[FRIAM] sanctions schmanctions

Fri Feb 25 14:09:06 EST 2022

Since the new trend is *-as-a-service, it seems that there ought to be metal benders like LM and GD that resell their hardware like AWS does.
Crowdsourced cruise missiles, etc.

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Friday, February 25, 2022 11:01 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] sanctions schmanctions

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 at 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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