Well, it's kinda funny how people got excited about the 418s from mil.ru and
kremlin.ru, in spite of that being a bit of a pwn by the Russians. My VPN has a
location in Moscow. I should probably give it a shot. But I don't really care
enough.
I wasn't all that serious about Anonymous and Palantir. I do wonder why our country
doesn't have intelligence front "NGOs" to target our enemies' installations,
though. I feel like we must. But maybe because our democracy is relatively healthy, if
they got caught, the consequences would be worse than in some places like Israel. At the
pub, the idea of assassinating Putin keeps coming up. It's an ethical paradox similar to
the tolerance paradox. Those of us who have ethical standards simply can't play hardball
like those of us who don't.
Re: mens rea - Yes, we *must* take intention into account when estimating behavior
(estimating to explain/retrodict, real-time govern, or predict). But w.r.t. to something
like punishment or deterrence, I think it's stupid to consider the intentions. If you
keep defecting, I can't play with you anymore. This is even true in circular, say,
dysfuncitonal parent-child relationships where the parent is largely responsible for the
bad behavior the child. "If thine right eye offend thee" and all that.
Debilitating behavior has to be damped. And it can often be damped without spending huge
efforts to understand its etiology. Sometimes it *is* right to treat the symptoms and
worry about the cure later.
Putin keeps defecting. I don't care what his intentions are. He's poison. At
some point, you have to cut bait.
DAOs are interesting. I tend to think, because crypto is a ponzi scheme, token-based DAOs
aren't going anywhere. But old-school decentralized, compartmentalized org techniques
seem workable to some extent (mafia, al-qaeda, etc.). I think there's a limit to
large-scale operations ... e.g. "citizen science" like Fold@Home require some
centralization. The same would be true with any org, I think. Russia's sanction-resistant
war chest will also prevent penny-ante operations like Anonymous from having any real
effect. But it's still nice to see those pyrrhic victories.
Counterpunch content is not very trustworthy, FWIW. It depends on the author.
But it *is* true that Nuland recommended the right winger (Yatsenyuk) have
regular conversations with the new guy we promoted (Yatsenyuk). A more balanced
stance might be that Biden's, perhaps naive, idea that you want to maintain a
relationship with even the most batshit people like Boebert or Greene. Same
reason I entertain the people at the pub who believe in batshit things like
aura massage and ghosts ... or God. You can't *reason* with someone unless you
can reason *with* them.
On 2/25/22 10:14, Steve Smith wrote:
On 2/25/22 7:33 AM, glen wrote:
I guess I spoke too soon:
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/anonymous-attacks-russia-ukraine-invasion-rt-ddos-b2023177.html
I am still unclear about how self-organized/appointed dis-organizations like
Anonymous can actually work. I don't mean that critically as much as
hopefully. I am trying to understand how emergent distributed collectives
self-organize enough to exist, much less achieve (transitory) homeostasis. It
is fascinating in the abstract as well as in the specifics of space-time events
such as this article references. I'd love to hear more reflection/discussion,
even speculation about this.
rt.com was down around 3am. But it's back, now, with a fresh story about he
"denazification" of Ukraine. [sigh]
https://www.rt.com/russia/550617-response-to-negotiations-ukraine/
It looks like they are down now, or at least very askew. I get some crufty
bits in my browser (but without inspecting the html/javascript/css source,
which I am ill-equipped and in any case loathe to do) and take it to mean there
is significant interference afoot (more like direct server hack or Man in the
Middle than DDOS).
Of course, is it fake news that our agent in Ukraine may have helped "nazify"
them?
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/01/25/basic-notes-on-victoria-fuck-the-eu-nuland/
I've not read much from/by/about CounterPunch but they are part of one of the tangled
webs I feel you must live in, because so often when you offer us a nice cozy-looking
warren, we find it is twisty-turny passages all the way down (into a looking glass
wonderland?). Again, not to criticize... I assume this means *you* have the capacity to
go further, dig deeper, deconvolute the convolutions than I (apparently) do. The only
thing I can summarize from reading this article is a reminder that "my enemy's enemy
is not my friend".
I'm too ignorant to tease it all apart.
Re: my last paragraph. Your depth seems to exceed mine by more than a little,
but I *do* appreciate your willingness to tease these things apart (not just
tease us with them) in front of us as much as you do (try). It is often
frustrating and unsatisfying, but that, I think, is the nature of the beast,
not attributable to the messenger.
But it doesn't really matter why Putin's doing what he's doing ... like our silly
"mens rea" principle. What matters is the killing, not the intentions of the
killer.
As I contemplate the sensing/modeling/action cycle and try to fit it into some
abstraction of consciousness, I think we absolutely *must* take into the intentions of
the killer. That is not to say that we should conflate excuses with reasons and
vice-versa, or that in some ethical sense we (always?) give a pass to
"innocent" mistakes, yet it seems dys-functional to not factor in the
(apparent) black-box logic of an adversary/co-conspirator.
I have been planning a European trip in spite of Greta and Fauci's shrill
admonitions, but with Putin's swagger, perhaps I will put it off a bit longer.
After all, it seems that container-ship-sailing (my ideation of the least
impactful of commercial modes of ocean-crossings) may be a thing of the past
(between COVID and port-backups).
"interesting times" indeed. I've reported here before on Gibson's (semi) recent (and impending) Jackpot Trilogy and
my fascination with his (nicely unspecified) conception of "The Jackpot" but recently discovered a small group of
shared-world authors, organized by John Scalzi whose shared-world is a 2030ish post-collapse world which very nicely (IMO)
lampoons/implicates both neoCon and neoLibs alike with enough of my own techno-luddite-green-spectra ideations. A key linkage
to "Jackpot" is that they use the phrases "soft collapse" and "soft recovery" in a way that
complements the (more usual) short-sharp-shock collapses of Apocalyptic fiction.
Jumble,
- Steve
PS. I recently heard the term "Q Cucks Klan" for the first time... it seems so acutely
pointed and lampoony and "right on" that I would surely remember it if I'd heard it
before. On the Q-anon backstory, I wonder how many others here have held Q or other Gov
clearances and how their experience with that supports/denies the attributions folks give to Q
his/herself?
On 2/24/22 10:24, glen wrote:
Where is Anonymous?
--
glen
When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.
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