Hey You!
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- Hey You. Yes, You. If You’re 15, The Sky is falling. Act now.
One day you’ll be the President, the Prime Minister, Chief of Police, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
Or maybe the Pope.
- You, who won’t be allowed to drive on sandy beaches with that SUV you’ll buy when you’re old enough.
- You who can’t go fishing without first buying a special license.
- You, who may not be able to go online because every page costs $25.00
- You, whose credit card is tied to a toll system that’ll tell the government everywhere you go, how often and how fast.
- You, who’ll receive a criminal record for life for downloading Spiderman-3.
Say what?
The governments your parents elected are conspiring to remove your civil rights.
- Your right to enjoy life.
- Your right to obtain and keep steady employment.
- Your right to have a family home.
- Your right to have an economical fuel supply.
- You right to breathe clean air.
- Your right to survive.
But don’t get me wrong — it’s not your parents fault. They didn’t know the politicians they voted in would turn against the people .
Your parents thought they were voting for honest, upstanding individuals who’d change the bad things in the world and make them good again.
But unfortunately, the people they voted for got bought.
Have you ever noticed how some of them have more to say than others? These are the people who influence your thinking. Without you even realizing it.
Unfortunately, though, their points of view may be bad for you because they’re created by commercial interests that want their profits now and don’t care about your future sustainable lifestyle.
Hey! When you get to be president, or whatever, these guys will be six foot under. Why should they care about you now?
So get off your ass. Do something that tells the current politicians you won’t be voting for them if they keep this up.
Write to them. Tell them how you feel.
Tell them when you’re 18, or whatever the ‘legal’ age is where you live, you want to be able to get a job – without travelling to China because that’s where all the factories are.
Tell them you’ll pay for the movies you want to watch. But that doesn’t mean they should put you in a juvenile home now for downloading. Or bankrupt your parents for a couple of songs.
Tell them you’re concerned about the current incursions into your personal privacy.
Tell them when you become an adult, you can censor your own material and don’t need them to do it for you.
How?
Make it Face book project.
Make is a class or school project.
Draw up a petition and circulate it around to all the houses in your neighbourhood and knock on everyone’s door to sign your petition (and even if only ten people sign your petition – that’s a start.)
When?
Now is good.
Tomorrow will be already too late for some things.
To start you off, I suggest »»»
Hi, my name is …….. I was born on …../…../19xx and I’m worried.
I’m so worried about current events that will adversely affect my future I thought I’d write to you and explain why I may decide not to vote for you when I become a legal voter.
I’m worried about …
I hope you can do something about this, because I do want a future.
Yours faithfully,
<——- insert your name here.
Citizen of the World.
Tom Koltai – p2pnet
[Koltai is an economist in Sydney Australia. He's says he's been online for 26 years, has run several ISPs and, "lobbied governments in four countries to prevent Internet restrictive usage legislation from being enacted". He says he's a strong believer in P2P, "as being a technological requirement to fully exploit the convergence of telephony with computers and remove the last barriers to human communication and interaction".]
May, 2009
Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. It’s really easy! Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php
Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details.
May 25th, 2009 at 10:04 am
If its a human beach, SUVs don’t belong there. If it’s a natural beach, SUVs especially don’t belong there. Why do you think people deserve the right to act like jerks?
Fish are a communal resource, if it is ethical to think of them as a resource at all. Why should we not expect people to get a license to exploit the commons for their own ends?
I’m a lot more concerned by the fact that you need to have a credit card to enjoy so many of the expected privileges of adulthood.
May 25th, 2009 at 11:02 am
you see what we have to contend with Tom, you post a great article about the whittling away of human rights, and some asshat sheeple posts to rain on your parade. Nice article by the way, it points out the drastic measures needed to return what should never have been taken away in the first place.
stw
May 25th, 2009 at 11:14 am
It was a vapid call for further vapidness.
May 25th, 2009 at 11:20 am
Okay, that was too glib to be understandable.
Total freedom is anarchy. I’m willing to give it a try, but it’s sort of the antithesis of modern human civilization. The examples given are either examples of perfectly reasonable restrictions (given that reasonable people may sometimes differ) on our freedom intended to benefit all of us, or examples of corruption of government by private interests. To jumble them all up together as some sort of insidious but inexplicable, supervillain-like assault on our “rights” is asinine. The proposed solution is even worse.
The real solution is to educate yourself. If you believe this crap, you’re in no position to help anyone.
May 25th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
“Total freedom is anarchy.”
Right now we don’t have this problem so I don’t see the point talking about this while our societies and our contries are in perile.
May 25th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
Nobody is proposing anarchy at this point.
But for the US what is proposed is to go back to stick to the constitution.
Is it too much to ask the governement to abid by the supreme law of the land and not try to enforce unconstitutional pseudo laws such as the DMCA?
Eroding the law is a foolish and stupid thing to do for corporate leaders because once the law is gone this is the law of the strongest, the true Anarchy.
Clearly they are physically weak and they don’t stand a chance in such a setup even if they try to pay somebody to protect them.
May 25th, 2009 at 2:49 pm
“Right now we don’t have this problem so I don’t see the point talking about this while our societies and our contries are in perile.”
I said that only to establish the baseline. If we have *no* restrictions on our freedom, we live in anarchy. Most of us don’t want that, so most of us agree that some restrictions on freedom are a *good thing*.
The premise of the OP is that “the sky is falling”, and something must be done about it. However, the evidence that the sky is falling that we are offered is practically non-existent, and the solution is, apparently, to appeal to the cynically political side of the same tossers who (allegedly) caused the sky to start to fall.
Want to save our habitat? Learn permaculture. Want to save our nations? Learn history and political science. Me, I’d be happy to see the sky cave in.
May 25th, 2009 at 8:07 pm
Where I grew up, a long time ago, no one drove on the beaches. When I saw an American show with them doing that (probably the Monkees or something) I was waiting for them to be arrested.
May 26th, 2009 at 12:10 am
“The governments your parents elected are conspiring to remove your civil rights.”
You got that right. Or it should be more correctly stated, “the US is conspiring to remove your civil rights” via every lobby group going.
Even the UK court judges can’t call for an inquiry into what happened with their people because the US threatened to pull intel support if they did.
May 27th, 2009 at 1:47 pm
Beach baby, Beach Baby give me your hand
Give me somethin’ that I can remember
Just like before we can walk by the shore in the moonlight
Beach baby, Beach baby there on the sand
From July ’till the end of September
Surfin’ was fun, we’d be out in the sun every day
Mmmm, I never thought that it would end
Oooooh oooooh, mmmm, and I was everybody’s friend Ooooh ooooh
Long hot days
Cool Sea haze
Juke box plays
But now it’s fading awaaaaay
From THE FIRST CLASS
Sorry for that, but all the irrelevant prattle responding to one sentence in any article just got me into a sandy kind of mood.
May 27th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
Ooops correction…
Sorry for that, but all the irrelevant prattle responding to one sentence in the article just got me into a sandy kind of mood.
June 4th, 2009 at 11:53 am
Bull. Government merely conspires to remain government. Commercial interests exploit that to make us pay for what we think of as our rights. Writing letters does no good, you need to write cheques in either case. Or, just unplug.