341–350 of 427 posts
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"Maybe the real issue is selective outrage about legal injustice." The real issue is selective enforcement of the law. If it applied equally to everyone, then more people would be outraged as it affected them.
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The two party system is absolutely part of the problem, but there's also definitely the culture war being waged to distract people from the class war that's being waged against them. But the two-party system definitely enables that, making it easier to win by discrediting the other, because there only is one other.
And which party started the culture war? By definition it's not the conservatives.
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And which party started the culture war? By definition it's not the conservatives.
What do you mean "by definition"? They do nothing else. Against transgenders, against gay people, against foreigners, against hippies, against black people; it goes back a long time, and always to recruit the support of poor white people by giving them a sense of superiority over an even more oppressed group. Culture war is their primary weapon to distract from the class war they're also waging.
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What do you mean "by definition"? They do nothing else. Against transgenders, against gay people, against foreigners, against hippies, against black people; it goes back a long time, and always to recruit the support of poor white people by giving them a sense of superiority over an even more oppressed group. Culture war is their primary weapon to distract from the class war they're also waging.
Continually inventing new categories of "opressed" people and then demanding that others grant them special protections is exactly how you start a culture war.
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This isn't arbitrage, it's looking for loopholes. Presumably your "feast or famine" business owner did the responsible thing with leveling their income, no? They didn't? Oh, why would that be the public's concern. That would level out in their feasting years, after all (assuming you're using the previous year's taxable income, or an average income over the previous three years or so). The chauffeur is subject to the…
> This isn't arbitrage, it's looking for loopholes. "Have someone who pays the lower amount do the thing" is precisely arbitrage. > That would level out in their feasting years, after all (assuming you're using the previous year's taxable income, or an average income over the previous three years or so). Their income for the last three years was $10k, $10k and $1M. Their 20 year average is $80k but the three year ave…
The part that still bothers me so much about the US vs Swartz case is that JSTOR didn't pursue civil litigation against Aaron. It was the US government that pursued him. There was little for the government to lose in the case. In a case vs Meta, at the scale it has reached, it could have wide ranging economic implications limiting the investment in AI, which the US is absolutely not willing to pursue at this point in…
Under capitalism money and power are inextricably linked. Your influence in a democracy is tied directly to your access to capital.
This is why expensive elections are are desire of those funding Super-pacs. The more elections cost, the fewer people decide them.
Aaron didn’t matter because he was poor. Had he been named Musk, or Zuckerberg, he would suffer the consequences they do when they break the law which is zero.
This is how capitalism is supposed to work and does.
You can’t have capitalism is being rich doesn’t confer privilege in every area including the legal system. It’s why American oligarch can safely “ask forgiveness not permission”. The risk to them personally is nil.
Everyone is under the illusion that the US is still a democracy. It is not. It is a plutocracy. The rich control everything and the rest are modern day serfs.
These are two party states, the people are given two polarising choices and can only choose one. Party 1 gets in and does what the deep-state says, then people get angry and vote Part 2. Party 1 changes leader and says we are better now.
Party 2 does what the deep-state wants, and people run back to Party 1.
It's an illusion of choice. There is no democracy.
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> Swartz actually did was to download copies of scientific papers That's the root, but I think what Swartz actually did was anger someone at MIT, who called the Secret Service. The federal involvement persisted even after JSTOR and the state quit, and they had him served on a plate with MIT's help. You can set a surprising amount of government force in action with a concerned phone call, as it turns out.
> I think what Swartz actually did was anger someone at MIT, who called the Secret Service. MIT was concerned that someone (they didn't know who it was at the time--in fact IIRC they didn't find out until the police told them after they caught Swartz) was using their network in a suspicious way. I don't know that anyone was "angered". > You can set a surprising amount of government force in action with a concerned ph…
They knew what was going on before they found the laptop. They had been briefed by someone at MIT who was in contact with JSTOR. I suspect that everyone on the networking staff (and possibly most of the university) knew of the JSTOR downloading situation after the second incident in October. JSTOR had blocked MIT for 3 days, and that must have caught people's attention.
Once they found the laptop, they involved police despite knowing to a virtual certainty that the problem with the laptop was that it was scraping JSTOR, again. They didn't know yet that it was Aaron, but they would've known it would turn out to be someone ideologically just like him.
There was nothing suspicious about it. It was simply jeopardizing MIT's contract with JSTOR. The use of a data closet like that was very bad manners.
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Maybe the real issue is selective outrage about legal injustice. I totally agree that this was wrong and he should not have been prosecuted but a large part of the effort that dealt this injustice to him was facilitated by the fact that the vast majority of people willfully turn a blind eye when the same thing or worse happens to people are not of their ilk. If we were to finally stand up and say that justice for all…
I can't believe his lawyer didn't explain all of that to him? An important role for an attorney in this situation is as a counselor, to explain the actual reality and the possibilities.
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Continually inventing new categories of "opressed" people and then demanding that others grant them special protections is exactly how you start a culture war.
Those people were always there. Just stop oppressing them. They don't need "special protections", just the same rights as everybody else. Why is it so important to have an oppressed class?