[p2p-research] Fwd: [fcforum] Fw: iPad DRM is a dangerous step backward. Sign the petition!

[Andy Robinson]

*"I have no grand knowledge other than what people want and my own
opinions."*

I know you don't *have* grand knowledge, you just *claim* it constantly,
with sweeping claims about what 'people' in general want, about human
nature, etc.

"Other than that, I try to rely on science...which I think you rather
dismissively referred to as being an "analytic type.""

There are types and methods of 'science'.  You obviously know no
anthropology whatsoever, and next to no sociology.  You persistently make
claims that you would be told in an introductory course on these topics are
absolutely indefensible.  You make claims that a specialist in these areas
could cite a hundred empirical studies to falsify.  You pick and choose your
'sciences'.

"That doesn't surprise me since humans are competitive...even the Yanomamo."

The Yanomamo men (not the women) have intense intergroup antagonisms which
are entirely collective and bear no resemblance to stock market behaviour.
So do the Guarani and most of the Papuans (again usually only the men), but
not the Bushmen, the Mbuti, or the Australian aborigines.

*"We know they want to not be poor.  Every chance they get they leave
families, home lands and social structures to get an education to earn
money."*

When someone grabs all the food and locks it up in a walled compound, people
will try to break into the compound to get the food, or failing that, they
will do what the person says so he gives it back to them.  This doesn't mean
that they *want* the food to be locked up in a walled compound.

If you really imagine that the global North has all the resources it does
from being a better system, then you've obviously never studied the history
of colonialism.

In any case there are an awful lot of people who *don't* leave.  Those who
do, a great many are victims of forced displacement or persecution.  China
for instance is undergoing rapid urbanisation mainly because of the
increased role of capitalism in rural areas, driving farmers off their land.

Even supposing the preferences you posit are real - the analysis of them has
to take account of all those complicated variables you previously asserted
you were ready to accept - epistemes, subject-positions, social relations
and so on.  People travel to sites based on their perception of them - not
what they actually are.  Northern countries and major cities tend to have
good PR.

Another problem.  You can't account for the billions who *don't* move (it is
absurd to explain this by border controls alone, which would soon be
overwhelmed by movements on such a scale).  You also can't account for *
patterns* of migration - the sites to which people move.  Where possible,
people don't move alone, but move into shanty-towns or communities from
their area of origin.  Often these communities form quasi-autonomous
lifeworlds of their own in which the wider social discourse is not wholly
accepted.  Indeed, the great majority of migration occurs *between poor
areas*.  Refugees fleeing civil wars most often go to the nearest affinal or
supportive group.

In any case - as I said before - it's all a matter of coerced choice.  Faced
with a choice between been rich and poor (or between being tolerably poor
and being miserably poor), people will choose to be rich (or tolerably
poor).  This says precisely *nothing* about whether they would prefer to be
poor (or rich even) in an inegalitarian society or to live in an egalitarian
society.  Unless they seriously believe the option of realising an
egalitarian society is immanently realisable, there is no way their actions
will show their preferences between social systems.

I doubt such things can be derived from choices in any case (the
motive-forces of choice are too *complex* to simply read off motives from
aggregative processes), but if they could, the relevant set of cases would
be those in which people are faced with a *political* choice between
two *entire
ways of organising society*.  This kind of choice is rare, and again very
complex to read from (how do we know if people are choosing the side they
prefer or the side they think will win?), but there are a few cases where it
can be established.

Indigenous societies and subsistence peasants facing the prospect of
displacement for industrial development, which will provide significant
numbers of jobs and statistical economic growth at the expense of
dispossession and disempowerment.  People in these circumstances *always or
nearly always* prefer to remain as indigenous societies, and nearly always
put up considerable resistance.  One could cite here the Narmada Dam, Posco
in Orissa, chipko andolan, Tata Nano, Chiapas, West Papua (Freeport),
Bougainville, the Amazonian struggles in Peru...

The reactions of poor communities in settings where a government dissenting
against global orthodoxies seems to create space for popular organisation
(often with a lot of apparent goodwill but very little effective poverty
alleviation).  In these cases, people side *strongly* with the government in
question - Chavez in Venezuela and Aristide in Haiti for instance.

