What is Spam?
[This document is a work in progress]
What is spam?
Spam is theft.
Any questions?
Combine the very worst
aspects of your least-favorite door-to-door religious cult, the
most obnoxious, rude, tacky, crooked “MLM” sham you’ve
ever seen, a convention of the most “aromatic” (and
demented) panhandlers on Earth, and an endless parade of the
most twisted “Mr. Peeper” type deviates imaginable – the
kind of sick vermin that mothers shield their children’s eyes
from as they quicken their pace, urging their children to avert
their gaze as they hurry by – and what would you have?
You’d have an almost
close approximation of email “spam” – and email spammers.
Toss in the Mother of All
Backed-Up Sewers, and you’ll have an even more “almost”
accurate picture.
"You are receiving this message
because you are over 18 and have
opted-in for third party mailings
regarding..."
Don’t
you just love being lied to?
Why do
spammers lie? There are two reasons. First, they can’t
help it. It’s their nature. It’s what they do.
They’re subhuman worms; they’re liars. But
there’s another reason these foul vermin lie about
us having “opted-in” to garbage we’d never
request in a million lifetimes.
They want
us to complain! Every complaint, no matter how
irate, benefits the vermin, because it confirms that
they’ve hit a valid email address.
The more
obnoxious they can make the message, the more likely
you are to complain, and object that no, you most
certainly did not “opt-in” to have these
feces pumped into your computer. And as soon as you
dash off that “correction”, blam! - they
gotcha! Your address has now been verified as a working
address, and it will be “marketed” to even more
foul spambags, on CDs full of “confirmed email
addresses.” |
But, unless you factor in the
common thief, you’ll never reach a truly accurate
metaphor for the common spammer.
This foul, despicable, annoying
form of theft costs us upwards of ten billion dollars per
year.
That’s an awful lot of real
money for these scumbags’ claim to “free” speech, eh?
Now, I don’t claim to be a
Constitutional scholar. But I challenge anyone to show me any
part of the Bill of Rights that gives a thief a “right” to
steal my time, money, and resources.
Go ahead.
I dare you.
Spam is theft, plain and simple.
Any other definition borders on the artful, and the definer’s
motivation becomes instantly suspect, because common sense tells
us to give the ol’ hairy eyeball to anyone who calls theft
anything but “theft.”
Legislation...
There is so much proposed
legislation lately, that I’d say, “what a joke,” except
that jokes are supposed to be funny, and this stuff,
which I’ll charitably characterize as “crap,” is at best
cynical, and at worst, fuel tossed on the already raging fire.
I’ve seen no recent
legislation proposed that’s anything other than warmed-over
manure – the old “opt-out” lie, albeit with a new
twist. The “new twist” is a “gotcha” in the form
of a hook that will ensure that even if you break down and agree
to “opt-out”, you’ll be opting-out of essentially all
“commercial email.” That means that you won’t be able to
engage in any e-commerce.
These proposed laws refuse
to differentiate between spam and “commercial email”.
By failing to distinguish between virtual feces and food – by
requiring valid commercial email to adhere to the same
provisions that (their newly-legitimized) spam must obey, it
becomes impossible to filter out the garbage without also
filtering out the real commercial email – the stuff you
asked to receive; the stuff you need and want
to receive.
There is a word for that sort of
despicable tactic. I’ll leave it to your imagination.
Since very few people are
willing to eliminate something that is in reality a large part
of their Internet experience, merely to sign up for a type of
putative “protection” that most reasonable folks acknowledge
to be well nigh worthless in terms of stopping the
unwanted spewage, the mainsleaze spammers-in-waiting can be
quite confident that few if any will ever sign up for the
“service” in the first place.
This type of legislation – the
type that serves only to legitimize spam – is based on a
handful of lies. The first lie is implied: “spam is not theft;
it’s a type of ‘marketing’ that needs to be done ‘responsibly.’”
The next lie is that there is a
Constitutional “right” to steal – that there is a “right”
to send something tantamount to unwanted advertising received
via “postage-due” mail, or collect telemarketing
calls. And, this alleged “right” includes the “right” to
insist that the recipient – and all intermediaries – bear
these costs, whether they want to, or not, because to do
otherwise would be to “deny” these “marketers” their “right”
to “free speech.”
