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Mozilla Is Considering Revoking TeliaSonera Trust For Sales To Dictators
ndogg writes "Mozilla is considering pulling TeliaSonera from its list of root certificate SSL providers. They have asked for comments on this on their mailing list. They're concerned about the use of the certificates by those governments for spying on its citizens, particularly in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan — where TeliaSonera operates subsidiaries or is heavily invested. Mozilla's concern is that TeliaSonera has possibly issued certificates that allow hardline government servers to masquerade as legitimate websites — so-called man-in-the-middle attacks — and decrypt web traffic. This alleged activity would contradict Mozilla's policy against 'knowingly issuing certificates without the knowledge of the entities whose information is referenced in the certificates.'"
Instead of trusting any of these companies (they'll sell to the US government as well, I'm sure), why not switch to Convergence? It reduces the need to trust companies like this.
Mozilla (and Google, and other browser makers) should include it by default in all their products (even if turned off) to make it easier for people to switch away from centralised systems. Viva le revolucion.
Mozilla still includes all kinds of questionable cert authorities. Once I learned that, I had to go through my default Firefox installs and remove all the ones by Chinese government arms and similar.
Why single out these countries? I will never need a cert signed by a foreign government - ANY foreign government. There are probably only about 5% of authorities I actually might trust included in Firefox. The rest are illegitimate for 99% of users.
Yeah, I was just going to say... better pull the certs of servers in the US then...
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Hell did any government official go to jail for the Gulf Of Tonkin false flag which cost 58,000 Americans their lives? How about for Fast & Furious which handed drug cartels weapons by the truckload and killed at least one border agent and countless civilians?
Frankly the US government is just as nasty and corrupt as the rest, read general Butler's "War is a racket" speech sometime. That speech is nearly a century old and could have been taken from the current papers, wars all over the place for the benefit of a few rich people and corps, if the US gov told me it was raining outside? I'd want a second opinion.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The whole point of certificates and SSL is to protect communications between the browser and the web server. It's not "to protect communications from everyone except the government". It's to protect it from EVERYONE - including (and sometimes especially) the government.
It's good to see browser maintainers recognizing that the browser is an essential - albeit uncertified - part of HTTPS authentication.
The preinstalled root certs have enormous leverage. If the validation of certificate requests performed by CAs is a known weak link in X.509, how much more so the point where those CAs are designated as trusted?
Thanks to the efforts of Mozilla, among others, we have a much more diverse browser ecosystem than even a few years ago. To some extent at least, the free market can decide which browser to use. I know that I'm more inclined to use a product that is squarely on the side of human rights than one which can be used as an instrument of oppression. And these difficult questions of policy and enforcement provide a chance for Mozilla to distinguish itself, which I think it's doing very ably.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
I'm not particularly impressed with Convergence in particular. What seems to make the most sense is to self-publish SSL certificates using DNSSEC.
Why doesn't everyone use SRP instead?
- User proves it has password without divulging any data.
- Man in the middle obtains zero information.
- Generates encryption key for rest of the connection.
Presumably 99.9999% of US Government certs are in .mil and .gov, and 99.99999% of chinese-government-puppet certs are in CN, etc.
Seems to me that the exposure could be enormously narrowed by scoping all of the obscure CAs to the one or two TLDs where they are most commonly used.
Interesting discussion on the Mozilla forum. In light of the information so far, it seems like it would be difficult for Mozilla to keep TeliaSonera as trusted and not lose face. It will be interesting to see what kind of implications this has going forward in regards to dealing with other CAs that have practices or relationships that might fall into the similar shady areas as TeliaSonera. There are some forum posts mentioning that maybe Cybertrust (acquired by Verizon - known for participating in surveillance activity) and Entrust (related to BlueCoat via Thoma Bravo) as possibly requiring similar scrutiny.
"As nasty and corrupt as..." ... China under Mao? Venezuela under Chavez? Cuba under Castro? The USSR under Lenin and Stalin? Cambodia under Pol Pot? The NPRK under the various Kims? Zimbabwe under Mugabe? Zaire/the Congo under Mobutu?
Care to revise your bullshit story?
