As much as a detest the Extropians and social Darwinists this author criticizes, I have so far found nothing interesting in this sloppy and vague rant. The author lost all credibility when I read the following passage:
This breathtaking vista must be starkly contrasted with the Great Shame of computer science, which is that we don't seem to be able to write software much better as computers get much faster. Computer software continues to disappoint. How I hated UNIX back in the seventies - that devilish accumulator of data trash, obscurer of function, enemy of the user! If anyone had told me back then that getting back to embarrassingly primitive UNIX would be the great hope and investment obsession of the year 2000, merely because it's name was changed to LINUX and its source code was opened up again, I never would have had the stomach or the heart to continue in computer science.
I'm not sure what "indifferent" and "incandescent" mean when describing a book.
I read it in two sittings. It was always interesting, even when it got into tedious exposition mode (which, as someone has already pointed out, tended to occur in long dialogues, as if in a bad sequel or idealogical propoganda). It is an excusable sin, as the setting is fairly complex. It was really interesting to see the same fears of a corporate-government dystopia existing thirty years ago, and how it was portrayed then, compared to how it was portrayed in the height of cyberpunk movement, and to how it is portrayed now. Some people have called _The Shockwave Rider_ the first cyberpunk novel, which makes it worth reading just for historical interest (and why I sought it out in a used bookstore).
Brunner predicts an Internet-like network, which I think was quite an accomplishment, even if he didn't see the microcomputer revolution coming. The only difference is, instead of a PC on every desk, there is a terminal or phone connected to a mainframe somewhere, which is in turn linked to the worldwide data network.
Yes it is, in an ironic sense that the shallow and greedy do not understand. Every street urchin and refugee is a potential scientist, entrepeneur, doctor, etc. All it takes is nurturing environment and a decent education. The value of immigration is not in the immigrants, but in their children.
What the hell kind of contract exists by government mandate? The contract should be between the worker and the employer. The only reason the employer is capable of exploiting the worker is that the government sticks its nose in and places restrictions on the when, how, and why the worker crosses the border, and on how long the worker can stay.
Don't shrug this off as "they know what they are getting into". This is a condition manufactured by government coercion at the behest of large corporations. We have every fucking right to complain, and to change this practice.
Find a demonstratable flaw in their system, but refuse to reveal how it works until the RIAA donates $10 million to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The publicity it would generate for the issues at stake would be worth far more than the actual money.
The working assumption in every one of your examples was that the good's value is either time sensitive or the customer had he opportunity to haggle. The customer goes in knowing the they probably won't get the same price as the next guy.
Amazon does not fit either of those assumptions. They mislead the customer, and now they're taking flack for it. No one is saying they shouldn't have a right to do it. But that doesn't mean it isn't obnoxious.
Because people have working assumptions that vendors will sell according to the market price? That it shows a severe lack of respect toward its customers that Amazon would do this? That people, were in fact, "ripped off"?
If this were normal behavior for companies, and people could assume that they could be selected to receive a higher than normal price, either randomly or according to demographic profiling, then, yea, they have little to complain about.
This is unlike your airline example, where most everyone understands that the closer you get to a flight, the more the tickets will be. Obviously demand is going to be higher for those buying their tickets at the last minute.
But that isn't how things work for bookstores. There is a fairly stable market price for books (and DVDs, and music). Books don't suddenly go up and down in value (unless Oprah starts harping about them), and certainly not in the seconds between one purchase and the next. No one expects that their individual price could be randomly because Amazon is not a place where you can haggle.
They did something shifty and sleazy and now they're getting spanked for it by the market (you know, us), and rightly so. Just because you want to bend over when corporations pull this crap doesn't mean the rest of us should shut up about it. Thank us, we're the ones keeping the market fair, and ensuring that *you* don't have to look at dozen websites to price things, and log out and relogin again to try to get the lowest random price.
Because it's a fundamental part of all the rhetoric supporting capitalism? The free market will always be good for consumers because unfettered competition keeps prices at the market clearing price, giving neither the seller or buyer an advantage. This happens best with commodities, where goods of the same type may be easily substituted, but still occurs with any kind of product.
Now, this can only occur when pricing information is easily attainable. And for the most part, vendors are very eager to tell your their low low prices in order to compete. A thrifty consumer will always check prices from different vendors before buying anything. This is where the credibility of your argument lies.
