> Here's an important question: would it be a good thing or a bad thing if it was very difficult to make plans involving violence on the internet?
These sort of simplistic quips reveal that either:
not much thought has gone into what your saying, or
what your saying is a propagandizing effort to conceal ulterior motives.
Does it elude you that this heightened concern in quashing all discussions of violence seems to be rather targeted at a certain segment of the population?
Are they the only ones that "plan violence"? Or the only ones where violence originates from?
If your goal is saying nobody "should be able to make plans involving violence,"
then you're saying nobody should be able to make plans of any sort without being surveiled,
so that a determination can be made as to whether those plans involve violence.
Who's doing the determining? What if the violence is ostensibly to an end the determiner believes is righteous?
The issues at hand are not so simple as your comment suggests, and it creates a feeling that you're trying to pull one over on people.
There are issues here that needs addressing, the events at the capitol yes, but an equally if not more important issue of how do we map old notions of private property and public property/infrastructure onto socio-techno society where these notions are converging? How do we bring the rights and norms of a healthy, functional, non-repressive society from the pre-internet world to the post internet world?
Violence pre-internet did not elicit calls of "ban all telephones," or "ban them from the telephone network," or "confiscate their printer."
We've barely begun to form the language to talk about these things, and to take in the scope and complexity of the issues arising from the way society and technology have evolved. Glib comments of "violence is bad," make it harder to discuss in a productive way.
Violence is bad. The violence at the capitol was bad. And the violence that rocked American cities all summer was bad.
Great concern about quashing all discussion of violence was curiously absent this past summer? Well, discussions of it were jeered, quashed and censored unless you were praising it.
Is that a conversation you'd like to have?