Posted on January 26, 2012 – 11:09 in Features | Steven
A Discourse On SOPA
You Win A Battle But You Lose The War
Up until last week this is where I would have left this story. At that point the momentum created on the internet had reached a sort of terminal velocity that actually caused a real life reaction with more and more government types publicly distancing themselves from SOPA or at least admitting that the bill needed changing. Since I am yet to meet a politician I would trust I didn’t believe any of that shit though and knew something was up. Unfortunately, the collective attention spam of my generation and those younger than me is so short, that once even just one of those puppets uttered the desired words, all movement ceased and we went back to creating memes that mostly deal with cats, stoners, or the idiocy of the religious. Awesome, but not really. See- politicians and their puppet masters have more money available to them then any of us can ever hope to make, and money attracts talent, and that talent is mercenary- SOPA, in its current is still being voted up and chances are it will pass.
But does that even matter?
The big news last week was the arrest of Kim Dotcom and the closure of his site Megaupload. As I mentioned earlier this week: “the U.S. Justice Department not only indicted the owners of one of the world’s largest websites, the file-sharing site Megaupload, but also seized and shut down that site, and also seized or froze millions of dollars of its assets — all based on the unproved accusations, set forth in an indictment, that the site deliberately aided copyright infringement.”
I mean holy shit right? After everyone got pissed that their files were gone, can we stop and think about this for a minute? A person was arrested, his business shut down and his assets frozen ( read stolen ) “all based on unproved accusations”…
Put it this way, if I piss someone off with this article, and they lobby the US Justice Department with enough cash to convince that I MIGHT be doing something along the lines of what Kim Dotcom did, I can be arrested, without a charge, without trial merely based on accusations? Land of the Free?
I fucking think not. Right now, there is no actual difference between our world and the one we have been bombing for the past 20 years to install our Freedom. You get what I am saying. Essentially, we are back to times prior to French Revolution. If you don’t have money to protect yourself, you are at the whim of the King/ Congress / Parliament to simply disappear. The constitutions we all have to adhere to, do not count for those we PAY to upkeep them and protect us.