An interesting new bill aims to cut down anonymous trolls on the net.

“A new bill in Albany has its sights set on anonymous internet trolls. The Internet Protection Act would require sites to have online commenters identify themselves.

The Act, sponsored by Assemblyman Dean Murray (R-East Patchogue) and Senator Thomas O’Mara (R-Big Flats), would require New York-based websites to “remove any comments posted on his or her website by an anonymous poster unless such anonymous poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post.”

(Gawker be warned.)

I dare say it won’t pass constitutional tests, but there may be good reason to raise the issue and hope for a constitutional amendment that would allow free speech protections to be applied more selectively to genuine political criticism or public interest commentary.

The hope is instead to hamper speech that is injury, defamation, false light or cyber-bullying.

While SOPA (like the NDAA) was written too broadly,  that doesn’t mean more thoughtful approaches to delimiting free speech in the public sphere should not be tried.

This bill comes at the same time that Preet Bharara, US Atty for the Southern Dt Of New York, penned an article about the growing menace of cybercrime in the NY Times – cybergeddon, he calls it.

I’m not sure what his motives are in labeling it thus, but he’s not wrong about the extent of cyber crime, from hacking to bullying.

It’s all very well to argue for counter-speech as the only remedy for defamatory speech on the net (the default libertarian position).

That argument leaves the net wide open to the most powerful media monopolies and networks joining forces to squash legitimate criticism from lone individuals, while allowing the monopolies the ability to amplify their own slanders and lies.

The playing field hasn’t been leveled by the internet, as some mistakenly believe. The internet actually empowers the criminal and the corporate racketeer (do I repeat myself) to a far greater degree than it does legitimate journalists or commentators.

As for the “chilling effect” of restrictions on anonymous speech  – bunkum.

With all the free speech available in the US,  with all the freedom afforded anyone  to write the most vulgar, false trash about anyone, did the mainstream media get to any important stories in time? No.

Were the people who got to those stories hiding behind anonymous handles? No.

Did the stories involve crude personal attacks and name-calling? No.

Most of the big stories were broken by responsible journalists writing openly (both in the mainstream and in the alternative press –  for example, the excellent, “Den of Thieves” written decades ago)… or they were disclosed by whistle-blowers using their own names.

The Enron story, it is true, was broken open because of  short-seller analysis.

Fair enough, if the analysis was done legally. My point is not to say short-sellers aren’t god’s children. It’s to say that it’s not necessary to break the law if you’re a good analyst.

No need for hacking, espionage or theft or abuse.

Correction: Enron actually confirms my thesis. Jonathan Weil, an excellent reporter, is the one who broke the story. All Chanos did was use his research to trade. Big effin’ deal.

Besides,  a smarter analysis of the Enron story is not that short-sellers got to it before anyone else, because they were pursuing their own self-interest (journalists pursue their own self-interest too).

The smarter analysis is this:  Were journalists actually doing their job and not under the corrupt influence of  money (activist hedge-funds paying them off for negative stories and managers paying them off for positive ones), they would have figured out what was going on a long time before.

The whole leverage racket was laid out in detail in “Den of Thieves” long before Enron blew up.

The myth of the anonymous truth-teller is just that. One of those myths that have turned “free speech” into a tyranny of the mind, the very opposite of free speech.

That is what democracy tends to do. The demos are never smart enough to reason things out in any kind of nuanced way, so what starts out as a good idea turns into a slogan that is pushed so extremely it turns into the very opposite of itself.  It becomes a propaganda tool of corporations, states, and criminals…

There is room for anonymous criticism, but to pass muster it must be couched in reasonable language (i.e. the opposite of the filth purveyed by anonymous message board-bashers in the financial industry) and it must include some evidence.

All other forms of critical speech must be presumed to be false or baseless speculation and must be disallowed as potentially felonious.

Why should short-sellers and promoters not be held to the same professional standards applied to managers and employee?

I wouldn’t be sorry to see criminal sanctions against anonymous abuse, equal to the sanctions levied against the physical equivalent of the abuse.

Thus, IP theft should be treated like robbery; email hacking  of sensitive personal information or business information should be treated like breaking and entry; computer monitoring and surveillance should be treated like physical stalking; vulgar abuse of the kind doled out against women (Matt Taibbi, Daniel Loeb,  and a few others come to mind) should be treated like assault; posting of personal details (such as some of the stuff on Gawker) or hacked emails or private conversations should be treated as rape, voyeurism.

This is not delusion.

Decades of psychiatric and psychological research have shown that verbal abuse leaves greater damage than any physical abuse short of the most extreme. Women in domestic abuse cases have said the same thing. So have children who suffer emotional and verbal abuse, and so have victims of government torture.

