I mean, I understand the driving force behind a demographic's distrust of Google. They're a giant corporate information broker that lures people to simply hand over their data by providing free services. In certain distopian future sci-fi novels, that would be a nifty plot.
But I can literally taste the tin foil on this guy's head. The little nutter gave me synesthesia. I think Its mostly his tone of voice. The way he's simply incredulous about the possibilities, with nothing to show for it.
1.) I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist by disposition, but...
Hey, I think I spotted where he became a conspiracy nutcase.
Are these posts here to show us how evil Google has become to to show us how nutty the "google is evil" crowd has become? Because despite the title, I'm leaning with the latter.
Uh, yeah, but my last two examples ARE examples of damaged civil rights.
Freedom of movement has been damaged due to TSA's porno scanners and body searches. I can still generally go anywhere I want, so it's not like I've lost the right, but they're sure making it uncomfortable.
Due process has been damaged when the system can mistakenly take over 85,000 sites. I mean, I know a judge signed off on it, and that's the due process here, but apparently either the judge or the person writing the warrant didn't stop to think of the repercussions. Why isn't there more to the process? Something that would make sure the door they're busting down isn't to the public water utility? Because "why won't you think of the children?", that's why.
So yeah, civil rights are important. But realize that these ARE civil rights. That civil rights are MADE OF these sort of things.
I dunno if smoking weed can really be considered a civil right though.
For all you hip Libyan geeks out there (and I think you qualify if you're reading slashdot comments), listen up:
It's time to diversify. Facebook is quick and easy to set up groups and organize. Woo. But as the article points out, it's also an easy target. But the Internet is bigger then that. Make your own page, conscript a forum somewhere, run a chat server, or a BBS for that matter. Tell people about it. Link to it. Replicate posts from one system to another. Use the full force of the Internet. There's no reason to stay within the walled garden of facebook, and there are plenty of reasons to spread out.
And if the Libyan government turns their ire to the Internet on the whole? A lot more people will rise up with you. It's a pretty good rule of thumb that when a government tries to shut down the Internet, it's time to shut down the Government.
There was no downside to the mass hysteria on The Wars on Things
Buuwha!? I'm sorry, have you been under a rock or something?
The mass hysteria over the war on drugs made the USA have one of the highest incarcerations per captia in the world.
The mass hysteria over the war on childporn has given oppressive assholes the shoehorn to wantonly take over 85,000 websites. By accident.
The mass hysteria over the war on terror has made flying a sexually abusive experience, and let Bush invade two nations, and arguably lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths.
But oh hey, CORPUSA didn't lose their profit margins, so it must not be all that bad.
Well aren't you a negative Nancy. If it's helps any, most other places are just as messed up as we are.
We ARE rich, but that doesn't make us the bad guys.
We subsidize corn in a very much protectionist way to keep our farms from going the way of manufacturing. Feeding ourselves is one of those REALLY important and fundamental things.
We embargo N. Korea because of hold-over political crap from the Red Scare and the war. They haven't exactly wanted to play nice with us either. So be it.
China's manufacturing is chewing up rural peasants and turning them into profit. But let me make this exceedingly clear: We are not the world police. It's a crappy job and no one has to do it. China is a sovereign nation and if the people don't want to rise up and change things, then we have no business preaching to them.
And really, have you seen the typical Hollywood movie of late? Ugh. Maybe we are the bad guys.
There is a debate currently underway in some circles about whether the internet is a force for liberation or repression. But I think that debate is largely beside the point. Egypt isn’t inspiring people because they communicated using Twitter. It is inspiring because people came together and persisted in demanding a better future.
Just who the hell in what circles are even debating that the internet isn't a force for liberation, freedom, information, knowledge, equality, and god-damned apple pie?
No really, I want a list of names and groups so I know who to exile when I'm king for a day. And really, what are their arguments, cause I'm having a hard time conceptualizing how anyone would use the internet for repression. I mean, usually the repression is in terms of denying people access to the Internet.
