Hi Odinn,

Sorry for not getting back sooner. I have to agree with you that there is
a batshit-crazy contingent within the US military establishment, however
I would urge that they should be judged by what they do more than by what
they say. Not to appologize for anyone but just because much of that they
say is either kicking up a smokescreen, pandering to some extremist voting
demographic inside of the US or possibly both.

Interesting somewhat related quote from John Perry Barlow on Dick Cheney:
"But he is a careful listener and not at all the ideologue he appears at this distance." [1]

I respect your opinion on anonymity as I recognize you've put significant
thought into it but I still feel that somehow anonymity is a compromize.
A truce with oppression and intollerance, and as long as there is still
legitimate reason to hide one's identity, there is still work to be done.



PS. Quinn just talked me into pledging some money for Lessig
https://medium.com/@quinnnorton/my-plan-and-why-you-don-t-want-it-b6bcaf0403f2
If he doesn't get 1mn by labor day (looks like he won't) then it's free
license to be smug.



[1]: http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/other/on-the-practical-exercise-of-power-or-why-the-old-white-dudes-keep-winning-2598

On 01/09/15 09:58, odinn wrote:
> > Recent news article which I saw today, which (sadly) not just lends
> credence to the arguments I made, but also suggests that the position
> of the US military is now to target legal scholars or critics of the
> USA's legal system "even if it means great destruction, innumerable
> enemy casualties, and civilian collateral damage."
>
> http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/aug/29/west-point-professor-targ
> et-legal-critics-war-on-terror
>
> Which is to say, that there are certainly people in the US military
> who would target us for making these critiques on this list.
>
> Curiously, the military is disavowing him, stating that he was “never
> an NDU employee nor an NDU professor.” Yet they went ahead and
> published his fascist rant in the National Security Law Journal and
> then published a halfhearted apology for having published it:
> https://www.nslj.org/a-message-to-our-readers/
>
> Note how the military author (William Bradford) plays to certain
> racist or nationalist sympathies by suggesting that “Islamic holy
> sites” and “law school facilities, scholars’ home offices and media
> outlets where they give interviews” – all civilian areas, but places
> where a “causal connection between the content disseminated and
> Islamist crimes incited” should be targeted and blown to smithereens.
> His hope, apparently, is that any possible public unease over this
> enthusiastic expression of hatred would be quelled merely by the
> implication that those who are on the receiving end are, you know,
> 'just Islamic,' and so not as deserving of consideration and
> compassion as other people (whoever it is that he might actually love,
> if indeed he remains capable of that).
>
> Another thing to observe here is that it is apparently his intent that
> we believe that this belligerent and violent attitude is being
> directed at Muslims. Yet clearly he is using this as a mask, hoping
> that his ideas (of targeting and killing legal scholars or critics of
> the US legal system abroad) will gain favor, so that they can also be
> applied more broadly to anyone inside or outside US borders. This
> broader goal of killing as many people as possible (whenever they
> criticize the United States), certainly regardless of their
> background, is obviously an ultimate objective of an increasing number
> of the reactionary and fascist members of the militarized
> corporation-state.
>
> The real terrorists are such people within the US military who are
> applying these ideas; the institutions such as the US military and the
> ISIS groups essentially function as terrorist organizations. When we
> give our resources to them either voluntarily or because of a coercive
> system (e.g. taxation) then we are enabling and empowering them.
>
>
> "Rather than solely creating a(...) “culture of giving,” we should be
> challenging capitalism’s institutionalized taking." - Mathew Snow
>
>

>    Decentralized, voluntary systems to facilitate altruism are good
> alternatives to today's society~ but society's "taking" must be
> challenged.

>

>    Anonymity will be, by necessity, a component of any viable
> decentralized, distributed, and peer to peer system enabling
> altruistic spending.

