That attitude is precisely why Iraq is an unwinnable war. You can't defeat an amorphous concept like terrorism and when you operating procedures are so flawed that your actions create more 'terrorists' you are trapped in a hopeless loop.
I'm not claiming that under the rules of engagement what the soldiers did was illegal. However those rules should never have been implemented past the first couple months in the first place or in areas where active combat operations are taking place. The fact that you think that they are legitimate targets simply for bearing arms is indicative of a lack of understanding of the situation. While it is a bit unusual to do so in the city the inability of the US troops to maintain the peace is why they carry weapons despite the prohibitions because it remains dangerous to do so.
Also as a side note have a read through the leaked documents. Some of what is revealed is precisely that there are 'units idly driving around the country side' on patrol in areas that are believed to be clear while avoiding areas known to have 'insurgents'.
You don't understand who and how different taxes affect people at different income levels.
Sales taxes for example are extremely regressive because as my income gets lower, a proportionately higher % of my income is spent of necessities which means the net effect on my income approaches the tax rate. For someone wealthier who is spending only a fraction of their income on necessities it puts a much less significant impact on their wealth.
Capital gains taxes are another situation. Because capital gains taxes are not something a low income person can even hope to worry about because they don't have the money to invest. While a significant fraction of a wealthier person income can come from stocks and dividends.
Also the wealthy disproportionately benefit from tax credits, loopholes, and havens. Because the savings a poor person can expect from them are so low it isn't worth paying an accountant to set it up despite the fact that their savings would be a higher percentage of their total wealth because the absolute savings are so low.
Lastly don't use the tired old claim that people who earn less don't 'bother working hard'. People on the poorer end of the spectrum work damn hard for their paychecks amongst other reasons because they are easily replaceable. The reason you make twice as much likely has more to do with educational opportunities and melanin content than hard work.
In Iraq and Afganistan it is extremely common for men to go about their daily business armed because of the instability and danger created by the US invasion. Unless the US is announcing where they will be conducting operations in advance, how do you propose that armed men avoid being in 'an area of U.S. operation'?
There is no 'battlefield' in Iraq which is the entire problem with treating it like a war with 'rules of engagement' instead of a police action. These were men that were meeting in the street while armed, not engaging in any sort of overtly hostile acts. I bet that you could find a similar situation in any Texas city on a saturday afternoon.
The fact of the matter is that they weren't combatants, no matter how many times you or the military claim that they are. Neither was the unarmed man who drove his van in to take the wounded to hospital. Nor were the children in his van which, while the helicopter weren't aware of them, is a strong reason not to shoot up a non-threatening vehicle just because you want to.
The laughing while killing helpless targets and general chatter during the entire incident was profoundly disturbing. While you and many members of the army would have murdered those men too, it doesn't make it right. Ignoring the post production captioning (which was the only addition, and only to one version of the released tape) there was absolutely nothing that had been done that was threatening when the gunship opened fire, there was no indication that there was specific intel on the targets, and there was no indication that they had any idea who the targets were. Imagine for a moment that the reporters had been doing an interview with some Iraqi police force members, the situation would have looked exactly the same - a bunch of men with rifles talking on the street.
It isn't monday morning quarterbacking to point out that the entire system we have in Iraq is designed to produce these sorts of outcomes. The military insists on keeping treating this like a war when it is a combination of police action and guerilla attacks. Once they stop treating it like something entirely unrelated to the real situation this sort of thing could be considered a tragic accident but until then it is an ignorant inevitability.
Lastly people become 'extremist' out of those factors along with moral outrage. If you had your friends, family, and acquaintances murdered because a negligent bunch of imperialists invaded your country (say Iran to stop the outrageous seperation of church and state) you would act in the exact same way that these people do in taking up arms. If armed gangs of dangerous men wandered around your city you would probably ensure that you were armed when going out to. The populace supported invading Iraq because the US government lied about WMD being developed and no matter how hard you and your ilk try to change history there is recorded proof of the false claims that were made.
If they are classified because of their source rather than their content it shouldn't matter if they are released.
