Interesting story. Reminds me of this story from Flow:
> Tollas Tibor, a poet who spent several years in solitary confinement during the most repressive phases of the Hungarian communist regime, says that in the Visegrád jail, where hundreds of intellectuals were imprisoned, the inmates kept themselves occupied for more than a year by devising a poetry translation contest. First, they had to decide on the poem to translate. It took months to pass the nominations around from cell to cell, and several more months of ingenious secret messages before the votes were tallied. Finally it was agreed that Walt Whitman’s O Captain! My Captain! was to be the poem to translate into Hungarian, partly because it was the one that most of the prisoners could recall from memory in the original English. Now began the serious work: everyone sat down to make his own version of the poem. Since no paper or writing tool was available, Tollas spread a film of soap on the soles of his shoe, and carved the letters into it with a toothpick. When a line was learned by heart, he covered his shoe with a new coating of soap. As the various stanzas were written, they were memorized by the translator and passed on to the next cell. After a while, a dozen versions of the poem were circulating in the jail, and each was evaluated and voted on by all the inmates. After the Whitman translation was adjudicated, the prisoners went on to tackle a poem by Schiller.
I always thought prison would be a great place to practice meditation. Even at home, where there are lots of distractions, I can easily spend hours meditating. In prison, with much more time to waste and a lot fewer distractions, I'd probably be able to focus for much longer and get really good at it, as the more you practice, the better you get, and the better you get the easier it is for you to meditate and the longer you can meditate.
Another reason meditation could be great for prison is that it could be a fantastic antidote to boredom. After a few weeks of regular meditation, I found I actually started to look forward to "boring" chores like brushing my teeth and waiting in line, which provided great opportunities for meditating (which consisted of just focusing on my breath).. and those boring times just seemed to fly by as I meditated and no longer seemed boring.
Yet another reason that meditation could help in prison is because it could be used to help one "detach", in the Buddhist or Stoic sense -- not to cling to things one desires, to be content with one's circumstances and surroundings, to help with pain, anger and other emotional issues, and just to achieve peace of mind.
Meditation need not rely on any physical items that can be taken away from you. If you use the technique of focusing on your breath -- your breath being something that will always be with you as long as you live -- it can always serve as an object of meditation.
Meditation seems tailor-made for prison (not to mention ordinary life, where it can also help).
Have you ever been to prison? I think you may have a romantic view. For example:
> “Plaintiff is being tortured on a daily basis in Attica Correctional Facility Special Housing Unit,” he wrote. “Plaintiff is subjected to having to listen to loud banging all day and night” and to “screaming and yelling” and to “feces being thrown in plaintiff’s cell” by “mentally disturbed prisoners” who were housed near him.
Or (from an article about how prisons are putting two people in a solitary confinement cell):
> The two started arguing immediately. Each had to prove that he would not be messed with, because if something happened — if one attacked the other — there was no escape. The only way to alert a guard was to bang on the door and hope the sound could be heard above the din.
There's lots of variation between the kind of incarceration you might be in. Minimum security, maximum security, supermax, solitary confinement or not, federal, state, county, death row, etc. Mixed in with the general prison population or not, among murderers or among white-collar criminals?
Some types of incarceration will give you more opportunities for meditation than others.
If someone has the leisure to write a book in prison, or to work on some software project, work on a game (like the author of the article this HN thread is about), read, exercise, make license plates or belt buckles or perform other minimal-skilled work (like many prisoners do), get vocational training, or even simply do chores like cleanup or kitchen duty, they have great opportunities to meditate.
Also, you can actually meditate while doing other things. I do it all the time -- especially when something annoying or boring is going on (like when I'm talking to my boss). Helps keep the blood pressure down.
Still sounds perfect for prison to me.
I'm also reminded of the Forest Monk tradition[1], where monks deliberately lived and meditated in the forest, among wild beasts, with very little to eat, and in very primitive (if any) shelters, etc.
"Fear accompanied many wilderness newcomers, due in part to the insecurity of daily life and survival but especially fear of wild animals, sickness and injury, and -- given the accretions of cultural lore -- ghosts.
"Many forest monks record their encounters with wild animals, namely tigers, elephants, and snakes. Tigers often lurked around hermits in their open air klots at night, and the monks learned to face fear directly...
"In such settings the training of the mind was invaluable...
"A second fear that masters bade their disciples overcome was fear of corpses and spirits. The Visuddhimagga teaches the corpse meditation as a way of inculcating a spirit of impermanence but also as a practical way of conquering sexual temptation, and fear of illness and disease. But spending the night in a cemetery, whether in the open air or in a klot, could be the source of great fear.
