WikiLeaks, Money, and Ron Paul

Another day, another dozen WikiLeaks stories, several of which revolve around money. PayPal has given in to pressure to release WikiLeaks funds, though they still won't do further transactions. Mobile payment firm Xipwire is attempting to take PayPal's place. "We do think people should be able to make their own decisions as to who they donate to." PCWorld wonders if the WikiLeaks' money woes could lead to great adoption of Bitcoin, the peer-to-peer currency system we've discussed in the past. Meanwhile, Representative Ron Paul spoke in defense of WikiLeaks on the House floor Thursday, asking a number of questions, including, "Could it be that the real reason for the near universal attacks on WikiLeaks is more about secretly maintaining a seriously flawed foreign policy of empire than it is about national security?" The current uproar over WikiLeaks has prompted Paul Vixie to call for an end to the DDoS attacks and Vladimir Putin to break out a metaphor involving cows and hockey pucks.

Comments

Ron Paul

[bmajik]

We don't have to wonder, since the SecDef has said that no US soldiers, missions, or security were harmed or jeapordized by the Wikileaks releases.

So what are they so mad about?

Being made to look like spoiled children, that's what. Being shown to be backstabbing hypocrites. This is the political equivalent of being pantsed on the world stage.

There are a small handful of votes where Ron Paul has voted in a way that would be upsetting to left-liberals (gay adoption in DC comes to mind), but aside from that, I don't think there is anyone in DC more passionately committed to personal freedom than Ron Paul. The strong support for Wikileaks is just another example.

Re:Ron Paul

[Anonymous Coward]

'This is the political equivalent of being pantsed on the world stage.

For once it's the bully who got a wedgie.

Re:Ron Paul

[Amorymeltzer]

If there's one thing Tron Paul gets it's the Constitution. I personal freedom (construed broadly) is a misnomer, I think, when it comes to Paul, but at least someone in there realizes that this is about freedom of speech, the integrity of the press, and human rights.

Re:Ron Paul

[Registered Coward v2]

If there's one thing Tron Paul gets it's the Constitution.

Without getting into a debate over RP views, he did make one (minor) constitutional flaw:

The Pentagon Papers were also inserted into the Congressional record by Senator Mike Gravel, with no charges of any kind being made of breaking any national security laws.

Senators and Congressmen are specifically not prosecutable for any remarks on the House or Senate floor; which would mean remarks in the record would be protected.

Per Article I, Sec 6:

They shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.

While some might argue that except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace would not be restricted, the ; and makes it a separate clause. The Senate could have chosen to take action based on Senate rules; but those aren't laws.

Re:Ron Paul

[Opportunist]

Hold on, hold on, you think it's the cables that led the arrests? 'scuse me? That cat is out of the bag and it's not like there's anything that can be done about it.

The big leap upon Assange and the attempt to squelch Wikileaks came when they announced they got material that would make an important bank go keel up.

Re:Ron Paul

[harlows_monkeys]

Ron Paul is committed to personal freedom from Federal government interference. State and local government, on the other hand...

Re:Ron Paul

[Amorymeltzer]

Governments absolutely should keep confidential secrets, but trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube once the cat is out of the bag is not only futile, but plainly wrong and, for yet another odd saying, shutting the barn door after the horse. Without evidence that they aided Manning in performing the GaGa transfer, the Wikileaks crew has broken no laws in the US and trying to shut them down/string Assange up is exactly that - trying to limit speech. Our First Amendment rights allow me to recite something that I didn't write - it's copyright I come up against. This is the Government, so no copyright and no foul. The military has the right idea re: removable media - we dun goofed, so let's learn and not do it again.

Re:Ron Paul

[erroneus]

We know this. Ron Paul knows this. Ron Paul is calling BS on the current excitement which is, in short, nothing to get excited about.

Ron Paul is showing in clear detail that the Vietnam war, and the current wars were based on lies and disinformation. He is also alluding to the fact that the pursuit/persecution of Assange and the "outrage" over Wikileaks is also a distraction from the real intent and future actions.

Yes, it's the banking industry that is most threatened here. It's what really makes the world go round. Throw the switch, Wikileaks! Throw the switch! It's time we started the new year with something better than this.

Re:Ron Paul

[commodore64_love]

>>>No one is suppressing the writings of Assange or any other protester

Yes. Yes they are.
They wish to silence him via arrest.

Re:Ron Paul

[commodore64_love]

Ron Paul considers it Congresses' job to designate where the money will be spent, because if it's not designated, the president will spend the money randomly.

His son Rand disagrees with his dad, and I don't think it matters because earmarks represents just 1/100th of 1% of the total budget. There are more important expenditures that need to be reduced like the military and SS (exclude the rich from getting benefits) which represent over one-half of the budget.

Re:Ron Paul

[zach_the_lizard]

Feingold was part of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act, which I would say makes him a limiter of free speech. In essence, your right to mention an incumbent is contingent upon who funded you, and how close we are to the election. The Supreme Court has struck parts of this law out, but protecting incumbents so blatantly hardly earns him a gold star for defense of freedom. His opposition to the PATRIOT Act is noted, however.

Re:Ron Paul

[choko]

Freedom of speech or not, I like to know when my government is covering up things like contractors supplying underage children to rich Afghanis for prostitution.

http://blogs.houstonpress.com/hairballs/2010/12/wikileaks_texas_company_helped.php

Re:Ron Paul

[Anonymous Coward]

There are a small handful of votes where Ron Paul has voted in a way that would be upsetting to left-liberals (gay adoption in DC comes to mind), but aside from that, I don't think there is anyone in DC more passionately committed to personal freedom than Ron Paul.

*cough*Abortion*cough*

Your right to swing your arms ends when it hits my face. In other words, you are free to do as you wish as... and here is the really important part you seem to have missed... as long as you don't take the rights from or harm another. See, you are free to do what you want with YOUR body. But when you have an abortion, you are harming someone else. See, the baby inside you is NOT your body. Go ahead, DNA test it if you want proof, but it is NOT your body.

And that is Ron Paul's stance on abortion in a nutshell. Then again, what would he know about medical procedures. He's just a politician. While politicians understand political issues and laws and their views are important, I would still recommend that you consider the opinion of a doctor over the opinion of a politician. Now, if you can find a politician who is also a doctor, his opinion would be highly valued.

Re:Ron Paul

[gambino21]

Whose speech is being suppressed?

Wikileaks? Freedom of speech and freedom of the press are closely related.

Whose newspapers have been shutdown?

Again, Wikileaks. They may not be a newspaper in the traditional sense, but they are certainly part of the press. They analyse the information they release and write articles. Contrary to mainstream media belief, Wilileaks actually reads and redacts stuff before releasing it.

This isn't about free speech, period. This is about a giant classified document dump.

Less than 2000 of the more than 250,000 diplomatic cables have been released. The majority of these were first released by one of the large newspapers (New York Times, etc) first. Wikileaks included the same redactions included by the newspapers. How can that be considered a "giant classified document dump"?

If you want to make the argument that governments should have no secrets at all, that diplomats should have no confidential communications at all, then say that. But quit saying that this is a freedom of speech case.

Nice straw-man, no rational person is saying governments should have no secrets. The issue here is government law-breaking which was exposed, and they are now trying to cover up.

Re:Ron Paul

[bmajik]

Congress is going to spend the money one way or another. He often votes against spending bills that he has allocated earmarks into, becuase he'd prefer if the spending didn't happen. But since he always loses that argument, and the money is getting spent anyway, he's sending it back to his district, since it is THIER money.

I'd put his record of financial stewardship of the people's money up against anybody. ANYBODY.

Re:Ron Paul

[bmajik]

Well, he works in the federal government. And that's where most of the trouble is.

One of Jefferson's ideas was that each of the states would be its own experiment in democracy; with different laws and customs and implementations of governance.

I don't know where Paul stands on various BOR amendment incorporations into/upon the several states. It will be a wonderful time in American politics when all of the other problems of federal overreach are solved and we are arguing about if the feds have the power to force 2A incorporation, for instance.

Re:Ron Paul

[jkroll]

Feingold was part of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act, which I would say makes him a limiter of free speech.

I would argue that you are falling into the same mistake the Supreme Court has made repeatedly, equating money with free speech. Money is not speech, money is power. Misuse of this monetary power is what has seriously corrupted the US political process.

While McCain-Feingold may not have been perfect, it was a step in the right direction to limit the influence of money on the US political system. It is one of the great ironies in that international election observers would consider the US campaign contribution system highly corrupt if it were replicated in any election they were monitoring.

Re:Ron Paul

[fishexe]

Feingold was part of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act, which I would say makes him a limiter of free speech.*

*For a suitably peculiar definition of free speech.

In essence, your right to mention an incumbent is contingent upon who funded you, and how close we are to the election.

Well, it's illegal to pay people to vote a certain way, and that's not considered a violation of the right to vote. How is the right to speak any different from the right to vote?

The Supreme Court has struck parts of this law out,

Yeah, it took them decades to find a supreme court conservative enough to do that (note that that decision wasn't just about McCain-Feingold but also struck down parts of several older campaign-finance laws). This same supreme court has ruled, by the same 5-4 margin, that when the government locks you up because of your religion and hires guards to beat the shit out of you can't bring suit against the people who planned that policy, only the people who implemented it. So I wouldn't hold being struck down 5-4 by the Roberts court against any law.

but protecting incumbents so blatantly hardly earns him a gold star for defense of freedom.

Campaign-finance restrictions were about protecting incumbents?? Really?? Think about it: who has the connections to get the money to lock in an election through dominating the airwaves? Incumbents. McCain-Feingold was basically the only thing in politics working in favor of leveling the playing field between incumbents and newcomers in the last 20 years. After McCain-Feingold was overturned, Feingold was practically guaranteed re-election until he voluntarily chose to hold himself to the standards of McCain-Feingold once again. Yeah, a real pro-incumbent cad there, for sure. We're talking about a man who stuck to his anti-protecting-incumbent principles even to the extent of sacrificing his own job.

His opposition to the PATRIOT Act is noted, however.

Aw, thanks for throwing me a bone.

