploy towards making the posters seem superior and/or creating a special group of people who “care”. The worst offender I’ve really been concious of is this lovely babe:
Stupid cancer. We all want a new car, a new phone. A person who has cancer only wants one thing… to survive. I know that a lot of you “who think you’re too cool” probably won’t re-post this. But a very little amount of my friends will. Put this on your wall in honor of someone who died of cancer, survived, or who is fighting against it now…
Now, I’m not saying the message is bad. I AM NOT a fan of Cancer, but this whole deal about people being to cool to post it… Seriously? It’s trying to make it seem like, “you’re cool but I really care.” It’s this self-inflation that bothers me. This whole idea that one someone who posts is somehow above those who would prefer to not. I have reasons (which i’m outlining here, and this isn’t even all) that I don’t want to post. You aren’t better than me. Worst of all are the ones that specify a given amount of time to keep said status posted, like a badge of honor. “I care so much that I’m willing to post a copied ‘heartfelt’ status. And that makes me better than you.” I hate it. It’s like people have to post to feel good about caring. Which brings me to number three.
3) These statuses seems to me like people’s feeling good about themselves instead of really doing something to help. Now, obviously I’m not a cancer researcher nor am I someone with power to help 9/11 survivors. But that doesn’t mean I can’t do something about it. I can sign a petition to get governmental recognition. I can donate money to the Leukemia and Lymphoma association. To me, a canned status seems like an attempt to assuage one’s guilt as opposed to really trying to go out and make a difference.
Conclusion) Now, this isn’t some sort of attack on people who post these statuses, this is my explanation of reasons why I choose to not. I’ve been getting a lot of messages lately saying I need to post some. To those of you sending, here you go.
I’m Tired of this Bullshit.
Aren’t we all a little tired with the Bullshit? With all this name-calling and this finger pointing. All of this meaningless hatred towards other ideas. It’s gotten to the point where all anything is… is politics. And I don’t mean to say it’s the American Political System, or the French political system, or the a parliamentary system. Or anything. It’s just stupid politics.
Definition–Politics: That Bullshit people get hung up over while avoiding actual solutions.
This I believe.
Like, let’s look at some of the politics going on in the United States right now… This is my shortlist of things that are so very wrong
- It’s a bad thing to be well educated at a nice school.
- If you’re rich and want lower taxes, you’re greedy, but if you want higher taxes, you just don’t understand.
- If you’re poor and you want lower taxes, you can’t help yourself. If you want higher taxes, you just don’t want to work
- IF YOU’RE THE MIDDLE CLASS and you want lower taxes, you just won’t help the poor OR YOURSELVES. And if you want them higher, you’re killing the poor.
- If you disagree with a conservative, you’re a Marxist in hiding.
- If you respect Islam, you’re a Muslim. And apparently that’s bad.
- The United States thinks itself responsible for solving other nations’ problems
- Other nation hate the United States for it, but do we care? noooo.
- Our president is paid 20X someone in the armed forces.
- We care so much about politics coming up with a(n) _______ plan, the scientists/economists get no say.
Filtration and Personalization
We live in a culture of filtration. We live in a culture of personalization. And we increasingly aren’t willing to face the other side.This become really clear to me a few weeks ago when I (thoughtlessly) posted a status about the potential of raising taxes. Horrors. And apparently, this is a bigger deal than it would seem. On particularly offended person commented that I need to think about people who might not agree with me before I post statuses with my opinions. Seriously. You can’t make this stuff up. It would seem that the found my confronting them with an idea they didn’t like so evil, so heinous that it never should have existed in the first place. She was even angrier when I pointed out how we are at historically low tax rates (and here). I felt like she was offended by my facts. Like disagreeing ideas ought not be shared. And it’d be stupid to pretend this isn’t a broader idea ingrained in our culture. There’s a reason there’s both Fox News and MSNBC. We have the Cato Institute and MoveOn.org. People are attracted to everything they like.
Back on MSNBC and Fox. It’s interesting how people are willing to lash out against the media they don’t like. Against the media that doesn’t represent them. That’s why these guys is going so hard against Fox, and these guys are hating on MSNBC. They aren’t represented. We need to get away from this assertion that on the other side it’s only bad people. I’m not saying there aren’t some crazy people. And there is some evidence Glenn Beck was just bad. But on the whole, they’re all going for what they think is right. So then why do we hate them so much?
