'Anonymous' Stratfor Hack Reportedly Start Of Weeklong Assault

[polaris93]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/25/anonymous-stratfor-hack-hackers-hacking_n_1169268.html

Hackers on Sunday claimed to have stolen a raft of e-mails and credit card data from U.S.-based security think tank Stratfor,

Comments

[galadrion]

And the way you do that is to even out the economic highs and lows of the system -- make everyone start from the same position, none having any more or less than anyone else.

Fortunately, this aim has never been achieved and probably cannot be achieved by any human-derived agency. It is - theoretically - possible for all people to be allocated the same physical resources (if you're willing to grant a totalitarian authority sufficient remit), but people themselves are not equal: the utility each will be able to extract from his or her own resources will be different. (No two people have identical capabilities; for an instructive parable, see Harrison Bergeron.) As a result, no possible human agency will be able to eliminate trade and the benefits thereof without completely eliminating humanity - and from the outcome of recent current events, such a human agency can apparently look forward to being eliminated by the oppressed: see Qaddafi, Hussein, and others. (I doubt Obama will suffer the same fate, but then, he didn't take the dance to the same level the others did.)

We shall see what develops. Personally, I tend to be optimistic through cynicism - people in power will always do their utmost to ruin things, but fortunately they're too incompetent to do the job properly. Just because they fail to screw up completely, though, does not mean they should be excused...

[polaris93]

I agree with you. Here, I was exploring something that I suddenly realized was fascinating: the basic likeness of an economy to an ideal gas, electricity, or crowd behavior. Along with astronomy, my first love as a kid was mathematics, which is the language of the physical sciences. So I got very excited about this, and wrote about it. But the conclusion, that Socialism is a civilization-wrecker, not only is not fun, it's also confirmed by what we've seen happen in the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. And not just when it comes to money and what it can buy. There are other things than money that people value -- a man or woman's children are worth any amount of money to them, which is why it's hard to keep them from giving in to kidnapper's demands and giving them the money they demand within minutes of the demand being made. Both China and Russia have lost a great deal of their cultural strength, thanks to Socialism. China has money and economic strength now (some), but culturally and socially she is shot full of wholes, and so is Russia.