Stephan Kinsella Presents: The Worst Blog Post of 2009

[Capital_Pumper]

@Alan Kaufman

When I hear the term Kindle I think not of imaginations fired but of crematoria lit. And when I hear the term “hi-tech” I think not of helpful androids efficiently performing household chores or light-speed rockets gliding seamlessly through space but of the fact that between 1933-45, modern technology was used to perform in ever more efficient ways the mass murder of six million of my people. The instruments of so-called progress, placed in the hands of the modern state, disappeared six million Jewish men, women and children, into a void from which they will never return and in which a majority of them remain forever unidentified. This was done in the name of progress by means of technology for the creation of a better world.

The Nazis often were, by their own lights, well-intentioned idealists working for a better tomorrow. And their instrument was modern technology, aspects of philosophical and aesthetic modernism and the old religious concept of supercession implicit in the Christian notion of progress. Jews were outmoded, useless, they said. Most high level Nazis, like Himmler or Heydrich or Eichmann, did not feel visceral hatred towards the Jew. Rather, they looked upon them coldly as something that simply needed to disappear so that the new life could get on its way. And the means by which they sought to do so was first through a propaganda campaign that portrayed Jews, in Wagnerian terms, as a drag on the visionary energies and bursting vigor of the new Aryan man, and then by the implementation of this decision to eliminate Jews through ever more sophisticated state corporate and scientific technological means. And yet, during the war crime trials at Nuremberg, while Nazi Jurisprudence was tried and hanged, Nazi technological attitudes were not put on trial.

… The hi-tech campaign to relocate books to Google and replace books with Kindles is, in its essence, a deportation of the literary culture to a kind of easily monitored concentration camp of ideas, where every examination of a text leaves behind a trail, a record, so that curiosity is also tinged with a sense of disquieting fear that some day someone in authority will know that one had read a particular book or essay. This death of intellectual privacy was also a dream of the Nazis. And when I hear the term Kindle, I think not of imaginations fired but of crematoria lit.

Aside from the fact that this article is laden with logical fallacies, the validity of the “technology being a slippery slope to an idea concentration camp” premise can be refuted by replacing the kindle with a laptop that has Internet access.

The laptop is a gateway to the internet that has relatively the same functionality (store and then read written information all on one screen) and level of portability as the kindle,.The Internet is the greatest example of the dissemination of information. It is government’s as well as the IPer’s nightmare, as the content is growing, unfiltered, and out of their control. The information can be saved on other devices (memory sticks, floppy disks, hard drives etc…) as well as printed.

I wouldn’t doubt this guy is an IPer trying to smokescreen his intentions. The fact that this article is linked by Kinsella arouses that idea.

[Telpeurion]

I actually dislike Kindle and perhaps Google for the same reason, and that is IP. Kindle reserves the right to remove content from your system without your knowledge or consent, and that bugs me. Of course that just means I won’t buy their product, which is extremely expensive for what you get in my opinion.

[Le_Master]

Read the comments. Alan Kaufman has to be trolling. Seriously. I mean look at this:

@Alan Kaufman

And just to note that even as we argue these points, yet another venerable San Francisco bookstiore[sic] has announced the closing of its doors: Abandoned Planet Books.

When the conditions of a society have proven inhospitable to bookstores, we are entering into a totalitarian condition.

[Laughing_Man]

@Le Master

When the conditions of a society have proven inhospitable to bookstores, we are entering into a totalitarian condition.

Yes, the buggy drivers complaining that the automobile will leave them unemployed. Woe is our world and we bath in it.

[Capital_Pumper]

@Le Master

When the conditions of a society have proven inhospitable to bookstores, we are entering into a totalitarian condition.

Argh the curse of machinery! We should do away with all technological alternatives in the name of freedom!

@Le Master

Read the comments. Alan Kaufman has to be trolling.

Your observational acumen serves you well.

@Andy Kaufman

But though we seem like weirdos and cranks to so many of you, we are the only voices in the wilderness arguing for the rescue of your human essence.

[K.C_Farmer]

Cave For Rent