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Ron Paul's New Primary Goal Is "Internet Freedom"
Charliemopps writes "Ron and Rand Paul are shifting the central focus of their family's libertarian crusade to a new cause: Internet Freedom. From the article: 'Kentucky senator Rand and his father Ron Paul, who has not yet formally conceded the Republican presidential nomination, will throw their weight behind a new online manifesto set to be released today by the Paul-founded Campaign for Liberty. The new push, Paul aides say, will in some ways displace what has been their movement's long-running top priority, shutting down the Federal Reserve Bank. The move is an attempt to stake a libertarian claim to a central public issue of the next decade, and to move from the esoteric terrain of high finance to the everyday world of cable modems and Facebook.' This seems like welcome news to me. Let's see if they can get more traction here than they did with the Fed."
Ron and Rand Paul are shifting the central focus of their family's libertarian crusade to a new cause: Internet Freedom.
Depends what you mean by freedom. According to this Ars Technica Article, he means the freedom of corporations to decide who gets to speak and what they get to say on the Internet.
This seems like welcome news to me.
I'd say that depends pretty heavily on whether you want citizens to be free to speak, or network providers to be free to generate revenue by restricting speech.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
He was reelected 11 times, often by overwhelming margins. So it seems his constituents disagree with you.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
The Internet allows the only real free flow of information nowadays. That's why keeping it open is so important. Without the Internet, the only information we'd get would come from CNN, Fox, BBC, ABC, CBS, etc.
The Internet is only free press. Hence the desire to keep it unfettered.
Because in an era of unchecked, unlimited federal power, an equally extreme counterpoint is not only refreshing, but necessary. Sure, it's better to take the middle ground. You only end up at the middle when both sides are equidistant from it. If you start in the middle, you'll only end up skewed to one side, just less so than if everyone was at an extreme. Which is what we've been seeing these days.
There are, of course, many different axes, and just because one is at one extreme on one axis does not imply that person is the same degree of extreme on any of the others.
I'm not a libertarian, but I do recognize that they have a place in this government.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Sounds like a great record to me. The less Congress does, the better. Not every problem is something for government to try to solve.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
"Internet Freedom" sounds like a phrase designed to make being anti-Net Neutrality sounds good.
And no wonder: Verizon and AT&T are heavy contributors to Rand Paul's campaign.
Make no mistake: there's nothing "free" about the state-granted monopolies the wireless and cable industry have. Since they're monopolies, they ought to be regulated.
And if regulation is removed, you know that the telecom industry will be hitting up Google and Netflix for cash right away.
"Internet Freedom" means freedom for Verizon, Comcast, and AT&T to charge siteowners like Google and Amazon just because they feel like it.
"Internet Freedom" means every single thing you do on the Internet is going to cost more because Verizon and Comcast need to keep posting massive increases in profits.
"Internet Freedom" means freedom for the carriers to hold you hostage. ...and if you think that the 'free-market' will solve this, remember: bandwidth is scarce and already monopolized by the big carriers. You won't see landline competition either: the big carriers also have all the local governments locked up so there won't be any competition there. And you know that the Pauls won't be taking on the local governments so that there can be competition in the landline market.
"Internet collectivists are clever," the manifesto says, accusing their foes of series of Orwellian linguistic twists. "They are masters at hijacking the language of freedom and liberty to disingenuously pushfor more centralized control. 'Openness' means government control of privately owned infrastructure.'Net neutrality' means government acting as arbiter and enforcer of what it deems tobe 'neutral'."
The irony is that If he gets his way on this issue HE will be among the most likely to be stifled.
As Bugs Bunny used to say, "What a maroon!"
-- QED
Ron Paul is now our friend... for now.
I'm not so sure. I would rather have net neutrality myself, and this is exactly the opposite of that (it even says that on the website). It's another of his "let the free market fix all the problems" approaches. Of course some paullowers - especially some of the ones here on slashdot - will insist that he is the lord, savior, and the only source of true knowledge.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
We pay attention to ron paul on slashdot because he is the source of >90% of the political groupthink here.
You can't be serious. This place is a hotbed of anti-free market sentiment, especially when it comes to protectionism. It's also nigh on impossible to have any kind of meaningful discussion about something like science funding or healthcare without wading through a morass of snarky comments about the toxic fruit of capitalism. And besides that, the comment you're replying to, which is critical of Paul, is currently at +4. So, yeah.
Uh... dude, have you actually READ the proposed "net neutrality" rules?
Hint: They have nothing to do with what you and I mean by "net neutrality." They're just a Government power-grab, and nothing else. THAT is what Dr. Paul opposes.
