'Chilling Effect' of Mass Surveillance Is Silencing Dissent Online, Study Says (vice.com) 266
An anonymous reader quotes a Motherboard article: Research suggests that widespread awareness of mass surveillance could undermine democracy by making citizens fearful of voicing dissenting opinions in public. A paper published in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, the flagship peer-reviewed journal of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), found that "the government's online surveillance programs may threaten the disclosure of minority views and contribute to the reinforcement of majority opinion." The NSA's "ability to surreptitiously monitor the online activities of U.S. citizens may make online opinion climates especially chilly" and "can contribute to the silencing of minority views that provide the bedrock of democratic discourse," the researcher found.
They already do. (Score:5, Insightful)
Mass government and commercial surveillance already have a massive chilling effect on speech online. Employers check your online presence and commentary for controversial issues; I can't believe the security clearance process doesn't do the same thing. Many people I know avoid making many political comments online precisely because of this.
This becomes more true as you enter fields intelligent people who understand policy may enter, such as law, finance, etc...
Re:They already do. (Score:5, Insightful)
I would moderate you as insightful, but that means I'm agreeing with your position and thus inviting the government to monitor me more closely to see what other heretical beliefs I may have...
Re: They already do. (Score:5, Insightful)
Moderating insightful it's not necessarily agreement, merely acknowledging the view as well thought out and with intellectual merit. You can see it as insightful and still disagree.
Re: (Score:2)
Let's face it, the government doesn't REALLY need a sound reason to monitor you anyway.
Re: They already do. (Score:5, Insightful)
As the cost to monitor people decreases, more and more people will be put under watch for increasingly trivial reasons.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Let's face it, the government doesn't REALLY need a sound reason to monitor you anyway.
No sir. They do not. It just has to be convenient and technologically feasible.
The gov't is not beholden to traditional budgetary metrics. Others are positing that it is the cost of the data accumulation and storage that affects the amount the gov't is willing to monitor.
Not so much. It seems the people who print the currency that is the rest of the world's reserve currency basically have a license to print money.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, but anyone who objects to the current surveillance is a terrorist and so, by definition, cannot be insightful or capable of good thought...
Re: (Score:3)
-1 commented not obviously against Edward in a Snowden story
-2 moderated a Snowden comment favorably
-3 Submitted a favorable Snowden story
-4 Posted a pro-Snowden story (damn the bad luck)
Re: (Score:2)
No. You can't. Really.
Re: (Score:2)
Ah, but you've made previous dissenting opinions known so failing to agree with them, in a public fashion, will mean that you're attempting to now hide your views in light of recent events and, because of this, you've likely made efforts to curtail your speech and to hide it - thus you'll need to be monitored all the more closely because you're acting suspiciously.
My view? Fuck 'em. I say what I have to say and do what I need to do. If they don't like it, they know where to find me. I don't need a job, I do
Re: (Score:2)
Re:They already do. (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, its not really the government surveillance I'm most concerned with. I know enough to express my opinions in such a way as to not give the government any evidence to do me harm (or at least to 'want to do me harm'). I'm far more concerned over my employer knowing my opinions. If I was independently wealthy (not robustly so just so I could live free of having to be employed) or was self-employed in a business where I could support myself I would have 0 problem removing my anonymity online. Heck I used to robustly debate all kinds of things on-line (long before the 'internet' became what it is today), it was fun, a 'sport' if you would, it was intellectually gratifying. But with employers & especially SJWs running amok that can threaten my livelihood I have taken to express my views only to those people I already consider close family or friends & thus pretty much already know my opinions...they are smart people but its not nearly as gratifying.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm posting anonymously because I don't want people to track this opinion to me. But here goes...
We have already seen where Brendan Eich was pressured to step down as the CEO of Mozilla. Despite showing respect to everyone who worked for and with him, the loudest ones on the Internet showed their full intolerance of him voting for Prop 8 and made an example out of him. You could also see that in the primaries where people would whisper "Republican" when asked which primary they wanted to vote in.
Re: (Score:2)
Eich made a large contribution to a campaign to deny the right to marry to a group of people. It had nothing to do with voting (which I assume he did on the secret ballot) or even expressing an opinion.
Re: (Score:3)
Yet, somehow you can get in a lot of trouble if you send money to jihadists. It must be somehow different from speech.