Now guess what? All that could change due to the current legal climate. Never before has price gathering been so easy, as robots can be sent scouring the net getting the latest deals, whether the vendor likes it or not. And eBay has already sued and won to prevent a company from doing this on their servers. There argument wasn't just about putting load on their servers, they considered it tresspassing.
In addition, there are laws and treaties in the works to give databases of facts copyright protection. Guess what a price list is?
A vendor can kick you out of a store if it sees you gathering prices, but they can't take the price list away. You can't mirror Pricewatch, but you can distribute prices gathered off of it. That could all change. Pretty soon you may have to agree to a click-through NDA to even enter a web-based store.
All the glorious efficiency promised by the "e-commerce" revolution could turn into a giant scam for the conglomerates, using demographic data to milk every consumer for as much as he or she will tolerate. And we won't be able to fight back, even though technology could give us some pretty sophisticated tools, because we'd be breaking various laws to do it. Just like now, where it perfectly legal to export DVDs, but illegal to crack the region coding on the DVDs that would make doing so worthwhile.
How are truly anonymous ads better? Do you realize how much of our economy is devoted to advertising? Think of how we could devote those resources towards more useful ends, such as making better products, and having more money to spend on those products. The fact is that targeted advertisement is cheaper and it is more effective with real demographic data than with generalisations drawn from anonymous sources. If you know certain people will fast-forward through certain kinds of ads, why even run them for those people?
Yea, I'm playing devil's advocate here, but remember there are two sides to this, and most of us tend to fall on boths sides at one time or another. We'd all save money if advertising was less intrusive and more effective. Privacy is a myth, and what little we had and lost ain't coming back, so let's use our demographic value to our advantage.
Imagine being able to announce to the world "I'm in the market for a new TV!" and have every ad you see be for different TVs and home entertainment products. Nobody would bother with spam, and companies would be less likely to break their privacy agreements because it would now be cheaper to keep the customer's goodwill. You could add to that announcement "but not from GE!", which allows GE not to waste their time on you now, and gives them an incentive to not piss you off for the future.
An email plugin? Bah, I'd rather see a much more interesting use of this technology, like this:
Dear Net-Mail User [HyperLink: EweR-635-78-22267-3 aPl]
Your mailbox has just been rifled by EmilyPost, an autonomous courtesy-worm chain program released in October 2036 by an anonymous group of net subscribers in western Alaska. [HyperRef: sequestered confession 592864 -2376298.98634, deposited with Bank Leumi 10/23/36:20:24:21. Expiration-disclosure 10 years] Under the civil disobedience sections of the Carter of Rio, we accept in advance the fines and penalties that will come due when our confession is released in 2046. However we feel that's a small price to pay for the message brought to you by EmilyPost.
In brief, dear friend, you are not a very polite person. EmilyPost's syntax analysis subroutines show that a very high fraction of your net exchanges are heated, vituperative, even obscene.
Of course you enjoy free speech. But EmilyPost has been designed by people who are concerned about the recent trend toward excessive nastiness in some parts of the net. EmilyPost homes in on folks like you and begins by asking them to please consider the advantages of politeness.
For one thing, your credibility ratings would rise. (Emily Post has checked you favorite bulletin boards, and finds your ratings aren't high at all. Nobody is listening to you, sir!) Moreover, consider that courtesy can foster calm reason, turning shrill antagonism into useful debate and even consensus.
We suggest introducing an automatic delay to your mail system. Communications are so fast these days, people seldom stop and think. Some net users act like mental patients who shout out anything that comes to mind, rather than functioning citizens with the human gift of tact.
If you wish, you may use on of the public-domain delay programs included in this version of EmilyPost, free of charge.
Of course, should you insist on continuing as before, disseminating nastiness in all directions, we have equipped EmilyPost with other options you'll soon find out about . . .
The libertarians are squarely on the side of Lars on this one, if they are being consistent.
Only if a they are statist hypocrites. Copyright and patents were created by government fiat, and before that it was a priveledge granted by the crown. You do not have a natural right to a sequence of bits.
(Was it feed a troll, or starve a troll? I always forget which...)
Because that's the only way they can do effective customer profiling, so they can screw people the way Amazon does.
And don't think the credit card companies are on your side. They're part of the problem, pushing a security model where the identifier is also used as a "secret" key. It is their fault credit cards are such a risk to begin with.