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth gets you modded -1 Troll
Right, in the same state that elected W and Perry for Governor.
Obama's executive record features some of the most and largest legislation ever passed by any president.
It apparently escaped your notice that it's not the prerogative of the president to pass legislation. That's OK, he doesn't seem to know it either, what with him deciding that he has the power to imprison or kill people on nothing but his own say-so.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The US elected W as their president. So I would say that Texas is good at churning out politicians that have a chance at the federal level.
Its not what it is, its something else.
"State's rights" in practice is almost always a way to hide one's immoral motives.
So every founder of this country that favored a weak central federal government was just trying to hide some "immoral motive", and wasn't thinking about how we'd just come out of a war with a central federal government system that had repressed pretty much whatever it wanted even though it was on the other side of an ocean from us?
Or is the concept that the best government is the one closest and most responsive to the citizens that have granted it the right to exist somehow an "immoral motive"?
Real internet freedom needs freedom not only from government interference, but also from corporate interference. And the latter requires strong competition based alternative forms of internet access. Since it is not economical to build up that much duplicate physical connectivity to customers, internet access services will need to be split between a shared physical infrastructure and independent core connectivity and associated access services (DHCP, RADIUS, DNS, and whatever else the chosen technology may need). This common shared infrastructure needs to be regulated by government and operated as a regulated monopoly with a mandate to provide service to all on a level and open playing field.
IMHO, Ron Paul would never agree to any part of the infrastructure to be regulated in any way. Competing companies would not overbuild on each other more than 2 or 3 because of the capital inefficiency. As a result, there would not be sufficient competition for a viable free and open internet.
Ron Paul would certainly reject a single vertical internet provider monopoly which would effectively entrench government interference. At least that much is good about his positions.
Only a hybrid solution can ever really work. See how electricity is delivered in Texas. One company (Oncor Energy Delivery) operates the infrastructure and delivers the electricity to the customers of many competing energy providers which customers choose from. Ron Paul is from Texas, so he should know about this.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
There is no Free Market, The Free Market is handled in back rooms and the winners are the ones that fix the game. If we lived in a free market, things would look like Mad Max and Aretha Franklin would rule us all!
This is the "No True Scotsman" fallacy. Paul (either of them) is a libertarian. Libertarians are really corporate anarchists, some motivated by petty local exploitations of groups vulnerable to local elites. There are no "real libertarians" as you'd probably define them, because libertarianism is a fallacy that ignores the corporate/warlord thrusts into the vacuum libertarianism creates. Every time, around the world, without exception.
Your "real libertarian" might exist in Sim City, but not in the real world. It's a fantasy. A dangerous one when it's pumped at us to deprive us of the power to create government to protect our rights. It's downright un-American.
--
make install -not war
Calling him "Dr. Paul" when he's "Representative Paul" outside his cult is groupthink.
Since when is it "groupthink" to refer to a man using the most prestigious of the titles he's earned?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
My main beef with Obama is that he claims to be everything he is not.
The biggest whopper is that he claimed to want transparent government. That apparently didn't matter when he unilaterally ratified ACTA without taking it through the senate (as is normal for any treaty) and without anybody but himself even being able to read it (granted there were leaks, we shouldn't depend upon leaks from a supposedly transparent government) He just signed our digital freedoms away without asking anybody.
Whats pathetic is how he happily parades around hollywood with the celebrities, and the fans of celebrities eat it up. Meanwhile they don't even realize that the celebrities themselves lobbied hard for him to take these freedoms away from us.
http://www.ustr.gov/webfm_send/1862
Among a bunch of other supporters:
http://www.ustr.gov/acta/
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
You'll notice they did away with that an adopted the constitution.
I don't know how you call it "doing away with" the concept of a weak federal government when they enacted a constitution based on that concept, and which explicitely said at the end "anything not taken by the feds in this constitution is left to the states and the people."
And, since "marriage" doesn't appear in the US Constitution, it's one of those things that are, by default, left to the states to deal with. Maybe it's some ICC-based issue? Selling wives across a state line would be hindered if different states had different laws about marriage?
"State's rights" in practice is almost always a way to hide one's immoral motives.
Speaking as a Californian who doesn't like the DEA harassing sick people who need marijuana, I'm going to say fuck you.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Since when is it "groupthink" to refer to a man using the most prestigious of the titles he's earned?
Which is more prestigious? A title that hundreds of people have, maybe even thousands, in a several county area, or a title that only one person in that area has (and only 435 in the entire country)? A title that comes about because a panel of five to seven people say you've accomplished the prerequisites (for Ph.D doctors, the committee), or one that takes the votes of tens of thousands of people to achieve?