Yes, it’s an affront to common
sense (and to a whole lot more!), and, it would never fly if
applied in any other venue. But, there is big money
behind this “right to spam” movement, and it seems like it’s
buying some pretty big government in its efforts to
legalize its “right” to steal your time, money, and
resources.
The next lie is a biggie.
It’s the lie that says that any law will make it safe
to “opt-out” of unsolicited spewage. Leaving aside for the
moment the sheer math (after all, how many tens of thousands of
times a day do you want to “opt-out” of spewage from
“responsible” spammers?), there’s the not-so-slight
problem that will never change. Anyone who’s been on
the Internet for more than ten minutes realizes that you never
reply to a spammer, because in the vast majority of
cases, the only thing you accomplish is to verify that
you’ve got a working email address!
Promise
them anything
Yet, these disingenuous “public
servants” (koff koff) would have us believe that somehow,
we’ll be able to send an endless stream of ‘remove request’
emails to the “good” spammers (koff koff) – the ones that’ll
honor the requests – and, not be suckered into sending
replies to the “bad” ones who will only use the requests as
confirmation to add even more spewage to our inboxes.
Any fool can realize that this is
a lie. A big lie.
And likewise, it doesn’t take a
rocket scientist to realize that if one of these wonder-laws
passes – an “opt-out” law that dictates that we need to
communicate a “remove request” to a spammer to make him stop
spewing in our faces – no one is going to do it,
because of the impossibility of telling which of the thousands
of spammers are “good” and which are “bad.”
Is Congress going to issue us “spam
dowser joysticks” that we can wave over our inboxes, that’ll
gently quiver if it’s OK to reply with a remove-request to a
“good” spam, and shake like a spammer-on-crack when we wave
it over a spam to which we dare not reply?
Let’s talk sense, shall we?
It turns out that these proposed
laws are jokes after all! They’re sick
jokes – the kind of joke that only a cosmically cynical
slime-bag, fat at the public trough, would ever try to
foist on his subjects as an offer to lighten their load. What
kind of lowlife would impose such a lie on his victims? The kind
of lie that says, “this will help cut down on your spamload,”
when in reality, it will only help to dramatically increase the
load?
What kind of lowlife would do
that?
The kind of lowlifes that we keep
electing to office, naturally – and, the kind of compliant
(yet unaccountable) regulators that these elected officials
continue to appoint to positions of power.
What
if...
If legislators approached other
crimes the way they propose to deal with spam...
-
...they’d promise “protection’
from date-rape by allowing women to “opt-out” of meeting
people!
-
...they’d tackle the
problem of car theft by letting people put, “Please Do Not
Steal Me Again,” signs on their cars – after they’d
been stolen!
-
...they’d deal with
home-invasions by passing a law ordering burglars to leave after
breaking in – if the homeowner politely requested
that they leave – and, the law would also require
them to avoid breaking into the same house again (for
a period of time, only!) – if the homeowners
politely requested they spare them from future break-ins, if
the homeowners used the proper forms and wording.
-
...they’d “protect” us
from fraud by only allowing “reputable” companies
to lie, cheat, and steal when we do business with them –
and then offering us the “option” of not doing any
further business with them after they had their one free
shot at us.
-
...they’d address trespass
of posted real estate by allowing landowners to
prohibit anyone from visiting them – except for politicians,
and “approved’ trespassers (the ones who’ve expressed
a willingness to only commit “responsible, ethical”
trespass) – who would then have the “right” to enter regardless
of the wishes of the property owners!
Are you starting to see the
problem here?
Ask yourself a rhetorical
question: Why can’t the politicians see what’s so obvious to
the rest of us? How can they be so obtuse? How can
they keep coming up with such stupid and ineffective
– and downright bad – legislation? How can they keep
coming up with these spam-legitimization proposals? Why
can’t they just get it, and come up with a simple
law to deal with an obvious problem?
How can they be that
stupid?
They can’t. No one is that
stupid!
So, follow the money.
To be continued...
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