weak institutions (Exxon, Pentagon) instead of strong ones (State, academica incl. MIT)
I guess it's a huge relief for Bradley Manning (whom M.M. has carefully avoided mentioning along with Assange and Greenwald, although all three tend to get media exposure in connection) that he tried to "bully" a weak, indecisive Pentagon, whose hands are tied by its mortal enemies in the civillian bureaucracy - and thus the military can't stand up to the treasonous filth and has to treat him with kid gloves on.
And of course, the dirty, brainwashed, cowardly commies who hung out at the Occupy "protests" are the Obama regime's wet dream, spewing abuse against the already powerless big business and financial institutions - a perfect opportunity for it to further rob the deserving and appearse the plebs! Which is why the regime is intimidating its police into accommodating the lawless rioting scum - and the cops slavishly obey. The forces of law and order wouldn't dare lay a finger on those good-for-nothing hippies, not with the propaganda media watching!
Oh wait, this isn't relevant! Moldbug's above such inconvenient commie-sympathizing "facts", he's using Schwartz' death as an occasion to preach the hallowed and unchanging party line. He's for Truth and Clarity, unlike all the delusional left-wing fanatics!
Normally, posting all this tripe on LW would be merely adding noise, but it also happens to be exploitative of a community figure's recent and shocking death. Moldbug fails. You fail.
Unlike him, you seem to be capable of critical self-evaluation. Seems like you should employ some right now, and learn from it.
In my opinion, your reply would be significantly more powerful if it didn't contain that much sarcasm and overall didn't resemble a typical comment in a random political discussion on the internet. I am not sure whether signalling own political bias helps in internet discussions in general, but strongly suspect that it doesn't help here.
(Written by someone who's too getting annoyed at this moldbuggish madness.)
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/01/noam-chomsky-killed-aaron-swartz.html
Summary: Moldbug on the Aaron Schwartz affair. Power is a very real thing with real consequences for activists, yet many people don't understand the nature of power in modern times. People like Noam Chomsky get great fame doing bad epistomology about who has power, and as a result do great harm to idealistic nerds who don't read between the lines to selectively target their attacks at weak institutions (Exxon, Pentagon) instead of strong ones (State, academica incl. MIT).
Here he returns to a theme that is one of his real contributions to blogospheric political thought: that victory in political competitions provides Bayesian information about who has power and who doesn't. If your worldview has the underdog somehow systematically beating the overdog, your epistemology is simply wrong - in the same way, and to the same extent, as a geocentrist who has to keep adding epicycles to account for anomalous observations.
This means that activists like King, Schwartz, and Assange are only effective in bullying the weak, not standing up to the strong (despite conventional narratives that misassign strengths to institutions). When such activists stop following the script, and naively use the same tactics to attack strong institutions, reality reasserts itself quite forcefully: