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voodoo

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Re: L. Neil Smith turns out to be a statist asshole
« Reply #105 on: July 19, 2010, 07:05:39 PM »

Whatever's making him act like a prick.

Seems the title of this thread stuck in his craw.
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Cognitive Dissident

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Re: L. Neil Smith turns out to be a statist asshole
« Reply #106 on: July 19, 2010, 07:13:13 PM »

Whatever's making him act like a prick.

Seems the title of this thread stuck in his craw.

You think he'd "lower himself" to reading this thread?
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Andy

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Re: L. Neil Smith turns out to be a statist asshole
« Reply #107 on: July 19, 2010, 10:55:11 PM »

Whatever's making him act like a prick.

Seems the title of this thread stuck in his craw.

You think he'd "lower himself" to reading this thread?

Seems like he's at least read the title.

I'd be behind the guy using any kind of harsh language he likes... at Ian. It does seem like he's collectivising people weirdly though.

Terror Australis

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Re: L. Neil Smith turns out to be a statist asshole
« Reply #108 on: July 19, 2010, 11:09:40 PM »

I am thoroughly disgusted by his behaviour.I wrote him  a couple of emails about most of the things I have been hearing about and the responses I received are unprintable in  polite society.The amount of anger Neil displays makes me wonder if he is about to go postal.Has anyone seen the movie with michael douglas where he plays the middle aged man who breaks down and goes on a rampage?I expect neil to turn up in Keene with baseball bats.He is best avoided at all costs.
« Last Edit: July 19, 2010, 11:11:27 PM by Terror Australis »
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Terror Australis

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Re: L. Neil Smith turns out to be a statist asshole
« Reply #109 on: July 19, 2010, 11:17:35 PM »

In case anyone is interested, L. Neil has posted his defense of I.P.:

http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2010/tle579-20100718-02.html

Underwhelming.

I only got as far as this-

Quote
millions of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and others were stripped of their perceived humanity in the 1940s and massacred.

Godwin's law in the first paragraph lmao!
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Terror Australis

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Re: L. Neil Smith turns out to be a statist asshole
« Reply #110 on: July 19, 2010, 11:36:30 PM »

Quote
by leftists deeply involved in what was billed as the "Civil Rights Movement"

What does this insinuation mean?Does he think people can own slaves and call them "property"?
« Last Edit: July 20, 2010, 02:11:47 AM by Terror Australis »
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BobRobertson

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"I regret that I am now to die in the belief that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776 to acquire self-government and happiness to their country is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be that I live not to weep over it."
-- Thomas Jefferson, April 26th 1820

Sam Gunn (since nobody got Admiral Naismith)

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Re: L. Neil Smith turns out to be a statist asshole
« Reply #112 on: July 20, 2010, 12:10:16 AM »

Everyone involved in this situation is a jerk off.  They shouldn't have plagiarized his work.  They should have asked permission.  He shouldn't have flipped out like he did.  He could have easily used this situation as a huge PR move instead.

Now everyone looks like assholes.
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John Shaw

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Re: L. Neil Smith turns out to be a statist asshole
« Reply #113 on: July 20, 2010, 12:24:39 AM »

Everyone involved in this situation is a jerk off.  They shouldn't have plagiarized his work.  They should have asked permission.  He shouldn't have flipped out like he did.  He could have easily used this situation as a huge PR move instead.

Now everyone looks like assholes.
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BobRobertson

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Re: L. Neil Smith turns out to be a statist asshole
« Reply #114 on: July 20, 2010, 12:28:42 AM »

Everyone involved in this situation is a jerk off.  They shouldn't have plagiarized his work.  They should have asked permission.  He shouldn't have flipped out like he did.  He could have easily used this situation as a huge PR move instead.

Not permission, it's a published work.

Attribution, yes. Much louder than it already was, specifically because it was so obviously derivative of the earlier work.

And no shit both sides could have used it for PR. Big, hand-shaking, sloppy kissing, massive orgy PR.

...but instead it turned to...

Quote
Now everyone looks like assholes.

Yep.

As mentioned in another forum on this subject, I've been reading L.Neil's works for years. I never would have said he would go Randroid like this, considering the individual liberties expressed in his works.

They are quite good, I suggest folks look them up even with all this crap going on. They're well worth reading.

The only "good" that I can see coming from this is a better understanding of the issues surrounding I.P. for everyone.