Re:Ron Paul

[flaming error]

RP sees Abortion as a personal freedom issue - for the fetus. The problem with abortion is that some of us see it from the perspective of the fetus, some of us see it from the eyes of the woman. Trying to see both perspectives presents all sorts of dilemmas, so most of us just pick a side. In my own case, for the first 20 weeks of the pregnancy I ignore the fetus because it is not viable for birth. For the last trimester I favor the child, with exceptions for mother's health.

For the six weeks in between, when the fetus could possibly survive but is not developmentally ready, I don't know which side to favor. I think it's interesting that left out of the discussion is the man. It's possible sexual contact occurred without the consent of the woman, but pretty unlikely it occurred without the consent of a man.

I think if society wants to ban abortion, that might be ok, if they can extract the costs of medical delivery and government childcare from the biological father. It's really not fair for the law to demand the inconvenience of pregnancy and the pain and danger of labor from the woman, but nothing at all from the man.

And back to the philosophy of Ron Paul, he thinks the Federal Government has no business telling people what their values should be. He thinks social issues should be hashed out at a more local level, rather than imposing one ideology on the entire nation.

Re:Ron Paul

[Shark]

Just a note on his voting record: If he voted against gay adoption in DC, it most likely was because he thinks the federal government has no business deciding on such things, not because he may (or may not) agree with them personally. He explained his stance on abortion the same way. Now that's not to say he doesn't state his personal view on that last matter to gain political support among people who share it but if any politician can be trusted to vote on constitutional principle rather than personal belief, I'd say he's it.

Re:Ron Paul

[Nursie]

If society wants to ban abortion then young, scared women, mostly from strict moralistic or religious families, will die.

Because they will be scared of being beaten by fathers or boyfriends, or scared of being thrown out of home, or socially ostracised, or losing all their life prospects, or whatever it happens to be. They'll probably be from strongly anti-abortion backgrounds but they'll make a mistake and think they can fix it by some back-street guy with a coathanger, or drinking something their friend heard could induce miscarriage or a million and one other ways.

This is one of the major reasons abortion should be free, legal and infrequent. Even if you disagree with it vehemently, because otherwise girls die.

Of course the anti-abortion crowd and the abstinence-only crowd overlap considerably, and neither of them is a reality based argument, so this always falls on deaf ears.

Re:Ron Paul

[Shark]

As someone posted above:

http://blogs.houstonpress.com/hairballs/2010/12/wikileaks_texas_company_helped.php

So you have rape stories in the leaks too. They're just a bit worse than the charges laid against Assange.

Re:Ron Paul

[burnin1965]

I think you have misunderstood Ron Paul's political position and his political objectives.

When you compare Ron Paul's speeches to his legislative record there are some glaring inconsistencies. What most people listening to Ron's speeches don't realise though is that the purpose of his speeches on Wikileaks, the Iraq war, etc. are not necessarily in defence or opposition to those causes, he is only taking advantage of what he sees an an opportunity to induce distrust, confusion and anger into the public mind when dealing with anything in the Federal government because Ron Paul wants to place state governments at the forefront of law and governance in the United States.

In 1997 Ron tried to pass a constitutional amendment that would allow states to make it illegal for citizens to deface the flag of the United States. Clearly an infringement of citizens rights to freedom of speech that are now protected by the Constitution of the United States.

In 1999 Ron tried to pass a congressional bill that would declare the land in Panama on which the Panama Canal resides as sovereign United States territory. This appears contradictory to statements he has made about recent wars but in reviewing his statements I think people misunderstand what he is saying, Ron Paul is not against Imperialist actions by the United States but he believes they are only legal if they are initiated by the Congress and not by the Executive Branch.

And the real humdinger, in 2003 Ron tried to remove the check and balance of the Supreme Court with legislation that would bar the Supreme Court from addressing citizen's grievances against unconstitutional state laws that arose from religious dogma. I think Ron dreamt this one up after a few Texas state laws were struck down by the Supreme Court like the Texas sodomy law that tried to outlaw gay sex.

The reality is that Ron Paul is against Constitutional law and wants nothing short of a return to the Articles of Confederation that allowed individual states to determine for themselves what rights would be protected and when it is okay for the majority to oppress the minority.
 

Re:Ron Paul

[Shark]

Keep in mind that with state and local governments, you have an extra voting option: your feet. It may sound silly but it is quite significant. It is (relatively) easy to move out of a state if you don't like the laws and states will ultimately have to compete with each-other to come up with good laws or face exodus of their tax income.

Re:Ron Paul

[Mr. Slippery]

There are a small handful of votes where Ron Paul has voted in a way that would be upsetting to left-liberals (gay adoption in DC comes to mind), but aside from that, I don't think there is anyone in DC more passionately committed to personal freedom than Ron Paul.

Ron Paul is anti-science, anti-choice, anti-separation of church and state, a liar (in that he's given two contradictory stories about the controversial racist statements that appeared in his newsletter), and either a racist or incompetent to run a 'zine.

A great deal of his faux-libertarianism is about removing federal safeguards against state governments and big business fscking you over. Ron Paul wouldn't know personal freedom if it bit him in the ass.

The fact that he still makes more sense than most of the G.O.P. is an indictment of the conservative movement, not an endorsement of Paul.

Re:Ron Paul

[MightyMartian]

The point of legalizing abortions was two fold; 1. why should the state have the right to tell someone what they can do with their body... and 2. simple pragmatism, having abortions illegal doesn't prevent abortions, it just criminalizes the doctors performing them and pushes young, desperate women into back alleys where they so often are mutilated or die.

There's no easy answer. Science can, to some degree, answer the question as to when a fetus becomes conscious, but those who are opposed to abortion are not going to accept that anyways (a lot of these folks are experts at rejecting science inconvenient to their belief system). At the end of the day, if we accept the premise that a fetus is not legally a person to a certain point (and we don't, you don't have to get a birth and death certificate for a miscarriage, and so far as I'm aware, not even for stillbirths, but only live births).

Liberties create uncomfortable situations, but the alternative of the state controlling women and forcing medical decisions on doctors seems much worse.

Re:Ron Paul

[mopower70]

I believe you've just performed the often sought but rarely achieved redundant analogy trifecta in a single sentence.

Re:Ron Paul

[burnin1965]

Exactly.

Ron Paul makes popular statements about the big bad Federal government but gets a free pass on the real legislation he tries to ram through Congress that is designed specifically to give state government the right to infringe on citizens rights. Ron Paul is no friend of freedom nor the Constitution of the United States. In fact, James Madison noted that the infringement of citizen's rights by these "State's Rights" goons was likely the sole driving factor that made the Constitution of the United States possible...

James Madison, October 24 1787

A constitutional negative on the laws of the States seems equally necessary to secure individuals agst. encroachments on their rights. The mutability of the laws of the States is found to be a serious evil. The injustice of them has been so frequent and so flagrant as to alarm the most stedfast friends of Republicanism. I am persuaded I do not err in saying that the evils issuing from these sources contributed more to that uneasiness which produced the Convention, and prepared the public mind for a general reform, than those which accrued to our national character and interest from the inadequacy of the Confederation to its immediate objects.

The Constitution of the United States was meant to protect against the flagrant oppression of mob democracy that was practised at the state level and that is exactly what Ron Paul wants to bring back. And whether they realise it or not Ron Paul supporters are supporting establishment of a Christian State Theocracy with oppressive religion based laws.

These are some pertinent Ron Paul bills that highlight his true political nature:
Religious Freedom Restoration Act
Expressing the sense of the Congress that the Panama Canal and the Panama Canal Zone should be considered to be the sovereign territory of the United States.
Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States authorizing the States to prohibit the physical destruction of the flag of the United States and authorizing Congress...

Re:Ron Paul

[ukemike]

Hold on, hold on, you think it's the cables that led the arrests? 'scuse me? That cat is out of the bag and it's not like there's anything that can be done about it.

Actually as has been pointed out several times on this page, only about 2,000 of the 250,000 cables have been released so far. So only 1% of the cats are out of the bag. Though I agree that the bank leaks have been a big motivating factor in the rest of the world's institutional powers takings sides against wikileaks.

Re:Ron Paul

[cold fjord]

We don't have to wonder, since the SecDef has said that no US soldiers, missions, or security were harmed or jeapordized by the Wikileaks releases.

Not quite. Secretary of Defense Gates said that the release of the stolen classified documents by Wikileaks is "likely to cause significant harm or damage to national security interests of the United States".

Washington (CNN) -- The online leak of thousands of secret military documents from the war in Afghanistan by the website WikiLeaks did not disclose any sensitive intelligence sources or methods, the Department of Defense concluded.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said there is still concern Afghans named in the published documents could be retaliated against by the Taliban, though a NATO official said there has been no indication that this has happened. (Re: NATO comment, see below. -CF) " We assess this risk as likely to cause significant harm or damage to national security interests of the United States and are examining mitigation options," Gates wrote in the letter. "We are working closely with our allies to determine what risks our mission partners may face as a result of the disclosure."...

Over the summer, the Pentagon created a team of more than 100 personnel made up of mostly intelligence analysts from various branches of the Defense Department as well as the FBI, who were involved in the round-the-clock review. Gates: Leaked documents don't reveal key intel, but risks remain

The phrase, "sensitive intelligence sources or methods" is primarily referring to satellites & signal intelligence. Allies and informants, key resources when fighting a counter-insurgency, have been put at risk by being named.

“My attitude on this is that there are two areas of culpability,” Gates said on ABC’s This Week. “One is legal culpability. And that's up to the Justice Department and others -- that's not my arena.

“But there's also a moral culpability,” he added. “And that's where I think the verdict is guilty on WikiLeaks. They have put this out without any regard whatsoever for the consequences.”

Those consequences could be the loss of innocent lives, Gates said, and not just those of American troops.

“If I'm angry, it is because I believe that this information puts those in Afghanistan who have helped us at risk. It puts our soldiers at risk because they can learn a lot -- our adversaries can learn a lot about our techniques, tactics and procedures from the body of these leaked documents,” the secretary said.

Gates said that having an intelligence background, he knows that “protecting your sources is sacrosanct.” He noted that “there was no sense of responsibility or accountability” associated with the leak of information. WikiLeaks Guilty on Moral Grounds, Gates Says

With apologies to an unnamed NATO official (what sort of job did he have?) the Taliban are starting to hunt down people. (The Taliban have assembled a group to examine the Wikileaks documents.)