For all of America's, the American government's, and its leaders' flaws - and of course they are many (and one wonders how your life would stand up upon the withering criticism and examination that the life of a President, for example, gets) - I believe very few of our leaders have ever had a genuine desire to harm people nor have they harbored a profound megalomania. Ego - of course; megalomania - no. Sure, go ahead and despise a President because of their ideological orientation that you disagree with but the notion of the Chomskyites, this strange Kool-Aid they like to guzzle, being fed doses of pablum about "American Imperialism" and the "Military-Industrial Complex" and railing endlessly about the "Evils of Capitalism" yet enjoying its countless benefits (you know, like jobs, homes, clothes, electronics, computers, global air travel, and this weird little thing called the Internet), never proffering a meaningful let alone viable alternative, I am convinced is one of the luxuries provided by the American model of capitalism and Constitutional governance. Trust me if you were to write what you wrote about Mugabe your flesh-burned and -torn body (they wouldn't spend a bullet on you, lest they lose out on a good opportunity to torture you first) would soon be found on the roadside somewhere.
And, if you despise America, think it hopelessly corrupt and nasty "as the rest" then why not leave it for greener pastures? Maybe some other country has it figured out better than we do? According to Michael Moore, Cuba has the best medical care in the world. Just ask Hugo Chavez.
I like the US forcing its American Way on others, insofar as it means freedom.
Unless you are gay and want to marry.
Want your children to learn real science in school and not pseudo-babble based on superstition.
Want to earn a living without the state confiscating some of it from you.
None of that indicates the US is pro-freedom.
Unless you are gay and want to marry.
There are many places in America where gays can marry, and more states are considering it. We are moving in the right direction.
Want your children to learn real science in school and not pseudo-babble based on superstition.
Creationists and IDers have repeatedly been smacked down by the courts.
Want to earn a living without the state confiscating some of it from you.
American taxes are among the developed world's lowest.
None of that indicates the US is pro-freedom.
Would you care to name someplace better?
Brazil. So this kind of action is a natural extension of that.
If there are Authorities you do not need in the browser list, how do you choose which ones to untrust? What if you only use https with a few sites, should you just look at the information and whitelist only those?
Unless you are gay and want to marry.
There are many places in America where gays can marry, and more states are considering it. We are moving in the right direction.
It's hardly a country that loves freedom if it regulates people's personal lives like this.
Want to earn a living without the state confiscating some of it from you.
American taxes are among the developed world's lowest.
And yet those taxes are still there. How can the US be pro freedom if it actively harms people by confiscating property off them using a threat of force?
None of that indicates the US is pro-freedom.
Would you care to name someplace better?
I can't - but that doesn't mean (in any way at all) that the US is the bastian of freedom. It's not. Your government removes and dilutes your freedoms far too much.
Firefox works from a list thats different than Chrome. I assume that there is another list again for people writing software for https connections. Maybe thats why I see the ssl libraries updating on my machine? If this is broken, then why is there not software available to "tune it" or test it so that it can be made to work?
Can the web server see what Cert you used? Can they tell that a fake cert was used? Maybe it should draw a warning on your pages that the cert authority had no business issuing the cert that was used?
Turn every browser in to a cert tester. Obviously you trust your browser.
It's hardly a country that loves freedom if it regulates people's personal lives like this.
It's a federal country. You have the freedom to leave a state that doesn't respect your freedom for one that does.
How can the US be pro freedom if it actively harms people by confiscating property off them using a threat of force?
Without taxation, there is no way to fund a court or police force. Without those, there is no way to enforce the laws against a private citizen using force or fraud to coerce another private citizen. Or what am I missing?
It's hardly a country that loves freedom if it regulates people's personal lives like this.
It's a federal country. You have the freedom to leave a state that doesn't respect your freedom for one that does.
So you're saying that the US is pro-freedom, except for when it's not and in those cases you can go and live somewhere else?
How can the US be pro freedom if it actively harms people by confiscating property off them using a threat of force?
Without taxation, there is no way to fund a court or police force.
There are other ways of raising funds without resorting to extortion. Donations and lotteries come to mind.
Without those, there is no way to enforce the laws against a private citizen using force or fraud to coerce another private citizen. Or what am I missing?
You're missing the fact that in order to prevent one citizen from using force or fraud against another citizen, the state must use force and fraud against all citizens.
If their goal is to protect people from the initiation of force then they lost immediately when they fund it via compulsory means.
Considering how the US government is positioned for playing MITM games, and that is putting laws to require information and actions from internet providers of critical services, is tempting at the very least. But having such aggresive player in the middle of the field maybe is better to just close your eyes and just put a token warning in a page tham trying to fix it, just will put more in evidence how broken is everything now.