Oh man, have you read the editorials? Here is a piece from a rant against the First Amendment that is just so ironic:
The first amendment does not allow the mentally deranged person to sharply perceive his mental abnormality but deludes him into thinking his abnormality is a normal difference. If the seriously mentally ill person can function in the society without physically harming himself or others, it is possible for him to convince other like-minded psychotics to follow his psychotic beliefs. By virtue of their psychoses, they are unable to perceive the true psychotic symptoms expressed by the mentally ill person they are following and they are unable to perceive evidence of phychosis in his beliefs. They therefore embrace his expressed delusions as truths.
Whoops, looks like I broke his license agreement. The fool seems to think a publisher can force his readers to waive their "fair us" [sic] rights.
Don't beleive the hype. Even if it is legit, they're only doing it for propoganda value, to steal the glory from University SETI projects. Of course, it's probably just a cover for a Planet Buster facility. Our immediate concern should be to finish the space elevator.
Heheh. Half of my family are rednecks (and proud of it!) and the other half are Southern Baptists. But the rednecks aren't dim-witted or racists, and the Baptists aren't fundamentalists.
If you think I'm referring to you, you might be guilty of the things I ascribe. Nowhere in my rant did I mention a specific group or denomination, or even the word Christianity.
But there is a specific group of people, who have some very specific ideas about their place in the world and the place of everyone who isn't like them. They're out there banning books from libraries, trying to censor the internet, trying to put a bible in every student's hand and the ten commandments on every classroom wall. On the TV they talk about putting religion back in government, all religions, mind you, because we can't play favorites, but in their churches and their PAC meetings it's all about the superiority of their ideology and how they need to fight the evil of Islam, New Age, Atheism, sec-u-lar humanism, and those dirty moral relativists of all stripes, and yes, that includes other Christians.
Bigotry is about creating conflict were there isn't any. But there is a conflict here, and my side didn't start it.
Mocking organized religion is an example of intolerance of intolerance: superficially intolerant, but generally aimed at a net gain in tolerance.
What an interesting concept.
Is it intolerant to promote the idea that racists are dim-witted rednecks?
That homophobes are closet-cases afraid of their own sexual instincts (hence the name).
That misogynists are insecure and threatened by women?
What makes these stereotypes acceptable is that the attributes in question are almost universally despised, so much so that even the people who have those attributes don't admit it to themselves.
But a lot of people believe in organized religion, and specifically, a lot of people see nothing wrong with being a complete snot about other people's religious beliefs. Because, after all, one can't help being black, gay, or a woman, but you have a choice to baleeeve in Jeeezuss!
(uh oh, rant coming)
And then they get snippy when you criticize them for it! Intolerance? What's so intolerant about it? Like you said, it was your choice to baleeve in Jeeezuss! But what makes me different from you is that I don't really hold that against you. I may laugh at you behind your back, and mock your belief system publicly *ahem*, but I'm not going to be a jerk to you about it. My philosophy is to treat all people with simple courtesy, and judge people by their actions, not by what they say they believe (because beliefs and actions are often inconsistent, for better and worse).
Now, I told you to piss off because you won't stop bugging me about that Jeeezus guy, and you keep trying to push it on my kids in school. You promote the idea that my (lack of) beliefs makes me incapable of behaving ethically and responsibly, that my female friends should be submissive, and that my gay friends should be condemed for doing what comes naturally, though when you do it you call it an expression of "love". And you know, I don't think you're really over that racism thing, because you keep representing that Jeeezus guy with blue eyes, even though he is should clearly be of Semitic decent.
You think you are so God-damned superior because God is on your side, and it shows in everything you say and do. It is so pervasive and insidious, but you won't admit it is bigotry, because after all, I can always leave the oppressed and join the oppressors. Join the winning team, you say, be SAVED! You'll see that we really love you, and though we may seem to act like jerks, it is for your own good, because you need to be SAVED!
Yea, right. And I suppose the school bully acts like he does because he wants his victims to learn to stand up for themselves. I see through your agenda and understand your motivations, and they ain't as pure and noble as you say they are. Don't lecture me about tolerance, buddy, because you've already demonstrated just how intolerant you are. Once you go from live and let live to live as I tell you to live (or else), I'm under no obligation to treat you with respect or courtesy.
But there is nothing good about religion that can't be obtained with secular philosphies, except maybe the peace of mind it gives the grieving or those afraid of death. Of course, secular philosophies are just as capable of justifying evil, but we denegrate those as well. The evil stems from the fact that once someone believes they know absolute "truth", they can justify any action if it can be worked into the framework of that "truth". Religions started this behavior and have been encouraging it for millenia, as they are the tools of those in power (God rules over the universe, and by God's will, I rule over you). Only recently have things like Marxism or Objectivism taken God out of the equation.
