Freedom on the Internet

Priest of Swag: Well no - it has to be extrajudicial (no due process etc) and motivated by anarchy (ie your dissatisfaction with the FBI) to fit that definition. What worries me is the extrajudicial part.

admin: What definition is that? Vigilante justice doesn't have to be motivated by an anarchist ideology. We've had vigilantes operating in the west for our entire history who have had no political streak. Most vigilantes were just people who had to take matters into their own hands when the government wasn't around.

admin: What worries me is the extrajudicial part
Legality is just socially constructed BS right from the gecko.

Priest of Swag: The dictionary definition. Either there must be lawlessness (as in your western vigilantes) due to an existing lack of government control, or such control must be opposed.

admin: I would ask what dictionary, but really it doesn't matter.

Authority is in the eye of the beholder, and anarchists choose to recognize no political authority. That doesn't mean an unrecognized entity can't exist in a similar manner as a recognized entity. It just gives society more flexibility in "cases", whereas established political authorities tend to always set things in stone (the law).

I could like the CIA, but hate the NSA. The problem is that both organizations have recognized authority, because they exist under a recognized government. People in America wouldn't put up with the NSA if it were not for it being a government organization. That's the problem.

Priest of Swag: Hire private internet censors, Problem Solved. The private sector can operate more efficiently than the government, so this may work well.

Bi0Hazard: The private sector only protects the interests of those with the money. Assuming these censors monitor the whole internet at the heed of the people who pay them, they wouldn't have my support.

Priest of Swag: Not that I support this view or anything, but you seem to oppose government on the internet, so I thought something like this would work.

Bi0Hazard: Perhaps private organizations, but not private companies.

I don't see why management structure is the problem - accountability is. Governments are accountable to all people, private companies to their shareholders, private orgs to their members, and vigilantes only to themselves.

admin: Governments are accountable to the law, not the people. Hope you realize that by now.

Vigilantes can be accountable to themselves, or they can be accountable to the people. It is a matter of choice, and the choice they make affect their standing among society.

Don't get it either though, because for all I care the government are the vigilantes as long as I don't recognize their jurisdiction.

Populism is pretty overrated too. People actually get stupider as a collective, just look at today's liberal movement. I respect 1 in a 1000 people intellectually speaking, so democracy is always going to be a reflection of stupidity.

Not that a single country has managed to create anything close to an actual democracy to begin with. All governments are and always have been a cess-pool of corruption.

Priest of Swag: Law tends to be written by elected officials, who represent people through a voting mechanism. If people don't like the law they can vote to change it. I'd prefer that to any group that is not accountable.

The rest of this appears to be off-topic to the original thread.

admin: : Law tends to be written by elected officials, who represent people through a voting mechanism.
It very well does not. The law making process in every country is so far from the people's grasp, and is influenced by millions of misconceptions and personal ambitions of the politicians who wrote them (and the corporations that support them).

My point on populism is not unrelated either. Laws only represent the vocal majority of people during one fraction of time in the past (and almost always they do not even meet that criteria, but I don't want to go off on a tangent ).

If people don't like the law they can vote to change it.
They will usually fail too. Elected officials don't have to obey the whims of their voters once they are already elected. They just need to keep a slightly polished image for re-election, that is if that don't already live in a partisan system in which they will get re-elected no matter what (or that they are not in the pocket of some fat cat who benefits from their voting patterns)

Oh yeah, I forgot to ask something important in the last post. If you believe that laws are justified when they are supported by the majority of people, what is your justification for why the majority of people should be able to rule over the minority

Priest of Swag: This is all questions on the process of democracy. Procedural issues (which I don't concede) still fail to trump the principle of a general social right to control human media (that is to say, in this case, the internet) as a principle.

admin: All my questions and statements were speaking directly on the concept of democracy itself, not the process. Anything about the process is just inferred. If you cannot justify the legitimacy of government, then you can't defend your belief that government should police the internet.

The next bit is confusing. What does a "General social right to control human media" mean exactly? I have to remind you that the existence of conceptual 'rights' is baseless.

I believe society should be able to police the internet. I was only rebutting your argument that governments should be the one to do it. So that post doesn't really get us anywhere further.

Priest of Swag: But if you define "government" as "an agency controlled by society" then it isn't so. Your only claim is that this definition is not how governments operate.

admin: If you look up just about any definition of government, it will explicitly state some kind of direct control over a society of sorts,

Not only did I dispute that government fails to operate the way you mentioned, but I also reiterated several times that the means in which you want government to do this, IE populism, is an evil in its own right.

Priest of Swag: The second thing is procedure. A dictatorship would function on the same principle of internet policing, as would any other form of government. It's not relevant to this thread to question what form of government is best.

I view government as society controlling itself, not some obscure elite controlling society. Regardless of who is administering them, limitations on speech are reasonable.