We must either respect their sovereignty, or pay the consequences.
Snort. As long as they respect the sovereignty of their people.
Anything else is exactly equivalent to a terrorist demanding we leave them alone because they've got "enough" hostages.
And you wonder why the rest of the world hates the US for our attitude with regard to bullying other countries and pushing our brand of freedom on them.
And yet the USA has never tried to do anything I'd recommend...
What would you say if China decided to 'enlighten' our population by "...roll[ing] RED Chinese trucks through the streets of every city in the world and "offer" to relocate anyone..."?
They could, it's (mostly) legal here. It's a matter of making an offer to people and letting them choose.
We might make a fuss if they were to try taking prisoners but we'd be in the wrong. (The point of prison largely being protection of the innocent - if the prisoner was gone we'd still be safe.) Ditto children - if the child can express meaningful intent.
It's in countries that require exit visas where there'd be a real fuss. They think they own the people.
Using or threatening to use force to bring about political change is the definition of terrorism, you know.
Tell that to the government when they come to arrest me for not wearing pants. Or are you seriously against the police?
Also, force is fine where appropriate. To a bully, someone who by definition abuses others, it's always fine. If they didn't want to accept force they wouldn't use it on others.
I think you'll find that wielding terror is the definition of a terrorist. A single clear threat to kill a dictator, one easily avoidable by stepping down, is pretty much the definition of reasonable use of force.
If you, as a country, have exhausted all peaceful means, then maybe we can help.
Well I think they did exhaust legal means. The state militia started shooting innocent protestors and even killing bystanders like Neda. And to show these weren't one-off accidents it then clamped down ridiculously such as forbidding Neda's family from holding a funeral because of the bad press.
If your government is horribly repressive, we'll take you in as a refugee.
Oh great. If your state is HORRIBLE we'll let you try to escape and cross the world on your own and, then probably turn you back anyways.
But invading to force peace and freedom is a bit of a contradiction, IMHO.
Sure is. The fiasco in Iraq is the reason the Iranians would be daft to trust the USA. But Canada, before we squandered our world trust by going into Afghanistan, would have been perfect for this.
But a threat to shoot a terrorist in mid-terror - if that was also terror our SWAT teams would be illegal...
Sure, but we've got a million of these potential show-stoppers here, like complex butterfly ballots. We need a system where we can admit errors and fix things rather than one where we've painfully avoided features trying for radical simplicity.
Perhaps I should have said "deemed qualified to vote".As in the people who determined who was "qualified to vote" were in part the slave owners. It's little surprise they decided that slaves weren't "qualified to vote".
No I understand. My point is that while they slave-owners already would try to prevent the slaves from voting on emancipation (or anything else) a system of tests for voting would have simpler tests for simpler issues. This is already a problem and my ideas would make it vanishingly worse, if at all.
And, of course, there's the secret bonus level of democracy where the slaves rise up and vote with fire...
Do you believe that government should have NO secrets at all?
No, it's "do you believe government should have no special powers to compel the keeping of secrets beyond simply encouraging those holding them to do so".
This means troop movements, battle plans, agents of any kind, anywhere.
Yup. If they leak they're leaked. Instead of trying to put the genie back in the bottle try moving the troops.
And I'm not saying an agent's identity should be revealed, just that if it is it should not be censored.
Want to know the location, passwords, procedures to gain access to nuclear, biological or conventional weapons?
I'd hope there was something other than secrets keeping me from launching nukes. Like, maybe, people at the controls.
No problem. There should be no secrets...right?
Of course not. Otherwise how would I be able to audit the system to make sure it's really safe and it's not just that the media is forbidden to tell us about the problems.
That's because Wikileaks thinks that anyone and everyone who thinks classified material of any kind should be public for whatever twisted reason, can publish it without repercussion.
No, they know people cannot publish without unjust repercussion, that's why all the security.
There is no firewall.
That's not how firewalls work.
No protection. Nothing. If someone has access and thinks it should be public...there ya go.
Yeah, there ya go. Data out in the open where the greatest minds of our day can analyze it. What a crime.
There are legitimate secrets worth protecting with force of law
No. There are secrets worth protecting by being secretive, but censorship after the fact is doomed to fail and unjust.
There are no secrets worth protecting with law because it merely drives them underground, like illegal weapons, so only the underworld possesses it.
I'm just saying that Wikileaks declaring themselves 'ultra-national' and thus not subject to laws of state secrets is no more or less legitimate than a nation declaring 'this is a state secret'.
They aren't declaring anything, they're simply acting for social justice.
