Do you actually know anything about Spain?, because that statement makes no sense.
They've been relying heavily on American investment and northern European (little American) tourism since Franco, like all new conservatives, discovered trickle-up enonomics. This is built on the classical Catholic Spain of a few wealthy business-families enjoying special relations with the powers that be. So, I guess you could say that America imitated Spain, did a very good job of it, and then sold its success back to Spain.
Beyond the obvious (Eating better, living longer, having clearly different political, institutional, educational and health systems).
This is merely legacy. The direction is to the Amerian system. The EU is fundamentally a corporation of corporations in the American style designed to force its members to transfer state/national control to "free competition" amongst private companies. (These freely selected companies tend predictably often to be the same French or German behemoths.) And Spain's official line is that it loves the EU and should swallow its bait along with hook, line and sinker.
Spain's message against Piracy is not "don't steal or else", but rather "protect your culture".
Please justify. Spain is full of self-hate about its recent past while its youth are one of the most alienated in Western Europe. There's a lot of "protect the middle-age who have ridden the first wave of prosperity which ended about 5 years ago", but culture? Nah, fuck culture, everyone in that group was too busy buying second homes until the bottom fell out of the economy.
the justice system over there can actually do something about it.
Coming from a common law nation, I am quite scared by the thought of any justice system which consists entirely of a panel of professional judges. However, I acknowledge that Spain's judiciary has remained more impartial than I would have expected over the past half-century - it's not that the very well-connected won't always get off; it's more that fascist fetish for correct bureaucratic process hasn't been pierced. In Britain, law at this level is little more than ex-public school lawyer buddies having a well-paid debating competition while the jury is hoodwinked and the judge grins on.
So now my mobile 'phone is the device which gets cracked and keylogged for access to the signing certificates which approve dozens of credit card transactions?
I understand your proposal but I hear it as, "Now, rather than only keeping it in your head and typing it on dedicated terminals, you enter your PIN-substitute on a computer you use for general Internet access etc."
Consider a person with turret's calling you an asshole versus someone without calling you an asshole. One effect is far easier to overlook and/or forgive than the other.
It depends entirely on why I'm being called an asshole and how disruptive the name-calling is. If someone with Tourette's loudly and repeatedly calls me an asshole in the middle of a library, interrupting other users, then it is entirely appropriate to remove him. The third time he does the same thing in a week, it is appropriate to temporarily ban him from the library. If someone without Tourette's does the same thing, the same applies.
But in each case the help the person needs to stop that behaviour is different. A good librarian will hopefully make re-entry to the library dependent on seeking appropriate help.
As for me, the target of the insult, a similar story applies. If the guy has an anger management issue, say, I would feel no worse about them than if they had Tourette's. If they were a danger to me as well then I might distance myself quickly, and if over time I found them to not be making the effort at decency I might drift away from them, but otherwise I'll try to see the problem for what it is and encourage them to do the same and to seek help.
A brain is just a complex machine. Every human has a reason for acting a certain way, rational or otherwise. If you spend enough time then you'll find something out about those reasons and might be able to help. There's no asshole/not-asshole binary. The only problem is a finite amount of time/energy/interest in the world to deal with everyone else's problems, so prioritising becomes essential:-).
For people who are not deeply familiar with the condition, it is only understandable by its results... "he's awkward" "he's an asshole" "he flips out for no good reason" "he's like a robot."
These alone are not reasons to lock anyone up, except perhaps "he flips out" if the flipping out is dangerous. I think you've read something into my post which is not there. What I'm suggesting is treatment always to fit the condition and loss of freedom iff someone is a serious danger (in a sense which needs carefully defining) - not locking someone up just because he's a little bit annoying.
people with asperger's can be treated with therapy and teaching.
In a hospital the government will have absolute control over him mentally and physically. He will have no rights whatsoever.
What gives you that impression of (British) hospitals? While things have got worse since Thatcher pushed for care facilities (not hospitals per se) to be sold off to private business and we occasionally get this sort of thing, successive Mental Health Acts have given more "freedom" to the individual - even the seriously mentally ill individual. You're far more likely to be put on the street when you should be in compulsory residential care than the other way round.
Well, the proper purpose of locking someone up is to protect society or themselves. This means you choose a custodial sentence on those grounds, not on the grounds of punishment / blame / responsibility / etc. There is no benefit in chastising either the mad murderer or the wheelchair user, though obviously society needs to tackle the problems of each in a different way.