More over unjustified classification of documents based on their source delegitimizes the entire classification scheme and prevents the citizens from providing informed oversight on the government. For the last century it has been a well known fact that classification is used for many purposes besides actually protecting secrets including bureaucratic infighting, avoidance of oversight, a means of backdoor regulation, and avoidance of accountability.
While General Hayden may be incensed that someone would reveal classified information, you should bear in mind that he has a direct interest in concealing his personal involvement with the ongoing failures in the Afganistan war. As well he has direct financial interests in the Afganistan war continuing so that the Chertoff group he now works for continues to recieve unaccountable contracts.
That is correct. Wikileaks held off releasing the documents for several months while in discussions with the Pentagon regarding getting assistance in protecting the identities of the sources. When it became clear that the Pentagon was unwilling to assist they released them unaltered because they lack the manpower to do so themselves.
When refering to him being better than Bush is was referencing the domestic end of things. He understands what a budget is (even if he can't work one), is working on fixing Bush tax cuts and having the most wealthy pay their fair share, pushed healthcare reform even though the results are crappy, pushed financial sector reform even though hefty loopholes are left, not attempting to dismantle social safety net, and driving environmental and consumer protection agencies to start doing their job again. While being FAR from what I consider a good job, I don't feel that on a domestic front Obama can be compared to Bush.
When it comes to national security Obama is complete shit. He is deferential to the entrenched interests who created these horrific policies rather than cleaning house and replacing them with competent authorities. However in almost all these cases he is only continuing bad policies rather than creating them which doesn't make what he is doing better but hard to say it is worse. The only real new policy that he has introduced is the ramp up of assasination targets which is completely illegal, but no more so than most of the other policies that he is continuing.
I'm not an American (thank god) and Obama is well to the right of Canada's Conservatives but he is better than any of the 2008 Republican candidates would have been (except maybe Romney who would be awful in entirely unique ways) and the vast majority of the Democratic candidates (Dennis Kunich being the exception and John Edwards if he hadn't turned out to be an adultering jackhole). I fully expect that the US will collapse into an authoritarian second world country within the next couple decades, but Obama presents a potential wedge to bring the leadership of the country back to mediocre from god-awful.
Anonymous sourcing. All the benefits and none of the responsibility.
Is it any wonder that government officials demand it for any and all discussion since 'reporters' are unwilling to have a backbone and refuse it when there is no justification.
I don't think that he 'sensationalized' the "Collateral Murder" video as it did a pretty good job of that on its own.
Are the innocent civilians that got gunned down by laughing Americans from a helicopter gunship somehow deserving of death? It is tragic that there could be risks to informants that helped the US but to claim that they are innocent is a stretch. They choose to provide information to an invading army knowing that there were risks of being discovered by nationalist fighters. To me at least that is profoundly less innocent that the victims of Predator bombings whose only 'crime' was to go to a family members wedding.
I find myself torn on the subject. While the Taliban was undoubtedly a terrible organisation that harmed the nation of Afganistan I don't believe that we have the right to unilateraly invade and 'make' them change. After all I imagine that during WWII that the Germans would have been extremely upset if records of their collaberators were released but we laud the French freedom fighters for discovering and executing them. The only difference in this case is that our side is the 'good' guys in this one.
It is really sad. I want to like Obama, I really do but he and his administration/party make it so damn hard. While he is undoubtedly better than the Cheney/Bush administration, I strongly dislike how he is continuing the exact same types of policies in regards to 'national security' so that it legitimizes the horrendous evils that the previous administration engaged in rather than marking them out as significant abberations in the United States moral code.
They would get a lot more support for this sort of action if the leaked documents were legitimately classified due to national secrets rather than just because they are embarassing. Revealing that the US government has been lying to its citizens and the world about what is happening in Afganistan and Iraq is certainly something they wouldn't want but keeping the electorate in the dark prevents them from providing direction to the country by electing officials to serve its aims
Absolutely, partisan bias is great for gaining an audience but it dramatically limits the maximum size of that audience. World Net Daily for example has a rabid but limited audience compared to a real news site or aggregator like Slashdot.