I think they act like such assholes and throw those words about because they assume they will only anger the people who hate them (those really intolerant). An open-minded Christian is not going to identify with the word "fundie", but use it front of Pat Robertson and he'll know you're making fun of him.
I think there is a more direct explanation. Computers allow one to make abstract ideas a functional reality. Anything you can conceive of can be implemented, assuming you have the skill and it doesn't violate some fundamental laws on algorithmic efficiency, which, for the most part, are far more forgiving than the laws of the physical universe.
This lack of constraints appeals to the creative person who has little patience for the real world. The computer offers limitless possiblities and great power for those who understand them. In this sense, computers are much like magic, and the hacker much like a wizard.
Myths and fantasy are appealing to the hacker, because they offer flexibility and strangeness not found in the real world. But the most important part is that these systems are internally consistent, just like mathematics. It is fun to imagine things that cannot exist, but it is even more fun to imagine the ramifications of those things, and that can only be done if there is an order to their being.
That is why we just don't just settle for sword and sorcery stories, but construct a taxonomy of monstors and magical creatures, of spells and weapons, of characters and races, etc. It isn't enough to just make shit up, you've to got make up a system so that it can be understood and manipulated, otherwise, what's the point?*
So computers and fantasy do two things: they both offer greater possibilies than the mundane world, and they both offer much greater power over their respective environments than we are used to, so we can achieve more of those possibilities.
(*) This probably where us rationalists differ from actual mystics and romantics in our view of these things. The romantic likes fantasy because it's pretty, or horror because its scary. The mystic likes the lack of responsibility implied in being part of "something bigger".
To hell with congress, those fuckers only work for the highest bidder, which is not us. Get out your debuggers and packet sniffers, reverse engineer the Real protocols, and set it loose on the net à la DeCSS. Not even the government and its guns can stuff a genie back in its bottle.
Slashdot Mirror
As much as a detest the Extropians and social Darwinists this author criticizes, I have so far found nothing interesting in this sloppy and vague rant. The author lost all credibility when I read the following passage:
;)
This breathtaking vista must be starkly contrasted with the Great Shame of computer science, which is that we don't seem to be able to write software much better as computers get much faster. Computer software continues to disappoint. How I hated UNIX back in the seventies - that devilish accumulator of data trash, obscurer of function, enemy of the user! If anyone had told me back then that getting back to embarrassingly primitive UNIX would be the great hope and investment obsession of the year 2000, merely because it's name was changed to LINUX and its source code was opened up again, I never would have had the stomach or the heart to continue in computer science.
Ok zealots, flame away!
--
I'm not sure what "indifferent" and "incandescent" mean when describing a book.
I read it in two sittings. It was always interesting, even when it got into tedious exposition mode (which, as someone has already pointed out, tended to occur in long dialogues, as if in a bad sequel or idealogical propoganda). It is an excusable sin, as the setting is fairly complex. It was really interesting to see the same fears of a corporate-government dystopia existing thirty years ago, and how it was portrayed then, compared to how it was portrayed in the height of cyberpunk movement, and to how it is portrayed now. Some people have called _The Shockwave Rider_ the first cyberpunk novel, which makes it worth reading just for historical interest (and why I sought it out in a used bookstore).
Brunner predicts an Internet-like network, which I think was quite an accomplishment, even if he didn't see the microcomputer revolution coming. The only difference is, instead of a PC on every desk, there is a terminal or phone connected to a mainframe somewhere, which is in turn linked to the worldwide data network.
I believe the spelling was even more Americanized, something like "sweedjack", though that doesn't look right either.
Like every other art film? Find something better on the same themes that isn't pretentious sophmoric drivel.
--
the basic plot of The Matrix was invented by Rene Descartes!
Back it up a little more, it was invented by Plato with his "shadow on the wall of a cave" analogy.
--
Yes it is, in an ironic sense that the shallow and greedy do not understand. Every street urchin and refugee is a potential scientist, entrepeneur, doctor, etc. All it takes is nurturing environment and a decent education. The value of immigration is not in the immigrants, but in their children.