Re: (Score:3)
I'd have to disagree. Money is definitely speech in a situation today where you don't get a voice unless you can pay for ad time. Certainly, I agree that you could strictly define it as having the ability to say what you like, but it is pretty clear from the specific freedom of the press being mentioned that paid speech, like journalists usually provide, was considered just as protected.
That is why some J. Random Guy can't just stand up in East Podunk and run for President. No one would ever hear him who
Re: (Score:2)
Are you saying that there's no difference between saying "I don't think same-sex marriage should be allowed" and saying "Since you're campaigning to disallow same-sex marriage, here's $100K"? It looks to me like the difference between disagreeing with me and becoming an effective political enemy. There's no actual evidence that Eich would have been in much controversy if he'd just expressed a personal opinion, even one that many people disagreed with.
Eich's actions were not illegal, so that's a red her
Re:They already do. (Score:5, Insightful)
Horseshit. You don't buy ad time, but you have a voice.
Speech as defined in the Constitution does not guarantee you a mass audience. It guarantees you that nobody is going to prevent you from saying something. The speech can't be regulated. The money can and should.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Hypothetical:
Donald Trump somehow wins the presidency. His supporters then manage a clean sweep in the next round of Congressional elections, stacking Congress with Trump supporters. This Trump-friendly Congress passes a law criminalizing any donation of money, by any entity, to any political candidate not personally approved by Trump.
Does this law, in your opinion, violate the First Amendment?
If so, your claim that "money is not speech" is at best a half-truth.
If not, I'd like to hear your reasoning on w
Re: (Score:2)
Money is not the expression. It's the purchase of a megaphone.
Money does not equal speech.
Re: (Score:2)
"Speech" is shorthand for "expression", including the press and other ways of being heard. These usually require money. People who all want to express the same political point pooling their money to do so is political expression: this couldn't be more clear.
I think what you're really try to say is "free speech doesn't include wrong ideas" (as judged by Ratzo, of course).
Re: (Score:2)
Only since 2010 apparently. The United States Constitution was clear on this matter right up until then, and somehow we managed to survive as a civil society.
Re: (Score:2)
Since when was buying a political ad in the paper not protected speech? The SCOTUS has been clear from very early on that a law that de facto restricts speech is a law that restricts speech. Do you really think there's something wrong with, say, a Kickstarter to fund a political ad? What if none of us can afford a full-page ad, so we each by a 1 square inch section of the page such that the full-page ad appears? Is that somehow different?
Or is it really that the wrong people are getting the message out?
Re: (Score:3)
An individual could always buy an ad in a newspaper under his own name(assuming the paper wanted to run it, of course). What he could not do, was form a liability-protected legal entity for the purpose of raising money anonymously to use in elections.
That was the innovation of the 2010 court.
Re: (Score:2)
I agree that people who object to Soros have every right to call for his resignation just as people called for Eich's.
Re:They already do. (Score:4, Interesting)
It's one of the reasons 4chan is as popular as it is.
I can go there, say whatever I want; "burn the gays!", "kill the niggers!", "Hitler did nothing wrong!", or even something as mundane as "Yeah, I actually support Trump" - anything and I won't be persecuted, ostracized, or otherwise attacked in real life for it.
And you know what that enables?
Actual political discourse. Because you no longer have to temper anything against the prospect of retributive action from people who oppose your political ideas. If someone thinks your idea is full of shit they can't just censor you, they can't just throw you in jail or even kill you. No matter how asinine (in fact, the more contrarian the post, the more visible it is due to the larger number of replies it will garner) someone will have to argue against your position in order to refute it.
And it's absolutely fantastic. It and the few *chan copycats are the only places on the internet where actual political discussion can take place. Where, rather than posting in a hugbox of like-minded people who echo your thoughts, you put yourself in a hurt-box where everyone tells you you're a dumbfuck moron who doesn't know what he's talking about, and you're forced to actually defend whatever argument you've made.
The only two issues the format has are: [1] signal-to-noise ratio; as there is a very large amount of spam that takes place due to the free-speech nature, and [2] moderation stepping in and censoring certain viewpoints/topics. (This doesn't tend to happen much on 4chan's popular boards just for the sheer number of posters that makes censorship almost impossible, but on the smaller sites as well as the smaller boards on 4chan itself, it's definitely an issue).