The specific inane kleptocratic nonsense a state spews is only as valid as its mandate to rule, which obviously can't truly be given when deceived any more than consent could be in a contract. As nobody could ever be said to consent to having facts withheld from them any government decision to do so merely de-legitimizes the government.
And yes, that does mean we've been living without a valid government (by modern liberal standards) literally since forever.
We also never ran "slavery allowed" past the slaves. The slaves outnumbered the slave owners. However, the owners were qualified to vote and the slaves were not.
Qualified to vote in a complex financial decision is not the same as qualified to vote for your own emancipation.
I wouldn't oppose tests and such in a fully voluntary association such as you propose (your club, your rules) so long as it remained strictly voluntary
And I wouldn't oppose you giving everyone an exactly equal vote despite unequal qualifications or moral worth (the vote of a killer for instance) if it was strictly a voluntary organization.
it's just that that's not what we have now.
So I'm left supporting tests to vote. I think there are so many slippery slopes already (complex ballots, race-based gerrymandering, e-voting, etc) that it means we already can't just cast our hopes on simplicity to save the day. We need a motivated and qualified oversight committee tasked with making sure people are 1) capable of meaningfully voting (schools, etc) and 2) get an opportunity to vote.
So at that, if we're willing to monitor to make sure it's working, why not offer an open-book test on the issues. (Written with the express goal of being non-judgmental, merely fact-based. For example, read a news-report and answer questions like "which communities were reported to be hardest-hit by economic measures?".) If you fail you'd get another problem, endlessly, as the point is to show you can understand something not that you agree with the test on every answer.
No, not really. One is semantically a bit different, but also, tautologically just the same offense but against an organization with the power to declare its rules to be law.
And no, there's no such thing. Censoring is always bad.
Spare me the "move to Somalia" nonsense. You're as tiresome when you use the "love it or leave it" angle as the stereotypical smelly redneck in a wife-beater.
While I'm glad (proud?) to see the things my labors can contribute to (accessible public health) I'm sickened by the unreasonable and unnecessary wars they're also funding.
But you're the one who had to get bent out of shape about my opinion. Claiming taxes aren't theft, first offering some crazy rationale and then changing your argument to "but not when governments do it".
The problem with taxes being theft is that California doesn't have much income when their victims' pockets dry up. It's not sustainable. Like how Rome needed to keep conquering to stay afloat. Health-care costs almost as much in a recession but the taxes, being a percentage of earnings, are lower.
If the state used its mineral wealth instead of giving it away to the first corporation to claim it we could potentially be totally supported by value-creating (if resource-based) industry instead of coercive taxation. (And we'd be better stewards of our resources!)
But I bet you aren't going to eat that libertarian label you were throwing around, are you?
We should roll white UN trucks through the streets of every city in the world and offer to relocate anyone (man, woman, child, criminal, debtor, etc) to a new life. And we should do it in a "proactive peacekeeping" style. Everything Canada (could have been and tried to be but) wasn't in Rwanda.
But, besides that semi-hippy answer...
NKorea: Intervene - SKorea is on the line and negotiating with terror always fails - see Hitler and... North Korea. China: Too big - we can't fight openly. Intervene by bypassing their state-controlled media controls and let a liberal educated populace peace them up from the inside.
If the people want change and can't accomplish it through non-violent means, then maybe we could intervene by applying pressure. Until then, we shouldn't mess around with them.
Right. I don't think we should shoot the Ayatollah for being the leader of a country with a questionable election.
I think we should be willing to shoot dictators like the murder-ordering mob-bosses they are. And we should let that be known as a general principle. He'd probably take the hint and not condone/order the murder of protestors as he did, or forbid recounts, etc. And if not we'd be ready when the people needed us.
Of course the other part of this strategy is not being imperialists so that people welcome us as liberators instead of fear to call us.
I'm imagining real-world deletionists... "Your art gallery wasn't notable enough so I burned it down."
I do agree though with the need for and practicality of a participatory democracy.
In general the answer to "who would..." is "the same people who do now". (... and anyone else who wants to be responsible for that area of their life.)
If we all woke up and the government had simply vanished most people would go on doing what they always did. We're mostly civilized because we want to be, not by threats of force. By necessity we'd end up using markets instead of currency and other procedural differences but it seems like it'd be less of an bump than the government-induced real-estate collapse and banking bailout is.
Forcing it, yes. But the people have a valid right to ask for our help in removing him.
Had we been willing to consider it, as opposed to your total hands-off policy, he might have been less cavalier with his treatment of the slaves (oops, citizens) he had killed by the militia. Instead he know we'll never touch him and he's free to murder critics right and left.