Now, when I told my wife this quote, she immediately said that Clinton must still be butthurt over wikileaks, which was funny. So I want to make one thing explicitly clear. Wikileaks helps, aids, and benefits Americans. I'm not really talking about South Americans, Canadians, or Latin Americans, although they benefit too. No, I'm talking about "We The People" of the United States of America. We function on facts and truths. I'm not yet so cynical that I think that everyone's an idiot and that democracy is a bad thing. WE need to know this stuff so WE can fix it as the ultimate controllers of this whole shindig. And it is broken. In places. I like the USA, I'm a fan. But I like it because we're the good guys. If there are things that make us look like the bad guys, then that needs to be fixed. And the people in charge of those things need to be given the boot.
Most of the time we don't even know when things are broken until it's way too late. People send information to wikileaks out of a moral obligation.
Well at least she didn't send one of them Internets to her intern the other day.
But really, she just comes from a different age. All of them do. Think about it, the Internet really only became widespread in the 90's. Clinton was in her 40's. She's certainly no geek. So it's like describing how the Internet work to my mother. She tries, god bless her, and minding the gap I think she does pretty well. But she's made an effort to understand what it is I do for a living. Now look at congress, the average age is 67 (the mean would be a better guage, but work with me here). They have all grown up, become established, and done the majority of their work without the Internet. Different fields work at different speed. Evolution is just creeping along, and politics only slightly faster. The Internet is still new to them. And the constant stream of new things to come out of the Internet is probably way WAY too much for them to absorb. Even though it's their job. Can we really blame them?
Yes. Yes we damn well can. Seriously, when are we going to get the geeky politician into power?
Agreed, but when he said "think wikileaks" he could have meant the material on wikileaks. Although, that's kinda silly as the majority of wikileaks is stuff that's leaked by those entrusted with said information leaking it to the public. It's kinda build into the name.
Yeah, I'm not really diggin the list.
#1 "Criminal" is any law-breaker, which would be everyone on the list, except maybe "Cyber Warriors". Also maybe Hackticists, depending on if you consider "crime" to mean anything "socially detrimental".
#1a Maybe you meant for-profit criminals, which would still include Spam, Adware, and Corporate Spies.
#2 Spamming and adware spreading are two different activities. They may be of the similar low-hanging-fruit bulk-rate sort, but I don't know if they overlap.
#3 APT, wow what a horrible name. But after a wiki explanation, I think it includes anyone whose dayjob/hobby is to screw over a specific target. That would include subsets of Corporate Spies, Hacktivists, and maybe cyber warriors.
#6 What the hell is a "cyber warrior"? I think they were in Shadowrun.
#7 Rogue hackers is kind of a catch-all, but it includes subsets or splinter-groups of all the other types.
And yeah, missing from the list is:
#8 National Entities, with two flavors: "Yours" and "Foreign".
Well, go shout it out.
You don't have to appear on major media channels to be heard. Sent letters to those people in the media. Print off pamphlets and post them around. Strike up conversations with with people who talk about it. Send letters to your government. Make a website. Make a youtube video.
It's really easy to be heard now a days.
What I'm finding is that it's hard to give enough of a damn to put the effort into it.
Well duh, early Christianity WAS a cult. One charismatic leader with 12 in his inner circle and who knows how many followers. He preached radical ideas contrary to the establishment. It eventually turned into an established religion, mostly thanks to Paul, but it certainly had more humble origins.
Likewise, Ron Hubbard founded Scientology, somehow got some people to believe in it and him, and had ideas contrary to established psychiatry.
The difference being that the established views weren't all that good in Jesus's day, and the radical ideas like "love thy neighbor" and "forgive and forget" resounded with people and arguably lead to a better living conditions. (Or arguably lead to the fall of Rome and the end of Pax Romana). Meanwhile in 20th century, while the field wasn't exactly "hard", psychiatry was trying to be build off of science, and Hubbards dianetics was full of quakery.
I see what you're saying. Most people, *cough* the media *cough* use the term "cult" when they want to denounce something. But you can't simply wave it away as hate speech because there are real substantial reason why it's being called a cult.