After WikiLeaks published a trove of U.S. intelligence documents—some of which listed the names and villages of Afghans who had been secretly cooperating with the American military—it didn’t take long for the Taliban to react. A spokesman for the group quickly threatened to “punish” any Afghan listed as having “collaborated” with the U.S. and the Kabul authorities against the growing Taliban insurgency. In recent days, the Taliban has demonstrated

Re:Ron Paul

[multisync]

They wish to silence him via arrest.

Also, pressuring companies to cut off service to wikiLeaks because it is a "criminal organization." What laws have they broken? Who's laws? Were those laws written prio to the commission of the "crime?"

This is a denial of service. A company can not refuse to serve someone because of their religeon, or the colour of their skin.

Others are calling for the assassination, or arrest and execution (which pretty much amounts to the same thing) of people working for WikiLeaks.

This is absolutely a free speach issue, and if ordinary people don't draw a line in the sand and support WikiLeaks - even if they don't like the fact that theses particular cables were leaked - they will one day find themselves prevented from being allowed to know what their government is up to.

There's a word for that, and it ain't democracy.

Re:Ron Paul

[burnin1965]

My views are fairly close to yours, I see major moral and legal issues with abortion but I see room for acceptance based on situation and the length of the pregnancy. However, I am strongly against any ban on abortion because 1) many of the people trying to create a ban are basing it on their religion rather than any sane knowledge of biology, 2) nobody has the right to place absolute bans on something which they have no knowledge or understanding, 3) as you noted there are instances where abortion is a necessity and a ban will be equivalent to a death sentence to the mother or a horrific and painful life sentence for the child.

But I disagree with your conclusion on Ron Paul's philosophical position. Ron Paul's philosophy is not about freedom of the individual, which is the basis of the Constitution of the United States, his philosophy is freedom of State Governments to determine what rights citizens are allowed and which rights a state will infringe. I say infringe because the Constitution does not define an individual's rights but instead touches on the most obvious rights which it protects. Just because a state creates a law, say for example Ron Paul's dream of state laws forbidding the burning of the United States flag in protest or his dream of bringing back the Texas gay sex laws, it does not mean that the right does not exist, it just means the will of the local mob is enforced on the individual. This is Ron's philosophy.

Re:Ron Paul

[phantomfive]

If you can make a law limiting someone's use of money to promote their views, then you can make a law limiting any kind of speech.

Campaign finance laws are not the problem, the problem is that people get their information about who to vote for from commercials. As soon as that stops, then campaign finance won't matter so much.

Also, whatever law you make about campaign finance, there will be a way around it. If we can't advertise on TV, we can hire protestors to push our viewpoint. We can buy a television station. It doesn't matter. Campaign finance laws attack the wrong part of the problem.

Re:Ron Paul

[SomeKDEUser]

Thank you. The concept of letting people die because you think you have the moral high ground is abhorrent. Fantasise about your pink-pony society where foetus are people and abortion is a lifestyle issue, but by Hell, don't go making actual humans miserable because you can't handle reality.

Re:Ron Paul

[ifiwereasculptor]

Who's laws?

I don't think it's a person. Could be about 6 million, though, if you meant Laos.

Re:Ron Paul

[Opportunist]

That's not the point now. The point is to assassinate Assange's credibility so when the bank data shit finally gets to hit the fan, the involved bank will stand up and do whatever it can to get news outlets to shut up about it, lest they side with a "criminal". Do you want to release that info and side with someone accused of rape, hunted like an animal and (insert random other slander here)?

Wikileaks' "power" and its threat hinges on its credibility. If that can be eroded away, it doesn't matter anymore that they leak the bank data. Nobody will care. Nobody will believe it. Nobody will report it.

Re:Ron Paul

[nschubach]

not against Imperialist actions by the United States but he believes they are only legal if they are initiated by the Congress and not by the Executive Branch.

And technically, he's right. The Executive branch is there to execute the law, not make policy, declare wars, or make laws.

There are some flaws with his staunch religious views, but that's what makes him human. I agree with a good portion of Ron's voting record, but I'd never support him to be king. Anyone that would place 100% faith in any one person should be analyzed for insanity. Anyone that would 100% oppose someone should be analyzed as well.

Re:Ron Paul

[Mr. Slippery]

See, you are free to do what you want with YOUR body. But when you have an abortion, you are harming someone else. See, the baby inside you is NOT your body. Go ahead, DNA test it if you want proof, but it is NOT your body.

No, you are not harming someone else. An embryo is not a person. Personhood requires a functioning forebrain, which does not arise until well after birth.

Forcing a woman via threat of violence to carry that embryo to term, out of sentimentality about babies or on the basis of some superstition about a ghost entering the zygote at conception, is not compatible with liberty.

See, the baby inside you is NOT your body. Go ahead, DNA test it if you want proof, but it is NOT your body.

If it's "inside you", it's not a "baby", it's fetus or an embryo or a zygote. Yes, in popular usage the term are conflated, but if we are to arrive at useful conclusions we must be precise in our language.

DNA testing tells us nothing: a cancerous tumor has a different genetic code, while it will soon be possible for a woman to be carrying an embryo that is her genetic clone.

Personhood is about brains. DNA has nothing to do with it.

Re:Ron Paul

[burnin1965]

Technically Ron Paul is correct, I am not questioning the accuracy of his statements about declaring war and I fully support his stopping these illegal activities.

However, I think there is a great deal of naivety about his stance on nation building and intervention into foreign nations. Which is why I think it is important to read his congressional record and note his position on Panama.

Re:Ron Paul

[7-Vodka]

The ex-president of Brazil, Lula, said this (and I paraphrase):

...We owe much to the press. Sometimes I've been called on criticizing the press and I'm not criticizing the press, I'm just keeping them honest. Like they keep me honest. What I can't believe nobody is standing up for wikileaks. Julian Assange was jailed against freedom of speech. Where are the protests? The only thing he was doing is embarrassing some and showing them au naturale. Showing the memos of some low level ambassadors. Now I don't know if my ambassadors send these kinds of memos, but look, the current president Dilma has to know and speak to her ministers if you don't have what to write, don't write silliness. Leave it blank.

So then wikileaks shows up, bares naked the diplomacy which appeared untouchable, the best in the world. And they start a hunt, maybe with old style wanted posters. And they arrest the guy and I did not see one call for protest. So go ahead and put on the blog of the planalto (brazilian newspaper) the first protest. That this is against the freedom of expression on the internet. So that we can protest because the man was using only that which he himself had read. And if he read something because somebody else wrote it, the guilty is not the one who divulges it but the one who wrote it in the fist place.
So instead of blaming the one who exposed it, blame the one who originated the stupid documents.

Therefore to wikileaks, my honest support and my protest against the oppression to freedom of expression...

Youtube video

Re:Ron Paul

[FiloEleven]

Let's not forget the child, either. If an unwanted child is born, while the possibility exists that she will be offered up for adoption it's pretty rare. Chances are she'll either grow up with a mom who doesn't love her and sees her as a burden, or she might be abandoned or left in a home to be cared for by other people.

A life like that isn't going to be a whole lot of fun. I am personally against abortions except for extreme cases, which means that if I were faced with the choice myself I would choose not to do it, and would counsel others who asked me for my opinion likewise. You mentioned some of the very good reasons why there ought to be a legal, safe method for getting abortions, and that is why I believe that it should remain legal despite my personal objection.

Re:Ron Paul

[NoOneInParticular]

So, they're closing down the New York Times & the Washington Post? They've committed exactly the same 'crime' that WikiLeaks did.

Re:Ron Paul

[multisync]

What laws have they broken?
Receiving and distributing classified information that causes harm to national security is against the law.

Which nation? Australia? That's where Julian is from.

What specific information in the thousand or so cables published to date has endagered the security of any nation?

Whose(sic) laws?
The laws of the United States.

That's not how (sic) works. You put (sic) after what I actually wrote to indicate that you believe I spelled it wrong, but are leaving it that way to maintain the integrety of the quote.

Getting the quote wrong, then putting (sic) after it kind of defeats the purpose of using (sic).

Re: "the laws of the United States" see above.

Yes. It was even tested in court prior to this. See here: http://www.fas.org/sgp/jud/rosen080906.pdf

You're joking?

I wasn't familiar with the case, so I went to Wikipedia. Here's an excerpt from the article about Steven J. Rosen:

He was under federal indictment from August 4, 2005 for alleged violations of the Espionage Act in the conduct of AIPAC's work, but the prosecution dropped charges once it was clear that they would not be able to convict him. The case has received wide attention more because it raises new issues about the conflict between Bush Administration national security policy and civil liberties guaranteed by the First Amendment. Floyd Abrams, a leading First Amendment attorney, said the AIPAC case "is the single most dangerous case for free speech and free press" (Washington Post, March 31, 2006) and Alan Dershowitz called it "the worst case of selective prosecution I have seen in 42 years of legal practice" (Jerusalem Post, January 31, 2006).

So you've actually brought my attention to another case that illustrates why it is important to speak out against the attacks on WikiLeaks, and ensure free speach and freedom of the press is vigorously defended whenever it is attacked by the government of the day.

You must be retarded to have to ask those questions.

I should have just stopped reading your comment there.

Re:Ron Paul

[Culture20]

No, you are not harming someone else. An embryo is not a person. Personhood requires a functioning forebrain, which does not arise until well after birth.

You have just exonerated everyone who has murdered a newborn, or even apparently a weeks-old baby. I think I'll go eat one right now. I mean, if they're not people, they're not Soylent Green right?

Personhood is about brains.

No, personhood isn't even about brains. It's about an arbitrary graduation from womb to air. So says SCOTUS, So Say We All!

Re:Ron Paul

[Anonymous Coward]

Scarily enough ... there is a Federal Acquisition Regulation that covers child labor, and how government contractors aren't supposed to be using child labor, but for things like bamboo, beans, bricks, sugarcane and teak.

See FAR 52.2123

Re:Ron Paul

[burnin1965]

When the US federal gov't infringes on your rights, there's basically nothing you, a citizen, can do about it.

