<img alt="" height="1" width="1" />Pentagon Gunman,John Patrick Bedell's Facebook And [b]Wikipedia Profiles[/b]
DimeWars (blog)
Pentagon gunman, John Patrick Bedell, who attempted an assault on the government last night has caused quite a stir in the online communities around the web ...

and more »

View the article

Extremist internet libertarian and Wikipedian shoots people.

Rumor has it, he left this message on Wikipedia:

Free Kulture Gunman.

www.bazpedia.com/en/j/p/a/User~JPatrickBedell_18fb.html

en.wikiversity.org/wiki/User:JPatrickBedell

Apparently this was information WMF did not want to be free. But it caught its pants on the barbwire during the Escape from Freedom.

“Simulate the interaction of bullets with simulated biological entities”

Looks like "simulation" was not good enough for him …

I don't know why you call it "libertarian" when somebody wants stuff to be "free" to all without having to pay for it. Why not "internet socialist" or "internet communist"? That's much closer.

Do you really think "libertarians" are for "free culture," in the sense of "free medical care" and "free ice cream"? Meaning no intellectual property? It's all commons? Sorry, you're sadly confused, if so.

AFAICT, libertarian is a barbarism for exfalsoquodlibetarian, to wit, or not, a person with no consistent principles at all, who therefore affects belief in wutevah comes to hand by way of rationalizing wutevah.

Jon

The sectarian left had a slogan used while the various alphabet parties beat each other over the head: "Left in form, Right in content." That does describe Free Kulture pretty well. It has at bottom a fetish like belief in markets. There is no "Copy Left" as Stallman would claim. Only "Copy Extreme Right." As Kato has noticed the most outspoken critics of Free Culture in the music industry include socialists like singer/songwriter Billy Bragg. Remember socialists want people to be rewarded for their labor. Exploiting the labor of others and transferring the costs of business created nuisances to the public are cards from the deck of the Right.

Besides this guy clearly self identified as a libertarian.

I don't really care how he "self-identified." Hitler self-identified as a socialist and so did Stalin. But Stalin also called himself a communist and Hitler didn't. I suspect a lot of other self-identifying commies and socialists want nothing to do with either one of them.

Was Hitler left or "extreme right"? Well, the popular view is that he was "extreme right." How do we know? Because the extreme left didn't like him, nor he them. But otherwise, looking at Hitler's Germany vs. Stalin's USSR, it's hard to tell the difference. Political ideologies don't lie on a linear line, as has been pointed out here many times. It's probably closer to say they lie in a circle, with the extreme ends biting each other, in sort of an Operation Ouro-barbarosa, if you will. Individual liberty is probably in another dimension or direction or plane entirely.

Yeah, I'm sure there are a lot of leftist writers who suddenly become very property oriented, when the property involves their copyrights. That's not idiology-- it's merely human hypocricy. The average person is left-of-center when it involves somebody else's stuff, and right-of-center when it involves their own stuff. So? Boring.

Socialism originally as Lenin reformulated it did NOT involve rewarding people for their labor, but only supplying their needs. They had to change that.

And yes, the idea of socialism is rewarding people for their LABOR but not their productivity. Unfortunately, since the universe doesn't work that way, it's an economically untenable idea. Nor does it work in the arts, as somebody can labor years to produce crap, while somebody else might produce a timeless work after a night of dope-smoking. Very unfair.

It's sometimes educational to students to give one who has earned an A, a "C." On the basis that they didn't work very hard (too little labor), due to being a lot smarter than some other kid who did earn the C (who you naturally give an A, because he NEEDS it to get into grad school). Do enough of this, and you can make young commies into Republicans.

I try to avoid the political discussions in the lounge etc. You, H, anthony etc are not people I would care to discuss politics generally with. If you don't know what part of the political spectrum Hilter belongs to there is no point to talking with you.



Vain, elitist crap. My work-good. Others work-worthless.