If you want to get the pulse of what the political undercurrents and beliefs in present day western society actually are, without the politically correct censorship that takes place, you go to 4chan and get the whole ugly truth of it.
Re: (Score:3)
And you know what that enables?
I sure do. A bunch of 20-something white dudes circlejerking about they're brave enough to say "Hitler did nothing wrong!" on an anonymous imageboard, where only the edgiest opinion wins.
Re:They already do. (Score:4, Funny)
So you're saying it's a Trump rally.
Re: (Score:3)
> And you know what that enables?
> Actual political discourse.
Nonsense. There is no political discourse on 4chan, only obnoxious people yelling at each other.
Re:They already do. (Score:4)
Re:They already do. (Score:5, Informative)
Yes they can. [wikipedia.org]
I've got an easier way to silence speech! (Score:5, Insightful)
Go onto any college campus and commit a microagression. That'll shut things down real quick, no mass surveillance required.
Re: (Score:2)
Damn. Two days after my mod points expired (since "Yale Shrieking Girl" was my first thought when reading the summary).
Re: (Score:2)
my first thought
Well here's another little meme [youtube.com] to keep your outrage collection fresh. Our most powerful academic institutions are straight up teaching hate.
Re: (Score:2)
The black guy is talking too fast to understand. Anyway, it's nothing different from what the Nation of Islam taught Malcolm Little 70 years ago.
Re: (Score:3)
When everyone is watching you, you tend to get militant defence of the status quo.
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed. I don't want to be mass surveilled any more than you do, but on a personal level the culture war and the hate being created by it is many times more chilling than anything the NSA is doing. So I have some contempt for those who feel one so acutely while studiously ignoring the other.
I'm chilled (Score:5, Insightful)
I was just having a conversation about this the other night with some friends. I said, "That's why I don't comment about a lot of stuff. It may be that one day all of those tweets and facebook comments will get sifted through, and someone may decide all you guys need to be in concentration camps." I was half-way joking... but only half-way. It certainly is chilling.
It's not just mass surveillance, however. Social media being what it is, everyone is one bad joke away from becoming the pariah du jour, losing their job, and having their entire life ruined.
Re: (Score:2)
All during the NSA slurp years, millions of idiots said the most hateful things about W, and moaned that they might get thrown in Gitmo.
Shockingly, none are.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Here's how it's chilling, and has been chilling for a long time: I only post where I can comment either without logging in or where there are accounts on BugMeNot. Both are getting quite rare. Hello Slashdot, though. If Slashdot ever starts requiring logins, I'm out of here. I used to post to Usenet, with my real name even. But then came DejaNews and altered the deal: What was previously a transient form of communication, with at most personal archives, became a public archive of statements, indexed to be f
Protecting Democracy, or Breaking it Down? (Score:5, Interesting)
Under the guise of protecting the U.S., I'm sure plenty of well-intention ed people are serving their roles in NSA, FBI, Congress, etc. that in the short run are trying to protect, but in the long run are undermining our values. This is very dangerous and troubling for our future.
Re: (Score:2)
I agree. Did I just get on a list?
For that matter, I regularly go through what the Constitutional protections are, and why, and how a need for emergency powers has been the downfall of the few historical democracies. Does that get me on a list?
Finally, unspoken is what happens when, not if, someone hacks the NSA and out comes tumbling everyone's emails and phone "metadata" (and conversations, as some suspect), and browser histories?
Re: (Score:2)
I am trying to come up with a pithy and simple way to say; The boot is stomped with the greatest zeal by those who believe they're doing the right thing.
I guess, that's as close to concise as I can make it and it shouldn't need much elaboration or expansion - everyone should be able to agree and there are many instances in history of this being demonstrated as true. Do you think the NAZI party members believed they were doing bad things?
So, there's the above. I'm not usually all that concise, I do not artic
I think it's the fear of future career-kills (Score:5, Insightful)
That's part of it, but the bigger part is that many people see how something stupid or controversial someone says now could bite them in the ass twenty years from now. That exact thing is playing out now with a state supreme court justice in Wisconsin (http://www.jsonline.com/news/rebecca-bradley-called-gays-queers-who-opted-to-kill-themselves-b99682686z1-371276861.html), but I think it will probably be 10x bigger in ten years when even more people's careers or positions in their communities get torpedoed by drunk/ignorant comments they put on Facebook before they grew up.
