> Your, meaning
>you all, have no idea just how much effort has been devoted to making
>and keep you stupid and clueless.
you also probably don't know how to or wouldn't want to or have time to bake your own bread, pasta, jam, cookies, or roll your own smokes, make your own wine/beer, grow your own vegetables, read a chart in USA today, figure out how much a shirt will be if it's onsale for 20% off, weave the fabric for your clothes or, at least, stitch them yourself, diagnose and treat your own illness, build your own motor, wire your own home for electricity or pipe it for plumping, reload your own ammo, change your own fucking oil, refinish or build your own furniture, make your own radio or television, build your own deck or addition or friggin home. ETC
do you think this is a special situation? and had it ever ever occurred to you that exaggerating this concern about keeping people klewless does not for one second address the issue. yes, it is true that Billby is part of the problem, but maybe there isn;t necessarily a problem with this. why is it that people think that it's okay for folks not to know how or care to make their own clothes or buid their own car but it *horror* *horror* *shock* *shock* awful if people don't understand how a 'fuser works.
did you know that one of the reasons why women became secretaries and, later, telephone operators was because men, who mostly secretaries, didn't fucking "get" the technology at the time? did people understand how a telephone system worked? the xerox machine? the fucking ditto machine?
if we were to take seriously your assumption that freedom lies in controlling and understanding technology then please tell me how one could possibly get through the entire day fully self-sufficient like this.
nice display of dick slinging. 10 on the snit dick slinging meter.
while having known you for several years now, i know you to be the kind of person who might do many of the above things, even people who know how to run freebsd often could give a crap about baking their own bread or changing their own oil. (you are awate, btw, how the auto industry has made it difficult to change your own oil on new cars. they claim this is be/c reconfiguring the placement of the motor makes it more compact and efficient. i wonder....)
at any rate, i DO understand what you are saying. i think you and others are unrealistic and are arrogant to expect that people should understand "fusers when no one flipped out b/c men didn't understand how telephones worked and refused to use them and learn how they worked or to even see the hypocrisy of the claim that it is awful that 'fuser and the sneer at lusers is precisely the point. why? because while i understand what you are saying because i too have learned everything (which ain't much) because of the generousity of this community, i also know that the exact same fucking thing was said by other groups, like sociologists. sociologists lamented how the powerful had kept people in the dark. in the process of showing everyone how they'd been blinded by the powerful, they managed to create knew ways to enslave people. i am not so sure that the same factors that contributed to that developments that squashed the more radical branch of sociology *for people* are not also evident here. in fact, i am certain of it. as i said before, all social theories about the world presume that there is something awry. they, in turn, try to explain why most people don't get it (why they are lusers) and see the light as the enlightened do. implicit in that structure of thinking is a condescension to your average jack scotchenwater and jill ginantonic