(And that has always been a sticking point for me... does the second amendment include an exception for convicted felons? How can any imposed restriction on a convicted felon's right to bear arms be constitutional? Does the same constitutionally guaranteed right to vote include any exception against convicted felons?)
The exception is in the 14th amendment, which allows discrimination against criminals:
(Section 1)... No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law...
(Section 2)... But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the executive and judicial officers of a state, or the members of the legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such state, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime...
I think it sucks too, but it will require an amendment to the Constitution to fix.
Wait, are you suggesting that Microsoft didn't bribe a dozen counties, at a hundred or more people, and pull off the biggest corporate cover-up in history (aside from the brilliant and astute readers of Slashdot who have worked diligently to uncover this plot) just so they could get their document format adopted as an ISO standard--something which will yield them little to no gain because the market share of Office essentially requires competitive document compatibility?
Actually it gains them a lot. For one thing, as reported here, in at least some of the nations where irregularities have been seen laws were recently passed requiring all government documents to be published using open standards. Since MSOffice does not provide this facility, they'd have to use something else to produce the documents. If they can just say their document format *is* an open standard (ipso facto!) they don't lose their coveted market share and they don't have to make any changes to their software.
It also gains them something in an area of Microsoft's desires that has puzzled me forever. For some reason it just offends their sensibilities to support ANY open format in their software, be it png, OpenDocument, or XML. HOWEVER ever since the Linux revolution around 2000 and the big hoopla over open standards Microsoft has billed themselves as the most open company in the universe out of one side of their mouths while deriding the Free Software people as Communists out of the other. In any case this is one more feather in their cap of features in their Software they can point to and say "See we're the most open company in the world!"
This is, in fact, what started this mess. Microsoft claimed they supported XML, an open standard, in their office suite, people with more than half a brain said "that doesn't look like XML to me" so Microsoft decided to call what they were doing OOXML and get it approved as a standard. When that did not fly, the votes got changed so it passed.
I'm with AC here. Are Groklaw, etc, really suggesting that several standards bodies in several nations are/all/ corrupt? And not one leak? Not one failed, incorruptible whistleblower?
This argument doesn't really fly with me because the corruption isn't even a secret. When several groups decide, by fiat, to ignore the votes of their members, it is wrong and corrupt, Microsoft's involvement be damned. Besides which there were several whistleblowers, which is how we heard about this in the first place.
2) I think the problem with your theory is that it was already (at least partially) flamebait in the original context. Flamebait is flamebait, even if it has a pop-cultural basis.
No, it was +5 funny in its ORIGINAL context. The song (a story really) was meant to be funny, like all their other songs. If you want anti-flamer flamebait try some Republican party speeches.
3) "The Mods REALLY hate the Dead Milkmen." => You ignore Hanlon's Razor.
Not really. They don't like the Dead Milkmen and are therefore stupid. There I said it.:D Either way Hanlon's is irrelevant to the observation.
4) Even insightful, informative comments which are unconnected to the topic of the article are fair game for Offtopic mods. That would, of course, include this comment.
Wow. Just... Wow. So a joke about martians is offtopic in a slashdot article about martians. Typical/. moderation logic; this only confirms point 4.:D
"All beautiful women who have been stalked, abused, or raped because they are physically attractive, may beg to differ."
I think that every ugly woman who has been stalked, abused, or raped irrelevant of their physical appearance may beg to differ with you.
Exactly. Rape, stalking and abuse are not about sex. It's about power. The perpetrator desires power over their victim, in which case someone less attractive, overweight, elderly, etc might actually make a better target. Either way sexual attraction is not the most important determiing factor here.
When I hear someone prettier than me complain that people don't take them seriously because they are beautiful, it generally annoys me... at least they're getting some attention at all.
That's usually what they're trying to get when they say that to you. They want attention and they want you to take their requests seriously. People could be falling all over themselves to get them whatever it is they want, but it's not enough for them. Anyone who complains with the old saw that they are not being taken seriously because they are sooo beautiful is a needy whining bitch that craves validation. You have to agree with the premise that they are so blindingly stunningly beautiful that all reason comes to an end at their event horizon, and further that they have such great contributions to the world that it is a travesty they are being ignored for five minutes. It's really hard to take someone like that seriously. No you're not being ignored because you are beautiful. People don't take you seriously because you are full of shit and always trying to manipulate people with sob stories.
