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...

 

 

Last updated on: 01/28/07

 

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