Skinner's way

Very eloquent presentation of Reward /Enjoy - System of compulsion vs The independent autonomous being.

No need for Nazi salutes (is Snowden still a spy?)

The Nazi salute may have had many reasons, but the most obvious one should have been to show that the man giving the Nazi salute received the propaganda and is acting on it.

This way of receiving feedback was most likely implemented due to the fact that there were no other technical means, but when there is a state of the art mass-surveillance state this is no longer needed. The ones that are watching you can see if you received the propaganda and if you act on it.


Update: I figured out that one of the most important component in this setup is also the feeling of being watched, which make you comply even if you are not convinced, then I  also remembered this article and found the same concerns voiced by Naomi Wolf:

It is actually in the Police State’s interest to let everyone know that everything you write or say everywhere is being surveilled, and that awful things happen to people who challenge this.  Which is why I am not surprised that now he is on UK no-fly lists – I assume the end of this story is that we will all have a lesson in terrible things that happen to whistleblowers. That could be because he is a real guy who gets in trouble; but it would be as useful to the police state if he is a fake guy who gets in ‘trouble.’

 That feeling, of being watched, was missing in surveillance until a certain agent leaked a lot of PowerPoint presentations, basically nothing compromising for NSA (technically speaking, software, keys etc) other than the fact that there is limitless technical capacity for surveillance.

And now in the light of recent conflict with Russia they may also have a spy in the heart of Russia, if that is true is hard to know, if we will ever know. So now that the path is already set what whistleblowers will dare go to the enemy (Russia).

For the business as usual the machine needs to work no matter that the system sooner or later will get false confessions and bring a lot of injustice.

Mass Trolling In The Arena, The Way Great Civilizations End Up In The Ditch Of History

Gladiatorial games are a constant theme in our culture and there are a sensible amount of movies, novels and any form of modern art representation about the gladiators, their fierce enemies, and those who send them to fight. For the gladiator predicament not only is persistent in contemporary art across its time-span and spectrum but gave also iconic masterpieces. Yet there is a great majority that is part of this game that is scarcely represented or is usually misrepresented: the spectator.

 The spectator is usually portrayed as either struck with terror and fear or is sadistically cheering to the slaughter and gore. This is somewhat true because this is the way usually a helpless person behaves when is temporarily exposed to gratuitous violence. That the reaction of outrage or protest against the senseless blood-shed  is absent is understandable given that the spectator wouldn’t dare to go against the status-quo agenda: keeping violence relevant in time of peace, without risking to witness the games much closer than the first row.

There is one kind of spectator that is not represented and I would say extrapolating to the present it could represent if not the majority at least a significant portion from the spectator base. To reconstruct the profile of this type of spectator we need to see what constant violence exposure, as a witness not as a part of it, does to the human psyche.  That the gladiator, the referee, even the animals might have suffered some kind of chronic post-traumatic disorder would not surprise anyone. But not this spectator, the conspicuous spectator, the ancient equivalent of the violent evening news watcher that sadistically teases also his family and neighbors, was not stressed, not even thrilled, but was becoming blasé, wanting the same emotional punch for the content but, being unable to receive it. This would resonate with what Seneca observed this in his writing (taken from an interesting read by Keith Hopkins):

 All the previous fighting had been merciful by comparison. Now finesse is set aside, and we have pure unadulterated murder. The combatants have no protective covering; their entire bodies are exposed to the blows. No blow falls in vain. This is what lots of people prefer to the regular contests, and even to those which are put on by popular request. And it is obvious why.

 There is no helmet, no shield to repel the blade. Why have armour? Why bother with skill? All that just delays death. In the morning, men are thrown to lions and bears. At mid-day they are thrown to the spectators themselves. No sooner has a man killed, than they shout for him to kill another, or to be killed. The final victor is kept for some other slaughter. In the end, every fighter dies. And all this goes on while the arena is half empty. You may object that the victims committed robbery or were murderers. So what? Even if they deserved to suffer, what's your compulsion to watch their sufferings? 'Kill him', they shout, 'Beat him, burn him'. Why is he too timid to fight? Why is he so frightened to kill? Why so reluctant to die? They have to whip him to make him accept his wounds. 