We get a little bit of a high (link someday) every time we come to something we agree to. And in my opinion, coming to something we don’t agree with is like having a light shone into our hungover eyes while heavy metal plays in a the background. And with the rise of the Internet, this addiction will only worsen.
About a month ago, I finished this book about Internet personalization. In the book, Pariser (author) describes how we’re living in a society increasingly dominated by personalization. He gave the example of search results, where each person on Google, yahoo, or Bing will get search results tailored to habits they’ve exhibited. For example, when I search wikipedia.com on Google, one of the results I get is ‘Topiary (hacktivist)’. If you’ve read one of my prior posts, you’ve realized that I’m very interested in Hacktivism. Google acts accordingly. It seems like a perfect system. Google doesn’t just give me what I ask for, it gives me what I really want. It gives everybody exactly what they want.
The link to this, and the beginning of the article is pretty clear. People no longer have to confront ideas they go to. With growing personalization all over the web, the problem is only getting worse. Plus, web personalization is different. When you choose to watch MSNBC or Fox News, you understand you are taking an option of a certain way. When you go to the pundits, you know they’re paid to give this kind of opinion. The Internet is different. When I Google something like tax hikes, I get a whole lot of things about how they’re necessary. When my ultra-conservative friend looks up the same phrase, he learns how Tax hikes will crash the US economy. We’re never faced with each other’s reality.
Each person lives in their own little bubble. No person need face other opinions when they can just be reinforced. Why do you think my friend at the beginning of this post hated hearing about somebody’s disagreement? Because we’re all so used to being agreed with. Sometimes we need to face the facts.
So what’s the answer to this? I’m not sure. I know I expose myself to multiple sources ranging from the Huffington Post to Fox News Opinion but not everybody will. It’s easy to delete cookies from your computer, or to browse privately, or in Incognito Mode (chrome). But let’s think about what’s happening for a moment. It doesn’t seem necessary to have everything tailored to you every whim. If I look up animal rights for medical use, I should probably get what the NIH says, but I should get what PETA says as well. It’s ridiculous to think we should get exactly what we’re going for. It’s healthy for someone who hates Hip-Hop on principle to see an article about all the good certain artists do in the world.
Maybe there needs to be a law about it. Because I would love the girl at the beginning of this post to be able to see what I can see too. We don’t NEED our ideas. Search engines were fine before they gave us a personalized search. Personally, I think there should be a federal law about it. It’s constitutional under interstate commerce, and it’s justified. Legitimately. It could be as simple as a less-than-a-page bill that says a website cannot personalize except for (a). advertising, and (b.) local news.
You can still find what you want. But at least now, you’re forced to see a different idea.
~Schima
The GOP–I promised I wouldn’t get political.
This blog was supposed to be about commentary. I wasn’t going to be the person that clearly shows his (or her) political views. I promised I would talk about what going on. I would talk about events, not people. But looking through the internet today changed that. I was working on a post about Internet Personalization, but i couldn’t focus. And something radically different happened. My personal filter bubble (more on that coming, I promise) has awarded me with quite a bit of American Political news. And today, while I was on Youtube, one of the suggested videos caught my eye. I had recently been looking up some campaign videos of presidential candidates, and based on what I had watched, youtube suggested another video for me to watch. Michele Bachmann and homosexuality. The video becomes more uninteresting after they fully discuss the husband. And the second interviewee isn’t as good, but still worthwhile
For those of you who can’t watch for any number of reasons, we’ll just say that Michele Bachmann, along with her husband, is very much against gay marriage. And I would go so far as to say she doesn’t believe people who practice homosexuality are as good of people at all. Her husband references to them as “barbarians” and calls it “sinful nature.” It’s probably apparent here why I wouldn’t like Representative Bachmann to begin with. It’s an understatement to say I adamantly believe in gay rights. It’s an understatement to say that she doesn’t.
I’ll give a little justification for why here. Since homosexuality is a trait that comes before birth, it’s discrimination just like any other form. You’re taking somebody’s inherent trait, sexuality, and saying that it isn’t as worthwhile. Saying that it isn’t good. Saying that it’s unequal. I didn’t mean to go further, but I’ll just briefly mention/address this whole civil union stuff. It’s literally saying you can be like us, just not be us. Sounds a lot like separate but equal? Ok. I’m done. So to recap. THIS is true. THIS is not. Let’s not hate on somebody’s inherent traits (race/gender/sexuality).
