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Google Earth Highlights Darfur
jc42 writes "Google Earth, in cooperation with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum now presents details of the growing disaster in Darfur. They give a virtual tour of the area, with details of events in many villages in the words of local residents. So in addition to their "Do no evil" motto, they apparently now have a policy of exposing evil. Needless to say, the Sudan government didn't exactly cooperate with this project."
It's time to give up on the "do no evil" crap. Google helps censor the Chinese for a start. They have a mountain of data from logging all their users, definitly a tool for the future Big Brothers of the world.
Lots of large corporations do good things, usually to make it seem as if they 'do no evil'. As Google gets larger, we will see them commit more evil.
Well, this is not surprising... Darfur is close to some nice oil resources. Just like the US helped and liberated Iraq, there are good reason to help the nice people of Darfur.
If you want to convince everybody that some US action is urgently needed in Darfur, why not start by showing images of the war that is taking place there? Sure, there is a war there and as with all wars, it is not nice at all. But calling it a genocide is going a bit far. And Darfur is unfortunately not the only place in the world where people are killing each other. Iraq had twice as many casualties so far. Why don't we focus on that first? Because it does not serve the political interests of our US government? (not anymore)
Please take a look a this insightful comment posted in the blog linked in the article:
Yes? What sort of Kool-aid do you drink?
About a quarter million of serbs were forced to move after the end of "humanitarian bombings" ("After the war ended, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1244 that placed Kosovo under transitional UN administration (UNMIK) and authorized KFOR, a NATO-led peacekeeping force. Almost immediately returning Kosovo Albanians attacked Kosovo Serbs [1], causing some 200,000-280,000[20] Serbs and other non-Albanians[21] to flee"). But that's not a genocide, sure. That's just a "normal migration".
And now Kosovo is the major center of drug trafficking in Europe and poverty levels there are highest in Europe.
Maybe you should read transcripts of Milosevic's trial? Have you ever wondered why such prominent trial was not widely published? My brother did a research for his term paper and found that the court found sufficient evidence for exactly ONE case of war crimes.
Actually, here in the US, we do things a little differently. We don't like to wait for the actual THEFT of ice cream:
"We don't have any proof, but we think you, (insert country name here), are building a weapon of ice cream destruction. See, our satellite photos show all this activity going on outside of a building in the north-east corner of your country. That is obviously related to the construction of an ice cream destruction device. And, we hear a rumor that you tried to steal yellowcake ice cream from Nigeria. As a result of what we THINK you are going to do, we will now invade you."
Just look at our recent success stories.
If you don't know anything about American history, don't start spouting off about it. While the total numbers of deaths in the American Civil War and the Darfur ethnic cleansing are similar, most of the deaths in the ACW were soldiers, and the deaths were in the same range on each side (around 300k). Most of the deaths in Darfur are civilians. The Confederacy proclaimed independence and was willing to fight to back it up. They had the resources and technology to wage a strong battle, though they eventually lost, in part due to international assistance provided to the Union.
A better comparison would be the killing of native Americans throughout the 19th century, where hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed and many more displaced from their homes. While the native Americans certainly tried to fight back (as I'm sure the civilians of Darfur are trying to do against the Janjaweed soldiers), it was largely a slaughter due to the overwhelming technology, tactics, numbers, and government support of the United States military.
And guess what? It was wrong then, and such things are still wrong now.
If the independent Islamic government of Sudan doesn't wish to be undermined, it should stop supporting the extermination of civilians and actually resolve this "internal conflict". They do nothing to prevent it - to the contrary, they support the killing - and that's why much of the West is pushing the issue.
On the note of things being visible from space, you can peer into Israel and see how the settlements relate to the Palestinian held land.
Israel holds the high ground! Strategery aside, beneath those hills lies the water supply. The palestinians can order water via telephones and big trucks will come to deliver it. Israelis turn on the tap.
