that's an order, corporal

emmyangua:

justkiddingforawhile:

Anonymous: My Fellow Tumblrers:

anoncentral:

Consider this your call to action.

I know that we all love this site as an expression of our individuality, but the fact of the matter is, we are under attack. And what we do is distracting us from that fact.

The…

Do you want to know what REALLY pisses me off? You’ve mangled that poem for a largely frivolous reason. ON HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY.

And now I’ll speak rationally.

I have to reblog this and try and speak reasonably, because it made my blood boil and I can’t allow someone to let logic and fact fly out of the window when trying to argue for an important cause.

I absolutely agree that legal bids such as ACTA must be stopped. I agree the internet should be a place of freedom. But some of what this ‘essay’ discusses is a bit OTT.

• Regarding the government prosecuting you for downloading movies from megavideo - I hate to break this to you but that is ALREADY A CRIME. The only reason you aren’t prosecuted is that the government doesn’t have access to the information, doesn’t have the manpower to prosecute that many people, and frankly has better things to do. I’ve got some movies that I shouldn’t own, but if I was punished I’m not going to scream about the government taking away my freedom.
• Regarding be punished for sharing a link to an illegal file - that particular example doesn’t work either. The case of the man in trouble for sharing links ran a website devoted to giving people access to illegal sites. He used the ‘linking’ as a loophole to avoid the law. While this is legally and morally debatable the fact is this man set out to help others infringe the law on a large scale. This wasn’t someone sending a friend a link to Harry Potter.
• What concerns me most is this hysteria about jail and fining. I don’t know what country you are in right now, but I’m in the UK. Our government is financially screwed, our jails are overcrowded, our police and legal system overrun. Can you seriously imagine the uproar if everyone who’d downloaded illegally was to be put through that system? Also, how would the legal system PROVE who had downloaded it? I live in a house of three adults - any one of us could download a file. What about the culprits who are below legal age? There’s already a great deal of debate around punishing parents for things like truant-ism - but as yet there’s no law to punish parents for their offspring’s crime. But what alternative is there - shoving thousands of otherwise innocent teenagers and children through law courts and detention centres designed for extreme cases? To assume hysterical punishment for all is a scary but irrational. All of these cases would have to individually go through court or at the very least have the option of appealing a fine. They’d all cause an enormous amount of work for the government, which it can’t really handle right now, and it would make any government HUGELY unpopular with voters.  

I’m not saying ACTA is harmless. I’m not saying the internet shouldn’t be free of government control for the majority of innocent users. I’m not saying you shouldn’t always fight for free speech.

I’m just saying… be logical about it. And for fuck sake, remember it’s just the internet. Not a god given right.

Seconding everything Emmy has said here.

And yes, rewriting that poem, on this day, is just… not on. Have some respect for history people.