A title that is completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand and the job being performed by that individual, or the title that goes with the job?
If by "failure" you mean refusing to change his beliefs no matter how many checks get waved at him? well then i guess you'd call him a failure.
Sadly having principles in such a corrupted system will get you a record no different than his, because he won't "sweeten the pot" to get his way, pile on the pork or "play ball" which is why every damned bill that gets passed has so much shit added its not even funny anymore.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Seems to me, Obama is still running the "I'm not GWB" campaign. He sure isn't running proud of his accomplishments for the last 3.5 years. Problem is, he isn't the great HOPE and CHANGE people were expecting. Just more of the same, only worse. Problem is, Romney isn't much better. But then again, I'm a (L) so ... the same old song and dance doesn't affect me much. More selling us to the highest bidder, and security for liberty exchange we always get using the same scare tactics.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
One needs to separate "marriage" as a private/religious institution from government reward of the same. The only legitimate interest, IMO, for government giving special privileges to those who marry (tax benefits, primarily) are related to preventing offspring from becoming wards of the state, something which doesn't apply to homosexual couples.
If you're going to take that line of thought, then "marriage" in that sense should be automatic between any couple who have children together, and excluded from anyone who doesn't yet have children. If marriage is to be about childrearing, then there should be (legally) no such thing as a childless marriage or a child out of wedlock. If you have a kid, you're "married"; if not, you're not. No contesting it.
Of course, there are other things involved in marriage besides the rights and responsibilities of children. Mutual rights in each others' property and lives (e.g. medical decisions in case of incapacitation). I can see a reason why people who aren't romantically or sexually involved at all might want to do something like that. Say you have two very straight guys who have no intention of ever settling down with one woman but plan to play the field their entire lives; but they are very close friends, have been housemates for years, etc, and want to buy a house together, file joint taxes on their mutual incomes and expenses, and have the other guy watch out for them if anything horrible should ever happen to them. Neither has any sexual or romantic interest in the other, and they each plan on having a different girl over every night, in their separate rooms, for the rest of their lives.
Why shouldn't they be able to make such financial and legal arrangements so resembling what we now call marriage? We don't have to call that marriage, call it a kind of incorporation, partnership, or union... a civil one, you might say. And let men and women in love with each other planning to raise a family get that exact same thing, and call it the exact same thing. And if those two guys want to make that arrangement, and are also having sex with each other, what difference does that make? What if more than two people want to live together and pool their lives and finances together -- whether or not any of them are having sex with each other -- what's wrong with letting them? And the slippery slope stops there, because children, dead people, goats, and furniture can't enter into contracts at all, and so there's no worry about anybody "marrying" any of those things if we replace marriage with a generic civil contract.
And then there's the social ceremony. This is legally meaningless, and should be the thing that gets the term "marriage". Let your favorite church, temple, mosque, coven, social club, or renaissance faire guild decide who they want to give what ceremony and recognize what title to, and let the law not give a shit about any of that. "Marriage" should be legally meaningless. Civil unions for everyone!
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Those who want gay marriage don't seem to want to settle for a legal status that doesn't include the term "marriage". Civil unions aren't good enough. Fixing bad civil union laws isn't good enough, even though they're trying to fix what they consider to be bad marriage laws, so they're trying to get laws changed either way.
If civil unions are good enough for gay couples, shouldn't they be good enough for straight couples too?
Get the government out of marriage entirely. Call it a civil union and forget about the sex of the people involved. Leave "marriage" to the churches, and give that no legal weight whatsoever.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
i absolutely understand and agree with your point!
and this is the corporate corruption of our government. and this must be stopped
what is the alternative? reduce and weaken the government?
thereby rewarding the source of the problem?
i never understood this "the patient is sick, so kill him and give the virus an award" thinking about the corporate corruption of our government
you see as the source of the problem as the government
the source of the problem is the corporations
we need to fight back and reclaim OUR government
not weaken it, and reward the crimes committed when our government is compromised
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"A free market fixes everything" is nonsense. Imagine no rules/laws/regulations. Perfectly free market. To win, I'll murder my competition, and get away with it (until they murder me). There are no laws. It's free and fair, brutal and ugly.
OK, so we make murder illegal. And kidnapping, extortion, blackmail, etc. It's no longer a free market. But I don't think anyone minds.
But already, government can be corrupted. A sheriff that aggressively investigates crimes against my competitors while ignoring my crimes gives me an advantage. And this is just serious crimes.
The point is not to get government out of the way, it's to make government enforce fairness (you are right about that). And "less government" is not really the way to do this. I don't want a perfectly free market. If you take econ101, you'll see many ways businesses could screw over consumers with asymmetric info, monopolies, fraud, etc. And I want regulations to eliminate toxins in food, unreasonably dangerous products, etc. And I don't want to drink polluted water.