*"China has the largest urbanization in history."*

One of these statements that sounds clear but isn't.  The largest
*number*migrating, the highest
*rate* of migration, the *fastest* migration?  If the first then it means
nothing - it simply reflects the fact that China is demographically bigger
than anywhere else.  The other two are clearly false - Russia went from
mostly rural to mostly urban within a decade - and this was due to forced
displacement, expropriation, deportations and state-induced famine.  All of
which tells us a lot more about urbanisation than fairy-tales about people
seeking opportunities.

*"Just look at failed states like Somalia or even Jamaica and you'll see
people who live in abject misery for want of a working state."*

Come on, you can do better than that old chestnut.

http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/isec.2007.31.3.74

As a matter of fact I've been researching Somalia recently.  Reading what
anthropologists and Somali commentators have to say.  Among the things I've
come across:

Somali states have historically been no less brutal than warlords;

states in (most of) Somalia are unsustainable because of centrifugal
features in Somali society;

relatively successful states have existed only on the basis of massive
external patronage;

states are always monopolised by a single clan, becoming systems of clan
domination resented by the overwhelming majority from other clans;

Somalis consistently resist state-building, preferring local diffuse
governance;

parts of Somalia have been peaceful and without predatory banditry for very
long periods, without any state existing;

the Somali civil war of 1991-4 was largely a product of forces *generated by
the state* and *sustained by the international community *(notably, looting
of state resources, clan conflict arising from Barre's divide-and-rule, and
the manipulation of aid flows);

Somalia was one of the safest places in Africa before about 1980, in spite
of having an extremely weak state;

Somalia was predominantly peaceful from 1994 until outside forces stirred
things up in the last decade;

Many areas in Somalia have lower rates of murder, robbery, etc than
comparable areas in Kenya, which has a central state.

*"People aren't perfect."*

That's why it's idiocy to trust them with large amounts of centralised
power.

You really want an imperfect person with his finger on a nuclear trigger?
Wouldn't it be better if he just had a spear?

"States are technologies.  Of course everyone starts out without them."

Firstly this deduction doesn't follow - people 'start out' with all sorts of
simple tools, and very complex social relations.  Secondly, states aren't
technologies.  States are systems of social relations.  It would be quite
simple for people in a small, technologically basic society to set up
relations of this type *if they wanted to *(as is imagined by the likes of
Hobbes and Locke).  The fact that they *choose not to* is therefore
indicative.  There are also many cases (from the First Emperor of China to
the Roman Empire) where states collapse and people choose not to revive
them.  There is by no means a linear path from stateless to state society.

In any case, the crucial point is that, once states emerge, societies
without states do not spontaneously adopt them.  Other societies 'acquire'
states only through colonisation.  Faced with the choice, people do not *
choose* state societies.

*"I agree that states are competitive so far."*

That's not what I said and you know it.

This concept of 'competition' is being stretched so broadly that it is like
a black hole, distorting the symbolic space.  Companies are 'competitive' in
profiting better from satisfying demands.  Politicians are 'competitive' in
manipulating people into voting for them instead of their rival.  Yanomamo
are 'competitive' in engaging in ritual intergroup feuding connected to
symbolic identity.  Now states are 'competitive' in militarily subjugating
people.  These are all *quite different* varieties of social relations.

States invade non-state societies and force their people to live under
states whether they want to or not.  They don't out-perform these societies
in a level playing-field so that the societies adopt states or the people
migrate to the state societies.  They invade, enslave and dispossess
stateless societies which are otherwise quite successful by their own
standards.

What states are good at is concentrating means of repression and coercion.
A state can build bigger, more destructive weapons than other social forms
so far (noting that bigger and more destructive does not necessarily mean
more effective; states have always faced asymmetrical warfare).  It can
cause more misery than anyone else, and by causing misery, force people to
submit to it.  Is this what you mean by 'competitive'?  If it is, then the
'less competitive' social forms are clearly ethically far more desirable,
and the pressing question is simply how to offset the state's military
advantages (which in any case are now being lost at an unprecedented rate).

