<nettime> yugoslavia/nato digest [hopkins, groendahl, barlow]

["nettime's_indigestive_system" <nettime@Desk.nl>]

John Hopkins <hopkins@iex.net>
          Re: We are all nothing but fools!
Boris Groendahl <boris@berlin.snafu.de>
          Re: Some Slogans
John Perry Barlow <barlow@eff.org>
          Re: Paralysis

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Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 23:05:22 +0200
From: John Hopkins <hopkins@iex.net>
Subject: Re: <nettime> We are all nothing but fools!

To join the rhetoric, posturing and bluffing, whining, sermonizing,
bull-shitting, propagandizing, and assorted life-like expressions, some
coming from individuals in internal pain, some in external comfort and vice
versa:

What is pacifism? What is non-violent resistance? What is activism  Is it
okay to kill under special circumstances? If you have a gun and some one
else with a gun comes to take all that you have including your life, do you
kill them or do you lay down your gun and allow them to kill you?  What is
it to kill in self-defense?  What is self-defense?  Is aggression ever
justified?  What does it mean to justify -- to make excuses for otherwise
unexcusable actions?  Is it okay to support others who are killing?  What
does it mean to encourage an Other to go with a gun to take a son, a
father, a husband away from someone else?  Which is more important -- Human
Rights or Human Obligations?  We demand possession of the first, and refuse
to fulfill ours of the second.  Possession seems to be a driving force in
War.  And the idea of giving freely to the Other is the power of Love.  Why
do we hold so tightly to the objects around us in the world?

"We got to Fight for the Right to Party" may be the dying mantra of the
West -- what a legacy of ignorance!

Having been at gunpoint several times in life, it is not easy to judge
another person's actions.  But it is clear that a society that drives a man
or woman to kill anyone else for whatever direct or indirect reason is a
sick society.  So what else is new?

Why does everyone seem so surprised by these unfolding events?  Are there
really blind Utopians who think that at this time in the history of the
human race we have somehow reached a pinnacle of evolutionary development
where cool idealism and peaceful coexistence is a way of life?  Good god
almighty, if this is what people think we are all nothing but fools.
Intellectuals who make a praxis of discussing praxis, yet so few integrate
high ideals into quiet, generous living.  Helping those immediately around
us to live to the fullest of their being.

..."So, if we sell you our land, you must keep it apart and sacred as a
place where man can go to taste the wind that is sweetened by the meadow
flowers. Will you teach your children what we have taught our children,
that the earth is our mother? What befalls the earth befalls all the sons
of the earth. This we know. The earth does not belong to man. Man belongs
to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us
all."...  -- from a speech by Chief Seattle, 1851

>These are very sad days and we should cry rather than continue to pose in
>cool arrogance.

>We are all nothing but fools!

I agree Roya, we are living in days of sadness with prospects of greater
sadness in the near future.

And, yes, we are fools, until, to paraphrase Rilke, 'we  change our lives!'

sadly,
John

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Date: Tue,  6 Apr 1999 11:21:28 +0200
From: Boris Groendahl <boris@berlin.snafu.de>
Subject: Re: <nettime> Some Slogans

On 1999.04.04 at 01:38 Uhr, Richard Barbrook wrote:

>SOME SLOGANS FOR THE FIFTH COLUMN OF SERBIAN FASCISM

Make New Filter: bozo

    Filter Criteria:
    
        If From Contains richard@hrc.wmin.ac.uk
        And Body Contains "KLA"
    
    Fiter Actions:
    
        Transfer To Trash.
        
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Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1999 05:21:32 -0400
From: John Perry Barlow <barlow@eff.org>
Subject: Re: <nettime> Paralysis

At 11:09 AM -0400 4/5/99, Douglas Rushkoff wrote:
>Key concepts: Internet Paralyzes
>
>Attention Conservation Notice:  Pure rhetorical bombast, but extremely brief
>
>Links: none
>-------------
>
>Could it be that a real war, with real pain and suffering, reveals just how
>incapable the Internet and, in particular, online conversations are of
>enacting real strategies for helping others?
>
>There's the "who is telling the truth?" thread, the "time will tell,"
>thread, the "I wish there was something I could do for the people"
>consensus, and then the meta-discussions of which of these threads, if any,
>are even appropriate.
>
>All I see is people who'd like to do something and don't understand why
>their keyboards can't help them. The only ones who win are the people who
>use the medium to confuse and paralyze.


So, what did you expect at first, my fellow Internet Guru?

The truth lies, as it always has, in either the clarity of the words or,
far better, the clarity of the eyes close to one's own.

This would be a bad time to lose faith over so little a matter as the
inability of an entirely new place to conform to one's time-deep
expectations his kind has only inhabited since they had memory.

"The best lose all conviction."

-- Yeats

And sometimes, of course, the worst turn out to be right. And no one will
ever judge us but our own hearts.

Love,

Barlow

*************************************************************
John Perry Barlow, Cognitive Dissident
Co-Founder & Vice Chairman, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Berkman Fellow, Harvard Law School

Home(stead) Page: http://www.eff.org/~barlow

MegaPhone: 800/654-4322

Fist Phone: 917/863-2037

E-Mail my shirt-pocket: 9178632037@mobile.att.net (Keep it brief!)

Barlow in Meatspace Now: Yew Nork, Yew Nork  (212/965-1991)

Coming soon to: New Haven, CT 4/9 -> Athol, MA 4/10-11 -> South Bend, IN
4/11 -> San Jose 4/12-14 -> San Francisco...

**************************************************************

Whilst it is as well to be free of messianic hopes, it is good to retain
some sense of vertigo.

-- Ernest Gellner

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