Presumably, such a task would require access to DMV computer systems
Why? Who the hell would bother hacking the server when they have physical access to the one part of the system that matters, the plate itself?
Plus, the perp compounds their crime by hacking into a computer system without authorization
Y'know, this point alone worries me the most. I can't think of any compelling legal argument against it, yet it sets a bad precedent about ownership and our already-thin right-to-modify/repair items you pay for and of which you have physical possession.
"Yeah, a rock hit my plate. I can fix it with a $20 replacement screen I install myself"
"Sorry, felony tampering with official gear, buddy! Pay $250 for a new DMV-issued plate, or go to jail!"
Clearly, California must have the single best quality roads in the entire world.
In the Northeast US, come spring, your license plate looks like a sand-blasted salt-shaker. These no doubt fairly expensive (large LCD screen and cell enabled?) license plates would last less than a year.
But hey, don't let that pesky ol' reality get in the way of yet another way for Uncle Sam to track our every move!
Wow. I hope you realize your version goes a lot further than the court verdict.
That version includes all the evidence the judge suppressed and the prosecution actively tampered with, found on Trayvon's phone, email, and Facebook pages.
That's a long way from determining that Martin, initiated the confrontation, tried to kill Zimmerman, shoplifted (first I heard of this), or was going to smoke drugs that evening (irrelevant even if true).
In the absence of knowing Trayvon's "real" intent, the trial amounted to little more than establishing his general character as either the saint the media painted him as, or just-onother-random-thug... Or more realistically, somewhere in between (decent kid doing stupid shit that got him killed). So yes, it does have relevance.
The part where it's Google/Facebook/Whomever that decides whether an account is your and open, not the user.
And the part where this entire discussion relates to people who take positive action to protect their privacy?
How do you propose Google/Facebook/Whomever recognize that "zork98' has the same owner as "bin55go"? Will they go by my fake DOB? As much of my fake mailing address as they require to make an account? My throwaway email address I used to sign up? My randomized user agent? Hell, if you read a few of my posts closely, ignoring the actual content, you'll notice I even affect a fake writing style for accounts to which I actually post often (such as Slashdot).
Okay, technically they have my IP address - Which (in the case of accounts I access from work) could include "only" a few hundred people. And ones I access from the free WiFi at Starbucks in the morning... Well that narrows it down to one of millions.
And therein we have the ultimate irony of policies designed to make you easier to track - Most of them only apply to those dumb enough to make themselves easy to track in the first place.
that's why facebook is a big deal, since they're the only one's who have enough somewhat reliable data to actually sell adverts targeted at 20-35 year old people living in country X
My pet iguana's profile would like to disagree with you. Sure, "they" know they have a 20-35YO (in people years) male that studies insects, likes warm weather, and dislikes Tennessee Williams... But I'd like to see them sell something to him.
And in other news, Google has rolled out their monthly gratuitous GMail revamp. And no one even noticed, because we've all gotten tired of hunting down the "please give me back the old interface" checkbox somewhere in the labyrinthine depths of the user options pages.
Ah well, at least Slashdot limits its retarded UI crippling and eye-bleed-inducing changes to twice a decade. Hmm, probably due any day now...
We have a few problems with just crunching the numbers in this case.
First of all - Not everyone who manages to 2.0 their way through a STEM degree will do well at it, or even like doing it for that matter.
Second - A STEM degree (even with a 2.0) carries the prestige of "this guy knows something". For all the require-a-degree-but-not-really jobs out there, having a "real" major rather than Wymins' Studies will go a loooong way toward getting you in the top half of the pile of applicants.
Finally, jobs that really do require a STEM background tend to favor younger people, both in terms of sharpness of mind and lack of experience to say "no" to regularly putting in 60+ hours a week, on salary. The core STEM workforce of the 90s and even the 00's has largely moved on to manage today's engineers - If they haven't gotten so sick of busting their ass that they dropped out and went on to a sleepy AP Entry Clerk position somewhere.