"The cemeteries of southeast Asia were not the tombstones and spacious lawns of the Western world. Corpses were brought and deposited in shrouds on the ground, make-shift cremations incomplete or left unfinished with nightfall. One monk records being in a cemetery at dusk when villagers brought a shrouded body and left the smoldering corpse on the ground where the monk could see it from his klot. As in any such case, the odor was overwhelming and the monk's imagination stirred. The monk was taught to recognize and observe fear, to control it with mindfulness, and ultimately to transcend it. But that seldom happened without considerable experience.
"The third fear was fear of bodily suffering. The widespread contraction of malaria by forest-dwellers called for perseverance, especially when palliative drugs were unavalable in isolated locales. Despite suffering malarial fever, some monks did not deviate from their discipline, walking in pain or sitting stolidly in the open air during rain storms. The conviction that pain is rooted in the mind was a strong motivation to discipline.
"In terms of physical hardship, the forest-dwelling monks contrasted their wilderness context to the cozy, rarified atmosphere of the monastery. To the forest-dwelling monks and hermits, book learning could not overcome bodily suffering. A strong intellect might mask emotional weakness, undermining mindfulness. Ajan Man, who passed a rains retreat while suffering severe stomach pains, would sometimes enter towns and villages in order to test himself against temptations of food and sensual desire. Mastering sense stimuli would guard against viewing the forest as an escape."
Of course, some prison experiences can be even worse than this, with people actively trying to harm you, but I still think there are a lot of parallels and meditation can help in both types of situations.
I think almost everybody will encourage the imprisoned to meditate ...about their imprisonment reason.
Joke aside, it's not uncommon to hear former convicts mentioning about "back then" having "time to think". The time (served) does that to a man, be that he either likes it or not. Meditation (exercise) and other forms of dealing with boredom are something that give someone immediate and/or cheap result. Being trapped and forced to think about our own life and about the real things in it, like the prehistoric cavemen next to their camp fire through the winter nights, have a chance to produce something more valuable.
I've thought this too, same with going blind. I'm sure it would suck, I'm sure there would be a lot of distractions, but maybe sleep through that crap during the day and meditate at night. I'm very curious how well I could do in solitary confinement, or in those very noise proof rooms that people freak out in. It would probably really suck still though.
Haven't read the article yet (I usually read HN comments first before reading the original) but your comment caught my attention. If you are really curious to see how well you could do in solitary confinement, maybe one of the ways to 'try out' the concept of not being 'connected' is to go to a week or two meditation course like Vipassana[1].
(Disclaimer: I haven't been to one, I am not affiliated in any way) From what I have read about this - The idea is to give up as many sources of external stimulation as possible. For e.g. they don't allow cell phones, any gadgets, internet connection, reading, writing,etc. The setting also takes away from you - having to think about cooking and other daily chores and all you are left to do is either meditate OR take a walk in the campus OR sleep.
Thanks, I do Daoist meditation and have been on a few retreats. They're not nearly as strict about no communication, but it is a lot of meditation / qigong each day. I'd be really interested in a strict retreat environment, but I'm not very interested in Vipassana meditation.
Meditation is one of my big motivators for early retirement. Saving money so I can train harder (and comfortably) down the line. Let's face it, a house is more comfortable than a cave :)
You're opening a whole new world for me. I'm one of those that thought one could only meditate given the perfect quiet setting, and so used to do it only sparingly, now even less after I got married and have a kid. So I'm gonna give it a try and be more contemplative during boring chores. Do you happen to like some online resource dealing with this?
It's interesting that he references GURPS given that it was created by Steve Jackson Games, who were also raided by a Federal Agency and had their computers taken away without cause (Secret Service, I think). It is covered in Bruce Sterling's excellent The Hacker Crackdown http://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html
It's a great source book, despite (because?) they had to redo almost all the work from memory. The foreword is a nice bonus that adds nicely to the theme.
The GURPS ruleset is interesting - but I much prefer variants on White Wolf's Storyteller system. But the sourcebooks were great. Next to GURPS Cyberpunk, there's the wildly dark and entertaining "Cthulupunk" that merges one part of a mix of Gibson, Sterling and Vinge with one part Lovecraft. It can be challenging to keep players alive (or at least animate) through a session, though.