 Why civilization go back to rubble given enough time is one of the great mysteries of the Universe, but people like Arnold Toynbee speculated that is the failure of the elites ("creative minority") to inspire the masses, and this is what makes the weaving to unravel, the elites main preoccupation, in his own words, becomes:  "sustaining and expanding their own wealth and power."

I would argue that the elite remained creative enough given that they always came with ingenious solutions to keep the crowd entertained and thrilled, to cite again from the above mentioned article by Keith Hopkins:

The quality of Roman justice was often tempered by the need to satisfy the demand for the condemned. Christians, burnt to death as scapegoats after the great fire at Rome in AD 64, were not alone in being sacrificed for public entertainment. Slaves and bystanders, even the spectators themselves, ran the risk of becoming victims of emperors' truculent whims. The Emperor Claudius, for example, dissatisfied with how the stage machinery worked, ordered the stage mechanics responsible to fight in the arena. One day when there was a shortage of condemned criminals, the Emperor Caligula commanded that a whole section of the crowd be seized and thrown to the wild beasts instead. Isolated incidents, but enough to intensify the excitement of those who attended. Imperial legitimacy was reinforced by terror.

 In the above setting, when all the variations have worn out we can easily go back in time with the mind eye and probably easily hear people mumbling or screaming: “Fake !”, “Staged!”, “He deserves it ”, “Boring!”, “That’s what you get for being on the wrong side!”, “He looked for it!”. That upping the game by wanting to get an emotional kick from trying to stir the unsuspecting other spectator, or by massively annoying him if he is aware, would not have be strange to this ancient spectator is a very probable guess. Here we can easily zoom out back to the present and bring up the modern equivalent of this ancient conspicuous spectator to the Gladiatorial games that has become blasé to all forms of violence and injustices and thrives on more: the troll.

 That being troll is not some form of mental illness (yet, just wait for DSM 6) is not enough for people to take the phenomenon for serious study, and a recent study found:

 trolling correlated positively with sadism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism, using both enjoyment ratings and identity scores. Of all personality measures, sadism showed the most robust associations with trolling and, importantly, the relationship was specific to trolling behavior. 

(source for the above image)

The troll comes as the greatest (yet) level player in this game of passive participator that the violent Internet  arena can provide.  That this is the case, and trolling is a force to be reckon with, is confirmed by recent revealed cases where government and army use it.

 Trolls I am sure recently came again stridently loud into everybody’s focus with the events in Gaza and Ukraine, where reported mingled corpses, scattered brains, and open bowels, children carried like rags were met with, “Terrorists!”, “Fake”, “They looked for it”, “God punished them!”, “They chose the wrong side!”, etc

 But psychologically the phenomenon goes much deeper than just trolling and it is here to stay, and as psychology professor Phillip Zimbardo showed with his experiments, given the right conditions people quickly fill in the roles.

 To come back to the ancient terror games, it is clear that the gladiator, the stage animal, and some spectators are the abused, the terror system, and a limited circle of the elite is the abuser, and the gladiatorial game abstraction the majority agreed upon is the enabler.

 The very fact that everybody agrees on who the sides are, where is the arena and that there is a fight carry on: eliminate the evil opponent, is enough to make the things roll, the rules of engagement will most likely bend over time.

 People might look back in time and look to the gory youtube fresh videos from Gaza and Ukraine, the hateful tweets and heartless comments as our modern form of gladiatorial games. There’s no secret that social media can make us shallow and less empathic, but the recent level of trolling shows that there is a next level to this. And as we discussed earlier certainly there are also professional trolls in this bloody PR games, to spice it up a bit or just spin it in the right direction, but there certainly are a handful of “naturals” too, all making the comment sections, and some hashtags, un-breathable.

 In the arena of gladiatorial games some fights can be seen as great victories, but in the greater game of Life we are all losers, and at stake might be our own civilization and culture, as for the past certainly was.  Now the roman gladiator arena is a quiet and dusty ruin, no way to know what tragic stories happened there if not for the history.

 As James Carse put it: “War is the ultimate finite game. Religion is the ultimate infinite game,” …  “Evil does exist: it is when an infinite game is absorbed utterly in a finite game. All evil is an attempt to eliminate evil.”

