[link|http://www.techcentralstation.com/102703A.html|Free for me, not for thee]

Excerpt:

Later, I voiced my discomfort with the video in this blog post. In the comment section of the blog, Professor Lessig said, "I don't see why criticizing the effect of overregulation makes my message Left wing. When did the Right become a fan of regulation?"

In fact, this is exactly the point. I have made the libertarian case against copyright excess myself, several times -- in this essay, for example. I felt that by showing a video that primarily gave the audience a chance to vent hostility toward a conservative President and his main ally, Professor Lessig was sending a signal to the audience that one's position on the copyright issue should be connected to where one stands on the war in Iraq.

If professor Lessig were not trying to engage in left-wing rabble-rousing, he could have chosen an apolitical example to illustrate his point. Instead, the message that he sent by pandering to the Bush-bashers at Pop!tech was that he had no desire to see anyone on the Right included in a coalition to fight copyright regulation. It was Professor Lessig who made expressing opposition to overzealous copyright regulation a package deal with expressing tasteless, adolescent scorn for the President's foreign policy.

I say:

For the right, free speech cuts both ways. For the elite, that is unthinkable. Not unspeakable, but unthinkable.

Excerpt:

One could have a debate over whether the Angry Right came before the Angry Left. Regardless, I am not calling for an uprising by an Angry Right today. Quite the contrary.

I think that it would be a mistake to react to the current anger of the left by writing them off or by getting angry in turn. We ought to try as best as we can to discern the ideas of the group-thinkers, even if it means that we have to sift carefully through their rhetorical rubble.

I think that the main consequence of political rage is to shut out other opinions. I would argue that barriers against ideas are to politics what barriers against trade are to economics. An import tariff on goods hurts both countries, but generally does the most damage to the country imposing the tariff. Similarly, when one side puts up barriers to listening to the other side's ideas, then both sides are damaged, with the side that refuses to listen suffering the worst.

Open systems win. The Angry Left, because it is closed-minded, is in no condition to govern. Barring a catastrophe at home or abroad, I doubt that it will be given the opportunity to do so.

I say:

Fine with me. Let those of us for which "freedom" is more than just a word we use hold on to the initiative. We'll make things happen. Including many of the things the Left pretends to want. IP reform will happen in time. But it won't be the Left's doing. Big business will in the end be held accountable, but the Left will have had nothing to do with that. Democracy will expand across the globe - against the active resistance of the Left.

But are both sides really damaged? He presumes there was ever a hope of a dialogue in the first place. I don't think there ever was. The Left simply isn't interested, and never will be, so long as they are the Left. He also presumes the Left has something to offer in trade. Quite frankly, I doubt it. Even their high-sounding moral postures are insincere, and are mostly stolen from 18th and 19th century liberalism anyway. (Freedom of expression being an example.) The true heirs to *that* tradition are to be found on the right.

And the Left can't stop us from from studying and dissecting them. They may dissemble, but we can deconstruct. They obfuscate, we probe. They posture, we analyse. We will know our enemy. They can't stop us from doing so. They can only slow us down a bit.