Yes, it was by the Secret Service and yes they were overly excessive in what they grabbed (e.g. everything plugged into an electrical socket that was not involved in food production), but even Loyd would probably admit by now that it was not entirely without cause...
There was of course a reason why the Secret Service raided them, but that doesn't mean it was a good reason. At the time, everybody was shocked and the courts sided with Steve Jackson, but with the past 15 years, I can imagine people are now more used to this kind of invasive, ill-justified raids by law enforcement organizations, and more willing to accept this as normal behaviour.
It was a good reason even if they were incorrect regarding their suspicions, and they did not have either the proper paperwork to enter the premises or the legal authority to remove what they did. As someone personally involved in the whole affair I can assure you that it was considered excessive and the Secret Service rightly deserved losing that case.
Yes perhaps it is better to use a term like "heavy handed". Current situation seems so much more adversarial and frightening than what Sterling describes.
Yeah, these days you're lucky if you don't have an armored vehicle crash through the wall of your house and you or your family don't get "accidentally" shot during a police raid.
Loyd was a bit of a hacker (</understatement>) and was working with SJG to write a cyberpunk GURPS module. As a part of operation sun devil the secret service raided a bunch of hackers, including Loyd. When they found the material related to the game and asked about it he mentioned that he was writing a game for this company down the road. The agents headed over, basically broke in, and seized a ton of gear including an Amiga that was running a BBS and also held a bunch of printing files and markup for the game. The story was later changed to them thinking that the BBS might have had a backdoor to a hacker board, but this was complete BS and the collection of what was seized showed that the agents on the scene had no idea what they were doing.
I am reminded of something that I heard on the Alcatraz audio tour (which I strongly recommend if you ever tour Alactraz, which is awesome), where a former prisoner said he made up a game to help pass the time in his months of solitary confinement:
He'd take a button off of his shirt and throw the button down on to the floor of his cell, in the pitch darkness. Then he'd crawl on his hands and knees to find it. Then he'd repeat the process again.
I'd also recommend getting locked in the solitary confinement cell for a few minutes at Alcatraz, it's quite an experience (though it certainly takes a bit of trust to get over the fear that they won't let you out).
Part of me is actually a bit jealous that he gets to design an intricate campaign full-time. The bigger part of me is outraged that an innocent guy got locked up for uncovering a criminal conspiracy.
And part of me is dismayed that he butted heads with the DOJ - a DOJ he was in the process of demonstrating was corrupt - and expected to come away clean.
> The chairman and co-founder of Palantir is Peter Thiel — the same man who more recently funded the lawsuit that destroyed Gawker, a media outlet that had angered him, and who served as the final speaker at the Republican National Convention. His firm continues to work closely with the U.S. intelligence community.
To be clear, I think supporting political candidates is a fine thing for anyone to do. I am not disagreeing with Thiel's choice to support a candidate, but rather his choice to support an ignorant, totalitarian bigot under any circumstances.
We are post nuclear war. Cyber is the new nuclear. This nuclear saber rattling is a way for leaders to show their mettle to people in a way that they understand well.
I strongly disagree. There are still thousands of nuclear weapons pointing from the US to Russia and vice-versa, along with many others in hot spots like India and Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea.
A lot of the weapons and warning systems in Russia are antiquated, and could result in false alarms. False alarms have drawn the world close to nuclear war before.
Now that either Hillary or Trump will get elected, the US is very likely to get in to another war, and it's quite possible that it will turn nuclear if one of the other nuclear powers get involved in a big way.
The nuclear threat is just not considered much any more, except in the case of North Korea, because of the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, but this is a false sense of security. The proverbial Doomsday Clock might not be quite as close to midnight as it was at the hight of the Cold War, but it's still way too close for comfort.
If those countries had the gall to launch a nuke, they would have to be willing to live with the consequences when their compromised system levels their missile silo or other installation.
Edit: That is to say, the NSA might have probably compromised this ICBM and it will detonate before moving an inch.
Never mind. This isn't the issue. But this is amusing to see Gawker - a garbage tabloid with a pseudo-progressive agenda and highly questionable ethics - be referred using a very neutral term ("media outlet"). And to see any attempts at neutrality vanish next sentence when it comes to describing Peter Thiel. As if Thiel was not famous for Paypal, Facebook, Palantir or 0->1 but rather for being the guy who "destroyed" Gawker (an innocent media outlet that is.). Or I guess for being the guy who helped Hulk Hogan get justice, but that's if you are not a rancid journalist.