This statement is about as dead wrong as you can get. The Federal government as established under the Constitution of the United States has checks and balances to provide even individual citizens with the power to challenge the super power.

Case in point, Welsh vs United States and here Leary vs United States and here Muhammad Ali vs United States.

Don't get me wrong, it is not perfect and oppression still occurs but make no mistake, you do have options under the Constitution to protect your rights.

Now compare this to (T)Ron Paul's option.

Yes, by all means do compare.

In Ron Pauls Religious Freedom Act he doesn't intend for there to be religious freedom for individuals like the Constitution, no, he intends "REMOVAL OF RELIGIOUS FREEDOM-RELATED CASES FROM FEDERAL DISTRICT COURT JURISDICTION" which means you will no longer have the protection of the Constitution and no recourse to the Supreme Court when the local mob in your state creates oppressive laws based on religion.

The reality is quite the opposite of what you are describing.

you would be free to vote with your feet

This is an interesting and common solution among Ron Paul supporters, don't like the oppression then leave, but here is the deal, the United State as defined by the Constitution was here before you and before Ron Paul. If you have so much trouble with the liberty and freedom of individuals that is protected by the Constitution then leave. Nobody is forcing Ron or anyone else to stay in the United States.

Any biologist will tell you that evolution proceeds fastest when it takes place in small groups.

Political oppression and tyranny are not ruled by natural selection and they do not experience variance due to random mutation. Besides, oppressive governments have been tested many times, they don't work, there is no reason to trash the Constitution and revert the states to some ridiculous mob rules democracy where the desires of the mob no matter how absurd take precedence over the rights of individuals.

Okaaaaayyyy...

[dangitman]

Ron Paul, Julian Assange, cows, hockey, Vladimir Putin and PayPal?

I'm sorry, that's one orgy I don't want to be invited to.

Re:Okaaaaayyyy...

[Anne Thwacks]

What about RuPaul and Ron Jeremy?

Re:Okaaaaayyyy...

[fishexe]

If there is a god, Rule34 will pass on this one.

I think the mere existence of Rule 34 is already proof there's not a god.

Re:Okaaaaayyyy...

[interkin3tic]

Ron Paul, Julian Assange, cows, hockey, Vladimir Putin and PayPal? I'm sorry, that's one orgy I don't want to be invited to.

Why not!?! I don't know how conversations usually go before, during, or after interspecies orgies usually go, but I'm guessing the most interesting ones ever would be at THAT orgy. The book deal alone would probably cover the therapy bills.

Re:Okaaaaayyyy...

[rubycodez]

Rule 34 can be used to prove the existence of all gods known to modern man; they can be found, on the internet, having sex.

Electronic currency

[igreaterthanu]

BitCoin's creator and it's forum members don't want to be associated with WikiLeaks for fear of becoming associated with money laundering, so why is this article pushing it?

Anyway, if there is to be some future electronic currency then IMHO it should be based on IOUs traded between trusted "friends", to send to someone who is not your friend then the network could make a path between nodes with whatever has the best exchange rate and tah-dah, a currency based on trust, not on wasting cpu cycles (as how BitCoin works). I did see a project like this once but the name escapes me. From memory I also think it was centralized which is a big no.

Re:Electronic currency

[IamTheRealMike]

You are thinking of a project called "Ripple" by Ryan Fugger. It is another P2P currency system, except not quite the same as BitCoin. I looked into some of these alternative currency systems some time back - they tend to be academically interesting but have weak justifications.

BitCoin is a variant of a system called HashCash. The basic insight behind hash based coins are that they are portable proofs of work, and thus easily checkable as being scarce. Any attempt to create electronic coins needs scarcity so that's a useful property.

Briefly, to create a hash coin you find some data that when run through SHA1 or whatever results in a hash with some easily checkable property. BitCoin uses "N leading digits are all zeros" where N varies over time. The nice thing about this is that the only way to find this data is brute force, so finding them represents real "work" in the sense of burned electricity and CPU time costs. It might seem arbitrary but it's really no less stupid than digging shiny metal out of the ground then putting it in a central bank.

Hash coins are not, by themselves, enough to create an electronic currency. They distribute and decentralize the minting process, but obviously to "spend" such a coin you need to transfer it in such a way that you lose it and the other person now has it. Some systems use a centralized registry to do this. I forget the name but one researcher was using a trusted computing/TPM style approach to that, so the registry could prove its trustworthyness to the participants remotely.

BitCoin attempts to decentralize the movement of coins as well via some clever cryptographic tricks. Essentially, to transfer a coin from A to B, the transaction is broadcast and incorporated into a constantly moving proof of work chain. The chain becomes a difficult to forge or tamper with public record of all transactions that have occurred.

So BitCoin can be seen as fundamentally the same idea as metal coins, but transferred into the digital realm and entirely decentralized - no banks required.

Ripple is a very different beast. Ripple networks are also P2P and decentralized but that's where the similarities end. In Ripple, if I do work for you, say I mow your lawn, the fact that you owe me a debt is marked in our Ripple accounts ... and that's it. Now let's say I go to the grocery store and want to buy some food. My debt to the grocery store is recorded in our accounts. I can run up as much debt to the grocery store as they will allow. Finally, the owner of the grocery store goes to your shop and gets a haircut. The owner of the store now has a debt marked to you.

We now have a debt cycle .... you owe me, I owe the grocer and the grocer owes you. Ripple seeks out and destroys this circular debt, thus resetting the system to zero. In a Ripple network, the ideal state of an account is empty: you owe nothing and nobody owes you. The system attempts to trend towards that state.

If Ryan were to read this description he would undoubtably say it was inaccurate, as Ripples design is much more focussed on finding paths of debt.... for instance, if I don't know you why should I merely accept that you owe me $50 for mowing your lawn, when I might not ever get that back? So Ripple attempts to find social connections between people and locate a path of credit lines that can make the transaction possible, eg, maybe you know Bob and I also know Bob, Bob trusts you and I trust Bob thus Bob is willing to automatically back your debt.

Re:Electronic currency

[Seth Kriticos]

Please, for the love of the written text: read the damn FAQ http://www.bitcoin.org/faq *before* you engage in a discussion about the topic!

The generation of BitCoins is just part of the bootstrapping process, and it's not economically viable to do that to get wealthy (you'd set up an Amazon cluster to make them, you'd pay more than you'd earn). Generation also slows and will cap out at around 21 million BitCoins.

The primary value of BitCoins is defined by how much people are ready to exchange it for, and what you can buy/sell with it, not unlike real currency.

The primary differences are that there is no central bank that can print more money on a whim, and that the transactions are anonymous (kind of, the numbers are broadcasted, but they are not attached to names, only cryptographic keys anyone can make).

In that sense, it is an interesting and promising thing. Could use some broader adoption though, but that's not an over night thing. The current structures are stable enough to use it for practical things already and maybe we'll see it in broader adoption in the future.

Re:Electronic currency

[oiron]

Thanks for explaining, but honestly, didn't all that give anyone a headache?

Real-world currency works because it's bloody simple to use: give the shopkeeper a few coins or notes, and he gives you an ice-cream. Unless you can simplify it down to something like that, where I don't have to worry about hashes and debt chains, I doubt it's going to really gain traction.

But experimenting with such systems does give us a really good idea of what's actually going on behind those bits of green/blue/brown paper and shiny circular pieces of metal we keep exchanging for goods and services.

Re:Electronic currency

[IamTheRealMike]

BitCoin is conceptually simple to use, not much different to what we do today. The headache inducing part is the implementation :-)

But if you want to spend some BitCoins it's actually not that hard. You just fire up the software, select who you want to send coins to (eg from the programs built in address book), how much you want to send and hit go. If the receivers P2P node is online at the time you can also include a message. If it's not, you can still send the money but without a message.

And that's it. That's all it takes. Receiving coins is likewise easy - you just fire up the software, let it synchronize with the network and now you have the coins that were sent to you.

There is one (big) catch. By the very definition of what BitCoin is, all transactions are public. It seems the latest versions attempt to obfuscate the size of the transactions, and there is a discussion in the linked page of how to go further - but nonetheless, the fact that an address you control transacted with somebody is a matter of public record. This is very different to today, where financial transactions are assumed to be secret unless otherwise published.

Ripple is much harder to understand and that's why I doubt it'll ever go anywhere. It's an excellent intellectual exercise but in a series of debates with Ryan I had back in 2008 (?) he admitted that a lot of the justifications for Ripple were post-hoc, and the fractional reserve did not have many of the flaws often cited.

Re:Electronic currency

[diablo-d3]

I'm one of the major third party developers (I wrote DiabloMiner, a OpenCL miner written in Java), and at no point has anyone in the community said they don't want to be associated with Wikileaks.

If anything, many of us have asked Julian and his associates to accept Bitcoin so we can donate to Wikileaks.

So, please, don't spread FUD.

Re:Electronic currency

[Wonko the Sane]

You do. The economy consists of people trading goods and services with each other. Those goods are the wealth of the economy. Currency is simply a token we pass around to make this bartering more efficient. When you want to trade with someone who doesn't have what you want you accept currency in exchange for your good or service and take it to someone who does have what you want.

Trust Xipwire?

[Doc Ruby]

I don't trust PayPal: it's an unregulated global banking monopoly, that routinely abuses its monopoly to steal money from people. It's not insured by the FDIC like a regular bank, so if it goes bust any money in there is going to disappear.

What about Xipwire? Has it demonstrated theft, dishonesty or any other reason not to trust it with money and private info? Is there any reason to believe it won't just do like PayPal (or worse) once it does become big enough not to care, like PayPal?

If I don't trust PayPal, is there any reason I should use Xipwire instead?

Re:Trust Xipwire?

[jimicus]

Don't you start. This discussion has been done a million times before on /., particularly around the time of the Microsoft antitrust trials.

There is more than one definition of monopoly, and only one of those is "has 100% market share". The word can be - and frequently is - used to mean "has so much market share that the market is distorted".

Re:Trust Xipwire?

[mounthood]

Monopoly doesn't mean zero competitors.

In economics, a monopoly (from Greek...) exists when a specific individual or an enterprise has sufficient control over a particular product or service to determine significantly the terms on which other individuals shall have access to it ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly

Re:Trust Xipwire?