Sadly, it seems only to have reinforced the position of those who HAD positions prior to the event.
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"I regret that I am now to die in the belief that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776 to acquire self-government and happiness to their country is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be that I live not to weep over it."
-- Thomas Jefferson, April 26th 1820

Cognitive Dissident

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Re: L. Neil Smith turns out to be a statist asshole
« Reply #115 on: July 20, 2010, 12:59:56 AM »

Another place to post your opinion on the matter,

http://jneilschulman.rationalreview.com/2010/07/guest-editorial-by-l-neil-smith-little-criminals-the-context-of-consent/

That's quite an irony.  At FreedomFest '09, L. Neil responded to the reference toward the similarity between his name and J. Neil's as unfortunate, and the context was unmistakably one of disdain for J. Neil.  Maybe their love for the institution of thought crime has brought them together again.

Everyone involved in this situation is a jerk off.  They shouldn't have plagiarized his work.  They should have asked permission.  He shouldn't have flipped out like he did.  He could have easily used this situation as a huge PR move instead.

Not permission, it's a published work.

Attribution, yes. Much louder than it already was, specifically because it was so obviously derivative of the earlier work.

And no shit both sides could have used it for PR. Big, hand-shaking, sloppy kissing, massive orgy PR.

...but instead it turned to...

Quote
Now everyone looks like assholes.

Yep.

As mentioned in another forum on this subject, I've been reading L.Neil's works for years. I never would have said he would go Randroid like this, considering the individual liberties expressed in his works.

They are quite good, I suggest folks look them up even with all this crap going on. They're well worth reading.

The only "good" that I can see coming from this is a better understanding of the issues surrounding I.P. for everyone.

Sadly, it seems only to have reinforced the position of those who HAD positions prior to the event.

...with the possible exception being people who hadn't earnestly examined their views looking at it in a new light.  I read something by Stephan Kinsella several years ago, and it's probably what put me over the edge from minarchy to self-government (along with a paper on private security, which I read at very nearly the same time--these were my last hang-ups.)
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Alex Libman

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Re: L. Neil Smith turns out to be a statist asshole
« Reply #116 on: July 20, 2010, 04:46:13 AM »

My sleepy (but hopefully still coherent) e-mail rant at his "Little Criminals: The Context of Consent" article (though you may think twice before clicking that link, lest you lose ownership of the portions of your brain that are touched by his IP):


Code: [Select]
Dear L. Neil Smith,

It seems that the past five days did not clear up your confusion about
the distinction between the actual "negative" and the non-existent
"positive" Intellectual Property Rights, and with your "Little
Criminals" article you continue to dig yourself further down the pit of
irrationality, pettiness, and self-delusion.

The latter particularly applies to your estimate that Free Talk Live --
the most popular Anarcho-Capitalist syndicated radio show in the world,
and the #84 talk show nationwide according to Talkers Magazine -- only
has "sixteen listeners". I don't know whether to laugh at your research
incompetence or to question your sanity for saying something like
that...  A person whose Web-sites rank #779,396 (ncc-1776.org) and
#8,380,291 (lneilsmith.org) according to Alexa.com probably shouldn't be
throwing any stones, and that might actually be reflecting a recent
boost in recognition your name has received due to the coverage on Free
Talk Live.  You could have stopped at only losing this little conflict
intellectually, but now you're going to lose it in terms of libertarian
"noosphere pull" as well.

You are reminiscent of a little kid who was the first on his block to
open up a lemonade stand, but when several other kids got the same
idea you went crying to your mommy that it's "not fair" for other
people's actions to diminish your profits.  Sorry, Mr. Smith, but you
do not own the minds of others, and those minds are capable of
reflecting off your ideas and thus diminishing your ability to make a
profit. The downstream inheritors of your ideas did not violate the
rules of any contest, as was the case with your flashback to the 9th
grade, nor did they commit any force or fraud.  Their alleged "crime"
is just an amplification of the alleged "crime" committed against you
by every other economic actor in the world who might buy the same
resources that you want to buy, thus raising your costs, or who might
sell the same resources that you want to sell, thus diminishing your
income. Conversely, every person in the world is also a potential
customer or a business partner, and a civilized society encourages
people to simply accept their loss of potential profit and try again.
You could have tried to compete with the new lemonade stands on the
basis of merit, perhaps aided by your advantage of having been around a
lot longer.  You even could have partnered with them in the areas where
your interests aren't in direct competition - a minute that a
libertarian spends listening to Free Talk Live is a minute he doesn't
spend reading L. Neil Smith books, but many libertarians can make time
for both, and thus advertising one from the other produces mutual
benefit.  Etc.  Instead you chose to get your mommy involved, which
doesn't speak very highly of the quality of your lemonade, or your own
personal character for that matter.