--
What the hell kind of contract exists by government mandate? The contract should be between the worker and the employer. The only reason the employer is capable of exploiting the worker is that the government sticks its nose in and places restrictions on the when, how, and why the worker crosses the border, and on how long the worker can stay.
Don't shrug this off as "they know what they are getting into". This is a condition manufactured by government coercion at the behest of large corporations. We have every fucking right to complain, and to change this practice.
--
Blackmail? It is simply an exchange of money for services. Why should you let them set the price?
Find a demonstratable flaw in their system, but refuse to reveal how it works until the RIAA donates $10 million to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The publicity it would generate for the issues at stake would be worth far more than the actual money.
The working assumption in every one of your examples was that the good's value is either time sensitive or the customer had he opportunity to haggle. The customer goes in knowing the they probably won't get the same price as the next guy.
Amazon does not fit either of those assumptions. They mislead the customer, and now they're taking flack for it. No one is saying they shouldn't have a right to do it. But that doesn't mean it isn't obnoxious.
Because people have working assumptions that vendors will sell according to the market price? That it shows a severe lack of respect toward its customers that Amazon would do this? That people, were in fact, "ripped off"?
If this were normal behavior for companies, and people could assume that they could be selected to receive a higher than normal price, either randomly or according to demographic profiling, then, yea, they have little to complain about.
This is unlike your airline example, where most everyone understands that the closer you get to a flight, the more the tickets will be. Obviously demand is going to be higher for those buying their tickets at the last minute.
But that isn't how things work for bookstores. There is a fairly stable market price for books (and DVDs, and music). Books don't suddenly go up and down in value (unless Oprah starts harping about them), and certainly not in the seconds between one purchase and the next. No one expects that their individual price could be randomly because Amazon is not a place where you can haggle.
They did something shifty and sleazy and now they're getting spanked for it by the market (you know, us), and rightly so. Just because you want to bend over when corporations pull this crap doesn't mean the rest of us should shut up about it. Thank us, we're the ones keeping the market fair, and ensuring that *you* don't have to look at dozen websites to price things, and log out and relogin again to try to get the lowest random price.
Bezos! Quit trolling slashdot. Talk about whiny and self-important, sheesh!
Because it's a fundamental part of all the rhetoric supporting capitalism? The free market will always be good for consumers because unfettered competition keeps prices at the market clearing price, giving neither the seller or buyer an advantage. This happens best with commodities, where goods of the same type may be easily substituted, but still occurs with any kind of product.
Now, this can only occur when pricing information is easily attainable. And for the most part, vendors are very eager to tell your their low low prices in order to compete. A thrifty consumer will always check prices from different vendors before buying anything. This is where the credibility of your argument lies.
Now guess what? All that could change due to the current legal climate. Never before has price gathering been so easy, as robots can be sent scouring the net getting the latest deals, whether the vendor likes it or not. And eBay has already sued and won to prevent a company from doing this on their servers. There argument wasn't just about putting load on their servers, they considered it tresspassing.
In addition, there are laws and treaties in the works to give databases of facts copyright protection. Guess what a price list is?
A vendor can kick you out of a store if it sees you gathering prices, but they can't take the price list away. You can't mirror Pricewatch, but you can distribute prices gathered off of it. That could all change. Pretty soon you may have to agree to a click-through NDA to even enter a web-based store.
All the glorious efficiency promised by the "e-commerce" revolution could turn into a giant scam for the conglomerates, using demographic data to milk every consumer for as much as he or she will tolerate. And we won't be able to fight back, even though technology could give us some pretty sophisticated tools, because we'd be breaking various laws to do it. Just like now, where it perfectly legal to export DVDs, but illegal to crack the region coding on the DVDs that would make doing so worthwhile.
How are truly anonymous ads better? Do you realize how much of our economy is devoted to advertising? Think of how we could devote those resources towards more useful ends, such as making better products, and having more money to spend on those products. The fact is that targeted advertisement is cheaper and it is more effective with real demographic data than with generalisations drawn from anonymous sources. If you know certain people will fast-forward through certain kinds of ads, why even run them for those people?
Yea, I'm playing devil's advocate here, but remember there are two sides to this, and most of us tend to fall on boths sides at one time or another. We'd all save money if advertising was less intrusive and more effective. Privacy is a myth, and what little we had and lost ain't coming back, so let's use our demographic value to our advantage.
