Categories
Freedom Philosophy

How not to feel the horrible burden of Time

Lapham’s Quarterly (Winter 2013 edition) opens with the following mission statement by Charles Baudelaire (circa 1867). It suits the holiday mood, which for an atheist like me is every day. (Why? Read Every Day is an Atheist Holiday by Penn Jillette.) Cheers!

One should always be drunk. That’s the great thing, the only question. Not to feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and bowing you to the earth, you should be drunk without respite.

Drunk with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you please. But get drunk.

And if sometimes you should happen to awake, on the stairs of a palace, on the green grass of a ditch, in the dreary solitude of your own room, and find that your drunkenness is ebbing or has vanished, ask the wind and the wave, ask star, bird, or clock, ask everything that flies, everything that moans, everything that flows, everything that sings, everything that speaks, ask them the time; and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, and the clock will all reply, “It is Time to get drunk! If you are not to be the martyred slaves of Time, be perpetually drunk! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you please.”

 

 

Categories
Freedom

Germany outlawing Darknets

Increasingly, people are using darknets to hide their communication from prying eyes. It looks like Germany is moving to try to punish those people. Note that in Germany, someone who unwittingly passes on a copyrighted file can be held responsible. That’s not true in the U.S.

“Anonymous” File-Sharing Darknet Ruled Illegal by German Court | TorrentFreak

A court in Hamburg, Germany, has granted an injunction against a user of the anonymous and encrypted file-sharing network RetroShare . RetroShare users exchange data through encrypted transfers and the network setup ensures that the true sender of the file is always obfuscated. The court, however, has now ruled that RetroShare users who act as an exit node are liable for the encrypted traffic that’s sent by others.

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