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  • On the post: US Is Apparently Torturing Bradley Manning, Despite No Trial And No Conviction

    Free Capitalist ( profile ), 15 Dec, 2010 @ 01:23pm

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Awful

    While it is academically interesting that Levy was allowed to use the civilian judicial system, you should note that this very decision pre-ambles the military's description of your curtailed rights which you must agree to when you join up.
    PDF

    Also note the content of the SCoTUS decision is basically telling Levy, "What the hell are you doing here, you're a soldier, not a civilian. We've been over then before."

    While Manning might some day get to go to the SCOTUS himself, he will most definitely be held by the military and tried in a military court first. His rights and the process are very different from those of a civilian citizen. Until he is discharged from service, that is.

  • On the post: US Is Apparently Torturing Bradley Manning, Despite No Trial And No Conviction

    Free Capitalist ( profile ), 15 Dec, 2010 @ 12:48pm

    Re: Re: Army Property

    1860 is calling. It wants its Zeitgeist back.

    I'll see your zeitgeist and raise you two paradigms. When you join the military you are, in effect, property of the U.S. government.

  • On the post: US Is Apparently Torturing Bradley Manning, Despite No Trial And No Conviction

    Free Capitalist ( profile ), 15 Dec, 2010 @ 12:32pm

    Re: Re: Awful

    The Constitution doesn't get suspended merely because someone's in the military.


    ?(The Supreme Court of the United States) has long recognized that the military is, by necessity, a specialized society separate from civilian society?(t)he rights of men in the armed forces must perforce be conditioned to meet certain overriding demands of discipline and duty.?
    Parker v. Levy, 1974

  • On the post: US Is Apparently Torturing Bradley Manning, Despite No Trial And No Conviction

    Free Capitalist ( profile ), 15 Dec, 2010 @ 12:12pm

    Awful

    What Manning is going through is no joke, I have no doubt, even if the article is completely wrong.

    The harsh reality is he is being held under military jurisdiction and with the rights of an accused soldier, not a citizen. This type of torture sounds like something they may very well be able to do without repercussion.

    Also, is there such a thing as a soldier whistle blower and protections for the same? I'm doubting it but I do not know.

    If he leaked, he did bring this on himself, as heinous as it may be.

  • On the post: Congressional Research Service Analysts Complaining About Blocked Access To Wikileaks

    Free Capitalist ( profile ), 15 Dec, 2010 @ 10:52am

    Re: Re: Probably Parsing

    and though this stuff has been leaked to the public, it is still technically "classified", so some gov't agencies are still following their security rules for such documents.

    This is certainly correct, every U.S. government agency is supposed to still be following security protocol for all classified information, including that already made public.

    You probably agree, but from my understanding this shouldn't limit the employee's ability to read information from public sources. For instance, a submariner from the cold-war era is certainly permitted to read "Blind Man's Bluff", but is not permitted to discuss any of it or whether it is or isn't true.

  • On the post: Congressional Research Service Analysts Complaining About Blocked Access To Wikileaks

    Free Capitalist ( profile ), 15 Dec, 2010 @ 10:12am

    Probably Parsing

    The information was released illegally, and it's not right for government agencies to be aiding and abetting this illegal dissemination.

    I understand the original release of classified material is illegal, but I thought dissemenation (publishing) of information was protected by the first amendment, a la the Pentagon files. Is this not the case?

    I guess everyone with a federal lifeline has to 'sound off like they hate Wikileaks' or lose their ass.

  • On the post: Is The US Response To Wikileaks Really About Overhyping Online Threats To Pass New Laws?

    Free Capitalist ( profile ), 14 Dec, 2010 @ 12:10pm

    Re: Re: Re: Re:

    It is just jumping in front of a marching band and claiming to be the leader. The band would have played on without the needless extra body standing in front of them.

    I'm not sure what you mean by claiming "ownership" of an issue being reported. Are you perhaps referring to the "glory" newspapers give themselves when they are the first to "break" a story or perhaps the first to reach a large audience with a story?

    If so, you must be saying Mike is acting like a "real journalist" even though he just writes opinions and conclusions, not news stories.... oh... wait a minute....

    Never mind.

  • On the post: Is The US Response To Wikileaks Really About Overhyping Online Threats To Pass New Laws?

    Free Capitalist ( profile ), 14 Dec, 2010 @ 11:56am

    Re: Re: In a word...

    it's a logical conclusion that wars are more functions of economy than philosophical policy.

    I believe this is true throughout history. Game, good farmland, water and even strategic location (offensive or defensive) are functions of economy. Philosophical battles are fought amidst the people in order to gain support for war.

  • On the post: Comic Artist Dylan Horrocks Explains How Copyright Is Too Often Used To Kill Culture

    Free Capitalist ( profile ), 13 Dec, 2010 @ 12:43pm

    Hard to deal with but, oh well. I for one appreciate it, means we truly are resourceful and why we can neva die!!(as a whole)

    I'd like to think this way about Earth, but the universe is an awful big bully.

  • On the post: US Has Lost All Moral High Ground On Internet Censorship

    Free Capitalist ( profile ), 03 Dec, 2010 @ 12:31pm

    Re:

    To me the dichotomy is how politicians don't actually call our forms of censorship "censorship". When they grandstand about censorship in other countries it comes off as an all or nothing affair, i.e.: censorship is "bad". When it comes to censorship at home, the word rarely comes up.

    To me, though, this is still about the police actions being taken before authority is even established. That's not just a "bizarre" dichotomy, that's a down right dangerous dichotomy.