A few thoughts anyway: 1/ Interestingly, it is a few months after Thiel publicly endorsed DT that Palantir faces an obviously bogus lawsuit from a US agency that is directly supervised by the Executive branch.
2/ The article fails to mention that if Thiel was "angered at Gawker", it is because he was outed as a homosexual without his consent by those very people pretending to be progressives.
3/ Thiel funded the Hogan lawsuit. The tone the article takes make it seem like he fabricated evidence or used his power to take away the jobs of those honest and hard-working investigative journalists. That is not the case. He helped someone (Hulk Hogan) get reparations for the harm Gawker and their greed had caused him, ruining part of his life.
4/ There is a trend here. An ever increasing amount of vicious attacks towards Thiel since he started to create some harsh cognitive dissonance between media/liberal narratives ("Trump supporters are ignorant idiots, rednecks who don't know any better") and reality ("There is a broad spectrum of people who support Trump, each for different reasons. You can be a V legend, a successful tech entrepreneur and Stanford-educated lawyer and think Trump is the best choice all things considered").
Gawker's case has absolutely nothing to do with freedom of speech, as much as they were styling themselves, instead it has a lot to do with ruining people's lives, breaking the law and paying the consequences of such behaviour.
Just to be clear, "ruining people's lives" by reporting true things, at least in the case of Thiel and Hogan.
I mean, reasonable people can disagree about the bounds of journalism. It is not crazy to say that outing someone or publishing a sex tape is scummy. But it is not true that this had "nothing to do with freedom of speech," and your rhetoric seems awfully overblown. Is Thiel's life ruined? Hogan's?
I would just like to note, that the gist of the problem with Hogan is that Gawker has been ordered to remove the said tape by a court and they refused to comply.
That is the real reason why they got obliterated in the end.
That may be true. But my parent poster said that it was because they ruined people's lives. I don't think that refusing to comply with a court order, however dumb that may have been, was ruining anyone's life.
Without knowing the details of the people's private lives, their relationships, and the impact this has had, it's impossible to say. From the outside, you don't know what's happening in someone else's life except for what they publish / gets published about them.
This could have had a very real impact on personal relationships in both of their lives, which they've chosen to not publicise precisely because it's personal and none of our business.
No, parent comment said they went down because they ruined people's lives AND broke the law.
Trying to argue whether or not someone's life was actually ruined is irrelevant. That's not for you to decide. It clearly damaged someone enough for them to dump millions of dollars into a totally legal retaliation effort.
Gawker had no right to do what they did, as determined by a court. This is the crucial point. They tried to screw someone by financially strong arming them out of justice, so Thiel did that to them instead.
It's absolutely tone deaf to say that outing someone as gay or posting a sex tape couldn't have devastating effects.
What an excellent strategy to move conversation forward. Just take the peripheral argument, attack it, then act like that was the only argument ever presented.
Oh, I'm sorry, I wasn't aware that you had blessed the general concept under discussion as having truthiness, making it inappropriate to discuss the parts of it that weren't true.
Gawker certainly were judged to have broken the law, and certainly did pursue a legal strategy that was at best unwise.
HN regularly anoints as justified activities that break the law if we find the law unjust or unwise, and typically looks pretty badly on legal authorities who impose massive disproportionate penalties on people who disrespect the legal authority.
The person who kicked off this thread asserted that this issue had "absolutely nothing to do with free speech", and that Gawker had ruined lives as a way to argue that this was not appropriate, hacker-like lawbreaking, but inappropriate, opprobrium-worthy lawbreaking.
The idea that this case had "nothing to do with free speech" is farcical in a "black is white" kind of way. It was about whether it was okay for reporters for a news organization to print a story.
The idea that it "ruined lives" runs up pretty hard against the evidence that pretty self-evidently, neither Thiel's nor Hogan's lives were ruined. Now, could we argue that perhaps they did suffer in some way for the story? Sure! Which is why I noted that the "ruined lives" thing was overheated rhetoric, rather than saying that it contains no truth of any kind.
That's a slippery slope argument. The same could easily be said of WikiLeaks. Or Edward Snowden. So why are you making it here? Are you suggesting that Thiel should maybe bankroll the rendition of Assange or Snowden as well?
I don't think you need to bankroll those. It is not much of a slippery slope than an indication how much certain media outlets can fuck with people who does not have money to fight back.
The court ruled in their favor. They were correct and unless Thiel had bankrolled then Gawker would have gotten away with breaking the law. That is not a good thing.