"There is no good or bad."
You were making sense, until you wrote that bit of drivel. Yes, child, there really IS good, and there really IS bad. I can agree with you that the US government often doesn't know the difference. I can agree that the US government is in no position to be the final arbiter of good and bad. But, there really are evil sumbitches in the world. A significant number of them occupy positions of power.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Strange. Almost everyone who has issues with the corruption found in American politics is labeled as a "communist".
And, if my wealth, relative to that of the rest of the world, depends on a subservient Latin America - well, I don't need or want it.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I like the US forcing its American Way on others...
Your desire to lord over me is not on an equal footing with my desire to be free.
Those two statements contradict each other, especially when "forcing its American Way on others" means an occupying force.
It is about freedom -- of associaton, of speech, of property.
Property is not a natural right.
... That rules out Obama...
More to the point, ownership is not a right that can be defined in the absence of government....and here "government" has to be defined as "use or threat of overriding force".
Note that in this sense social animals have government, so it's broader than the normal use of the term.
For that matter, I equate "natural right" to "evolutionarily stable strategy", which means that it alters with the environment, and isn't something stable. It's also worth remembering that "money" is a government invention (King Cyrus of the Persians, IIRC) and was originally a promise that the item being offered was actually as represented. (I.e., a small bar of gold with the royal seal embossed on it.) But do note that counterfeiting arose amost immediately, so there's nothing "natural" about it without the presence of overriding force.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Not quite clear what you are reccommending here.
FWIW, I don't thing ANY of the certificate issuing authorities are trustworthy. This doesn't mean that some aren't worse then others, and it might make sense to revoke the trust you have given to some of the worst actors, if you can do so without TOO much cost to yourself. If nothing else it would ensure that the infrastructure is in place to do the revokation. And it would encourage the weaker authorities to avoid being excessively vile.
The down side is that this will be interpreted by some as a statement that you trust those you don't revoke the certificates of.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
First, this is coming from a die hard libertarian.
You do realize that the idea of taxes is to pay for things that everyone uses, but would be infeasible to be run by private entities. This so called extortion you speak of is basically making you pay for that which you use. i.e. not stealing it. Any sane individual has no problem with paying taxes for public services, the disagreement comes into what should be a public service and what should not.
And you're statement on fraud confirms you do not know what fraud is. I may not know everything the government does with the money I give them, but I do know that it's not swindled from me, and I do know what a lot of it goes towards. Fraud would be being told you're paying for one thing, then either not getting it at all, or getting something very different, and worth much less.
And everything is pro-freedom except when it's not. I expect to be free to do what I want, except when it violates the freedoms of other people. I don't expect to have the freedom to get in my car drunk off my ass and drive down the road. That endangers the freedom of other people to exist.
Seriously, are you trolling or just stupid?
I use certificate patrol. It basically warns you if a cert has changed suspiciously, or if the CA has changed.
It's flawed in that it only remembers one cert per domain for comparison and nowadays for whatever reasons companies like facebook and Google often use different certs signed by different CAs for the same domains and spread the load/connections amongst them. So you can get more warning prompts than you'd want.
This doesn't mean the concept is broken though, just that Certificate Patrol's particular implementation has room for improvement.
The desired case is, if at home you decide that the different certs you get from gmail or facebook are OK (and told the plugin to ignore them), then go to some foreign country and suddenly you get certs that are signed by TeliaSonera, you'd get a warning message and you'd know that something was up and choose not to login.
Same goes for logging in to your bank/corporate site while on a business trip to China. If the cert changes unexpectedly - from being signed by say Equifax to being signed by CNNIC, you should get a warning too.
Lets put it this way. Already the US security agencies have access, and is actively using it, to google/facebook/twitter and so on information, no need to get into the encrypted communication. But what about other sites, specially the ones not hosted in US but that could use certificates to encrypt communication? If don't have already pretty broad (i.e. to *.com) or reissued certificates, will start to ask for them pretty soon.
In the other hand, not trusting any certificates from any US based company will show almost any secure site as untrusted, being intercepted or not. Would you use your credit card, put personal data, or download binaries to execute on a site with a big red warning telling you that the site could be fake? There is no middle ground, or can't be trusted, or can, there is no space to say "it can be examined or modified as anything that goes thru something US related"
So because Stalin was a dick, the feds are...what? Given a free pass because "Hey they ain't beating me with a tire iron herpa de derpa". That is about the DUMBEST fucking argument I have EVER read, and since we are talking about the net that is a pretty mean feat...congrats. Oh I noticed you didn't have the balls to have a UID, kinda sad when you don't even have the balls to stand behind your bullshit, maybe because even you could see the problems with it?