  • On the post: US Has Lost All Moral High Ground On Internet Censorship

    Free Capitalist ( profile ), 03 Dec, 2010 @ 12:24pm

    it's a crime to go around advocating that people should overthrow the government

    Is it really? I thought sedition was about organizing the overthrow of the government, not talking about the positive and negative virtues thereof.

  • On the post: US Has Lost All Moral High Ground On Internet Censorship

    Free Capitalist ( profile ), 03 Dec, 2010 @ 12:10pm

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Censorship + no due process

    I mean it's censorship in the general sense that they are scrubbing a certain ideology,

    You're still talking about censorship in a very specific sense. Unless there is a monkeyed up a legal definition that contradicts the literal meaning of censorship.... anyone know?

  • On the post: State Department Telling Students Who Apply For Jobs That If They Mention Wikileaks On Twitter, They Won't Be Hired

    Free Capitalist ( profile ), 03 Dec, 2010 @ 12:03pm

    Re:

    Just because the information is public does not mean its not still top secret, those in law enforcement, the military, etc are actully under orders to not talk about or look at this information.

    This I know to be true.

    However, I'm not sure the state department can get away with public prior restraint. Applicants to a position with the government may not have had prior classified experience and therefore would not have been subject to the indefinite "no discussion" obligation for classified material.

    Predisposition is an unavoidable reality everyone has to deal with to some degree. However public discrimination can lead to civil or even criminal liability.

    In this case, we have the State Department retroactively restricting potential applicants from exercising the very rights that department is supposed to be helping to protect.

    Seems a bit off to me.

  • On the post: TSA Told To Tell Children That Groping Them Is A Game… Horrifying Sex Abuse Experts

    Free Capitalist ( profile ), 03 Dec, 2010 @ 11:54am

    Re: How dumb are these people?

    Hehe... for me that's second time today Brave New World came rushing back to memory.

    Aldous was right.

    What was the line... something like: "could you imagine a world where the children couldn't engage in erotic play?"

  • On the post: US Has Lost All Moral High Ground On Internet Censorship

    Free Capitalist ( profile ), 03 Dec, 2010 @ 11:18am

    Re: Re: Censorship + no due process

    If the former, then this really wouldn't enter the realm of censorship, since it's akin to the police serving a warrant on a drug-den. They seize the drugs, then prosecute the parties via due process. Seems about right.

    I would argue that even in the case of a criminal being silenced pending a trial, it is still censorship for better or for worse.

  • On the post: US Has Lost All Moral High Ground On Internet Censorship

    Free Capitalist ( profile ), 03 Dec, 2010 @ 11:00am

    Morally High

    I could not agree more, though I might argue that post-19th century, we never really had a moral high ground on censorship as it relates to freedom of speech in this country.

    One of the problems in the discussion of censorship is that it seems the word itself can evoke emotional responses before any premise or even context can be agreed upon.

    Like most modern Americans I received a great deal of idealistic information about our Constitution and government growing up. Not unlike Huxley's Brave New World, the repetition of this information I believe caused me to accept without question that I lived in a free country standing as a model for the world, and thriving on the cornerstone of free speech.

    Until later indoctrination, the word censorship applied to my own country was a non-starter. It took the years of repetition of concepts like "nudity is bad", "communism is bad", and of course "bad language is bad" to finally dull down the rebellion that I felt inside whenever censorship in the U.S. was discussed.

    Even today, sometimes it's hard for me to remember that censorship is really censorship in any context when expression is suppressed.

    Censorship is suppression of information considered to be harmful, or "bad" for the public. It's the same in China as it is in the U.S. only, as you point out, our broadly accepted concepts of good and bad differ quite a bit.

    We don't have the "simple life" of the distant past when most everyone in a community attended the same church, and therefore more readily agreed on issues like censorship. Today we depend mostly on the law to be our moral yardstick.

    Since the law is just about as close as we get to having a common moral framework, it is most alarming that the U.S. is circumventing the law in affecting the domain name seizures without mandate or clear jurisdiction.

    It's quite alarming that in my free country, censorship is being affected through uniformed vigilantism.

  • On the post: Talking About Homeland Security's Domain Seizures

    Free Capitalist ( profile ), 02 Dec, 2010 @ 10:16am

    Re:

    Hehe that is kind of funny (though they didn't actually "birth" Marxism). In essence he's talking about government takeover and control of a market in the land that tried very hard to make that work in scale and showed just how badly it fails in the long run.

    I hope the IP industries enjoy cold fish soup for breakfast.

  • On the post: Piracy Is Over Like The Web Is Dead

    Free Capitalist ( profile ), 02 Dec, 2010 @ 10:06am

    Re:

    I read through the article but all I could make out was 'pop... pop... shiizzzz... pop...'

  • On the post: How The US Response Turns 'Failed' Terrorist Attacks Into Successes

    Free Capitalist ( profile ), 02 Dec, 2010 @ 09:49am

    Re:

    Not sure where you're going with that... are you trying to say nobody likes Snookie?

  • On the post: How The US Response Turns 'Failed' Terrorist Attacks Into Successes

    Free Capitalist ( profile ), 02 Dec, 2010 @ 09:44am

    Re:

    ... vector graphics on a virtual front? Just like that sweet tank arcade game from the 80's. Well that, and actions that more resemble the types of guerrilla tactics in the U.S. Revolution where destructive forces, to the enemy, seem to coalesce out of thin air and then evaporate back into the landscape and populous.

    Only now the guerrillas have instant global communications capabilities.

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