So yes, we very much do have both a surplus and a shortage. We have a surplus because not all STEM grads can or want to work in STEM; we have a shortage because we don't have enough people good enough or naive enough to put up with actually doing a STEM job.
Note the difference: the latter is a belief system, the former isn't.
Only because you phrased it as such. In actuality, the atheist disbelieves in a deity given a lack of proof one way or the other - That still very much counts as a "belief", regardless of how positively or negatively you chose to word it.
Now, I have to agree with you that saying we can't know anything about the divine amounts to an assertion of faith. Merely saying we don't know and moving on from a moot question, however, does not.
I think, though, that we really have more subtlety here than two distinct groups. You already brought up "weak" atheism, we have the same for agnosticism (and theism, and gnosticism). Referencing that chart, any stance (in the absence of evidence, which describes our current reality) outside the center amounts to an irrational belief system. Personally, however, I consider it more of an error to posit that we can have information about something which may not even exist, than to say we cannot (as distinct from "do" and "do not"); but I will grant that as a slight deviation from pure rationality on my part.
Are you saying that if there's an energy source there we should wreck it because you like plastic bottles?
Who said anything about "wreck"ing the moon?
First of all, TFA's arguments have more to do with morality than aesthetics. I poked fun at that, not whether or not I consider the moon "pretty".
And second, "wrecking" involves a subjective analysis of value. With the arctic, we can take about aesthetics, but we more commonly mean the loss of biodiversity (ie, polar bears). The moon has no biome, and it would take mining on a truly incomprehensible scale to spoil something that big in any meaningful aesthetic sense.
Problem with that, is "I" have an allergy to NOT eating peanuts. And since I'm the most important person "I" know, "I" win.
+5 ironically insightful.
I do count as the most important person I know. My SO comes close, along with my parents, and then various other friends and family member.
But when you expect me to not eat a food I particularly like because you have a problem with it - You haven't just taken away my right to eat Allergen-X, but that of the entire world you normally encounter. Sorry, but just plain fucking no.
How many people's right to eat Reese's trumps your right to go out in public? 1? 10? 100? 7 billion? It really does come down to that, put bluntly. Don't like it? Visit me. One of us will survive the encounter, and I promise I'll never lay a finger on you.
too much access to energy would be bad for the human race.
Ah, so the classic "we should all live in the dark and grow our own food" argument. Beautiful. Give King Ludd my warmest regards.
Free hint, Tony - Yes, many of the energy booms of human history have come along with a variety of ills. But they have also come along with the single greatest periods of progress as well, both social and technological. The industrial revolution caused a good bit of pollution, but basically made human slavery a net loss, economically. And fusion, as a nice perk, pollutes less than fission (which we already do), which in turn pollutes less than dinofuels (which we also already do because the hippies would rather let birds - and us - die that build more fission plants).
So in summary - Go fuck yourself, Tony. Live in the dark if you want. I like computers, and air conditioning, and cars, and concrete, and aluminum cans, and cheap plastic bottles.
You do realize these people changed their course and advocated this vaccine? You do realize that millions of people who have faith have had all the recommended vaccines?
"Holy(tm) shit! Our beliefs are killing us! Quick, abandon them!". Jesus would weep, if he existed.
I don't appreciate your insinuation that all people of faith are idiots who don't understand science and refuse to be vaccinated. The hatred shown on these forums really boggles my mind.
Science means not accepting anything on faith. People who actually understand science will, at best, count as agnostic. "We don't know" makes for a scientifically-acceptable answer. "We don't know, but fear our thunder-god's version of Hades" does not.
If it makes you feel a bit better, I would also call atheists equally irrational. "We don't know" makes for a scientifically-acceptable answer. "We don't know, but will deny the possibility" does not.
/ At this point, you can probably guess I count as agnostic.
Americans are renounced for not knowing their geography, but thinking that Indonesia is within US borders is still astonishing.