We are living in a world of many exciting new possibilities for
innovation and entrepreneurship in all fields of commerce, including
business models related to intellectual property.  Much of my own income
as a freelance "open source" programmer comes from selling my time to
support and extend the software that I give away for free (and I even
strongly prefer Copyfree licenses or "as is" / "public domain" over
Copyleft and/or Copyright).  I don't need to hold a gun to anyone's head
to ensure that companies hire me and not somebody else to provide those
services, even though a lot of people around the world would be able to
compete with me for a much lower price, because of the recognition I get
as the initiator of those projects.  The Internet is one giant time-
stamp machine with countless redundancies - I don't need to threaten
arbitration against anyone, since it's obvious to everyone who wrote
what piece of software first. Google can make its billions without
prodding anyone's eyelids open to make sure they look at the ads - in
fact those ads are very easy to automatically block, even on the open
source Web browser that Google itself releases for free.  A growing
number of fans are willing to pre-pay to finance the creative projects
they want to see, in exchange for "bragging rights", access to exclusive
real-life events, and exclusive tangible merchandise.  The free market
is moving forward from a business environment of information scarcity to
one of information super-abundance, just as it once moved from hunting /
gathering to the domestication of animals and agriculture.  One wonders
what would have happened if the hunters who used to bring home the bacon
believed in positive intellectual property rights - would every
domesticated boar and its offspring constitute an act of "theft" from
the hunters' position within the tribe?

The economy moves ever-forward through endless paradigm shifts and
cycles of innovation and creative destruction.  It is a great shame that
the otherwise distinguished name of L. Neil Smith will now be associated
with that most unlibertarian of ideas that humanity is about to leave on
the dust heap of history - the "positive right" to intellectual
property.  Once again, this pronouncement should not be confused with
the actual, negative right to Information Property, which will continue
to exist even in spheres of application that were are only beginning to
imagine - mind uploading, artificial intelligence, self-owning
"information based life-forms" who are just as sentient and worthy of
Rights as you or I, galaxy-sized super-computers used to emulate
realities that minds like ours cannot even begin to vaguely comprehend,       
and so on.  Trying to apply old ideas about intellectual monopolies to
such a world is a terribly dangerous endeavor, and I can only guess at
all of the possible new layers of tyranny that fallacy could bring.  Far
from resisting the baseless power of the state, you may in fact be
strengthening a new "divine right of kings" through which civilization
will remain enslaved for eons to come!

Best regards,
Alex Libman
« Last Edit: July 20, 2010, 04:56:11 AM by Alex Libman »
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Terror Australis

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Re: L. Neil Smith turns out to be a statist asshole
« Reply #117 on: July 20, 2010, 06:10:59 AM »

My sleepy (but hopefully still coherent) e-mail rant at his "Little Criminals: The Context of Consent" article (though you may think twice before clicking that link, lest you lose ownership of the portions of your brain that are touched by his IP):


Code: [Select]
Dear L. Neil Smith,

It seems that the past five days did not clear up your confusion about
the distinction between the actual "negative" and the non-existent
"positive" Intellectual Property Rights, and with your "Little
Criminals" article you continue to dig yourself further down the pit of
irrationality, pettiness, and self-delusion.

The latter particularly applies to your estimate that Free Talk Live --
the most popular Anarcho-Capitalist syndicated radio show in the world,
and the #84 talk show nationwide according to Talkers Magazine -- only
has "sixteen listeners". I don't know whether to laugh at your research
incompetence or to question your sanity for saying something like
that...  A person whose Web-sites rank #779,396 (ncc-1776.org) and
#8,380,291 (lneilsmith.org) according to Alexa.com probably shouldn't be
throwing any stones, and that might actually be reflecting a recent
boost in recognition your name has received due to the coverage on Free
Talk Live.  You could have stopped at only losing this little conflict
intellectually, but now you're going to lose it in terms of libertarian
"noosphere pull" as well.