Right...I'm not suggesting they'd need to be bankrolled, just pointing out that it's not too difficult to make the same sort of argument about Wikileaks or Edward Snowden: that laws were broken.
For the record:
I think Gawker acted like a bunch of thugs, and society didn't need a protector to rise up against them. I didn't; I just stopped reading their sites.
I think Wikileaks ... well, I don't know what I think about them. They've caused harm, but they've also enlightened, and they've performed a public service that contributes to the electorate's available information. I wish they had more to contribute for other candidates, and I have no judgment on why that is other than that it appears politically motivated to not participate in opposition disclosure for all candidates (yes, I know, it may simply be that they have no data). It's difficult for me to stake an unequivocal position on them, and I think that's okay, because I have no convincing evidence to support one.
Snowden? I believe he behaved in as responsible a manner he could to support his ethical beliefs, and I believe justice for him includes being allowed to live a normal life in whatever country he chooses without fear of prosecution. He profoundly affected me and my beliefs, and I have immense respect for him.
Barrett is one of my best friends. He gets out soon and I can't wait for a time when he can put out articles like this every week again. It takes a lot longer to get through the process while in prison.
For some reason, this is something I have very often thought about. Not because I think I'll ever to go prison, but because I've often wondered what I'd do if I didn't have access to things that please me, like a musical instrument, or a computer. I've often thought that I would also be capable of keeping my mind excited without anything, and for me the one item that always stands out is that I'd commit myself fully to number theory and just think about integers and prime numbers all day and all night, for years, trying to work out the most basic puzzles in existence.
That would probably never happen, I'd more likely end up a depressed opiate addict, but the thought that it could happen, even in the face of incarceration, gives me a bit of strange solace.
Contrary to what we like to imagine from outside, in prison you don't get the most favorable conditions for meditation. It's still an effort to get your mind serene and ready for heavy lifting like math. It's way more productive to focus on things that both have a lesser mental demand and touch your interest on a deeper, personal level.
Former "nerds" having grown up, finding mentions of D&D is no longer really rare, but I'm always surprised where you find GURPS. I do wonder whether prisoners might find the increased realism interesting, as there's a higher likelihood that they might actually know a bit about losing "hit points". (If it's white collar crime, the point-based accounting might be a bigger incentive)
GURPS is not particularly obscure, so I'm not surprised to hear mention of it. Though it definitely is more obscure than D&D, which is sadly the only RPG that a lot of gamers have ever played.
I really like Barrett's writing, both the style and content. I look forward to seeing much more from him on his release. How he has maintained his wit throughout this episode is beyond me - especially after receiving such a harsh sentence.
Not all prisons allow you to write. In addition, some allow you to write but you must first purchase writing materials and this cannot be done at liberty, only on occasion. Finally, they may have limits on how much writing materials you are allowed to have concurrent access to or keep (which means that your maximum program length and effective mental program swap memory are artificially reduced), as well as when and for how long you may use them. So there are quite a number of limitations.
Has anyone ever done this? There have been successful books written in prison but not many, and that translates much better to pen and paper than software does. It sounds like something of a fantasy to be honest.
I don't know about complex pieces of software. But many algorithms were invented on paper first (or whiteboards.) Conway's game of life became popular before computers were programmed to do it, and people executed the moves with pencil on graph paper. Turing had a chess playing algorithm which he executed by hand on paper.
I've written short sections of code on a notebook before implementing it into a computer. It's slower, but it's possible, and I don't think paper is that inferior to a text editor. It will definitely require a lot more debugging when you finally implement it on a computer. So maybe write lots of test cases.
This I can see, but the parent seems to be talking about commercially viable software. I think people should be careful when discussing imprisonment as some kind of distraction-free vacation for intellectual pursuits, the reality is that a large amount of time would be spent caring for your mental wellbeing.
Well, most of the people I knew in prison used weight-lifting, tennis, jogging, arts and crafts, instrument playing, card games, reading, cooking, TV watching, naptime, and even alcohol to manage the mental wellbeing.
What can really be tough is if you have someone on the outside you care about who is struggling with their own issues. That, more than anything, puts an imprisoned man into depression.
In prison, I wrote a code editor with intellisense in VB.net, but I had a computer to use.
I spent about 4 years at one federal prison. I first got a job in the laundry. To pass the time at that job, I took over the khaki shirt area, and re-folded every shirt until they were all military inspection ready. The laundry was beside the Commissary, and the officer who ran it noticed and hired me into there. I worked there for about 9 months, during which I started and completed the Drafting Vocational Training school. I am such a meticulous person that my skill at drawing on the drafting board and with AutoCAD landed me a Tutor job at that school. That gave me access to one of the computers for about 11 hours a day, 6 days a week, for the rest of my time at that facility.
