448 lines
23 KiB
Plaintext
448 lines
23 KiB
Plaintext
vol 1 ish 1
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April 1994
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6666666666 666 66666666666
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666 666 666 6 666666666666 66666666666
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666 666 666 66 66 66 666
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666666666 666 666666666666 6666 666
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666 666 666 666 666 66666666666 666
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666 666 666 666 666 6666 666
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666 666 66666666666 666 666 6666 666 666
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666666666666 66666666666 666 666 6666666666666 666
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F _ A _ M _ Y
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...a Private World E-Zine
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Snailmail: Box 1165 Station B,
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London, Ontario
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CANADA
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N5W 5K2
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ed-in-chief: P.W. Casual, C.E.O, P.W.E, pwcasual@io.org
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contributors (whether they are aware of this or not):
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Mark Jr., God of Rhythm Guitar, markjr@io.org
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Rob Black
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Scott B
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Aleister Crowley, the Beast, beast@lowest.circle.of.hell.org
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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Everything herein is anti-copyright.
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In Cyberspace, EVERYTHING is anti-copyright.
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Get used to it.
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+----------------------------------------------------------+
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| "So nobody must be allowed to think at all. Down |
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| with the public schools! Children must be drilled |
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| mentally by quarter-educated herdsmen, whose wages |
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| would stop at the first sign of disagreement with |
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| the bosses. For the rest, deafen the whole world |
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| with senseless clamour. Mechanize everything! Give |
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| nobody a chance to think. Standardize "amusement". |
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| The louder, the more cacophonous, the better! Brief |
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| intervals between one din and the next can be filled |
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| with appeals, repeated 'till hypnotic power gives them |
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| the force of orders, to buy this or that product of |
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| the "Business men" who are the real power in the State. |
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| Men who betray their country as obvious routine." |
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| |
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+----------------------------------------------------------+
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Contents:
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Inaugural Ye Ching Divination
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Slacker Poll
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Brevity as the Art of Banality: One-Syllable Band Names
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Essay: The Abolition of Work
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For Informational Purposes Only: Cop Radio Frequencies
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Glob o Quotes: Eugenics
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Inaugural Ye Ching Divination
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As many a new-age flake will attest, the birth of any new venture
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calls for an oracle to raise expectations & explain future failures.
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With this in mind I am about to use a shareware program to perform
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a divination. The program is caled ICHING.EXE, which I picked up
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in a software library in London years ago. It uses Aleister
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Crowley's interpretation of what has been called "the third
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oldest book in the world", one that survived the great book
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burnings under the tyrant Shih Huang Ti (the Occidental version
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of the burning of the Library of Alexandria). I recently uploaded
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this prog to the /pub/magick archives at slopoke.mlb.semi.harris.com
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if anyone is interested it just may be there.
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So here we go:
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Ch<43>n Over Tui : Fire over Water
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Hexagram number 54
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Kuei Mei: The Marrying Maiden
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------ ------
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------ ------
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-------------
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------ ------
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-------------
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-------------
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To give first younger daughters - ill course.
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Don't start with the carriage in front of the horse.
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Go to it, ye cripples! I'll hold your crutches.
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Blind of one eye? Be as chaste as a duchess!
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Now, younger sisters there's scrubbing to do!
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Better postpone matrimonial clutches!
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Think of Ti-Yi and his sisters anew!
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No meat on the chops, and no beans in the stew.
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This is a good and a bad sign. In a nutshell this can be summed
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up as very auspicious, but also, action can bring failure. There
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is a lot that can be read into this, but in keeping with the
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Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, observation affects outcome.
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The mere act of including this divination here renders it pie-
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in-the-sky. Suffice it to say, we have consecrated this E-zine
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in a true-to-form Age-of-Aquarius type way. Whatever goes wrong
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from here can henceforth be blamed entirely on the above, Heisenberg
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notwithstanding.
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Slacker Poll
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Ok, we've all heard the buzzword n^n times. The question is,
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how many people thought the word "Slacker" was original enough &
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inventive enough to name a band "Slacker". I know one in London,
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Ont. Three-piece power-pop-punk trio. They sound real cool, and
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have a tape coming out soon. I figure they are either the 1st
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or the 1001st band by this name. If you know of one, let us
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know at pwcasual@io.org, enough responses may well spawn an
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alt.bands.named.slacker newsgroup.