I believe someone mentioned something like "let there be light" and it's been going from there.
The criteria is pretty much a popularity contest that never ends.
Or are you one of those types that still thinks the Amiga is going to have a comeback any year now?
BWAahahahahaha, OH WOW!
If you don't see the problem with that, let me point it out for you.
"... Exxon and Mobile, who would be trusted..."
Ah, but no, you missed an important step:
They would take control,
give the supply source to Exxon and Mobile, subsidise them to
sell it to US citizens at a lower rate then they could sell it to Europe.
We'd give it to them, then pay them to sell it right back to us. Brilliant.
And on the flip side, if they say that they only have 5 million barrels left, those 5 million barrels will be LUDICROUSLY expensive.
After which, they can magically pull out ANOTHER 5 million barrels from nowhere, and sell that at ludicrous prices as well.
How exactly would that work?
The USA government would invade, take control of the oil sources, and open up their own gas stations across the nation?
Or would they take control, give the supply source to Exxon and Mobile, who would be trusted to sell it to US citizens at a lower rate then they could sell it to Europe?
Or would they take control, sell the oil on the free market, and use the cash to subsidies the price at the pump? I think at that point, people would fill up their cars, ship them to Europe, and sell the gas out of them.
Crapware cannot have an artificially low pricepoint. It's pricepoint is low BECAUSE it's crap. These aren't commodities or dry goods. It's art. Their value is ENTIRELY dependent on how much people like it. If it is priced at zero, that may still be too high for a lot of people. Indeed, artificially "priced" crapware wanders into the realm of pre-installed bloatware.
If you think, for a moment, that Angry Birds or Snood is competition for Fallout or Halo, then you're entirely down the wrong path. Now, you may indeed have some overlap where people play both Halo and Snood, very similarly to how college students will buy both textbooks and comic books. The two don't compete with each other except on a very high level where everything from food, sex, dental hygiene, and/or fencing compete for the time slice of our lives. If that's the competition here, then you also need to rant about church, school, loved ones, and work all undercutting the poor little game developers.
And power to the aggregators; Newgrounds, Kongregate, and yeah even Armor Games help lower the bar to game/movie development. That makes for a WHOLE LOT of really shitty clones, but the cream rises to the top and society benefits. As for Apple and Steam? Meh, slightly different market, but same mechanic. To hell with your Walmart analogy, people NEED shirts on their back, they WANT to play games. Again, these aren't commodies, basic needs, or dry goods. If Newgrounds undercuts Steam and Blizzard, no one really cares. Poor little mom&pop Blizzard isn't going to way of the dinosaur, because their bottom line isn't affected by yet another crappy snake game.
Of course we don't need every detail of daily military action to be broadcast on the media. That's a ludicrous caricature, and is not what's being debated here. Wikileaks has certainly tried to have responsible reactions and we've certainly had input from the public and everything and anything. With their philosophy of dumping everything except the reactions rather then simply publishing the "juicy bits", they've probably missed a few sensitive portions. I've only seen one so far. And Iranian fencer. But they dump everything in an effort to be impartial. Remember when they posted that "collateral murder" video? Because they edited it for time, everyone claimed that they were blatantly anti-American. So there's a bit of a balance there. With the Internet age and everyone's mother being able to parse through all of it, I prefer the large dump which can be sifted through by the aggregates.
So I don't believe that wikileaks has completely failed on any of these counts, but could probably do more to remain impartial. I mean, Julian is kind of an ass.
But really, what could wikileaks do to make the public comment more on their actions?
You're right about the more moderate channels of protest being a more civil route of action. But I'm not so sure that it would have had as much of an impact as, well, throwing the digital rock through their front window. I've no doubt that Mastercard receives hundreds of thousands of email. Most of it spam. Which is completely ignored. A small public outcry from some punks on the internet would probably have about as much impact.
I agree about the civil action thing. I don't think it's time. But that time will come if and when I lose confidence in the ability of legal civil action to affect the world around me. Other people have differing levels of confidence. Some will never believe in the system, and society needs to deal with them. Others will never doubt the system, they too need to be dealt with.