When I first began on that computer, I knew VB.net, and I knew that XP had the command line compiler for it. So, using notepad, I slowly crafted up an editor until it was useful enough to start using. I eventually had the full intellisense function working, where it parsed every file in the currently loaded project, and parsed every dll referenced, and presented a list which gave me full access to all the library functions without having documentation. It was my personal masterpiece, programming-wise.
Incidentally, I used AutoCAD to give me the command prompt. We had 4 icons available on the desktop and it was locked down pretty good (but not good enough for me ;D)
I had to leave my code editor program behind. No way to smuggle it out.
Jawaharlal Nehru is one example that I know. He wrote his most famous books while imprisoned by the British and they were instant bestsellers when they were released.
I've debugged lots on paper, and written code on paper, but not without being able to make my changes and test the code at least once a day or so.
I'd imagine it'd be possible to get quite far, but the additional effort involved and chance of making far reaching mistakes that don't become clear until much later makes it challenging.
Agreed, although I don't personally mandate paper-coding to pass any syntax / compiler checks, but the code should resemble the language and the algorithms be made sound without any googling or whatever.
When I was first learning programming at a young age, probably 14-15, I was so engrossed by my new skill that I carried on with pen and paper when I was dragged away from my computer to go on a family holiday. I guess there's worse priorities to have as a teen!
For those who didn't read the whole thing, the part referred to by the title is at the very end. This guy constructed an insanely elaborate RPG world, which it sounds like he plays by himself:
>I oversee some 70 fully realized characters as they pursue their blood-soaked vendettas against one another in accordance with the several handwritten pages of primitive, dice-based behavioral heuristics I have devised for them. Their entire world is limited to a map I’ve drawn on graph paper and taped to my wall, their stage confined to my cell’s steel wall-mounted desk on which I have created an elaborate city consisting of dozens and dozens of buildings, vehicles, vending machines, trees, dogs, rats, surveillance drones, and dwarves — a small world, yes, but one of extraordinary depth and intrigue. I make the pieces out of cardboard tea boxes, drawing and then coloring them with very sharp pencils, and I don’t mind saying that I’ve become very good at making itty-bitty tea box people over the last year or so.
Otherwise a very sad story that this guy got locked up and it didn't even accomplish any change.
From the discussion on the reddit, many prisons ban D&D, probably because of fear D&D sessions could turn into gangs and...:
>D&D can "foster an inmate's obsession with escaping from the real life, correctional environment, fostering hostility, violence and escape behavior," which in turn "can compromise not only the inmate's rehabilitation and effects of positive programming but also endanger the public and jeopardize the safety and security of the institution."
> because they kept taking away his books and papers
This is very worrying. There is a (light?) documentary[1] which compares nordic and american prisons which tries to compare both systems. Both have totally different operational philosophies ergo, results.
Very interesting watch but probably even better if coupled with more insightful reading.
Federal prisons (min to medium security) cannot take away role-playing books. They can limit you to 10 books total, though. And, as long as your papers do not have any prison layouts or escape plans, they cannot take them either. There are legal courses of action an inmate can take to force the facility to comply with policy with regards to these things. Allowed subject matter is set by BOP system-wide.
It would have had to be a state prison or perhaps a pre-trial facility
Not directly about the article, but the Quote of the day, which is below the article.
> “Bob, please get me the names of the Jews, you know, the big Jewish contributors of the Democrats. … Could we please investigate some of the cocksuckers?”
— Richard Nixon, 1971
I don't know the context of the quote, but hatred towards Jews is something that I never really understood fully. I tried reading up a little on the history of Jews, and a few reasons seems to be (I know I am missing a lot):
-first Abrahamic religion, difficult to acknowledge for Christians and Muslims
-Palestine-Israel conflict creates hatred among Muslims
-super successful and influential for such a small community.
Without becoming a flamewar, can someone provide an objective TL;DR about hatred towards Jews?