Not really. A large enough brigade to bury a story using random sampling would have to be a significant fraction of the active userbase in order to be able to reliably influence stories. On average any individual account is only going to see a fraction of the total stories and only over time will they get more. This means that in order to influence a story you need several orders of magnitude more people (50000 instead of 50) with the corresponding difficulty of organising and near impossibility of secrecy. It also prevents 'flash mob' style behaviour where the group can organise a bury vote shortly after the story appears preventing it from being seen by many other users who could possibly upvote it and ruin their efforts. If it were possible to organise 5-10% of Digg users (secretly or openly) to promote/bury particular types of stories I would have a hard time saying it was gaming the system because it now legitimately represents the outlook of a significant portion of their users rather than a fractional percentage.
The other influence it would have would be to shift the dynamic of power to people who regularly use Digg for extended periods of time since the random sample would be periodic. Like wikipedia this would shift the direction of content into the hands of power users rather than random joes. As well it would prevent use of alternate accounts and IP spoofing to inflate ratings as they would have to spend a significant amount of time on digg to rate any given story. It would also prevent people who have no interest in Digg itself but are told by a influencial member of their political group to downvote/upvote an article or do so as part of their 'service' to their political agenda.
While it is quite possible that someone would discover new ways to game the system it would raise the effort required to do so signifcantly and help avoid the appearence of political bias which could be the death of a social system like digg.
From all the (admittedly scant) evidence I was able to find online there was no proof that he lied to her rather than her drawing incorrect assumptions based on limited information. According to him he never made any claim that he was Jewish but she assumed that he was based on his long used nickname.
How was he supposed to know that he was going to have sex with a rampant racist? No reasonable man should expect that he would be accused of rape for having sex with a enthusiastically willing and forward woman whom he had only met a few hours earlier. More over he gave her his contact information and stayed in touch with her indicating that he had further interest in her.
I have to admit that I thought that your claim was one of the worst bullshit urban legends I had ever heard. However I decided to Google it just to be sure and came up with
That is a astoundingly anti-consumer ruling. Anyone who browses a infringing copyright image is guilty of copyright infringement themselves but if they can prove (at the cost of time and a lawyer) that it was innocent infringement the court 'may' reduce the award so that they are 'only' liable for statutory damages. That means a $750 minimum award per infringing work for someone who is entirely innocent of any intent to infringe and likely with no way of knowing that there were infringing works there before visiting even if they had perfect knowledge of the copyright status of all works.
That has the very real potential to create a business model that would make the RIAA look positively kind and reasonable. 'Arrange' for works that you have the registered copyright to are easily available for taking. Find website that has posted a selection of them posted (or for a fairly illegal and risky method - post them yourself anonymously) then ensure that the site gets a high traffic boost (/., digg, 4chan). Once that is done sue the website for copyright infrigement with a settlement option of no cost to them but they must provide full logs of everyone who visited and then go to town RIAA style with mass lawsuits against improperly injoined Doe's.
The lengths they went to in order to communicate clandestinely was quite significant and far beyond what anyone who engage in doing if they were not concealing something. If you look up a bit in the thread I have a run down of the specific statutes they are being charged under. However it summarizes very quickly as: they aren't being charged with espionage but with being an unregistered agent of a foreign government. In addition they were involved with transfering falsified identity documents, using false identity documents, and money laundering.
Have a read over the complaints yourself, they are pretty damning.
As much as it seems foolish there is legitimate reasoning behind it.
(1) Penalty proportional to the harm done. If you fail to commit a crime the harm done to the victim and/or society is greatly reduced, thus since the US 'justice' system is largely built on retribution (rather than rehabilitation) there is less to take out on the criminal.
(2) It encourages going through with a crime when faced with discovery. If you are faced with an identical penalty whether you succeed or not, there is no motivation to back down if confronted by police (ie kill your target vs surrender) because there will be no lessened punishment. It is similar to the argument used for why making forcible child-rape a capital crime is counter productive (the penalty for killing the kid after is the same so why risk them being able to identify you if caught).