*"Systems are imperfect and unjust. Show us how to do it without
imperfection and injustice"*

Another non-answer.  I said you prefer laws because you're not the one
getting locked up or bashed over the head.  The fact that people get locked
up and bashed over the head is not an incidental failing of statist law,
it's fundamental to how it functions (at least in its modern form).  The
problem is that your preferences are shaped by your privilege and would be
unjustifiable without it.  It has absolutely nothing to do with perfectable
systems.

But a brief comment since you've raised it.  The way to minimise the
existence of what you term 'injustice' (let us better say: to minimise such
phenomena as oppression, exclusion, domination, etc), in this rather
artificial scenario of designing a just system from scratch, is twofold -
both focused on the need to set up mechanisms which counteract such
phenomena such they arise (feedback loops which quickly eliminate the
problem).  Firstly to diffuse dialogical capabilities and
conflict-transformation mechanisms for reconciliation densely throughout
society.  Secondly to diffuse throughout society means which enable and
legitimise rapid and forceful response to oppressive acts, and which
mobilise solidarity for the oppressed not the oppressor.  The latter
capability prevents oppressive relations from becoming entrenched because
they are instantly rejected, and the former minimises the antagonistic
effects of the latter by enabling such irruptions to pass quickly back into
social peace.  The former would be instantiated by institutions such as the
Nuer leopard-skin chief, Somali *heer* courts and the role of women in
Sambia society, as well as various dialogical techniques associated for
instance with Freirean pedagogy and with conflict transformation approaches;
the latter would be instantiated by the volatile sense of honour typical of
certain indigenous societies, and the sharp sense of outrage at oppression
found among autonomous activists.

Now, compare this approach to how states work.  States concentrate power in
the hands of a few, who are thereby empowered to oppress with impunity.
Counter-mechanisms against such abuse are weak.  Further, legitimatory
forces are diffused throughout society (partly by the state, partly by
statist ideology) which make the use of counter-mechanisms limited.  (To be
fair to the writers of the US Constitution, they did *try* to work in such
mechanisms to a limited degree, but underestimated the task they faced).
Means of redress are similarly rather limited: indirect processes are
permitted (mostly legal and bureaucratic procedures) through which appeal
can be made *to the bearer of concentrated power* to take account of some
injustice.  Those procedures available are *antagonistic*, and typically
carried out at the expense of the complainant.  If the system works and is
not rejected, holders of state power also have concentrated capacities for
violence, are widely legitimated in using violence, and violence against
them is delegitimated even when they act oppressively; people come to accept
that they are disempowered and stop complaining about injustice.  *This is
not at all a matter of imperfection*.  One could hardly come up with a *better
system* than the centralised state to *guarantee* concentrated power.  (And
the 'democratic' state, like many other forms, is simply a compromise
between this basic drive towards state despotism and the difficulties of
making enough concessions to keep people quiet and accepting of the system
in practice).

*"Undoubtedly so.  The US imprisons ridiculously too many people in my
view.  But a democratic society chooses those outcomes continually.  It
isn't fair and it is racist.  Those are things that need hard work to
repair."*

More *supplemental* reasoning (in the Derridean/Lacanian sense).  You're
giving the state the right to be cruel, racist, unjust...  and not only
letting it get away with it, but rendering these aspects of its *actual
functioning* irrelevant to assessment of its legitimacy.  Of course you can
then harmlessly admit that all of this is really very bad...  at the same
time deferring to the dominant Other the *right/privilege to decide*how many
people to imprison and whether or not to be racist.  And it is this
recognition of the *sovereign*, in the strict sense used by Agamben and
Schmitt, which marks the point of continuity of your own discourse with all
the forms of state despotism.

The logic of rights (*not only the logic of anarchy*) implies something far
more radical: that a state ceases to be legitimate when it is unjust,
racist, draconian, despotic.  That *social peace is a condition for
legitimacy*.  It would be possible to build a liberal theory on this
basis... but most liberals would rather suck up to the powers-that-be, like
the pet Marxists of Stalinism.  The violence of complicit liberals to the
emancipatory potential of ideas such as rights is exactly homologous to the
similar violence performed upon Marxism by its deployment as regime ideology
- both are equally instances of the pigs rewriting the slogans on the wall
in *Animal Farm*.