BTW that was the SAME ARGUMENT used by McCarthy during his red scare which ruined lives and helped lead to the 58,000 that died for nothing in Vietnam...again GREAT company you are keeping there sparky.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
It's hardly a country that loves freedom if it regulates people's personal lives like this.
Balderdash. Anyone can live with whomever he wants and can make whatever kind of promises or agreements he wants with whomever he wants. The government not giving a slip of paper endorsing or verifying their private decisions is not a form of regulating their personal lives--it's the opposite! It's refusing to be involved in it! How much more freedom do you require than lack of involvement?
Then why all this fuss about gay marriage? Why is bigamy illegal? Laws that criminalise those things restrict personal liberties.
And yet those taxes are still there. How can the US be pro freedom if it actively harms people by confiscating property off them using a threat of force?
You're being silly. Every nation in the world has taxes, and no nation could exist with zero taxes. Taxes have been around as long as death. Your argument is preposterous and irrational.
Just because all nations have taxation does not mean that it is impossible for a nation to exist without it. Just because taxation has been around for a long time doesn't mean it's not an infringement on our liberties.
I can't - but that doesn't mean (in any way at all) that the US is the bastian[sic] of freedom. It's not. Your government removes and dilutes your freedoms far too much.
All governments do--that's their basic function. Only by the vigilance of its citizens does a nation preserve its liberty.
The basic function of government should be to protect people from harm. They shouldn't be the ones doing the harming.
Thankfully, our basic rights which allow us to be vigilant are enshrined in our founding documents, a claim which few nations can make.
Is the US perfect? Hardly. Is it getting worse? Perhaps. Is there any freer nation? No.
But, hey, bashing America is easy and popular, so why not join the mob?
I'm not bashing the USA. I'm bashing all countries that dilute the freedoms of its citizens. (Which is all countries). Some are much better than others.
Yes your taxes are low because you have poor people living in misery! People who wants to live good, doesn't live in USA, you live in propaganda, in bubble where poor people are to be ignored and not to be taken care of. There are loads of better countries, I am from scandinavia in from our point of view, USA seems more like third word dictatorial country than rich democratic country ... you should try to live somewhere else sometimes ...
How about giving us a specific link to a faked cetificate from a specific "US" CA?
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
According to Michael Moore, Cuba has the best medical care in the world. Just ask Hugo Chavez.
No. The US has the best medical care in the world. Just ask Michael Jackson.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Certificates are global. A single bad CA spoils the trust in all of them. So Mozilla has to pull those. (yes, this is a problem with how SSL currently works)
I mean, they've been issuing intermediate CA certs to various 'friendly' governments and agencies, to support MITM (for 'lawful interceptions' only, of course).
Will Mozilla remove them too, since they seem to be breaching that same policy?
Smedley Butler was, if not an outright Communist, at least a fellow traveller. His views on American's wars of the era are therefore tainted by the particular ideology that gripped him at that time, and he was not a dispassionate commentator.
Hahaha. Are you actually using this as an argument?
Wow.
"As nasty and corrupt as..." ... China under Mao? Venezuela under Chavez? Cuba under Castro? The USSR under Lenin and Stalin? Cambodia under Pol Pot? The NPRK under the various Kims? Zimbabwe under Mugabe? Zaire/the Congo under Mobutu?
Care to revise your bullshit story?
For all of America's, the American government's, and its leaders' flaws - and of course they are many (and one wonders how your life would stand up upon the withering criticism and examination that the life of a President, for example, gets) - I believe very few of our leaders have ever had a genuine desire to harm people nor have they harbored a profound megalomania. Ego - of course; megalomania - no. Sure, go ahead and despise a President because of their ideological orientation that you disagree with but the notion of the Chomskyites, this strange Kool-Aid they like to guzzle, being fed doses of pablum about "American Imperialism" and the "Military-Industrial Complex" and railing endlessly about the "Evils of Capitalism" yet enjoying its countless benefits (you know, like jobs, homes, clothes, electronics, computers, global air travel, and this weird little thing called the Internet), never proffering a meaningful let alone viable alternative, I am convinced is one of the luxuries provided by the American model of capitalism and Constitutional governance. Trust me if you were to write what you wrote about Mugabe your flesh-burned and -torn body (they wouldn't spend a bullet on you, lest they lose out on a good opportunity to torture you first) would soon be found on the roadside somewhere.