I'd agree with leaving peaceful and happy groups alone, but when a dictator starts oppressing the people it's not government - it's slavery. It's like leaving children with an abuser because they're his.
Pft. Do nothing and it'll sort itself out. Slaver apologist.
If you ever see a religious dictatorship in my country that denies me self-government, please SHOOT THEM. And I have to assume that other people feel the same way. Not that they want their current leader dead, or that they want to swap for a foreign slaver, but that there's a spot they'd gladly welcome help.
I also have to assume that spot was reached in Iran, where government-backed militia members beat and killed thousands to restore "order". If you see me being beaten or killed, please help me. If the aggressors claim to be my government you're safe to assume they don't have my consent to govern.
The Ayatollah is just one person. If he gets killed, there are a lot of clerics who would take his place
Sure. Maybe we'd have to assassinate twenty clerics before they stopped killing protestors after holding rigged elections... Can't be as bad as full-out war where we kill hundreds of thousands of draftees before leaving the leader in power to re-offend.
And at least during that time the dictators aren't consolidating power, having moderates jailed and killed, murdering rape victims, etc.
[clerics] who would be *far* more anti-West than what is there now.
I'm not concerned with empire building but with dictator squashing and people freeing. With the people not enslaved into following the mad cleric's demands they're just another ranting nutjob.
You can call that "West" if you want, but that's just because you're lumping the entire middle-east together in a racist fashion and assigning them simplistic motives and the inability to differentiate between a USA-style invasion of Iraq and a targeted removal of dictators.
If we'd done it in Germany early enough it would have worked. Hitler wasn't the only force behind the Nazi atrocities but having the war brought directly to the people making the decisions would have erased their god-complex pretty quickly. It might have even accelerated WW2 by giving Germany an excuse (that it proved to be perfectly capable of coming up with on its own), but it wouldn't have made it worse - giving the bully time to prepare is always worse.
Where, exactly would you propose to draw this arbitrary line?
Nowhere.
Let's imagine that technology advances further to the point that we have available to us for $0.99 a set of goggles that will let us see through walls and other obstacles to see inside of locked boxes or inside of sealed envelopes. With the relative ease and inexpensive nature of these devices, should all people then be required to head out to the store to buy the special paint that then blocks these goggles from seeing into their privacy?
Required? By their own desires?
If they have curtain over their windows they'd probably want the special paint...
This "ease of access" argument can easily evolve and develop into a privacy arms race where we have to line the walls of our homes with lead and other materials to insulate ourselves from eavesdropping.
You're missing the point. Reality is an arms race. You can choose to acknowledge this or bury your head in the sand of law. The tide does not care.
If the device cost $1M dollars we could probably achieve some success in outlawing it. It'd be large enough to be traced and only certain groups could afford it. But at $1000 or below, no. And at $1, it's a joke.
You claim that encryption should be used. Fine... but what qualifies as encryption?
ROT13, trust me. Just mandate that ROT13 "counts" as encryption and you'll be fine. TRUST ME!
Seriously though, anything you wouldn't expect your expected enemy to be able to decrypt. Ask an expert.
The radio signals themselves are pretty cryptic to begin with.
So is math. Unless you understand it.
But let's say it uses the same encryption as used on DVDs -- CSS. The argument offered about CSS was that they "deserved it" somehow because it was weak encryption.
No, the claim was that the DVD CCA deserved it for pushing DRM that their own people told them couldn't be secure. And the industry deserved it for not having any technical due-diligence done before they bought in.
Also, they happily used DRM that hurts consumers. That they ended up getting hurt by it does seem pretty funny and deserved.
Would that same argument then apply to privacy?
Depends. Are you basing a business on promising things you can't deliver? In that case you certainly deserve something and it isn't accolades...
Or do you just want your data to be safe? Because in that case there are answers. There are encryption algorithms and methods that can be strong enough for any reasonable demand you have.
Meanwhile, it would be quite simple to say that "eavesdropping" is illegal regardless of the method.
Quite easy, and totally worthless. Harmful even.
It's ridiculous for one. Can you imagine criminalizing hearing people talking too loudly? Seriously. How could you prove it? And if you did half of our families would be in jail.
But when you get to technologies like cellphones that law starts tricking people who'd otherwise follow reasonable precautions (not using names, etc) into thinking they're secure simply because, like you, they don't understand how to tap their conversation and are denied the tools.
So you've created a whole vulnerable class of people almost guaranteeing that criminals try to exploit them.
Or, we could explain reality and help get encryption devices, bug detectors, "special paint" down to $1 too, which would help people be secure.
How would you know? You can't just see what's there, that's the point.