You know what? I think I'm going to go write a round of flamemail to Mastercard and Amazon tonight. And maybe that dumbass in congress that wants drones to fire missiles into London.
I like the USA. I'm a fan. It's done some good things in the past and it's a pretty good model for how to run things. On the whole, people here are more free and more prosperous then people elsewhere. But I like the USA because we're the good guys. When it was us vs. the NAZIs, it was pretty obvious who was the bad guys. I mean, they invaded countries and were conquerors. And while we really screwed over the local Japanese, the Japanese empire was really brutal. When it was us vs. the Soviets, it was more or less apparent that we were the good guys. I mean, we really REALLY screwed over most of Latin America, and the whole "proxy war" thing was a series of quagmired that brought a lot of people down, but they kept their people in line with tanks, and had a culture of political murder. A bunch of people starved in the Urals, and people lived in fear. Well, ok, we lived in fear too, but it wasn't fear of our government.
And then we were kinda the top dogs for a little while. And we were supposed to be the good guys. We donated money, encouraged democracy, and were trying to do good. Our corporations kinda screwed over some people, but nothing as bad as interim camps.
But then we started invading nations. And breaking laws. And being international bullies. And lying about it. And then not even bothering to lie about it.
I like the USA because we're the good guys. But if we're doing things that paint us as the bad guy, then we need to stop doing that, and fix it. The first step to doing that is to know about it. And wikileaks certainly helped the USA there. There is the virtue.
As for throwing rocks, some people don't have any other resource. And wikileaks isn't exactly hurting for cash. Disobedience isn't a great option, but sometimes it's the best (although this LOIC thing was retarded). Or do you think that the colonies never should have revolted? Or that Tunisians and Egyptians should have just sat down and been quiet?
Slashdot Mirror
But I can literally taste the tin foil on this guy's head. The little nutter gave me synesthesia. I think Its mostly his tone of voice. The way he's simply incredulous about the possibilities, with nothing to show for it.
1.) I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist by disposition, but...
Hey, I think I spotted where he became a conspiracy nutcase.
Are these posts here to show us how evil Google has become to to show us how nutty the "google is evil" crowd has become? Because despite the title, I'm leaning with the latter.
Wow, sounds like your projector room needs chairs.
Uh, yeah, but my last two examples ARE examples of damaged civil rights.
Freedom of movement has been damaged due to TSA's porno scanners and body searches. I can still generally go anywhere I want, so it's not like I've lost the right, but they're sure making it uncomfortable.
Due process has been damaged when the system can mistakenly take over 85,000 sites. I mean, I know a judge signed off on it, and that's the due process here, but apparently either the judge or the person writing the warrant didn't stop to think of the repercussions. Why isn't there more to the process? Something that would make sure the door they're busting down isn't to the public water utility? Because "why won't you think of the children?", that's why.
So yeah, civil rights are important. But realize that these ARE civil rights. That civil rights are MADE OF these sort of things.
I dunno if smoking weed can really be considered a civil right though.
For all you hip Libyan geeks out there (and I think you qualify if you're reading slashdot comments), listen up:
It's time to diversify. Facebook is quick and easy to set up groups and organize. Woo. But as the article points out, it's also an easy target. But the Internet is bigger then that. Make your own page, conscript a forum somewhere, run a chat server, or a BBS for that matter. Tell people about it. Link to it. Replicate posts from one system to another. Use the full force of the Internet. There's no reason to stay within the walled garden of facebook, and there are plenty of reasons to spread out.
And if the Libyan government turns their ire to the Internet on the whole? A lot more people will rise up with you. It's a pretty good rule of thumb that when a government tries to shut down the Internet, it's time to shut down the Government.
There was no downside to the mass hysteria on The Wars on Things
Buuwha!? I'm sorry, have you been under a rock or something?
The mass hysteria over the war on drugs made the USA have one of the highest incarcerations per captia in the world.