From the PoV of treatment of the individual, it is then absolutely important that you apply a scientifically sound understanding of the human brain rather assuming a political/philosophical simplification of a rational mind having made poor decisions of his own free will.
And, as you say, it might neither serve this guy nor his victims/potential victims to be locked up.
Makes sense. FWIW I have a UK Amex Blue card, all recent issues of which have been chip/PIN. It was launched with the simple benefit of straight cashback on all purchases, which is far too generous and lacking in leeching middle men, so I don't think it's offered any more to new customers. Now Amex UK is all "Nectar points" and "BA miles" and other such barrel-scraping bullshit.
You mean the government, right? The bank has little incentive because it profits from the fraudulent transaction (as long as there's not so much fraud that the banks actually get negative publicity and lose customers to all the great alternatives for online payment).
Because the merchant is liable for fraudulent transactions when no PIN is entered. Liable plus a fine on chargeback. Liable plus a fine plus a threat of increased discount percentage.
Small businesses are the backbone of modern America: if you want to conquer America you have to break its backbone.
I say we return to VLB. When the central processors and the peripheries are forced to work at the same pace, there is less opportunity for corruption. Sure, it might mean the former needs to slow down a bit, but that's essential in dealing with any sleight of hand issues.
Sort of. A disorder can filter your perceptions to the extent that you plan something based on completely unreasonable assumptions. For example, you could be so paranoid that someone is planning to kill you that you plan how you'd defend yourself by killing them. A slight transgression on their part might be interpreted as a sign that they're about to kill you, so you take your planned action.
Of course, the number of murders where mental illness is considered to be a contributing factor are going down year on year in the UK. The psychiatric profession has been pushed into spreading a political "it's your own fault!" attitude in which the assumption is that almost everyone is in control of himself and just needs to pull himself together. Since the brain is no less a biological organ than a leg, you might as well chastise those in wheelchairs for not just trying harder to walk.
My real question is why the hell anyone making $86k/year would risk throwing everything away to steal something she could have easily bought? She has problems I think beyond just one theft.
Not everyone becomes a thief to get loot/money. Hell, not everyone in general does stuff for the money. Haven't you ever given up / risked giving up the opportunity for a lot of money because there's something else you'd rather do? Your job isn't "everything", I hope. And never count the sunk cost, right?
Of course, she might have had a reason to think that particular iPad had valuable data on it, so the exercise might have been just for cash.
So you're saying that one excuses the other here? "Our women are still allowed to drive and criminals aren't pointing guns at us, so it's okay for us to give up a little of our freedoms. It's all still good..."
Since several respondents seem to have jumped to this conclusion, no, I'm definitely not saying that. I'm only saying what I said: we should acknowledge the good in what we have established (as well as the bad). There neither cancelling out of the good by the bad nor of the bad by the good.
Considering that NATO is getting their panties in a bunch over Anonymous I'm expecting that they're not going to suggest an open Internet as we know it today.
You know what irritates me perhaps more than is healthy? Thanks to the Internet we've seen a decline in amateur radio and shortwave listening, ham radio being the only true decentralised communications medium relying on no third party service to survive.
Thanks to this decline, regulatory bodies have been able to allow markets to be flooded with RFI-producing equipment which makes it harder to transmit and receive effectively to/from amateur and broadcast stations. What took the Soviets hundreds of millions of dollars (seriously) of jamming equipment is achieved today with distributed cheap modern electronic junk. If/when the Internet becomes over-regulated and dissent leads to disconnection, that haven of free communication won't be there as a fallback any more - at least not for those in more built-up areas.
The people who label themselves lulzsec have done more than one thing. Civil disobedience is the refusal to obey a law considered unjust.
So, random acts of vandalism aren't really civil disobedience. But releasing information demonstrating corruption is likely civil disobedience - it's implicitly or explicitly argued that you believe such information should be public and that laws to the contrary are unacceptable and worth breaking. Looking somewhere in between, a DDoS might be civil disobedience - if some organisation has an authority to act in some way which you consider unacceptable, then perhaps it is civil disobedience to impede their operation. It's the electronic equivalent of making a wall in front of policemen who want to pass you in order to execute acts you consider unacceptable: "We shall not be moved!"
You can't handwave this as a flimsy excuse, though. Your acts need to be well argued if they're going to reach the collective consciousness of the concerned masses rather than making you look like a bored haxor. The hard work is in the organisation, not in the technical methods (which seem to be based on a combination of botnets, spotting obvious security holes and coincidental timings around the time people leave certain workplaces, isn't that right, Sony?).
