U.S. To Drop Charges Against Sklyarov

Schmerd writes: "The New York Times has a story saying that charges will be dropped against Dmitry Sklyarov in exchange for his testimony against his employer ElcomSoft." Si adds: "It looks like Dmitri might be home for Christmas. This is not the end of the trial, but it appears Dmitri has been freed, pending certain stipulations." jij adds this breaking news article on the Associated Press wire as well. (The AP story is also at Wired). Update: 12/13 22:23 GMT by T : sam@caveman.org links to a slightly more in-depth AP report at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Comments

This is good

[billmaly]

Flame me if you must, but following Sept. 11, Dmitry's "crimes" don't seem quite as heinous as previously depicted.

Political Ideologies

[skwang]

I would mod you up if I could. Not because I agree with you but because you have realized that fundamentally names are, well names. Ironically the politician who most acuratly fits your ideology is a liberal, defined in the classical sense: a so called Classical Liberal. John Lock comes to mind. Even more ironically a "true" conservative is the same sense is someone who wants government to push morality on the populus. (More or less, I am talking about Edmond Burke for instance). In the last 200 years the definitions have changed. Liberal today means a socialist liberaism while conservatism has moves toward the classical liberal view (I'm generalizing but you get my drift).

My real point is that we as a society assign names and labels arbitrary to classify. We group everyone on the left as liberal and everyone to the right as conservative. Libritarians will tell you they don't really fit in either. Even the definitions of left and right are arbitrary.

However, there is a good reason we do this. It is easier for us as humans to assign labels. Imagine if on the election ballot instead of Republican, Democrat, etc. we had a string of descriptive adjectives like (to quote you first):

• believes government should leave the people alone, whether we're talking about guns, taxes, religion, family values, technology, etc.
• believes government should do what it can to aid middle and lower middle income families by providing socal services and welfame programs.
• believes in strong environmental policy to prevent futher damage to fragile ecology of planet.

Unfortunately by assigning names to group we deprive ourselves the valuable tool of critical thinking. Instead of analyzing exactly what a politician wants and will do we instead look towards the label assigned and imprint that label on the politician. Being able to think critically about a deicision is much harder than assigning labels, people do it all the time. I am gald to see that there are still some people who are willing to look past assigned names and, in this case, vote their conscience.