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Modern Civil Disobedience - Tim DeChristopher

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Re: Modern Civil Disobedience - Tim DeChristopher

#31

Post by orbitingpluto »

This just smacks of corruption. Sweet legal corruption.

He was in a position to be able to purchase the rights to drill. He does not have to necessarily have to exercise those rights that he purchased.

Moreover, he is leasing those rights! It is in the governments best interests to have someone pay for the right to take a non-renewable resource and then not decide to use it!!!

Since there is a lot of talk about patents and copyright here, let's do a simple example. If I purchase the rights to 'Happy Birthday', can't I just not enforce the copyright? Will I be prosecuted if I don't sue every child getting sung 'Happy Birthday'?

If I purchase Lodsys' supposed patents and decide to not sue every indy developer out there, will I be persecuted for it?

Sexual orientation? You've got the right either way! If you go princess or bear is the government going to break down your door?

If you lease land for logging and your company decides it's not fiscally feasible to log this year, are you going to be thrown in jail.

No. No. No. No.

It's too bad his defense was hampered by the judge.

His only crime was trying to get in the way of the revolving door system of public property being given away to private interests. That's a big no-no.

Re: Modern Civil Disobedience - Tim DeChristopher

#32

Post by Joeboy »

wisty wrote: post #9
ryanpers wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not so, he was able and willing to pay for the land, but the BLM doesnt allow people to buy land w/o drilling for oil. So he was charged with "disrupting a lawful government activity" - even though in fact those BLM auctions are NOT lawful.

Using illegal methods to disrupt illegal activities is not legal. You can't shoot a guy to stop him running a red light. There are rules about Citizen's arrests, but they are pretty specific. On the other hand, making a nuisance bid at an auction (especially when you are forthright about your actions, which he claims he was) doesn't seem like a serious criminal act.

> Using illegal methods to disrupt illegal activities is not legal

I don't know about the US but in the UK, it is a valid defence to say you were trying to prevent a greater crime. The textbook example is that you'd be allowed to steal a bicycle in order to prevent a murder. It's a defence quite commonly adopted by practitioners of civil disobedience, and there have been some notably successful uses of it.

Re: Modern Civil Disobedience - Tim DeChristopher

#33

Post by Cushman »

brianleb wrote: post #30
Cushman wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether "mankind makes it" in the end matters or not, our not making it would involve millennia of avoidable human suffering. It's a little hard to care about anything without caring about that, which I think is what your parent was getting at.

> not making it would involve millennia of avoidable human suffering This premise assumes that in the situation where we "don't make it," the total amount of suffering by the end of the human race would be more than one in where we "do make it." Given that human suffering is caused by everything , I would say that if the race were to survive, there would be infinitely more suffering because we would have more time to…

I don't think I buy that the idea of "total amount of suffering" makes sense. That suggests that a world with more people, who are each suffering less, would be a worse world overall by virtue of having more "total" suffering. That strikes me as strongly counterintuitive, and very hard to justify rationally, though I'd be happy to see the attempt.

And in fact that seems to be the world we're living in. For example, in this TED talk[1] Steven Pinker makes the argument a person being born today — anywhere in the world, counting Iraq and Darfur — has less of a chance of dying at the hands of another person than at any time before in history.

So I'm a little skeptical of the idea that the only way to make the human race feel better is to have less of it.

[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violen...

Re: Modern Civil Disobedience - Tim DeChristopher

#34

Post by chc »

Joeboy wrote: post #32
wisty wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using illegal methods to disrupt illegal activities is not legal. You can't shoot a guy to stop him running a red light. There are rules about Citizen's arrests, but they are pretty specific. On the other hand, making a nuisance bid at an auction (especially when you are forthright about your actions, which he claims he was) doesn't seem like a serious criminal act.

> Using illegal methods to disrupt illegal activities is not legal I don't know about the US but in the UK, it is a valid defence to say you were trying to prevent a greater crime. The textbook example is that you'd be allowed to steal a bicycle in order to prevent a murder. It's a defence quite commonly adopted by practitioners of civil disobedience, and there have been some notably successful uses of it.

As far as I'm aware, the closest US equivalent is jury nullification, which this guy apparently argued for. But the US government has waged a very effective PR campaign against jury nullification to the point where most people consider it immoral in all cases.

Re: Modern Civil Disobedience - Tim DeChristopher

#36

Post by lukifer »

bugsy wrote: post #19
redthrowaway wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is libertarianism defined by Ayn Rand? Is capitalism defined by Donald Trump? Let's put Gore aside for a minute, and focus on the core issues. An environmentalist is someone who, fundamentally, sees the protection of the environment (for practical and/or idealogical reasons) as one of our most serious responsibilities. To say that certain people who identify with the movement are wrong, therefore the movement is wron…

The deal with this is that I am an environmentalist in the traditional sense. I have an extremely low "carbon footprint" but not because I believe in the Goldman Sachs propaganda of doom. However, far less that 5% of "Environmentalists" I have ever met practice what they preach. It is a religion of mass hypocrisy, just like "Christianity", which likewise has almost nothing at all to do with its defined core teachings…

I'm done with the ideological purity tests of environmentalism; it's time for pragmatic engineering to take the helm. If you ask me, this guy should be the head of the new environmentalist movement: http://fora.tv/2011/06/27/Peter_Kareiva_Conservation_in_the_...
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