I’m off the rant. Moving on. Let’s talk about Bachmann’s seeming hatred of government. I was going through a video of her “best” quotes, and one stood out to me specifically. She said, “”I wish the american media would take a good look at the people in congress and ask, are the pro-America or anti-America?” It seems like an nutty statement, and nothing more; still, I feel that it we should have someone who is willing to cromprimise and work with other people. NOT somebody who is apt to describe anybody that doesn’t adopt the beliefs and policies that she does “Anti-America.”
Full Video:
And she makes some other ridiculous statements.
And her statements are more than outlandish. They’re also factually wrong. Take an NPR Report that came out not too long ago. I was stunned when the person being interviewed mentioned, ” The first thing I should say is, I truly don’t mean this in any partisan way, but this is the fourth presidential campaign I’ve covered; I’ve been covering politics since 1997, and I’ve never really covered a candidate, sort of at her level, who frankly makes so many misstatements when – so many factual misstatements. She’s fairly careless with the facts.” I was sure he was exaggerating, but something he said later convinced me she was truly saying falsities. Observe:
And so she told a story about how her ancestors came to the United States from Norway, and she tells a series of dramatic stories about their flight from Norway to Iowa: floods, bad weather, locusts, this and that, and then they finally persevere and survive and live happy lives.
But all of the dramatic stories she told, that she told her audience happened in Iowa, actually happened in Wisconsin and South Dakota. And so I was – and her cousin actually wrote a family history, where it very clearly laid out the facts of her family moving to Wisconsin and then moving to South Dakota and these dramatic things happening in South Dakota, and then her family leaving the frontier of South Dakota for the relative safety and civilization of Iowa.
And in Bachmann’s hands, this became a story of just botched facts and misstated narrative. And I’ll be honest with you, that sort of blew me away when I sat there and looked at the text she took this from and how she delivered the speech. And that may seem like a trivial example, but when you’re running for president, these things really do matter
That was all I could really take. I’d realized that, regardless of her policies, she has been shown to be inadequate as a candidate. Just my opinion, though. I’d like to open this up to anybody reading. What do you belive? Would she make a good president. I invite you to leave a comment and tell me what you think.
Oh, and vote in this poll.
Anonymous Terrorists–How extremism can or is infiltrating powerful organization.
I’ve become very, very interested in Hacker culture of late, particularly the exploits of groups/individuals such as Anonymous, Lulzsec, and Jester (Th3J35t3r). At the beginning, I was enamored with the Antisec movement, as was represented by Anonymous and Lulzsec. It’s not difficult to see why at first, they have these powerful words. They have well crafted notes (granted, less since Topiary was arrested); however, it remains tempting to believe wholeheartedly into the cause. They make it so brilliant to be together. This video, which is continually retweeted by Anonymous, creates an incredibly strong belief in what Lulz represented (transcript).
As time went on, I began to notice how #Antisec ‘Hacktivists’ would constantly attack some guy called Jester. The attacks were constantly personal. They nearly always went after this other hacker, named Jester. The attacks were increasingly immature. They shot insults at him. They attacked his track record of going after Jihadist websites (if you don’t know Jester’s history, read this, this, and this).
As a naturally inquisitive person, I spent some time reading what the Jester had to say about these Hacktivists. He had a point of view I’d never seen before. Jester was literally the first person to have a good case against what Anonymous and Lulzsec were about. He brought up some all-too-accurate points. More on those later. Thus began my personal quest to read as much data on the Antisec movement as I could.
Just yesterday, I ran across an NPR report from a few days ago, you can find it here, where they had Steve Chavinsky, deputy head of the FBI’s cyber division on. In the report, Chavinsky said, “law enforcement agencies have to worry that politically motivated “hacktivism” could evolve into more dangerous cyberactivity, should organized crime or terrorist groups become interested in the hacking capabilities demonstrated by Anonymous or its offshoot group, LulzSec.”
This struck me for two reasons. First, because the possible impacts of a terrorist group. If a terrorist group were to infiltrate an organization that accesses government and corporate servers, then steals the documents, it would be horrible. This would constitute a terror group having nearly unlimited access to anything that any government (or corporation) had to hide, the results could be disastrous. Imagine if a hostile group had access to the USA’s military and/or intelligence strategies, or any other possible exploit. Every government has something worth hiding, and that includes not giving a terror group. This alone is reason to be worried about Anon. They have the power to ruin governments if somebody were to infiltrate them.