[Doc Ruby]

No, a monopoly does not require zero competition. It requires market control through market dominance. Macroeconomics doesn't turn on single exceptions that don't change the categorical behavior, just as classical physics doesn't turn on a small statistical anomalies outweighed by the main objects. Xipwire is orders of magnitude smaller than Paypal, and doesn't affect Paypal's market dominance.

Re:Trust Xipwire?

[phantomfive]

I don't trust PayPal: it's an unregulated global banking monopoly, that routinely abuses its monopoly to steal money from people. It's not insured by the FDIC like a regular bank, so if it goes bust any money in there is going to disappear.

Exactly. I am fairly certain PayPal employs people to look over accounts with lots of money in them for any excuse to freeze them. That way, even if they can't steal the money outright, they've been able to freeze it for a month and make interest on the cash. Dirtiest company ever.

Oh my gosh...

[DoofusOfDeath]

Ron Paul is my biggest... fucking... hero.

My only regret is that he's not 30 years younger, so that he'd have the energy and lifespan needed to better advance his goals.

Re:Oh my gosh...

[commodore64_love]

That's why Rand Paul has arrived on the scene to take-over for his dad when he retires from politics. And of course there's other Ron Paul types in congress, just not as visible (they didn't make three attempts to become president).

The reporters who revealed the Watergate scandal were protected.
Ditto Edward R Murrow when he revealed secret documents of the Unamerican Committee.
Likewise the reporters at wikileaks should be protected. Arrest the government employees that stole the documents, not the press.

Re:Oh my gosh...

[mattcsn]

Ron Paul is a nutcase of the most epic sort, but at least he's an honest and self-consistent nutcase. He believes in personal freedom from government interference, and self-sufficiency. I disagree with 99% of his opinions, and I think that his policies are both deeply flawed and deeply stupid, but at least I can respect him for his sincerity and conviction.

Rand Paul is a hypocrite of the worst sort. He's a full-scale moralizing dipshit who believes that the role of government is to enforce the will of the religious-right, both domestically and internationally. He has no convictions, no intellectual honesty, no respect for individual rights, and no policies that weren't bought and paid for by lobbyists.

I respect Ron Paul, even though I disagree with him. I have no respect for his idiot son.

Re:Oh my gosh...

[AnonGCB]

You have no idea what you're talking about. Please stop.

You say nothing damning? What cables have you been reading?

In July 2009, a confidential originating from the U.S. State Department ordered U.S. diplomats to spy on the leader of the United Nations, Secretary general Ban Ki-moon, and other top U.N. officials.[1] The intelligence info the diplomats were ordered to gather included biometric information, passwords, and personal encryption keys used in private and commercial networks for official communications.

In 2009, the U.S. manipulated — via spying, threats, and bribes — the Copenhagen global climate change summit to prevent any agreement to be reached leading to the overall failure of summit.

According to a cable from the American Embassy in Kabul, Vice President of Afghanistan, Ahmad Zia Massoud, was found carrying $52 million in cash that he “was ultimately allowed to keep without revealing the money’s origin or destination.”

There's more but that's what I found in about 2 minutes on wikipedia.

And the government works for us, they have no right to secrets. It is completely different from a private citizen's communications being leaked.

Re:Oh my gosh...

[fishexe]

The reporters who reveled the watergate scandal, also kept lots of it secrets and didn't divulge into every piece of paper the republican's created that year, only the parts that referenced the scandal.

Wikileaks simply dumped the entire contents onto the web. So far there hasn't been anything really damning about them, except the fact that diplomatic relationships are now shattered across the world.

That's why those of us who are paying attention compare Wikileaks to the Pentagon Papers, not to Watergate. The Pentagon Papers were also a verbatim dump of masses of documents which contained a lot of mundane stuff which Beacon Press published, in addition to the juicier excerpts published by the NYT.

Re:Oh my gosh...

[diegocg]

So far there hasn't been anything really damning about them

It has, but its fine that you feel happy thinking the contrary.

Re:Oh my gosh...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wikileaks did not dump the entire contents onto the web. It released less than 2000 out of the 250,000 it holds and those it did release were redacted and published first in the newspapers.

The claim that Wikileaks simply dumped everything is a lie spread by the media.

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/10/wikileaks_media/index.html

Re:Oh my gosh...

[peragrin]

a diplomats very job is to be a legal spy in a given country. he won't run around with a gun, but he will be learning anything and everything he can to make sure his country has the information they may or may not need. Most diplomats are also in charge of real spies. either directly or indirectly.

2009 global climate, sound like normal diplomacy to me. See China manipulating people to boycott the nobel peace prize.

no american has a right to detain or control the leader of another country if he is carrying armed weapons, cash, or even illegal drugs. now proper authorities might be contacted so he can be limited movements, but he had to be let go as he wasn't a threat to the Embassy or it's personnel. Are you saying that it is right for American's to interrupt and arrest foreign officials, because that is what it is you are saying.

Do you have any idea what diplomats actually do? or are you another moron. Do you have any idea on the limits of their abilities? Because it sounds like you are just another moron shouting out that it is wrong when you can't even under stand the concept of sovereign foreign countries.

Re:Oh my gosh...

[commodore64_love]

>>>Rand Paul...believes that the role of government is to enforce the will of the religious-right

Completely false.

If you think it's true then go-ahead and cite where Rand wants to act like a tyrant and force us all to become "religious"..... else your statement has zero validity and is just a lie.

Re:Oh my gosh...

[commodore64_love]

>>>How would you like every note you passed in class, every text you have sent, and every conversation where you said something bad about a friend to be posted to your facebook wall?
>>>

If this happened on my Employer's email or web server or computer, then they have every right to view everything I wrote on their premises. Likewise the Employer of the politicians (us) have every right to view their work product. That's why they are called PUBLIC servants, and "have zero expectation of privacy"* while on the job. At home? Yes. But not inside the People's government buildings while getting paid by the people's money.

*
* phrase borrowed from the US Supreme Court

Re:Oh my gosh...

[gambino21]

Wikileaks simply dumped the entire contents onto the web. So far there hasn't been anything really damning about them, except the fact that diplomatic relationships are now shattered across the world.

Why do people keep repeating this complete falsehood? A 30 second visit to wikileaks site and you can see that they have released less than 2000 of the 25000 total cables. Of these 2000 most were released by a major newspaper first, and wikileaks included the same redactions that the newspapers included. Yes, these have shown "damning" information. The difference now vs. pentagon papers is that the wikileaks information damns both parties, and in the mainstream US media if both parties agree then it must be true (Iraq war?). Here is a short list of new revelations found just from the cables (not including the previous wikileaks releases) [1]

(1) the U.S. military formally adopted a policy of turning a blind eye to systematic, pervasive torture and other abuses by Iraqi forces;

        (2) the State Department threatened Germany not to criminally investigate the CIA's kidnapping of one of its citizens who turned out to be completely innocent;

        (3) the State Department under Bush and Obama applied continuous pressure on the Spanish Government to suppress investigations of the CIA's torture of its citizens and the 2003 killing of a Spanish photojournalist when the U.S. military fired on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad (see The Philadelphia Inquirer's Will Bunch today about this: "The day Barack Obama Lied to me");

        (4) the British Government privately promised to shield Bush officials from embarrassment as part of its Iraq War "investigation";

        (5) there were at least 15,000 people killed in Iraq that were previously uncounted;

        (6) "American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world" about the Iraq war as it was prosecuted, a conclusion the Post's own former Baghdad Bureau Chief wrote was proven by the WikiLeaks documents;

        (7) the U.S.'s own Ambassador concluded that the July, 2009 removal of the Honduran President was illegal -- a coup -- but the State Department did not want to conclude that and thus ignored it until it was too late to matter;

        (8) U.S. and British officials colluded to allow the U.S. to keep cluster bombs on British soil even though Britain had signed the treaty banning such weapons, and,

        (9) Hillary Clinton's State Department ordered diplomats to collect passwords, emails, and biometric data on U.N. and other foreign officials, almost certainly in violation of the Vienna Treaty of 1961.

[1]http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/01/lieberman/index.html

Re:Oh my gosh...

[tverbeek]

Mistaking Rand Paul for "Ron Paul the Second" would be as large an error as mistaking George W. Bush for his father.

Understand: I don't like G.H.W.Bush at all. I campaigned and voted against him all four times (for VP and P), protested his invasion of Iraq, etc. But he was a much smarter and more responsible president than G.W.Bush. Likewise, Ron Paul (I'm not a fan of him, either) is a far better advocate of libertarianism than his boy Rand is. The elder Paul arrived at his viewpoints personally, and understands why he believes what he does; you can reason with him. Rand just half-understands what his father taught him.

Re:Oh my gosh...

[Magada]

"Legal" is exactly what harvesting personal data and biometrics from UN diplomats isn't. The CIA should have done it, sub rosa, but they chose to pass the buck to State (in a deeply offensive manner, I might add - I mean, an actual shopping list?! for shame) thus throwing out the window the very notion of diplomacy in the process.

It is of course well known that some spies function under diplomatic immunity. It's also understood in the community of nations that there should be at least some actual diplomats in every embassy and mission that you can talk to without having to worry that they're going to lift your DNA off the conference table afterwards, GATTACA-style.

Re:Oh my gosh...

[Urza9814]

So far there hasn't been anything really damning about them, except the fact that diplomatic relationships are now shattered across the world.

Wait. The fact that we had a bunch of agents who illegally abducted, abused, even tortured an innocent man from Germany - and our Government knew this, and former Secretary of State Rice was involved in forcing the German government to withdraw prosecution against the agents involved in this....that isn't damning? That doesn't matter at all?

Re:Oh my gosh...

[bky1701]

Here you go.

How you believe that a person who supports a constitutional amendment of nothing but religious bullshit could be PROTECTING the constitute is beyond me, and dare I say you know better. This guy is exactly what is wrong with the republican party; hypocrisy in the pocket of the rich and religious.

Re:Oh my gosh...