While it isn't genocide, the israeli treatment of palestinians sure is malicious. And their walls and settlements are visible from space. Also, with all the uploadability of google earth you can see pictures from ground level of many structures and settlements.
Wow. Great strawman. Very well built, and you really knocked it over with verve.
But the problem, you see, is that no is claiming that "That'll make it all OK"... that's where your strawman becomes embarassingly obvious to anyone paying attention. The point isn't to somehow atone for all of "our" past sins by aiding the people of Darfur, the point is to *aid the people of Darfur*.
But, you go on feeling all self-righteous and smug about your spectacular knowledge of the dead and persecuted peoples of the world. Meanwhile, others will actually try and do something in the hopes that such things will be stopped or outright prevented in the future.
Listen up little idealogical liberal. When someone's shooting at you, or hacking your wife to bits with a machete after raping her in front of you; yes, the only course of action that WILL DO ANYTHING is to shoot/fight back. Open a history book once in a while, the proof is in the pudding.
Oh, and since you brought it up (in another thread), Rawanda wasn't stopped by diplomacy. It wasn't stopped by humanitarian aid. It only ended when one side (the 'good' side in this case) militarily defeated the bad guys. That involves shooting people. The UN could have done the same, only much quicker. That's the only thing that would've stopped that horror. Period.
I'm sorry, but evil doesn't stop for words. Evil won't stop and have a cup 'o tea with you to discuss why it's so pissed off and killing your family. The only way to stop evil is to destroy it and those who belong to it.
Should we have tried diplomacy against Hitler, after a million Jews had already been gassed and a few countries were being occupied? Yea, that would've worked.
It's absolutely morally reprehensible that the UN and the West in general does nothing about Africa, I agree. But to pretend that anything can be done there without military force is absurd and ignorant. These people (the Evil ones, not Africans) are subhuman, and there's only one way to deal with them.
I have a question. While you're out playing "big humanitarian," out there in the shit in Africa, or where ever, helping refugees; how do you find time to post to slashdot? Oh, that's right, you're just another spoiled rich ( and probably white ) Westerner like the rest of us.
Talk is cheap kiddo. Get off the computer and go save some refugees if your heart is bleeding so fucking much.
The practical problem with the silver rule is that it is only stable under the conditions where actions have a clear measurable impact that is judged impartially.
When it comes to actions that bear on harm and benefit to self, people are very poor judges. They overestimate harm to themselves and underestimate harm to others. You cut me of in traffic, I feel threatened, so I pull my gun out and shoot you. It's self defense, right? You look at my girl, I beat the crap out of you. Sounds even to me.
It happens in subtler ways too. Some psychologists did a simple study in which one subject pushed another using a mechanism that measured the force of the push. While the first subject was pushing, the second subject was supposed to push back at the same time, matching the force of the first subject. Consistently the second subject underestimated the the force he was pushing back with. The researchers speculate that many shoolyard fights start this way.
The classic pattern of revenge is not rational tit for tat, but irrational escalation. Escalation eventually leads to a stable, but undesirable result: a feud.
So, perhaps we need an "electrum" rule: Start by treating people as you wish to be treated. When mistreated, respond in kind, but with restraint. Periodically try different levels of golden rule behavior and evaluate the results. This provides negative feedback which enables other equillibria to be reached.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Its a good thing we aren't actually talking about ice cream then because then what you describe would be truly ridiculous. But since we're talking about weapons of mass destruction that could kill millions I think the level of action the US is taking is wholly appropriate.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Your point is solid, but non-compelling.
Past sins do not command future performance. Let's learn already!
"We think people rightly feel that once they buy something, it stays bought," --Suw Charman, Open Rights Grp
I'm not sure where you get the idea that the US is attempting to spread democracy. That's what they say they do, sure, but you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to take a look at the last 50 odd years of US foreign policy and see that they tend to do the opposite.