Solyndra is no big deal--they expected a percentage of businesses the government backed to not succeed, and Solyndra was in that percentage. If there's corruption involved, then I'd be mad, but I haven't heard of any yet. I'm glad the US government invested in the Internet.
You're wrong in a very fundamental way. Obama most certainly is proud of his accomplishments, as are most Democrats who voted for him. Among other things, he's dramatically changed the health care landscape for the better, he's helped to radically shift society's perception of homosexuality, and militarily he's kicked ass, accomplishing the destruction of the most hated person on earth since Adolph Hitler. Am I in love with everything the guy's done? No, but on the whole, I am extremely proud to proclaim that I supported him in 2008, and I am happily doing so again this year.
You seem to be buying Republican attempts to make him out as ineffectual. I know it's pretty difficult with right wing politicians, Fox News and a whole bunch of talking heads on the radio constantly spewing out lies and misrepresentations about his record and corporations who want the unfettered ability to run roughshod over our freedoms spending hundreds of millions, possibly even billions of dollars on 24x7x365 slick well-planned marketing campaigns designed to get the poor and middle class to vote against their own self-interest. It's clearly a case of the old adage of telling a lie enough until even the person telling it believes it's true.
But make no mistake, I am not supporting him because of any kind of "I'm not GWB" campaign. The fact is that he inherited a hell of a mess caused by eight years of bad policy, and he's done an amazing job turning things around. Most Democrats knew this well enough in 2009 that they really haven't needed to constantly remind everyone except when Republicans keep trotting out things like the massive job losses that the U.S. sustained in Obama's first year when we were still operating under Bush's economy. If Republicans would stop pitching these losses as Obama's fault before he even had a chance to enact any policies, we would stop reminding everyone why those numbers were so bad.
But yeah, it's most certainly not more of the same. Ask anyone who is getting mortgage relief now. Ask any gay member of the military. Ask anyone who had their insurance policy canceled during the Bush years because they had an incurable condition. Ask the brave members of SEAL Team Six. Ask any young immigrant who is here through no decision of their own but, until a couple of weeks ago, faced the threat of deportation to a country they've never known. Anyone who thinks that the past four years have been more of the same is either lying, stupid, or grossly not paying attention.
We still have HOPE and we've seen CHANGE. Backtracking on that now would be one of the dumbest things the American electorate could ever do.
An axis with liberal and conservative ends is not 2D but 1D.
Besides, in politics, the means one is eager to use in order to further one's values or ends, is just as important as where those values fall on this liberal/conservative axis. That requires another dimension of measurement.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
24.4% of eligible voters voted for W. 24.7% of eligible voters voted for Gore. 49% of eligible voters did not bother show up at the polls. Irrespective of your political leanings, it's more true to say that a quarter of you are idiots and half of you are dangerously apathetic.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I'm pretty sure that Ron Paul would be opposed to net neutrality full stop, since it involves the government meddling in how private corporations run their business. Sure, without net neutrality we're effectively giving a few major corporations the power to control and censor an important channel of communication, but in Paulworld that's not real censorship because it's not the Government doing it.
You mean like the whole Ayn Rand fanaticism, the racist newsletters, and the anti-choice and anti-women crap?
I love how everyone fawns over Ron Paul for one issue and ignores all the other batcrap crazy stuff that he does.
The Hippocratic oath is an oath/EM., not a guideline to be bent for superstitious beliefs.
Yes, but in that case you are asking a doctor to do harm to what some feel is life. "Do no harm" is then applied with precedent (Do no harm to the mother first, then no harm to the baby). That is the both moral and ethical issue surrounding abortion so your point is weak.
Doctors certainly face this type of issue many times in their careers, not just with a pregnant mother, but with choices on who to save first. It is not a black and white oath when looked upon in that context.
If Dr. Paul turned away a mother for a routine abortion it could be viewed as his "superstitious beliefs" trumping his oath, or it could be viewed as his belief that he is doing harm to an unwitting life versus a mother who is otherwise in good health. Hmmmm, then he is following his oath. The SC legalized abortion, it did not compel doctors to perform them.
Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter
I can't tell if I get more disappointed by seeing tired parrot arguments like these or seeing tired parrot arguments like these get modded insightful. Ron Paul could provide free medical care to a black family, declare his hero to be Martin Luther King, and expose the racism in the drug war and uninformed people would still call him racist because of some implications in newsletters he didn't write.
He actually did those three things.
--- We need more Ron Paul!