And, if you despise America, think it hopelessly corrupt and nasty "as the rest" then why not leave it for greener pastures? Maybe some other country has it figured out better than we do? According to Michael Moore, Cuba has the best medical care in the world. Just ask Hugo Chavez.
You are probably under 30, since it would appear you don't understand what USA was 30+ years ago and why people see USA as horribly horribly corrupt country.
But of course, your short life experience and Wikipedia make you competent to bleath about anything you wish.
Since I'm supporting an application that uses TeliaSonera certificates on the web server.
And changing to another certificate is probably not on the map since it runs at TeliaSonera.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Oh I noticed you didn't have the balls to have a UID, kinda sad when you don't even have the balls to stand behind your bullshit
As opposed to Mr. Hairyfeet of 4 Riverside Drive, Boston who risks his political career whenever he posts?
Yeah it's more credible when there's a tag associated, but it's not taking balls to log in and create an account. I could post any amount of heinous shit myself and walk away with my life working just perfectly.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
US, Canadian and European governments also spy on their citizens. So Mozilla now needs to determine whose spying is good and whose spying is bad. I'm not sure that's a business that Mozilla should be in.
Perhaps a better solution would be to make it easier and more user friendly for people to detect questionable certificates and choose which certificates you trust. But, of course, that would upset Western governments...
I believe very few of our leaders have ever had a genuine desire to harm people nor have they harbored a profound megalomania. Ego - of course; megalomania - no.
What is, Manifest Destiny's Child.
I'll take ironic idiots for $1000, Alex.
I would argue that anyone logging in to their corporate site from China without using a VPN with a self-signed certificate is doing it wrong. Hell, I'm going on holiday to Australia later in the year and I'm setting up a VPN to my home network so I can use email etc without worrying about my credentials being lifted by any local agency. I know it's a little much for most home users, but for anyone with even an inkling of tech knowhow or a corporate user it should be mandatory.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Unless you are gay and want to marry.
There are many places in America where gays can marry, and more states are considering it. We are moving in the right direction.
The same group that pushes for gays to marry also presses the hardest to outlaw polygamy, and 1-on-1 marriage between biological adults. The latter even carries massive prison sentences, and at least brands you for life.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Your original comment said "Frankly the US government is just as nasty and corrupt as the rest[...]", against which examples of other, worse regimes is a quite effective argument.
The 58,000 of you are nothing compared to the 400,000 civilians killed in a war that you had to use a false flag operation to start. What about them? What about the ongoing effects of what you left behind? My wife's cousin not only can't speak but has no concept of language because of the dioxins in the food chain. It really makes my blood boil when I see shit in the media that ignores the cost to Vietnam while making a big deal over the loss of American or Australian lives, or the effects of agent orange on foreign veterans. There's nothing to feel sorry for, that's the price you paid for a war you had no business starting.
If I can pull a Godwin, the winners of WW2 get to write history, build memorials to their lost, and demonise the other side. Accused perpetrators were tried and executed. There's no mourning for the Nazi soldiers who followed their government's orders to fight. There doesn't even seem to be much sympathy for the civilians who perished in the fire bombings. Why doesn't VN get the same luxury? They won the fucking war and got their own country back, but they're still painted as the bad guys. There's no sympathy for the civilians, the perpetrators of the war were never held to account, there's no compensation for the lingering effects. And I get a nice reminder of this every time I catch up with the extended family.
ok troll, i will bite it!
what, homeland security, FBI, NSA are angels?
The countless US invasions, the protection of dictators like Noriega, Pinochet and even Saddam just because (at their opinion its the less of two evils), the support of Islamic groups like the Taliban, etc, etc. Even today, with the CIA torture jails, Halliburton corruption, wall street and banks frauds show that you have nastiness and corruption all over the top US government and companies.
Probably the US is directly and indirectly responsible of more killings and problems than most of those countries.