Even the CIA has reached the same conclusion. That is the rationale behind “no touch” torture codified in the KUBARK manual, where psycho-sexual  and religious imagery is used to break down the sense of identity of the victim. It is real. It is traumatic. It is torture.

Free speech arguments meanwhile have lagged two centuries behind, beating the same tired drum of the “slippery slope” that ostensibly runs from kicking the pants of  the average net psychopath to the coming of the Fourth Reich.

Rubbish. The truth is exactly the opposite. It was the Nazis – like Julius Streicher – who used the most violent sexual and racial language to dehumanize the Jews and inflame the population.

Besides, to my mind, the Fourth Reich, or some version of it, is already here. This is it. This is how it operates. Through spying, blackmailing and pornographically violent abuse on the internet.

If you can’t see that, you are its tool or its victim.

The Nazis  of yesteryear live on in their new incarnation in the financial world today and in the media of the modern West.  Pornographic gossip sites, voice-mail hacking, cyber-stalking, blackmailing…what are these but the methods of Nazis? And this “freedom” is what the this government wants to export all over the world through its NGO mouth pieces.

This tyranny of porn abuse that keeps women out of political life, forces them out of the media,  harasses them in their business life, terrorizes them in their personal lives; that turn them into pieces of meat that can be hung out in public for any man to randomly spit on and abuse, prod and poke and jeer at.

This is what the West exports as its great emancipation of women, the centerpiece of its civil society.

This it exports to cultures far more protective of women and children than the West  has ever been. This it uses as its rationale to bomb and destroy countries.

This is the means by which cowardly hedge-fund managers, hiding behind anonymous handles and piles of ill-gotten cash, savage strangers with lies, squash subpoenas, silence whistle-blowers, and bend the terms of contracts to make a mockery of justice.

Except for one eccentric businessman I don’t see anyone else wise to what’s going on, or if wise to it, either brave enough or honest enough to take the part of the victims.

The crooks, like all crooks, have opted for the winning side, and the rest are silent.

Well, critics say, wouldn’t a new law also be subject to abuse?

Perhaps. But perhaps not, if it was written astutely.

It might instead be a help to victims of cyber-bullying and fraud who are struggling against the widespread misuse of free speech protections to commit criminal acts.

It all depends on how the new laws will be written.

It’s really  not a question of new laws at all, but a rethinking of the original laws and what they entail in the age of virtual reality, mind-control, trauma-based conditioning, mind-reading software, and psycho-sexual torture.

It is not a question of government versus the rest of us. With government directly  behind 40 percent of the economy and enmeshed in the other 60 percent, the government IS US. We are the government.

It is from “us” that politicians are drawn, media pundits are drawn, courts and corporations and armies are drawn.

Where is the bright line between businesses and government? I don’t see it. We all use Google, in bed with the CIA, we use the dollar, propped up by B52’s and napalm, by easy money and Fed policies.

We all fall silent when we should speak, speak half-truths when only the unvarnished truth will help,  or talk so much and with such forked tongues that our truths might as well be lies.

Speech and act are not as far apart as our current laws take them to be.  Holistic approaches to the human body that take into account the ancient Vedic sciences of energy (of which yoga is a part) demonstrate that the body is not only the physical body but also its emotional and energetic sheaths.

In fact, those energetic sheaths are much closer to ourselves than our physical bodies.

And injury to them is often more damaging and long-lasting than to the body.

Just read the comments and posts on forums and boards all over the net and ask yourself if public culture here isn’t criminal.

I don’t think the internet culture in India or anywhere else is nearly as bad, at least from the evidence of the comments.

It is the internet here in the US that is most awash with criminality. And it is here that the clamp-down should begin.

Exercise self-restraint, or restraint will be forced on you, one way or other

…that’s the way life seems to work.

Just a thought.

McKinsey is Ground Zero for outsourcing.

The Gupta trial is really a spectacle intended to appease the American masses.

That’s why the FBI is going after him on such a scale, with wire-taps spread out over years.

No doubt, if Gupta did betray corporate board confidences, that certainly wasn’t right and he should be reprimanded and fined, as warranted.

But this degree of attention and media hooplah has more to do with optics. The optics of diverting attention from the real perps.

This entails diverting attention away from the largely Anglo-Jewish ethnicity of the most egregious and important figures in the financial crisis and redirecting it to a non-white foreign group that is exceptionally successful and therefore likely to attract envy and hostility from the American working population. 

Affluent businessmen will also garner no sympathy from the left, which might otherwise side with a minority.

