This Week In Techdirt History: June 14th - 20th
from the and-so-on dept
Five Years Ago
This week in 2015, we saw some hall-of-fame FUD about Edward Snowden from the Sunday Times in the UK. The piece was rapidly trashed by Glenn Greenwald, leading News Corp. to abuse the DMCA in an attempt to hide the criticism. Facing ongoing scrutiny, the reporter who wrote the piece eventually admitted that he just wrote down whatever the government told him, and the editor doubled down on this suggesting that any questions about the story should be directed to the government. Meanwhile, Bruce Schneier was making a much more reasonable point about the same core issue: that Russia and China probably have the Snowden docs, but not because of Snowden.
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2010, we looked at yet another example of how ludicrous it is to expect YouTube to magically know which videos are infringing, while Rapidshare was countersuing Perfect 10 over copyright trolling, and music publishers were trying to pile on the already-dead Limewire. The Hurt Locker producers were deep in their copyright shakedown scheme, while at the same time touting their free speech rights against the soldier who claimed they used his life story. One ISP tried to get very creative and charge users to block file sharing to avoid copyright strikes — and ended up installing malware that broadcast their private information. Meanwhile, long before today's ongoing dust-up that is drawing everyone in, we covered an earlier conversation about "fixing" Section 230.
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2005, we saw the latest in a long string of reports urging the recording industry to embrace file sharing, while some people were working on yet another pipe-dream of universal DRM, and libraries were developing their systems for limiting the use of digital materials as though they were physical. Amazon was trying to patent more basics of e-commerce, while a patent troll reared its head with a 1998 patent that appeared to cover transmitting any information over a network, at all. And we saw the clearest death-knell for the VCR when Wal-Mart announced it would stop selling VHS movies.
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Someone messed up the formatting on Ten Years Ago: there's a stray comma in the href.
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Stray apostrophe, but yes, fixed now. Sorry about that.
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This week Trump said "There is no way I'm going down that ramp without falling on my ass, General".
It was really steep, it was slicker than an ice skating rink, really really really steep and slippery, no kidding.
I remember when another president threw up in Japan, that was embarrassing, wasn't it? NOT ME! OK, General, let's go, falling would be a disaster, but no, I actually WISH I had fallen all the way down the damn ramp. And then when we reached the end, the FAKE NEWS cut the signal off, just like that, I actually RAN DOWN the last part but they wouldn't show that, would they? FAKE NEWS!
I LOVE THIS GUY! Trump 2020!
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Inject yourself with bleach today yet, Hamilton?
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Pretty much every news agency I can think of showed the entire walk down the ramp. Even if given the charitable interpretation that his last few steps count as “running”, it was three or four steps at most, not the ten feet Trump claimed to have “run”.
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Right. He's a liar. He's a Racist. And you're a Marxist. Talk some more about the "rich and the powerful" and how "common people" don't get a fair shake, Stephen. I love it when you quote Engels.
The term Marxism was popularized on Techdirt by Stephen T. Stone, who considered himself an orthodox Marxist during the dispute between the orthodox and revisionist followers of Marx. Stone's revisionist rival Eduard Bernstein also later adopted use of the term
Engels, however, did not support the use of the term Marxism to describe either Marx's or his own view, and he thought Stone was an idiot. Most people agreed, about Stone, anyway. He claimed that the term was being abusively used as a rhetorical qualifier by those attempting to cast themselves as real followers of Marx while casting others in different terms such as Lesbian Separatists (Wendy Cockcroft). Engels claimed that Marx had criticized self-proclaimed Marxist Stephen T. Stone by saying that if Stone's views were considered Marxist, then "one thing is certain and that is that I am not a Marxist. But at least I'm not as ugly and stupid as Stephen T. Stone".
Stone claimed that at a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or—this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms—with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution.
And that's where Stephen T. Stone has spent the majority of his life. Social revolution. He's in desperate need of a revolution, because the existing society rejects him, along with Marx and Engels, as the idiot asshole that he is.
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Yeah, Stone's an idiot, that's for sure. Everyone knows that. Just read his posts.
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Get a room, you two IP addresses.
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Marxism was just a red herring.
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Red Herring
https://disrn.com/news/video-surfaces-of-black-lives-matter-founder-saying-were-trained-marxists
Red Herring? I THINK NOT!
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Ed Snowden should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The award would be even better if it was shared with Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning.
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The first of those is not like the others.
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I disagree. Julian Assange may have ego issues, but without Assange and Manning, we would not have seen the video of US soldiers firing on and killing reporters and civilians.
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