Are you sure you don't mean a tor exit node?
And you do realize, don't you, that you just gave the government the perfect way to quash dissent - sneak some kiddy-porn across the same wires and shut it down on that pretext.
The only solution to Israel that doesn't involve genocide is find a place for the Palestinians.
The countries that attacked Israel in all the wars could all stand to lose some more land considering how they contributed to the Palestinian's problem then by helping strand them and now by lamenting the situation without offering them a home.
Of course ideally we'd bulldoze both sides' holy places to remove their justification for fighting.
But it sounds like you want a crackdown on guns under the guise of slowing the progression of violence.
Trust us, we aren't sitting by and laughing it off though. There's a tremendous amount of social engineering going into changing it. But it's not a case of armed hot-heads who'll kill at the drop of a hat like some mob comedy/romance as much as poverty and religion producing emotionally stunted people who have no better arguments than violence.
But weapons don't cause violence, or cause it to escalate needlessly. I was too young for bring-your-gun-to-school days but I knife with six-inch blade on my belt to school from grades three through six and left it in the coatroom during the day. (I grew up in the countryside...) Despite that and other weapons that other students had access to, fights stayed tame. There wasn't the desperation that would make someone kill over a fight - the teachers and a support structure were there and would help.
I'm not "pro gun" but I don't really think weapons are the problem. If they were MacGyver would be killing people nonstop. As would people with cars (well, intentionally, not just because of unsafe driving).
It was interesting talking to Iranians at protests for their recent stolen election. The majority of people were flying to current islamic flag and merely wanted the religious government (the Ayatollah) to let their religious puppet lead instead of the other religious puppet. Very disappointing.
A few people flew the old flag and wanted to pitch the entire religious government, seeing that it was the Ayatollah who fixed the election. But they just wanted to bring the old government back. (Dunno if they wanted the Shah or what parts.) At least they realized it was theirs to control - the first group didn't.
One thing I didn't see was supporters of the coup government. They seem to have kept a pretty low profile overseas. There was fear about them collecting names and hurting the protestors or their families at home though. Even as they expressed their gratitude at foreign attention they worried about the photos being used against them back home.
If they are collecting information of protestors maybe it's shaping up to be a Rwanda in a few years. They've got a polarized population that can obviously (from incidents during the post-election) be ideologically motivated to group-based slaughter.
It's a shame. We put all this war effort into Afghanistan (Canada does) and we can't even afford one sniper team or airstrike to kill the Ayatollah. If everyone acted to stop these hitlers they wouldn't be a problem. Instead we let them legitimize themselves by collecting enough slaves.
Yes and no. I don't think fairness is a reason to pad reality. So for that, no. If they used services I still think they should pay (if they can), and laws are more about what we'll shoot you for doing than anything else - so no, they'd still be held to the laws. We never ran "no slaves" past the slavers, we just started enforcing it, for instance.
But I don't actually favor a democracy. It's very counter factual. It involves us deciding that because a stupid person is incapable of usefully expressing themselves that we'll give some of our say to them. And then what, we'll all vote on what someone else is allowed to do in their bedroom? Ridiculous.
Not that other "traditional" forms of government are better. They all beat everyone down and fit a one-size-fits-all government onto them, that dilutes the voices of some, improperly amplifies others, and forces it all into the bedrooms of everyone else.
But in the end though, no, I don't favor "taxation without representation". In "my" government I might require a test but that's to join my group. Dues would be whatever the cost was divided by the people paying. There'd be other groups doing whatever they felt was important, some with higher and lower standards, and I might join some of them too. You obviously wouldn't be forced to support these groups unless you were a member or other groups would rightly consider them to be oppressors.
Because they're stupid. And because their right to choose their favorite person also correlates with granting that person the same mandate to rule as voters who actually understand the issues.
I'd favor a test, but not a test of basic fundamentals as much as ability to avoid being manipulated.
For example, read a story about a situation where someone rode his bike and then answer a trick question like which model of car they drove. Common sense and spotting liars seems more important in picking leaders than understanding of any given issue.
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We must either respect their sovereignty, or pay the consequences.
Snort. As long as they respect the sovereignty of their people.
Anything else is exactly equivalent to a terrorist demanding we leave them alone because they've got "enough" hostages.
And you wonder why the rest of the world hates the US for our attitude with regard to bullying other countries and pushing our brand of freedom on them.
And yet the USA has never tried to do anything I'd recommend...
What would you say if China decided to 'enlighten' our population by "...roll[ing] RED Chinese trucks through the streets of every city in the world and "offer" to relocate anyone..."?