(3) Easier to prove. Despite the fact that the law does not allow for it, it remains much easier to get convictions for offences with lesser penalties. If the penalties were normalized than the standard of evidence required for something like attempted murder would correspondingly rise. *Note: This is probably a good thing, but would fundamentally alter the judicial system.*
They aren't being charged under the typical set of espionage laws (Title 18, 792-798) which cover gathering or disclosing information on defense installations or plans and disclosing classified information. Rather they are being charged with 'Conspiracy to Act as Unregistered Agents of a Foreign Government' (Title 18, 951) which is much broader and covers many otherwise non-criminal activities if performed at the behest of a foreign power.
In addition there are charges unrelated to actual performance of espionage including falsifying passports and other identity documentation, money laundering, and conspiracy to defraud the US.
Over all the complaint has a wealth of specific details that make it very clear that there was intent to commit espionage and commision of crimes in furtherance of that. We still file criminal charges against individuals who have been stopped in the attempt to commit a crime even if they did not succeed to do so, though the charges may be slightly reduced (ie no murder charges if bombing is prevented, but still charged for the bombing).
The articles that this law violates that I referenced were from the Italian Constitution which given this is a law being proposed in Italy is the only one that applies. European Union laws may also influence the legality of this but should not override it unless they specifically conflict.
No anonymity means no privacy for personal choices.
No anonymity means arguments will be judged by their poster rather than their content.
No anonymity means oppresive regimes can identify disidents.
The government does not have a right to monitor my every action in the real world or online. I don't have anything 'to hide', but I don't see why some bureacrat ought to have a record of which political party I discuss online, what flavour of porn I view, who my friends that I chat with are, which diseases I'm reading up on, how much time I spend on ebay, or if I am looking up information on euthanasia. All those are valid and legal activities (assuming said porn isn't child porn) that I have no desire to share with the world. Why not start implanting everyone with GPS tracking devices so that we can monitor anytime an adult nears a child to prevent pedophilia. It is an outrageous affront to our personal privacy and constitutional rights (in most countries).
Specifically this proposed bill violates articles 13 (personal liberty is inviolable), 15 (freedom and confidentiality of communication), and 21 (freedom of speech, writing, and communication). Arguably it also violates the underlying principles of articles 14 (the home is inviolable), 17 (right of peaceful assembly), and 18 (right to form associations).
Silly me. I forgot that our 'elected' officials have the good of the public in mind when extremely broad and unaccountable legislation to combat a problem that already consumes a vastly disproportionate amount of resources to its frequency and severity. It is a good thing that our public servants are so incorruptable and service oriented that they would take care of us like this.
Well I guess my concerns are completely unfounded, thanks for reassuring me.
So you consider it to be 'morally superior' to flush the excess fertilized eggs down the drain, destroying them with absolutely no benefit, than donate them to scientists who will use them in an attempt to develop treatments for you, your children, and the rest of the human race?
I can't help but see that donating them to scientific and medical research is a fundamentally good act on par with donating your organs when you die. You certainly shouldn't be compelled to do so but everyone ought to be encouraged to think of the good of our entire society.
It is a sad state of our societies that child pornography can be invoked to justify absurd and highly unethical changes that would infringe of fundamental rights. It is almost certain that these would fail to successfully deter those seeking child porn but conveniently would be easy to use by the police and political system to silence dissent.
Absolutely correct. The 'test' is so bad as to produce no results of any value whatsoever. It has no way of discerning who scores highly because they genuinely feel that way, who overrates their positives or negatives, how self-aware a testee is, or whether the testee is just mimicking socially acceptable responses. It is extremely subjective and will rate those prone to self-deception very highly while truly empathetic people who have real life experience which makes their empathy less 'blind' lower. The results of this test aren't worth the piece of paper they are written on....after being substituted for toilet paper.
Slashdot Mirror
That attitude is precisely why Iraq is an unwinnable war. You can't defeat an amorphous concept like terrorism and when you operating procedures are so flawed that your actions create more 'terrorists' you are trapped in a hopeless loop.