That plays out into political speech too - I'd say MOST people are afraid to sign their name to their beliefs today, not because they don't want to be challenged, but because someone could try to nuke them for speaking their mind down the road. (e.g., http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/04/04/mozilla-ceo-resignation-free-speech/7328759/ or http://www.nationalreview.com/article/417155/wisonsins-shame-i-thought-it-was-home-invasion-david-french)
FWIW, it's also part of the reason for Trump's popularity - I think a lot of his supporters remember a time when you could speak your mind without getting fired/sued/ruined because someone thought you were "microaggressing" or not supporting the right cause at the right time, and they identify with him as a politically incorrect old schooler.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
YOURE FIRED!
Re: (Score:2)
Its hard to ridicule well reasoned opinions. If your opinion is well constructed and rationally based (even though wrong), its a lot harder poke holes into than saying "Gay people don't deserve marriage" or "Gay people are the best employees have", etc..
Life lesson: Say dumb things and they'll come back at you. Say well reasoned wrong things and you could still get bashed for it, but at least its a more simple conversation than defending 'fags are bad, k!'
PS: The only time I've ever heard words Microaggress
Re: (Score:2)
tl;dr
Got a link to a shorter version of what's happening in Wisconsin?
Re: (Score:3)
> http://www.nationalreview.com/... [nationalreview.com]
I'd wondered what the fallout would be. I had no idea. "HOLY SHIT" does not cover my thoughts well enough. I'd been a bit curious as to what was going to happen to the people involved but that never showed up in any of the media that I follow so I mostly forgot about it. I figured that they had to have pissed some people off - especially at the national level and at the level where powerful people sit.
I have not yet looked into it further to see who sent down the orders
Re:I think it's the fear of future career-kills (Score:4, Informative)
>> police state is coming and both the Republicans and the Democrats can't wait for it to get here
Well...which is it? In Wisconsin, you had a Democrat district attorney try to punish Republican political supporters for legally supporting Republicans in a political arena. (Fortunately courts at multiple levels essentially said the DA was on a rouge witchhunt but stopped short of tossing him in jail.) That's a chilling police state if there ever was one: support the wrong party and go to jail, lose your house, and pay tens of thousands of dollars of legal fees.
In response, the state passed a bunch of reforms, one of which is that if you're going to investigate a political crime (e.g., misuse of funds), you have to use a normal criminal process, not a secret (called "John Doe" in Wisconsin) multi-year process in which one prosecutor can (and without judicial supervision) seize the records and property of anyone he/she wants without ever specifying what crime he/she is trying to prove.
>> Republican Scott Walker and his Republican Cop Cronies in the WI Congress changing the laws for themselves only
The reforms don't just benefit Republicans operating in Democrat-controlled counties, they also return the rule of law to Republican-controlled counties. In other words, a right-wing DA in upstate county X can no longer start an open-ended "John Doe" investigation to hassle the peace protesters his buddies hate to see at the Memorial Day parade. (If you're for open government and an open court system, you should be FOR Walker's reforms.)
This seems like willful ignorance (Score:2)
Sure, but I'd wager that hyper-sensitivity towards minority viewpoints is FAR more affected by the social effect of "political correctness" rather than than literal "political correctness" from a government body as an independent entity (unless the government is responding to specific social pressures, which is then a failure of 1st Amendment enforcement).
If you're plotting to overthrow the government, then yes there's a "chilling effect" if you know the FBI is listening in. That's debatably/arguably a good
Re: (Score:2)
you forget, majority POLITICAL opinion.
obviously the kind of opinion that needs the least protections.
Re: (Score:2)
Probably because people realized (belatedly) that it was a terrible, bigoted opinion. I think that, quite soon after the Prop 8 vote, opinions in CA changed such that the proposition would have failed.
Re: (Score:2)
just because it's the loudest, doesn't mean it's the most popular.
Awful (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Not really. I think what has made America worse in recent years is the phenomenon of most Americans to vote tactically. By which I mean, they vote against the people/party they dont want, instead of voting for the policies they actually do want, regardless of person or party.
If you just vote for the thing that is most against the things you definitely don't want, no wonder you're gonna get a mess.