They could, it's (mostly) legal here. It's a matter of making an offer to people and letting them choose.
We might make a fuss if they were to try taking prisoners but we'd be in the wrong. (The point of prison largely being protection of the innocent - if the prisoner was gone we'd still be safe.) Ditto children - if the child can express meaningful intent.
It's in countries that require exit visas where there'd be a real fuss. They think they own the people.
Using or threatening to use force to bring about political change is the definition of terrorism, you know.
Tell that to the government when they come to arrest me for not wearing pants. Or are you seriously against the police?
Also, force is fine where appropriate. To a bully, someone who by definition abuses others, it's always fine. If they didn't want to accept force they wouldn't use it on others.
I think you'll find that wielding terror is the definition of a terrorist. A single clear threat to kill a dictator, one easily avoidable by stepping down, is pretty much the definition of reasonable use of force.
If you, as a country, have exhausted all peaceful means, then maybe we can help.
Well I think they did exhaust legal means. The state militia started shooting innocent protestors and even killing bystanders like Neda. And to show these weren't one-off accidents it then clamped down ridiculously such as forbidding Neda's family from holding a funeral because of the bad press.
If your government is horribly repressive, we'll take you in as a refugee.
Oh great. If your state is HORRIBLE we'll let you try to escape and cross the world on your own and, then probably turn you back anyways.
But invading to force peace and freedom is a bit of a contradiction, IMHO.
Sure is. The fiasco in Iraq is the reason the Iranians would be daft to trust the USA. But Canada, before we squandered our world trust by going into Afghanistan, would have been perfect for this.
But a threat to shoot a terrorist in mid-terror - if that was also terror our SWAT teams would be illegal...
Sure, but we've got a million of these potential show-stoppers here, like complex butterfly ballots. We need a system where we can admit errors and fix things rather than one where we've painfully avoided features trying for radical simplicity.
Perhaps I should have said "deemed qualified to vote".As in the people who determined who was "qualified to vote" were in part the slave owners. It's little surprise they decided that slaves weren't "qualified to vote".
No I understand. My point is that while they slave-owners already would try to prevent the slaves from voting on emancipation (or anything else) a system of tests for voting would have simpler tests for simpler issues. This is already a problem and my ideas would make it vanishingly worse, if at all.
And, of course, there's the secret bonus level of democracy where the slaves rise up and vote with fire...
Wow yeah, I want information out where the voters can see it. Give me that flaming garbage can!
I never realized what awesome punctuation it is for a long political post.
You sound pretty much like one of those guys who like to decry and denounce everything simply because change scares him.
Do you believe that government should have NO secrets at all?
No, it's "do you believe government should have no special powers to compel the keeping of secrets beyond simply encouraging those holding them to do so".
This means troop movements, battle plans, agents of any kind, anywhere.
Yup. If they leak they're leaked. Instead of trying to put the genie back in the bottle try moving the troops.
And I'm not saying an agent's identity should be revealed, just that if it is it should not be censored.
Want to know the location, passwords, procedures to gain access to nuclear, biological or conventional weapons?
I'd hope there was something other than secrets keeping me from launching nukes. Like, maybe, people at the controls.
No problem. There should be no secrets...right?
Of course not. Otherwise how would I be able to audit the system to make sure it's really safe and it's not just that the media is forbidden to tell us about the problems.
That's because Wikileaks thinks that anyone and everyone who thinks classified material of any kind should be public for whatever twisted reason, can publish it without repercussion.
No, they know people cannot publish without unjust repercussion, that's why all the security.
There is no firewall.
That's not how firewalls work.
No protection. Nothing. If someone has access and thinks it should be public...there ya go.
Yeah, there ya go. Data out in the open where the greatest minds of our day can analyze it. What a crime.
All agreements were null and void when the government ordered Manning to commit war crimes.
By ordering Manning to fake evidence against innocents they essentially required this, by international law and near-universal moral consensus.
There are legitimate secrets worth protecting with force of law
No. There are secrets worth protecting by being secretive, but censorship after the fact is doomed to fail and unjust.
There are no secrets worth protecting with law because it merely drives them underground, like illegal weapons, so only the underworld possesses it.
I'm just saying that Wikileaks declaring themselves 'ultra-national' and thus not subject to laws of state secrets is no more or less legitimate than a nation declaring 'this is a state secret'.
They aren't declaring anything, they're simply acting for social justice.
The specific inane kleptocratic nonsense a state spews is only as valid as its mandate to rule, which obviously can't truly be given when deceived any more than consent could be in a contract. As nobody could ever be said to consent to having facts withheld from them any government decision to do so merely de-legitimizes the government.