But seriously... it's not even possible for this to happen. Yes everytime a female scientist has an article on slashdot there are 500 posts about her breasts versus one about her theories. Even NASA has a laugh with their "mountains of mars" article. But despite our piggish behaviour you can guarantee every time a beautiful woman presents a beautiful theory men will hang on her every word. Especially nerds, who are suckers for nerd chicks. Hell, people listen to Condaleeza Rice don't they? They even tried to put theories in Monica Lewinsky's mouth!
"Either way, the system does not appreciably change."
Nonsense. I will end up paying MUCH more in taxes. That is an appeciable change in the system, from any rational perspective.
What I meant was the Health Care system. That doesn't change because of taxes. I do agree that higher taxes are probably going to be required, because for the forseeable future our defense costs are unlikely to go down much.
Now, let's talk about that Virginia Tech dorm. Do you honestly believe there'd be someone watching every single dorm, all the time? If so, isn't that a bit creepy, too? If not, someone's going to slip through -- they'll "accidentally" bump the camera offline, or throw something over it, and no one will notice until the next day, when a bunch of people are dead.
It's moot anyway. Spying would not have stopped the Virginia Tech massacre, specifically because even once the students and teachers knew that there was a killer stalking the halls and shooting people they could not stop him because they did not have doors with locks.
"Trust us, it's working, after all, we haven't had an attack since 9/11, have we?" (Someone needs to educate the average American about the concept of 'correlation != 'causation'.)
It's even worse than that, as warrantless wiretapping started in February 2001 [theregister.co.uk], *before* 9/11, and did nothing to stop that attack.
Well it was the 1996 Telecommunications Act that allowed the tapping in the first place. That's why I can't stop laughing at the fools that want to sue AT&T for providing the wiretapping. They were required by law to install and operate the digital wiretapping equipment.
By the way, under Mr. Clinton wiretapping apparently tripled during his first term. Most of the scandals his wife was involved in were about warrantless surveillance and basically snooping. (Remember TravelGate?) It boggles the mind to think that people actually think Hillary Clinton will create more freedom than Bush. Her husband was the one who ramped up Extraordinary Rendition, sending people to Egypt to be tortured.
What annoys me most about people that think it's a good idea to get rid of due process in order to get "bad people" is that it basically guarantees that you won't get them. The normal process is that you have some reason to suspect that someone might have committed a crime. If your suspicion is reasonable you get a warrant. If you find evidence of a crime you can proceed to court. What's so damn horrible about that? The only thing that ignoring due process gets you is the power to punish people who you have NO IDEA whether they are guilty or not, because you didn't even have a legitimate reason to suspect them, much less evidence of a crime. To me the process is there to allow you to prove whether someone commits a crime or not, which is the best way to guarantee that the actual perpetrator gets nailed. For every innocent man you punish, a guilty man walks (sometimes two or more). If we keep punishing people who are not terrorist, the world will be filled with terrorists, both because we aren't catching the real offenders and because our draconian ways will make more enemies who think the only righteous path is to bring our destruction.
"Wow, you really don't think before you write, eh?"
Surveillance data can be subpoenaed if necessary. If I am accused of an act and can use data proving that I couldn't have done that act, I'm fine with the systems that gathered that data.
And the government can ignore your subpoena, just like they very often, maybe usually do. In fact there have been plenty of cases where the government or even regular policemen have had what they knew to be exculpatory evidence, and neither did it stop them from prosecuting the person but they certainly did not share it. Sometimes you don't even know they have a particular piece of evidence. That is what really gets you.
"They" rarely come for everybody, though there is much invested in implying that "they" will. History is informative here, and IMO the risk in the US that "they" will ever come for "me" is nil.
Man you are a poor student of history. Every time, historically, some group has gotten power to persecute some group, usually for righteous reasons, they have extended that authority toward a potential infinite (though they usually get stopped by someone eventually, or time). Cases in point, Mccarthy hearings (and related Red Scares), the Nazis, the Stalinists, the Church (Crusades, wars, Inquisitions, witchhunts, heresies, etc), the FBI, the CIA, etc, etc.
Besides, with an unPC attitude like yours, you should fear an overzealous Democrat government who might just come for you after all; hell they might even send you to (reeducation) camp!
To this day, I have no idea why he pulled me over and did that.
The answer in both cases is that you pissed off a cop by getting in front of them on the highway. I've learned that the hard way too. Some officers take out their road rage on citizens and the police officer's arbitrary power helps them get away with stuff like that.
Do the "for the children" thing and say Joe FBI agent can now spy on your 13 year old daughter unencumbered if he/she so chooses.
Doesn't seem to work. People seem not to care that the RIAA is spying on 13 year old girls and attempting to extort thousands of dollars from them. Will they really balk at letting the government do it? They've been crying for a national sanity litmus test and regular monitoring as it is as a weapon against school shootings.
Now, no one with a real insight into the situation has actually made reference to anything different then a connection to terrorism or terrorist. We have listened to people claiming to protect civil liberties demand that terrorist and people who took up arms against our troops get a trial in US courts where the argument against that claimed it would expose intelligence gained from them and cause those gains to be ineffective in the future. Yet, the Civil liberties side claims that someone being held for fighting and killing our troops or conducting attacks against civilians is inherently privileged to our constitutional protections as if they were elevated above the slime they are. And when you finally get right down to it, you find all these people making personal insults to the president of the United State and other leaders who have backed these policies.
But the problem with that is that it is not true. In other words not everyone the government designates as an enemy combatant ever took up arms against our country. I fact there are several good examples of this, which is why there is supposed to be this thing called a trial that determines if you really did something. As for the "national security" argument, it is routinely and demonstrably abused. ONe o fthe funniest examples is the infamous "parrot report". They spent decades trying to keep that out. The FBI has an amazing propensity to declare that some or all of the evidence against someone cannot be submitted because it is classified (for national security reasons). In other words, there is a reason people don't feel comfortable trusting the government with this sort of thing.
Incidentally, the only people I'm aware of who even fit the description of bearing arms against our country and attacking our soldiers who are also in GitMo are the soldiers who defended their country when we invaded it. To my mind this makes them *by definition* POWs.
What we really have is the alarm side ruining it's credibility with individual citizens thinking that the positions of the civil liberty alarmists are insane. They are actually making the case for people to not believe them or to think they are somehow too extreme to be right.
It does not matter. People of that persuasion would not believe the government was spying on them if they found FBI agents in their house. It's like all news of that kind is surrounded by a "Someone Else's Problem Field." They don't even believe the spying that the government admits publicly and the news drones on about for days, much less the stuff that was reported longer than 5 minutes ago. There's a switch that goes off in some people that says "if he talks bad about the government, especially if it's about surveillance, he is a looney conspiracy theorist nutjob." This efficiently prevents them from learning anything about it. Meanwhile the real conspiracy theorist nutjobs usually find out about the extent of government spying, but they tend to go further in their theories or have odd ideas about the motivations behind them.
It's amazing to me that we find it entertaining to watch agents of US government work to overthrow foreign governments by any criminal means handy. If another nation did that to us, we'd immediately label they as renegade nation and now-a-days, terrorists ( the all-purpose bogeyman ).
Well they can, and they sometimes do, but it doesn't quite have the sting of when we do it. If we think you're a rogue nation we bomb you into the stone age and if we feel like bothering we might occupy your country for a decade or two. If a country like Iraq or Venezuela determines that we are a rogue nation (actually they both did), our response is "yeah, so what's your point?" Because they really cannot do anything about it.
Same deal as the UN. As someone (I think maybe Henry VIII) famously said "The Pope has no army." In other words the UN has to rely on the good graces of other nations to provide the soldiers and money to enforce its will. Guess who supplies most of both.
People tend to hate their government if A. their standard of living is bad and declining or the B. repressive measures impact them directly. If America's standard of living continues to decline American attitude towards their government will change. Ranting about peoples indifference wont change it, putting them in the poor house will. People also tend to be indifferent to spying unless and until it directly impacts them (i.e the get arrested for something).
The only problem with making more poor people is they tend to turn into Communists. Redistribution of wealth is incredibly attractive when you have nothing.:D
You need to look no further than Eliot Spitzer. He was caught by the fact that there is now widespread spying on EVERYONE's bank accounts. Any transaction over $10,000 in your account is reported to the government. ANY transaction some bank employee decides is a little fishy can be reported through a SAR(Suspicious Activity Report).
It's even worse than that. IIRC even if you have a bunch of small transactions, if it looks like you are doing that to avoid hitting the magic $10,000 mark the bank is obligated by law to report that as well. I'm not sure how they determine that. A lot of $9,999 transactions would be obvious. But what if you did a semirandom number of transactions in semirandom amounts that end up adding up to a net change of $10,000 or some multiple thereof? It is an interesting question.