You understand how Customs works, right? By the time they allow you on "US soil", you've already spent ten hours with 100+ people packed into a flying sardine, landed somewhere inside the US, made your way from Terminal F to terminal D, spent 15 minutes mixing with a different group of 50 people on a rolling sardine can, spend another half hour packed in line with hundreds of people so some minor official can wave a blacklight over your passport with no clue why... And only then do they allow you to mingle with the far less densely-packed US public.
Somehow, I question the efficacy of bothering to send the one symptomatic visitor back, at that last point in a whole chain of weakest links.
Normally, these children are protected by herd immunity [wikipedia.org], but when enough people begin to refuse vaccinations based on stupid, insane, and utterly discredited theories
Or, to put it another way - The lord is my shepherd, but I ain't a sheep!
Herd immunity doesn't work if a bunch of idiots decides that vaccines are evil/dangerous/demonstrative of a lack of faith/useless/*insert absurd argument here*.
Most importantly, herd immunity doesn't work if you socialize almost exclusively with a herd lacking that particular immunity.
Which, incidentally, makes this just the most sublimely satisfying bit of news I've heard all week - Idiots reject vaccination on assorted bogus grounds, trusting that their baby won't die of some horrible disease because our society has largely eradicated it (through vaccination, no less). Idiots then hang out with other idiots following the same flawed logic. Idiots thereby have their gene-pool chlorinated.
Sadly, not fast enough, and really, quite a pity that these things mostly affect the young, not-yet-brainwashed members of their community. But - if you'll pardon the pun - baby-steps in the right direction.
/ Now if we could just find a disease that prefers people who drive too slow in the left lane...
You've never bought a car? Had a student loan? Rented an apartment? Had a credit card? Had a utility bill, cable/satellite, or cell-phone service in your own name? Had a regular above-the-table job?
fuck you
Sorry if I hit a little close to (your mom's) home dude, but if you can honestly answer "no" to all of the above - If not Amish, you pretty much prove my point. I hear this season's OG Kush has a heck of a kick!
If I friend a guy I knew 20 years ago in high school who didn't pay off a loan, what does that have to do with my ability to pay off a loan? Not a damn thing.
If you still have no credit history at 38, then you almost certainly still smoke weed with that high school friend in his mom's basement. This has nothing to do with your "real" FICO score, think of it more like the "payday loans" version of a credit rating. Nothing to see here, move along.
As an aside, though - Why would you "friend" a deadbeat you haven't even bothered to talk to in 20 years? Anyone I would want to have stayed in contact with - I did.
Because in spite of it all they're still human beings. you racist asshole.
Although that remains open to debate, I didn't ask why we don't turn them into a sheet of glass, moron. And for the record, religion doesn't count as a race, however fucked up it may make its adherents.
I asked why we still play nice with people who clearly behave in a manner that makes them the enemies of the rest of the human race. Not whites, not Christians, but humans. Diseases don't fall for type-II statistical errors such as racism. Diseases like genes that we all, arabs and jews and blacks and whites and hispanics, all share in common.
But by all means, rage against that machine, friend! Piss in the wind while dying of TB because of distrust of Western pharmaceuticals. Blow up our buildings as we try to save us all, and then whine about the unfairness of it when we vaporize your asses from orbit. Send more soiled underwear bombers to take down the Great Satan, so we can have another brief chuckle as you successfully make the world a worse place by stripping the Great Experiment of its freedoms.
Point 1: I see nowhere in that article where Faisal's Bastards managed to suppress publication of actual information about MERS. It makes the same claim (word for word) as the FP, but substantiates it... Not at all?
Point 2: So - The vast majority of the 9/11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia; they count as the #1 contributor to OPEC (how do you like fracking now, bitches?), and... They seem intent on covering up the next pandemic? Someone remind me why we keep playing nice with these worthless misogynist theocratic pieces of dog shit?
