Crooks rip off nonprofit rape crisis center, then return the stuff with an apology note

boing
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It’s not like I don’t agree with your point, but I feel you’re missing mine.

If a person becomes part of an institution like the police, and then goes on to embrace many of the failings of that institution, thus becoming assimilated into an inhuman (or at the very least inhumane) monster, how are we to regard them?

Yeah sure, they’re still literally humans, etc - in my book that should go without saying. My point is that if dehumanisation is ever justified, these are the guys to dehumanise. It’s the sheer scale of it; they wantonly inflict lasting misery, with widespread, regular persistence on a proportion that dwarfs the contribution to human misery made by two categories of people folks are most encouraged to dehumanise, namely terrorists and paedophiles. And these guys do it with relative impunity.

We’re told that some people are so terrible that it’s okay to throw away the rulebook when dealing with them, and we both know that’s utter bullshit. But what about the rat bastards who take advantage of their position to piss all over the rulebook, or rewrite it as it suits them?

What can we do about these people, aside from back the odd good apple to the hilt? We’re bloody impotent; the only recourse we have is the complete fuck you.

…Which isn’t how I regard the cops per se (wary suspicion is more like it); it should also go without saying the complete fuck you is reserved for those who’ve individuals who’ve demonstrated their own heinous lack of humanity.

I think there’s perhaps a very specific place for dehumanisation, and rather than that specifically being the problem, it’s actually just prejudice (as usual).

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-I-. . well, the me that existed two years ago . . agrees with you.

The me I am now, well, my beloved was the gentlest woman I’ve known, and the world hurt her with it’s madness, life with her was like Vincent and The Doctor, except without the monster, I figure she took care of that before we met.

Now that she’s no longer with us, well, she changed me a lot when I was with her, and I made an effort to learn all those lessons she taught me. When I saw Osama Bin Laden die I said ‘Yeah! Good riddance!’, and she said ‘They always seem to die with their families’.

These horrible, broken people we’re talking about. . . they’re broken by the world around them more than anything else. We should wish them the best, just not in situations where they have power and authority over others. George Bush seems to like art, and perhaps in a different world some of these people could be folding proteins or . . .well, anything else.

Their greatest crime is that they’re more adaptable than we are, and given all the insane pushes society gives us pretty much right out of kindergarten, and how horrible some parents are (no testing required!). . . I don’t think I can blame them anymore.

That’s why my preferred approach is an end-around, combine Valve, Mondragon, and the Venus Project, let anybody who doesn’t want to be a dick to other people join, turn ‘employment’ into ‘peaceful, safe citizenship with lots of distractions and toys’. The corporation is such a powerful construct, and it’s not attached to a chunk of dirt, it’s DESIGNED by accident to be a democracy of choice. As Rebecca said, ‘Just because that’s why they made it doesn’t mean that’s what it’s for’.

I don’t care if we don’t convert Hannity or Obama, we get the entire third world, most of the second, and pretty much all of the children. 50 years later we’re gone and if we’re clever and un-brainwash our innocent, then they’re making much better decisions and we’ve given them the reset button they need.

Nothing else is going to work, you can’t win by fighting this sort of inertia, you have to exploit the most powerful construct we have, use every tool at our disposal, and take our lives back by NOT fighting. And the best way to avoid resistance among the way is to aggressively humanize the opposition.

I know, sounds a bit crazy, but this is what my skillset is designed for, I just didn’t realize that a broken, gentle woman would turn me into this sort of person. . . I thought I was nice before, I never hurt anybody and took care of everyone who needed it. Now I know that’s not enough.

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I’m betting you’re young. I once believed this too. But while certainly MOST people are not ALL bad or ALL good, I certainly have met people who are ALL bad.

These thieves certainly are not all bad. Indeed, I suspect they are mostly good. But don’t deceive myself that there do not exist truly evil people. I know they do exist.

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Hmm.

I think maybe you should expand on that at length.

I didn’t quite follow; you seemed to be talking in a condensed sort of way there…

But you seem to have an interesting angle. I’d like to see it.

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Yeah, you can’t really cover ‘all aspects of human experience’ in a few paragraphs. It’s a tough concept anyway, because it takes a couple of lateral hops, and we humans seem to really suck at those, don’t we? (I remember it taking WEEKS to convince people that a marketing algorithm would work just as well predicting health care events, and that’s just one hop, and not even a big one!)

Believe it or not, after almost two years of serious scholarship, over 800 TED talks, supply chain analysis and all the rest, I’ve FINALLY come up with a method that seems to work on most people.

Doctor Who fan fiction.

Seriously, WTF?

But I’m having a hard time arguing with a recent burst of results, it’s allowing me to hit most of the key points without imposing TOO Much of a vision (it’s a framework that hordes of types of lives could live inside, so I’m cautious about people interpreting what I’m designing as a seed as a final product, I fear blinding people to the true potential)

I’m only at the 7/8 point or so (leading up to a couple of parts of the reveal with better context and some fun fourth-wall breaking at the end), I suppose if you wanted to start there you could also help make this thing better! Either that or we could hit on aspects that don’t click? I’ve yet to have this conversation in-person with somebody and not have them end with their mind completely blown, but I need to figure out a way to communicate this better via text, so most people can understand it.

So, how do you like to discover things? The funny-ish script? Lots of ramblings and links that are thorough and cover lots of bases but don’t tie together well because I had a hard time organizing so many things in a way others understand? Are there specific bits that don’t click in a ‘no way we can pull that off’ way? (we can! I haven’t even mentioned that Citizen’s United is, for me and this idea, AWESOME!)

And would you like to help crowdsource a revolution? A surprisingly peaceful one that loudly and proudly uses some exploits we’ve created and gives us almost all honey and almost no stick?

This is the fun part, you have excellent timing.

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You may be thinking of an actual military war game exercise, the Millenium Challenge 2002, in which General Paul Van Riper used a sneaky asymmetrical strategy which led to an almost immediate victory for his OPFOR side. The embarassed establishment restarted the game with strict new rules to guarantee a victory for “our” side.

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Even if he wasn’t, I was. That was another of my inspirations (also, Monster Bug Wars)

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some friends of mine made back patches with a picture of bruce springsteen and the text “THE ONLY BOSS WORTH LISTENING TO.” i was gonna do some with robocop that said “THE ONLY COP WORTH SPARING” but decided that i would rather not be arrested with that on.

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when i was real young i stole some expensive shit from a party, cuz it turned out that everyone that lived there was a violent racist. but on the way home i was like “do you really want to be that guy?” i turned around and discreetly put all the items back where they belonged. i wish i just kept it.

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I don’t think I was, but there are some weird similarities. My recollection of “my” story was the combat was entirely virtual and/or fairly lo-fi. Think pen and paper or computer equivalent. I believe it was more of a fun pastime for the people. But wow, that Millenium Challenge sounds bananas.

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haha ok

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