You are reminiscent of a little kid who was the first on his block to
open up a lemonade stand, but when several other kids got the same
idea you went crying to your mommy that it's "not fair" for other
people's actions to diminish your profits.  Sorry, Mr. Smith, but you
do not own the minds of others, and those minds are capable of
reflecting off your ideas and thus diminishing your ability to make a
profit. The downstream inheritors of your ideas did not violate the
rules of any contest, as was the case with your flashback to the 9th
grade, nor did they commit any force or fraud.  Their alleged "crime"
is just an amplification of the alleged "crime" committed against you
by every other economic actor in the world who might buy the same
resources that you want to buy, thus raising your costs, or who might
sell the same resources that you want to sell, thus diminishing your
income. Conversely, every person in the world is also a potential
customer or a business partner, and a civilized society encourages
people to simply accept their loss of potential profit and try again.
You could have tried to compete with the new lemonade stands on the
basis of merit, perhaps aided by your advantage of having been around a
lot longer.  You even could have partnered with them in the areas where
your interests aren't in direct competition - a minute that a
libertarian spends listening to Free Talk Live is a minute he doesn't
spend reading L. Neil Smith books, but many libertarians can make time
for both, and thus advertising one from the other produces mutual
benefit.  Etc.  Instead you chose to get your mommy involved, which
doesn't speak very highly of the quality of your lemonade, or your own
personal character for that matter.

We are living in a world of many exciting new possibilities for
innovation and entrepreneurship in all fields of commerce, including
business models related to intellectual property.  Much of my own income
as a freelance "open source" programmer comes from selling my time to
support and extend the software that I give away for free (and I even
strongly prefer Copyfree licenses or "as is" / "public domain" over
Copyleft and/or Copyright).  I don't need to hold a gun to anyone's head
to ensure that companies hire me and not somebody else to provide those
services, even though a lot of people around the world would be able to
compete with me for a much lower price, because of the recognition I get
as the initiator of those projects.  The Internet is one giant time-
stamp machine with countless redundancies - I don't need to threaten
arbitration against anyone, since it's obvious to everyone who wrote
what piece of software first. Google can make its billions without
prodding anyone's eyelids open to make sure they look at the ads - in
fact those ads are very easy to automatically block, even on the open
source Web browser that Google itself releases for free.  A growing
number of fans are willing to pre-pay to finance the creative projects
they want to see, in exchange for "bragging rights", access to exclusive
real-life events, and exclusive tangible merchandise.  The free market
is moving forward from a business environment of information scarcity to
one of information super-abundance, just as it once moved from hunting /
gathering to the domestication of animals and agriculture.  One wonders
what would have happened if the hunters who used to bring home the bacon
believed in positive intellectual property rights - would every
domesticated boar and its offspring constitute an act of "theft" from
the hunters' position within the tribe?

The economy moves ever-forward through endless paradigm shifts and
cycles of innovation and creative destruction.  It is a great shame that
the otherwise distinguished name of L. Neil Smith will now be associated
with that most unlibertarian of ideas that humanity is about to leave on
the dust heap of history - the "positive right" to intellectual
property.  Once again, this pronouncement should not be confused with
the actual, negative right to Information Property, which will continue
to exist even in spheres of application that were are only beginning to
imagine - mind uploading, artificial intelligence, self-owning
"information based life-forms" who are just as sentient and worthy of
Rights as you or I, galaxy-sized super-computers used to emulate
realities that minds like ours cannot even begin to vaguely comprehend,       
and so on.  Trying to apply old ideas about intellectual monopolies to
such a world is a terribly dangerous endeavor, and I can only guess at
all of the possible new layers of tyranny that fallacy could bring.  Far
from resisting the baseless power of the state, you may in fact be
strengthening a new "divine right of kings" through which civilization
will remain enslaved for eons to come!

Best regards,
Alex Libman



nicely said mr libman.
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blackie

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Re: L. Neil Smith turns out to be a statist asshole
« Reply #118 on: July 20, 2010, 09:09:34 AM »


He spent a few sentences explaining how mentioning a bcc'd attorney wasn't a threat.

I think he doth protest too much.  I took it as a threat.  But why use bcc at all instead of cc if it isn't intended as a threat?  Whatever.
Maybe it was just a peaceful communication to his lawyer.

If that was a threat, then having a group of people holding fire outside of someone's house is a bigger threat. Do the Keeners open carry when they do that? No one has ever answered my question about that.

Anyway, the Keeners seem to have a very high standard as to what constitutes a threat...when it comes to their words/actions.
« Last Edit: July 20, 2010, 09:12:01 AM by blackie »
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The Muslim Agorist

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Re: L. Neil Smith turns out to be a statist asshole
« Reply #119 on: July 20, 2010, 11:14:22 AM »

The downstream inheritors of your ideas did not violate the
rules of any contest

Contract?

I don't think anyone is sweating the typos at this point since Mr Smith is setting the standard. I'm just as guilty.

Nice piece.
« Last Edit: July 20, 2010, 11:16:52 AM by The Muslim Agorist »
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