[osgeek]

Yeah, Ron Paul is a total loon. He's so crazy that I've heard him consistently espouse:

1. Having a government that operates within its budget.
2. Having a government that respects personal freedoms by not subjecting airline passengers to being irradiated and/or fondled.
3. Being honest about the Iraq war and how we got into it.
4. Ending our country's imperialistic bent by drawing down on our military deployments.
5. Taking a serious look at the secretive central banking system that is given extraordinary power to fuck with our economy with little oversight. ...

Just to get it straight, you're 99% against crazy whacky shit like this, right?

Given what you've posted so far, I'm going to go ahead and call bullshit on your seeming out-of-left-field attack on Rand Paul. Didn't his recent political opponent actually dig up some dirt that Rand Paul was ANTI-CHRISTIAN? I think that Rand Paul then gave the required "I'm a good Christian" response to that, but my guess is the guy is probably an agnostic.

The West is too reliant on American services

[Duncan J Murray]

These recent events have shown how reliant we are, in the West, on American companies which do not necessarily hold the same values as us. Unless you want to return to living in a cage, boycotting both VISA and Mastercard is simply not an option, and the same goes to some extent to using paypal. It's surely not a good idea that the American government have such power over money transactions of all countries in the West.

I wonder if this will be recognised by governments in the West, and a new form of electronic transfer be supported as an alternative, as the article mentions, or whether this will blow over and we'll find ourselves in a similar position in the future, but it could involve an entire country that displeases the US government rather just a small organisation.

Re:The West is too reliant on American services

[Gonoff]

Sounds like a good idea to me but I have this thought that, if it ends up doing things that US Spooks/Corporations don't like, it may be accused of bad things or something. Rather like Wikileaks has been.
I am aware that Wikileaks is not perfect - it has human beings in it, but what it is doing is excellent. The big problem is that it has offended rich and powerful criminals. Any alternatives to US control could do the same.

The only thing that will save us from the US Global hedgemony is the same thing that saved us from the USSR. It collapsed under the weight of internal problems. The west didn't do it. It wasn't the fact that "communism doesn't work" - they never tried it. Neither was it violence - the violent people were in charge anyway.
What broke it up was thousands of different groups pulling their own way, There was ethnic division, political strife, economic carnage, and total dissolusionment with the whole idea of their empire.

Sounds like nowadays doesn't it?

Re:The West is too reliant on American services

[Cimexus]

I've never understood why America doesn't seem to have an EFTPOS (electronic funds at point of sale) system that doesn't rely on Mastercard/Visa etc. From what I've seen all your 'debit' cards over there are essentially just masquerading as credit cards (i.e. are Visa or Mastercard, with a 16 digit number and an expiry date etc.), just that the funds come from your bank account, not from credit.

In my country EFTPOS is a completely separate thing from MC/Visa debit cards. You get to the checkout, swipe your standard ATM card, type your PIN and you are good to go. But there's no Visa or MC logo on the cards and they don't have a credit-card-like number or expiry date etc. (Note that you CAN also get the Visa/MC debit cards - they are useful for shopping online and overseas trips - but they aren't the only type of cashless payment card).

So where I live it's perfectly possible to have nothing to do with those companies. I don't really use them for anything, other than having one credit card that I basically never use ... just there for complete emergencies etc.

Re:The West is too reliant on American services

[Anne Thwacks]

Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers

I believe the correct technical term for this is offshoring

Re:The West is too reliant on American services

[Cimexus]

It does (well in quite a few countries). That's precisely what I've just outlined (in response to the OP's assertion that all other Western countries are reliant on Visa/MC - it's not true).

Having said that, it varies by country a lot...

Re:The West is too reliant on American services

[GreatBunzinni]

Care to point out where Portugal's multibanco relies on America?

Re:The West is too reliant on American services

[Urza9814]

Debit systems over here do _NOT_ use Visa/Mastercard. What you're seeing is the fact that most debit cards _also_ work as Visa or Mastercard credit cards. When I do a transaction, the clerk asks 'debit or credit?' - if I choose credit, it goes through Visa's system, and comes out of my checking account. If I choose 'debit', it goes through the Star system and comes out of my checking account. Star is the leading debit network:
http://www.star.com/about/

However, most people usually just run it as credit - and there's a good reason for that. If someone steals your card info for a debit card - you're pretty much screwed. Any money they pull out before you notice is _gone_ unless you report it pretty much immediately - and even then, that's no guarantee you'll get it back. I think they have a maximum amount they'll refund, and they'll only refund that if you notify them within 30 days. With Visa - they'll refund everything. And I don't recall there being any significant time limit on it. So yea, I usually run my transactions through the Visa system too whenever possible, because it's safer.

VISA supports the KKK

[Error27]

2600.org points out that if you want to make a donation to the KKK then Visa is everywhere you want to be.

Re:VISA supports the KKK

[Pharmboy]

2600.org points out that if you want to make a donation to the KKK then Visa is everywhere you want to be.

Wow, best example ever. I disagree with many of Wikileak's methods, but I fully support their right to do it. If you want to punish anyone, you find and punish the person who released the information to begin with, where the law is clear and what it was designed to cover.

As an exUSAF guy, I'm hating the direction our country is going. Facist methods of controlling corporations by publicly financing business losses, while the profits are still private. Using the threat of force to get other countries to create trumped up charges to silence someone. Completely unacceptable methods of security in airports that are not only effective and degrading, but are ILLEGAL if outside the airport, and likely inside as well. A corrupt judicial system that favors the rich and corporations.

Re:Did anyone understand Putin's Metaphor?

[Calydor]

My perception of it, and to be fair I'm not Russian nor do I know a lot about the mentality of Russian farmers, is this:

When your neighbors' animals are making noises that are completely natural to them, this be cows mooing or dogs barking, you don't really pay attention to it. The sound is just there. But if it's your own making the noise you start trying to make them keep quiet through a strange perception that it will reflect badly on you that your animals are noisy.

Mob rule justified?

[leromarinvit]

Vixie makes some good points about the rule of law and how DDOS attacks both by supporters and enemies of Wikilieaks are unjustified. Yet I can't help but wonder what the outcome would be if everyone just went back to business and let the courts settle everything out. Wouldn't this mean that Wikileaks is taken down for now, Assange's ass is ripped up in court for the next ten years, and even if he wins in the end (in the unlikely case he manages to afford a year-long court battle), Wikileaks will have utterly failed to reach its goals?

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.
  - Desmond Tutu

Re:Mob rule justified?

[Opportunist]

Vixie's fallacy is that the law is impartial, and that the rule of law does not favor either side but instead wants to distribute "justice".

That's not the case.

The law always supports the side that makes the law.

Re:Did anyone understand Putin's Metaphor?

[Opportunist]

I'm not Russian, but I think I understand what he means. Mostly because my country has quite odd social standards and norms sometimes. Let me explain.

You don't care if your neighbors cows make noise, but you want yours to be quiet. So you can strut and brag how well trained your cows are, compared to the dumb animals your neighbor has. The noise doesn't really bother you, but the common agreement is that it is bothering. I admit that's not easy to grasp as a concept.

There are certain "norms", also in my country, where certain things are supposedly "annoying", while others are supposedly "pleasant". Even though few people actually feel that way. If any at all. But convention dictates that it should be like this. Russian convention apparently dictates that you should be annoyed by cows mooing. So if your cows moo, you feel bad and feel like you should apologize to everyone around, because your mooing cows supposedly annoy everyone. Again: Nobody is really bothered by it, but everything is supposed to be. In turn, you don't care that your neighbors cows moo because they don't "really" bother you and you don't really care too much that it "should" bother you.

Of course, he could mean something completely different and it's just lost in translation.

Re:Did anyone understand Putin's Metaphor?

[martas]

Almost, though I think it's more like: when your animals start making noise, your neighbor starts complaining that you're too noisy, which is hypocritical of them 'cause their animals make just as much noise. The part about the puck is just a colorful way of saying "right back at ya!", i.e. you shouldn't lecture us about free press if you're arresting the only real journalist the West has left (I'm extrapolating a little bit, but that was the spirit of what he said).

The Dark Side

[lyinhart]

If you don't know what Ron Paul's foreign policy views are, here is a handy summary from his book "Revolution": Leave everybody else alone. Some might call it isolationism. Not sure how well that would work, but if that was our policy, then there obviously wouldn't be much to leak about it.

Re:The Dark Side

[Opportunist]

I like that guy more by the minute.

Seriously, the US has caused enough trouble around the globe for a century, let someone else fuck up the planet for a change.

Re:The Dark Side

[Xyrus]

Some might call it isolationism.

And some would be very wrong.

Paul isn't saying we should go all turtle and not interact with the world. He's saying stop being a dick to the rest of planet by forcing our ways and desires on other countries. He's saying we should become a self-sufficient nation such that we don't need to fight resource wars half a planet away. He's saying stop spending a metric assload of cash on our "defense"and international empire and focus more on what we need in our own country.

I don't agree with everything Ron Paul stands for, but he's got this one right.

Re:The Dark Side

[burnin1965]

I prefer to rely on Ron Paul's legislative history rather than his speeches or books.

Expressing the sense of the Congress that the Panama Canal and the Panama Canal Zone should be considered to be the sovereign territory of the United States

Ron Paul has no problem trying to pass legislation to restore the imperialistic land grab perpetrated in 1903 when the United States signed a treaty with a French diplomat to give away sovereign territory to the United States.

Re:The Dark Side

[phantomfive]

The problem is, every time we've tried an isolationist policy, the rest of the world messes things up and drags us in. The famous example is WW2, when Americans (but not Roosevelt) were extremely reticent to get involved, and then Japan attacked us anyway. Hitler would have eventually too, if he'd reached his goals.

But it's been that way from the beginning. In the lead-up to the war of 1812, the British started interfering with American trade and capturing our sailors. We either needed to protect our interests or lose them. Although the oceans are big, it is not enough to isolate us from our neighbors. Now less than ever, since they are so easy to cross.

It is a hard problem and I don't know the solution, but I don't think strict isolationism is the answer. The problems of the rest of the world will come back to us one way or another.

Re:The Dark Side

[MightyMartian]

The US tried that (for the most part) through the 19th century and even partway through WWI, until they found out that an industrial nation that in some substantial part relies on exports can never be truly neutral. When the Germans refused to stop their unrestricted submarine warfare in the Atlantic, neutrality went out the door.

