"Every word you know has been taught to you one way or another. And thus, every concept and belief you have is a result of this same influence. (...) Consequently, the cultural attributes we maintain as important values, are most often the ones that are reinforced by the external culture. The most dominant cultural attributes maintained are the ones that are reinforced by your environment. If you are born into a society which rewards competition over collaboration, then you most likely will adopt to those values in order to survive."
"Can we see in any media or even university press a paragraph of clear unmasking of a global regime that condemns a third of all children to malnutrition with more food than enough available...? In such a social order, thought becomes indistinguishable from propaganda." (John McMurty, The Cancer State of Capitalism)
"For, as this presentation will explore, the majority of people on this planet not only have no idea how they are being affected negatively by the market economy at large, they actually on average hold a steadfast commitment to its principles based on nothing more than the traditional indoctrination. I got an email once that said to me, "If you're against the free market, you're against freedom". And naturally I shuddered at the state of mind control that the dominant established orthodoxy has successfully imposed. Of course, this is how power is maintained. The trick again is to condition people so thoroughly into the established value systems that any thought of an alternative is inherently rules out without critical examination. And to show how deeply pervasive this phenomenon is, you will notice that virtually all the activist organizations, and the environmental, social and political movements of the day always exclude the market system itself as a determinant of harmful effects. It doesn't even occur to them. Instead, they focus on individuals and certain groups or corrupt corporations, and while, you know, it is needed in a per-case basis to target problematic areas it avoids the mechanism which is essentially creating the problem. This is the fatal flaw of what's happening in the so called activist community today. And, as will be firmly and clearly established over the course of this presentation, the greatest destroyer of ecology, the greatest source of waste and pollution, the greatest purveyor of violence, war, crime, inhumanity, poverty and social distortion, the greatest generator of social and personal neurosis, mental disorders, depression, anxiety, and the greatest source of social paralysis, stopping us from moving into new methodologies for global sustainability and hence progress on this planet is not some government, not some legislation, it's not some rogue corporation or monopoly or cartel, it's not some flaw of human nature, it is in fact the economic system itself, at it's very foundation."
StackOverflow has a lot of interesting material on teaching programming (and computing in general). Among the links is the following video. Don't watch it if you're not interested.
Es werden unkommentierte Filmaufnahmen von der Züchtung bis zur Schlachtung von Tieren, sowie der industriellen Anpflanzung und Ernte von Obst und Gemüse gezeigt.
Täglich werden ca. 90 000 männliche Küken in Deutschland "entsorgt" weil sie männlichen Geschlechts sind und nicht als Legehenne zum Profit beitragen.
Männliche Hühner finden in dieser massenhaften Eierproduktion im Allgemeinen schon als winzige Küken den Tod, da die Legehennen-Industrie sie als "nutzlos" ansieht. Eigentlich schlüpfen etwa gleich viele Männchen wie Weibchen aus den Eiern. Es ist aber billiger, die als "Eintagsküken" bezeichneten Tiere sofort zu töten, als sie an einen anderen Ort zu transportieren, aufzuziehen und zu Fleisch "zu verarbeiten". Denn in der Massentierhaltung besteht kein Mangel an Geflügel für die Fleischindustrie.
Tierschützern ist es nun gelungen, in einer ungarischen Stopfleberfabrik einen "Küken-Schredder" unbemerkt zu fotografieren. Dabei handelt es sich um das Instrument, das die aussortierten weiblichen Küken tötet. Anders als die männlichen Küken werden sie auf einem Fließband von Arbeiterinnen aussortiert und in den tötenden Schredder geworfen. Die Weibchen sind wegen ihrer naturbedingt kleineren Leber für die Stopfleberproduktion unbrauchbar.
"...prophesied the rise of the World Wide Web. He understood the idea half a decade before it happened." (John Markoff)
"...is a treasure in the world of computer science...the most articulate and thoughtful of the great living practitioners" (Jaron Lanier)
"...is one of the pioneers in getting many computers to work together and cooperate on solving a single problem, which is the future of computing." (Danny Hillis)
"...is one of the most brilliant and visionary computer scientists of our time." (Bill Joy)
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96. As for our constitutional rights, consider for example that of freedom of the press. We certainly don't mean to knock that right: it is very important tool for limiting concentration of political power and for keeping those who do have political power in line by publicly exposing any misbehavior on their part. But freedom of the press is of very little use to the average citizen as an individual. The mass media are mostly under the control of large organizations that are integrated into the system. Anyone who has a little money can have something printed, or can distribute it on the Internet or in some such way, but what he has to say will be swamped by the vast volume of material put out by the media, hence it will have no practical effect. (...) Even if these writings had had many readers, most of these readers would soon have forgotten what they had read as their minds were flooded by the mass of material to which the media expose them.
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172. First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained.
173. If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can't make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all the power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines' decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better result than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won't be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.
174. On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite—just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. Or, if the elite consist of soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone's physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes "treatment" to cure his "problem." Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or to make them "sublimate" their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they most certainly will not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals.
175. But suppose now that the computer scientists do not succeed in developing artificial intelligence, so that human work remains necessary. Even so, machines will take care of more and more of the simpler tasks so that there will be an increasing surplus of human workers at the lower levels of ability. (We see this happening already. There are many people who find it difficult or impossible to get work, because for intellectual or psychological reasons they cannot acquire the level of training necessary to make themselves useful in the present system.) On those who are employed, ever-increasing demands will be placed; They will need more and more training, more and more ability, and will have to be ever more reliable, conforming and docile, because they will be more and more like cells of a giant organism. Their tasks will be increasingly specialized so that their work will be, in a sense, out of touch with the real world, being concentrated on one tiny slice of reality. The system will have to use any means that it can, whether psychological or biological, to engineer people to be docile, to have the abilities that the system requires and to "sublimate" their drive for power into some specialized task. But the statement that the people of such a society will have to be docile may require qualification. The society may find competitiveness useful, provided that ways are found of directing competitiveness into channels that serve that needs of the system. We can imagine a future society in which there is endless competition for positions of prestige and power. But no more than a very few people will ever reach the top, where the only real power is (see end of paragraph 163). Very repellent is a society in which a person can satisfy his needs for power only by pushing large numbers of other people out of the way and depriving them of their opportunity for power.
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