Ahh, the Washington Post/MSM and their standard excuse of "no one could have imagined" when finally forced to report the consequences of the sociopathic behaviors of the ruling class (consequences that were not only warned against at the time of the original behaviors but that they themselves were part of insisting were impossible).

"No one could have imagined America's war in Viet Nam would have such disastrous consequences."

"No one could have imagined rewarding companies for shipping jobs overseas would devastate the economy."

"No one could have imagined attacking other people's countries would create anti-American sentiment."

"No one could have imagined repealing Glass-Steagall would lead to such rampant speculation by Wall Street."

"No one could have imagined misleading our readers would have them stop reading our newspaper."

I feel like they're tracking my every moove....

"We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out." - Decca Records rejecting the Beatles

"I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders." - Michael Dell on the future of Apple

"I think there is a world market for about five computers." - Thomas J. Watson, chairman of IBM

"We don't think that's what people want. A movie takes forever to download." - Steve Jobs on the possibility of an iTunes Movie Store

I think the phrase "promoted as being a Buddhist" may be a clue. ;-)

Though perhaps Steve simply saw Buddhism as the primitive work of that artless hack Siddhartha Gautama, a few trivial concepts that only Steve's vision could fully bring to life and only his (multi)touch could elegantly refine to its shiny essence and bring to the world.

Steve probably felt not suing Buddhism was a noble gesture.

To me Slashdot surely deserves a place in the pantheon of great technology creations. If the early Internet was the Homebrew Computer Club for the whole planet, Slashdot was a project not only fun and exciting and cool - the kind of thing one told one's friends "you have to see this" - it was worthwhile. Slashdot was the kind of creation all nerds hope to be able to give to the world: something that brought joy to its users while enabling the creation of things larger than itself.

Rob Malda, you've made the world, and my world, a better place.

Thank you and farewell, good CmdrTaco.

Indeed - western tyranny's sweet spot.

Maybe they're only buying it inside Second Life.

I don't know that I have an immediate alternative this evening (though I might and just can't remember it ;-) ), but I think societies reflect in a self-similar way the way the rules and agreements that describe them were fashioned.

In other words, were a small group of people, no matter how gifted and altruistic, to create a framework for others to follow without participation and consent of those others during the framing itself, then eventually the society will come to reflect that inequity of that process. The society will just become a larger, longer-term analog of the seed that created it.

This is what we see in the U.S. today.

There are moments of exquisite beauty in the founding documents of the U.S. But because the system itself was developed - of necessity, mind you - in a procedurally inequitable way, the resulting state also reflects that inequity.

It's a function of consciousness, really. Consciousness is self-similar (like fractals and holograms), so the pieces reflect the whole. If the first piece is inequitable (even if that's simply the inequity of participation in its creation), then the whole will be as well.

So whatever follows after Law (which is simply the collective-scale version of how a parent needs to be when a child is roughly two, the structure necessary to hold the developing consciousness until it can hold itself. It was absolutely essential thousands of years ago, but humanity as a whole has developed beyond that stage now) will of necessity be something we create together.

And in order to create something together, we first need to realize and accept that's what we're doing. And to do even that we'll need to be brave enough to leave some of the past behind. Then we can agree to work together to create something - anything.

I'd even go so far as to suggest that anything we create together, no matter how immature in comparison to what we have now, will still in the long run be better for us all.

The "law" has always been just another way for those who write the law to control those who are required to follow it.

"Law" is simply disembodied violence, physical force transferred to the domain of the mind.

The notion of "fair and equitable analysis" is simply the system's own inflated self-image, like "all men are created equal" in 1776, or "freedom" in 2010.

I agree with your statements, btw. I just want to make sure that in moving to something new we don't repeat the mistakes of our past.


There's free as in speech, free as in beer, and free as in range. Americans are "free" in the final sense.

Hold on...Utah? They're saying Larry King's Mormon?

Maybe it's just that the world's horniest dinosaur prefers to prey on Mormon girls. That must be it.