Internet Tragedy Of The Commons

I am a professional research mathematician, and I have studied infinity quite a bit (arriving at an emotionally drastic conclusion). Still completely uneducated clowns come out on the Internet… and get published there, pontificating out of sheer crass ignorance… on infinity. So idiotic they are that Ancient Greeks, 25 centuries ago, who had already established a few things about the concept of infinity, would have rolled their eyes in dismay. 

The same “philosophy” site, with more than 100,000 participants,  bans all my essays, even in completely unrelated fields, since the invasion of Ukraine… They even warned it would be so: somehow, wisdom should not be interested by the potential end of the woirld…. Probably Putin collaborators, in action, many intellectuals are pro-Putin, for the same reason as their cultural ancestors were pro-Lenin, pro-Stalin, pro-Duce, or pro-Hitler… Having no power, they torture others by imposing their own blatant madness…

The delight of the Internet, with completely ignorant people knowing better, reminds me of the delight of my dog, who often tells me he knows best, so I tell him to do something, such as going across wet grass, and he looks at me like: “no way!” 

Tragedy of the commons is not just tragedy of common property, as… common wisdom has it. Tragedy of the commons also means, in today’s world, that the least educated are the most popular and most powerful. In mental matters, tragedy of the commons shows up as nobody making the hard work to learn until the edge of what is known, and thus contributing to the advancement of civilization. Some may ask, Putin and Hitler admirers, why would civilization need to advance? Because if it does not advance, it falls, from ecological disaster if nothing else.

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Think of these wealthy, buxom Instagram stars in Muscovite Rus. One of these sexy wixens has nine million followers. They use shears to destroy ultra expensive Chanel bags. Such bags are worth around half of the median yearly Russian salary [1].

Chanel confirmed to the BBC that it is complying with EU sanctions, which ban the sale of luxury goods worth more than 300 euros (about 1,550 Brazilian reais) to Russia, as well as the sale of products to individuals who intend to use them. them on Russian soil. The brand “requires customers whose primary residence we do not know to confirm that the items they purchase will not be used in Russia.”

Victoria Bonya (on the right above) destroyed her black Chanel bag  for her 9.3 million followers saying, “If Chanel does not respect its customers, why should we respect Chanel?… not a single thing is worthy of my love for my country, and not worthy of my respect for myself. I am against russophobia, I am against a brand that supports russophobia.”

This is how Nazism worked: crass ignorance, cynically manipulated by vicious extortionists and criminals for whom greed for power was the highest drug.

These days, when I send to the New York Times a comment related to Ukraine with some true technical points of great relevance (for example the fact the Ukraine Trident, symbol of the country, is more than 11 centuries old, we have it etched in old stone; or that there are French military (hence NATO) on the ground in Ukraine, and similar technical comments)… I get censored. This is striking, especially on purely technical comments pointing out pieces of history, such as the prompt expulsion of Russia from the Society of Nations, after it attacked Finland in 1939.

There are 2 possible explanations for this censorship on steroids: NYT writers are stealing the information (after reading it, they republish it, as if they produced it themselves; I observed this), or then they are truly traumatized by information they never heard about and are not conditioned to accept: the NYT has a censorship bureau, actually… Something they admitted last year, after denying it for more than a decade to me personally.

Right some NYT writers are more thuggish than others, for example Bret Stephens (who used to be at the Wall Street Journal for many years) loves to censor me and then use my ideas: hey, his salary depends upon it, the way he looks at it, it’s moral.

So there on the Internet, on a philosophy site which has censored me completely since Putin attacked, a completely ignorant person is pontificating at the highest level of stupidity on infinity, proffering thoroughly deranged statements, and hundreds of thousands are reading him…

I maintain that civilization needs an independent state organization, much more independent  than the Justice Branch of government, to evaluate the various dimensions of propositions: truth, potential truth, significance, potential significance, novelty, potential novelty, authenticity, integrity, etc… No censorship, just a star system, for purely informative purposes, and no small committee of experts, but total openness….

Elon Musk@elonmusk

I made an offer https://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001418091/000110465922045641/tm2212748d1_sc13da.htm

[for Twitter…]

Offer to unlock potential for more truth? Truth is complex, potential, multidimensional. Censorship must be banned, but truth shouldn’t suffer the tragedy of the commons, as it does now, where the cheapest and most dilapidating propositions are most popular. Evaluations are needed!