How many of those countries have an NDAA and allow their citizens to be militarily imprisoned without a trial?
How many of them have a sixth amendment (or equivalent) in the first place?
How many of those countries have a "constitution free" zone that covers most of their population?
How many of them have first and fourth amendments in the first place?
How many of those countries have continue to hold innocent prisoners cleared for release a la Gitmo?
How many of them have an Article I, section 9 in the first place?
How many of those countries have openly assassinated one of their citizens for engaging in protected speech?
We already mentioned the sixth amendment. We could add in the fourth, fifth, and eighth though, if you really want.
You're either snarking the shit out of us, have limited to your travels to places like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, or have a terminal case of American Exceptionalism.
I'll lead the charge to damn the US for its sins, make no mistake. But the GP has it right - We hear about similar atrocities from every nation on the fucking globe on a daily basis. This week it sucks to work as a reporter in the UK; last week, I'd hate to work as a president in Egypt. And god help anyone stupid enough to work a a scientist in Italy. And hey, for the past four years of "Change", the surgeon general has found whistle-blowing in the US hazardous to your health.
The US government doesn't even come close to having a monopoly on human rights abuses. It just has the biggest stick, for now. Simple reality of the situation, all governments, everywhere, will abuse their power for the purpose of aggregating more of it over time.
And speaking of "rights" - You wonder why Americans brag about the second amendment? Because, How many of those countries have the means to overthrow an oppressive government formally codified in their constitution?
Slashdot Mirror
Presumably, such a task would require access to DMV computer systems
Why? Who the hell would bother hacking the server when they have physical access to the one part of the system that matters, the plate itself?
Plus, the perp compounds their crime by hacking into a computer system without authorization
Y'know, this point alone worries me the most. I can't think of any compelling legal argument against it, yet it sets a bad precedent about ownership and our already-thin right-to-modify/repair items you pay for and of which you have physical possession.
"Yeah, a rock hit my plate. I can fix it with a $20 replacement screen I install myself"
"Sorry, felony tampering with official gear, buddy! Pay $250 for a new DMV-issued plate, or go to jail!"
Clearly, California must have the single best quality roads in the entire world.
In the Northeast US, come spring, your license plate looks like a sand-blasted salt-shaker. These no doubt fairly expensive (large LCD screen and cell enabled?) license plates would last less than a year.
But hey, don't let that pesky ol' reality get in the way of yet another way for Uncle Sam to track our every move!
Guess what is the superposition of "quantum" and "hacker"?
This?
Awesome! Time to write a quantum Bitcoin miner - Let's see if we can waste CPU cycles by the universe itself! ;)
Wow. I hope you realize your version goes a lot further than the court verdict.
That version includes all the evidence the judge suppressed and the prosecution actively tampered with, found on Trayvon's phone, email, and Facebook pages.
That's a long way from determining that Martin, initiated the confrontation, tried to kill Zimmerman, shoplifted (first I heard of this), or was going to smoke drugs that evening (irrelevant even if true).
In the absence of knowing Trayvon's "real" intent, the trial amounted to little more than establishing his general character as either the saint the media painted him as, or just-onother-random-thug... Or more realistically, somewhere in between (decent kid doing stupid shit that got him killed). So yes, it does have relevance.
Are you listening?
What a silly question! Of course they listen! Why, we have a whole intelligence agency with no legitimate purpose other than to listen in on...
Oh, you didn't mean "illegally spy on", you meant "take your bosses seriously". Sorry, simple mistake.
The part where it's Google/Facebook/Whomever that decides whether an account is your and open, not the user.
And the part where this entire discussion relates to people who take positive action to protect their privacy?
How do you propose Google/Facebook/Whomever recognize that "zork98' has the same owner as "bin55go"? Will they go by my fake DOB? As much of my fake mailing address as they require to make an account? My throwaway email address I used to sign up? My randomized user agent? Hell, if you read a few of my posts closely, ignoring the actual content, you'll notice I even affect a fake writing style for accounts to which I actually post often (such as Slashdot).