If you look at Judaism, Christianity and Islam, you notice they are constructed in a way that it is difficult to reconcile them if you take at least one of them as true. For example, the most holy day in Judaism is Saturday, in Christianity it's Sunday, in Islam it's Friday; this alone would make some people want to kill the other groups. Then Judaism doesn't accept Christianity because it doesn't adhere to what is expected from Messiah, perfect justice and tradition. Christians on the other hand blame Jews for killing Christ, a Jew, and the main actor in this, pharisees, is what became the prevailing type of Judaism, causing disdain. Islam accuses both Judaism and Christianity of heresy, usurps Jerusalem as exclusively its holy site, and the newer Quran suras, which are more militant to other Abrahamic religions, supersede the older, milder ones (which is how Islam deals with internal inconsistency). What you can notice is that all three religions use each other as scapegoats whenever something goes wrong.
Imagine we live in a simulation, or a real-time strategy game of beings we can't comprehend; how would you make sure there is a permanent conflict in your game? Just make a few similar but incompatible religions claiming they are the right ones and the others are corrupt and watch the fun...
Since the time of the Roman Empire, Jewish people have constituted a significant, economically important population of non-Christians in a continent in which very specific versions of Christianity were the compulsory state religion and religious non-conformity was frequently persecuted. As such, their social and legal status varied considerably but was always extremely precarious.
The ancient Greeks were anti-Semitic when Rome was a republic, not an empire. And the Egyptians earlier than that. I think it has to do with their separation from other cultures, which God commanded them to do. No one likes people who won't conform to their ideas of what is right.
Maybe, but anti-Semitism in Europe today doesn't have much to do with the Ancient Greeks or Egyptians.
I'm not sure that's true anyway. The Egyptians certainly warred with Israel, but they warred with everybody. Solomon married an Egyptian princess, a prayer written by her praising her husband is in Psalms. Later there was a movement of Greeks attracted by the idea of monotheism[0 Historical background, third paragraph] that used to hang out near Synagogues and debate philosophy with Rabbis. In fact it's arguably this which made adoption of Christianity by Greeks so easy and rapid, kickstarting Christianity.
There's also other evidence of Jews living perfectly peaceably and integrating well into other middle-eastern cultures. For example the corpus of incantation bowls[1] used by members of many different religious groups, but interestingly often created by Jewish scribes for non-Jewish clients.
So I don't think there's much evidence for Jewish people being picked out in this way in the pre-Roman and pre-Medieval world.
Jews are a merchant minority. That explains most of it. Merchant minorities are subject to hostility even when the difference is as minor as being New Englanders in the South. Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, Chinese in Southeast Asia, Jews all over Europe, they get much more hostility, and pogroms because they're rootless cosmopolitans. For much more check out World On Fire, Amy Chua.
The Chinese in Southeast Asia get the same Elders of Zion level conspiracy theorising and craziness. There are elements that are distinct to the history of the Jews, like the blood libel, but getting peasants to riot and kill rich people of a different ethnos has never been that difficult. Usually the ruling classes of the areas they live are much friendlier to merchant minorities than the peasantry.
I think an objective summary is going to be hard to come by.
The only thing I can add is that this view is common throughout history - think Shylock in the Merchant of Venice. The stereotype of Jewish people as being involved in the processes of finances and money lending may have been one seed for this.
In many places in 17-18th century Europe, foreigners (which usually included Jews and gypsies among others) were forbidden from owning land and engaging in quite a few honorable jobs.
Jewish practice converged to require praying from a book, so the literacy rate was extremely high (not so much among the general population, especially in Eastern Europe), and as a result of both this and the restrictions, Jews were constrained to jobs like trade, bankers, lawyers, doctors, which later became much more desirable than the (previously) more honorable jobs and ownership positions that they couldn't take.
IIRC, at some point in the late 19th century Germany, Jews were ~3% of the population, but were about 30% of the doctors and 70% of the lawyers; they were also over-represented among the rich. (Can't find a reference right now, so numbers might be off - but I'm quite sure about being over-represented in lucrative and rich circles).
I have no idea if a percentage of jews involved with finances (among all jews) was high; But they were definitely over-represented among finance people.
And besides, hating someone who's different is an established tradition among the people of the world.
I don't think it is entirely irrational to suspect a group that has non trivial dealing with the land's finances, law and health - yet is distinct, marries among itself, has its own "secret" languages and rituals, and has a demonstrated history of moving around and rotating loyalties. (My statements are not politically correct, I'm afraid)
I don't think it's a stereotype. In the Middle Ages Christianity and Islam both had strict usary laws forbidding the charging of interest on loans. Judaism only forbade it amongst fellow Jews so they could charge interest to followers of other religions. This allowed them to afford to make loans where others could not. Obviously they also became the focus of anger when people could not repay the loan and the subject of jealousy when they became rich from loaning money. This is probably the root of many historic pogroms.
