Berin Szoka of TechFreedom speaks at memorial meeting for Aaron Swartz in Washington.
I wrote of the spectacle of the Washington memorial service for Aaron Swartz -- I didn't realize how bad it was. Now the videos are up, we can see what heckling and harassment the libertarian bedfellows of the copyleftists suffered.
We sure get a taste of what life would be like under the rule of those copyleftists heckling Berin Szoka of TechFreedom -- they would never let anyone speak who didn't agree with their technocommunist perspective. And they shouldn't pat themselves on the back because Swartz's girlfriend gets them to shut up to hear a fellow sectarian across the aisle -- they behave this way on every Internet forum and news site and mute, block, ban anyone who disagrees and if they persist, they hack their computers and expose their privacy -- they control the discourse and all Szoka bought was some time to give the barbarians another optical maneuver to pretend they aren't at the gates.
As Pando Daily reported and as you can see in the video above, it was a spectacle of unfreedom there for some minutes:
“I cannot condone what Aaron did,” Szoka started, about to launch into an argument about how Internet freedom should not be a partisan issue. He was cut off before he could go any further.
“Come on!” shouted a man from the crowd. “Come on!”
As Szoka tried to speak again, someone else shouted out: “Knowledge for everyone!”
Then from a different corner: “We’re free!”
“Just don’t come then!” cried another.
Szoka tweeted some of his reactions to this and you can see some of the smarmy reactions from people then patting Swartz's girlfriend and the "moderates" for being "willing to listen" -- when in fact their heckling in the first place gave away the story as a hopeless one. What will it take to mug this Libertarian with the thuggish reality of the technocommunists?
You would think professors and tech millionaires goading a young hacker into his death because they didn't support him would give him some clue of that essential tribal criminality. It hasn't yet. He's young. He also feels sorry for Swartz -- his tells us in his moving presentation that his own father committed suicide because he faced some sort of criminal prosecution and he feels like he understands Swartz's family.
Anonymous and the Lessig copyleftists are a known quantity -- they are anarchists engaged in the "propaganda of the deed", like Swartz was. But CATO type Libertarians ought to know better. They ought to have a healthier attitude toward privacy and private property and a better nose for Leninism in new cyber-clothing, and realize that smashing JSTOR by destroying its ability to monetarize is not libertarianism but a new form of the coercive collectivism they supposedly reject. Szoka seems to concede that this is wrong, or "an infringement," but then he busies himself complaing about the law. Why? The law may in fact not be stringent enough given what we're facing -- online anarchy that even threatens power plants in real life.
Aaron Swartz and his organization take away choices -- no one can use the Internet for purposes they don't approve and in ways they don't like. But the Internet has to have multiple forms of commercial and nonprofit activity on it and pay walls and walled gardens must be protected by law and have a right to exist if there are to be human livelihoods. Surely the socialists can respect that much even if they want to smash corporations. And that means laws and prosecutions, not posturing with the enemy in "bi-partisan" coalitions that exist only to get foundation grants -- it's the sort of things that Soros loves.
Berin Szoka is utterly not credible in demanding changes to CFAA or killing of SOPA given the stakes here -- that a rabid, radical communistic force is smashing the ability to have a free Internet. He's not characterized how changing these laws will solve the problem of technocommunism that is very real when kids can casually hack banks and the Pentagon and break JSTOR.
And the reality is that CFAA is not the draconian horror he claims when you look at precedents, which count for a lot in our country. There are no such cases under the CFAA where any hacker of Aaron's type served 50 or 35 or 7 or 5 years -- it's absurd. The few edgecases are very different. Hackers get off; hackers get the Asperberger's defense; hackers get 1-2 years -- and the kinds of cases coming up now involve things like greatly harming SONY costing millions or dollars, or hacking Stratfor and harming business and right to freedom of association and speech; and even Gawker or Twitter. Arguably, these more serious offenses if anything should get more than a year -- they aren't getting that.
