In the news are a couple items which remind me of the issue of loyalty.
The first is the news that I have had my resume picked out of a pile to do some of the grunt work for a very large and popular company. Let's call it Bazillion.com. At the first news I was quite impressed with myself for having done nothing whatsoever to deserve their attention. But I guessed that somewhere in there was somebody who needed my skills and was reaching out. So I had a temporary high that has lasted about a week, and I took a moment to consider what I might do at such a place. It turns out, however, that it was something of a cattle call and they are likely to be singing that famous Flava Flav song to me after the formal process is complete. I can't do nothing for you man.
Still, given the operation of Chris Rock's Rule, a man is as decietful as his opportunities permit, I did give the alternatives some consideration. Nevertheless, the fact of the matter is that all I want to do is the exact same thing. For me it's all a question of funding and time. Can I get the time and money to build those things I want to build? Can I get the space and opportunity to create those things I wish to create?
Such are the fundaments of loyalty.
I stumbled across an interesting definition today. It's the idea of legal positivism. The Wiki says:
Legal positivism is a school of thought in philosophy of law and jurisprudence. The principal claims of modern legal positivism are that:
I don't quite understand why the second bullet point needs to be said, but that's aside. The very idea that there need be no necessary connection between the validity of a law and ethics or morality is a striking statement, especially given the number of lawyers in this country. They must have learned the term within the first semester of law school, and there must be no equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath for the likes of the JDs. What a setup. Such knowledge makes me want to exploit my own skills in amoral fashion, just to get ahead of the grip of law before the legal crew can understand what they are suing me for.
That might lead me to cracking beyond mere hacking. But Anonymous has an object lesson of dying by the sword as their realm of anarchy descends into chaos.
War rages between competing factions within the hacker collective Anonymous after this weekend's drama-filled takeover of the main Anonymous IRC server network. That network, used by Anons to plan and conduct attacks, was taken over by one of its own, an IRC moderator known as "Ryan."
His attack has sparked a debate over the "leadership" of Anonymous.
Hacking the hackers
The main Internet chat servers used by Anonymous have been run by a group called "AnonOps," which provides communications platforms for the group. Pointing IRC clients at anonops.ru or anonops.net would connect anyone to the servers, where they could then join channels like "#OpSony" and participate in various Anon activities.
Though Anonymous is often described as leaderless, factions like AnonOps by necessity have a loose structure; servers must be paid for, domain names must be registered, chat channels must have at least some moderation. Ryan was one of those IRC mods, and this weekend he proceeded with an attack that seized control of the AnonOps servers away from the small cabal of leaders who ran it.
As I said not long ago, the problem with Wikileaks and all such ultra-libertarian organizations is that everybody thinks they are equal and submit to no authority. And so without the rule of a moral law, people come to the daft conclusions that everyone can be equally right which is not only a logical fiction but the beginings of every political nightmare.
Where are your allegiances, and how often do you renew your pledges?
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