# Smapti is Pitted **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [May 21, 2014, 8:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907 "2014-05-21T08:14:40Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![Steve\_MB](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/steve_mb/32/5339_2.png) [@Steve\_MB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steve_MB)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2014, 11:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907/81 "2014-05-21T23:36:22Z")
> [@Kobal2](#): > > Oh, no no no. You see, your opinion is trivial and absurd at its heart. And \*that \*is why everybody rejects it. Get the nuance ? As noted on [the earlier thread](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=700029), Smapti’s opinion is becoming irrelevant as well as trivial and absurd. New developments are rendering it obsolete: 1. [Communications channels](http://rt.com/news/mega-secure-email-lavabit-359/) designed so that the system manager simply does not have the ability to betray customer privacy: > [@](#): > > According to the company’s founder Dotcom, Mega doesn’t hold decryption keys to customer accounts and “never will”, thus making it impossible for it to read the emails. This also means that Mega by design cannot be forced to rat on its users by intelligence agencies. 1. [The use of passive “dead-man switch” communication](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/sep/09/nsa-sabotage-dead-mans-switch) rather than active notification, thus rendering moot any legal prohibition on the latter – a legal basis for a gag order does not provide a legal basis for compelling a citizen to actively utter a flasehood: > [@](#): > > This gave me an idea for a more general service: a dead man’s switch to help fight back in the war on security. This service would allow you to register a URL by requesting a message from it, appending your own public key to it and posting it to that URL. > > Once you’re registered, you tell the dead man’s switch how often you plan on notifying it that you have not received a secret order, expressed in hours. Thereafter, the service sits there, quietly sending a random number to you at your specified interval, which you sign and send back as a “No secret orders yet” message. If you miss an update, it publishes that fact to an RSS feed. ---
**Author:** ![kaylasdad99](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kaylasdad99/32/3398_2.png) [@kaylasdad99](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kaylasdad99)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2014, 11:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907/82 "2014-05-21T23:55:19Z")
> [@Smapti](#): > > You trivialize my opinion in order to reject it. I don’t care at all about my fluids or my essences. I care about my organs being harvested by opportunistic doctors working in for-profit enterprises with less than pure motivations. You know that’s about on the same level of sanity as the “handshakes is rape” assertion that can be found elsewhere in this message board, right? ---
**Author:** ![Smapti](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/smapti/32/17938_2.png) [@Smapti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smapti)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2014, 12:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907/83 "2014-05-22T00:31:23Z")
> [@Miller](#): > > So, uh… why is it, exactly, that a few stories of unethical doctors is enough for you vehemently oppose opt-in organ donation, but the entire history of human governments using their security apparatus to oppress their own citizenry isn’t enough to get you to bat an eye at the NSA’s activities? I know of no history of the NSA using its security apparatus to oppress the citizenry. ---
**Author:** ![Smapti](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/smapti/32/17938_2.png) [@Smapti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smapti)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2014, 12:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907/84 "2014-05-22T00:32:25Z")
> [@Kobal2](#): > > Look, if you can’t grok the difference between exploded brown kids and **Smapti** ’s precious gallbladder, why one’s A-OK and the other untouchable, you just won’t ever get it, man. Deal with it. When did I ever say I was pro-exploded brown kids? ---
**Author:** ![Smapti](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/smapti/32/17938_2.png) [@Smapti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smapti)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2014, 12:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907/85 "2014-05-22T00:35:24Z")
> [@Steve\_MB](#): > > As noted on [the earlier thread](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=700029), Smapti’s opinion is becoming irrelevant as well as trivial and absurd. New developments are rendering it obsolete: > > 1. [Communications channels](http://rt.com/news/mega-secure-email-lavabit-359/) designed so that the system manager simply does not have the ability to betray customer privacy: > 2. [The use of passive “dead-man switch” communication](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/sep/09/nsa-sabotage-dead-mans-switch) rather than active notification, thus rendering moot any legal prohibition on the latter – a legal basis for a gag order does not provide a legal basis for compelling a citizen to actively utter a flasehood: The first ought to be illegal and probably will be made so, and the second is by its own admission fomenting treason. ---
**Author:** ![Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e8c25b/32.png) [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Really_Not_All_That_Bright)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2014, 12:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907/86 "2014-05-22T00:38:11Z")
> [@Smapti](#): > > I know of no history of the NSA using its security apparatus to oppress the citizenry. Results of secret surveillance programs are secret; film at 11. ---