When we change mental worlds, we start by changing emotional worlds. This is true even in mathematics. Non-Euclidean geometry preceded (!) Euclidean geometry. But the latter was simpler, so it became more popular, it looked more rigorous (it was not), so beautiful. It was a case of tragedy of the commons: Non-Euclidean geometry got lost to the point that the fact it is all over and everywhere also got lost! I allege something similar about the sort of infinity mathematics we have been walloping in: understanding that there is something, at least locally, as a largest number, will require an emotional switch… not denying infinity, but realizing the limitations of the concept (similarly, Euclidean geometry actually does not exist, it’s a simplification… And the reason why General Relativity is needed for GPS…)

As we need to change mental worlds, thus emotional worlds, the shocking value of the Internet, well done, is a great progress. But people need to know about probable reality too…

Patrice Ayme

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[1] The price for a Chanel Medium Classic Flap bag increased from $1,150 in 1990 to $7,800 in July 2021. After the third price jump of the year (as of November 2021), the Chanel Medium Classic Flap is now $8,800. 

A Modest Proposal Regarding Google: Separate Greed From Cognition

Abstract: I propose to legislatively force Google to separate its for-profit search from its non-pecuniary interested search. In one case one would look for $Search, say Google$.com and in the other, one would search inside Google.com. (That is Google without the $ dollar sign…)

***

I spoke to the owner of a cheap hotel in the Alps. He explained to me how much money he was loosing from the already hyper wealthy, powerful and influential Google and its associated for-profit accomplices. Then I got a very simple idea to remedy part of the problem.

Google is the search engine most used around the planet. That made it into a world public utility. Now of course those who contributed most to its growth may object that Google is a private company, and they should be able to do with it as they want, like any other private company (private companies which are on stock exchanges are, confusingly, called “public” in the USA; they are not “public”: they are the property of the holders of the so-called “stock” of the company, so they are truly private!)

I had a much more thorough, truth-telling picture at my disposal. However, more than 15 years ago, I got evacuated from the then search engines because I had gone a few truths too far… (when I mentioned this to “friends”, then, they told me that was impossible, I was paranoid… Nowadays, few would believe that can’t happen: search censorship is official). So I didn’t want to repeat the experience (I got enormous censorship from Facebook in the last few months). So here above was a much milder picture: those billionaire creeps, endowed with all the powers thanks to my good friend Obama even scare people who, as I did today can hang on a cliff, 1,000 feet above the deck. We are in censoring dictatorship… At least we don’t get cut-up in pieces: see the Saudi Arabia exploit below…

But Google, by hook or by crook, achieved a world monopoly. That position is, in turn, an asset. How it became a world monopoly was by paying, directly or indirectly, by cash or by jobs, some “consulting”, some obtained just through the grossest influence peddling. Same as Apple and Facebook. (Notoriously Steve Jobs made a deal with corrupt Irish leaders to get Apple worldwide profits taxed only 1%… in violations of EU and US law…)

Thus Google owes We the People of Planet Earth, quite a bit. Besides, its spy-on-everyone practice should be unlawful: “We don’t need you to type at all because we know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less guess what you’re thinking about … Is that over the line?” – Google (then) Chairman Eric Schmidt

https://gizmodo.com/5878987/its-official-google-is-evil-now

Now if one looks for a given product or subject, one finds plenty of “Adv” (Advertising) listed on top. Then there is a whole jungle of paid transactions: Search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimisation (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC), cost-per-click (CPC), cost-per-impression (CPM) search engine advertising, sponsored listings, paid for placement, and that’s before you get to services provided by the search engines themselves – Google AdWords, etc…

This is all extremely lucrative. Google has paid billions of dollars just to have Apple, its partner in crime, brandish it as its default search engine:

https://searchengineland.com/report-google-to-pay-apple-9-billion-to-remain-default-search-engine-on-safari-306082

Thus, worldwide, when people search for something, they enrich the crooks. Crooks? How else do you want to qualify those who pay very little or even no taxes, while being the richest (legal) persons on Earth. Companies as persons? Since “Citizen United” the crooked (?) Supreme Court of the US (“SCOTUS”) has recognized companies as “persons” with a right of free speech… GAFA (Google Amazon Facebook Apple) pay very little tax, whereas normal companies pay much more; that’s (greatly) how they became the richest in the world. They do not invent the science: they are technological aggregators, exploiting the work of obscure, impoverished, scientists.

Google once had a deep partnership with Apple. Then, while Steve Jobs mentored co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Schmidt sat on Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) board of directors, Android magically acquired into iphone like capabilities: do Google and Apple constitute a double headed duopoly?