Your question is valid and deserves a proper answer, but it won't do this topic any good. It is an extremely political topic, and discussing it in full would hijack this HN submission.
The other answers are correct, but there is more to the story.
Jews have a much higher average IQ. This is a result of being genetically separated population that was selected for "white collar" kind of jobs. As a result they are vastly over represented in many areas of life. For instance, 40% of nobel prize winners are jews, despite being a tiny minority of the general population. Jews are overrepresented in banking, CEOs, famously as producers in hollywood, successful writers, and jewish surnames even seem to be overrepresented among pro video game players.
As a result there have been a ton of conspiracies about jews trying to take over the world. In world war I, many of the bankers that loaned money to the allies were Jewish. Many of the notable communists were jewish. And in Nixon's case, big donors to democrats probably overrepresented Jews.
I'll answer with a book, which is Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco.
To (poorly) summarize the book, which has nothing directly to do with Jews, the protagonists create an imaginary secret society to take over the world conspiracy theory style for the sheer role playing hell of it, and they LARP the heck out of it until the world responds back to them as if they're real, with some pretty chilly consequences. Sorcerers Apprentice and "don't call up what ye can't put down" and all that kind of stuff. Heck of an interesting book.
So say you wanted to make an imaginary secret society to take over the world kinda like Eco's book. So your secret society would be closed to outsiders, foreign language, unusual rites, unusual lifestyle and food requirements, a cultural belief in prioritizing taking over finance, academics, mass communication and PR, entertainment, economics, professions in general so as to lead the society in ways that help your group over all others. Distributed all over the world including in revolutionary areas, communist areas. Very racially conscious WRT helping each other out in preference over other races (opposite of devoutly progressive white people). In, but eternally intentionally separate from, the community (opposite of a melting pot culture). Add a few centuries of interesting historical behavior such as usury at both high and low levels of society and some serious allegiance issues with the community you're temporarily residing in. In other words they're LARPing as something right out of a conspiracy theory book. So that's the imaginary theoretical conspiracy theory subject... which happens to sound culturally Jewish, the above is just their thing, what they do.
Groups that don't have cultural problems generally do the opposite of the Jews. They abandon the old language, maybe even the old countries religion. Cut back on the traditional food or add ethnic recipes to the local mix either way the food isn't unusual anymore. Don't try to run the place at least until you're a member of the place. Be fair to the locals not your own people first above all the locals. Patriotic to the local country first and back home a distant second. None of that is religiously or culturally possible to Jews, so they tend of have a bit of a rough time fitting in.
The moral of the Eco book is if you LARP, if you LARP really hard, the truth no longer matters and the worlds gonna come down on you like a stack of bricks, and right or wrong has little to do with how much the impact is gonna hurt. Welcome to human nature.
Actually its a footnote, and is mentioned in the article:
> You could create a bunch of characters based on the Nixon administration,
> You can also create custom skills appropriate for your particular campaign (Textile Tariff Negotiations; Remembering That Everything You’re Saying Right Now Is Being Recorded on the Taping System That You Yourself Installed, Yes, Even the Anti-Semitic Stuff).
I really can't wait for the future, the kind of childish maliciousness we have today will be replaced with increasing technological sophistication and innovation.
People working on this are probably on HN, and I can only doff my hat to them. Being employed by palantir et al is far better than being on the receiving end.
> Tollas Tibor, a poet who spent several years in solitary confinement during the most repressive phases of the Hungarian communist regime, says that in the Visegrád jail, where hundreds of intellectuals were imprisoned, the inmates kept themselves occupied for more than a year by devising a poetry translation contest. First, they had to decide on the poem to translate. It took months to pass the nominations around from cell to cell, and several more months of ingenious secret messages before the votes were tallied. Finally it was agreed that Walt Whitman’s O Captain! My Captain! was to be the poem to translate into Hungarian, partly because it was the one that most of the prisoners could recall from memory in the original English. Now began the serious work: everyone sat down to make his own version of the poem. Since no paper or writing tool was available, Tollas spread a film of soap on the soles of his shoe, and carved the letters into it with a toothpick. When a line was learned by heart, he covered his shoe with a new coating of soap. As the various stanzas were written, they were memorized by the translator and passed on to the next cell. After a while, a dozen versions of the poem were circulating in the jail, and each was evaluated and voted on by all the inmates. After the Whitman translation was adjudicated, the prisoners went on to tackle a poem by Schiller.