**Author:** ![OldOlds](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/a3d4f5/32.png) [@OldOlds](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/OldOlds)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2014, 12:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907/87 "2014-05-22T00:59:29Z")
> [@Grumman](#): > > The rules of the pit forbid me from truly expressing my hatred for this sniveling, spineless piece of shit, so I shall attempt to work around that. > > Smapti has never met a war crime he didn’t like. He is a coward who would destroy everything America should be to protect himself from a handful of incompetent cave-dwellers. He believes that all blame for the misdeeds of his beloved CIA and NSA should lie with those who refuse to whitewash their crimes, and not with the individuals who spend their days shitting on the Constitution. He revels in his ignorance, always bleating about how much better things would be if the world just let his jack-booted puppeteers do our thinking for us. > > In short, he is a poor effigy of a human being, an invertebrate that somehow learned to mash a keyboard to create a crude semblance of human conversation, without once engaging in that practice he so despises: thought. While I appreciate your pitting, and agree wholeheartedly on the basis of what’s been posted, I have to assume that he’s playing it up for reaction. I have simply never met anyone so unabashedly fascist and proud. And I have known some real one-percenters in that regard. I call Jonathan Swift on this guy. ---
**Author:** ![Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e8c25b/32.png) [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Really_Not_All_That_Bright)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2014, 1:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907/88 "2014-05-22T01:00:33Z")
… he wants the NSA to eat us? ---
**Author:** ![Crazyhorse](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/crazyhorse/32/31_2.png) [@Crazyhorse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Crazyhorse)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2014, 1:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907/89 "2014-05-22T01:30:15Z")
> [@Jackmannii](#): > > The CIA’s involvement didn’t help matters. But I think that its role in generating suspicion about vaccination drives and avoidance of immunization has been overstated. > > There’s plenty of idiotic fear, extreme religious sentiment and political gaming going on over rejection of vaccination in Islamic countries that has [nothing to do with the CIA](http://www.news-herald.com/general-news/20120625/editorial-radical-islam-nixes-big-polio-vaccination-effort). That story is two years old. Go back and read it and imagine the same players today, who can now say “Aha! We told you so! These doctors were CIA agents all along, exactly as we suspected.” While we hopefully weren’t injecting them with HIV, we have still literally proven that their ‘paranoid, dangerous, and ridiculous’ justifications for refusing to allow vaccination programs were true and well founded. This has a bigger effect than I think you are giving it credit for. Alongside the lunatic fringe anti-vaxxers who need no factual basis to fear that vaccines are dangerous and maybe part of some grand conspiracy, there are many more who have no doubt vaccination is safe and effective in principle, but have (ir)rational(?) fear that if the government or big corporations are involved, anything no matter how good will get screwed up somehow and wind up not being in their best interest. Besides almost anyone in Pakistan or neighboring regions now wondering what else isn’t true about what the world has been telling them about vaccination, you can bet this will be seized by the most vocal and influential of the North American branch of the lunatic fringe. But now when they profess that “It’s all part of some big gubbmint conspiracy” they have authentic evidence giving plausibility to that suspicion. ---
**Author:** ![andros](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/e480ec/32.png) [@andros](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/andros)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2014, 1:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907/90 "2014-05-22T01:36:21Z")
> [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](#): > > … he wants the NSA to eat us? Nah, just your kids. ---
**Author:** ![Steve\_MB](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/steve_mb/32/5339_2.png) [@Steve\_MB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steve_MB)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2014, 1:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907/91 "2014-05-22T01:47:13Z")
> [@Smapti](#): > > The first ought to be illegal and probably will be made so, and the second is by its own admission fomenting treason. Ignorance of law, technology, and basic logic packed into one sentence. How very efficient of you. The bottom line remains; your position is not merely malignant and foolish, it is profoundly irrelevant. At this point, all that remains is to point and laugh, like we do at the professional homophobes’ screeches as another court defeat washes over them like the washbucket washed over the Wicked Witch of the West. > [@Smapti](#): > > I know of no history of the NSA using its security apparatus to oppress the citizenry. Well, see, that’s why I told you to educate yourself. I even gave you the relevant Google search term. ---
**Author:** ![Steve\_MB](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/steve_mb/32/5339_2.png) [@Steve\_MB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steve_MB)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2014, 1:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907/92 "2014-05-22T01:48:49Z")
> [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](#): > > … he wants the NSA to eat us? No, no, no; he wants the NSA to steal your organs (as long as they leave _his_ alone). ---
**Author:** ![Smapti](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/smapti/32/17938_2.png) [@Smapti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smapti)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2014, 2:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907/93 "2014-05-22T02:34:20Z")
> [@Steve\_MB](#): > > No, no, no; he wants the NSA to steal your organs (as long as they leave _his_ alone). No, I want the NSA to protect us from people who want to kill us. If there’s a non-zero chance that monitoring emails will contribute to that, then I have no opposition to it. I’m not doing anything that would interest the NSA, and there’s nothing I do that it would worry me for them to know about. What are you doing that you need to keep secret? ---