I'd argue that for a nation the size of the United States, the kind of neutrality Paul wants is impossible. Of course, most of what Paul wants is impossible, because his knowledge of history, of geopolitics and economics all suffer from the fact that he has a religious devotion to Libertarianism. I'll give him points for consistency and some principled stands, but all in all, he's an idiot.

Re:The Dark Side

[MightyMartian]

That's what the Soviets practiced with Germany, right up until the morning of Operation Barbarossa. Stalin was quite happily selling steel to the Germans, a good chunk of which was made into tanks and guns used to slaughter millions of Soviet citizens.

Jefferson was a bright guy, but in some respects deeply naive. His ideal agrarian state (a sort of proto-Libertarianism) faltered and ultimately failed in spectacular fashion, the US Civil War, as near as anything, wiped out the Jeffersonian-Madisonian state. His foreign policy was nonsensical and ultimately he was a better political theorist than he was a political leader.

At any rate, the whole period from 1914-1945 should indicate that neutrality doesn't work unless all nations agree to it. So Switzerland, who has by and large managed to get everyone to agree not to molest it, has pulled it off. I'd argue that a major industrialized economic power like the US would never be permitted to be completely neutral. It's impossible, and attempts to do so have always ended up with the US being forced into conflicts (declaring war on Germany in 1917 and 1941 as good examples).

Re:The Dark Side

[MightyMartian]

The problem is, every time we've tried an isolationist policy, the rest of the world messes things up and drags us in. The famous example is WW2, when Americans (but not Roosevelt) were extremely reticent to get involved, and then Japan attacked us anyway. Hitler would have eventually too, if he'd reached his goals.

It's an important point. What if the US had stayed neutral, and Britain had fallen (as likely to some domestic fascists willing to do business with the Germans like Petain in Vichy France)? What if the Soviet regime had been driven out of European Russia and the Axis powers had managed to join hands in Central Asia? How long would American liberty held forth with a fair chunk of the rest of the planet in the hands of a network of powers utterly opposed to American values?

Sometimes you have to think in the longer term. Helping the British Empire defeat the Nazis, and even recognizing the natural alliance between Britain and the US wasn't a bad thing, even if it flies in the face of the Paulite view of neutrality. It saved the world from one of the most evil regimes the world has ever known.

Re:The Dark Side

[phantomfive]

I think what you are missing is reading comprehension. I never said nor implied that the solution to every problem is sending the military over there. Furthermore, you demonstrate an inability to understand nuanced situations. My post was discussing times when the US acted as an isolationist, and you brought up times when it wasn't acting as an isolationist. Brilliant. Please work on basic logic skills and get back to me.

Bitwhat?

[MrQuacker]

Please explain, as I have no idea what I just read.

I can use a credit card or paypal to "buy" coins at $0.20/ea. (Dec/12th price)
I can also download a program that gives me a free coin every three weeks if I let it run constantly on my computer.
There are sites out there I can trade bitcoins in for cash or prepaid credit cards.

How does this work then? Why does it give money for processor time? What's it doing that merits payment, and who is paying it? And wont the first botnet operator who signs up end up the richest, simply because of the massive amount of stolen cpu cycles? Doesnt that in turn make the whole system worthless?

As someone sells stuff online (like etsy/ebay) why would I benefit from this? Sure, I save 4% by skipping paypal, but how do I get actual cold hard cash I can buy liquor with? This whole thing involves too much trust into a system that appears real easy to game. It also relies on people I can't trust, and who have no incentive to keep their side of the deal. When I get a paypal payment, I know I have money I can spend. But with this bit stuff, I just dont understand how one gets from worthless digi-bits online, to something I can buy groceries with.

Re:Bitwhat?

[lattyware]

The point is, it's chicken and egg. Money has value when people think it has a value. Paper money has a value because people will accept it for goods and services - if people accept bitcoins, then they have value. The idea of giving away free money is that it has to be there to begin with for people to use it. Using CPU time to generate bitcoins is a good way of distributing them to begin with. I suggest you go and read 'Making Money' by Terry Pratchett - for a fictional novel it's good at giving you the right thought process about money.

Re:Bitwhat?

[IamTheRealMike]

BitCoin is a little complicated to understand the internals of. See the discussion of it further up the thread for what it's doing and why it needs to burn so much CPU time. The thing to understand is that BitCoin eliminates the need for banks to mediate currency transactions on the internet (or at all), and it does so by forming a public, never ending story of money flows in the economy. That story (called the block chain) is extended by having public nodes perform large computations, the fact that coins are generated as a side effect of this process is basically a reward for donating CPU time to the system.

Re:Bitwhat?

[ribuck]

Seriously, read the Bitcoin technical paper. It's short and easy to read.

Re:Bitwhat?

[nedlohs]

If you can use a credit card to buy them then clearly someone else on the other end of that deal getting something they can buy groceries with.

It's just currency, it is inherently worthless just like all the other currencies we use today. If other people accept it in exchange for goods and services than it has a value, if they don't then it is worthless - just like other currencies.

Of course government backed currencies have the rather large benefit that the government forces their use (requiring taxes to paid in them, requiring local merchants to accept them). They have the downside that the government tends to print them faster than botnet operators manage.

 

Good publicity

[devent]

We are lucky for the stupidity of the US government to give Wikileaks so much publicity. They could just say that they working hard to make sure no more secret documents are leaked and nothing more. But instead the US government pressures US companies, US politicians give talks about Wikileaks and Assange, the press is all over how Wikileaks is bad, etc. etc. The members of Wikileaks should be proud to get so much publicity, I hope the politic in USA will polarize about Wikileaks some more and thus give Wikileaks even more publicity.

Hey look, everyone. It's a fucking pussy communist

[copponex]

Paypal and Amazon both gave in to US government pressure to eliminate their services to WikiLeaks. Since WikiLeaks depends on internet presence and donations to exist, it's no different than cutting the power to a house. In this case, it signaled to any other internet provider that they would no longer be friends to the US government, which per the norm, acts like a local mafia boss in enforcing its will in the neighborhood.

The United States differs from other States only in that it does not overtly tell someone to shut up. It threatens charges. It stays quiet while members of it's government and celebrity punditry call for assassination. It sends a few spooks around to anyone connected with you. It's a base form of terrorism, and differs from the KGB only in that it has to look like an accident if they decide to eliminate you. They like plausible deniability because the miserable pro-authoritarian sycophants like you can pretend that those things don't happen, and you'll continue to support the government regardless of how badly they ignore the laws they are supposed to be following.

Take a look at the latest Nobel Peace Prize winner, Liu Xiaobo. What is the effective difference of the Chinese government throwing him in prison, and the US leaning on Sweden to bring back trumped up charges so Assange could be detained while they build a bullshit case to do the same thing? We just have better PR.

Honestly, you're fucking pathetic. You are everything that is wrong with democracy today, because you don't even know what freedom of speech is, or why it's important. I hope you end up in the society you dream of, protesting the latest corporate takeover of your publicly funded infrastructure from your "Free Speech Zone" like the coward you are in order to keep what little freedom they decide to let you keep for the time being.

Jefferson said it the best.

[copponex]

From his Inaugural address, formatted for clarity. Notice how many times he uses the word "peace" and how he describes that we should have "honest friendship with all nations".

. . .it is proper you should understand what I deem the essential principles of our Government, and consequently those which ought to shape its Administration. I will compress them within the narrowest compass they will bear, stating the general principle, but not all its limitations:

Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political;

peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none;

the support of the State governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against antirepublican tendencies; the preservation of the General Government in its whole constitutional vigor, as the sheet anchor of our peace at home and safety abroad;

a jealous care of the right of election by the people—a mild and safe corrective of abuses which are lopped by the sword of revolution where peaceable remedies are unprovided;

absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority, the vital principle of republics, from which is no appeal but to force, the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism;

a well disciplined militia, our best reliance in peace and for the first moments of war, till regulars may relieve them; the supremacy of the civil over the military authority;

economy in the public expense, that labor may be lightly burthened; the honest payment of our debts and sacred preservation of the public faith; encouragement of agriculture, and of commerce as its handmaid;

the diffusion of information and arraignment of all abuses at the bar of the public reason; freedom of religion; freedom of the press, and freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus, and trial by juries impartially selected.

These principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation. The wisdom of our sages and blood of our heroes have been devoted to their attainment. They should be the creed of our political faith, the text of civic instruction, the touchstone by which to try the services of those we trust; and should we wander from them in moments of error or of alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty, and safety.

it's simple

[Charliemopps]

A government will advocate for freedom of the press as long as that freedom is used to embarrass other governments and further it's own interests. Once the those things get turned around and focused on the advocate country they quickly call it espionage and treason. If Wikileaks focused on China and their members were hunted down in other countries and then Jailed in China, the state department would call them political prisoners and demand their release. Citizens of the United States should listen very carefully to what their representative have to say about this issue. It will show exactly what kind of freedom they support. Freedom of speech or freedom to agree.

Re:it's simple

[Dr. Spork]

You're quite right, but I think that it's a huge misconception to think of WikiLeaks as being an organization that focuses on American transgressions. Their first huge story uncovered sickening, systematic corruption in the Kenyan government. They've leaked evidence of corruption in Swiss banks. They've done lots more. Of course the US only inflates the story into a big stink when it's their shit that's smeared everywhere, but that's not because WikiLeaks ignores non-US corruption.

What Assange really needs right now are leaks about human rights abuses in China, as you say - something serious enough that the Chinese would be calling for his head using exactly the same words used by US Republicans. I think that would make the cognitive dissonance complete.

Re:Hey look, everyone. It's a fucking pussy commun

[quacking duck]

I agreed with everything in your post--except for one word in your title. Communist!? Seriously?

Overwhelmingly it's been the supposed conservative defenders of freedoms that have been throwing a fit over Wikileaks, or inferring that Assange should be assassinated (one of those clowns was advisor to Canada's current prime minister, who heads the so-called Conservative party).

Call them neo-conservative if you must, as libertarian Ron Paul did in his speech.

Meanwhile, the same neo-conservatives are labelling Wikileaks supporters as leftist, anarchists, socialists, communists, or terrorist sympathizers intent on disrupting the world order. Yet on CBC, Canada's supposed pinko socialist news source (according to neo-conservatives, anyway), comments left on their wikileaks news articles are overwhelmingly in support of Wikileaks.