The trial also diverts attention from the origins of the  financial heist, mostly in the financial industry (Federal Reserve, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, hedge-funds), abetted by the incompetence of  the government (SEC and FBI) and the failure of the Wall Street media.

By focusing on McKinsey and making Goldman Sachs a witness for the prosecution, the government gets to rehabilitate Goldman, give Mr. Blankfein’s reputation a bit of a polish. cover up its own incompetence, and simultaneously rehabilitate the US media, which fell down on the job abysmally.

Most important of all, the trial re-frames the financial crisis and makes the kingpin of the outsourcing industry and its foreign chief the villain of the piece.

That plays nicely to nativist sentiment.

Some good points in this essay by Robert Locke in The American Conservative about the fatuity and insularity of the mutant species called American libertarianism.

My positions are much closer to the classical liberal, but, for a long time I believed I was one too.

Now, I don’t.

Whatever the merits of libertarianism in theory, in practice most American (and Indian) libertarians strike me as faddish, dogmatic, insular, shrill, and intellectually superficial.

And not a few of them here seem to be flim-flam men of various kinds. I can see why they would embrace a content-less notion of liberty.

And, I no longer think libertarian anti-war positions are really meaningful either. I think most of  that is  posturing, unlikely to have any impact and adopted solely for the sake of  popularity.

There are a few exceptions, like Justin Raimondo and the Independent Institute  left libertarians (Long, McElroy etc.), who are honorable sorts. Then there are a handful of (real) Christian libertarians.

But the common or garden financial world libertarian is a wretched fraud and fools no one but himself…maybe not even himself. Libertarianism  in the financial world is mostly an ideology that allows the  predominantly Jewish elites (assiduously supported by their Gentile chamchas) to excuse uncivilized and predatory behavior toward the community in which those elites derive their income, while simultaneously posing as victims.

Gentiles accept this kind of thing because they are relatively powerless.

The PC cries of anti-semitism are only meant to prevent the masses from recognizing, naming and fighting this kind of ethnic supremacist thinking, no different in its way, however offensive the comparison might sound, from Nazism.

And there are also a whole lot of corporate sociopaths who mouth libertarian slogans as an excuse for their aberrant behavior.

Meanwhile, where the fight has counted, even the honorable  libertarians have been AWOL, or busy defending various shady personalities, compromising themselves in the process.

“Libertarian naïveté extends to politics. They often confuse the absence of government impingement upon freedom with freedom as such. But without a sufficiently strong state, individual freedom falls prey to other more powerful individuals. A weak state and a freedom-respecting state are not the same thing, as shown by many a chaotic Third-World tyranny.

Libertarians are also naïve about the range and perversity of human desires they propose to unleash. They can imagine nothing more threatening than a bit of Sunday-afternoon sadomasochism, followed by some recreational drug use and work on Monday. They assume that if people are given freedom, they will gravitate towards essentially bourgeois lives, but this takes for granted things like the deferral of gratification that were pounded into them as children without their being free to refuse. They forget that for much of the population, preaching maximum freedom merely results in drunkenness, drugs, failure to hold a job, and pregnancy out of wedlock. Society is dependent upon inculcated self-restraint if it is not to slide into barbarism, and libertarians attack this self-restraint. Ironically, this often results in internal restraints being replaced by the external restraints of police and prison, resulting in less freedom, not more.

This contempt for self-restraint is emblematic of a deeper problem: libertarianism has a lot to say about freedom but little about learning to handle it. Freedom without judgment is dangerous at best, useless at worst. Yet libertarianism is philosophically incapable of evolving a theory of how to use freedom well because of its root dogma that all free choices are equal, which it cannot abandon except at the cost of admitting that there are other goods than freedom. Conservatives should know better.”

One criticism of that last paragraph. Libertarianism is more a theory of how society is best ordered. It doesn’t set itself the task of choosing the individual ends each person pursues, i.e. how they will use freedom. Nor does it really say all choices are equal. It says all choices are equally valid choices. A different thing,

A more accurate criticism would be to point out that when all choices are allowed to be valid choices, it leaves open the possibility that some of the choices will end up destroying society as a whole.

A simple way to put it is this. Without a clear and correct idea of what is the good life, and without some restraints on individuality, preferably imposed by social codes and mores more than a proliferation of laws, libertarian societies will tend to move very quickly to totalitarianism.

That is precisely what has happened in the US, although observers keep trying to say the answer is “more liberty from government.” Yes, of course, government should be limited.

But before that can happen, we need something else. More self-restraint.

Can’t have one without the other. Or you get a criminal society. And a criminal society will always tend toward totalitarianism.