One could use against them the insult GAFA use against companies who buy patents from inventors (thus rewarding inventors). GAFA and their ilk are NON-PRACTICING ENTITIES:  indeed, they, mostly, didn’t practice the research. They are just tax free monopolies exploiting the discoveries of others (who now, thanks to SCOTUS’s devastation of the Patent System, can’t exploit their own discoveries pecuniarily…).   

So Google: let’s separate for-profit search from non-profit search. Greed needs to be kept away from knowledge.

Morality starts legislatively.

Today, Trump said that Saudi Arabia’s disappearance of a well known journalist, if confirmed, would bring “severe punishment“.

Things are getting ever more complicated and rougher in Saudi Arabia, as expected (from, in part the war against Iran by proxy in Yemen, where faults are shared, and civilians facing today’s world greatest human crisis). The disappeared journalist used to be an Islamist and was a supporter of the (fascist) Muslim Brotherhood, before supporting in 2018 democracy (& incoherently, still, the Muslim Bro!) Missing Journalist Was an Insider Willing to Cross Saudi Red Lines

The famous Jamal Khashoggi rankled authorities (and maybe Muhammad Bin Salman, MBS Himself, the reigning “Crown Prince”) with socially liberal views and (intolerable) sympathy for the Muslim Brotherhood…

What to do? Just as common denizens should put pressure on legislators to separate profit and search, they should insist to separate fascist regimes and supporting them… by frequenting them. For example, going to Thailand, or Indonesia, let alone UAE or Saudi Arabia, as a tourist, should be carefully considered for what it is: an active support for fascism. Evil regimes (and that could be arguably more than 100 countries) should be spurned, avoided and rejected. I was no friend of Khashoggi, because of his Islamist past.. Nevertheless, cutting up the enemy in body parts (as probably happened to Khashoggi) just because he is basically right, is enforcing terror, just as efficiently as others are enforcing terror with biased search, and for the same basic reason.

Google greed cognition, the Saudi Islamist dictatorship: time to meditate the well-known Chinese proverb:”Kill the chicken, to frighten the monkeys“. If we chicken out of all this, the mighty getting mightier, in the grossest ways, we will be all become frightened monkeys..

Patrice Ayme

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Note on something somewhat related: Calling “private” companies the shares of which are publicly exchanged, enables the wealthiest owners of the world to claim, intuitively and emotionally, that they do something “public”. Whereas, of course, the exact opposite is true. The equivalent happened when Google seized as motto “Don’t be evil” (we will do it for you…)

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Note on the author not being an hypocrite contrarily to appearances: I use Google all the time… I even use, very rarely, features of Google I know enrich it… But I would use any top performing search engine: search is a public utility…

Neat Suggestion For Net Neutrality

Under Obama, the US spy networks were given full power. Paying no, or little taxes, with the full resources of the USA behind them, they were mandated, as modern-day corsairs, to seize the world. They did (in spite of the Snowden scare; Snowden revealed the entanglement between the imperial machinery of the USA and the US Internet companies).

This Internet coup is a Obama’s great achievement, proving how great and just the brown president has been for the powers that be, over the powers that don’t deserve to be.

Here is the market capitalization of the forty largest French companies (the “CAC 40”), versus that of GAFA (Google-Apple-Facebook-Amazon):

Thanks Oh Great, Wise, Respected Obama, For Having Made The USA Mightier Than Ever With Your Mighty Espionage Agents

[Was the satanic Bush a smaller devil? One shudders at the question. Just asking…]

As you can see, GAFA, those four companies, Google-Apple-Facebook-Amazon, under the presidency of Barack Obama, became everything, while the French Republic stagnated between being and nothingness. This is a general pattern, with all countries. It has to do with GAFA being above all and any local laws. And there are no global laws to speak of. (The Chinese joke that GAFA is the new world empire; well, new, not really.) In particular GAFA eschews most taxes, so stand above all and any companies and firms, worldwide.

Donald Trump, hated by GAFA, has said that he would make GAFA pay taxes. Said Trump, speaking of GAFA, and, in particular, Amazon:”Oh, God, would they have problems if I became president”. But what of the rest of the world? How can the world get out of this pickle?

First GAFA should pay taxes (France wants Google to pay billions in overdue taxes, Great Britain, though, asks for only a tenth of what the French Treasury is asking. Why? Because Great Britain is onto the plot, and understands that GAFA is one way for its overlord, the USA, to seize world control, and will be rewarded for getting on the program!)

