Spam Under Legislative Attack in Europe

Anonymous Coward writes: "CNN has an article in their Science and Technology section detailing how the European telecommunication ministers have agreed that unsolicited e-mail and wireless text messages should be prohibited under a new data protection law. They also are agreeing to allow leeway for law enforcement to access logs of e-mail and telephone traffic.

Comments

Antiwar liberals are as bad as hitler

[Anonymous Coward]

These are dark times for the United States, and the world. Thousands of American citizens have been brutally murdered by fanatical terrorists bent on destroying our country. We are locked in a life-or-death struggle with the dangerous and fanatical nation of Afghanistan. If there was ever a time for all the citizens of this great nation to come together as one in support of a righteous cause, this would be it. To the shock and dismay of patriotic Americans everywhere, a substantial minority of the population openly opposes the air-strikes and ground troop assaults necessary for the United States to overcome our sworn enemies, the Taliban regime. One can only wonder how the minds of such people work. Would these anti-war liberals have been opposed to, say, the United States' involvement in World War II? A moment's reflection reveals that the answer is clearly yes: present-day anti-war liberals would have opposed our righteous war against the Nazi regime, and are therefore as bad as Hitler.

1. Afghanistan's Taliban regime has openly sheltered, collaborated with, and supported Osama Bin Laden, a cruel islamist-supremacist fanatic bent on dominating the entire middle eastern region under totalitarian, fundamentalist rule. Bin Laden's henchmen are responsible for the murder of thousands of Americans, British, Africans, and other peoples, as well as the destruction of billions of dollars worth of commercial real estate. The parallel between Bin Laden and Adolf Hitler, a cruel aryan-supremacist fanatic bent on dominating the entire European continent under totalitarian Nazi rule, is too clear to merit further elaboration. Yet in spite of this, antiwar liberals refuse to condone the use of military force in putting a stop to Bin Laden's reign of terror, citing the weak excuse that violence only begets violence. As if self-defence and aggression amounted to the same thing! There can be no doubt that these same individuals would also have opposed any use of military force against the Nazi occupation of Poland, France, and North Africa.

2. Antiwar liberals regularly decry the loss of civilian life caused by U.S. air strikes. It is claimed that the Allies' goal of toppling the Taliban government that openly shelters Osama Bin Laden, the mastermind behind the murderous September 11 attacks, is not worth the hundreds of innocent Afghani lives that have been lost in the effort. By analogy, if today's date were 1944 instead of 2001, these same concerned humanitarians would be wailing loudly over the innocent German people losing their lives in Allied bombing raids. Better to let Hitler (a misunderstood anti-imperialist, for certain!) occupy France, Poland, and the rest of Europe, than a single hair on the head of a single blameless German civilian should come to any harm!

3. The United States' involvement with the Northern Alliance, a group of loosely affiliated Afghani tribesmen united mainly by their desire to overthrow the Taliban, has been called into question by prominent antiwar groups. Worried liberals have fretted mightily over brutalities committed by Northern Alliance soldiers, such as the mistreatment of prisoners and pashtun civilians. Once again, the comparison with World War II should prove instructive: in that great struggle, the United States was allied with the Soviet Union, which was then controlled by the psychopathic dictator Joseph Stalin, a man of unsurpassed brutality. Today's liberals would have decried any involvement with Stalin. To them it would be better for the Nazi armies to drive unopposed to the Caucasus oil fields than to have the United States sully its lily-white hands in an alliance with a totalitarian despot.

4. In World War II, it was well understood that there was a need for responsible citizens to take care about what was said or written, lest enemy spies glean valuable information from idle talk. "Loose lips sink ships" was the slogan of the day. Vigilance was the price Americans were willing to pay to defeat the evil that was Naziism. Our present struggle with terrorism finds us in a similar situation. Legislation has been passed by Congress that expands the data-gathering abilities of American law-enforcement officials. Sadly, today's antiwar liberals fancy themselves too good for this sort of restraint. They complain to no end about the terrible restrictions these new security measures will place on their precious civil liberties (as if new regulations for obtaining "HAZMAT" licenses, and enlarging the venues for money laundering cases will usher in a new police state!) irregardless of the improvements the new legislation will make in our ability to track down and apprehend terrorists. The hue and cry has been especially loud among Internet users, the so-called "geeks". It appears that these people would rather have thousands of their fellow Americans die than compromise their ability to download encrypted pornography at work.

5. But what about the Holocaust? Wouldn't genocide, the supreme violation of basic human goodness be enough to stir today's antiwar liberals to action against Hitler? Sadly, the answer can only be no. It has ben irrefutably shown that the Taliban regime has committed atrocities against women and ethnic minorities that rival those carried out by Nazi einsatzgruppen during the Second World War. In spite of the undeniable disregard for human rights and human lives shown by the Taliban, antiwar liberals refuse to sway in their opposition to the use of force against this brutal regime and the murderers it shelters. By their line of reasoning, any opposition to "American Capitalist Imperialism" is a good thing, and deserves to be supported. Clearly, then, if the current year were 1941, these same antiwar liberals would be crying out for peace with the National Socialist (Nazi) government of Adolf Hitler, sweeping under the rug German efforts to exterminate millions of people as "cultural differences that need to be respected".

There can now be no doubt about the mindset of those opposing America's war with the Taliban: these antiwar people are relentlessly opposed to war at any cost, and singlemindedly bent on seeing the United States as evil, and seeing any group opposed to the United States, no matter how murderous, degenerate, and foul, as defenders of truth, justice, and anti-imperialism. It is an undeniable fact that the antiwar liberals of today would have opposed the United States' struggle against Nazi villainy during World War II, and, as has been conclusively demonstrated, are as bad as Hitler. Thank you and God Bless America.

Re:Why did Slashdot change their SPAM logo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that was a well thought out troll. Bravo!

Re:Apples, oranges.

[LS]

Word games.

"allow people to stop receiving information". Hmmm. Shut off your radio if you don't want to "receive". How about, "prohibit people from sending information". Much different, isn't it? How would spam be defined? What if other things like petitions get lumped in with spam?

Damn, I paid for my radio and electricity, and all these damn stations keep sending me unsolicited information.

This may all sound like a troll, but it's not. The metaphors used in associating with email seem to break down when you get into the details.

If you want to live in a free society, you will have to "receive" the good with the bad.

LS