*"DRM a violation of the right to privacy?  By who's legal interpretation?
Any court so find?  In any nation?"   *

I defer to no-one in understanding the literal meaning of words.  I take the
view that *words mean*.  (Granted, their meaning is socially situated and
requires an understanding of their deployment within speech-communities,
with each user deciding upon use, so ultimately, people and not words
'mean'; nevertheless, this right to syncretic use of language performing
small alterations in its overall meaning is *diffuse*, and at any particular
moment the meaning inheres in words).

It is ridiculous to let power-invested people pick and choose what words
mean - the effect will be Animal Farm.  And the effect *is* Animal Farm, or
1984 - they persistently, constantly, decide that black is white, two plus
two is five.

Logically, it is an invasion of privacy for a company to be able to know or
control what's on one's computer/phone/iPad, because this is information
pertaining to one's private life and freedom of expression.  Having a tool
set up to obligatorily report this information is logically similar to
requiring everyone by law to report this information to the government.  The
latter is not justified, so neither is the former.  This is an *obvious
logical conclusion*.

Of course, all this will be wriggled out of by clever corporate lawyers
pretending that the iPad in your pocket is really *the company's house*, or
that companies don't have to respect privacy because they're *really the
same as individuals* and so *not able to oppress anyone*...  And remember of
course that there are vested interests here, firstly on the part of the *
judges* who want to keep their Schmittian sovereignty to decide what
something means even at the cost of doublethink, and secondly by *powerful
corporate lobbies* who can afford the best lobbyists to get laws passed by
governments and the best lawyers to get them enforced in courts.

Let us take a similar example, in which the right is less contested, yet the
state does *exactly the same thing* to get out of it.  Pretty much everyone,
at least in international jurisprudence, admits that the right not to be
tortured (or subjected to other kinds of torture-like abuse - 'cruel and
inhuman treatment') is a basic human right.  Yet, it will be hard to find *one
government* that does not sometimes torture.  Bearing in mind first of all,
all the various forms torture can take: beatings in custody, denial of
medical treatment, sleep deprivation, certain so-called 'restraint'
techniques - especially when used punitively, prolonged solitary
confinement, electroconvulsive 'therapy', forced drugging, tasers, and so
on.  Now, granted, governments might have trouble stopping their individual
agents from committing abuse; but they can quickly denounce and sanction
it.  Instead, nearly all of them try to cover it up - there are
*successful*legal defences that something is not torture because it is
intended for some
other purpose (restraint, treatment or whatever); because it is abusive, but
not quite abusive enough; or simply an inability to prove that such things
have happened - an inability reproduced over dozens or hundreds of cases by
a lack of sufficient response to the problem.

*"You are certainly entitled to your opinion. But the rest of us are
entitled to our legal frameworks."*

No, you aren't.  For the same reason that the slave-owner is not entitled to
keep his 'property'.

Your friends in the judiciary are *not* entitled to make up what words mean
as they go along, from the standpoint of sovereignty.  They are not entitled
to do this because it is a fundamental crime against language.  They are not
entitled to do this because it concentrates in a gesture of despotic
sovereignty a function which properly belongs to all the users of speech.
They are not entitled to do this because tricking people into conforming
people by telling them they have rights and then taking the rights away
through technical interpretation is a fraud, creating a false appearance of
legitimacy based on a concession, a ground, which is not in fact respected.
And they are not entitled to do this because it leads to oppressive effects
- because people are getting their heads bashed because of the actions of
these judges, in a constant war by the state against society.  You're not
ethically entitled to support them because in doing so, you contribute a
resource of legitimacy to these people - you are performatively inciting
them to their acts of violence, just as if you were saying that a certain
group of people should be slaughtered, or calling for acts of war against
someone else.  Nobody should lock you up or censor you for holding these
views, because the ethical mode of response to oppressive ideologies is
ethical not repressive.  Yet I would add that *your* people are quite
prepared to jail people for less - Omar Abdul-Rahman for example is serving
a life sentence for a speech-act in the same class as own.