Okay, technically they have my IP address - Which (in the case of accounts I access from work) could include "only" a few hundred people. And ones I access from the free WiFi at Starbucks in the morning... Well that narrows it down to one of millions.
And therein we have the ultimate irony of policies designed to make you easier to track - Most of them only apply to those dumb enough to make themselves easy to track in the first place.
that's why facebook is a big deal, since they're the only one's who have enough somewhat reliable data to actually sell adverts targeted at 20-35 year old people living in country X
My pet iguana's profile would like to disagree with you. Sure, "they" know they have a 20-35YO (in people years) male that studies insects, likes warm weather, and dislikes Tennessee Williams... But I'd like to see them sell something to him.
And in other news, Google has rolled out their monthly gratuitous GMail revamp. And no one even noticed, because we've all gotten tired of hunting down the "please give me back the old interface" checkbox somewhere in the labyrinthine depths of the user options pages.
Ah well, at least Slashdot limits its retarded UI crippling and eye-bleed-inducing changes to twice a decade. Hmm, probably due any day now...
If only there were some sort of secure way of exchanging keys over an insecure medium...
Saaay, someone should tell Phil Zimmerman about that - I'll bet he could really put it to some good use!
I am selling platinum-tipped, lead-shielded, kevlar-reinforced Ultra Mega HDMI 2.0 cables for the low, low price of $200/ft.
Wow, really undercutting Monster by a good margin there! Can I order a palette now and beat the rush?
Oh... Hey, waitasec... I see your game now, Mr. Scam Artist! You didn't mention "low oxygen"! Fraud! Charlatan! Senator! Cad!
We have a few problems with just crunching the numbers in this case.
First of all - Not everyone who manages to 2.0 their way through a STEM degree will do well at it, or even like doing it for that matter.
Second - A STEM degree (even with a 2.0) carries the prestige of "this guy knows something". For all the require-a-degree-but-not-really jobs out there, having a "real" major rather than Wymins' Studies will go a loooong way toward getting you in the top half of the pile of applicants.
Finally, jobs that really do require a STEM background tend to favor younger people, both in terms of sharpness of mind and lack of experience to say "no" to regularly putting in 60+ hours a week, on salary. The core STEM workforce of the 90s and even the 00's has largely moved on to manage today's engineers - If they haven't gotten so sick of busting their ass that they dropped out and went on to a sleepy AP Entry Clerk position somewhere.
So yes, we very much do have both a surplus and a shortage. We have a surplus because not all STEM grads can or want to work in STEM; we have a shortage because we don't have enough people good enough or naive enough to put up with actually doing a STEM job.
Note the difference: the latter is a belief system, the former isn't.
Only because you phrased it as such. In actuality, the atheist disbelieves in a deity given a lack of proof one way or the other - That still very much counts as a "belief", regardless of how positively or negatively you chose to word it.
Now, I have to agree with you that saying we can't know anything about the divine amounts to an assertion of faith. Merely saying we don't know and moving on from a moot question, however, does not.
I think, though, that we really have more subtlety here than two distinct groups. You already brought up "weak" atheism, we have the same for agnosticism (and theism, and gnosticism). Referencing that chart, any stance (in the absence of evidence, which describes our current reality) outside the center amounts to an irrational belief system. Personally, however, I consider it more of an error to posit that we can have information about something which may not even exist, than to say we cannot (as distinct from "do" and "do not"); but I will grant that as a slight deviation from pure rationality on my part.
Are you saying that if there's an energy source there we should wreck it because you like plastic bottles?
Who said anything about "wreck"ing the moon?
First of all, TFA's arguments have more to do with morality than aesthetics. I poked fun at that, not whether or not I consider the moon "pretty".
And second, "wrecking" involves a subjective analysis of value. With the arctic, we can take about aesthetics, but we more commonly mean the loss of biodiversity (ie, polar bears). The moon has no biome, and it would take mining on a truly incomprehensible scale to spoil something that big in any meaningful aesthetic sense.