And it wouldn’t be too hard for someone to infiltrate Anon. Anonymous members contact each other through IRCs (Internet relay chats). Most of the members have never met in real life. And the probably never will. If I were charismatic on the IRCs, I could make my way into Anonymous; I could guide their actions. Anon brags about being a decentralized, loosely formed organization of like-minded people. Nobody knows who’s who. Anybody can get in and take advantage of the brute force Anon has or utilize the raw power of their botnet. The point here is charisma and influence can take a collective like anonymous in a radically different direction. And if the actor(s) changing the direction have malicious intent? The consequences could be disastrous. Infiltration is easy. Infiltration is real.
This brings me to my second point. There is a definite possibility that Anon is already infiltrated by Terror groups. This brings me back to Jester. Not too long ago, Jester published this post on his blog tying the leader of anonymous, AnonymouSabu (Sabu for short) with terrorism. I’ll briefly outline some of the possible proofs. Sabu successfully shifted to focus of Anon to Western regimes, away from oppressive regimes. On his Twitter, Sabu never mentions the new #OpSyria. That’s other Anons who stayed true to the original cause. Even more disturbing is how Sabu flaunts the Hamas symbol on his twitter. His profile picture includes the Hamas flag. More than a little worrying. An extensive list of links between Sabu and Terrorism is available here.
The Jester signs off everything he says with a quote that I love. “There is an unequal amount of good and evil in most things. The trick is to work out the ratio, and act accordingly.”
You are amazing. You are beautiful. And, to steal from the Jester one last time, you are forever frosty.
~Schima
Like this:
Let’s talk about London.
I think we all know about the rioting going on in London right now. If you haven’t, It’s a pretty big deal. It started on Saturday, when Police shot man named Mark Duggan when they arrested him in his taxi. Initial reports suggested Duggan had opened fire on the police, but just today, the International Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) said there was no absolute proof that Duggan had opened fire.
I don’t need to explain why people would be infuriated by such an incident, but the later reaction was off-the-charts. For one day, it may have been an extreme, but possibly understandable, response to what appears to be police brutality. The city, and now the greater country, is literally up in flames. This isn’t some civil response; it’s the epitome of barbarism, and i don’t mean that to mean uncultured. The violence is unprecedented, and I would say unjustified. What people claim the police have done is not a good thing by any means; still, the disproportionate response that has come as a result of the violence is far from legitimate.
Just take a look at some of the pictures from the rioting. At this point, you can ignore the tweets. I’m working on getting them out. You’ll have to open the picture in a new tab to stay on this page.
And you can find even more here
It’s gotten out of hand, and what the rioters are doing isn’t civil disobedience. It’s barbaric disorder. Burning, looting etc are not responses to police brutality. More crime is not a way to counter what you would consider a bad action. It isn’t logical, and it isn’t Just.
This lack of meaning in the rioting, however, does not stop people from trying to justify it. Observe.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to justify the killing if, in fact, the officer did not do it out of a sense of self, preservation. But, these reactions are ridiculous. Police, on whole, are not people out to kill innocent people, and they don’t do it for money. They aren’t authoritarian, and they don’t try to kill all people. If police were to do more harm than good, they wouldn’t exist. That is a fact. Honestly, there were two officers involved in the killing of Duggan, but sixteen-thousand involved in protecting innocent citizens in the subsequent rioting. One person did badly, and eight-thousand are being put at risk. 16,000 are voluntarily risking themselves to protect innocents. Police aren’t evil.
This is a complete reversal of the brutality the rioters are fighting against. right now, the rioters are brutal. They attack people. They burn cars and buildings. Worse, they attack police trying to protect citizense who are not guiltoy of any crime in the riots. This role reversal has no justification. There isn’t a good reason for this to happen, and it’s only spreading.
Obviously, this is partially a result of built up tensions which were set off by the police shooting of Mark Duggan; still, this is not the way to go about expressing their displeasure. There are other ways. Legal ways. Ways that don’t involve the destruction of private property and the assault of officers. Peaceful protest that doesn’t involve rioting, looting, and setting buldings aflame is preferable.
While it’s far from good that a man (likely unjustly) was shot, it’s just as bad a sign of humanity that the public reaction is destructive.
The subject is sad. But remember.
You are amazing. You are beautiful. You can be or do whatever you like.
~Schima
Hello world!
I am Schima. I’m a decently good guy, and i analyze absolutely everything.
Everything.
Ever single thing.
But it’s a gift just as much it’s a curse.
I certainly enjoy life. And I certainly analyze it.
You are amazing. You are beautiful. And I love you.
~Schima