*'The Constitution references patents.  The UN has numerous documents,
treaties and conventions on the protection of intellectual property.  The
Declaration has Article 17 which has numerous times been discussed in terms
of both physical and intellectual properties.'*

If the rights in the Declaration are basic rights, they have primacy over
the 'documents, treaties and conventions'.  Of course the UN, which is
basically a quasi-state, has signed up to and taken part in many absolutely
indefensible things - the genocidal sanctions regime against Iraq for
example.  The crucial point regarding rights is the gap which separates
these persistent violations from the principles which are *supposed* to
guide and limit the more specific policies, and which provide a firm basis
for *immanent rejection of the contingent order*, not by anarchists but *by
properly ethical liberals*.  (Though of course it is also crucially relevant
to the question of whether these rights would be better protected by liberal
or anarchist social relations).

Article 17 'Everyone has the right to own property' says precisely *nothing
*about *what *might be construed as property.  Its main point appears to be
to stop states from arbitrarily dispossessing people - to rule out things
like asset forfeiture and eminent domain.  Though, it also seems to imply
that everyone is entitled to a basic income, since otherwise they may be
rendered unable to own property.  Everyone should have a home, and someone
who collects items of personal sentimental value should not have them stolen
or smashed up by thugs in riot gear...  All pretty fair as basic rights,
however much I want to do away with the idea of property.

Article 1, section 8 of the US Constitution says that Congress *may* grant
patents (to aid the teleological goal of progress) - not that anyone has a *
right* to intellectual property.  The *limited duration* rules out that it's
a right.  Congress's exercise of its power to grant patents is circumscribed
by the rest of the Constitution - it couldn't justify doing anything that
violated any other part.

Trying to define either of these as *mandating* an idea of *intellectual
property* and rendering it *equal to or greater than *the basic rights
recognised in each document, is really an exercise worthy of the pigs of
Animal Farm.

*"See also article 20...no one may be compelled to be in an association..."*

Which has nothing to do with anything here...  Except maybe that requiring
that someone associate with a company that implements certain DRM measures
to the satisfaction of content providers as a condition of accessing the
content is a (mild) form of coercion into being in an association with the
content-owner.

And here's the problem...  Once liberals who really believe in authoritarian
states get their hands on rights regimes, they start coming up with absurd,
non-literal interpretations to interpret whatever regime they want as
justified by rights which quite clearly go against them.

*"No one needs a phone.  If you don't like the system, don't participate"*

And here we have an ethical double-bind.  Because the kind of denunciations
you make are directed at all those who object, including those whose
objection is exercised simply by not participating.

The problem is that the availability and pervasiveness of certain
items *changes
the entire social field*.  This can make it very hard not to participate - a
lot harder than if these items did not exist.  What's more, the fact that
they exist *in the form they do* creates strong pressures,
path-dependencies, against other, better forms emerging.  Not an absolute
block, but a strong negative pressure.

Let us take a case where a local pub decides to ban black people.  This was
formerly legal in a lot of the global North, and very common; it is now
illegal, on grounds of oppression.  The argument you make here could *and
is/was* also made in defence of such practices - it is the business owner's
choice who he lets in, and if you don't like it, go somewhere else.  But
this has knock-on effects of structural exclusion, which were eventually
recognised.  First off, as long as most customers are not banned, and do not
object to the ban on black people, the fact that a few black people and a
few anti-racists decide not to participate has little effect on those
engaged in the oppressive practice.  Secondly, the fact that this pub
exists, and is meeting the existing demand from, say, 90% of the potential
customers, is itself a structural block against the appearance of another
pub which might meet the needs of, say, 99% or 100% of potential customers.
The existence of the oppressive institution occupying a market niche makes
it systemically difficult or even impossible for a non-oppressive
institution to be commercially successful, even though in a direct
comparison it would give rise to greater utility and have greater profits.
Thirdly, the structural effect, assuming there is only one pub in town, or
that all the pubs have the same policy, is in effect that black people are
banned from drinking in pubs - it is *exactly the same at the level of
effect* as if it was a government policy.  Fourthly - even if we assume
there is, say, one niche bar which caters to black people (and
anti-racists), the net effect of the policy is structural segregation *across
society* - institutional discrimination.  Black people would miss out on
social networking which would have knock-on effects, might be viewed with
prejudice because they are rarely encountered in common leisure spaces,
etc.