Don't try to turn the arrogance and possessiveness of the British library into Google's fault.
I must have written part of my post in invisible ink. There's no, "And it's Google's fault!" The people who should be most ashamed of their behaviour are the British people for tolerating the behaviour of their recent governments, including organisations under government control, funding and/or protection.
Of course, being given the opportunity to take advantage doesn't absolve you of the responsibility for taking it. Your moral obligation is to what is moral, not to what is legal. (Yes, corporations have no inherent morals. Yes, that's a problem.)
But you are welcome to blame me for not putting more effort into correcting the behaviour of the people who are supposed to represent me. I know it's all my fault, OK?:-)
Out-of-copyright work was given to Google to scan and in return the BL accepted that Google would have exclusive commercial rights to the scans for a while. It's not quite the same as giving over the copyright on the original works - in theory another organisation arrange a deal with the BL to have physical possession of the works for a while at no cost to make their own copies. Good luck with that, non-profits.
Incidentally, the BL estimated the cost of the work for them would have been £6 million, which is not very much by the standards of this sort of work and certainly not a figure on the publications' cultural value. This is just another government gift to a large corporation - indeed, previous meetings and announcements suggest Cameron has a bit of a hard-on for Google.
Even though I believe the impeachment process worked in Nixon's case but were abused against Clinton, you're right that it doesn't mean I should misuse the technical term "impeachment". I should have talked in terms of the effectiveness of "impeachment proceedings" or something. Sorry.
The other guy said he hates me with a passion (I wonder if it keeps him up at night?) but that Professr3 fails at reading comprehension. Given the context of your post, I'm going to chalk this one up to tragic irony.
Clinton's technical impeachment was trivial, partisan and he was acquitted. It was one of IIRC three attempts, the other two of which never reached trial. It was essentially an abuse of the impeachment process and didn't work. It was technically an impeachment but in spirit a waste of time.
Proceedings towards Nixon's impeachment received bipartisan support from the House Judiciary Committee, appropriately targeting an abuse of power with the Articles of Impeachment. Everyone knew what the outcome would be and the proceedings resulted in Nixon's removal - forcing a corrupt president's removal being one of the aims of such proceedings. He resigned before the impeachment proceedings reached the stage which is technically labelled "impeachment", but that is irrelevant.
Nixon's was the last impeachment proceeding which worked, and Clinton's was simply partisan abuse. The efforts to impeach Bush, who had behaved in a manner far worse than poor Nixon dreamt of, fell on deaf ears within the Judiciary Committee.
But I apologise for not demonstrating the necessary level of pedantry. I should have said, "the President not only could be affected by impeachment proceedings, but was affected by impeachment proceedings, shows how great things were. You think that's going to happen again?"
Yeah... it was more a braino than a typo: in my head I said \approx, which I could write =~, but that should be written =\sim, but I'll omit the LaTeX markup lest I sound even more pompous than usual. For some reason I've done that sort of thing often when de-TeXing for a general audience, although usually the formula is slightly more complex! The upshot is that I end up looking an idiot, which everyone surely agrees I deserve;-).
Lol, embarrassing. = should have read [unsupported symbol to indicate approximately equal to]. Thatcher didn't really start fucking things up until a year or two into power, though.
Really? Since 1981? So the 1970s was as good as we got?
In Western civil rights terms, yes.
What about the 70s oil and energy crisis?
This wasn't a civil rights issue.
Watergate?
The fact that the President not only could be impeached, but was impeached, shows how great things were. You think that's going to happen again?
The Vietnam war?
This was a stain on the US, yes, but it ended in the middle of the decade. It also admitted a huge amount of popular and well-publicised protest. You even almost got rid of conscription - elimination of the Selective Slavery System, unfortunately, hasn't happened.
Pol Pot, and the West's apathy towards him? Pinochet leading a CIA-backed coup?
I guess you could argue that to ignore rights abroad is to ignore the rights of everyone. But I wasn't going that far.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you actually know anything about Spain?, because that statement makes no sense.
They've been relying heavily on American investment and northern European (little American) tourism since Franco, like all new conservatives, discovered trickle-up enonomics. This is built on the classical Catholic Spain of a few wealthy business-families enjoying special relations with the powers that be. So, I guess you could say that America imitated Spain, did a very good job of it, and then sold its success back to Spain.
