Nordic » Wed Nov 11, 2015 12:23 pm wrote:
But then that might be the cool place to go, and others might troll and provoke just so they could get banned for a while and read what was there!

Yeah, when it comes to positions of responsibility,
What is The Opposite of What Jehovah Would Do? is a pretty effective barometer when we're out at sea, and 2015 has definitely been...that. Bond Villains and Evil Kings let their enemies live; historical victors don't. Carl Schmitt was not exactly movie hero material, but his writing is damn interesting, especially on the nature of power --
the sovereign, as dude himself puts it. Recommended.
With Brussels under an "indefinite" period of Mandatory Fear of Nameless Reasons, with a multi-continent world war 10 years in and nobody calling it WWIII yet, and with two GOP front runners insisting that
New Jersey Arabs, not
Israeli Art Students, were caught dancing and celebrating on that fateful day in September,
I find it easy to sympathize with the kind of fundamental disorientation that leads to such blackrabbitholes as Crisis Actors or "Bruh, What if The Earth Was Actually Flat like Moses Said?"
Shit is
gone these days. We're watching thousands of competing reality tunnels, in hundreds of languages, burrowing not only
away from the truth, but perhaps more importantly,
away from each other -- simply witness the humble petri dish to glimpse the myriad patterns that will make up the future of human culture.
Those lanky fractal tendrils are infinitely complex, intimately familiar, and yet they don't connect very much.
I remember being shacked up in runaway poverty in the Appalachian woods and reading Wilson's book/manifesto
"Consilience" (E.O. Wilson, not RAW) around the same time I'd been digesting Ken Wilbur, and being unable to shake the gut certainty it was all so naive, so Utopian. Which is not to dismiss the Utopians amongst us, I love them when they do it well. But this is cut from the same cloth as Kuhn's interesting but unimaginative "Paradigm" thesis - he saw linear progress where
there fucking was none and physics has since been shattered into overlapping, diverging, and
competing intrepretations of reality, all in a free-fall status of total failure to validate...for decades...which is why they all keep getting funded.
Just like when the ETF or REIT market gets crowded out: anything that advertises itself as a port and invoices monthly in a storm. Pretty sure that's verbatim Shakespeare. Thus did the "IT Security" / InfoSec industry get born, after all. None of those motherfuckers can deliver shit for results, they just claim credit for getting lucky and avoiding attention from qualified actors. They don't have answers or working strategies,
but they do have a set of best practices that enables them to "quantify risk" and take out insurance policies for the inevitable Ashley Madison moment when...
But, to conclude a drunken rant: I talked to a co-worker I really respect about the correctional / criminal justice system in Vermont - and he said
"I don't understand why they're not delivering results when we pay them to solve these problems."
I was stunned and repeatedly asked him if he really believed that, which flustered the cat and honestly, is an asshole thing to ask. Especially several times in a row. How could you not get defensive, yeah?
Still, I never felt that any government agency has ever been founded on the intention or promise of
solving problems. We expect only
mitigation. And hot damn if flat-out magic rituals -- be they TSA security theater or assholes in suits having press conferences -- don't substitute for even that low standard.
Happy Thanksgiving, and for fuck's sake, read Ryan Holiday's book on PR, it's current, accurate, hilarious, depressing.