**Author:** ![Smapti](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/smapti/32/17938_2.png) [@Smapti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smapti)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2014, 2:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907/94 "2014-05-22T02:41:22Z")
> [@Steve\_MB](#): > > Well, see, that’s why I told you to educate yourself. I even gave you the relevant Google search term. So a couple of NSA employees, acting under their own accord and WITHOUT official sanction, authorization, or approval, misused the security apparatus in an unlawful manner, and the NSA caught and disciplined them ITSELF and told the public on its own without anyone “blowing the whistle” on them. And THAT’S your argument that the entire organization is hopelessly corrupt and all domestic intelligence is evil? That would be like me calling organ harvesting an argument for the abolition of medicine. ---
**Author:** ![Crazyhorse](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/crazyhorse/32/31_2.png) [@Crazyhorse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Crazyhorse)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2014, 2:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907/95 "2014-05-22T02:55:51Z")
> [@Smapti](#): > > No, I want the NSA to protect us from people who want to kill us. If there’s a non-zero chance that monitoring emails will contribute to that, then I have no opposition to it. There is a non-zero chance that if you give me a million dollars I’ll wind up traveling to some exotic local and flagging down a taxi that winds up running over a terrorist who would have killed you. So pay up lionheart. ---
**Author:** ![JRDelirious](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jrdelirious/32/9531_2.png) [@JRDelirious](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JRDelirious)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2014, 2:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907/96 "2014-05-22T02:59:37Z")
> [@](#): > > Who said anything about wealth? I love life more than I love liberty. I’d rather be alive and “licking the hands that feed me” than be dead and… nothing else, because then I wouldn’t exist anymore. > […] > I choose not to be an organ donor because I am concerned that, in an emergency situation, medical officials might not prioritize saving my life if I had consented in advance to having my organs harvested. Ah… such pure unencumbered unashamed cowardice. “Save ME, and who cares about anything else”. Refreshing in a world of pseudo-badass rebels and playing-to-the-crowd faux sacrifice. ---
**Author:** ![andros](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/e480ec/32.png) [@andros](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/andros)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2014, 3:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907/97 "2014-05-22T03:12:35Z")
> [@Smapti](#): > > What are you doing that you need to keep secret? Fucking chickens, thank you very much. ---
**Author:** ![Smapti](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/smapti/32/17938_2.png) [@Smapti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smapti)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2014, 4:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907/98 "2014-05-22T04:53:02Z")
> [@JRDelirious](#): > > Ah… such pure unencumbered unashamed cowardice. “Save ME, and who cares about anything else”. Refreshing in a world of pseudo-badass rebels and playing-to-the-crowd faux sacrifice. I care about others. I just care about my own survival more, because, as me, I have a vested interest in my remaining alive. ---
**Author:** ![Crazyhorse](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/crazyhorse/32/31_2.png) [@Crazyhorse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Crazyhorse)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2014, 5:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907/99 "2014-05-22T05:26:16Z")
> [@Smapti](#): > > I care about others. I just care about my own survival more, because, as me, I have a vested interest in my remaining alive. Perfectly understandable point of view, and one shared by almost every 2 year old in the world. But as a selfish and cowardly individual you must still have some flaw in your ability to understand probability. Almost all these activities you support are examples of abhorrent behavior on the part of the US in the ‘War on Terror™’ that actually serve to inspire legions of new terrorists while eliminating only a few existing ones. At the same time they reduce support for us with the rest of the world community. Your chances of finding someone who hates America enough to kill you just for being an American are much greater today than they were on Sept. 12 2001. And that is a direct result of all these tactics you support. You still stand to lose in a way that is meaningful to you even if you otherwise can rationalize the thought of innocent civilians being burned alive by drone fire or legions of people refusing vaccine programs in their towns as simply being collateral damage. You are on the idiot side of the argument even when viewing the situation purely as a selfish douchebag. ---
**Author:** ![YogSothoth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/8edcca/32.png) [@YogSothoth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/YogSothoth)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2014, 5:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907/100 "2014-05-22T05:29:33Z")
> [@Smapti](#): > > That was never an option. The CIA wasn’t going to spend its money on vaccination programs with no intelligence benefit. The possibilities were “vaccinate the people and use the program to gather DNA” or “don’t vaccinate anyone”. Maybe it should be an option [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907.md?page=4) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907.md?page=6)