Beyond the obvious (Eating better, living longer, having clearly different political, institutional, educational and health systems).
This is merely legacy. The direction is to the Amerian system. The EU is fundamentally a corporation of corporations in the American style designed to force its members to transfer state/national control to "free competition" amongst private companies. (These freely selected companies tend predictably often to be the same French or German behemoths.) And Spain's official line is that it loves the EU and should swallow its bait along with hook, line and sinker.
Spain's message against Piracy is not "don't steal or else", but rather "protect your culture".
Please justify. Spain is full of self-hate about its recent past while its youth are one of the most alienated in Western Europe. There's a lot of "protect the middle-age who have ridden the first wave of prosperity which ended about 5 years ago", but culture? Nah, fuck culture, everyone in that group was too busy buying second homes until the bottom fell out of the economy.
the justice system over there can actually do something about it.
Coming from a common law nation, I am quite scared by the thought of any justice system which consists entirely of a panel of professional judges. However, I acknowledge that Spain's judiciary has remained more impartial than I would have expected over the past half-century - it's not that the very well-connected won't always get off; it's more that fascist fetish for correct bureaucratic process hasn't been pierced. In Britain, law at this level is little more than ex-public school lawyer buddies having a well-paid debating competition while the jury is hoodwinked and the judge grins on.
Why am I supposed to feel sorry for someone who failed to read and understand the terms of the contract that he signed?
Empathy block - check.
Assumption that all humans are perfect rational entities - check.
Supremacy of the business contract - check.
Internet Libertarian Warrior mode engaged!
So now my mobile 'phone is the device which gets cracked and keylogged for access to the signing certificates which approve dozens of credit card transactions?
I understand your proposal but I hear it as, "Now, rather than only keeping it in your head and typing it on dedicated terminals, you enter your PIN-substitute on a computer you use for general Internet access etc."
Consider a person with turret's calling you an asshole versus someone without calling you an asshole. One effect is far easier to overlook and/or forgive than the other.
It depends entirely on why I'm being called an asshole and how disruptive the name-calling is. If someone with Tourette's loudly and repeatedly calls me an asshole in the middle of a library, interrupting other users, then it is entirely appropriate to remove him. The third time he does the same thing in a week, it is appropriate to temporarily ban him from the library. If someone without Tourette's does the same thing, the same applies.
But in each case the help the person needs to stop that behaviour is different. A good librarian will hopefully make re-entry to the library dependent on seeking appropriate help.
As for me, the target of the insult, a similar story applies. If the guy has an anger management issue, say, I would feel no worse about them than if they had Tourette's. If they were a danger to me as well then I might distance myself quickly, and if over time I found them to not be making the effort at decency I might drift away from them, but otherwise I'll try to see the problem for what it is and encourage them to do the same and to seek help.
A brain is just a complex machine. Every human has a reason for acting a certain way, rational or otherwise. If you spend enough time then you'll find something out about those reasons and might be able to help. There's no asshole/not-asshole binary. The only problem is a finite amount of time/energy/interest in the world to deal with everyone else's problems, so prioritising becomes essential :-).
For people who are not deeply familiar with the condition, it is only understandable by its results... "he's awkward" "he's an asshole" "he flips out for no good reason" "he's like a robot."
These alone are not reasons to lock anyone up, except perhaps "he flips out" if the flipping out is dangerous. I think you've read something into my post which is not there. What I'm suggesting is treatment always to fit the condition and loss of freedom iff someone is a serious danger (in a sense which needs carefully defining) - not locking someone up just because he's a little bit annoying.
people with asperger's can be treated with therapy and teaching.
Agreed.
In a hospital the government will have absolute control over him mentally and physically. He will have no rights whatsoever.
What gives you that impression of (British) hospitals? While things have got worse since Thatcher pushed for care facilities (not hospitals per se) to be sold off to private business and we occasionally get this sort of thing, successive Mental Health Acts have given more "freedom" to the individual - even the seriously mentally ill individual. You're far more likely to be put on the street when you should be in compulsory residential care than the other way round.
It's not at all like chastising wheelchair users.
Well, the proper purpose of locking someone up is to protect society or themselves. This means you choose a custodial sentence on those grounds, not on the grounds of punishment / blame / responsibility / etc. There is no benefit in chastising either the mad murderer or the wheelchair user, though obviously society needs to tackle the problems of each in a different way.