I'm a centrist Democrat, but I was cautiously in favor of the Iraq war. I didn't believe that Saddam was a threat, or that he was linked to Al Qaeda, but I believed that, where possible, American military power should be used to make the world a better place. I figured, if invading resulted in fewer Iraqi deaths than not invading, then even if the reasons for going to war were bullshit, it was arguably the right thing to do. I don't buy into the knee-jerk liberal sentiment that war is always wrong: intervening in Kosovo, for instance, killed a lot of people, but otherwise it probably would have been a bloodbath. There was even a term for people like me: "liberal hawk", leftists who were in favor of using American military power abroad, where it had the potential to make things better.
But Bush and his hacks have basically discredited that idea. They've given ammunition to the far left, who maintain that war is always the wrong option (war is always a bad option, but sometimes not going to war is worse). They've given ammunition to the isolationists to the right, who say that even though we have the power to change the world for the better, we shouldn't try. He's destroyed the U.S. army, such that even if we wanted to intervene in places like Darfur, we'd have a much harder time. And for the next generation, any time the U.S. tries to apply pressure to human rights violators, they'll look back at us and say, "what about Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo? Who are you Americans to lecture us about human rights and due process?"
the people in al qaeda, evil as they are, they still understand two things about the world you live in better than you:
1. in the age of jet air travel and the internet, there are no borders for anything
2. you are a human being. you therefore count (in their agenda: you can live under global sharia)
there is no morally or intellectually defensible opinion on any issue anymore except a global one. your attitude made sense once, when spanish galleons plied the oceans. those days are over, and so is your worldview
what killed it? globalization. you, reading my words, right now, on the internet, is all the proof i need to show you you are wrong: i could be sitting in calcutta, yogyakarta, or kandahar. it doesn't matter who i am, or what ethnicity, or what nationality: i am impacting your thoughts and ideas
reflect upon the world around you, and how it is changing, and how the way you view your world has been made obsolete
what happens in kandahar matters in downtown manhattan. no one can think like you after 9/11 and expect to have a valid intellectual or moral compass. welcome to the 21st century. re configure your way of thinking. it is obsolete
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Just not in the way you think. Muslims and blacks are fighting and killing each other. So?
It is extremely hard to see why a white european should care OR for that matter even if he cared what the fuck he could do about it.
Who exactly do you propose we shoot?
Because that is the only way to deal with this kinda situation, go in and kill the most agressive party and basically enforce "don't fight or we will kill you".
At the moment some claim that it is the black population that is receiving the worsed of it, so are you saying, in 2007, that the US (because the EU is to chicken shit) should start another war against muslims?
Even americans aren't that insane. *me looks at the americans*
Well, they might be that insane but they can't afford another war that you can't win.
Because the sad fact is this, you CANNOT end a force by conflict UNLESS you use extreme force and that is no longer acceptable. If the US intervenes and just one muslim child is claimed to have been killed (it is well known that muslims claims in this area are about as trustworthy as ANY propaganda claim has been in the whole of human history) the shit will hit the fan and it will face the exact same problems as in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The website you linked to reminds me an awfull lot of similar sites urging the western leaders to save the poor koerds. That went awfully well remember? Do you promise this time to remember what your bleeding heart cried out today when next week a US plane drops a bomb and some photographer show the corpse of a child (and again at another bombsite, several days later?)
No you won't and western leaders know this. They rather take the short, easily forgotten critisim of doing nothing. Because they know people like you, can't be counted upon to accept what needs to be done.
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You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Yes it's quite strange how so many people are worked up about Iraq, yet don't really care about Darfur. The worldwide protests sound so hollow since their silence on Darfur is even more deafening.
I've seen tons of complaints here and attached to the original article page demanding why google maps doesn't highlight [insert favorite genocidal nightmare here]. Remember that what they're doing is free. They didn't have to do anything at all -- which I bet is what 99.9% of all the bitchers have done about [insert favorite genocidal nightmare here] or Darfur. So quit your bitching and learn. Maybe ... just maybe google plans to expand what it's doing to other issues. They didn't add a "Global Awareness layer" to the application just to highlight one issue did they?