To force GAFA to pay taxes, they should be threatened with exclusion. Now, of course, that would require guts. First, suffering of being accused of “anti-Americanism” by the soon to disappear in the oubliettes of history, Barack Obama, the great enabler of GAFA. (The US already makes war against the French economy, so it may as well come up to the surface!)

Unfortunately for, say, the French, GAFA uses massively treacherous countries without much industry such as Great Britain (full of subordinate tax havens, more than a dozen treasure isles which charge no income or wealth tax), and Ireland (top corporate tax rate, 12.5% in contrast with France 33% and the USA’s 35%!)

So going to war against GAFA means that the French would have to go to war with Ireland and the British Virgin Islands (hence the UK!) If the traditional parties don’t have this sort of guts, maybe Marine le Pen will… (She will be accused of dreadful “populism”, just as the Donald is, for doing something against the multibillionaire plutocrats of GAFA, and their demonic little helpers…)

Could we try something less bloody? Well, GAFA spy on people, and then tweak what they see on the Internet, accordingly. GAFA, and its ilk know you have a health problem, so they suggest businesses associated to treatment or relief from that condition. I have noticed search engines such as Google manipulate searches according to what they think i should see. Worse: Microsoft’s Bing censors completely some of my essays. For example “Violence In The Holy Qur’an” cannot be found on Bing (even looked directly by title and author) This sort of censorship is deliberate: the essay consists essentially of 10,000 words from quoting entire verses of the Qur’an. (The English paper, The Guardian, accused me to be someone who “blogged” the Qur’an, to justify censoring me!)

If these Internet manipulations were completely unlawful, all the time, the business model of GAFA and their ilk would collapse. Of course, one does not want to be that cruel (what would Obama do?)

But here is an idea nevertheless. Why are not GAFA (and its ilk) required, by LAW, to present a neutral web if asked to do so by someone using the Internet? As I said, one does not want to be too cruel with the corsairs of modern communications: after all, they have some public utility, as they (vaguely) innovate.

So, say, every time one turns on one of the GAFA, or other Internet manipulators, one should be offered, manually, the option of a neutral web.

Simple. Drastic.

The right to neutral information is basic to enable democracy. Without it, there is no democracy. The present rule of GAFA, and their present manners, is a complete denial of democracy. Time to fight. When the philosopher Demosthenes called the Greeks to fight the (gold mines propelled) the Macedonian plutocrats, who were quickly increasing in power, he was not listened to. It sounded alarmist to go fight the rich and nasty. When it turned out Demosthenes was finally observed to be right, it was too late. Democracy was destroyed in Greece, for the next 23 centuries. And it all originated from a philosophical debate where Aristotle was prominent.

We are what we know. And we are nought if we know not. The neutral Internet is not obsolete, it’s a human right. Are those obsolete? Hmm… Wait…

Patrice Ayme’

 

Qur’an Has Everything To Do With It

War scenes in Saint Denis, north of Paris. A seven hour battle, one Salafist woman exploded herself, another terrorist was shot dead, but seven were captured alive (police uses blinding stun grenades). The information about their location was obtained in diverse manners, including amateurs videos.

Dalil Boubakeur, head of Paris Grand Mosque, France’s most prominent Muslim, condemned in the strongest words Muslim terrorists. He claims he saw reports on 1,100 Muslim terrorists inside France, who, he insists, should be arrested immediately. I agree. I agree with all the measures he proposes like throwing out bad imams, closing bad mosques, and having all imams being taught French law, and instilling it, etc. However, the fundamental texts of Islam contain huge amounts of prescribed violence described as orders from God. (It gets even worse with the Hadith, which is much more explicit, even ordering to kill all Jews to have the final judgment: Hadith 41; 685 and the like.)

(There are 7,800 “Fiche S” Islamist terrorists in France. Most of them are not followed: following one individual takes tens of inspectors. There is only one solution: explusion.)

War Against Qur’an In Paris, Nov. 18, 2015

However, I do not agree with Boubakeur’s basic precept that: “The Islamist State is not Islam.”

This the fundamental error. The Islamist State is pure Islam.

If Boubakeur does not want pure Islam, that is, of course, perfect. legally, sociologically and politically necessary, and desirable in all ways. Certainly pure Islam should be condemned and discarded.

It is not just a question of sexism:

Quran 2:223 – “Men have authority over women because God has made the former superior to the latter, and because men spend their wealth to maintain women. Good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because God has guarded them. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and forsake them in beds apart, and beat them up.”

