Day: September 8, 2006

…This is not me,
No matter what you think you see.
I am not here, this is not me…

Just passing by…

I’m really enjoying my Wonder Woman’s grad classes right now. For one thing, she’s in a degree program aimed at “technologizing” librarians, and that means I get to be her onsite consultant, sounding board and even tutor at times.

But one of the other things I’ve enjoyed has been watching her heartily embrace actually using the kinds of technologies (read, “toys”) I’ve been surrounding myself with for years. This computer (yeh, I happen to be using hers right now, cos I had some maintenance to do on it) is a brand new lil Toshiba notebook–one of those rare “built by someone other than me” computers that have graced our household. It’s nice, but she also needed a new scanner (couldn’t use mine cos I’d given it to Son & Heir for school), a handheld (found her a nice lil Palm) and some other neat lil toys, just for one class this Fall.

(No, that’s not the Palm I found for her. :-))

Yeh, that means not only is she learning to use ’em all, but I play with ’em too. Even broke down and finally got a Palm for myself… mostly for notetaking and reading eBooks on while I’m out n about and doing the occasional “hurry up n wait” stint. Been a few years since I carried a Daytimer (and logged my day in 15-minute increments), but I may do a lil of that, too. Might even save some of those inspired blogposts I later ask myself, “Now, what was that blogpost idea” about.

*heh*

Speaking of toys. I installed Steve Gibson’s lil “ClickType” app for my logon on WW’s lil notebook, so I could know when I missed actually depressing a key (each keypress sounds like a manual typewriter “click”). Need to remember to put that on my cruiser…

Oh, well, not really much of import; just a drive-by post.

Linking in over at Clash of Civilizations (even though I have to wonder what other civilization he’s talking about :-))

This is an open trackbacks post, opoen all weekend long. Link to this post and track back. (Posts that actually mention/discuss the subject–below–will be hard-linked later in the post body).

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“Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

Another one of those pithy statemments often attributed to Napoleon. The Corsican had a point. And I’d like to keep it in mind as I very briefly consider anarcho-tyranny.

The sorry state of public education. Borders leaking like a swimming pool made of chicken wire. Thousands Standing Around (enough said). A Byzantine tax system that punishes targets only the productive people in society. All of these assininities and outrages have a common link, and it’s not contemporary faux liberalism.

It’s anarcho-tyranny.

Let’s let the guy (Samuel Francis) who coined the term describe it:

What we have in this country today… is both anarchy (the failure of the state to enforce the laws) and, at the same time, tyranny—the enforcement of laws by the state for oppressive purposes; the criminalization of the law-abiding and innocent through exorbitant taxation, bureaucratic regulation, the invasion of privacy, and the engineering of social institutions, such as the family and local schools; the imposition of thought control through “sensitivity training” and multiculturalist curricula, “hate crime” laws, gun-control laws that punish or disarm otherwise law-abiding citizens but have no impact on violent criminals who get guns illegally, and a vast labyrinth of other measures. In a word, anarcho-tyranny.

Now, Francis ascribes the condition of anarcho-tyranny as something deliberate, intentional, planned (do read the whole article). Maybe, but I’d rather posit a mixed state of anarcho-tyranny which seems to fit with my observation of human nature in general and people in groups, particularly.

As one baby step away from a massive conspiracy theory Continue reading “Anarcho-tyranny/OTA”