Eventually, due to a massive mobilisation against racism, huge campaigns of
civil disobedience, mass inner-city uprisings, and a wave of radical groups
threatening the status quo, the state stopped defending the privilege of the
owner to engage in racist discrimination.  This has so far only been
admitted as an *exception*.  But the conditions for the recognition are *
general*.  The *same* forms of structural inequity arise *whenever* a
company engages in practices which restrict who can use its products or
which produce ethical refusal.  Of course there are variations in how strong
the effect is, how serious the problem.  But the point is that the case of
racial discrimination *disproves* the objection that the right to not
participate (the right to boycott) renders objectionable corporate practices
legitimate.  This objection is disproven *in all cases*, because the same
problems arise in every case: market share dominance (always a potential
even when not a fact) can impose the same effects as a state ban;
path-dependency in oppressive institutions precludes the emergence of more
inclusive institutions; and the inability to use a particular space or
resource has knock-on effects for other forms of social inclusion.  (Worse:
in some cases the *allowing* of some oppressive measure in fact
*precludes*the existence of more inclusive alternatives, because the
oppressive measure
gives some kind of unfair market advantage - as when an oppressive measure
has a large effect on vulnerability to losses from crime for instance).

Here is another problem: your recognition of others' right to boycott can
only be exercised if people disagree with your parallel recognition of the
entitlement of companies to do as they like.  The pressures against the
ethically objectionable practice are only exercised *because people take the
act of the company to be wrong in principle, and not to be something it has
an entitlement to do*.  If one is convinced that something like auto-editing
of your data is ethically permissible and a legitimate choice of the
company, one isn't going to decide not to buy the product.  It's only if one
thinks or feels on some level that it's wrong (even if simply the ethical
reaction that it creeps you out) that one will refuse.

Another problem.  Someone with a comprehensive ethical orientation is going
to have fundamental objections to an awful lot of what is 'on offer' today.
It is still possible to do without a mobile phone.  But what if one also has
objections to all the most common brands, to ecologically destructive
massified agriculture, to exploitative landlords, to the common unethical
lending practices of banks...  one soon ends up having to withdraw from most
of social life.  Which does indeed happen in the case of some autonomous
activists, and a number of small religious sects.  The point being that
these people *are* under *immense *pressure to come into the fold of normal
conformist social life, mainly through the unavailability of alternative (or
unused) resources, the criminalisation of various alternative forms of
practice, and the pressure of systems such as the benefits system.  While
the sacrifice of one or another oppressive technology may seem a legitimate
choice to impose on people, *it adds up* - the total effect someone has to
take on board to boycott *all* the objectionable items is immense.

Another point.  There may well be certain social niches where one
*does*need a phone to survive - suppose that unemployment benefit
claimants are
meant to be on-call at all times, and if necessary are provided with a
mobile phone (I've heard rumours this happens in parts of Britain).  Or
suppose they need a phone to get a particular job.  If they refuse on
ethical grounds to carry a phone, they will be denied the job; they will
then be considered voluntarily unemployed and will lose their benefits.  In
these cases, if they submit to the pressures they *are* forced to have a
phone.  And if they don't, they will have to subsist some other way which is
most likely criminalised.

*"But don't expect support when you decide what the rules should be without
due process and the instruments of society unless you are willing to suffer
the consequences when society finds you anti-social."*

And here we see the totalitarianism underlying your position clearly
exposed...  'society' as an integral whole, its enemies as 'anti-social', *
gemeinschaftsfremde*, enemy of the people.

What you are talking about here is *social war* - the war of one group (the
included) against another (the excluded).  The included claim to be
'society', but they are simply one part - at most the majority (more often,
the privileged).  The included demand to have everything 100% their way, and
to not recognise any rights which pertain to the minority.  When this
happens - when a dominant group declares war on its out-group(s) - the
effect is that *there is no longer a society in which the decision is made*.
Rather, there are *two societies* - one of which subordinates the other.
The effect is no different to if a large country invades a small one and
then holds a plebiscite on the invasion.  The large country's voters embrace
the invasion so it passes the vote.  But of course it does not thereby
become justified - it is not a matter of what a majority wants within a
single society, but of one society subordinating another.  *It is exactly
the same whenever conditions of social peace are breached.*  This isn't
about rules.  It's about social relations.  People don't have any legitimate
entitlement to oppress other people, whatever social system they live in.
If a system is oppressive, one is ethically entitled, indeed obliged, to
resist it.  Such things can be deduced very simply from the conditions for
social peace.