Szoka needs to be confronted for he is unleashing here; Anonymous and their copyleftist enablers are beyond reason. He shouldn't be.
I speak as not a Republican, not a reactionary, not a copyright authoritarian, but a true liberal who is interested in all human rights for all on a free Internet which is indeed free for the free flow of people, ideas, goods, and services -- and that means multiple forms of property, whether capitalist or socialist, commercial or nonprofit. It means CHOICE. And it means the rule of law, not code-as-law.
In his zeal to be seen reaching across the aisle and looking cooperative on the Hill, Szoka does not seem to have grasped the dangers he is inciting and enabling in these people. He pleads with them not to hack sites and heckle and make Swartz a martyr because otherwise the cause looks loony and left -- and he's right, it looks that way because it is. He struggles to get them to behave themselves long enough to focus on a law he thinks is outdated or draconian -- but he fails to explain why such a law isn't needed when they are like this, poised to take away all our freedoms.
If you want a taste of the death cult of the "progressives," just look at what Hamish and Pando prescribes:
As it turns out, contrary to the perceived robustness of US democracy, political change in America is often tied to martyrdom of some sort. It took an egregious mass shooting, one that claimed the lives of 20 young children, before President Obama and Congress got serious about the gun control debate. It took the suicide of two kids for Massachusetts to pass an anti-bullying act. The Republicans had to be humiliated in a Presidential election in which Mitt Romney won only 27 percent of the Hispanic vote for the party to change its tone on immigration. And New Jersey and New York had to suffer a devastating hurricane before the words “climate change” became a 2012 election issue.
This is just plain ridiculous -- and scary. Change in American happened at the ballot box, not the bullet box: gay marriage got passed in New York and other states through legislative action, not killing or suicide. Sentence reduction that impacted minorities was achieved through civic campaigns. Marijuana was legalized in five states -- if that's your thing -- not because somebody hanged themselves. This country works. You can't listen to oppressive and extremist anarchists telling you Congress is "broken" when they are the broken creatures produced by the Internet who won't even consider for a moment that violent video games and movies might be culpable in some massacres.
The gun control debate was serious with Virginia Tech and then Aurora -- to be sure it heightened with Newtown but we don't know if in fact anything serious really happened. And...to get action this way? Is this to be a national yearly ritual, like The Lottery or the Hunger Games, which ripped off the Lottery story, where we kill off some young people who are idealistic about causes to make a point? Disgraceful. As for the claim that Sandy became an election issue, that really is to misunderstand politics. People like Christie because he was there for him and went to bat for them with the federal government. If he endorsed -- or rather, didn't dis -- Obama for president, it isn't because he had caught religion about climate change per se or socialist solutions for it, but because he merely went to the federal pot to get as much as he could, and that was what had to be done.
The issue isn't to somehow coerce people to "admitting" climate change -- many do. The issue is to stop pretending that religious conversation process of yours is a replacement for actual policy debates that aren't about the religious doctrine of the planet's changes, but about what you do about them: whether you suppress capitalism and forcibly bring about communism, the way Naomi Klein wants to, citing the excuse of such disasters, or Susan Crawford, who invokes Sandy. It really is a debate about communism or capitalism, not about the weather. You don't have to convince a Republican that his house didn't wash away; you have to convince him that spending millions on green jobs and research that Obama's cronies benefit from is the way to keep the next house from washing away.
Ben Szoka's group was a useful corrective to the madness of the Mitch Kapor-funded organizations like EFF and Demand Progress, Swartz's campaign. They came out with an alternative Internet Freedom manifesto this summer when the copyleftists were stumping for communism. That was a useful public service.
But they are drowned out. They will lose. They don't have an alternative to 50,000 screaming for Ortiz' head in the most unseemly and chaotic manner on whitehouse.gov. Right now, the CATO tech Libertarians have an outsized influence on people like Issa in Congress for only one reason: people are afraid of technology and they look in awe at those who seem to have mastered it. This is how we will lose all our freedoms.
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