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12/24/2001 Entry: "in memorian"

"Well, not only am I naturally cantankerous and litigious, but I comport myself in a number of ways that are calculated to incite particular legal actions against me. Thomas Jefferson said that it is every American's duty to violate any law that he feels is unjust, for only in that way can an unjust law be tried in court. I extend that statement to precedents as well. We have a lot of bullshit in our legal system that needs to be corrected. I'm working on correcting them, and I've succeeded in a number of issues (there are, however, a very large number of outstanding issues). I'm fulfilling that duty which is a condition of my membership in Jefferson's grand experiment.

What are you doing?"

"What's the worst that happens when a plumber screws you? You get wet feet. What's the worst that happens when the auto mechanic screws you? Your car rolls over the cliff and you die.

Any questions?

Even with the people who can't hurt you much by screwing you, there's still the issue of negotiating position: if you ever go into negotiations without the ability to walk out of there, you'll get eaten alive. When negotiating with laborers, the ability to walk out of there is dependant on your ability to do their job yourself. If you can't do the job yourself, you're entirely at their mercy. If you can, then you aren't."

"People have been different forever. It's just that back in the days when your conceptual horizon was the border of your village, you didn't have enough of a pool to notice differences. Naturally, people who grow up together (and share a tight subset of the genetic pool) are going to be very similar. But you go to the next hamlet over, and all of sudden things get very different. As your horizon opens up, you start to credibly question whether or not those humanoids in the big city are actually homo sapiens.

We see the differences today so easily merely because we can see a lot farther than before. That's because of the opening of communications that you mention. It hasn't made the world smaller, it's made our horizon wider."

"Naw. The 21st century will be the century of the police state. It'll be a century in which every first and second world nation will have massive private and government survellience, and the governments will have access to all of it. When they will all band together to fight their own citizens, in the name of freeing the world from real and fabricated terrorists. It'll be the century where software that can automatically and accurately analyze, sift, and correlate visual and audio content finally matures to the point where the principle barrier to exhaustive surveillance (manpower) will be rendered irrelevant. It'll be the century in which the populace finally overwhelmingly capitulates to the police state either out of love of the safety and convenience of massive surveillance, or out of a bone-deep sense of the futility of fighting. It'll be the century when the anonymity of the crowd is forever shattered, and intelligence, individualism, courage, and honor are completely alienated from civilized society.

It'll be the century in which the last individualists gather the resources to flee this planet forever, and bar Earth's access to the solar system. It'll see the first offworld combat, either in space or on other bodies, with each side clumsily flailing at the other with weapons and equipment wholly unsuited for low-gravity and hostile-environment warfare."

These quotes are all over the place regarding topic, but they came from the same person. They're from someone who called himself Sinster, who I only knew vaguely from a mailing list I've been on for almost seven years now. It's one of the first mailing lists I ever joined, and one of the most fulfilling in terms of its scope. While his views didn't always parallel mine, his intelligence and humor almost made his posts worth reading, and the vast body of knowledge he drew from often sent me scrambling to search engines and the library to research what he had referenced. He was clearly someone who acted on his strongly-held beliefs, and who felt compelled to share his views.

Sadly, I don't have all my e-mail archives with me, and am only able to post these very few pieces of writing he wrote. Even more sadly, I'll never have the opportunity to receive another e-mail from him. Jon Paul Nollman, aka 'Sinster' was hit by a car, and killed yesterday.

He's missed greatly.

Replies: [C.1]

I was lucky enough to know JP. If I have learened anything from him it was that even the smallest belife is worth standing up for.

He was the only person I have meet that stod by ever belife he had.

The world has lost a unique soul today.

Goodby Jon Paul.

Posted by Leon Horne @ 12/29/2001 02:41 PM PST

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