 I would use a similar metaphor for our discussed theme: Empire is the ultimate finite game. Life is the ultimate infinite game. And evidently we are all trying to absorb Life in this finite game of Internet, pretty much like the Romans tried with their glamour gladiatorial arena, with all the golden Caesars, thousands of ferocious beasts and brave fighters, beautiful women. And it was evil, and now its easy to see, but back then all those contributions made with passion, art and blood by everyone made it seem alive, but beyond the meaning that was given by the system that owned it was meaningless. Pretty much like Internet is today and we don't get it. The satisfied sadistic Roman spectator like our troll is a blessing in disguise because it shows us what it means to be at the apex of the system, shows the real face of the "Arena".

 P.S. I sometimes wonder if the latest stream of botched executions in the United States has less to do with technical reasons and more to do with feeding the trolls, and making the hate game run, providing thus a  fresh stream of troll victims, outraged about the issues. Thus pointing out that activism, outrage and protest not only has very low impact on the way the events but it is rather effectively feeding the trolls.

Was Snowden a frustrated "green badge"?

So Snowden was a "green badge", so what ?  It seems that according to some "NSA insider jokes" it is a source of contempt for other blue badges:

I think I speak for a whole lot of blue badgers that I am relieved the source is a green badger. We knew it was, right? NSA insider joke.

— John Schindler (@20committee) June 9, 2013

This exact color division is by no means new to NSA and it seems to be present in other companies with similar results for some:

Green badges are treated as a sub-life form even though there are more green badges than blue badges on this site and Intel could not get the job done with out green badges. very poor collaboration between green badges and blue badges.

This is a normal human trait as it is obvious from a lot of psychological experiments where divisions are made arbitrary from Zimbardo's Stanford prison experiment to Jane Elliott's eye color division experiment. This shows that the people fill in and identify exactly with the roles they are expected to do and this takes a life of its own with real consequences. Take this paragraph from a paper on Eliott experiment:

Even if she wanted to stop her experiment, when Jane got back to her classroom, it had taken on a life of its own. A smart blue-eyed girl, who had never had problems with her multiplication tables, started making all kinds of mistakes. Jane noticed the student stumbling when she read aloud. When she walked across the room, Jane saw that she now slumped. During afternoon recess, the girl came running back to Room 10, sobbing. Three brown-eyed girls had ganged up on her, and one had hit her, warning, “You better apologize to us for getting in our way because we’re better than you are.”

Looking in this article there seems that there were the same kind of invisible barriers that Snowden tried to break:

As his coworker tells it, he was given full administrator privileges, with virtually unlimited access to NSA data. “Big mistake in hindsight,” says Snowden’s former colleague. “But if you had a guy who could do things nobody else could, and the only problem was that his badge was green instead of blue, what would you do?” (The emphasis is mine)

Is Snowden the product of a frustration simply generated by the way NSA does its business?

5 sleek IDEs for python, all free.

To say that I like python would be an understatement, I really love python and that's why I looked over a few options when it comes to IDEs, and chose five close to my heart. This will not be an objective exposition but a subjective one, so I'll try to keep it short and put in the foreground some unique traits from my experience I had with each IDE. And by sleekness I don't mean meretricious glossiness but some kind of neatness earned through character, even if that is completely subjective, again.

Aptana -  includes PyDev out of the box so you don't have to install it, very useful for those familiar with Eclipse and those that develop for Web and use python at the same time and want to keep it all in one place. Works also with IronPython.

Jet Brains PyCharm - an acclaimed commercial IDE with a lot of features was released for free only for python, makes me think that python was a good investment in the end. Works also with IronPython.

Light Table, smooth both in design and workflow, still at initial stages but I think it deserves a call.

Python Tools for Visual Studio - the only free version of Visual Studio and if you download the PTVS integrated with VS 2013 you can have the only free version of VS to my knowledge that works in one install and without any trouble, brings all the power of VS to python programming.  Works also with IronPython and WPF.

SharpDevelop  Works very well with IronPython and WPF(has also design possibilities) and also offers code conversion from C# and VB.NET to python among others. And to my knowledge is the only way you can compile a .NET application using IronPython.

To end, I think that python not only receives a lot of attention in IDEs, libraries, etc but also a lot of support in the Internet community, and it is in my opinion a well deserved attention for a promising language.
I would really like to hear your subjective experience and what you like or not in some of these IDEs or other IDEs for that mater.

P.S.This is my first blog post in a while.