And yes, that does mean we've been living without a valid government (by modern liberal standards) literally since forever.
We also never ran "slavery allowed" past the slaves. The slaves outnumbered the slave owners. However, the owners were qualified to vote and the slaves were not.
Qualified to vote in a complex financial decision is not the same as qualified to vote for your own emancipation.
I wouldn't oppose tests and such in a fully voluntary association such as you propose (your club, your rules) so long as it remained strictly voluntary
And I wouldn't oppose you giving everyone an exactly equal vote despite unequal qualifications or moral worth (the vote of a killer for instance) if it was strictly a voluntary organization.
it's just that that's not what we have now.
So I'm left supporting tests to vote. I think there are so many slippery slopes already (complex ballots, race-based gerrymandering, e-voting, etc) that it means we already can't just cast our hopes on simplicity to save the day. We need a motivated and qualified oversight committee tasked with making sure people are 1) capable of meaningfully voting (schools, etc) and 2) get an opportunity to vote.
So at that, if we're willing to monitor to make sure it's working, why not offer an open-book test on the issues. (Written with the express goal of being non-judgmental, merely fact-based. For example, read a news-report and answer questions like "which communities were reported to be hardest-hit by economic measures?".) If you fail you'd get another problem, endlessly, as the point is to show you can understand something not that you agree with the test on every answer.
No, not really. One is semantically a bit different, but also, tautologically just the same offense but against an organization with the power to declare its rules to be law.
And no, there's no such thing. Censoring is always bad.
Actually, he could.
If he formally forbid torture, unlawful wiretapping, etc, it'd go a long way to stopping it when it was discovered.
But instead Obama chooses to condone it when he sees it.
Spare me the "move to Somalia" nonsense. You're as tiresome when you use the "love it or leave it" angle as the stereotypical smelly redneck in a wife-beater.
While I'm glad (proud?) to see the things my labors can contribute to (accessible public health) I'm sickened by the unreasonable and unnecessary wars they're also funding.
But you're the one who had to get bent out of shape about my opinion. Claiming taxes aren't theft, first offering some crazy rationale and then changing your argument to "but not when governments do it".
The problem with taxes being theft is that California doesn't have much income when their victims' pockets dry up. It's not sustainable. Like how Rome needed to keep conquering to stay afloat. Health-care costs almost as much in a recession but the taxes, being a percentage of earnings, are lower.
If the state used its mineral wealth instead of giving it away to the first corporation to claim it we could potentially be totally supported by value-creating (if resource-based) industry instead of coercive taxation. (And we'd be better stewards of our resources!)
But I bet you aren't going to eat that libertarian label you were throwing around, are you?
Here's my list.
World: Intervene, YES!
We should roll white UN trucks through the streets of every city in the world and offer to relocate anyone (man, woman, child, criminal, debtor, etc) to a new life. And we should do it in a "proactive peacekeeping" style. Everything Canada (could have been and tried to be but) wasn't in Rwanda.
But, besides that semi-hippy answer...
NKorea: Intervene - SKorea is on the line and negotiating with terror always fails - see Hitler and ... North Korea.
China: Too big - we can't fight openly. Intervene by bypassing their state-controlled media controls and let a liberal educated populace peace them up from the inside.
If the people want change and can't accomplish it through non-violent means, then maybe we could intervene by applying pressure. Until then, we shouldn't mess around with them.
Right. I don't think we should shoot the Ayatollah for being the leader of a country with a questionable election.
I think we should be willing to shoot dictators like the murder-ordering mob-bosses they are. And we should let that be known as a general principle. He'd probably take the hint and not condone/order the murder of protestors as he did, or forbid recounts, etc. And if not we'd be ready when the people needed us.
Of course the other part of this strategy is not being imperialists so that people welcome us as liberators instead of fear to call us.
I'm imagining real-world deletionists... "Your art gallery wasn't notable enough so I burned it down."
I do agree though with the need for and practicality of a participatory democracy.
In general the answer to "who would ..." is "the same people who do now". (... and anyone else who wants to be responsible for that area of their life.)
If we all woke up and the government had simply vanished most people would go on doing what they always did. We're mostly civilized because we want to be, not by threats of force. By necessity we'd end up using markets instead of currency and other procedural differences but it seems like it'd be less of an bump than the government-induced real-estate collapse and banking bailout is.
So you'd be fine with me stealing from you as long as I did charitable works with some of the money?
Simply because theft is easier doesn't make it right.
Forcing it, yes. But the people have a valid right to ask for our help in removing him.
