At 04:38 PM 12/31/2013, James A. Donald wrote:
In practice, it is pretty obvious that most practitioners of civil
disobedience believe they are above the law, that they usually *are*
above the law, and that in particular Swartz believed he was above the
law, and was shocked to find that he was not.
On 2014-01-03 11:53, Ulex Europae wrote:
You seem to be laboring under a pernicious misapprehension: that there
is a legitimate mandate to obey laws that are unconstitutional and/or
unjust. There is a mandate, but it is just as illegitimate as the
unconstitutional or the unjust law.
If someone was to hide a laptop in one of my cupboards, to steal such
large amounts of information from my home network as to disrupt its
functioning, I would take a sledgehammer to his laptop, and when he
showed up to collect his laptop, a sledgehammer to him.
Swartz committed a crime against people more powerful than he was,
incorrectly thinking he was more powerful than they.
