I’ll at least grant that some people involved in the functioning of the American legal system (and those of a great many other countries) manage to use it in a racist fashion or in some other improper/illegal/immoral way. I’m not convinced that the system is inherently racist. But, it’s no concidence that when now-ex-Governor Ryan of Illinois commuted the sentences of everyone on Death Row, just about everyone involved was black or Hispanic. Sometimes we do have to look at results and ask hard questions about how they got that way.

But not building prisons is not going to change that. It’s not the prison system, it’s the legal system. Not building prisons is just going to ensure that those people who are unjustly (and justly) incarcerated end up in prisons are are overcrowded and otherwise don’t meet the current standards for humane incarceration and cannot be adequately maintained.

If we have no prisons, what do we do with rapists and murderers? Or anyone else that you and I can both agree have committed a crime? I think that alternatives to incarceration should be used a lot more than they are. But what do we do with criminals where incarceration is the best way to handle them? Let’s not forget that while there are people who are unjustly incarcerated, there’s a lot of people who are quite justly incarcerated.

If you oppose state power, what power do we use to deal with criminals? I don’t care what societial system we have (capitalist, socialist, etc.), there are going to be bad people that the good people need to be protected from. What substitute for state power is there for that?

In passing, it’s deeply ironic that Illinois’ ex-Governor Ryan, who emptied Illinois’ Death Row (an act that I supported, BTW) is now due to be locked up himself and may well die in prison because of crimes of fraud and bribery that led to (among other things) six children being burned to death in a van that ran over a part that fell off a truck that was driven by a non-English speaking immigrant who got his license illegally from a Secretary of State’s employee who took a bribe from the immigrant so that he could pay thousands of dollars into the Secrtary of State’s election fund as a condition of keeping his job.

I completely agree with you w/r/t buying and selling as individual political acts. i came to that conclusion when i speant 2 full days trying to buy vegan, union-made tennis shoes and realized that no matter how hard I wished, they probably didnt exist and literally not one of the many activists whom I respected so much and who had educated me on these points could actually be wearing the ‘right’ shoes.

Oh have been there done and that. It has come to really annoy me, because of course the people who can afford to do this, the people who set the standards. It’s almost entirely people from affluent backgrounds who rail against consumerism.

Incidentally working in the union movement kind of helps that. While union organisers will tell you where not to buy, I’ve never heard a union organiser say “You should buy this product, it’s a great factory.” My friend who does a lot of work in the clothing industry wouldn’t choose any NZ clothing factories - even the unionised ones.

RonF - It was a dilema because the prison system is deeply racist, and upholds state power, and the economic system (both of which I oppose).

In the last year or two we have certainly seen movies & TV & music start to use the economic model that has been very profitable for pron. That is, how to make money from online content and how not to worry too much about piracy. Pron’s innovations on the web have rarely (if ever) been technological in nature. It’s mostly been business/profit models.

The Deparment of Defense found, as it became more dependent on data communications, that their communications network had many single points of failure. In case of war, it would be very simple for an enemy to totally disrupt communications by blowing up a few central communications points. It decided to fund development of a network that would self-heal, so that data would be communicated around failed nodes and that would be able to handle disruptions, errors, etc.

To that end, the Advanced Research Projects Administration in the DoD funded development of IP, TCP/IP, RIP, routers, etc. It was implemented as ARPANET and connected various military facilities and the research universities and other institutions that were involved.

The people at these institutions started using it for non-DoD purposes. Other institutions managed to get hooked up. It became apparent that there were a host of non-military applications for this network. For a while, only not-for-profits were allowed to get on; I can remember filling out a form swearing not to use the network for commercial purposes as a condition of getting on the ‘Net. “.com” is a relatively late addition to the Top Level Domain list, and this is also why .mil refers to the American military only, not all military uses.

Finally, laws were passed in Congress to fund the setting up of major backbones for the network and for opening it up to the public. That was the birth of the true Internet as we know it. Al Gore took a leading role in the latter. That’s what he was talking about when he laid claim to being the father of the Internet. He had nothing to do with the technology, but from a functional viewpoint of changing ARPANET to the Internet he was absolutely correct. Of course, that didn’t stop his political opponents from completely distorting what he was talking about, but they apparently think justifying their ends also justifies abandonment of honor.

You misread. She did not decline to make money typing plans for a prison.

They were plans for a prison.

I could have left, I would never have worked for the temp agency again, but that wouldn’t have been the end of the world. I wasn’t on the bones of my ass, but I wanted to get more work, I didn’t know what I was doing next and I wanted to work.

I’m curious. Why was this a moral dilemma? What’s wrong with typing up plans for a prison?

Everyone here has just passed by that completely, as if it’s a given that this is unspeakably wrong (literally; no one’s spoken of it, unless I missed it). Why?

I mean this seriously, if I was an animal rights activist (I’m not but lets pretend for a second), my priority wouldn’t be ensuring that I never ate or wore anything that had the smallest amount of products that came to animals (although I probably would find eating meat, eggs and dairy products impossible). It would be on educating, agitating and organising around animal rights.