Re: (Score:2)
So what should I do? In cases where I dislike both candidates, I can either try to avoid the greater of two evils or make a political statement, not both. I've been voting against people probably longer than you've been alive.
What I want to see is some sort of ranked-choice voting across the country. We have it in Minneapolis now, although the process to get on the ballot needs some fine-tuning. It was great in the last mayoral election: I voted for ones I really liked on my first two choices, then
Re: (Score:2)
Vote for the candidate you like. Who know, there might be a majority of people who would prefer that candidate, but they are all afraid to vote for him/her. If they see enough other people vote for that candidate, they may well decide to do so in subsequent elections.
Also, you are sending a signal that you prefer a certain political position. Over time, if enough people send the same signal, then the center of politics moves that way. Look at
Re: (Score:2)
So what should I do? ... ... I've been voting against people probably longer than you've been alive.
And how's that working out for you?
You're almost there... A few more pushes and I'll have turned you to the dark side! MUAHAHAH!!!
Re: (Score:2)
You're mistaking that 3-5% as actual dissent. Nah, their dissent is generally with their fellow citizens. If they were giving small percentages attention and kowtowing to them then the privacy advocates would like to have a word. The intellectually capable would like to have a word. The people with advanced degrees would like to have a word. The well-reasoned and logical would like to have a word. The advocates for liberty would like to have a word. The list goes on...
Just what [redacted] was [redacted] (Score:3, Funny)
Exactly.
[redacted] needs to understand that [redacted] and [redacted] are threatening our [redacted].
These are sobering findings.
Without the use of [redacted] and [redacted] to [redacted] for the [redacted] of [redacted], then [redacted] is certainly [redacted] to [redacted].
Rock solid argument. (Score:2)
I appreciate the taste of paranoia as much as anyone.
Less so when it is salted with too many words like "could" and "may."
widespread awareness of mass surveillance could undermine democracy by making citizens fearful of voicing dissenting opinions in public.
the government's online surveillance programs may threaten the disclosure of minority views and contribute to the reinforcement of majority opinion
The NSA's ability to surreptitiously monitor the online activities of U.S. citizens may make online opinion climates especially chilly
It struck me that if minority views are not disclosed they --- for all practical purposes --- do not exist. The majority holds the floor uncontested. It also struck me that the kind of group think that prevails in many online forums makes the NSA quite irrelevant.
Its true even on slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
I find it very depressing that even here on Slashdot where the readership is apparently meant to be more "deep thinking" than the average, if you post anything that questions current mainstream thinking, no matter how polite, rational, justifiable and sincere your post is, you will inevitably incur the obligatory crop of -1 troll moderations.
If you are one of those people that moderates rational, polite posts as "-1 Troll" just because it is making a point that is contrary to your own beliefs, you need to realize what you are actually saying about yourself.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
A popular trolling tactic is to disagree with someone in as plausible a way as possible. After dealing with that for a while, people get to a point where they can't take anyone who disagrees with them seriously. So they conclude that anyone who disagrees is doing so insincerely. The result is that they merely become part of the problem. It's bad enough that trolls waste people's time with bullshit insincere arguments, but at least when people respond to that bullshit, the response will have some educati
Re: (Score:2)
on second thought (Score:2)
...nevermind.
Law Enforcement (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Facebook and Twitter (Score:2)
Facebook, Twitter and your friends are a million times more guilty of this than any government agency. Technology and culture destroyed privacy and free speech well before the government was given half a chance.
Re: (Score:2)
This. A thousand time, this.
I just don't say much on Facebook anymore.
A friend was talking about how a Wisconsin company was dumping phosphorus into a river. As I work in a chemistry department, I mentioned that it was phosphate, not pure phosphorus and that it also comes from agricultural fertilizer runoff. Boy was that a mistake. It turned out that the company was owned or affiliated with the Koch brothers and he came back at me on a tear, saying that I was an apologist for them and all the other ills of
Not at all surprising (Score:2)
All along I've just been assuming that mass surveillance "contribute(s) to the silencing of minority views" and "undermine(s) democracy", to the point where TFA is about the equivalent of the statement "water is wet". The question I struggle with is "did the authors of these policies and mechanisms foresee this outcome and purposely work towards it, or did they just get lucky"? Not that it much matters though, because the outcome is the same regardless; but it would be nice to know how clever and foresightf
You say that as if you think it's a BAD thing! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Wow, one would assume that satire would be covered under the 1st amendment. Or is your impression that political free speech is going to be criminalized in the near future?