The fact Spitzer was destroyed by something as innocuous as flings with a prostitute, almost certainly came about only because of spying on his bank accounts.
I've always wondered about this. Every time something the least bit embarrassing comes out the official (even nonelected ones) steps down. It's insane and feeds the beast, because all your enemies have to do is make up shit (like when Bush the Elder supposedly produced a picture of Perot's daughter kissing a woman and threatened to publish it if he did not drop out of the race). Bill Clinton had the right idea, IMHO. In this day and age we don't really care as much about these things except as an amusing distraction. We knew he smoked pot and liked blowjobs and we still elected him twice. They even tried to prosecute him for having a blowjob and knowing what "is" means*, and he still was successful because he did not care.
*BTW for those short on research, the reason the meaning of "is" was important was that Clinton was also prosecuted for perjury on the theory that he was lying when he answered "No" to the question "Is there a sexual relationship between you and Monica Lewinsky. Kenneth Starr apparently did not know the meaning of is. It is the present tense form of "to be." When Hillary found out about Monica, you bet your ass the relationship ended real quick. Apparently informal surveys of Republicans have relatively consistently shown that when asked they do not know what the meaning of the word "is". That's why they make fun of Clinton for knowing the answer and using it to get out of trouble.
Except that it always was. Nothing has changed in fact, whether the issue was McCarthy's list of communists, Hoover's files on random people, do-not-fly lists, and so on. Government never was good in the first place.
It all started going downhill when we decided to leave the trees.
Slashdot Mirror
(And that has always been a sticking point for me... does the second amendment include an exception for convicted felons? How can any imposed restriction on a convicted felon's right to bear arms be constitutional? Does the same constitutionally guaranteed right to vote include any exception against convicted felons?)
The exception is in the 14th amendment, which allows discrimination against criminals:
(Section 1) ... No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law ...
(Section 2) ... But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the executive and judicial officers of a state, or the members of the legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such state, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime ...
I think it sucks too, but it will require an amendment to the Constitution to fix.
Wait, are you suggesting that Microsoft didn't bribe a dozen counties, at a hundred or more people, and pull off the biggest corporate cover-up in history (aside from the brilliant and astute readers of Slashdot who have worked diligently to uncover this plot) just so they could get their document format adopted as an ISO standard--something which will yield them little to no gain because the market share of Office essentially requires competitive document compatibility?
Actually it gains them a lot. For one thing, as reported here, in at least some of the nations where irregularities have been seen laws were recently passed requiring all government documents to be published using open standards. Since MSOffice does not provide this facility, they'd have to use something else to produce the documents. If they can just say their document format *is* an open standard (ipso facto!) they don't lose their coveted market share and they don't have to make any changes to their software.
It also gains them something in an area of Microsoft's desires that has puzzled me forever. For some reason it just offends their sensibilities to support ANY open format in their software, be it png, OpenDocument, or XML. HOWEVER ever since the Linux revolution around 2000 and the big hoopla over open standards Microsoft has billed themselves as the most open company in the universe out of one side of their mouths while deriding the Free Software people as Communists out of the other. In any case this is one more feather in their cap of features in their Software they can point to and say "See we're the most open company in the world!"
This is, in fact, what started this mess. Microsoft claimed they supported XML, an open standard, in their office suite, people with more than half a brain said "that doesn't look like XML to me" so Microsoft decided to call what they were doing OOXML and get it approved as a standard. When that did not fly, the votes got changed so it passed.
I'm with AC here. Are Groklaw, etc, really suggesting that several standards bodies in several nations are /all/ corrupt? And not one leak? Not one failed, incorruptible whistleblower?
This argument doesn't really fly with me because the corruption isn't even a secret. When several groups decide, by fiat, to ignore the votes of their members, it is wrong and corrupt, Microsoft's involvement be damned. Besides which there were several whistleblowers, which is how we heard about this in the first place.
1) Thanks for the reference, I'd always wondered about that. What song is it from?
It's called Stuart.
2) I think the problem with your theory is that it was already (at least partially) flamebait in the original context. Flamebait is flamebait, even if it has a pop-cultural basis.
No, it was +5 funny in its ORIGINAL context. The song (a story really) was meant to be funny, like all their other songs. If you want anti-flamer flamebait try some Republican party speeches.
3) "The Mods REALLY hate the Dead Milkmen." => You ignore Hanlon's Razor.
