I Am Fully Capable of Entertaining Myself in Prison for Decades If Need Be
theintercept.com
theintercept.com
> 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.
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).
> “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.
From http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/06/20/derrick-hamilto....
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.
From https://www.themarshallproject.org/2016/03/24/the-deadly-con...
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.
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.
Instead, people went mad.
(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.
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 :)
Ah, Operation Sundevil.
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.
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.
He his opposing a party that co-ordinates violet protests at political rallies as well as many, many other crimes.
We might all turn to glass, but at least we'd still have our safe spaces.
[1] http://dailycaller.com/2016/09/26/clintons-syria-strategy-wo...
[2] http://www.inquisitr.com/3598001/russian-trump-hillary-clint...
[3] http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/09/07/the-kremlin-really-belie...
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.
Edit: That is to say, the NSA might have probably compromised this ICBM and it will detonate before moving an inch.
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?
That is the real reason why they got obliterated in the end.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Gawker is a Caymen Island corporation founded by a foreign national.
Are you agreeing that corporations are people?
Gawker destroyed itself.
>Gawker
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").
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is deeply disturbing.
>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."
https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/57uz74/i_am_fully_capa...
Also the author says he couldn't do this at his previous prison because they kept taking away his books and papers.
Very interesting watch but probably even better if coupled with more insightful reading.
It would have had to be a state prison or perhaps a pre-trial facility
> “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?
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.
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)
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.
And in all cases, using the minority as a scapegoat and inciting pogroms is a common playbook for dictators (like Suharto in indonesia)
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.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_Rabbinic_Judaism
Irrational popular loathing, fueled by political powers.
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...
> 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).
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.
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.
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.