No, it’s a question of basic security. God, as depicted in the Qur’an, is a maniac:

Quran 3:56 – “As to those who reject faith, I will punish them with terrible agony in this world and in the Hereafter, nor will they have anyone to help.”

Quran 5:33 – “Crucify or amputate the hands and feet of those who make war against Allah and Muhammad. This is the recompense of those who fight against Allah and His Messenger, and hasten about the earth, to do corruption there: they shall be slaughtered, or crucified, or their hands and feet shall alternately be struck off; or they shall be banished from the land. That is a degradation for them in this world; and in the world to come awaits them a mighty chastisement.”

Quran 5:38 – “As for the man who steals and the woman who steals, cut off their hands as punishment for what they have earned, an exemplary punishment from Allah..”

Quran 8:12 – “I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.”

Great Britain under Tony Blair (a plutocrat often decried here) took drastic measures against Islam in 2005. Special services were enabled. The leading Islamist in London, long free to express his venom, in the guise of freedom of speech, was deported to the USA, where he was promptly condemned to life in prison.

Russia engaged long range supersonic bombers, and now totals one third of its entire strategic force.   France will ramp up with even more air force within a few days, double what she engaged in Libya. Putin ordered his forces to cooperate with the French, including at sea.

The Prime Minister of Qatar was received in Paris by the French PM. Discreetly (however, there was a red carpet). Qatar, at best, enables Muslim terrorist groups finances… And, at worst, finance them directly.

The most shocking sequence from the battle was a young Salfist woman who testified on TV about the battle. Only her eyes could be seen, the rest of her was covered by a black garb. How can that be legal?

It should not be.

First the United Nations recognizes that attacking a people culture’s on its own territory (here Salafists invading Europe) is a form of holocaust (more precisely, the Geneva Convention does).

Second, just as important, the French police gathered important information on the terrorists from videos, and the faces they saw. (The problem of women, or even men hiding bombs showed up during the Algerian War; paratroopers defeated it by using torture so quickly they got information which allowed to reveal the entire networks, and terminate them; that was completely different, though, from the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld sort of torture which was very wrong for many reasons.)

The established order is very bad, granted. Yet what the Qur’an proposes is way worse.

Why is the Qur’an so bad? Precisely because its very badness took the more civilized Greco-Romans and Persians completely flat footed. Before they knew it, their best warriors and potential draftees were all dead. It’s a long story; Persian and Romans expected slavery and war prisoners, negotiations. Instead they got an enemy who killed the wounded on battlefields, and sent assassins all over the land to kill every man who could bear arms.

Meanwhile in Marseilles three youths with ISIS clothing stabbed a Jewish teacher. Meanwhile WordPress promoted an entire set of essays on the Paris tragedy, in a mixture of  Politically Correct and New Age mood (what makes us sad is good, because we will find our true selves). I sent comments, they were censored. So was a quote from Voltaire. In other happy new, the New York Times has censored me 100% throughout this episode. What these outfits are doing is to, actually support Islamist terrorism (no I did not send such a comment to them, this is strictly between us). Methinks that the absolute censorship of any not just critique, but even quotes of the Qur’an, as above, is the real root of the problem. From what I figured out now looking at time stamps,  a quote in the Qur’an long agois probably why The Guardian censors me. This is an amazing state of affairs: if one quotes reality, one gets censored. No wonder Islamists are angry (in a way I am in the same boat as they are, just from the other side of the Styx).

If nothing else, this entire adventure should spawned a renewed interest in real history, and how it breeds moods.

Patrice Ayme’

Censoring “Electrocoal”, Violating Democracy

“Scientific American” Censors “Electrocoal”, Violating Free Speech, the Status of the Internet as Public Utility, And, More Generally, Democracy:

President Obama declared last week that the Internet was a Public Utility. Rightly so. Say you build up a bridge. Does that give you the right to do whatever you want with the bridge when people use it? Not so, especially if the bridge has become a Public Utility.

Any media using the Internet is, to some extent, a Public Utility, because the Internet is a Public Utility.

Expression on the Internet is what Free Speech has become now.

A fundamental democratic right in Athens was that of addressing the Assembly.

There should be a right of free speech answer, especially when a site allows public comments.

More generally, the Internet is in need of laws, with the core aim of enabling Free Speech, and disallowing Hate Speech. Commercial, For-Profit Speech ought to be regulated: commerce is always regulated.