Imagine being able to announce to the world "I'm in the market for a new TV!" and have every ad you see be for different TVs and home entertainment products. Nobody would bother with spam, and companies would be less likely to break their privacy agreements because it would now be cheaper to keep the customer's goodwill. You could add to that announcement "but not from GE!", which allows GE not to waste their time on you now, and gives them an incentive to not piss you off for the future.
An email plugin? Bah, I'd rather see a much more interesting use of this technology, like this:
Dear Net-Mail User [HyperLink: EweR-635-78-22267-3 aPl]
Your mailbox has just been rifled by EmilyPost, an autonomous courtesy-worm chain program released in October 2036 by an anonymous group of net subscribers in western Alaska. [HyperRef: sequestered confession 592864 -2376298.98634, deposited with Bank Leumi 10/23/36:20:24:21. Expiration-disclosure 10 years] Under the civil disobedience sections of the Carter of Rio, we accept in advance the fines and penalties that will come due when our confession is released in 2046. However we feel that's a small price to pay for the message brought to you by EmilyPost.
In brief, dear friend, you are not a very polite person. EmilyPost's syntax analysis subroutines show that a very high fraction of your net exchanges are heated, vituperative, even obscene.
Of course you enjoy free speech. But EmilyPost has been designed by people who are concerned about the recent trend toward excessive nastiness in some parts of the net. EmilyPost homes in on folks like you and begins by asking them to please consider the advantages of politeness.
For one thing, your credibility ratings would rise. (Emily Post has checked you favorite bulletin boards, and finds your ratings aren't high at all. Nobody is listening to you, sir!) Moreover, consider that courtesy can foster calm reason, turning shrill antagonism into useful debate and even consensus.
We suggest introducing an automatic delay to your mail system. Communications are so fast these days, people seldom stop and think. Some net users act like mental patients who shout out anything that comes to mind, rather than functioning citizens with the human gift of tact.
If you wish, you may use on of the public-domain delay programs included in this version of EmilyPost, free of charge.
Of course, should you insist on continuing as before, disseminating nastiness in all directions, we have equipped EmilyPost with other options you'll soon find out about . . .
David Brin
_EARTH_
Why not? A spamming company has recently sued a bunch of ISP for blacklisting them, and most of the ISPs have settled. Hey man, it's the American Way.
The libertarians are squarely on the side of Lars on this one, if they are being consistent.
Only if a they are statist hypocrites. Copyright and patents were created by government fiat, and before that it was a priveledge granted by the crown. You do not have a natural right to a sequence of bits.
(Was it feed a troll, or starve a troll? I always forget which...)
Because that's the only way they can do effective customer profiling, so they can screw people the way Amazon does.
And don't think the credit card companies are on your side. They're part of the problem, pushing a security model where the identifier is also used as a "secret" key. It is their fault credit cards are such a risk to begin with.
Oh man, have you read the editorials? Here is a piece from a rant against the First Amendment that is just so ironic:
Whoops, looks like I broke his license agreement. The fool seems to think a publisher can force his readers to waive their "fair us" [sic] rights.
Don't beleive the hype. Even if it is legit, they're only doing it for propoganda value, to steal the glory from University SETI projects. Of course, it's probably just a cover for a Planet Buster facility. Our immediate concern should be to finish the space elevator.
Heheh. Half of my family are rednecks (and proud of it!) and the other half are Southern Baptists. But the rednecks aren't dim-witted or racists, and the Baptists aren't fundamentalists.
If you think I'm referring to you, you might be guilty of the things I ascribe. Nowhere in my rant did I mention a specific group or denomination, or even the word Christianity.
But there is a specific group of people, who have some very specific ideas about their place in the world and the place of everyone who isn't like them. They're out there banning books from libraries, trying to censor the internet, trying to put a bible in every student's hand and the ten commandments on every classroom wall. On the TV they talk about putting religion back in government, all religions, mind you, because we can't play favorites, but in their churches and their PAC meetings it's all about the superiority of their ideology and how they need to fight the evil of Islam, New Age, Atheism, sec-u-lar humanism, and those dirty moral relativists of all stripes, and yes, that includes other Christians.
Bigotry is about creating conflict were there isn't any. But there is a conflict here, and my side didn't start it.
Mocking organized religion is an example of intolerance of intolerance: superficially intolerant, but generally aimed at a net gain in tolerance.
What an interesting concept.
Is it intolerant to promote the idea that racists are dim-witted rednecks?
That homophobes are closet-cases afraid of their own sexual instincts (hence the name).
That misogynists are insecure and threatened by women?