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And speaking of band names...
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Brevity as the Essence of Banality: One-Syllable Band Names
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Perhaps the most loathesome fad in music today is that of
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the one-syllable band name. The first 1 - 2 thousand didn't
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bother me, but beyond that point, every additional one that I
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happened across evoked painful images of 3 or 4 snot nosed
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dipshits sitting in a basement wearing touques and oversized
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sweaters grunting out new possibilities for the "perfect name".
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Here's some of the dumbest:
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Eggs
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Flop
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cub
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Jale
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Curve
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Blur
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Petch
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Low
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Moist
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...and if any of you are racking your brains to cash in on this
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latest flavour-of-the-month, my roomate Scott B and I have compiled
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the following list: (To our knowledge none of these have been used)
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Clap
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Mope
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Thing
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Chord
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Dog
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Slap
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Trend
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Bile
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Wheeze
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Essay: Excerpts from THE ABOLITION OF WORK by Bob Black
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I originally had the entire text of the essay in here, but
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the size of this issue balloned to over 50K, so I edited
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it down. For those of you who are interested, point yer
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gopher to gopher.well.sf.ca.us, it's in there somewhere.
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No one should ever work.
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Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any
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evil you'd care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed
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for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.
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That doesn't mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new
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way of life based on play; in other words, a _ludic_ revolution. By "play" I
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mean also festivity, creativity, conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art.
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There is more to play than child's play, as worthy as that is. I call for a
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collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance.
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Play isn't passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and
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slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once re-
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covered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act.
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*****
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Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end
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employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's
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wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue, I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor
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full employment. Like the surrealists -- except that I'm not kidding -- I favor
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full _un_employment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for
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permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work -- and
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not only because they plan to make other people do theirs -- they are strangely
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reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working
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conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about
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anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us
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rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of
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all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management
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agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival,
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although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by
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bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists
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don't care which form bossing takes, so long as the bosses are women. Clearly
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these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils
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of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and
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all of them want to keep us working.
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*****
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The alternative to work isn't just idleness. To be ludic is not to be
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quaaludic. As much as I treasure the pleasure of torpor, it's never more
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rewarding than when it punctuates other pleasures and pastimes. Nor am I pro-
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moting the managed, time-disciplined safety-valve called "leisure"; far from
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it. Leisure is nonwork for the sake of work. Leisure is time spent recovering
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from work and in the frenzied but hopeless attempt to forget about work. Many
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people return from vacations so beat that they look forward to returning to work
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so they can rest up. The main difference between work and leisure is that at
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work at least you get paid for your alienation and enervation.
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*****
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But modern work has worse implications. People don't just work, they have
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"jobs." One person does one productive task all the time on an or-else basis.
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Even if the task has a quantum of intrinsic interest (as increasingly many jobs
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don't) the monotony of its obligatory exclusivity drains its ludic potential. A
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"job" that might engage the energies of some people, for a reasonably limited
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time, for the fun of it, is just a burden on those who have to do it for forty
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hours a week with no say in how it should be done, for the profit of owners who
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contribute nothing to the project, and with no opportunity for sharing tasks or
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spreading the work among those who actually have to do it. This is the real
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world of work: a world of bureaucratic blundering, of sexual harassment and
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discrimination, of bonehead bosses exploiting and scapegoating their subordi-
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nates who -- by any rational/technical criteria -- should be calling the shots.
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But capitalism in the real world subordinates the rational maximization of
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productivity and profit to the exigencies of organizational control.
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The degradation which most workers experience on the job is the sum of
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assorted indignities which can be denominated as "discipline." Foucault has
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complexified this phenomenon but it is simple enough. Discipline consists of the
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totality of totalitarian controls at the workplace -- surveillance, rote-work,
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imposed work tempos, production quotas, punching-in and -out, etc. Discipline
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is what the factory and the office and the store share with the prison and the
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school and the mental hospital. It is something historically original and
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horrible. It was beyond the capacities of such demonic dictators of yore as Nero
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and Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible. For all their bad intentions, they
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just didn't have the machinery to control their subjects as thoroughly as modern
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despots do. Discipline is the distinctively diabolical modern mode of control,
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it is an innovative intrusion which must be interdicted at the earliest
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opportunity.