From the PoV of treatment of the individual, it is then absolutely important that you apply a scientifically sound understanding of the human brain rather assuming a political/philosophical simplification of a rational mind having made poor decisions of his own free will.
And, as you say, it might neither serve this guy nor his victims/potential victims to be locked up.
Makes sense. FWIW I have a UK Amex Blue card, all recent issues of which have been chip/PIN. It was launched with the simple benefit of straight cashback on all purchases, which is far too generous and lacking in leeching middle men, so I don't think it's offered any more to new customers. Now Amex UK is all "Nectar points" and "BA miles" and other such barrel-scraping bullshit.
You mean the government, right? The bank has little incentive because it profits from the fraudulent transaction (as long as there's not so much fraud that the banks actually get negative publicity and lose customers to all the great alternatives for online payment).
Because the merchant is liable for fraudulent transactions when no PIN is entered. Liable plus a fine on chargeback. Liable plus a fine plus a threat of increased discount percentage.
Small businesses are the backbone of modern America: if you want to conquer America you have to break its backbone.
I say we return to VLB. When the central processors and the peripheries are forced to work at the same pace, there is less opportunity for corruption. Sure, it might mean the former needs to slow down a bit, but that's essential in dealing with any sleight of hand issues.
Sort of. A disorder can filter your perceptions to the extent that you plan something based on completely unreasonable assumptions. For example, you could be so paranoid that someone is planning to kill you that you plan how you'd defend yourself by killing them. A slight transgression on their part might be interpreted as a sign that they're about to kill you, so you take your planned action.
Of course, the number of murders where mental illness is considered to be a contributing factor are going down year on year in the UK. The psychiatric profession has been pushed into spreading a political "it's your own fault!" attitude in which the assumption is that almost everyone is in control of himself and just needs to pull himself together. Since the brain is no less a biological organ than a leg, you might as well chastise those in wheelchairs for not just trying harder to walk.
The point was to highlight the false dichotomy: wants money / has a mental disorder.
I'm reminded of the way the USSR categorised people who didn't love the state and all its glorious leaders as surely being mentally ill.
My real question is why the hell anyone making $86k/year would risk throwing everything away to steal something she could have easily bought? She has problems I think beyond just one theft.
Not everyone becomes a thief to get loot/money. Hell, not everyone in general does stuff for the money. Haven't you ever given up / risked giving up the opportunity for a lot of money because there's something else you'd rather do? Your job isn't "everything", I hope. And never count the sunk cost, right?
Of course, she might have had a reason to think that particular iPad had valuable data on it, so the exercise might have been just for cash.
Although he might have the one-hand patent?
So you're saying that one excuses the other here? "Our women are still allowed to drive and criminals aren't pointing guns at us, so it's okay for us to give up a little of our freedoms. It's all still good..."
Since several respondents seem to have jumped to this conclusion, no, I'm definitely not saying that. I'm only saying what I said: we should acknowledge the good in what we have established (as well as the bad). There neither cancelling out of the good by the bad nor of the bad by the good.
Considering that NATO is getting their panties in a bunch over Anonymous I'm expecting that they're not going to suggest an open Internet as we know it today.
You know what irritates me perhaps more than is healthy? Thanks to the Internet we've seen a decline in amateur radio and shortwave listening, ham radio being the only true decentralised communications medium relying on no third party service to survive.
Thanks to this decline, regulatory bodies have been able to allow markets to be flooded with RFI-producing equipment which makes it harder to transmit and receive effectively to/from amateur and broadcast stations. What took the Soviets hundreds of millions of dollars (seriously) of jamming equipment is achieved today with distributed cheap modern electronic junk. If/when the Internet becomes over-regulated and dissent leads to disconnection, that haven of free communication won't be there as a fallback any more - at least not for those in more built-up areas.
The people who label themselves lulzsec have done more than one thing. Civil disobedience is the refusal to obey a law considered unjust.
So, random acts of vandalism aren't really civil disobedience. But releasing information demonstrating corruption is likely civil disobedience - it's implicitly or explicitly argued that you believe such information should be public and that laws to the contrary are unacceptable and worth breaking. Looking somewhere in between, a DDoS might be civil disobedience - if some organisation has an authority to act in some way which you consider unacceptable, then perhaps it is civil disobedience to impede their operation. It's the electronic equivalent of making a wall in front of policemen who want to pass you in order to execute acts you consider unacceptable: "We shall not be moved!"