I'm not claiming that under the rules of engagement what the soldiers did was illegal. However those rules should never have been implemented past the first couple months in the first place or in areas where active combat operations are taking place. The fact that you think that they are legitimate targets simply for bearing arms is indicative of a lack of understanding of the situation. While it is a bit unusual to do so in the city the inability of the US troops to maintain the peace is why they carry weapons despite the prohibitions because it remains dangerous to do so.
Also as a side note have a read through the leaked documents. Some of what is revealed is precisely that there are 'units idly driving around the country side' on patrol in areas that are believed to be clear while avoiding areas known to have 'insurgents'.
You don't understand who and how different taxes affect people at different income levels.
Sales taxes for example are extremely regressive because as my income gets lower, a proportionately higher % of my income is spent of necessities which means the net effect on my income approaches the tax rate. For someone wealthier who is spending only a fraction of their income on necessities it puts a much less significant impact on their wealth.
Capital gains taxes are another situation. Because capital gains taxes are not something a low income person can even hope to worry about because they don't have the money to invest. While a significant fraction of a wealthier person income can come from stocks and dividends.
Also the wealthy disproportionately benefit from tax credits, loopholes, and havens. Because the savings a poor person can expect from them are so low it isn't worth paying an accountant to set it up despite the fact that their savings would be a higher percentage of their total wealth because the absolute savings are so low.
Lastly don't use the tired old claim that people who earn less don't 'bother working hard'. People on the poorer end of the spectrum work damn hard for their paychecks amongst other reasons because they are easily replaceable. The reason you make twice as much likely has more to do with educational opportunities and melanin content than hard work.
In Iraq and Afganistan it is extremely common for men to go about their daily business armed because of the instability and danger created by the US invasion. Unless the US is announcing where they will be conducting operations in advance, how do you propose that armed men avoid being in 'an area of U.S. operation'?
There is no 'battlefield' in Iraq which is the entire problem with treating it like a war with 'rules of engagement' instead of a police action. These were men that were meeting in the street while armed, not engaging in any sort of overtly hostile acts. I bet that you could find a similar situation in any Texas city on a saturday afternoon.
The fact of the matter is that they weren't combatants, no matter how many times you or the military claim that they are. Neither was the unarmed man who drove his van in to take the wounded to hospital. Nor were the children in his van which, while the helicopter weren't aware of them, is a strong reason not to shoot up a non-threatening vehicle just because you want to.
The laughing while killing helpless targets and general chatter during the entire incident was profoundly disturbing. While you and many members of the army would have murdered those men too, it doesn't make it right. Ignoring the post production captioning (which was the only addition, and only to one version of the released tape) there was absolutely nothing that had been done that was threatening when the gunship opened fire, there was no indication that there was specific intel on the targets, and there was no indication that they had any idea who the targets were. Imagine for a moment that the reporters had been doing an interview with some Iraqi police force members, the situation would have looked exactly the same - a bunch of men with rifles talking on the street.
It isn't monday morning quarterbacking to point out that the entire system we have in Iraq is designed to produce these sorts of outcomes. The military insists on keeping treating this like a war when it is a combination of police action and guerilla attacks. Once they stop treating it like something entirely unrelated to the real situation this sort of thing could be considered a tragic accident but until then it is an ignorant inevitability.
Lastly people become 'extremist' out of those factors along with moral outrage. If you had your friends, family, and acquaintances murdered because a negligent bunch of imperialists invaded your country (say Iran to stop the outrageous seperation of church and state) you would act in the exact same way that these people do in taking up arms. If armed gangs of dangerous men wandered around your city you would probably ensure that you were armed when going out to. The populace supported invading Iraq because the US government lied about WMD being developed and no matter how hard you and your ilk try to change history there is recorded proof of the false claims that were made.
If they are classified because of their source rather than their content it shouldn't matter if they are released.
More over unjustified classification of documents based on their source delegitimizes the entire classification scheme and prevents the citizens from providing informed oversight on the government. For the last century it has been a well known fact that classification is used for many purposes besides actually protecting secrets including bureaucratic infighting, avoidance of oversight, a means of backdoor regulation, and avoidance of accountability.