As it is, the Internet is the Wild West, and those with the biggest guns rule. Comments, rankings, private information and access are manipulated all over. Some companies’ business is actually to write fake comments and reviews, while passing for non-profit oriented free speech individuals: this ought to be considered consumer fraud, and the appropriate laws ought to be passed to criminalize the activity.

Scientific American is in the habit of censoring comments: “deciding what material is displayed on our website is our right”. They have censored strict scientific comments from me (without explanation).

A law ought to be passed forbidding public utilities to censor comments without some excellent reason. (Journalists are above the law in the sense that they do not have to reveal their sources, nor can be tried for opinion; so journalism always has a public utility aspect at its root.)

Take the example of Free Speech in the street: it is a right of democracy. Yet it can be curtailed by the police if, and only if, it “disrupts the peace”, or violates other laws. In practice, the police rarely intervenes (in democracy, it would have to justify its intervention!)

Scientific American censors, and others, such as Facebook, have argued that their website is their own property, they can do what they want. Well, not really. The problem is that they are in position of monopoly (or more exactly, oligarchy). Then, to empower their oligarchy, they use, and need to use, a Public Utility. That means they are financed by the citizenry in general. Moreover, they got a fiduciary duty: informing and debating in a non grossly misleading, non injurious way.

I related that The Economist censored me for quoting the Qur’an (no, I did not join the Jihad; my aim was to show that, at face value, the Qur’an calls for violent acts, and, thus, the need for Imams to inform believers that this is all allegorical, and outlawing interpretations that are stricto sensu).

In an article on fuel cell cars, the SA Master allowed dozens of comments from (taxpayer financed) Elon Musk’s minions, calling fuel cell cars “fool cars”. That was not censored. I replied in kind.

Scientific American censored me for calling electric cars, ELECTROCOAL. So doing, I claim that Scientific American violated the notion of PUBLIC UTILITY.

Scientific American sent me the following email:

“This comment has been deleted. Scientific American reserves the right to delete comments and revoke commenting privileges without notice. A subscription does not exempt you from our rules, and deciding what material is displayed on our website is our right, not censorship. You can create your own website for your own opinions and views, to share with the world. Scientific American does not owe anyone a platform – anyone may create a website of their own.

This comment is off-topic. Further violations will result in the loss of your commenting privileges, so please review our guidelines carefully. This help desk will not provide another warning.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/page/sa-community-guidelines/

Regards,

SA Webmaster”

[Notice the contradictions and the weasel words, Big Brother speech: censorship desk is called “help desk”, and “further violations…no other warning”.] “Webmaster” is an interesting Freudian slip: in a free society, the Internet should have laws, not “masters”.

Calling Tesla Electric Cars “electrocoal” is an allusion to the fact that electric cars in the USA are loaded with electricity that is half produced in coal thermal plants. So their global efficiency is that of a coal burning installation (more on this in another essay).

The Masters at Scientific American don’t like “electrocoal”. So they censor it, and call me a “violator”. And threaten to unilaterally cancel a contract with me, while still taking my money. No law prevents them to indulge in all these abuses of power.

Just as no law prevents Uber, an Internet based car-rental company, to use the private information it gathers on its clients, tracking them, selling the data.

Uber has apologized. But there should be a law, and employees, and owners, who have violated that law ought to go to jail. Yes, shareholders ought to be punished, as those who owned shares in companies that make money from slaves, ought to be punished; believe or not, those are still around!

Laws are not censorship, they are the common rules which apply equally. Private censorship, though, while using the Public Utility of the Internet, is a violation of said equality, which is the essence of democracy. Violation of democracy ought to be unlawful, just as the equally vaguely defined “hate speech”, or “genocide” are unlawful.

The problem is the same as when plutocrats use publicly financed research to increase their wealth or power (thus scientific publishing ought to be open source, and subsidies from the likes of NASA to private enterprises subject to serious examination… same as subsidies to big banks).

The ultimate reason for democracy, is not fairness, but intelligence. That makes even dictators long for democracy. Democracy allows the group to reach higher intelligence than any other society. The Internet is a tool to further the debate of ideas (ideas which do not violate the law, including hate speech, that is).

Violating the free debate of ideas ought to be left to dictators, and other “Masters”. It ought to be illegal in democracy.

The right of reply ought to be enshrined in democracy. The manipulations of commentary, and censorship for profit or bullies’ sake, or for perverting the minds of the public or children (see Islamism) ought to be illegal, even if done under the cover of higher morality, or hypocrisy.

Internet policing will not solve all the problems of vicious thinking, but it will allow to threaten to address the most egregious of them.

Patrice Ayme’