You can't handwave this as a flimsy excuse, though. Your acts need to be well argued if they're going to reach the collective consciousness of the concerned masses rather than making you look like a bored haxor. The hard work is in the organisation, not in the technical methods (which seem to be based on a combination of botnets, spotting obvious security holes and coincidental timings around the time people leave certain workplaces, isn't that right, Sony?).
Don't try to turn the arrogance and possessiveness of the British library into Google's fault.
I must have written part of my post in invisible ink. There's no, "And it's Google's fault!" The people who should be most ashamed of their behaviour are the British people for tolerating the behaviour of their recent governments, including organisations under government control, funding and/or protection.
Of course, being given the opportunity to take advantage doesn't absolve you of the responsibility for taking it. Your moral obligation is to what is moral, not to what is legal. (Yes, corporations have no inherent morals. Yes, that's a problem.)
But you are welcome to blame me for not putting more effort into correcting the behaviour of the people who are supposed to represent me. I know it's all my fault, OK? :-)
Out-of-copyright work was given to Google to scan and in return the BL accepted that Google would have exclusive commercial rights to the scans for a while. It's not quite the same as giving over the copyright on the original works - in theory another organisation arrange a deal with the BL to have physical possession of the works for a while at no cost to make their own copies. Good luck with that, non-profits.
Incidentally, the BL estimated the cost of the work for them would have been £6 million, which is not very much by the standards of this sort of work and certainly not a figure on the publications' cultural value. This is just another government gift to a large corporation - indeed, previous meetings and announcements suggest Cameron has a bit of a hard-on for Google.
Even though I believe the impeachment process worked in Nixon's case but were abused against Clinton, you're right that it doesn't mean I should misuse the technical term "impeachment". I should have talked in terms of the effectiveness of "impeachment proceedings" or something. Sorry.
Sir,
The other guy said he hates me with a passion (I wonder if it keeps him up at night?) but that Professr3 fails at reading comprehension. Given the context of your post, I'm going to chalk this one up to tragic irony.
Nixon.
Clinton's technical impeachment was trivial, partisan and he was acquitted. It was one of IIRC three attempts, the other two of which never reached trial. It was essentially an abuse of the impeachment process and didn't work. It was technically an impeachment but in spirit a waste of time.
Proceedings towards Nixon's impeachment received bipartisan support from the House Judiciary Committee, appropriately targeting an abuse of power with the Articles of Impeachment. Everyone knew what the outcome would be and the proceedings resulted in Nixon's removal - forcing a corrupt president's removal being one of the aims of such proceedings. He resigned before the impeachment proceedings reached the stage which is technically labelled "impeachment", but that is irrelevant.
Nixon's was the last impeachment proceeding which worked, and Clinton's was simply partisan abuse. The efforts to impeach Bush, who had behaved in a manner far worse than poor Nixon dreamt of, fell on deaf ears within the Judiciary Committee.
But I apologise for not demonstrating the necessary level of pedantry. I should have said, "the President not only could be affected by impeachment proceedings, but was affected by impeachment proceedings, shows how great things were. You think that's going to happen again?"
Yeah... it was more a braino than a typo: in my head I said \approx, which I could write =~, but that should be written =\sim, but I'll omit the LaTeX markup lest I sound even more pompous than usual. For some reason I've done that sort of thing often when de-TeXing for a general audience, although usually the formula is slightly more complex! The upshot is that I end up looking an idiot, which everyone surely agrees I deserve ;-).
Thatcher was 1979 = 2011-30.
Lol, embarrassing. = should have read [unsupported symbol to indicate approximately equal to]. Thatcher didn't really start fucking things up until a year or two into power, though.
Really? Since 1981? So the 1970s was as good as we got?
In Western civil rights terms, yes.
What about the 70s oil and energy crisis?
This wasn't a civil rights issue.
Watergate?
The fact that the President not only could be impeached, but was impeached, shows how great things were. You think that's going to happen again?
The Vietnam war?
This was a stain on the US, yes, but it ended in the middle of the decade. It also admitted a huge amount of popular and well-publicised protest. You even almost got rid of conscription - elimination of the Selective Slavery System, unfortunately, hasn't happened.
Pol Pot, and the West's apathy towards him? Pinochet leading a CIA-backed coup?
I guess you could argue that to ignore rights abroad is to ignore the rights of everyone. But I wasn't going that far.
Not to mention Margaret Thatcher.
Thatcher was 1979 = 2011-30.
<3
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Filter error: You can type more than that for your comment.
Love is not enough :-(.