While General Hayden may be incensed that someone would reveal classified information, you should bear in mind that he has a direct interest in concealing his personal involvement with the ongoing failures in the Afganistan war. As well he has direct financial interests in the Afganistan war continuing so that the Chertoff group he now works for continues to recieve unaccountable contracts.
For some reading on how classification is abused try the following.
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/07/hbc-90005393
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moynihan_Commission_on_Government_Secrecy
That is correct. Wikileaks held off releasing the documents for several months while in discussions with the Pentagon regarding getting assistance in protecting the identities of the sources. When it became clear that the Pentagon was unwilling to assist they released them unaltered because they lack the manpower to do so themselves.
When refering to him being better than Bush is was referencing the domestic end of things. He understands what a budget is (even if he can't work one), is working on fixing Bush tax cuts and having the most wealthy pay their fair share, pushed healthcare reform even though the results are crappy, pushed financial sector reform even though hefty loopholes are left, not attempting to dismantle social safety net, and driving environmental and consumer protection agencies to start doing their job again. While being FAR from what I consider a good job, I don't feel that on a domestic front Obama can be compared to Bush.
When it comes to national security Obama is complete shit. He is deferential to the entrenched interests who created these horrific policies rather than cleaning house and replacing them with competent authorities. However in almost all these cases he is only continuing bad policies rather than creating them which doesn't make what he is doing better but hard to say it is worse. The only real new policy that he has introduced is the ramp up of assasination targets which is completely illegal, but no more so than most of the other policies that he is continuing.
I'm not an American (thank god) and Obama is well to the right of Canada's Conservatives but he is better than any of the 2008 Republican candidates would have been (except maybe Romney who would be awful in entirely unique ways) and the vast majority of the Democratic candidates (Dennis Kunich being the exception and John Edwards if he hadn't turned out to be an adultering jackhole). I fully expect that the US will collapse into an authoritarian second world country within the next couple decades, but Obama presents a potential wedge to bring the leadership of the country back to mediocre from god-awful.
Anonymous sourcing. All the benefits and none of the responsibility.
Is it any wonder that government officials demand it for any and all discussion since 'reporters' are unwilling to have a backbone and refuse it when there is no justification.
I don't think that he 'sensationalized' the "Collateral Murder" video as it did a pretty good job of that on its own.
Are the innocent civilians that got gunned down by laughing Americans from a helicopter gunship somehow deserving of death? It is tragic that there could be risks to informants that helped the US but to claim that they are innocent is a stretch. They choose to provide information to an invading army knowing that there were risks of being discovered by nationalist fighters. To me at least that is profoundly less innocent that the victims of Predator bombings whose only 'crime' was to go to a family members wedding.
I find myself torn on the subject. While the Taliban was undoubtedly a terrible organisation that harmed the nation of Afganistan I don't believe that we have the right to unilateraly invade and 'make' them change. After all I imagine that during WWII that the Germans would have been extremely upset if records of their collaberators were released but we laud the French freedom fighters for discovering and executing them. The only difference in this case is that our side is the 'good' guys in this one.
It is really sad. I want to like Obama, I really do but he and his administration/party make it so damn hard. While he is undoubtedly better than the Cheney/Bush administration, I strongly dislike how he is continuing the exact same types of policies in regards to 'national security' so that it legitimizes the horrendous evils that the previous administration engaged in rather than marking them out as significant abberations in the United States moral code.
They would get a lot more support for this sort of action if the leaked documents were legitimately classified due to national secrets rather than just because they are embarassing. Revealing that the US government has been lying to its citizens and the world about what is happening in Afganistan and Iraq is certainly something they wouldn't want but keeping the electorate in the dark prevents them from providing direction to the country by electing officials to serve its aims
Absolutely, partisan bias is great for gaining an audience but it dramatically limits the maximum size of that audience. World Net Daily for example has a rabid but limited audience compared to a real news site or aggregator like Slashdot.