What makes these stereotypes acceptable is that the attributes in question are almost universally despised, so much so that even the people who have those attributes don't admit it to themselves.
But a lot of people believe in organized religion, and specifically, a lot of people see nothing wrong with being a complete snot about other people's religious beliefs. Because, after all, one can't help being black, gay, or a woman, but you have a choice to baleeeve in Jeeezuss!
(uh oh, rant coming)
And then they get snippy when you criticize them for it! Intolerance? What's so intolerant about it? Like you said, it was your choice to baleeve in Jeeezuss! But what makes me different from you is that I don't really hold that against you. I may laugh at you behind your back, and mock your belief system publicly *ahem*, but I'm not going to be a jerk to you about it. My philosophy is to treat all people with simple courtesy, and judge people by their actions, not by what they say they believe (because beliefs and actions are often inconsistent, for better and worse).
Now, I told you to piss off because you won't stop bugging me about that Jeeezus guy, and you keep trying to push it on my kids in school. You promote the idea that my (lack of) beliefs makes me incapable of behaving ethically and responsibly, that my female friends should be submissive, and that my gay friends should be condemed for doing what comes naturally, though when you do it you call it an expression of "love". And you know, I don't think you're really over that racism thing, because you keep representing that Jeeezus guy with blue eyes, even though he is should clearly be of Semitic decent.
You think you are so God-damned superior because God is on your side, and it shows in everything you say and do. It is so pervasive and insidious, but you won't admit it is bigotry, because after all, I can always leave the oppressed and join the oppressors. Join the winning team, you say, be SAVED! You'll see that we really love you, and though we may seem to act like jerks, it is for your own good, because you need to be SAVED!
Yea, right. And I suppose the school bully acts like he does because he wants his victims to learn to stand up for themselves. I see through your agenda and understand your motivations, and they ain't as pure and noble as you say they are. Don't lecture me about tolerance, buddy, because you've already demonstrated just how intolerant you are. Once you go from live and let live to live as I tell you to live (or else), I'm under no obligation to treat you with respect or courtesy.
But there is nothing good about religion that can't be obtained with secular philosphies, except maybe the peace of mind it gives the grieving or those afraid of death. Of course, secular philosophies are just as capable of justifying evil, but we denegrate those as well. The evil stems from the fact that once someone believes they know absolute "truth", they can justify any action if it can be worked into the framework of that "truth". Religions started this behavior and have been encouraging it for millenia, as they are the tools of those in power (God rules over the universe, and by God's will, I rule over you). Only recently have things like Marxism or Objectivism taken God out of the equation.
I think they act like such assholes and throw those words about because they assume they will only anger the people who hate them (those really intolerant). An open-minded Christian is not going to identify with the word "fundie", but use it front of Pat Robertson and he'll know you're making fun of him.
I think there is a more direct explanation. Computers allow one to make abstract ideas a functional reality. Anything you can conceive of can be implemented, assuming you have the skill and it doesn't violate some fundamental laws on algorithmic efficiency, which, for the most part, are far more forgiving than the laws of the physical universe.
This lack of constraints appeals to the creative person who has little patience for the real world. The computer offers limitless possiblities and great power for those who understand them. In this sense, computers are much like magic, and the hacker much like a wizard.
Myths and fantasy are appealing to the hacker, because they offer flexibility and strangeness not found in the real world. But the most important part is that these systems are internally consistent, just like mathematics. It is fun to imagine things that cannot exist, but it is even more fun to imagine the ramifications of those things, and that can only be done if there is an order to their being.
That is why we just don't just settle for sword and sorcery stories, but construct a taxonomy of monstors and magical creatures, of spells and weapons, of characters and races, etc. It isn't enough to just make shit up, you've to got make up a system so that it can be understood and manipulated, otherwise, what's the point?*
So computers and fantasy do two things: they both offer greater possibilies than the mundane world, and they both offer much greater power over their respective environments than we are used to, so we can achieve more of those possibilities.
(*) This probably where us rationalists differ from actual mystics and romantics in our view of these things. The romantic likes fantasy because it's pretty, or horror because its scary. The mystic likes the lack of responsibility implied in being part of "something bigger".
To hell with congress, those fuckers only work for the highest bidder, which is not us. Get out your debuggers and packet sniffers, reverse engineer the Real protocols, and set it loose on the net à la DeCSS. Not even the government and its guns can stuff a genie back in its bottle.