But you’ll never hear that from libertarians.

From Haindava Kerelam, a clever initiative aimed against Christian proselytizing, as well as against denunciations of Hinduism because of caste:

In an Agniveer sponsored event, 40 Christian families in Western UP reverted back to Vedic Hindu Dharma yesterday jettisoning fanatic belief that those who do not believe in some son of God would go to eternal Hell.

Of these 40 families, one member from each family will receive training as Purohit from Agniveer so that they become respected Brahmins and are able to conduct religious and social rituals. Also they would be able to conduct Vedic induction ritual for others. This is our way of slapping the faces of casteism and blind evangelization.

The blog Kaipullai.com has a tribute to a government servant who got around India’s bureaucracy to perform feats of engineering that put to shame all the  “free-marketers” ( or, more accurately, corporate and crony capitalists) of the last twenty years of privatization.

The man is Dr. E. Sreedharan, who recently retired from the leadership of the Delhi Metro Corporation.

Dr. Sreedharan’s achievements suggest that sensible libertarians should avoid demonizing everyone who works in the government or attributing all things anti-social to their actions.

Check out this description of one of Dr. Sreedharan’s earliest feats – restoring a bridge destroyed by a cyclone:

“At that time, Dr Sreedharan was a Deputy Engineer in the Southern Railway. And this piece of wreck was in his territory. Indian Railways, gave Dr Sreedharan six months to restore connectivity to Rameshwaram. Which was asking a lot considering

Dr. Sreedharan, had to convert this

To

IN SIX MONTHS

Dr Sreedharan finished the job in ..FORTY SIX DAYS (1964).

He took one month and 15 days to restore, THAT bridge, back to full operation. The bridge which was India’s longest sea bridge for 96 years, till the Bandra Worli Sea Link was inaugurated in the year 2008.

Forty six days to restore this 2.3 Km bridge in a state where

THIS BRIDGE

took six effin months to restore after being washed away by a flash flood, in 2006.

There are some achievements that look cool, but once you get an award, you completely forget about them. And then there are some you won’t forget, even if you suffer a total memory loss.

This was one of those things.

For all this trouble, Dr Sreedharan got a Railway award consisting of Rs 100 and an awful looking plaque.”

The post ends this way:

“So let me just encapsulate, if that can be done, what Dr Sreedharan has done for the country

1. He restored India’s longest sea bridge which was completely destroyed, in 46 days.

2. He designed India’s first Metro.

3. Supervised the building of India’s first indigenous Merchant vessel.

4. Executed India’s most difficult project since Independence.

5. Gave Delhi wallahs, something called the Metro.

6. Predicted India’s biggest corporate fraud, three months before it happened.

I don’t know how the Bharat Ratna [LR: India’s highest civililan award] nomination thing works. But I believe you stand a chance if you have done something good for the country. Now tell me, what has Dr Sreedharan not done for the country?

I mean when you can consider a guy who sells a computer anti-virus on prime-time television for India’s highest civilian award, Why is there not a whisper about a guy who has ensured 400,000 people on the western coast of India saw a train for the first time?

Or, was responsible for a sharp drop in road-rage killings in Delhi?”

Read the whole post at Kaipullai’s Vetti Thoughts.

I dug around a bit after reading the blog, and found that since retiring,  Sreedharan  has become president of an NGO (non-governmental organization) called Foundation for Restoration of National Values,  an outfit to which Ratan Tata,  of the famous industrial family,  also belongs. In that capacity, he has been campaigning for the introduction of  a stringent anti-corruption law and, interestingly, has lent public support to Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption movement.

The Anna Hazare movement, an Indian version of OccupyWallStreet,  according to its supporters in India , has been endorsed (and claimed ) by Wikileaks’s Julian Assange.

[Assange has just lost his extradition appeal in UK and will be going back to Sweden to face rape charges that his supporters believe are trumped up.]

Critics of Anna Hazare include those on the anarchist left, like Arundhati Roy, as well many on the anarchist and/or nationalist right.

The former see Hazare’s emphasis on anti-corruption as a kind of moral dilution of their fundamentally anti-state position.

The latter see Hazare  as a Trojan horse for corporate and neo-colonial interests intent on breaking down national governments and religious/cultural identities through the mechanism of a transnational anti-corruption regime.

Corporate and NGO interests manipulate naive libertarians with anti-government rhetoric intended to get them on board what’s really a scheme for global management.

The globalists ultimately want to turn nation-states into surveillance units where citizens voluntarily monitor themselves and each other in a world-wide panopticon.

(I’ve blogged about this dozens of times last year).