More thoughts about ‘Anonymous’ and the #occupy crowd

The #occupy folks are still at it – still sounding rather shrill, poorly informed and selfish.

Most are idealistic – yes, I’ll give them points for that.  (On the honesty front, that is.)

But they also sound dangerously naive and deeply ignorant.  And if we san see the historical pattern, honest idealism coupled with naivite and ignorance is usually a deadly combination.

What makes it even scarier is that some very pragmatic forces have successfully infiltrated the movement and are focusing the idealistic crowds to their own ends.  That also is a historical pattern – with grave consequences (pun intended).

Psema4 commented on my earlier post about Anonymous (where I expressed my conviction that these #occupy protests were seeded by them) where he (she?) expressed similar misgivings about Anonymous and left a link to this site:  ‘What is The Plan’.  (Thank you for bringing it to my attention!)

On the home page, there is this movie:

Was your reaction to the video similar to mine?  I think that the neo-marxist semi-anarchist drivel that we hear from the majority of the #occupy people sounds very much like the remnants of this rant…

First things first:  the video is demonstrably self-contradictory.  At about 7 1/2 minutes, it claims that there is no such thing as membership in Anonymous, while just before the 9 minute mark, it boasts it has 50 thousand members.  That is just the most easily demonstrated internal  inconsistency within the video…  There are a few more, but they would take a long time to pull out and dissect – plus I am sure most people will have picked up on them anyway.

If you find the first part of the video painfully tedious, you can skip forward a bit: ‘The Plan’ comes up at around the 8:40 mark.  As Psema4 pointed out, the pattern for ‘The Plan’ as outlined in the video would very much fit in with the #occupy ‘movement’, either as step 2 or step 3…

These people sound a lot like a bunch of insulated anarcho-marxists and elitists who want to take a shortcut to fixing what is wrong with the world.  These types of short cuts have a history of becoming very bloody and resulting in great loss of civil liberties.

As long as Anonymous had limited themselves to the role of ‘the man with no name’, I had little problem with them.  But playing Russian roulette with a revolution?  That is immoral, plain and simple.

Like CodeSlinger said:  “End well, this will not!”

UKIP’s Nigel Farage on the need for ‘the referendum’

 

Ezra Levant speaks up for women

Because a person’s a person, no matter how small!

…or how female…

…or how Muslim…

 

 

Thoughts about ‘Anonymous’ and the #occupy protests

Why is ‘Anonymous’ so much on my ‘radar’ now?

Couple of reasons…

They are, well, enigmatic…  When a big company picks on little guys – and this appears on their radar – they kick but.  Their aims are altruistic – perhaps idealistic – at least for now.  And they are big-time fans of freedom of speech!

They are techies who are kicking some slick behinds – you have GOT to love that!  (OK, I am indulging in a bit of tribalism here – even if the ‘tribe’ is diffuse and I don’t know them personally. I suspect that most of the people behind Anonymous are Aspies or have strong Aspie tendencies:  they are, after all, techies.  And I like to think that I am rather good at playing ‘spot the Aspie’.  The rules they pick and the way they adhere to them:  very Aspie-like…)

We are still full of the #occupy news….and Anonymous was there first.  No, I don’t think that the majority of people who are there now are in any way connected to Anonymous, but, please, consider the following:

  • before anything happened, Anonymous announced the protests and said to look for them there, on Wall St.
  • when the occupation of Wall St. first started, there was an almost complete news blackout on it
  • Anonymous had hacked into some local CCTV cameras and streamed the signal – that was, at the very beginning, the ONLY coverage of the event
  • then, as time went on, the professional protesters and their media henchmen began to trickle in…and Anonymous disappeared from the picture…
  • now, the protests are creatures of the professional protesters and the big money behind them – including semi-official backing by the US President and his minions, with absolutely no role played by Anonymous (that I can discern)

It is not a coincidence that the vast majority of the people protesting in the #occupy movement have no idea what they want to accomplish with this protest:  it is not a ‘regular’ protest of the sort where people want to accomplish a specific goal, analyze the approaches to achieving this goal and then choose protesting as their tool.  Rather, I suspect, this may have been a bit of an experiment…

…an experiment to see IF Anonymous can harness the power of the professional protest organizers when they need to – and to get an idea of how it would play out.