At the level of predictable effects, it is of course true that evil statists
will engage in violent war against movements for emancipation, and this is a
risk which needs to be managed however possible, by developing strategies of
effective action, ways of forcing the state to legalise things, of getting
away without being caught, and of imposing costs which make the state think
twice about repression.  A risk faced similarly by liberals, who find
themselves living in fascist or Stalinist societies, who will similarly be
declared enemies of the people and will take exactly the same stance as I
have: that they deserve support in their struggles against injustice, that
they have no obligations to the mechanisms of an unjust social order, and
that the so-called 'consequences' (which are in fact *the actions of others*)
are both unjust and *ethically void*.  This is of course a strategic field,
not an ethical field.  But the crucial point is that it is justified to do
whatever is necessary to actualise rights and to resist the fascistic logic
of sovereignty.

So, let us turn your *THREAT* against me upside down.  Don't expect to go
around labelling people as *gemeinschaftsfremde* and still think you will
keep social peace.  Don't expect to get away with worshipping your rules and
processes regardless of their effects on people's rights, and not face the
wrath of the excluded in insurrection against the global order.  Your very
discourse, your insistence that the sovereign decision of the in-group is
justified whatever it decides, is a declaration of war on difference and on
the excluded.  You may contain the revolt for a time and in a place, but you
will never win this war, because it is inherent to your own discourse, your
way of constructing 'society'.  So you will never be free of having to look
over your shoulder the latest Bond villain of the global order, for the
shadow of your own violence.  This is not a threat.  Whether or not I
ethically approve of the effects that inevitably emerge from this structural
matrix is utterly irrelevant.  What is relevant is that *you do this to
yourself*.  It is the shadow cast by your despotic sovereign which produces
its social symptom.

And don't even get me started on the *difference between society and the
state* - the fact that the processes of which you speak are processes of *the
state* and not of society - that the *gemeinschaftsfremde *is not really an
enemy of 'society' (a network of relations which has boundaries but cannot
logically have enemies) but of the state.

Your fetishism for sovereignty - for *who* decides rather than *what* they
decide - leads to an abject amoralism in practice - it logically means for
instance: genocide suddenly becomes right simply because the minority want
it, and the majority sent to the gas chambers should not resist their fate
because it's been decided by 'due process'.  It logically means *the radical
denial of the 'right to have rights'* - every single practice and attribute
you hold dear, your way of life, your relationship to your family and
friends, your political views, your work, your hobbies, even your very life
- become contingent on *the whim of the sovereign* - they can be taken away
in a second because the majority has suddenly developed a prejudice against
them, because they are inconvenient for whoever has the ear of the
politicians or because some judge on some whim has chosen to read something
sideways.  You have chosen for yourself the status of *potential bare life*,
of being treated as *nothing*, by choosing not to posit rights which can be
held *against sovereignty and procedures*.

And if you hate yourself enough to assign yourself such an abject position *and
imagine it to be just*, perhaps I am hoping too much in thinking you can be
persuaded to recognise the rights of others.









