[MD] So cometh MOQ, what next?

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Craig]
I suggest we start communication with extra-terrestrials with music (like 
in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind") before moving to binary.

[Arlo]
Or whale songs?

[Craig]
Nice "font".  Did you invent it?  Glad to see you didn't put me on your 
enemies list.

[Arlo]
I'm going to "abductively reason" that you ran a binary-text conversion to 
decode my message to the aliens, and then are wondering about the first 
attempt. It is written in what is often called "Leetspeak", which is a 
shortened version of "Elite Speak". The "language", first developed I 
suppose by Hackers, began as a more-or-less one-for-one conversion, 
replacing letter characters with "near" non-letter characters.

A capital "A" would be replaced by a "4". An "e" with a "3". An "l" (el) 
with a "1" (one). This gave rise to "leet" being associated with the number 
"1337". (1337 is the leet version of the word "leet", for those who might 
miss the obvious).

Eventually, "1337" began employing multi-character replacement. For 
example, an "N" could be written "|\|". Or a "k" like "!<". Some use really 
long character strings, for example "W" could be "\\//\\//". There are 
dozens of possible substitutions, constituting several "dialects" of 
written "1337".

Eventually, "1337" spawned its on "in phrases", as with "roxor your boxor", 
which means basically something profound enough to "rock your boxer 
shorts". "Deep Leet", as I call it, is nearly indecipherable outside of 
those "in the know". Which is the point. It is supposed to maintain a level 
of crypticness to keep out "infidels", such as you and I. You can learn 
more about "1337" at Wikipedia. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet)

The phrase "All your base are belong to us" is what threw me into believing 
Case would think aliens spoke "1337" 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base). This is a commonly used 
phrase to demonstrate community membership (similar to a secret knock) in 
many 1337 circles. "Klaatu barada nikto", as Case also referred, is a 
similarly used phrase, taken from The Day the Earth Stood Still 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaatu_barada_nikto).

[Case]
Can you give an example of such a malady that didn't exist for centuries 
before & why discourse rather than values, behavior, etc. is to blame.

[Arlo]
First, I forground "discourse" because this is what I believe is the 
vehicle for value-transmission. So, of course, it is the values that result 
from the discourse, that in turn create the problems. In ZMM, as I commonly 
refer, Pirsig traces the SOM-foundational maladies back to Ancient Greece, 
but its not until this century, in writing about the schism in production 
and consumption that these SOM-derived problems become critical. In other 
words, Western culture has been SOM since Aristotle, but it seems to be 
mainly in post-1900 America that we are producing and consuming "junk". 
Maybe this is because Industrial production has unleashed SOM-derived power 
more than historically before, a power derived from an SOMist view of the 
world.

At any rate, one of the maladies, as I call them, of the modern paradigm is 
the commodification of people into expendable resources. This 
dehumanization follows a mercantilistic mode of thought where everything is 
expressible, and important only, in terms of market value. If something has 
no value in the market, it has no value "period". Hence people can be 
treated as chattle, disposed of and used as if they are no better than 
"slightly intelligent beasts of burden".

Stella recently brought up the "invisible hand" phenomenon, and provides an 
analysis of why and when this hand may fail. I'd also express this as such, 
"the invisible hand is only as good as the invisible heart". If all people 
want is cheap junk from Walmart, because their language tells them that 
"price" is the ONLY measure of value (this is a slight simplification), 
then the "hand" will guide the market towards more and more junk. This was 
exactly what ZMM was about. And exactly WHY people needed a language that 
said "Quality is Real".

By the way, I only classify people as "enemies" so that I can legally 
waterboard them later if I get the chance. ;-)