Seriously, I hope you don't think suppression of freedoms is a strictly "left" trait, the "right" is doing its best to do it better.

Link to a great background piece about WikiLeaks

[Dr. Spork]

This New Yorker article from the more innocent days of June is something that everyone needs to read before they can really make sense of WikiLeaks. It's about what those people actually do, and it's an excellent read. Even if you've read a hundred stories about WikiLeaks, you probably don't have this background and it will change the way you look at their work.

Re:Hey look, everyone. It's a fucking pussy commun

[copponex]

They're not conservative or liberal. They're authoritarian, just like Stalin.

Sure, if you want to go back to before the Revolution communism meant something else, but I'm not trying to convince an academic in some paper. I'm trying to convince a citizen that they're seriously fucking up the whole concept of democracy and the importance of freedom of expression.

Step away from this "left versus right" thing. In reality, what difference is there between Communism and Fascism? Does it make a difference whether a small elite group rules the state which rules commerce, or whether a small elite group rules commerce which rules the state? What if that group is an enlightened oligarchy, or a backwards junta? I suppose you could make a very weak argument that intellectual genocide has more merit than ethnic genocide, but I wouldn't agree. They are both two sides of the same coin: murder to create order.

The measurements of government cannot be drawn on a line graph. Even Canada has been waging it's war on personal freedom through the suppression of drug use, which is the very definition of totalitarianism: prosecuting someone for exercising personal freedom.

Re:Hey look, everyone. It's a fucking pussy commun

[Omestes]

what difference is there between Communism and Fascism?

In one you get raped by the government, and in the other you get raped by private industry protected by the government.

Not a huge difference for citizens (they still get raped), but still and important difference. In America we're rallying against some mythological Communist plague (and branding anyone who is even moderately left of the extreme right such), while wholly supporting fascist ideology. Amusingly there has been some interesting historical precedents for this, and all of them ended badly.

My favorite is people branding Obama as a commie, when his policies more smell like fascism (forcing people to support giant, rich, corporations).

Re:Did anyone understand Putin's Metaphor?

[wumpus188]

No, your interpretation is wrong as well as wired translation. Corect English idiom of Putin words would be "pot calling the kettle black".

Food for thought

[ZDRuX]

Questions to consider:

Below text is quoted, not my own
Number 1: Do the America People deserve know the truth regarding the ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen?
Number 2: Could a larger question be how can an army private access so much secret information?
Number 3: Why is the hostility mostly directed at Assange, the publisher, and not at our governments failure to protect classified information?
Number 4: Are we getting our moneys worth of the 80 Billion dollars per year spent on intelligence gathering?
Number 5: Which has resulted in the greatest number of deaths: lying us into war or Wikileaks revelations or the release of the Pentagon Papers?
Number 6: If Assange can be convicted of a crime for publishing information that he did not steal, what does this say about the future of the first amendment and the independence of the internet?
Number 7: Could it be that the real reason for the near universal attacks on Wikileaks is more about secretly maintaining a seriously flawed foreign policy of empire than it is about national security?
Number 8: Is there not a huge difference between releasing secret information to help the enemy in a time of declared war, which is treason, and the releasing of information to expose our government lies that promote secret wars, death and corruption?
Number 9: Was it not once considered patriotic to stand up to our government when it is wrong?


Thomas Jefferson had it right when he advised ‘Let the eyes of vigilance never be closed.’

Re:Hey look, everyone. It's a fucking pussy commun

[Dare nMc]

Paypal, and the US government both deny that any pressure was applied. It appears to me to be about stopping the next release (about banking) than the last release. Same with Assange, you think the US wants him out of control of the UK? Even that smells more like a more banking friendly move, than a US government move. More of a chess move to get him under control before, not after.

Re:Hey look, everyone. It's a fucking pussy commun

[ifiwereasculptor]

In reality, what difference is there between Communism and Fascism? Does it make a difference whether a small elite group rules the state which rules commerce, or whether a small elite group rules commerce which rules the state?

Not that I don't see your point, but as long as you're going there, you might as well throw in Capitalism and the kitchen sink as well. Communism is mainly an economic stance, while fascism is... well, hard to define in few words, but it's political in its core. It doesn't help that all communist governments up until now have been fascist (with the state owning of taking the place of big corporations), but there's an enormous difference in the meaning of those words. And neither of them usually advocate for or commit genocide, it just so happened that the few ones that got to power did.

Re:Well Played

[Totenglocke]

No, he doesn't. He simply wants to remove FEDERAL control over laws passed by the citizens of a particular state. While I may not agree with everything they want, the citizens of a particular state have the right to pass state laws to have the society of their choosing - and those who don't like it can either try to persuade people as to why how the majority feels is wrong or they can move to a state where most people agree with their views.

Also, regarding your "he wants an empire!" crap, the Panama Canal was built and paid for by the US - why SHOULDN'T we own it? This isn't walking in and saying "All your base are belong to us", it's saying "We're taking our property back".

You should be aware of this since you seem like an intelligent person, but I think political / religious fantacism is clouding your judgement.

Re:Is this about freedom or fencing?

[Marcika]

Bzzzt. Information is not physical property. Arguments about "stealing" and "fencing" are invalid, since the law about theft does not apply if nobody has been deprived of the use of a good.

Of course there is a different set of laws that deal with sharing state secrets, but it does not allow for punishing the equivalent of "fencing", at least in the US -- the NYT vs. USA court case documented this very clearly.

Re:Well Played

[Totenglocke]

Wrong, if you read his legislation the intention is to remove the Constitutional protections of individual's rights.

The section of the Constitution you're referring to states that the federal government can't pass such laws. No such restriction is placed on individual states. Also, those laws you mentioned are not necessarily based in religion - they're based on personal views, which may or may not be influenced by religion. You're claiming that since you don't like law X and some religious people support law X, then it's a "theocracy" to have law X - that's a logical fallacy. States have the right to have an anti-sodomy law (as stupid as it is). That's what the US is about (or was about when it followed the Constitution) - States have the power to have laws they desire instead of having the Federal government rule with an iron fist.

This was finally resolved in 1977 but Ron's bill would circumvent the resolution and return the issue back to the days of French Imperialism.

Yes the "imperialism" of "we paid for the construction of the canal which provides a great economic benefit to your country - we have the right to control it". Since you hate the idea of the country who paid for it owning it, would you support Panama paying the US back (adjusted for inflation of course)?

I am atheist, it is about the truth and it is about Constitutional law that was put in place to protect individual liberty.

Atheism is a religion, especially since many atheists (such as yourself) have a fanatical hatred of anything that goes against your views and trying to blame it on "evil christians". The Constitution does NOT prevent states from passing a law such as an anti-sodomy law (but citizens do have the ability to forcefully repeal the law if they do not agree with it).

The only role religion plays is in the fact that Ron Paul is using his religion as the driving force behind his desire to remove Constitutional protections for individual rights.

No, he's not. He's standing up for States rights, as guaranteed them under the Constitution. The only reason religion is brought into this is because you're using it as a strawman because you disagree with those particular laws. I disagree with those laws too, but realize that they're fully Constitutional and have nothing to do with establishing a religious role in government.

A better way to deal with bullies...

[Paul Fernhout]

... is to make them into friends: http://www.bullies2buddies.com/How-to-Stop-Being-Teased-and-Bullied-Without-Really-Trying

See also my related essay:
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html#On_dealing_with_the_social_hurricane_of_the_CIA

Re:inflation

[DavidTC]

You are so in love with your own smugly irrational ideology that basic arithmetic escapes you. a) no we would not, there is no need to "materialize" anything beyond the normal mining and exploration - the point of using a natural resource as a reference is scarcity - less mining the better, b) no, we would simply add a new sub-unit to $1 dollar, called cents. Should that prove insufficient, we would divide the cents into smaller sub-units, etc. The amount of gold that corresponds to each new unit would simply decrease as compared to the unchanged old units, the finite limit being an amount being small enough to be measured practically, at which point we would switch from gold to much more difficult to obtain (i.e. scarce) material and repeat the process, c) no such thing would have been needed.

Sigh. If you're expecting these new smaller units to be able to buy as much as the old units, (and thus the older ones could buy more) you've just REINVENTED FIAT CURRENCY, you idiot.

Do you really not grasp that gold-based currencies can't vary in value? The entire fucking point is that they are fixed to the price of gold. The only way for them to vary in value is for there to be more or less gold. (What's more, it might not even be possible for the government to control this by adding and removing gold coinage...the value might just be stuck, by the world market, to the gold market in general.)

You're assuming that somehow the dollar can be fixed to gold, but vary in value WRT everything else. Which is a) stupid, prices cannot operate like that, and b) if it did work, would defeat 90% of the supposed point of gold-based currency to start with, because now you do have inflation.

To repeat: WHAT YOU JUST DESCRIBED IS CALLED INFLATION, the exact thing you're railing against.

But, hey, I posed a puzzle for you in my other post. Go and solve it. Explain the actual changes you'd do, not how you're vaguely 'divide the currency more'.

In a fiat currency world, because of inflation, debt is seen not only as the trivial, commonplace norm, it is the fundamental factor in self-propelling the inflationary hamster wheel.

And now we get to the real nonsense, where inflation is blamed for all the woes, so if we have a system when it's not allowed, everything will magically be fine.

Of course, gold idiots never realize that we have inflation, deliberately, because inflation is a good thing. The alternative is to have random deflation and inflation as the economy changed in size. (Or have the economy trapped in a form-fitted box, as the gold idiots want.)

Keeping inflation slightly ahead of the economy causes the economy to constantly chase it, which is why we have policies to deliberately keep it like that. If you want to argue we've kept it too far ahead of an economy that hasn't grown much, you are correct in that, but it doesn't change the fact it's done on purpose and is a good idea when done correctly.

And none of the quite real problems you have with the borrowing economy has anything at all to do with inflation. In fact, strangely enough, half those problems were because we were trying to keep inflation low, so kept interest rates low, when it probably would have been better to do something else to keep inflation down. (And it would have been best of all to actually have economic growth instead of constant economic drain to other countries.)