<div dir="ltr">Catherine! It's been a while.<div><br></div><div>If you knew what was involved in Aaron's research, rather than absorbing the propaganda of the US Attorney's office and translations from MSM, you'd understand that the research Aaron was collecting was government sponsored research, all of it in the public domain, that was locked behind a service's firewall. And that they did not fight the idea that this material should be freely available, later on, and it is now through their own web and subscription portals.</div><div><br></div><div>You ended up stigmatizing someone unjustly with incomplete information. You object when others do that, but you see how easy it is to fall into the same trap yourself.</div><div><br></div><div>Sometimes compassion, rather than judgmentalism, is a better path. It leaves you open to learning, rather than snapping your mind shut when something comes into your sphere of influence that fits your cognitive biases.</div><div><br></div><div>yrs,</div><div>SN<br clear="all"><div><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div><br></div><div>Shava Nerad</div><div><a href="mailto:shava23@gmail.com" target="_blank">shava23@gmail.com</a></div><div><a href="https://patreon.com/shava23" target="_blank">https://patreon.com/shava23</a></div></div></div></div></div><br></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sun, Nov 10, 2019 at 4:20 PM later <<a href="mailto:notabot@espiv.net">notabot@espiv.net</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
<div bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
<p>I have never gotten involved here, not least because there are no
like-minded people.</p>
<p>Thank you, Catherine, for taking time to write. Not that your
liberal lenses at the world seem any less distorted and
oppressive, just differently distorted and oppressive than those
of techie libertarians, but at least you share your blind spots
and half-completed claims trying to engage in an argument, and I
respect that attempt. I wish there were more dialogue across our
fault lines, and I am the first to admit my intolerance towards
liberals and libertarians alike...</p>
<p>@Catherine: I'd like to ask you to think/imagine real people in
this world, body after body, who cannot become "a member of a
university".<br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<div>On 11/10/19 5:27 PM, Catherine
Fitzpatrick wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div style="font-family:"Helvetica Neue",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">
<div dir="ltr">I rarely get involved in
debates here because there are no like-minded people, except
some who lurk.</div>
<div dir="ltr"><br>
</div>
<div dir="ltr">A founding coder of Diaspora
committed suicide, too. If Diaspora were viable, we'd all be
there now, but it isn't, so we're not. It was "given to the
community" which is geek-speek for saying</div>
<div dir="ltr">"unpaid open source zealots
got tired of working on it". Maybe that's why you can't find
it anywhere.</div>
<div dir="ltr"><br>
</div>
<div dir="ltr">I'd invite you to contemplate
more deeply how the nihilistic, extreme culture of the hacker
in fact led us to the abusiveness of Twitter, Facebook, Google
and others and even the exposure of our</div>
<div dir="ltr">elections to Russian GRU
agents.</div>
<div dir="ltr"><br>
</div>
<div dir="ltr">It's not unrelated. The
profound disdain for private property is intimately related to
the rampant lack of privacy now, like it or not. You didn't
want to see democratically elected politicians regulate the</div>
<div dir="ltr">Internet through SOPA or
CISPA; so you got the Russians to regulate your Internet for
you. </div>
<div dir="ltr"><br>
</div>
<div dir="ltr">If you don't like the fact
that academic publishers charge money to cover costs -- and
no, your research grant or the university's grants don't
"already cover these costs", then don't buy them.</div>
<div dir="ltr">There are workarounds. One of
the most obvious workaround is to be a member of that
university with a library card in that university -- then you
get the publications for free! In fact, Swartz could have
taken out publications for free with an MIT card if he were
truly interested in finding some journal for his research. But
he didn't do that, because he wasn't about that.</div>
<div dir="ltr"><br>
</div>
<div dir="ltr">He wanted to commit a raucous
"propaganda of the deed" by making it big and criminal to
"make a point". Except, rarely does extremism bring that
desired effect. </div>
<div dir="ltr"><br>
</div>
<div dir="ltr">You can get friends to get
you publications; you can join Academia.org and get many of
those you need for free, and for their low subscription fee
get others. Pay walls are not the crippling effect on
scholarship imagined.</div>
<div dir="ltr">In fact, I never hear techies
complain about the real crippling effect, which is the high
cost of textbooks, even e-books, in the hundreds of dollars.