Not really. They don't like the Dead Milkmen and are therefore stupid. There I said it. :D Either way Hanlon's is irrelevant to the observation.
4) Even insightful, informative comments which are unconnected to the topic of the article are fair game for Offtopic mods. That would, of course, include this comment.
Wow. Just ... Wow. So a joke about martians is offtopic in a slashdot article about martians. Typical /. moderation logic; this only confirms point 4. :D
"All beautiful women who have been stalked, abused, or raped because they are physically attractive, may beg to differ."
I think that every ugly woman who has been stalked, abused, or raped irrelevant of their physical appearance may beg to differ with you.
Exactly. Rape, stalking and abuse are not about sex. It's about power. The perpetrator desires power over their victim, in which case someone less attractive, overweight, elderly, etc might actually make a better target. Either way sexual attraction is not the most important determiing factor here.
When I hear someone prettier than me complain that people don't take them seriously because they are beautiful, it generally annoys me... at least they're getting some attention at all.
That's usually what they're trying to get when they say that to you. They want attention and they want you to take their requests seriously. People could be falling all over themselves to get them whatever it is they want, but it's not enough for them. Anyone who complains with the old saw that they are not being taken seriously because they are sooo beautiful is a needy whining bitch that craves validation. You have to agree with the premise that they are so blindingly stunningly beautiful that all reason comes to an end at their event horizon, and further that they have such great contributions to the world that it is a travesty they are being ignored for five minutes. It's really hard to take someone like that seriously. No you're not being ignored because you are beautiful. People don't take you seriously because you are full of shit and always trying to manipulate people with sob stories.
But seriously ... it's not even possible for this to happen. Yes everytime a female scientist has an article on slashdot there are 500 posts about her breasts versus one about her theories. Even NASA has a laugh with their "mountains of mars" article. But despite our piggish behaviour you can guarantee every time a beautiful woman presents a beautiful theory men will hang on her every word. Especially nerds, who are suckers for nerd chicks. Hell, people listen to Condaleeza Rice don't they? They even tried to put theories in Monica Lewinsky's mouth!
No, because there are no empirical standards for beauty. Someone I find beautiful can be and often is dull or ugly to someone else.
Or they can say that because they are jealous, or because they are using a nonphysical standard, like personality.
We call it "beauty" but it's really about our own genes, and ensuring our mate is healthy enough to survive nature's harshness.
And alcohol is the way we endure their harshness. But that's how we ended up in this mess in the first place. :D
void* girl?
Are you saying that all girls are empty inside?
He's saying they don't return anything useful.
At least not valid data. :D
"Either way, the system does not appreciably change."
Nonsense. I will end up paying MUCH more in taxes. That is an appeciable change in the system, from any rational perspective.
What I meant was the Health Care system. That doesn't change because of taxes. I do agree that higher taxes are probably going to be required, because for the forseeable future our defense costs are unlikely to go down much.
Now, let's talk about that Virginia Tech dorm. Do you honestly believe there'd be someone watching every single dorm, all the time? If so, isn't that a bit creepy, too? If not, someone's going to slip through -- they'll "accidentally" bump the camera offline, or throw something over it, and no one will notice until the next day, when a bunch of people are dead.
It's moot anyway. Spying would not have stopped the Virginia Tech massacre, specifically because even once the students and teachers knew that there was a killer stalking the halls and shooting people they could not stop him because they did not have doors with locks.
"Trust us, it's working, after all, we haven't had an attack since 9/11, have we?" (Someone needs to educate the average American about the concept of 'correlation != 'causation'.)
It's even worse than that, as warrantless wiretapping started in February 2001 [theregister.co.uk], *before* 9/11, and did nothing to stop that attack.
Well it was the 1996 Telecommunications Act that allowed the tapping in the first place. That's why I can't stop laughing at the fools that want to sue AT&T for providing the wiretapping. They were required by law to install and operate the digital wiretapping equipment.
By the way, under Mr. Clinton wiretapping apparently tripled during his first term. Most of the scandals his wife was involved in were about warrantless surveillance and basically snooping. (Remember TravelGate?) It boggles the mind to think that people actually think Hillary Clinton will create more freedom than Bush. Her husband was the one who ramped up Extraordinary Rendition, sending people to Egypt to be tortured.
Pesty thing, that whole 'due process' thing.
What annoys me most about people that think it's a good idea to get rid of due process in order to get "bad people" is that it basically guarantees that you won't get them. The normal process is that you have some reason to suspect that someone might have committed a crime. If your suspicion is reasonable you get a warrant. If you find evidence of a crime you can proceed to court. What's so damn horrible about that? The only thing that ignoring due process gets you is the power to punish people who you have NO IDEA whether they are guilty or not, because you didn't even have a legitimate reason to suspect them, much less evidence of a crime. To me the process is there to allow you to prove whether someone commits a crime or not, which is the best way to guarantee that the actual perpetrator gets nailed. For every innocent man you punish, a guilty man walks (sometimes two or more). If we keep punishing people who are not terrorist, the world will be filled with terrorists, both because we aren't catching the real offenders and because our draconian ways will make more enemies who think the only righteous path is to bring our destruction.
When do they come for the people who post that stale, over-used quote on Slashdot? And who mod it up every single time?
After they come for people with "Rat" in their names and links to movie reviews in their sigs. :D
"Wow, you really don't think before you write, eh?"
Surveillance data can be subpoenaed if necessary. If I am accused of an act and can use data proving that I couldn't have done that act, I'm fine with the systems that gathered that data.
And the government can ignore your subpoena, just like they very often, maybe usually do. In fact there have been plenty of cases where the government or even regular policemen have had what they knew to be exculpatory evidence, and neither did it stop them from prosecuting the person but they certainly did not share it. Sometimes you don't even know they have a particular piece of evidence. That is what really gets you.
I know it's a mistake because they always ask me when I lived in Oakland (the answer is never).
That's what I tell them, too.
"They" rarely come for everybody, though there is much invested in implying that "they" will.
History is informative here, and IMO the risk in the US that "they" will ever come for "me" is nil.
Man you are a poor student of history. Every time, historically, some group has gotten power to persecute some group, usually for righteous reasons, they have extended that authority toward a potential infinite (though they usually get stopped by someone eventually, or time). Cases in point, Mccarthy hearings (and related Red Scares), the Nazis, the Stalinists, the Church (Crusades, wars, Inquisitions, witchhunts, heresies, etc), the FBI, the CIA, etc, etc.
Besides, with an unPC attitude like yours, you should fear an overzealous Democrat government who might just come for you after all; hell they might even send you to (reeducation) camp!
To this day, I have no idea why he pulled me over and did that.
The answer in both cases is that you pissed off a cop by getting in front of them on the highway. I've learned that the hard way too. Some officers take out their road rage on citizens and the police officer's arbitrary power helps them get away with stuff like that.
Do the "for the children" thing and say Joe FBI agent can now spy on your 13 year old daughter unencumbered if he/she so chooses.
Doesn't seem to work. People seem not to care that the RIAA is spying on 13 year old girls and attempting to extort thousands of dollars from them. Will they really balk at letting the government do it? They've been crying for a national sanity litmus test and regular monitoring as it is as a weapon against school shootings.
Now, no one with a real insight into the situation has actually made reference to anything different then a connection to terrorism or terrorist. We have listened to people claiming to protect civil liberties demand that terrorist and people who took up arms against our troops get a trial in US courts where the argument against that claimed it would expose intelligence gained from them and cause those gains to be ineffective in the future. Yet, the Civil liberties side claims that someone being held for fighting and killing our troops or conducting attacks against civilians is inherently privileged to our constitutional protections as if they were elevated above the slime they are. And when you finally get right down to it, you find all these people making personal insults to the president of the United State and other leaders who have backed these policies.
But the problem with that is that it is not true. In other words not everyone the government designates as an enemy combatant ever took up arms against our country. I fact there are several good examples of this, which is why there is supposed to be this thing called a trial that determines if you really did something. As for the "national security" argument, it is routinely and demonstrably abused. ONe o fthe funniest examples is the infamous "parrot report". They spent decades trying to keep that out. The FBI has an amazing propensity to declare that some or all of the evidence against someone cannot be submitted because it is classified (for national security reasons). In other words, there is a reason people don't feel comfortable trusting the government with this sort of thing.
Incidentally, the only people I'm aware of who even fit the description of bearing arms against our country and attacking our soldiers who are also in GitMo are the soldiers who defended their country when we invaded it. To my mind this makes them *by definition* POWs.
What we really have is the alarm side ruining it's credibility with individual citizens thinking that the positions of the civil liberty alarmists are insane. They are actually making the case for people to not believe them or to think they are somehow too extreme to be right.
