Hi.
I’m thrilled to be here, and I look forward to posting stuff.
In case you’re wondering what this blog is going to be about, I have a bunch of things I plan to talk about:
- Gun control (eventually)
- Military procurement, corruption, grand strategy, imperialism
- Computer security <– “that’s my thing“
- The surveillance state and its many lies and incompetencies
- Religion and philosophy, specifically, are religions much in the way of philosophies?
- Book reports – I’m not sure what else to call them. They won’t be “reviews” – they’ll be more along the lines of ‘a bunch of things that reading this book made me think about’
- Maybe some recipes
- Maybe some stuff about various crafts I get involved in
- Rhetorical tricks and “can your dialectics break bricks?”
- Anarchism and moral nihilism
- Historical skepticism
I also intend to post some stuff regarding verbal abuse and how to use abuse, or how to contextualize invective. That will probably feed into a commenting policy, which I will enforce. Spoiler: I don’t expect you to be nice to eachother, but if you’re going to be nasty, I want to see creativity. Please.
For the present, I think that I am going to keep from going into other writings at great depth – especially because I’m going to be pointing you toward things that are pretty long or crunchy. I’m probably going to favor offering an overview of something, a pointer to the original, some chunks out of context, and my analysis of the same. I’ve used that sort of approach for a long time and it has worked pretty well, I think. I may remix a few of my old postings from Deviantart or my personal website, too. There’s a lot of writing I’ve been meaning to revisit and this seems like a great chance to do it.
Sounds good! Or did you want examples of verbal abuse? Welcome.
Hey there and welcome! Looking forward to reading more from you!
Hey, great to see you promoted to the big time! ;)
Huh. Grats on your ascension.
I think most of the internet nastiness is by definition uncreative. At least, I think it’s been a good 8 years since I saw a troll that legitimately made me laugh. It’ll mostly just get filtered.
At any rate, welcome to the blag!
Have you given consideration to comment nesting level?
Um.
You’re fast off the mark, Marcus! So good to see you here.
I’m not sure how WordPress is set up here, but I do think comment nesting is a niceish thing. I’ll see what I can do there.
I hate comment nesting.
@Chigau#10:
I think I do, too. It means you can’t just scroll to the bottom and see what’s new, anymore.
It’s going to take me a bit to get the hang of this so everyone please be patient! I ought to have it all sorted in a week or two, though.
Menyambal@#1:
I think it oughtn’t be hard to find examples of verbal abuse. :) I was more thinking of discussing some mental tricks and strategies I have long used for giving and receiving verbal abuse.
I was wondering if you were the same Marcus Ranum who used to write about firewalls and other computer security topics. I guess that this post confirms it.
fakeusername@#13:
There aren’t a lot of people around with my name. Yeah, it’s me. I may even touch lightly on some infosec stuff here but it’ll mostly be oriented toward home users.
Abuse? I came here for an argument.
drken@#15:
No you didn’t.
As a computer security specialist, what do you think of the notion, given the incompetence of the government in keeping hackers out of their computer systems, that the Hildebeest’s private email system might actually been no worse then the State Department’s system, which, apparently, is known to have been hacked into?
colnago80@#17:
“Hildebeest” is pretty lame invective and eventually won’t be tolerated here. If you’re going to call Hillary names, why not call her “Secretary of State and War Criminal” or something that has teeth?
That said:
what do you think of the notion, given the incompetence of the government in keeping hackers out of their computer systems, that the Hildebeest’s private email system might actually been no worse then the State Department’s system, which, apparently, is known to have been hacked into?
I’m going to promote this question to a posting, with your permission? It’s a very interesting question. Short form: I have no idea and neither does the FBI, unless they have some information they are keeping secret – which is the antithesis of how to run an investigation.
Re #16
No prob. As I understand it, the FBI has no evidence that her private system was, in fact hacked but they, apparently, do have evidence that the State Department’s computer system was invaded by hackers (as by the way as has the Pentagon’s).