Ruling Expected on Twittering Anarchist Raided Under ‘Rioting’ Laws

wired.com

32 points·phsr··7 comments

If Madison were an Iranian using Twitter to coordinate government protests, he’d likely be considered a hero in the West.

While I don't agree with this guy's ideology, it is interesting to see how our government reacts when "disruptive" technologies such as twitter are turned against it. It certainly looks like the police overstepped their bounds, but regardless of whether this guy gets convicted, the police have already won. They succeeded in taking this guy out of play for most of the G20.

There were many others doing what he did. Yeah, he was the best, but I was still getting plenty of updates from other people.

I guess using twitter for political organizing falls in the same category as DDT: fine for other nations, illegal in the US.

Is the US really the land of the free still?

Slavery, the Alien and Sedition Acts, Japanese internment camps, eminent domain, the Federal Reserve, the Drug War, the military-industrial complex...

I think the better question is: has it ever been?

Until the 1964 Civil Rights Act, women and racial minorities had their rights curtailed by law. The Family Laws of the earlier Progressive period had established that women should be paid less than men, the nominal goal being to raise men's wages so they could support a family. Women didn't get a nation-wide right to open a mutual fund till the 1970s ("nation-wide" meaning some states allowed it, and some states didn't).

It would be tough to pick out a year when America was ever really free. The best it can claim is that, for a long time, it was doing better than other countries. But it seems to me that Europe caught up a long time ago.

Yes it is still the land of Free white christian political conformists.

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