>
>
>
> Caleb James DeLisle:
>> Excellent analisys, thank you !
>>
>> I've seen a pattern that when someone lives in a country which has
>> a strong government / legal system / police force, the US will use
>> pressure through that legal framework if possible (exception is
>> Russia where they just don't care about US pressure). When someone
>> lives in a "lawless" country, one which has weak government, if the
>> US military doesn't like them they will not hesitate to pwn them
>> with drones.
>>
>> Your raising of the Ferguson murders is quite interesting because
>> it runs counter to this logic. I think the Ferguson murders are
>> something that the US empire has a strong interest in quickly
>> stemming because there is a risk that gun-toting psycopaths bent on
>> establishing a "marter's legacy" will form an informal alliance
>> with the disenfranchised masses who see dead cops as the lesser of
>> two evils. This would be more difficult to squash than a simple
>> assasination market because in such a system there is no central
>> authority and no money changing hands, simply a tacit nod of
>> support from people who cannot and will not explicitly support
>> murder or take the risk of being charged as an accomplice or
>> co-conspirator. For a desperate psycopath with nothing to lose, a
>> tacit nod of support may be all it takes.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On 31/08/15 02:10, odinn wrote: I've seen a lot of reporting on
>> this. What occurred is unsurprising (if we assume that he was
>> helping ISIS). It's entirely possible he simply became a horrible
>> person helping ISIS, but that's not I want to write about. I'm not
>> going to get into a whole "why was he helping ISIS or not" thing
>> here, nor am I going to get into a debate about what some people
>> like to call "laws of war."
>>
>> What should be concerning is that it's relatively easy for some
>> ("three-letter agency" of "government X") to accuse someone of
>> being associated with ("designated "terrorist group Y"") and thus
>> make that someone immediately subject to ("law Z") ~ where that law
>> either expressly contains a death penalty or a statement that the
>> person is not afforded rights any longer at that point in the
>> traditional sense (depending on the country, the law will be worded
>> differently, but with the intention of the same end results). The
>> end result to which I refer is that we'll see increasing numbers of
>> people being dead by drone without any due process at all ~ in no
>> small part because countries like the USA have abandoned due
>> process anyway:
>>
>> In the detention and due process context (which I argue was the
>> critical level at which failure to continue to uphold due process
>> in essence meant at that point the state or its agents had clearly
>> abandoned the system of law (or legal protections) upon which it
>> actually relies): 1)
>> http://www.scotusblog.com/2014/04/detention-challenge-denied/
>>
>> In a long post here (dated Sept. 8, 2014), I have argued that at
>> the stage of the decision in Hedges v. Obama, the US government
>> actually rendered the entirety of US law invalid. For my reasoning
>> on this subject, please see:
>> http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1s8t6v4
>>
>> In the death by drone context (by this point if it was not already
>> apparent, it should be obvious that you can be killed in such a
>> manner without due process even if you have done absolutely zero to
>> harm anyone, and US courts will simply dismiss the cases: 2)
>> https://www.aclu.org/cases/al-aulaqi-v-panetta-constitutional-challeng
> e-
>>
>>
> killing-three-us-citizens?redirect=targetedkillings
>>
>> 3) One could also insert here any manner of ways in which the
>> state kills innocent people, which have resulted in popular unrest,
>> e.g., Ferguson, etc. http://killedbypolice.net/ In general, there
>> is no recourse when this happens, or if an avenue exists in the
>> courts it routinely results in dismissal of the case or a decision
>> which exonerates the killer.
>>
>> The cumulative effect of these corporation-state decisions is that
>> it turns people away from having any faith they might have had in
>> the legal system as we know it. It's easy to say that we hate ISIS
>> or that we think that the antiquated corporation-state model (US,
>> UK being typical examples) are not desireable and are simply no
>> longer solutions for the modern world; it's harder to find viable
>> replacements for such systems because it takes a lot of work, but
>> the answers are out there.
>>
>> Present day notions of governance, an observation:
>>
>> "The truth of the matter is that all things must eventually end.
>> The modern state, lubricated by 1700s-era orts of Hegelian
>> romantic nationalism, is no exception. Within this context, which
>> has been carried forward from the 1700s to the modern day, the
>> state attempts to assert a political legitimacy based primarily
>> upon the concept of unity of a people within certain fictitious
>> boundaries, which are primarily defended not through reason, but
>> through violence and coercion (imposed upon those inside and
>> outside the modern state's fictitious geographic boundaries). The
>> notion of 'representation,' considered revolutionary and generally
>> new and interesting at the time of the French Revolution, is now
>> antiquated and does not provide an adequate framework for newer
>> social and technological developments that have ensued well past
>> the emergence of French constitutional monarchy and the United
>> States of America in the period of 1776-1789. Indeed, by 1989, just
>> 200 years after the beginning of the French Revolution, it was
>> apparent that the notion of a strong, unified state, controlled by
>> a leader or leaders that everyone would be required to follow, was
>> (with more than a little finality) cast into doubt, and the notion
>> of "citizenship" as something defined by the state was likewise in
>> the early process of being discarded, as communities began to form
>> online with the development of the internet. The notion that
>> current systems of "government" should be preserved and maintained
>> is nothing more than a desperate grasp at living in the past -- a
>> past which we are now removed from by over 200 years!"
>>
>> Tim Patrick:
>>>>> Wasn't he helping ISIS?
>>>>>
>>>>> On Sunday, August 30, 2015, psy <epsylon@???> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> http://www.csoonline.com/article/2976282/cyber-attacks-espionage/r
> epo
>>
>>>>>>
> rts-ex-teamp0ison-member-killed-in-syrian-drone-strike.html
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________ unSYSTEM
>>>>> mailing list: http://unsystem.net
>>>>> https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/unsystem
>>>>>
>>
>>>>>
>>> _______________________________________________ unSYSTEM mailing
>>> list: http://unsystem.net
>>> https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/unsystem
>>>
>> _______________________________________________ unSYSTEM mailing
>> list: http://unsystem.net
>> https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/unsystem
>
> - --
> http://abis.io ~
> "a protocol concept to enable decentralization
> and expansion of a giving economy, and a new social good"
> https://keybase.io/odinn
> > _______________________________________________
> unSYSTEM mailing list: http://unsystem.net
> https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/unsystem
>