Problem with that, is "I" have an allergy to NOT eating peanuts. And since I'm the most important person "I" know, "I" win.
+5 ironically insightful.
I do count as the most important person I know. My SO comes close, along with my parents, and then various other friends and family member.
But when you expect me to not eat a food I particularly like because you have a problem with it - You haven't just taken away my right to eat Allergen-X, but that of the entire world you normally encounter. Sorry, but just plain fucking no.
How many people's right to eat Reese's trumps your right to go out in public? 1? 10? 100? 7 billion? It really does come down to that, put bluntly. Don't like it? Visit me. One of us will survive the encounter, and I promise I'll never lay a finger on you.
too much access to energy would be bad for the human race.
Ah, so the classic "we should all live in the dark and grow our own food" argument. Beautiful. Give King Ludd my warmest regards.
Free hint, Tony - Yes, many of the energy booms of human history have come along with a variety of ills. But they have also come along with the single greatest periods of progress as well, both social and technological. The industrial revolution caused a good bit of pollution, but basically made human slavery a net loss, economically. And fusion, as a nice perk, pollutes less than fission (which we already do), which in turn pollutes less than dinofuels (which we also already do because the hippies would rather let birds - and us - die that build more fission plants).
So in summary - Go fuck yourself, Tony. Live in the dark if you want. I like computers, and air conditioning, and cars, and concrete, and aluminum cans, and cheap plastic bottles.
You do realize these people changed their course and advocated this vaccine? You do realize that millions of people who have faith have had all the recommended vaccines?
"Holy(tm) shit! Our beliefs are killing us! Quick, abandon them!". Jesus would weep, if he existed.
I don't appreciate your insinuation that all people of faith are idiots who don't understand science and refuse to be vaccinated. The hatred shown on these forums really boggles my mind.
Science means not accepting anything on faith. People who actually understand science will, at best, count as agnostic. "We don't know" makes for a scientifically-acceptable answer. "We don't know, but fear our thunder-god's version of Hades" does not.
If it makes you feel a bit better, I would also call atheists equally irrational. "We don't know" makes for a scientifically-acceptable answer. "We don't know, but will deny the possibility" does not.
/ At this point, you can probably guess I count as agnostic.
Americans are renounced for not knowing their geography, but thinking that Indonesia is within US borders is still astonishing.
You understand how Customs works, right? By the time they allow you on "US soil", you've already spent ten hours with 100+ people packed into a flying sardine, landed somewhere inside the US, made your way from Terminal F to terminal D, spent 15 minutes mixing with a different group of 50 people on a rolling sardine can, spend another half hour packed in line with hundreds of people so some minor official can wave a blacklight over your passport with no clue why... And only then do they allow you to mingle with the far less densely-packed US public.
Somehow, I question the efficacy of bothering to send the one symptomatic visitor back, at that last point in a whole chain of weakest links.
Normally, these children are protected by herd immunity [wikipedia.org], but when enough people begin to refuse vaccinations based on stupid, insane, and utterly discredited theories
Or, to put it another way - The lord is my shepherd, but I ain't a sheep!
Herd immunity doesn't work if a bunch of idiots decides that vaccines are evil/dangerous/demonstrative of a lack of faith/useless/*insert absurd argument here*.
Most importantly, herd immunity doesn't work if you socialize almost exclusively with a herd lacking that particular immunity.
Which, incidentally, makes this just the most sublimely satisfying bit of news I've heard all week - Idiots reject vaccination on assorted bogus grounds, trusting that their baby won't die of some horrible disease because our society has largely eradicated it (through vaccination, no less). Idiots then hang out with other idiots following the same flawed logic. Idiots thereby have their gene-pool chlorinated.