Not really. A large enough brigade to bury a story using random sampling would have to be a significant fraction of the active userbase in order to be able to reliably influence stories. On average any individual account is only going to see a fraction of the total stories and only over time will they get more. This means that in order to influence a story you need several orders of magnitude more people (50000 instead of 50) with the corresponding difficulty of organising and near impossibility of secrecy. It also prevents 'flash mob' style behaviour where the group can organise a bury vote shortly after the story appears preventing it from being seen by many other users who could possibly upvote it and ruin their efforts. If it were possible to organise 5-10% of Digg users (secretly or openly) to promote/bury particular types of stories I would have a hard time saying it was gaming the system because it now legitimately represents the outlook of a significant portion of their users rather than a fractional percentage.
The other influence it would have would be to shift the dynamic of power to people who regularly use Digg for extended periods of time since the random sample would be periodic. Like wikipedia this would shift the direction of content into the hands of power users rather than random joes. As well it would prevent use of alternate accounts and IP spoofing to inflate ratings as they would have to spend a significant amount of time on digg to rate any given story. It would also prevent people who have no interest in Digg itself but are told by a influencial member of their political group to downvote/upvote an article or do so as part of their 'service' to their political agenda.
While it is quite possible that someone would discover new ways to game the system it would raise the effort required to do so signifcantly and help avoid the appearence of political bias which could be the death of a social system like digg.
From all the (admittedly scant) evidence I was able to find online there was no proof that he lied to her rather than her drawing incorrect assumptions based on limited information. According to him he never made any claim that he was Jewish but she assumed that he was based on his long used nickname.
How was he supposed to know that he was going to have sex with a rampant racist? No reasonable man should expect that he would be accused of rape for having sex with a enthusiastically willing and forward woman whom he had only met a few hours earlier. More over he gave her his contact information and stayed in touch with her indicating that he had further interest in her.
I have to admit that I thought that your claim was one of the worst bullshit urban legends I had ever heard. However I decided to Google it just to be sure and came up with
http://www.aolnews.com/surge-desk/article/palestinian-saber-kushour-accused-of-rape-of-deception-speak/19568421
I have lost a hefty amount of my minimal remain faith in humanity.
That is a astoundingly anti-consumer ruling. Anyone who browses a infringing copyright image is guilty of copyright infringement themselves but if they can prove (at the cost of time and a lawyer) that it was innocent infringement the court 'may' reduce the award so that they are 'only' liable for statutory damages. That means a $750 minimum award per infringing work for someone who is entirely innocent of any intent to infringe and likely with no way of knowing that there were infringing works there before visiting even if they had perfect knowledge of the copyright status of all works.
That has the very real potential to create a business model that would make the RIAA look positively kind and reasonable. 'Arrange' for works that you have the registered copyright to are easily available for taking. Find website that has posted a selection of them posted (or for a fairly illegal and risky method - post them yourself anonymously) then ensure that the site gets a high traffic boost (/., digg, 4chan). Once that is done sue the website for copyright infrigement with a settlement option of no cost to them but they must provide full logs of everyone who visited and then go to town RIAA style with mass lawsuits against improperly injoined Doe's.
The lengths they went to in order to communicate clandestinely was quite significant and far beyond what anyone who engage in doing if they were not concealing something. If you look up a bit in the thread I have a run down of the specific statutes they are being charged under. However it summarizes very quickly as: they aren't being charged with espionage but with being an unregistered agent of a foreign government. In addition they were involved with transfering falsified identity documents, using false identity documents, and money laundering.
Have a read over the complaints yourself, they are pretty damning.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/28_06_10_us_spies_complaint_1.pdf
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/28_06_10_us_spies_complaint_2.pdf
As much as it seems foolish there is legitimate reasoning behind it.
(1) Penalty proportional to the harm done. If you fail to commit a crime the harm done to the victim and/or society is greatly reduced, thus since the US 'justice' system is largely built on retribution (rather than rehabilitation) there is less to take out on the criminal.
(2) It encourages going through with a crime when faced with discovery. If you are faced with an identical penalty whether you succeed or not, there is no motivation to back down if confronted by police (ie kill your target vs surrender) because there will be no lessened punishment. It is similar to the argument used for why making forcible child-rape a capital crime is counter productive (the penalty for killing the kid after is the same so why risk them being able to identify you if caught).