As to the shooter politics: He was not unsophisticated. He was steeped in the Austrian School and was more informed than the average internet libertarian. He seemed to grasp the connection between, Free Kulture, atomized content creation on Wikis and right wing libertarian politics. It is likely that he figured this out long before it was raised by its critics here.

There are currently five paragraphs in WP article on Bedell dealing with his beliefs. They contain not a single word about his belief in Free Kulture although this was obviously an import part of his constellation and better sources exist to establish that than the beliefs covered.

If you don't want political arguments, then don't start them by applying political labels. I'm sorry for trying to make you think. Yes, the Left has managed to label Hitler as a "far-rightist" despite his socialist state (hence the name "Nazi"). It is actually the case that "right" is a name the left applies to any poltical ideology it doesn't like. "Far-right" to the Left just means WP:IDONTLIKEIT. The left calls libertarians far right, too, suggesting that, from their view, they actually can't tell Nazis from libertarians. Yep, those old rugged individualist minarchist Nazis.


Oh, no. Actually the opposite view, that only I or my Socialist Party can tell the genuine value of something, by some magical means outside its consensus value (see market value), is the ultimate elitism. Whenever you hear somebody complain that somebody knows the price of everything but the value of nothing, you're actually hearing somebody claim by implication that THEY know the true value of something (anything), without needing to consult anybody else about it. They know it by virtue of their superior moral judgement. No democracy or market required-- you just do as The Party says. Don't tell us what you want; we'll tell you what you actually NEED.

Meh.

Reforming (de-commercializing) intellectual property law would be one of several conditions necessary for a health-care "package" to be worth what anyone directly or indirectly pays for it.

But surely you know any attempts at non-binary thought on this forum will only hurt people's feelings.

Take your hands off of my wallet I make quite a bit of my money off of my intellectual property rights. Unless you want to make everything free, then just stop this discussion of my property and what I can do with it.

Anybody can write a book/a song/paint a painting/etc. If you want to use one of mine, you're going to have to pay for it.

Jump ahead to the end of the road. If the Free Kulture people prevail and all information is "free" and the connection between creation and compensation is severed then all that remains to determine who is able to profit from information is which players currently dominate in the ability to assemble capital needed to distribute and monetize the now "free" information. This means players like Google, Microsoft, the telecoms, etc. What you are looking at is a kind of super-exploitation on the level of feudalism, chattel slavery and imperialism.

Creative people end up as beggars in the world they made. Capitalist Uber-men again roam the earth unfettered and free from burden of having to content with pesky troublesome "labor."

Now do you get why Free Culture is embraced by Randiods and right wing extremists, even if under a vernier of social collaboration and collective good?

I beg you all to stop polluting the already incredibly confused discourse of political theory with the useless concepts of "left" and "right". They are meaningless labels, which are far outdated, and they also change over time.

Also, an observation, I have noticed over the time I've been here that Ayn Rand is always the person mentioned alongside libertarianism. Why does no one ever mention Nozick?

Free culture is not embraced by either "Randoids" or right wing extremists (unless you define "right wing extremists" that way, ipso facto; but where's the thought in that?). Atlas Shrugged is about as anti-free-culture as a book can be. Those bastards in Galt's Gulch had to pay to get into every musical concert-- there were no free ones. The entire book is about instances of theft of property, intellectual and otherwise.

Wales may be a Randroid, but to the extent he talks about free stuff for the masses, he's nowhere near that idiology. He personally doesn't give away a thing that he owns on Wikia. All his free culture talk is aimed at getting people to donate their time to building a work that HE can somewhat control, that's all. There's no political idiology in it, beyond simple greed. And you don't need to be a Randroid for that.

Ok you haven't understood a word I've said. Meanwhile try to recall this thread is about a terrorist shooter who embraced libertarian politics and free culture. Too bad that understanding that connection steps on libertarian toes but the connection is very real.