> Of course they do.  People aren't perfect.  But they like governance.  Just
> look at failed states like Somalia or even Jamaica and you'll see people who
> live in abject misery for want of a working state.  States are typically
> flawed in huge ways, but they alternative is, to me, far less appealing.
> I've seen lots of utopian efforts.  Haven't seen one work.
>
>
>
>> *"I like living in a world of laws,"*
>>
>> Probably because you're not the one getting locked up.  You wouldn't like
>> living under someone else's laws.  It's only because you're lucky enough to
>> be in the in-group that you like it.  The underside of a truncheon does not
>> look so nice as the top side.
>>
>>
> Systems are imperfect and unjust. Show us how to do it without imperfection
> and injustice.  My view is you focus on justice and dialogue and
> productivity.  You educate people in ways that allow them to participate in
> the desires and goals they esteem. Is it Nirvana?  No.  It's messy, broken,
> constantly collapsing and easy to criticize.  It burns out good people
> continually.  If I knew a better way...a consistently better way...I'd fight
> for it.  The best I know of now is markets, democracy, good governance,
> transparency, personal liberties, human rights...the whole spectrum of
> modern governance.
>
>
>
>> You are also quite probably benefiting from cheaper prices due to enslaved
>> (mainly black and Hispanic) prison labour, not to mention the others forced
>> into sweatshop labour through state expropriations and fear, though I doubt
>> you know it well enough for it to affect your preference for 'laws'.
>>
>>
> Undoubtedly so.  The US imprisons ridiculously too many people in my view.
> But a democratic society chooses those outcomes continually.  It isn't fair
> and it is racist.  Those are things that need hard work to repair.
>
>
>
>
>> *"I am more that willing to subscribe to US views of rights or those of
>> the Human Rights Convention."*
>>
>> Strange, I don't remember things like intellectual property being in the
>> US Constitution or the UN Declaration on Human Rights.  The latter is
>> deliberately very quiet on issues of property relations and distribution.
>> The former...  well, suffice to say that if read literally it would require
>> dismantling most of the current US state apparatus.  The approach of these
>> kinds of rights documents is usually very similar to that which I set out
>> initially - there are a small number of basic rights which are either
>> absolute, or have priority as a group (they can only conceivably be trumped
>> by other rights within the group); these rights are *meant* to be an *outer
>> frame* within which a range of policies, specific social orders etc can
>> then be pursued.
>>
>
> You need to re-read them.  The Constitution references patents.  The UN has
> numerous documents, treaties and conventions on the protection of
> intellectual property.  The Declaration has Article 17 which has numerous
> times been discussed in terms of both physical and intellectual properties.
> See also article 20...no one may be compelled to be in an association...
>
>
>
>> But in practice, states will very often *violate the outer frame* either
>> by ignoring it, 'balancing' it against secondary concerns, reading secondary
>> concerns into it, or rendering the rights impotent by technical
>> interpretation.  This was how I initially discussed this issue at hand...
>> the DRM framework in this case, is a violation of the right to privacy (core
>> right), makes using a particular technology conditional on effectively
>> carrying around the state in your pocket - reversing the burden of proof
>> (Fifth Amendment violation - you are required to report on yourself through
>> the item signing in automatically), and creates the *technical potential*for very serious violations of core rights such as widespread political
>> censorship or restrictions on freedom of expression (such as the risk that
>> the government could order the removal of all copies of "Cop Killer" and the
>> addition of those who purchased it to no-fly lists; or the Chinese
>> government locking up and torturing everyone who has a Free Tibet song on
>> their playlist).
>>
>
> DRM a violation of the right to privacy?  By who's legal interpretation?
> Any court so find?  In any nation?   You are certainly entitled to your
> opinion. But the rest of us are entitled to our legal frameworks.
>
>
>
>>
>> You responded that it is justified because of its positive aggregative
>> teleological effects (saving the music industry) and enforcement of
>> second-order non-core 'rights'/privileges/legal entitlements within a
>> particular system (suppression of piracy).  (This can be avoided - for now -
>> by not purchasing the product which implements this technology, but in cases
>> like mobile phones, market hegemony of dangerous technical practices was
>> followed rapidly by legislation to require them.  I would add that one is
>> only likely to refrain from buying something for these kinds of reasons if
>> one believes strongly that such technical measures are wrong).  But the
>> whole rights framework requires that core rights cannot be trumped by
>> aggregative teleological effects, non-core rights, or other kinds of
>> entitlements.  The core rights trump the other rights.  So you're willing to
>> endorse and draw symbolic capital from these kinds of rights discourses, but
>> not to uphold them when they're inconvenient for the pursuit of other
>> ethical positions you hold.  You aren't really prepared to operate them as a
>> limit on how and whether states and corporations can exercise power in cases
>> where you think their purpose is justified.  You aren't prepared to bear
>> their costs, and this means you don't really endorse them at all.
>>
>
> No one needs a phone.  If you don't like the system, don't participate.  If
> you can implement a better system, I'm with you.  Certainly complain, rail,
> protest, do all that is reasonable and legal to change injustices.  But
> don't expect support when you decide what the rules should be without due
> process and the instruments of society unless you are willing to suffer the
> consequences when society finds you anti-social.   You say you want a
> revolution?  Well, we all want to change the world.
>
>
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>
>
>
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