On 2021-03-27 2:27 p.m., quiliro wrote: > Aaron Wolf <[email protected]> writes: > > >> Don't just look for the flaws. Ask: how is the Snowden analogy *useful*? > > I'll take the bait. How is it? How is attacking an old activist from the > safety of distance comparable to risking our lives? >
I'd like to wrap things up and let the list relax and get back to other things. I'll try to briefly clarify. The utility of the analogy has nothing to do with the level of risk. The utility is about whether critics are *insiders*. Both Snowden and people like Deb Nicholson are *insiders* with lengthy experience working day to day with and within the organizations they are criticizing. And the dynamic I was emphasizing was whether the orgs and the orgs' defenders *attack* the critic or whether they focus on making sure they are hearing the concerns with an open perspective in order to learn all they can from them. The whole point of analogies like this is to help get a starting point where we can all agree (Snowden is a hero, the attacks on him are unfounded, the NSA and its defenders are more interested in making the conversation about him and criticizing him, they don't want to talk about the issues he revealed). Then, from that point we can *ask* and discuss where the analogy fits and where it doesn't. **Obviously** this is not a simple near-identical situation, a list of the *differences* would be thousands of points. The purpose of the analogy is to simply say, "don't fall into criticizing Deb or others in order to refuse to engage with the concerns they are bringing up, start with the presumption that there are real concerns and try to figure out the details." If efforts to understand the concerns come up short, that's the best evidence that the complaints were unfair. Much better evidence than attacking the witnesses. I'm not saying questions about the sources are unfair. Someone saying what Snowden said but with no credentials, no experience or connection, that would be more suspicious. And the critics of RMS who had no experience or understanding of him were all basically unfair and not compelling. So, the point of the analogy is that Deb isn't some superficial outside critic, she's as intimately knowledgeable and experienced with RMS and his issues as Snowden was with the NSA. Beyond these points which are the reason for the analogy, the rest of the analogy falls apart, and that's entirely uninteresting and takes nothing away from the main point. When Nina Paley brings up the analogy between slavery and intellectual property in https://questioncopyright.org/redefining-property she is NOT saying that her argument rests on concluding that intellectual property *is* slavery. Attacking her arguments by pointing out the differences between slavery and intellectual property is to completely miss the point. _______________________________________________ libreplanet-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss
