There's a book review of Walter A. McDougall's "Freedom
Just Around the Corner: A New American History, 1585-1828"
in Sunday's NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/28/books/review/28WOODLT.htmlIt explains that Americans are and always have been hustlers,
and why:
Take, for instance, the fact that "American English
is uniquely endowed with words connoting a swindle."
McDougall lists (excluding obscenities) over 200
verbs and nouns, from "bait" to "thimble-rig." But
we have more con men and hucksters than other nations
not because we have a different nature or are worse
than other peoples. It is just that "Americans have
enjoyed more opportunity to pursue their ambitions,
by fair means or foul, than any other people in
history."
So, what happens when you take this unbridled "opportunity
to pursue ambitions" and encode its principles into an
international telecommunication network designed to route
its way around congestion, censorship, legal niceties,
ethical qualms, and obstructions of any other kind?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/36699.html Harvard prof scams $600,000, then hands it to 419ers
A US scientist who collected $600,000 for SARS research
in China from students, colleagues and friends, actually
handed the money over to Nigerian 419ers, the /Boston
Herald/ reports
<
http://news.bostonherald.com/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=3118>.
Why, you get a world that's learning a more than a few new
words connoting swindle, and teaching us some, too.
The internet has given the world "more opportunity to pursue
their ambitions by fair means or foul", and they've taken the
bait.
Nigerian 419 scams, Romanian teenagers running fraudulent
auctions on EBay, phishers counterfeiting every webpage
that might reasonably request a credit card number, the
Russian mafia colonizing residential broadband connections,
the Phatbot worm with it's p2p network for distributing
DDOS commands among its peers, the netsky/bagle/mydoom
virus writing olympics delivered to your inbox fresh each
morning, the witty worm eating most of the vulnerable
firewalls in 30 minutes, and ..., and ..., and whatever
turns up next, which has probably been posted to Slashdot
while I was writing this.
So remember, it may be spam, or a scam, or just plain old
spyware, but it's also the triumph of the American way.
And never give a sucker an even break.
-- rec --
Locked