And really, the high cost of education in general, caused by
all sorts of things, including the addition of numerous
officials who now have to watch for Title IX, gender,
transgender, etc. issues. And it's ok to question these costs
and these programs and these methods and still support the
rights of LGBT and other minorities.</div>
<div dir="ltr"><br>
</div>
<div dir="ltr">The reason the academic
journals were targeted is that they enabled activists to
choose a hated target -- imagined greedy middlemen gouging
poor students and professors -- that wasn't the academic world
per se, but was part of their hypothetical "The Man" and
"Neo-Liberalism" and blah blah. These campaigns aren't about
academic freedom. They are about technocommunist partisans'
movements against capitalism. The</div>
<div dir="ltr">sort of capitalism that
enables Stanford, where this list is homed, to exist and
thrive. If you want to have a radical hackers' movement
espousing communism, that's fine, but don't pretend it's about
academic freedom.</div>
<div dir="ltr"><br>
</div>
<div dir="ltr">Prosecutors overreach all the
time. The plea-bargaining system creates all kinds of abuses
and the bail system is broken. But you can tackle those
problems without committing crime -- all sorts of groups from
the</div>
<div dir="ltr">ACLU to local committees,
churches, synagogues, etc. which I and many others support are
helping refugees do this all the time. They don't break and
enter into server rooms and paralyze networks and steal files
to do this.</div>
<div dir="ltr"><br>
</div>
<div dir="ltr">If someone is "neurologically
atypical," which is meant as a badge of pride like "indigo
children," to overcome real or imagined prejudice, that
doesn't mean if they commit suicide, that the government or</div>
<div dir="ltr">society or evil capitalists
or anything of the sort has killed them. They are responsible
for their own actions.</div>
<div dir="ltr"><br>
</div>
<div dir="ltr">I'm going to continue to use
Facebook because there is nothing as good, whatever its
faults. People and groups in poor countries, like Ukraine or
Belarus or Turkemenistan, which I follow, use Facebook as a
kind of free web site -- institutions like the parliament or
the military even of countries like Ukraine have Facebook
pages instead of paying money to maintain websites. They do
this also to avoid censorship in their homelands.</div>
<div dir="ltr">Of course Facebook is where
you keep up with relatives because the imagined privacy
tradeoffs are absolutely nothing like being hacked and doxed
by Anonymous and other criminals, something I've experienced
personally many times because they don't like my criticism,
they are totalitarians. It's not the NSA that exposed people's
privacy when they legitimately gathered data; it's Glenn
Greenwald who put up the photos and information of girlfriends
of the Taliban and their children. And so on.</div>
<div dir="ltr"><br>
</div>
<div dir="ltr">I think few of you ever have
to test your beliefs in the real world and see how they sound
to ordinary people. You could try it at Thanksgiving with your
relatives whom you think are morons because they voted for
Trump. Most often they did that because of disgust at campus
political correctness and extremist techie views imposed on us
all now. But you'd like to pretend it's only because they're
racists. You can go on pretending that and insist on splitting
the Democrats into more and more fine-tuned sectarian
grouplets in which you will feel you have at last achieved
political correctness. But then we'll get Trump again. Thanks!</div>
<div dir="ltr"><br>
</div>
<div dir="ltr">Catherine Fitzpatrick</div>
<div dir="ltr"><br>
</div>
<div dir="ltr"><br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
</div>
<div id="gmail-m_7781575343032960588ydpc59b61cfyahoo_quoted_4310583290">
<div style="font-family:"Helvetica Neue",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;color:rgb(38,40,42)">
<div> On Sunday, November 10, 2019, 03:19:02 PM EST, Rand
Strauss <a href="mailto:rand@peoplecount.org" target="_blank"><rand@peoplecount.org></a> wrote: </div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>
<div id="gmail-m_7781575343032960588ydpc59b61cfyiv6588635272">
<div>
<div>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div dir="ltr">
<div>> you
have a disgusting mentality… </div>
</div>
</blockquote>
</div>
<div><br clear="none">
</div>
<div>Let’s please have
no name-calling here, or pretend people have a
"mentality", much less that one can deduce it. Let’s
keep the conversation constructive and curb our
impulses to insult each other, even to highlight
contrasting views.</div>
<div><br clear="none">
</div>
<div>We have the
institutions we have, and they have advantages and
disadvantages. When the academic publishing groups
began, they added a lot of value- there was no
internet. They were expensive because publishing was
expensive because distribution was inefficient.