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*****
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The demeaning system of domination I've described rules over half the
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waking hours of a majority of women and the vast majority of men for decades,
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for most of their lifespans. For certain purposes it's not too misleading to
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call our system democracy or capitalism or -- better still -- industrialism, but
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its real names are factory fascism and office oligarchy. Anybody who says these
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people are "free" is lying or stupid.
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You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid, monotonous work, chances are
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you'll end up boring, stupid, and monotonous. Work is a much better ex-
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planation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such signifi-
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cant moronizing mechanisms as television and education. People who are regi-
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mented all their lives, handed to work from school and bracketed by the family
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in the beginning and the nursing home in the end, are habituated to hierarchy
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and psychologically enslaved. Their aptitude for autonomy is so atrophied that
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their fear of freedom is among their few rationally grounded phobias. Their
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obedience training at work carries over into the families _they_ start, thus
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reproducing the system in more ways than one, and into politics, culture and
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everything else. Once you drain the vitality from people at work, they'll likely
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submit to hierarchy and expertise in everything. They're used to it.
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*****
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Let's pretend for a moment that work doesn't turn people into stultified
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submissives. Let's pretend, in defiance of any plausible psychology and the
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ideology of its boosters, that it has no effect on the formation of character.
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And let's pretend that work isn't as boring and tiring and humiliating as we all
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know it really is. Even then, work would _still_ make a mockery of all
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humanistic and democratic aspirations, just because it usurps so much of our
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time. Socrates said that manual laborers make bad friends and bad citizens
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because they have no time to fulfill the responsibilities of friendship and
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citizenship. He was right. Because of work, no matter what we do, we keep
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looking at our watches. The only thing "free" about so-called free time is that
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it doesn't cost the boss anything. Free time is mostly devoted to getting ready
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for work, going to work, returning from work, and recovering from work. Free
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time is a euphemism for the peculiar way labor, as a factor of production, not
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only transports itself at its own expense to and from the workplace, but assumes
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primary responsibility for its own maintenance and repair. Coal and steel don't
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do that. Lathes and typewriters don't do that. No wonder Edward G. Robinson in
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one of his gangster movies exclaimed, "Work is for saps!"
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*****
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As Bell notes, Adam Smith in _The_Wealth_of_Nations_, for all his en-
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thusiasm for the market and the division of labor, was more alert to (and more
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honest about) the seamy side of work than Ayn Rand or the Chicago economists or
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any of Smith's modern epigones. As Smith observed: "The understandings of the
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greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The
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man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations... has no occasion
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to exert his understanding... He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as
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it is possible for a human creature to become." Here, in a few blunt words, is
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my critique of work. Bell, writing in 1956, the Golden Age of Eisenhower
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imbecility and American self-satisfaction, identified the unorganized,
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unorganizable malaise of the 1970's and since, the one no political tendency is
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able to harness, the one identified in HEW's report _Work_in_America_, the one
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which cannot be exploited and so is ignored. It does not figure in any text by
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any laissez-faire economist -- Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, Richard Posner
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-- because, in their terms, as they used to say on _Star_Trek_, "it does not
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compute."
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Workers of the world... RELAX!
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--------
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footnote
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--------
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This essay is in the public domain. It may be distributed, translated
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or excerpted freely. This ASCII file version was produced by Tangerine
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Network. Contacts as of April 1989:
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Bob Black can be reached at P.O. Box 2159, Albany NY 12220.
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Tangerine Network can be reached at P.O. Box 547014, Orlando FL 32854.
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For Informational Purposes Only (heh, heh)
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This will be a regular feature in BLAST:famy. This issue's
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topic: some Canadian police radio frequencies.
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2.7880 RCMP Canada Alberta, NWT
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3.5930 INTERPOL worldwide
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4.6325 INTERPOL worldwide
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4.7650 RCMP Canada Night Freq.
