Political & Elections

The internet may facilitate and organize. But ultimately issues are decided by actual violence or threat of same.

Democracy is just a way of predicting and avoiding violence by counting spears, latter bodies.

Organize all you want. Until someone puts a bullet in Gadaffi or leads him away in chains, he is still a threat.

The obsession with "command and control" loses sight of the fact you need planes in the air and boots on the ground.

Amazing, I think you misunderstand my point.  I don't think what they have recently done is the evil.  But as you have written, they are basically vigilantes, and what vigilantes do is "regularly 'decide' what is good and evil, and act on it without regards to what others think."  I don't know about you, but I have a problem with vigilantes, because you never know what they'll do next. 

Today, it's internet free speech (yay!), but what if tomorrow brings a campaign for veganism, or some other extreme political or social idea?  You have no control over what they may decide to do.  They have the right to believe and say anything they want, but they don't just speak and think, they act.  What happens when they decide to act against something that you like?  Oh, but that would never happen, cause they're all noble and good, right?  And they would never make a mistake in choosing their targets, because the good guys never make mistakes, right?


-- Edited by blankmind on Monday 28th of February 2011 06:24:32 AM

The best way to think about anonymous is as a group of vigilantes. 

Do they regularly break the law?  Yes.  Do they regularly "decide" what is good and evil, and act on it without regards to what others think?  Yes.  They are vigilantes, that is what they do. 

Their goal can be loosely described as an attempt to promote internet freedom and freedom of speech, almost to an extreme degree (there are many different factions within anonymous though).  And they do a fairly good job of achieving it. 

What you need to ask yourself is if you agree with this extreme form of the goal, or not. 

I do not think it is accurate to say that they crippled major businesses who "voluntarily" refused to do business with them.  It was either Joe Biden or Joe Lieberman (I forget which), who was calling companies, threatening them, and demanding that they remove their support/stop doing business with wikileaks.  When something like this is going on, there is really nothing that you can do to stop it.  The point of the attacks was to try to show that giving in to demands such as this isn't worth it. 

Also, there is something much more symbolic going on when anonymous DDoSs a website.  A simplified explanation of what a DDoS attack is is when a bunch of people get together and legitimately access a website a bunch of times, effectively causing a traffic jam on the internet.  Whats interesting about DDoS attacks are that they have existed for a very long time.  Much longer than the internet in fact, as "DDoS attacks" happen all the time in Real Space (as opposed to virtual space).  They are called protests.  Or sit ins.  The only real difference between the 2 is that DDoSing is illegal/condemned in virtual space, but perfectly legal/accepted in Real Space.  Both generally have the same goal, which is to disrupt the service of whoever is being protested.  I would actually argue that virtual DDoS Attacks are less harmful than real-space protests, as real-space protests often times results in tons of physical damages to the surounding area, innocent or not.  Where as the damage from a Virtual DDoS attack ends as soon as the people stop accessing the website. 

In the whole sceme of things, Anonymous actually doesn't directly do that much damage to anyone.  Sure they can take down a website here or there for a day or 2 (insignificant damage), but thats really it.  What they are good at though, is getting significant media attention towards freedom of speech, and censorship issues.  And I think that this is a good thing.


edit:
In response to blankmind.  What is your stance on censorship, freedom of speech, and internet freedoms?  If a country censors things that you are allowed to access on the internet(china, australia, many more), or what your allowed to say, would this be an example of forcing others to their way of thinking?  Are you saying that anonymous is trying to "force" freedom of speech on the world and that this is a bad thing?  How does that even work?  (are you saying that people should have the right to force other people to not say stuff that they don't like and that stopping this is "forcing" freedom of speech?) I would say that their goals are almost exactly the same as your, to prevent other people from forcing their ideas on them. 



-- Edited by amazing on Sunday 27th of February 2011 01:20:54 PM

...I don't know if I would classify sending faxes with proof of government abuse, and allowing internet access when it is blocked, as social engineering.

I agree with you there, but again, just because some of what they do is good doesn't make them good.  I think what they do on the whole is social engineering.  They are deciding what is good for society, hence the attack on businesses on behalf of Assange, because they have decided that he should be allowed continue his "work."

I don't have a problem with what they think, I have a problem with them deciding that the world will live by their beliefs, because if we don't, they will resort to forcing their morality on the world through sabotage & the the threat of it.

busdriver, I agree with your assessment of Assange.  It's a power trip, but he is still deciding between good and evil, ie, everything he wants to do is good, anything that tries to stop him is evil.  He's a legend in his own mind.

As for Anonymous, I will always intensely dislike anyone who tries to force their way of thinking on the world, even if I agree with their way of thinking.  My motto is:  Get out of my life with your social engineering.

You know the old saying, even a broken clock is right twice a day.  They have the ability to do both good and evil; the problem is that they are also deciding what is good and what is evil.  I don't know enough about these people to put my trust in their defiinitions of what's good for me.