Had we been willing to consider it, as opposed to your total hands-off policy, he might have been less cavalier with his treatment of the slaves (oops, citizens) he had killed by the militia. Instead he know we'll never touch him and he's free to murder critics right and left.
I'd agree with leaving peaceful and happy groups alone, but when a dictator starts oppressing the people it's not government - it's slavery. It's like leaving children with an abuser because they're his.
Pft. Do nothing and it'll sort itself out. Slaver apologist.
If you ever see a religious dictatorship in my country that denies me self-government, please SHOOT THEM. And I have to assume that other people feel the same way. Not that they want their current leader dead, or that they want to swap for a foreign slaver, but that there's a spot they'd gladly welcome help.
I also have to assume that spot was reached in Iran, where government-backed militia members beat and killed thousands to restore "order". If you see me being beaten or killed, please help me. If the aggressors claim to be my government you're safe to assume they don't have my consent to govern.
The Ayatollah is just one person. If he gets killed, there are a lot of clerics who would take his place
Sure. Maybe we'd have to assassinate twenty clerics before they stopped killing protestors after holding rigged elections... Can't be as bad as full-out war where we kill hundreds of thousands of draftees before leaving the leader in power to re-offend.
And at least during that time the dictators aren't consolidating power, having moderates jailed and killed, murdering rape victims, etc.
[clerics] who would be *far* more anti-West than what is there now.
I'm not concerned with empire building but with dictator squashing and people freeing. With the people not enslaved into following the mad cleric's demands they're just another ranting nutjob.
You can call that "West" if you want, but that's just because you're lumping the entire middle-east together in a racist fashion and assigning them simplistic motives and the inability to differentiate between a USA-style invasion of Iraq and a targeted removal of dictators.
If we'd done it in Germany early enough it would have worked. Hitler wasn't the only force behind the Nazi atrocities but having the war brought directly to the people making the decisions would have erased their god-complex pretty quickly. It might have even accelerated WW2 by giving Germany an excuse (that it proved to be perfectly capable of coming up with on its own), but it wouldn't have made it worse - giving the bully time to prepare is always worse.
Where, exactly would you propose to draw this arbitrary line?
Nowhere.
Let's imagine that technology advances further to the point that we have available to us for $0.99 a set of goggles that will let us see through walls and other obstacles to see inside of locked boxes or inside of sealed envelopes. With the relative ease and inexpensive nature of these devices, should all people then be required to head out to the store to buy the special paint that then blocks these goggles from seeing into their privacy?
Required? By their own desires?
If they have curtain over their windows they'd probably want the special paint...
This "ease of access" argument can easily evolve and develop into a privacy arms race where we have to line the walls of our homes with lead and other materials to insulate ourselves from eavesdropping.
You're missing the point. Reality is an arms race. You can choose to acknowledge this or bury your head in the sand of law. The tide does not care.
If the device cost $1M dollars we could probably achieve some success in outlawing it. It'd be large enough to be traced and only certain groups could afford it. But at $1000 or below, no. And at $1, it's a joke.
You claim that encryption should be used. Fine... but what qualifies as encryption?
ROT13, trust me. Just mandate that ROT13 "counts" as encryption and you'll be fine. TRUST ME!
Seriously though, anything you wouldn't expect your expected enemy to be able to decrypt. Ask an expert.
The radio signals themselves are pretty cryptic to begin with.
So is math. Unless you understand it.
But let's say it uses the same encryption as used on DVDs -- CSS. The argument offered about CSS was that they "deserved it" somehow because it was weak encryption.
No, the claim was that the DVD CCA deserved it for pushing DRM that their own people told them couldn't be secure. And the industry deserved it for not having any technical due-diligence done before they bought in.
Also, they happily used DRM that hurts consumers. That they ended up getting hurt by it does seem pretty funny and deserved.
Would that same argument then apply to privacy?
Depends. Are you basing a business on promising things you can't deliver? In that case you certainly deserve something and it isn't accolades...
Or do you just want your data to be safe? Because in that case there are answers. There are encryption algorithms and methods that can be strong enough for any reasonable demand you have.
Meanwhile, it would be quite simple to say that "eavesdropping" is illegal regardless of the method.
Quite easy, and totally worthless. Harmful even.
It's ridiculous for one. Can you imagine criminalizing hearing people talking too loudly? Seriously. How could you prove it? And if you did half of our families would be in jail.
But when you get to technologies like cellphones that law starts tricking people who'd otherwise follow reasonable precautions (not using names, etc) into thinking they're secure simply because, like you, they don't understand how to tap their conversation and are denied the tools.
So you've created a whole vulnerable class of people almost guaranteeing that criminals try to exploit them.