No, I'd like an American health-care system where the average patient premium doesn't mysteriously exceed the per capita GDP of most countries (including some which have better health-care).

Sorry if I've threatened your ability to retire early while the government decides whom to borrow/steal from in order to pay you.

Sheez, what planet are you on? Do you think that the government is paying those intellectual property rights? Performance Rights Organizations are unions of artists, not governmental agencies.

It's not about retiring early. It's about being paid for work. Simple as that.

Probably because he wrote no fiction. We like stories. I was influenced by Anarchy, State, and Utopia when it came out, and actually there's a paperback of it on my shelf.

Actually, Milton Friedman's Free to Choose is an even better book. Milton was somewhat less anarchistic than his son David, and always made better sense to me.

Here's an essay of Bedell's that was deleted from Meta this morning with the summary "Off-topic: please read Meta's inclusion policy". That is funny on several levels.



He was also active on Wikia, where published his arrest report for cultivating cannabis.

Please. Nozick is second only to Rawls among twentieth century political theorists (it is a distant second, though). Friedman, assuredly, is one of the foremost economists of all time, but I have never seen a word by him on a political theory syllabus. Friedman isn't even one of the most influential economists in political theory (I would confer the honor of most influential on Arrow, but there's room for debate). Free to Choose does not make any new or important contributions to political philosophy. Anarchy, State, and Utopia, on the other hand (while I disagree with much of it) is a significant and important text that placed a minimalist state on thorough philosophical foundations.

As familiar adages go, they spend your money just like it was your money, and they'll borrow from Peter to pay Paul. As one well runs dry they'll siphon funds from another program on the basis that this one is too important to fail (and who could disagree?).

I don't mean to imply a moral equivalence between your (what's this?) performance art and the pharmaceutical industry but I thought you were a little quick to take the latter's defense. GlaxoSmithKline, for example, always has the upper hand in negotiations. People don't die of treatable illness simply because a guild of minstrels and troubadours held out for more money.

If all of economics were about the market fetish that would be true.

So: you don't like Wikipedia, for whatever reason, and therefore you feel you need to redefine the terms so that free culture is associated with something else you don't like (libertarianism).

The reality is that a lot of people on the far-right are appallingly misinformed. That's why those extremist "teabaggers" rail against "Wall Street and the banks" even though their political philosophy is fundamentally oriented to benefit the economic elite. To expect consistency out of many of these people, especially the ones nutty enough to open fire at the Pentagon, is quite unrealistic.

If your point is that capitalism always preserves the same entrenched interests forever, that is somewhat undermined by your specific examples: Google was founded in 1998, and Microsoft in 1975, and both had a long period of being fairly small businesses run by people outside the entrenched institutions of their time, before growing to massive size. Only the telecoms, some of which date back to the 1800s, are truly examples of long-term entrenched institutions, and they have suffered a great deal of tumult in the last few decades, and the need to greatly reinvent themselves instead of just remaining fat and lazy.

In reality, extremists (both "right-wingers" like vic and "left-wingers" like yourself) aren't really misinformed, you're just so entrenched in your ideologies that truth goes out the window.

That's not the kind of right-wingers who make problems on WP, at least for the most part. It is the internet libertarians. You sympathize with them in their inability to demonstrate self restraint which gives you more content. You support them when they dump burdens and costs on the wider society in their refusal to anything about child protection or BLP issues. You join them in celebrating "free culture" as it raids public galleries. You enlist in their crusade to make the wiki barrier free for participation (a further shift of burden outside the project.) You cheer when they indulge themselves in being "non-censored" at any cost (to others.) Finally you get duped by them as they present their private appropriation of your own work as a benefit to society.

You might be able to put distance between yourself and the "tea baggers" but you are a tool of the Right.

This thread is akin to one of the hot tubs at Harbin Hot Springs,
in which a bunch of old hippies sit and squabble. For hours.