Entries in Life

Experimenting with the spam filtering tonight. I downloaded all of my Yahoo POP3 mail and ran it through the scanner. It caught just under 90% of the spam. Alright!

I did find some design flaws, though. Gotta work on those.

$500 email

After I read A Terrible Thunder, I said that idealism was fruitless — which is to say non-creative, or unproductive. It accomplishes something but what it acomplishes is often not beneficial.

I bring this up because Dandilion Wings is discussing idealism and power. Especially, she quotes an interview with Ursula K. Le Guin where the question is whether "sustainable" lifestyles are "sentimentally nostalgic". Ursula ends up talking about ideals, saying that all ideals are positvely dangerous.

Of course, David McCuster riffs off of Dandilion's comments and talks about power. I don't know if he is the one that started this, but for the past few weeks, I've been thinking about power and how it is manifest. Right now, I've come to this point: Your power is all in their head.

His comments seem to agree with this, in a way. When attacking power, imitating it doesn't work. He uses monopolies (e.g. Microsoft) as an example:

For example, you could work on eroding support for the monopoly. [...] Public belief in inevitability is one of the things supporting a monopoly.

This is the absolute source of power. The vast majority of people give power to other people and expect you to do likewise. When you fail to go with the flow, fail to accept another individual's assertion of power, you throw them for a loop. I experienced this a few years ago when I lived accross the street from a drug dealer. He intimidated everyone on the block. He would sit on their steps and they would hide behind closed doors.

But he had his own fears. You could confront him if you didn't let him scare you. If you refused to show fear, he lost power. His power was in your head.