The mass hysteria over the war on childporn has given oppressive assholes the shoehorn to wantonly take over 85,000 websites. By accident.
The mass hysteria over the war on terror has made flying a sexually abusive experience, and let Bush invade two nations, and arguably lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths.
But oh hey, CORPUSA didn't lose their profit margins, so it must not be all that bad.
Well aren't you a negative Nancy. If it's helps any, most other places are just as messed up as we are.
We ARE rich, but that doesn't make us the bad guys.
We subsidize corn in a very much protectionist way to keep our farms from going the way of manufacturing. Feeding ourselves is one of those REALLY important and fundamental things.
We embargo N. Korea because of hold-over political crap from the Red Scare and the war. They haven't exactly wanted to play nice with us either. So be it.
China's manufacturing is chewing up rural peasants and turning them into profit. But let me make this exceedingly clear: We are not the world police. It's a crappy job and no one has to do it. China is a sovereign nation and if the people don't want to rise up and change things, then we have no business preaching to them.
And really, have you seen the typical Hollywood movie of late? Ugh. Maybe we are the bad guys.
Damnit! Why does he keep dieing of heart failure after the third block?
My condolences Mr Sporny.
There is a debate currently underway in some circles about whether the internet is a force for liberation or repression. But I think that debate is largely beside the point. Egypt isn’t inspiring people because they communicated using Twitter. It is inspiring because people came together and persisted in demanding a better future.
Just who the hell in what circles are even debating that the internet isn't a force for liberation, freedom, information, knowledge, equality, and god-damned apple pie?
No really, I want a list of names and groups so I know who to exile when I'm king for a day. And really, what are their arguments, cause I'm having a hard time conceptualizing how anyone would use the internet for repression. I mean, usually the repression is in terms of denying people access to the Internet.
Now, when I told my wife this quote, she immediately said that Clinton must still be butthurt over wikileaks, which was funny. So I want to make one thing explicitly clear. Wikileaks helps, aids, and benefits Americans. I'm not really talking about South Americans, Canadians, or Latin Americans, although they benefit too. No, I'm talking about "We The People" of the United States of America. We function on facts and truths. I'm not yet so cynical that I think that everyone's an idiot and that democracy is a bad thing. WE need to know this stuff so WE can fix it as the ultimate controllers of this whole shindig. And it is broken. In places.
I like the USA, I'm a fan. But I like it because we're the good guys. If there are things that make us look like the bad guys, then that needs to be fixed. And the people in charge of those things need to be given the boot.
Most of the time we don't even know when things are broken until it's way too late. People send information to wikileaks out of a moral obligation.
Well at least she didn't send one of them Internets to her intern the other day.
But really, she just comes from a different age. All of them do. Think about it, the Internet really only became widespread in the 90's. Clinton was in her 40's. She's certainly no geek. So it's like describing how the Internet work to my mother. She tries, god bless her, and minding the gap I think she does pretty well. But she's made an effort to understand what it is I do for a living. Now look at congress, the average age is 67 (the mean would be a better guage, but work with me here). They have all grown up, become established, and done the majority of their work without the Internet. Different fields work at different speed. Evolution is just creeping along, and politics only slightly faster. The Internet is still new to them. And the constant stream of new things to come out of the Internet is probably way WAY too much for them to absorb. Even though it's their job. Can we really blame them?
Yes. Yes we damn well can. Seriously, when are we going to get the geeky politician into power?
Lookout rgrd! Bruce is coming for you!
Agreed, but when he said "think wikileaks" he could have meant the material on wikileaks. Although, that's kinda silly as the majority of wikileaks is stuff that's leaked by those entrusted with said information leaking it to the public. It's kinda build into the name.
Yeah, I'm not really diggin the list.
#1 "Criminal" is any law-breaker, which would be everyone on the list, except maybe "Cyber Warriors". Also maybe Hackticists, depending on if you consider "crime" to mean anything "socially detrimental".
#1a Maybe you meant for-profit criminals, which would still include Spam, Adware, and Corporate Spies.
