No Safe Harbor
Essays About Pirate Politics
The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
Where this age differs from those immediately preceding it is that a liberal intelligentsia is lacking. Bully-worship, under various disguises, has become a universal religion, and such truisms as that a machine-gun is still a machine-gun even when a “good” man is squeezing the trigger have turned into heresies which it is actually becoming dangerous to utter.
Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.
To deprive a man of his natural liberty and to deny to him the ordinary amenities of life is worse then starving the body; it is starvation of the soul, the dweller in the body.
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This book does NOT have an ISBN. The ISBN for the paperback edition is:
ISBN: 1468033999
ISBN-13: 978-1468033991
Dedication
This book is dedicated to all of those who would educate themselves about the political issues of our time and seek to change the course of events by becoming embroiled in that change.
Acknowledgments
The United States Pirate Party would like to thank all of those who allowed us to use their material, either that which existed before we edited this book, or those who saw a hole that needed filling and helped fill it. We salute you.
We would also like to thank you, the reader. Just as a tree that falls in a forest may not make a sound if there is no one around to hear it, so too it goes with words. Words, with no one around to read them, never change worlds.
Foreword
The first Pirate Party was founded on January 1, 2006 by Rick Falkvinge in Sweden.
Six months later, similar parties started to spring up all over the world. All of these parties started off with the same singular goal of intellectual property reform. But, these disparate parties realized that the roots of the world's problems ran deeper than even intellectual property reform could fix.
With time, these parties added many more items to their platform. These can be condensed into 3 topics — Government and Corporate Transparency and Accountability, Personal Privacy, and, of course, Intellectual Property reform.
If nothing else, 2011 will be seen as the year of the uprisings. The year began with the Arab Spring, in which the citizens of various Middle Eastern countries rose up and either overthrew their governments or caused massive changes in their governing structures. Later in the year — September — the Occupy Wall Street movement began and quickly spread across the United States and to every continent except Antarctica.
Who knows what 2012 will bring.
The problem the Pirate Party faces, and clearly, every third party, is:
— “Who are they?
— What do they stand for?
— Why should I vote for them?”
This book seeks to help alleviate that problem. To that end we have written a series of essays related to our primary platform. We decided to do this for several reasons. These reasons also mirror our platform.
The main reason is transparency. If we allow our platform to be plainly visible to anyone who wants to know it, then we have an even greater reason to follow it to the letter.
The second reason is personal privacy. We do not ask that you tell us who you are or where you are or any other personal information when you download this book from any of the USPP websites (if you downloaded it from there).
The third reason, mirrors the intellectual property reform we seek. We have licensed this book under a Creative Commons license. You can do anything you want to with this book. Email it to anyone, copy passages, post pieces to your website, whatever. As long as your use is not commercial, it should be allowed.
The fourth is that of education. An ignorant man looks in the mirror, likes what he sees and is happy with that. The wise man looks in the mirror, sees what he does not know, and is always questioning that which he does know. So we are left with a hope that many will read this who do NOT agree with us, but are willing to open their minds to other possibilities. That it will lead to self-investigation of topics, and a broader, better informed conversation on the topic. Only when we have dialogues of substance, free of spirited invective, fear mongering, soundbites, and claims fabricated from whole cloth, can we start addressing the problems properly.
The United States Pirate Party December 1, 2011
Part 1 — Government and Corporate Transparency and Accountability
Assassinating Citizens
Marcus Kesler
On September 30th, 2011, the CIA targeted and killed a citizen of the United States overseas. The citizen was Anwar Al-Awlaki, a Yemen-American born in New Mexico who was living in Yemen where he practiced his religion as an Imam and who has been accused of hiding in Yemen to avoid capture for his suspected roles in various terrorist attacks against the United States.
In December of last year, Al-Awlaki’s father filed suit against the Justice Department to stop the targeted killing of his son as authorized by President Obama. US District Judge John Bates dismissed the case, stating that his father had no standing to file suit and that a judicial consideration regarding the extrajudicial execution of a US citizen would have to wait another day[1]. Lawyers for the US Government would not confirm that Al-Awlaki was targeted for execution, but stated that Al-Awlaki could always file suit himself or present himself to US authorities.
1
Washington Post, Judge Dismisses Targeted-Killing Suit,December 8th,2010. Retrieved September 30th, 2011. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703296604576005391675065166.html?mod=googlenews_wsj