It does not matter. People of that persuasion would not believe the government was spying on them if they found FBI agents in their house. It's like all news of that kind is surrounded by a "Someone Else's Problem Field." They don't even believe the spying that the government admits publicly and the news drones on about for days, much less the stuff that was reported longer than 5 minutes ago. There's a switch that goes off in some people that says "if he talks bad about the government, especially if it's about surveillance, he is a looney conspiracy theorist nutjob." This efficiently prevents them from learning anything about it. Meanwhile the real conspiracy theorist nutjobs usually find out about the extent of government spying, but they tend to go further in their theories or have odd ideas about the motivations behind them.
Decisions are made that are neither black or white.
You mean we cannot accurately represent the world using binary and make decisions based on binary ranched decision trees? We're DOOOOOMED! :D
It's amazing to me that we find it entertaining to watch agents of US government work to overthrow foreign governments by any criminal means handy. If another nation did that to us, we'd immediately label they as renegade nation and now-a-days, terrorists ( the all-purpose bogeyman ).
Well they can, and they sometimes do, but it doesn't quite have the sting of when we do it. If we think you're a rogue nation we bomb you into the stone age and if we feel like bothering we might occupy your country for a decade or two. If a country like Iraq or Venezuela determines that we are a rogue nation (actually they both did), our response is "yeah, so what's your point?" Because they really cannot do anything about it.
Same deal as the UN. As someone (I think maybe Henry VIII) famously said "The Pope has no army." In other words the UN has to rely on the good graces of other nations to provide the soldiers and money to enforce its will. Guess who supplies most of both.
People tend to hate their government if A. their standard of living is bad and declining or the B. repressive measures impact them directly. If America's standard of living continues to decline American attitude towards their government will change. Ranting about peoples indifference wont change it, putting them in the poor house will. People also tend to be indifferent to spying unless and until it directly impacts them (i.e the get arrested for something).
The only problem with making more poor people is they tend to turn into Communists. Redistribution of wealth is incredibly attractive when you have nothing. :D
You need to look no further than Eliot Spitzer. He was caught by the fact that there is now widespread spying on EVERYONE's bank accounts. Any transaction over $10,000 in your account is reported to the government. ANY transaction some bank employee decides is a little fishy can be reported through a SAR(Suspicious Activity Report).
It's even worse than that. IIRC even if you have a bunch of small transactions, if it looks like you are doing that to avoid hitting the magic $10,000 mark the bank is obligated by law to report that as well. I'm not sure how they determine that. A lot of $9,999 transactions would be obvious. But what if you did a semirandom number of transactions in semirandom amounts that end up adding up to a net change of $10,000 or some multiple thereof? It is an interesting question.
The fact Spitzer was destroyed by something as innocuous as flings with a prostitute, almost certainly came about only because of spying on his bank accounts.
I've always wondered about this. Every time something the least bit embarrassing comes out the official (even nonelected ones) steps down. It's insane and feeds the beast, because all your enemies have to do is make up shit (like when Bush the Elder supposedly produced a picture of Perot's daughter kissing a woman and threatened to publish it if he did not drop out of the race). Bill Clinton had the right idea, IMHO. In this day and age we don't really care as much about these things except as an amusing distraction. We knew he smoked pot and liked blowjobs and we still elected him twice. They even tried to prosecute him for having a blowjob and knowing what "is" means*, and he still was successful because he did not care.
*BTW for those short on research, the reason the meaning of "is" was important was that Clinton was also prosecuted for perjury on the theory that he was lying when he answered "No" to the question "Is there a sexual relationship between you and Monica Lewinsky. Kenneth Starr apparently did not know the meaning of is. It is the present tense form of "to be." When Hillary found out about Monica, you bet your ass the relationship ended real quick. Apparently informal surveys of Republicans have relatively consistently shown that when asked they do not know what the meaning of the word "is". That's why they make fun of Clinton for knowing the answer and using it to get out of trouble.
Except that it always was. Nothing has changed in fact, whether the issue was McCarthy's list of communists, Hoover's files on random people, do-not-fly lists, and so on. Government never was good in the first place.
It all started going downhill when we decided to leave the trees.
I think that DC Comics has a copyright on that name.
You're thinking about trademarks, not copyrights.
These sort of errors are rampant 'round here. Could it be that slashdotterrs don't understand Intellectual Property?