#2 Spamming and adware spreading are two different activities. They may be of the similar low-hanging-fruit bulk-rate sort, but I don't know if they overlap.
#3 APT, wow what a horrible name. But after a wiki explanation, I think it includes anyone whose dayjob/hobby is to screw over a specific target. That would include subsets of Corporate Spies, Hacktivists, and maybe cyber warriors.
#6 What the hell is a "cyber warrior"? I think they were in Shadowrun.
#7 Rogue hackers is kind of a catch-all, but it includes subsets or splinter-groups of all the other types.
And yeah, missing from the list is:
#8 National Entities, with two flavors: "Yours" and "Foreign".
A Venn diagram would do wonders here.
Well, go shout it out.
You don't have to appear on major media channels to be heard. Sent letters to those people in the media. Print off pamphlets and post them around. Strike up conversations with with people who talk about it. Send letters to your government. Make a website. Make a youtube video.
It's really easy to be heard now a days.
What I'm finding is that it's hard to give enough of a damn to put the effort into it.
Well duh, early Christianity WAS a cult. One charismatic leader with 12 in his inner circle and who knows how many followers. He preached radical ideas contrary to the establishment. It eventually turned into an established religion, mostly thanks to Paul, but it certainly had more humble origins.
Likewise, Ron Hubbard founded Scientology, somehow got some people to believe in it and him, and had ideas contrary to established psychiatry.
The difference being that the established views weren't all that good in Jesus's day, and the radical ideas like "love thy neighbor" and "forgive and forget" resounded with people and arguably lead to a better living conditions. (Or arguably lead to the fall of Rome and the end of Pax Romana). Meanwhile in 20th century, while the field wasn't exactly "hard", psychiatry was trying to be build off of science, and Hubbards dianetics was full of quakery.
I see what you're saying. Most people, *cough* the media *cough* use the term "cult" when they want to denounce something. But you can't simply wave it away as hate speech because there are real substantial reason why it's being called a cult.
I agree that it sounds pretty good,
But all this just hammers home how much of a disappointment Civ5 is.
I believe someone mentioned something like "let there be light" and it's been going from there.
The criteria is pretty much a popularity contest that never ends.
Or are you one of those types that still thinks the Amiga is going to have a comeback any year now?
BWAahahahahaha, OH WOW!
If you don't see the problem with that, let me point it out for you.
"... Exxon and Mobile, who would be trusted..."
Ah, but no, you missed an important step: They would take control,
give the supply source to Exxon and Mobile,
subsidise them to
sell it to US citizens at a lower rate then they could sell it to Europe.
We'd give it to them, then pay them to sell it right back to us. Brilliant.
And a hypocrite when it came to accepting government hand-outs while she publicly denounced such things.
And on the flip side, if they say that they only have 5 million barrels left, those 5 million barrels will be LUDICROUSLY expensive.
After which, they can magically pull out ANOTHER 5 million barrels from nowhere, and sell that at ludicrous prices as well.
How exactly would that work?
The USA government would invade, take control of the oil sources, and open up their own gas stations across the nation?
Or would they take control, give the supply source to Exxon and Mobile, who would be trusted to sell it to US citizens at a lower rate then they could sell it to Europe?
Or would they take control, sell the oil on the free market, and use the cash to subsidies the price at the pump? I think at that point, people would fill up their cars, ship them to Europe, and sell the gas out of them.
What? Sorry, but no, that's not quite right.
Crapware cannot have an artificially low pricepoint. It's pricepoint is low BECAUSE it's crap. These aren't commodities or dry goods. It's art. Their value is ENTIRELY dependent on how much people like it. If it is priced at zero, that may still be too high for a lot of people. Indeed, artificially "priced" crapware wanders into the realm of pre-installed bloatware.
If you think, for a moment, that Angry Birds or Snood is competition for Fallout or Halo, then you're entirely down the wrong path. Now, you may indeed have some overlap where people play both Halo and Snood, very similarly to how college students will buy both textbooks and comic books. The two don't compete with each other except on a very high level where everything from food, sex, dental hygiene, and/or fencing compete for the time slice of our lives. If that's the competition here, then you also need to rant about church, school, loved ones, and work all undercutting the poor little game developers.