Or, we could explain reality and help get encryption devices, bug detectors, "special paint" down to $1 too, which would help people be secure.
How would you know? You can't just see what's there, that's the point.
Are you sure you don't mean a tor exit node?
And you do realize, don't you, that you just gave the government the perfect way to quash dissent - sneak some kiddy-porn across the same wires and shut it down on that pretext.
No, because once prefetched you can't prove you didn't view the material.
The only solution to Israel that doesn't involve genocide is find a place for the Palestinians.
The countries that attacked Israel in all the wars could all stand to lose some more land considering how they contributed to the Palestinian's problem then by helping strand them and now by lamenting the situation without offering them a home.
Of course ideally we'd bulldoze both sides' holy places to remove their justification for fighting.
But it sounds like you want a crackdown on guns under the guise of slowing the progression of violence.
Trust us, we aren't sitting by and laughing it off though. There's a tremendous amount of social engineering going into changing it. But it's not a case of armed hot-heads who'll kill at the drop of a hat like some mob comedy/romance as much as poverty and religion producing emotionally stunted people who have no better arguments than violence.
But weapons don't cause violence, or cause it to escalate needlessly. I was too young for bring-your-gun-to-school days but I knife with six-inch blade on my belt to school from grades three through six and left it in the coatroom during the day. (I grew up in the countryside...) Despite that and other weapons that other students had access to, fights stayed tame. There wasn't the desperation that would make someone kill over a fight - the teachers and a support structure were there and would help.
I'm not "pro gun" but I don't really think weapons are the problem. If they were MacGyver would be killing people nonstop. As would people with cars (well, intentionally, not just because of unsafe driving).
It was interesting talking to Iranians at protests for their recent stolen election. The majority of people were flying to current islamic flag and merely wanted the religious government (the Ayatollah) to let their religious puppet lead instead of the other religious puppet. Very disappointing.
A few people flew the old flag and wanted to pitch the entire religious government, seeing that it was the Ayatollah who fixed the election. But they just wanted to bring the old government back. (Dunno if they wanted the Shah or what parts.) At least they realized it was theirs to control - the first group didn't.
One thing I didn't see was supporters of the coup government. They seem to have kept a pretty low profile overseas. There was fear about them collecting names and hurting the protestors or their families at home though. Even as they expressed their gratitude at foreign attention they worried about the photos being used against them back home.
If they are collecting information of protestors maybe it's shaping up to be a Rwanda in a few years. They've got a polarized population that can obviously (from incidents during the post-election) be ideologically motivated to group-based slaughter.
It's a shame. We put all this war effort into Afghanistan (Canada does) and we can't even afford one sniper team or airstrike to kill the Ayatollah. If everyone acted to stop these hitlers they wouldn't be a problem. Instead we let them legitimize themselves by collecting enough slaves.
No, this is just an example of what goes wrong depending on theft (taxation) to fund your empire.
Without that you couldn't spend your neighbor's money on bread and circuses.
Maybe they'd have been broke for a while but that's better than massively in debt.
Yes and no. I don't think fairness is a reason to pad reality. So for that, no. If they used services I still think they should pay (if they can), and laws are more about what we'll shoot you for doing than anything else - so no, they'd still be held to the laws. We never ran "no slaves" past the slavers, we just started enforcing it, for instance.
But I don't actually favor a democracy. It's very counter factual. It involves us deciding that because a stupid person is incapable of usefully expressing themselves that we'll give some of our say to them. And then what, we'll all vote on what someone else is allowed to do in their bedroom? Ridiculous.
Not that other "traditional" forms of government are better. They all beat everyone down and fit a one-size-fits-all government onto them, that dilutes the voices of some, improperly amplifies others, and forces it all into the bedrooms of everyone else.
But in the end though, no, I don't favor "taxation without representation". In "my" government I might require a test but that's to join my group. Dues would be whatever the cost was divided by the people paying. There'd be other groups doing whatever they felt was important, some with higher and lower standards, and I might join some of them too. You obviously wouldn't be forced to support these groups unless you were a member or other groups would rightly consider them to be oppressors.
Because they're stupid. And because their right to choose their favorite person also correlates with granting that person the same mandate to rule as voters who actually understand the issues.
I'd favor a test, but not a test of basic fundamentals as much as ability to avoid being manipulated.
For example, read a story about a situation where someone rode his bike and then answer a trick question like which model of car they drove. Common sense and spotting liars seems more important in picking leaders than understanding of any given issue.
I agree. I was considering changing it back. Now it leaves you wondering if there would be a problem doing it the other way.
There no discussion for the image...