Sadly, not fast enough, and really, quite a pity that these things mostly affect the young, not-yet-brainwashed members of their community. But - if you'll pardon the pun - baby-steps in the right direction.
/ Now if we could just find a disease that prefers people who drive too slow in the left lane...
I'm 31 with zero credit and zero debt
Those don't equal zero credit history.
You've never bought a car? Had a student loan? Rented an apartment? Had a credit card? Had a utility bill, cable/satellite, or cell-phone service in your own name? Had a regular above-the-table job?
fuck you
Sorry if I hit a little close to (your mom's) home dude, but if you can honestly answer "no" to all of the above - If not Amish, you pretty much prove my point. I hear this season's OG Kush has a heck of a kick!
If I friend a guy I knew 20 years ago in high school who didn't pay off a loan, what does that have to do with my ability to pay off a loan? Not a damn thing.
If you still have no credit history at 38, then you almost certainly still smoke weed with that high school friend in his mom's basement. This has nothing to do with your "real" FICO score, think of it more like the "payday loans" version of a credit rating. Nothing to see here, move along.
As an aside, though - Why would you "friend" a deadbeat you haven't even bothered to talk to in 20 years? Anyone I would want to have stayed in contact with - I did.
Because in spite of it all they're still human beings. you racist asshole.
Although that remains open to debate, I didn't ask why we don't turn them into a sheet of glass, moron. And for the record, religion doesn't count as a race, however fucked up it may make its adherents.
I asked why we still play nice with people who clearly behave in a manner that makes them the enemies of the rest of the human race. Not whites, not Christians, but humans. Diseases don't fall for type-II statistical errors such as racism. Diseases like genes that we all, arabs and jews and blacks and whites and hispanics, all share in common.
But by all means, rage against that machine, friend! Piss in the wind while dying of TB because of distrust of Western pharmaceuticals. Blow up our buildings as we try to save us all, and then whine about the unfairness of it when we vaporize your asses from orbit. Send more soiled underwear bombers to take down the Great Satan, so we can have another brief chuckle as you successfully make the world a worse place by stripping the Great Experiment of its freedoms.
Point 1: I see nowhere in that article where Faisal's Bastards managed to suppress publication of actual information about MERS. It makes the same claim (word for word) as the FP, but substantiates it... Not at all?
Point 2: So - The vast majority of the 9/11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia; they count as the #1 contributor to OPEC (how do you like fracking now, bitches?), and... They seem intent on covering up the next pandemic? Someone remind me why we keep playing nice with these worthless misogynist theocratic pieces of dog shit?
How many of those countries have an NDAA and allow their citizens to be militarily imprisoned without a trial?
How many of them have a sixth amendment (or equivalent) in the first place?
How many of those countries have a "constitution free" zone that covers most of their population?
How many of them have first and fourth amendments in the first place?
How many of those countries have continue to hold innocent prisoners cleared for release a la Gitmo?
How many of them have an Article I, section 9 in the first place?
How many of those countries have openly assassinated one of their citizens for engaging in protected speech?
We already mentioned the sixth amendment. We could add in the fourth, fifth, and eighth though, if you really want.
You're either snarking the shit out of us, have limited to your travels to places like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, or have a terminal case of American Exceptionalism.
I'll lead the charge to damn the US for its sins, make no mistake. But the GP has it right - We hear about similar atrocities from every nation on the fucking globe on a daily basis. This week it sucks to work as a reporter in the UK; last week, I'd hate to work as a president in Egypt. And god help anyone stupid enough to work a a scientist in Italy. And hey, for the past four years of "Change", the surgeon general has found whistle-blowing in the US hazardous to your health.
The US government doesn't even come close to having a monopoly on human rights abuses. It just has the biggest stick, for now. Simple reality of the situation, all governments, everywhere, will abuse their power for the purpose of aggregating more of it over time.
And speaking of "rights" - You wonder why Americans brag about the second amendment? Because,
How many of those countries have the means to overthrow an oppressive government formally codified in their constitution?