Quantitative (Score:2)
If the "minority" views are silenced, how can you be so sure they aren't actually in the majority?
A unicorn! (Score:2)
Sigh... (Score:2)
it wont stop me from criticizing the govt (Score:4, Insightful)
as we all know the government is just middle managers for the real power behind the throne which is the global banking cartel with the military-industrial-complex as the muscle enforcing the desires of the BIG monied elite, thats why i say it does not matter who gets elected president because the monied elite is not going to let a president and an election by a bunch of filthy unwashed peasants change the status-quo
How to become interesting (Score:2)
Libertarian philosophies, survivalist literature, self-sufficiency, economic collapse, book of Revelation, the ever expanding role of big government, civil liberties.
Mention ongoing whistleblower news and list the project names surrounding the NSA's tasking tools, correlation and selectors. MAINWAY, IRONMAN ect.
Read local news about any events, anti war protests, campaigns with a US foreign policy connection, public meetings. Local government having a public
Not as per my experience (Score:2)
My experience on the internet is that it is not currently an issue.
There are too many idiots ranting about their personal version of the tinfoil hat. Therefore, there has been no chilling effect on the internet.
but which points of view are chilled? (Score:2)
Personally ... (Score:2)
... I welcome our voyeuristic overlords.
You want "chilling"? (Score:3)
This is our future.
Re: (Score:3)
What idiots are using their real names and putting in valid contact info?
The article talks about NSA surveillance. You really think a fake name is going to fool the NSA???
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Those sites, including Facebook, only say that they want the real name. They value the traffic more than enforcing the policy. The only time Facebook cares about someone not using their real name is when someone else complains.
Re: (Score:2)
I've personally lost 2 fake name accounts on Facebook. I live in an ultra-conservative state governed by a majority conservative religious electorate (Utah), and I personally hold some liberal views. I changed my Facebook account from my real name, to a fake name years ago specifically to stop any potential employers from seeing any of my social media activity (even with stringent privacy settings) and then causing me employment issues. On two separate occasions Facebook shutdown my fake name accounts, so I
Re: (Score:2)
On two separate occasions Facebook shutdown my fake name accounts, so I just don't use Facebook anymore.
That's wierd, I've never had any problem with obviously fake accounts on Facebook. Back when I played FFXI I had profiles for each of my characters without issue. I never did get around to making a real account, probably never will.
Re: (Score:2)
Beliefs that you profess to hold but are unable to accept the consequences of are not really beliefs, now are they? They're conveniences.
Sorry if that hurts but if you really held the views you profess to hold then you'd be willing to accept the consequences of holding and expressing those views. Beliefs that one is willing to be castigated for are truly held beliefs. The rest are just things you tell yourself to make yourself feel good about yourself or, perhaps, myriad other reasons.
Yes, yes that is a pep
Re:Sure does not seem like it (Score:5, Interesting)
Precisely, the nutters are the only ones crazy enough to use their free speech rights anymore.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The government should be afraid of the citizenry, not the other way around. If they are afraid then that is just, that is how it should be. I doubt that they are afraid of us, yet. I suspect they worry about losing control but that they're not afraid at this time. This sort of stuff is precautionary, not reactionary. If all were well in the world, the government would be afraid of us and would act accordingly.
Re: (Score:2)
If we are, as you say, the point where the government "clearly needs to be taken down" then why are you not doing so with you and your like-minded people?
What you have there is a non-sequitur. Your belief of when it needs to be taken down does not match the majority opinion. The militia you decry seems to have more intelligence than you do. If, as you claim, it were time to be taken down then you'd clearly be doing so. I notice that you're not.
The rest of us speak out, work in peaceful ways, and will rely o
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Alright... You're an asshole. I mean that in a good way.
So, I'm in Florida for the winter and my neighbor has some really good weed. I got up at 0300 and I just smoked - it's about 0530.
I then read your post... I'm halfway convinced it's a brilliant post that's insightful and demonstrating the decried problems from the article (which, of course, I didn't read but surmised from the comments).
But then, you could just be a script... Or, alternatively, you're a fucking idiot. The last one is actually unlikely.
Re: (Score:2)
> Sedition really is a crime.
Should it be?