(3) Easier to prove. Despite the fact that the law does not allow for it, it remains much easier to get convictions for offences with lesser penalties. If the penalties were normalized than the standard of evidence required for something like attempted murder would correspondingly rise. *Note: This is probably a good thing, but would fundamentally alter the judicial system.*
They aren't being charged under the typical set of espionage laws (Title 18, 792-798) which cover gathering or disclosing information on defense installations or plans and disclosing classified information. Rather they are being charged with 'Conspiracy to Act as Unregistered Agents of a Foreign Government' (Title 18, 951) which is much broader and covers many otherwise non-criminal activities if performed at the behest of a foreign power.
In addition there are charges unrelated to actual performance of espionage including falsifying passports and other identity documentation, money laundering, and conspiracy to defraud the US.
Over all the complaint has a wealth of specific details that make it very clear that there was intent to commit espionage and commision of crimes in furtherance of that. We still file criminal charges against individuals who have been stopped in the attempt to commit a crime even if they did not succeed to do so, though the charges may be slightly reduced (ie no murder charges if bombing is prevented, but still charged for the bombing).
The articles that this law violates that I referenced were from the Italian Constitution which given this is a law being proposed in Italy is the only one that applies. European Union laws may also influence the legality of this but should not override it unless they specifically conflict.
No anonymity means no whistleblowers.
No anonymity means retaliation against critics.
No anonymity means no privacy for personal choices.
No anonymity means arguments will be judged by their poster rather than their content.
No anonymity means oppresive regimes can identify disidents.
The government does not have a right to monitor my every action in the real world or online. I don't have anything 'to hide', but I don't see why some bureacrat ought to have a record of which political party I discuss online, what flavour of porn I view, who my friends that I chat with are, which diseases I'm reading up on, how much time I spend on ebay, or if I am looking up information on euthanasia. All those are valid and legal activities (assuming said porn isn't child porn) that I have no desire to share with the world. Why not start implanting everyone with GPS tracking devices so that we can monitor anytime an adult nears a child to prevent pedophilia. It is an outrageous affront to our personal privacy and constitutional rights (in most countries).
Specifically this proposed bill violates articles 13 (personal liberty is inviolable), 15 (freedom and confidentiality of communication), and 21 (freedom of speech, writing, and communication). Arguably it also violates the underlying principles of articles 14 (the home is inviolable), 17 (right of peaceful assembly), and 18 (right to form associations).
Silly me. I forgot that our 'elected' officials have the good of the public in mind when extremely broad and unaccountable legislation to combat a problem that already consumes a vastly disproportionate amount of resources to its frequency and severity. It is a good thing that our public servants are so incorruptable and service oriented that they would take care of us like this.
Well I guess my concerns are completely unfounded, thanks for reassuring me.
So you consider it to be 'morally superior' to flush the excess fertilized eggs down the drain, destroying them with absolutely no benefit, than donate them to scientists who will use them in an attempt to develop treatments for you, your children, and the rest of the human race?
I can't help but see that donating them to scientific and medical research is a fundamentally good act on par with donating your organs when you die. You certainly shouldn't be compelled to do so but everyone ought to be encouraged to think of the good of our entire society.
It is a sad state of our societies that child pornography can be invoked to justify absurd and highly unethical changes that would infringe of fundamental rights. It is almost certain that these would fail to successfully deter those seeking child porn but conveniently would be easy to use by the police and political system to silence dissent.
But I'm sure that fact is just a coincedence...
Absolutely correct. The 'test' is so bad as to produce no results of any value whatsoever. It has no way of discerning who scores highly because they genuinely feel that way, who overrates their positives or negatives, how self-aware a testee is, or whether the testee is just mimicking socially acceptable responses. It is extremely subjective and will rate those prone to self-deception very highly while truly empathetic people who have real life experience which makes their empathy less 'blind' lower. The results of this test aren't worth the piece of paper they are written on....after being substituted for toilet paper.