And power to the aggregators; Newgrounds, Kongregate, and yeah even Armor Games help lower the bar to game/movie development. That makes for a WHOLE LOT of really shitty clones, but the cream rises to the top and society benefits. As for Apple and Steam? Meh, slightly different market, but same mechanic. To hell with your Walmart analogy, people NEED shirts on their back, they WANT to play games. Again, these aren't commodies, basic needs, or dry goods. If Newgrounds undercuts Steam and Blizzard, no one really cares. Poor little mom&pop Blizzard isn't going to way of the dinosaur, because their bottom line isn't affected by yet another crappy snake game.
uuughhhh.... redactions....
Of course we don't need every detail of daily military action to be broadcast on the media. That's a ludicrous caricature, and is not what's being debated here. Wikileaks has certainly tried to have responsible reactions and we've certainly had input from the public and everything and anything. With their philosophy of dumping everything except the reactions rather then simply publishing the "juicy bits", they've probably missed a few sensitive portions. I've only seen one so far. And Iranian fencer. But they dump everything in an effort to be impartial. Remember when they posted that "collateral murder" video? Because they edited it for time, everyone claimed that they were blatantly anti-American. So there's a bit of a balance there. With the Internet age and everyone's mother being able to parse through all of it, I prefer the large dump which can be sifted through by the aggregates.
So I don't believe that wikileaks has completely failed on any of these counts, but could probably do more to remain impartial. I mean, Julian is kind of an ass.
But really, what could wikileaks do to make the public comment more on their actions?
You're right about the more moderate channels of protest being a more civil route of action. But I'm not so sure that it would have had as much of an impact as, well, throwing the digital rock through their front window. I've no doubt that Mastercard receives hundreds of thousands of email. Most of it spam. Which is completely ignored. A small public outcry from some punks on the internet would probably have about as much impact.
I agree about the civil action thing. I don't think it's time. But that time will come if and when I lose confidence in the ability of legal civil action to affect the world around me. Other people have differing levels of confidence. Some will never believe in the system, and society needs to deal with them. Others will never doubt the system, they too need to be dealt with.
You know what? I think I'm going to go write a round of flamemail to Mastercard and Amazon tonight. And maybe that dumbass in congress that wants drones to fire missiles into London.
I like the USA. I'm a fan. It's done some good things in the past and it's a pretty good model for how to run things. On the whole, people here are more free and more prosperous then people elsewhere. But I like the USA because we're the good guys. When it was us vs. the NAZIs, it was pretty obvious who was the bad guys. I mean, they invaded countries and were conquerors. And while we really screwed over the local Japanese, the Japanese empire was really brutal.
When it was us vs. the Soviets, it was more or less apparent that we were the good guys. I mean, we really REALLY screwed over most of Latin America, and the whole "proxy war" thing was a series of quagmired that brought a lot of people down, but they kept their people in line with tanks, and had a culture of political murder. A bunch of people starved in the Urals, and people lived in fear. Well, ok, we lived in fear too, but it wasn't fear of our government.
And then we were kinda the top dogs for a little while. And we were supposed to be the good guys. We donated money, encouraged democracy, and were trying to do good. Our corporations kinda screwed over some people, but nothing as bad as interim camps.
But then we started invading nations. And breaking laws. And being international bullies. And lying about it. And then not even bothering to lie about it.
I like the USA because we're the good guys. But if we're doing things that paint us as the bad guy, then we need to stop doing that, and fix it. The first step to doing that is to know about it. And wikileaks certainly helped the USA there. There is the virtue.
As for throwing rocks, some people don't have any other resource. And wikileaks isn't exactly hurting for cash. Disobedience isn't a great option, but sometimes it's the best (although this LOIC thing was retarded). Or do you think that the colonies never should have revolted? Or that Tunisians and Egyptians should have just sat down and been quiet?