Does that make sense? …

Yes, absolutely it makes sense. It’s called “leverage”. Sometimes a given effort/contribution/change can be most effective to the overall cause by indirect action. (FWIW, republicans are generally more aware of this than democrats. The “direct and personal” action viewpoint is more of a liberal thing.)

Think of it this way: Some rich liberal folks have recently given, oh, somewhere in the range of 37 BILLION dollars to charity. It will be directly spent on charity.

Leverage is the recognition that the U.S. budget is somewhere in the range of 2 TRILLION dollars, I think–so the interesting albeit theoretical question is whether a lobbying group with 37 billion in receipts could influence the budget through lobbying, advertising, campaig contributions, etc to acheive a disbursement to charity of more than 1.5% in a single year, or (more realistic) more than 0.25% per year over a 6 year Senate term. If you know the amounts spent on campaigns you begin to think the answer is pretty obvious.

I have not been able to find the column that I wrote and so I don’t really have much to say in response; it was some time ago–a long time ago by internet standards–and my memory is hazy, but I vaguely remember something about link sharing. What I remember clearly, though, is that it was in a publication considered authoritative at the time and that the overall thesis was that much of what Google and Ebay and other online giants were doing was based in stuff that the online sex industry had pioneered. Nonetheless, since I cannot find the article, I am perfectly willing to chalk my point up to faulty memory.

Once I worked doing a website for a conservative political party. I desperately needed the money at the time, but I felt really dirty. I think I’d rather pose naked on the internet.

Even with your narrower statement, I don’t think this is true. Which online innovations are you referring to? I think porn maybe innovated the use of credit cards as a proof of age online, but I can’t think of anything else. Ecommerce has been driven by online auctions, search engines and search engine advertising, and technologies like Java, Javascript, and SSL. The black market/organized crime innovates in different ways (spam of various kinds, trojans, link farming, botnets, etc) but those innovations are not especially useful to legitimate ecommerce, since the point is that they are innovations used for cheats and cons.

I also think it would be useful to many of the participants in this thread to draw the distinction between black market (I’m using this term loosely because I can’t think of something better — I might also say covert, parasitical, or criminal) and official legitimate Internet commerce. There is porn on both sides of that line. Playboy doesn’t need to spam or use search engine optimization techniques, and spammers sell many other questionable things besides porn. Not only that, but many times spammers are selling stolen porn (bootlegged copyrighted material). If you want to understand the economic behaviors, motivations, and impact, this is a case where I’d argue that the black market vs. official/legitimate distinction is much more useful than the porn/not-porn distinction.

I completely agree with you w/r/t buying and selling as individual political acts. i came to that conclusion when i speant 2 full days trying to buy vegan, union-made tennis shoes and realized that no matter how hard I wished, they probably didnt exist and literally not one of the many activists whom I respected so much and who had educated me on these points could actually be wearing the ‘right’ shoes.

I actually think that wether you view this act as an individual choice or one wiht an impact on some kind of real politics is the critical point–i discussed it a bit over at Heart’s place, too. It’s one I’m sort of unsure about; while I think a lot of grief would be spared if blogs were understood to be different than movement s and organizations (which need to be held to a lower standard) it seems to me that this blog in particular is closer to a non-political collective project, like a house with a lot of roomates, or a buying cooperative. The political standards there would fall somewhere in between do-what-makes-you happy at the level of the individual and the gravity we should make these decisions with inside movements. Obviously the nature of that collectivity has never been spelled out anywhere or agreed upon, which is part of what made this so sticky.

looked at that way, Amps ‘betrayal” of commenters and the feminist blogosphere receeds a bit, and the most significant issue becomes guest bloggers. I thnk that was my gut reaction, andy why I wondered what you thougth, Maia, early on.

Thanks f or all that.

Porn is the driving force behind the internet–most ‘net innovations arose through porn. Like it or hate it (and I hate it), porn is where the money is on the internet, and under capitalism that means that’s where most of the innovation is too.

I would like to make my point again, but with a little more clarity. What I wrote in the comment linked to above was that, in a column I ghostwrote for a client some years ago, the point was made that “one of the dirty little secrets of online commerce was that the Internet pron industry had pioneered many of the e-commerce and online traffic-generating techniques that made the growth of e-commerce possible”–a rather more narrow claim than what some others have been saying.

Moreover, my point was not to exonerate Amp because we are all culpable–he is still responsible and accountable for the decision(s) he made–but rather that one way of moving this discussion forward, so that it did not remain stuck on Amp’s personal culpability, would be to think about how, as anashi put it in the other Amptoons thread

…incidious the system is, how it worms its way into our lives through compromise…it happens in increments and suddenly we wake up and we don’t have a leg to stand on anymore because we’re just as bad as the people whose minds we are trying to change…

That, it seems to me, is also what Maia is trying to think about in this thread.