People all over the world have the same "Capitalism benefits" as you, even if they are communists, fascists, tribal, etc!! things like jobs (duh!) , homes (double duh!) , clothes ( triple duh!) , electronics (all made in china today... that is communist!!) , computers (even URSS had their own computers!), air travel(duh!) and yes, even internet (call it arpanet, fidonet, AMPRNet or minitel, what ever... arpanet won, but there where alternatives out there)
And yes, cuba have the BEST medical care in the world... and that limited high-tech medical machinery. In cuba everyone have full and free medical support, people around the world travel to cuba to use their medical cares for hard to solve problems (not free for non-residents of course). That doesnt mean that they can cure everything, that mean they give you the best treatment for your problem and long term support for it. No bullshit like, "Take this treatment, the other one a lot better, but is too expensive"... Everyone gets best treatment, not just the rich people.
Huge amount of money will also not give you better medical treatment, just ask Ted Kennedy.
who is full of bullshit now?
stop looking to your own belly and thinking that you are the center of the world. US have good things, but it also have many bad things, just like every place in the world!
Higuita
I am not saying anything about what is OK, and I think much of what the US government is doing and have done is very far from OK.
But that was not what we were discussing. You said that the US government was "as nasty and corrupt as the rest", the AC pointed out some examples that he felt was worse while acknowledging that the US did have its own problem, and you interpreted that as giving the US a free pass. I pointed out that that was not what the AC said, and you have now accused ME of saying everything the US does is OK. Lets see if you can get a hattrick, and misinterpret this post as well!
You, sir, are either not a Libertarian or you represent the 1% of the party that is actually rational.
Here's what I hear all the time from Libertarians I have known.
ALL taxes are evil. Well, OK, maybe it's necessary to pay something just to support the military so China/Russia/whoever won't invade us.
There's NOTHING that the government does that private industry can't do better and cheaper. NOTHING.
Most of the taxes paid are wasted on a bloated government.
If government didn't do anything except run the military and maybe 1 or 2 other tasks, everybody would be richer and better off in this country.
"As nasty and corrupt as..." ... China under Mao? Venezuela under Chavez? Cuba under Castro? The USSR under Lenin and Stalin? Cambodia under Pol Pot? The NPRK under the various Kims? Zimbabwe under Mugabe? Zaire/the Congo under Mobutu?
Are you trying to say that, if we rank all regimes in modern history by their level of corruption, the current US one would be in, what, 9th place?
OK, correction accepted.
Don't get excited. It's the address of a hotel.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
[...] original comment said "Frankly the US government is just as nasty and corrupt as the rest[...]", against which examples of other, worse regimes is a quite effective argument.
Let's deconstruct that argument, shall we?
The AC gave a list of 8 regimes, with three of the examples constituting of dead ex-leaders.
So, considering regimes ranging from 1917 (Example #4: USSR under Lenin) until today, given that we currently have over 200 countries and the tumultuous nature of the past century, a conservative estimate would be at least twice that number of distinct "regimes". I'm not a political historian, so I'll just take 400 as my estimate (feel free to correct me with hard data).
8 of which were claimed to be worse than the present-day US.
A whopping 2%.
Unless you provide us with a more comprehensive list, you may want to reconsider the effectiveness of the argument.
OK, what's so different about the US nowadays? US involvement in Iraq and Vietnam seems rather similar to me - authorization gained by deceit, winning all the battles but still floundering, lasting longer than WWII did (assuming the common 1939 start date), hurting a lot of innocent civilians. Slightly earlier, anti-communist witch hunts had been the demonization of the day, and during the Vietnam War the FBI infiltrated a lot of peaceful anti-war groups in an attempt to discredit them. I think I understand what the USA has been for longer than thirty years now, and I don't get your point.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I don't understand what you mean. I was referring to the way it seems popular to villify the U.S. nowadays, ignoring the good things the U.S. has done and continues to do. Yes, Eisenhower spoke about that, and he may have been right.
But I think you missed the GP's point. It's easy to criticize the status quo, because it's far, far from perfect, just, or fair. The problem is that there is no viable alternative. Communism and socialism and fascism all failed, because they are rotten at their core. Capitalism allows enough freedom for some people to do bad things and fulfill their greed, potentially at others' expense, but that's a price you pay for freedom. If you give up that freedom, you pay a greater price in that the common people have no liberty to determine their own destiny, or at least attempt to. And by removing that freedom, you not only give up a basic human right and greatly harm quality of life, but you also remove motivation for work, creativity, ingenuity, dedication, etc.