Alternatives are emerging.</div>
<div><br clear="none">
</div>
<div>Aaron Swartz was
one of many non-neurotypical people who were born long
before the term was coined. Back then, one was either
fit to stand trial, or unfit, sane or crazy. Today, we
know that there are many spectra of cognitive
abilities and tolerances. Many more people are capable
of standing trial, of thriving in schools, of
contributing in many ways to society if accommodations
are made. Aaron had both genius and
short-sightedness.</div>
<div><br clear="none">
</div>
<div>Clearly Aaron
missed the many compelling perspectives that showed he
was valued and needed and, after a time at least,
could find a community in which he could thrive. And
he continues to have a lot of company in this regard.
Suicide, as well as near-suicide, suicidal thoughts
and depression are all too common, especially in
America. Humanity has made some incredible strides in
understanding and treating these phenomena, but there
are still huge holes in distribution.</div>
<div><br clear="none">
</div>
<div>Many, many
prosecutors have been guilty of overreach, filling
America’s prisons with all sorts of people who should
never have been there, or should have had much shorter
sentences. These prosecutors reflect a large fraction
of society that reacts to small crimes with
name-calling, labelling a whole person as a criminal,
especially if they have a cognitive difference, seem
to oppose an establishment norm, or if their skin is
darkened by pigments. This extends to our schools as
well, with the rallying cry of "zero tolerance."</div>
<div><br clear="none">
</div>
<div>What are we going
to do about it?</div>
<div><br clear="none">
</div>
<div>Except, humanity
also seems to be weak when it comes to "we", and
"doing." </div>
<div><br clear="none">
</div>
<div>For instance, I
have a list of dozens of web-based political-reform
efforts (sites). While all but mine, and perhaps
another, seem unlikely to make a real difference,
there’s no group maintaining the list, much less
embellishing it, much less publishing it, much less
(to my knowledge) studying the phenomena to see what’s
promising and what’s missing (much less working on
mine...)</div>
<div><br clear="none">
</div>
<div>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div dir="ltr">
<div>> We
created it, and it still exists. It's called
Diaspora*. </div>
</div>
</blockquote>
</div>
<div><br clear="none">
</div>
<div>You didn’t even
say how to find it ( <a shape="rect" href="https://diasporafoundation.org/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://diasporafoundation.org/</a> ),
much less how to participate on this list through it.
Is there a LiberationTech pod? I spent 5 minutes
looking around it- it seems almost impenetrable…</div>
<div><br clear="none">
</div>
<div>Does <a shape="rect" href="http://MeWe.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">MeWe.com</a>
satisfy your anti-facebook requirements? We could
make a group there, such as: <a shape="rect" href="https://mewe.com/join/liberationtech" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://mewe.com/join/liberationtech</a>.
To augment, certainly not to replace, this forum.</div>
<div><br clear="none">
</div>
<div>Every single one
of us, and every single one of "them" is every day
doing what we think and feel is appropriate given our
thoughts, feelings and judgements of our abilities,
needs, wants and opportunities in the world. We’re
swept up by inspirations, whether of Aarons
willingness to oppose the the paywalls around
knowledge or the prosecutor’s willingness to defend
society’s rules about property and order. Meanwhile,
Trump has further institutionalized chaos and
stupidity, CO2 levels are averaging about 406, and the
new normal is ever-worsening climate change
catastrophe. While we have many partial answer, we
clearly have a long way to go.</div>
<div><br clear="none">
</div>
<div>'Best wishes as we
approach Thanksgiving.</div>
<div>-r</div>
<div>
<div><br clear="none">
<blockquote type="cite">
<div id="gmail-m_7781575343032960588ydpc59b61cfyiv6588635272yqtfd58988">
<div>On Nov 10,
2019, at 8:11 AM, Yosem Companys <<a shape="rect" href="mailto:ycompanys@gmail.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">ycompanys@gmail.com</a>>
wrote:</div>
<br clear="none">
<div>
<div dir="ltr">
<blockquote style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">In
fact, the masses ✊🏻✊🏽✊🏿 would like to
see an Anti-Facebook - with the potential
for limitless friends, more efficient
algorithms and no distortion of
information. We can all collectively usher
in a more beautiful digital 💻 world, free
of Facebook's limitations and unjust ♠️
social media practices #️⃣</blockquote>
<div><br clear="none">
</div>
<div>But
people need to use such alternate,
community friendly solutions if they are
to dethrone Facebook. And that requires
public awareness. And that requires
mass-scale earned media or expensive
marketing/advertising. (In the absence of
collective action, the only other solution
is turning these networks into public
utilities.)</div>
</div>
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