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4.7765 RCMP Canada
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4.7850 RCMP Canada
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4.7985 RCMP Canada
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5.4450 RCMP Canada
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6.7920 RCMP Canada
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7.5000 INTERPOL Worldwide
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9.2000 INTERPOL Primary
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10.3900 INTERPOL Primary
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14.6200 RCMP Canada
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14.8175 INTERPOL Worldwide
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18.3800 INTERPOL Wordwide-primary
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19.1300 RCMP Canada
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19.3600 INTERPOL Worldwide
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21.7850 RCMP Canada
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21.8075 RCMP Canada
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24.1100 RCMP Canada
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41.6600 RCMP Canada Mobiles for 41.820
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41.8200 RCMP Hamilton
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41.8600 POL Guelph Correctional Centre
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41.9600 OPP London, Newcastle, Niagara Falls, Strathroy
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Peterborough, Windsor, Woodstock
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Glob o Quotes: Eugenics
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A nasty politcally incorrect word? Perhaps. Any method to this
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madness? Judge for yourself. I'm going to leave Hitler right
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out of this, in my book, his methods cancelled out any
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genuine insight he may have had into this topic. I mean
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even Nietzsche said we have to "do away with millions of
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bungled humans", but he was trying to make a point. He didn't
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actually go out and attempt it. Here's what other historical
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figures have said on the subject (people with much lower
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derangement-to-intelligence quotients than der Fuehrer):
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Thomas Malthus (1798):
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A mob, which is generally the growth of a redundant population
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goaded by a resentment for real sufferings, but totally ignorant
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of the quarter from which they originate, is of all monsters the
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most fatal to freedom. It fosters a prevailing tyranny and
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engenders one where it was not; and though in its dreadful fits
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of resentment it appears occasionally to devour its unsightly
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offspring; yet no sooner is the horrid deed committed, than,
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however unwilling it may be to propagate such a breed, it
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immediately groans with a new birth.
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Of the tendancy of mobs to produce tyranny we may not, perhaps,
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be long without an example in this country ... If political
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discontents were blended with cries of hunger, and a
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revolution were to take place by the instrumentality of a mob
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clamouring for want of food, the consequences would be
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unceasing carnage, a bloody career of which nothing but the
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establishment of some complete despotism could arrest.
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Count Arthur de Gobineau (1853):
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The word _degenerate_ when applied to a people means
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(as it ought to mean) that the people has no longer the
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same intrinsic value as it had before, because it no longer
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has the same blood in it's veins... In other words, though the
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nation still bears the same name given by its founders, the
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name no longer connotes the same [peoples]; in fact, the
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man of a _decadent_ time, the _degenerate_ man properly so
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called, is a different being... from the heroes of the great
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ages.
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Charles Darwin (1871):
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We now know, through the admirable labours of Mr. Galton,
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that genius ...tends to be inherited.
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(I can't remember who said this but):
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Heredity is stored environment.
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Alfred Russel Wallace (1872):
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In one of my latest conversations with Darwin, he expressed
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himself very gloomily on the future of humanity, on the ground
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that in our modern civilization natural selection had no play,
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and the fittest did not survive.
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Herbert Spencer (1881):
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Fostering the good-for-nothing at the expense of the good
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is an extreme cruelty. It is a deliberate storing up of
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miseries for future generations. There is no greater curse
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to posterity than that of bequeathing them an increasing
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population of imbeciles.
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Bertrand Russell (1930):
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The most intelligent individuals on average breed least, and
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do not breed enough to keep their numbers constant. Unless new
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incentives are discovered to induce them to breed they will
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soon not be sufficiently numerous to supply the intelligence
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needed for maintaining a highly technical and elaborate system.
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Further, we must expect, at any rate, for the next hundred
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years, that each generation will be congenitally stupider than
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its predecessor, and we shall become gradually incapable of
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weilding the science we already have.
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Aldous Huxley (1958):
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In this second half of the twentieth century we do nothing
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systematic about our breeding; but in our random and unregulated
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way we are not only overpopulating our planet, we are also, it
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would seem, making sure that these greater numbers shall be
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of biologically poorer quality.
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Arthur Jensen (1985):
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There's no doubt that you could breed for intelligence in
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humans the way you breed for milk in cows or eggs in chickens.
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If you were to raise the average IQ just one standard deviation,
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you wouldn't recognize things. Magazines, newspapers, books,
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and television would have to become more sophisticated. Schools
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would have to teach differently.
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+++++++++++++++++++++++++++SUBSCRIPTION INFO+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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email pwcasual@io.org, in the text of your message say something along
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the lines of, sign me up!, and we will. Next issue due whenever we get
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||
our hands on some more doobage. Later. ...PW.
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+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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