…an experiment to see how ‘neurotypicals’ (non-techies/non-Aspies) would react and behave, to gage their intelligence, initiative and individuality – or lack thereof in this type of a situation.  How soon and how deeply would ‘mob mentallity’ set in?

…an experiment to see whether ‘if we build it, they will come’ would work with protests.

Recently, when an Islamist group doc-dropped/outed Thunderf00t and his family members and threatened them by urging ‘all Muslims to do their duty’ because he dares to criticize Islam (he criticizes all irrational belief systems – systematically and effectively), Thunderf00t dropped the name of Anonymous as his protectors….and potential avengers!

Which got me thinking:  this is not the first time Thunderf00t has talked about Anonymous in his videos.  So, I went back and looked through his earliest material.  Here it is:

Interesting, is it not?

But there is more here, here, here, here (note the Guy Fawkes mask in the background) and here.

Not just in what Thunderf00t says – and how he says it, but also in how fascinated Anonymous is by Scientology.  Remember how, a few years back, they tried to build some sort of a movement against that cult?  I wonder if this is an indication of their fascination in how brainwashed neurotypical behave in groups … or the source of this fascination.

Don’t get me wrong – I do not think Anonymous has bad intentions.  I rather suspect that they are attempting to figure out how to help neurotypicals help themselves from self-imposed servitude (if this was not a full fledged attempt of its own to get them to help themselves).

But experiments/projects can go wrong – and more people than just Anonymous are keenly watching this and taking notes.

Collectivism/Anarcho-Communism

The very first step in learning about someone’s life-philosophy/belief system is to listen to what they say.  The second step is to listen to what those ‘close’ to them who disagree with them have to say…

All these #occupy movements seem to have a distinct anarcho-communist undertones…even if, at times, only partially matured.

This has sent me digging around for what do other anarchists think of them:

The Supreme Court of Canada: hyperlink to your heart’s content!

The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that inserting a hyperlink does not constitute re-publishing (Crookes v Newton).

Justice Abella wrote:

Hyperlinks thus share the same relationship with the content to which they refer as do references.  Both communicate that something exists, but do not, by themselves, communicate its content.  And they both require some act on the part of a third party before he or she gains access to the content.  The fact that access to that content is far easier with hyperlinks than with footnotes does not change the reality that a hyperlink, by itself, is content neutral – it expresses no opinion, nor does it have any control over, the content to which it refers.

There is much equivocation in the ruling, so it cannot be regarded as a full victory of reason – but it is close.  And it clearly states that one should err on the side f not restricting free speech:

To prove the publication element of defamation, a plaintiff must establish that the defendant has, by any act, conveyed defamatory meaning to a single third party who has received it.  Traditionally, the form the defendant’s act takes and the manner in which it assists in causing the defamatory content to reach the third party are irrelevant.  Applying this traditional rule to hyperlinks, however, would have the effect of creating a presumption of liability for all hyperlinkers.  This would seriously restrict the flow of information on the Internet and, as a result, freedom of expression. (my emphasis)

H/T:  Walker

Also see commentary by Michael Geist and Dr. Dawg

UPDATE:  Ezra Levant has an opinion, too:

Donna Laframboise: a book is born

Donna Laframboise is the corageous Canadian journalist who has taken on the ACC/Global Warmmongers.

She is the one who conducted the IPCC audit (in which your never-humble correspondant participated) which clearly demonstrated that the IPCC did not use ‘peer-reviewed scientific publications’ as the sources of information on which it drew to created its reports.

Her new book is out!!!

(Check out the free preview – it is 7 chapters long!)

Europe v. Facebook

Voluntaryists are checking out the #occupy movement

Voluntaryism seems to me to be a very reasonable philosophical point of view.

It is interesting to see this voluntaryanist plans to check out the #occupy movement:

UKIP: Nicolas Dupont-Aignan MP – France now has a Eurosceptic voice !