Subject: Re: Societal differences and rudeness calibration From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 1999/09/30 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3147675397986719@naggum.no> * Dobes Vandermeer <dobes@mindless.com> | The intention of the original writer (Erik) was merely hyperbole; and | although it was well achieved it obviously struck a wrong note by placing | the trivial Bill Gates problem as equal to the Holocaust in magnitude; | since equality goes both ways this creates the implication that the | holocaust was a disaster no larger than the one that Bill Gates hopes to | lead us into. I don't think leading 90% of the Western Civilization, those who have entrusted their information to a system running an "operating system" from Bill Gates and believe he won't intentionally harm them when it suits his own designs, into a massive shutdown because he doesn't want his enemies (that's just "competitors" to normal people) to win. we already know that Microsoft _intentionally_ creates venues for viruses and make new products that are virtual breeding grounds for viruses that harm their users, and I suspect it's because they have interests in the anti-virus companies. (and I say _intentionally_ because stopping this insanity is easy, and they refuse to do it and refuse to think about security issues until somebody outside the company exposes it, and then they downplay it and gloss it over.) we already know how much press a virus gets, and how Bill Gates dons his glory and complain about the evil people in the world. every damn time there's a serious threat, Bill Gates manages to win from it. there's no reason to think this is not planned. we've seen what Bill Gates can do and what he routinely does to companies that provide a threat to Microsoft -- his actions are not that of a sane businessman, it's that of a pathologically competitive and now very powerful maniac. what will he do when he realizes that the customers who want to leave his control pose a seriousthreat to Microsoft and himself? what will aircraft, traffic control systems, nuclear battleships, etc, do when their Microsoft-based software goes belly up? the U.S. Navy already knows what happens: modern Navy vessels sit dead in the water for three hours while technicians get the NT-based computer system back on line. it has happened once. it will happen again. the problem with any comparison of past and future is that some people will regard the past as much worse than it was. there's no doubt at all that I offended Erann Gat's view of the Holocaust (which he may tell you, as he has told me, includes the German soldiers and civilians who died in WWII, which it doesn't in any reference works or even in any literature I have read) by diminishing its importance to him, but is he the standard? there are people out there who will feel that the entire female sex and every women in the entire world history are _suffering_ once somebody, somewhere in the world, looks at a pornographic picture. no doubt they would say that I diminish the tragedy suffered by women if I made a comparison between somebody and Hugh Hefner, but is it _rational_ to respect their views and feelings? does it serve any useful ends to tread so softly that one does not offend deranged people who have a _wildly_ exaggerated view of something? I don't think it does. therefore, we cannot suffer the restrictions to which the Erann Gats and Raffael Cavallaros of the world want to subject all human communication. the United States have for a number of years had restrictions on what could be talked about, and it has been a self-policing that some have labeled political correctness, quite contrary to the explicit belief in the freedom of speech, which seems reduced to dealing with non-offending ideas and otherwise offensive material. on USENET, we cannot avoid suffering the consequences of raving lunatics whose madness is triggered by words or ideas or even certain opinions. it's even hard to tell where the line is to be drawn sometimes, but when somebody responds "I didn't mean what you interpret it to mean" and they keep raving, the line has certainly been crossed. how many people in the interbellum Germany were unwilling to consider the imminent evil even when Hitler published Mein Kampf and spelled it out? how many fled because they did understand? and, more importantly, how many of those who fled were labeled paranoid and delusional by those who stayed and who later died or otherwise lost their future? we should learn from the past -- the makeup of the human being hasn't changed all that much over time and is unlikely to change a lot in the future, so the past is a very good guide to what might happen again if people don't learn from it. by refusing to listen to the very many very serious lessons taught us by World War II, we don't see how the means employed to gradually poison a whole population with demented ideas and a desire for violent revenge that could not be mustered without a careful propaganda plan deployed over decades. by refusing to consider parts of the history of a period during which atrocities were committed, we don't really know how they came to be committed, and that's the only thing we can use them for after the fact. we can mourne and all that, but those who were not part of it, have a duty to prevent it from happening again, and if that means ignoring the insane wailing from people who are unable to deal with the facts that this atrocity had a history and a development that could be reinvoked only with people who are unaware of the history, so be it. there are just too many people who exaggerate the importance of just about anything that we can believe them to be right without being careful when assessing the complainer's sense of proportions. a conservative estimate of the number of people who would die during a period of five years after only _half_ of the electronic infrastructure in the United States had collapsed is 30 million people. this is part of unclassified disaster planning that surfaced because of the Y2K scare, and it has been published widely by scaremongers that a decimation, in the technical meaning of 10% loss, of the population is considered a tolerable loss. if such an event should be caused by the pathological competetiveness of one man who has cut so many corners as to have very little left to stand on, with a whole company and culture who adore him, who are the people who would work _against_ securing a future where this does _not_ happen? why does Erann Gat have to label this paranoid delusions simply because he doesn't understand the need for contingency planning and securing the removal of the option of atrocity? are lawyers suffering from paranoid delusions when they write up contracts that specify how to deal with several really bad situations? of course not. it is clear that the American people are just as unable to think about the future and The Road Ahead (a really retarded book by Bill Gates), as interbellum Germans faced with explicit rhetoric, and just as willing to be subjected to propaganda of the same kind. am I thereby reducing any tragedies or atrocities? no, damnit, I'm trying to show how the attitudes that made it possible for them to become reality are still among us, and the worst of them is complacency and the rampant stupidity that goes with "they're German, don't mention the war". we can't hide from history, but we can forget, and if we only remember the horrors and not how they came to be, we stand unprepared in the face of the next horror. we must get over the horrors and prevent the next. this is not reducing their importance, it's _using_ their importance to productive ends: to ensure that equally destructive-minded people don't get a chance to put their ideas into reality. those who stepped up to warn people in the early 1930's were ridiculed by the dolts who saw only the positive effects and the positive rhetoric. Microsoft's collapse is no more than 5 to 10 years away, and Bill Gates is already reaching out to take control over companies and technologies that will survive Microsoft. I think the collapse could go largely unnoticed by the users, because all the products will have competing products on other platforms that can run on the same hardware, but there are a few signs to indicate that Bill Gates wants it to be otherwise: the drive to move most of the software in that used to be located in peripheral equipment is intensified such that manufacturers are pressured to make drivers availbale only for Microsoft operating systems and not disclose their specifications so others can make drivers for other operating systems, which means that people will lose their hardware investments when leaving Windows. Microsoft is all about this kind of control and the consequences of too much control in too few hands should be well known by anyone who has even the slightest interest in history, even if they feel terribly threatened by comparisons with their favorite horrors. I'm not saying we should ignore the scars left on our psyche by tragedies, but neither should we obsess about them so much that we get paralyzed whenever something similar appears, or deny similarity because that awakens the suppressed pain and angst and whatever. I just wish some people could quit being so hysterical and instead of defending their personal issues could understand the argument. that would help us avoid derailing discussions. if the argument is obscured by their own emotional responses, I suggest those who just _have_ to go bananas do it nicely by asking for a restatement of the argument, without including innuendo, accusations, assumptions, etc, etc, which would so rude as to render any argument about the value of politeness ridiculous. thanks in advance. #:Erik