People who rail against capitalism may be justified in their criticisms, and I'm sure it could be regulated better than it is. But that is what they should be calling for: better (not necessarily more) regulation of capitalism. Simply crying that capitalism is bad and unfair and evil is pointless, and ultimately naive, because there is no reasonable alternative.
Empty voices easily fill the void with empty words, but they ring hollow.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
It's hardly a country that loves freedom if it regulates people's personal lives like this.
Balderdash. Anyone can live with whomever he wants and can make whatever kind of promises or agreements he wants with whomever he wants. The government not giving a slip of paper endorsing or verifying their private decisions is not a form of regulating their personal lives--it's the opposite! It's refusing to be involved in it! How much more freedom do you require than lack of involvement?
Then why all this fuss about gay marriage? Why is bigamy illegal? Laws that criminalise those things restrict personal liberties.
That's a good question. Originally I'm sure it goes back to something like common law or colonial values, i.e. moral values. From a practical standpoint, it probably exists to protect women from men who would marry a woman and then marry another woman, perhaps even secretly; this could go on and on, as he abandons each one for the next. When those laws were written or assumed, women could not as easily suvive independently. It really hasn't been that many years since marriage and family was a basic necessity for most people to survive.
But again, while marrying two people at once may be illegal, there is no law against a spouse leaving and living with someone else, even having children. The government won't recognize it legally, but those two people don't require such official recognition to live together and make whatever promises they want to each other. As morally wrong as it is, it's not illegal.
And yet those taxes are still there. How can the US be pro freedom if it actively harms people by confiscating property off them using a threat of force?
You're being silly. Every nation in the world has taxes, and no nation could exist with zero taxes. Taxes have been around as long as death. Your argument is preposterous and irrational.
Just because all nations have taxation does not mean that it is impossible for a nation to exist without it. Just because taxation has been around for a long time doesn't mean it's not an infringement on our liberties.
Of course taxes are an infringement upon liberties.
Or that's one viewpoint. Another is that reasonable taxes are necessary for a government to exist and protect its citizens' liberties--without any taxes, a government couldn't exist, and might-makes-right would create anarchy.
I can't - but that doesn't mean (in any way at all) that the US is the bastian[sic] of freedom. It's not. Your government removes and dilutes your freedoms far too much.
All governments do--that's their basic function. Only by the vigilance of its citizens does a nation preserve its liberty.
The basic function of government should be to protect people from harm. They shouldn't be the ones doing the harming.
No one will disagree with you there. But again, that's not possible without taxes of some form. Even if government were only run by part-time volunteers, it would still be necessary to purchase and maintain resources for government use.
Thankfully, our basic rights which allow us to be vigilant are enshrined in our founding documents, a claim which few nations can make.
Is the US perfect? Hardly. Is it getting worse? Perhaps. Is there any freer nation? No.
But, hey, bashing America is easy and popular, so why not join the mob?
I'm not bashing the USA. I'm bashing all countries that dilute the freedoms of its citizens. (Which is all countries). Some are much better than others.
Ok...so what's your point? That the world isn't perfect?
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
There are other ways of raising funds without resorting to extortion. Donations and lotteries come to mind.
A lottery is a tax on being bad at math. Where does law enforcement get its funding once people become no longer bad at math?
You're missing the fact that in order to prevent one citizen from using force or fraud against another citizen, the state must use force and fraud against all citizens.
As for force, in this imperfect system of things, it is impossible to reduce total force and fraud to zero. The job of a tax-funded police force is to minimize the use of force. The job of a lot of other tax-funded services is to minimize situations that lead to poverty because desperation to survive is itself known to lead to the use of force. As for fraud, the laws are on the books for all to see. Please explain what you meant by government use of fraud against citizens.
Wow...congrats to the old dude, you sir pretty much demolished that argument with a couple of well written sentences, bravo sir. I guess I'm a little too passionate to pull something similar off, I was raised with a deep love of individual freedoms and all the jack booted bullshit we've seen for quite awhile really burns me up.
In fact the only thing that will piss me off quicker is the "you better love Murrica or GTFO" crowd because they make it clear the US government could slaughter brown and yellow people like cattle as long as they waved the flag, its the whole "America fuck yeah!" bullshit taken to its logical conclusion. How anybody could buy that bullshit when they saw the pics of soldiers with "Be very quiet, I'm hunting iwackis" patches posing with corpses like they nailed a 4 point buck is beyond me, I know my grandfather that fought against that kind of evil shit in WWII must be spinning in his grave at the sight of that.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.