It's reasonable that the Employer have some means of validating that the work they are paying for is indeed getting performed. Is there a more cost effective means that you can think of?
Check whether or not the job gets done? Have the police report any problems they encounter while they're cruising around the streets anyway? Ask people at the town meeting if they're satisfied by the job? Actually listen to complaints from people rather than just appeasing them?
And there is more than enough opportunity for the contractor to give the snow job to the State, City, County that is paying for it.
That's what contracts and lawsuits are for. If they don't do the job right, you don't pay them.
What he's looking for is how to establish and maintain ethics...not to just wing it.
There's no formula, though. Certainly not within the framework of a for-profit company. Maybe if you went non-profit you could do it, but for-profit company's exist to make money. That doesn't exclude ethical behavior, but it makes it very difficult to enforce it. Winging it is about all you can do.
I might trust you, and trust is based on individuals, though organizations can (if they have people with ethics) make the whole group more trustworthy.
Trust is not always based on individuals. A well established company with a long history of trustworthiness and the ability to protect itself from hostile takeovers can be trustworthy. Maybe that trust eminated from the individuals, but it's become part of the company culture itself.
'Sok, I'm not a right winger either. And I'm definately not a libertarian. I voted for Nader. I'm basically a pro-freedom liberal, but even with regard to fiscal policy I try to get the government out whenever possible. I guess I'd be a libertarian except for the fact that I think they are unrealistic. Anyway, WHBT.
And personally I find them to be about as useful as a pen and paper, and much more expensive. Of course, I felt the same way about our DBA (she was about as useful as a pen and paper, and much more expensive).
Just be yourself. I'll figure out for myself an appropriate level of trust and respect. I mean, I don't really understand your question. What people want is usually pretty obvious. It's also impossible to give everyone everything they want and remain in business. Figuring out the balance between those two is what management is there to do. It's not something you can sum up in a neat formula.
Uh...you can't have self-defense after the fact. If someone walks up to you and punches you in the eye, then starts to walk away, you can't just walk up and punch them back and claim self-defense. That's revenge and it's not the same thing.
I don't think that accrately describes the situation. It's more like someone tries to kill your brother, then runs away and hides for a few years. Then he successfully kills both your parents and your sister, but your grandmother narrowly escapes. Then he runs away and hides again. To kill him is self-defense, not revenge.
Too many technicalities here. You can't claim someone is wrong for what they believe.
Yes I can (in fact, I just did, but that's not the point). Moral relativism can only be taken so far. Some things are just plain evil, and if you believe they're not, then you're incorrect. This is one of those cases.
If that were true, I could just claim you were wrong and this discussion would be over.
Yep. If you claim that bin Laden is not a bad person, then this discussion would be over. It's not an opinion, it's a fact. If you disagree, you are incorrect.
Again, it's a matter of support, not inherent natural truth.
We fundamentally disagree on this point. But perhaps we can still come to an agreement. When you say that something is a "right," what are you saying? Do you believe that there are inherent natural rights? What are they? What if someone disagrees?
If you don't believe that there are inherent natural rights, then what do you mean by a "right?"
Nobody has an inherent RIGHT to do ANYTHING.
Heh, I must have subconsciously read that before I asked those questions. Anyway, if no one has an inherent "right" to do anything, then why do we have the word (in that context) in the first place? I guess you think everyone else, who uses the word on a regular basis, is wrong, and you are right? I'm going from the base assumption that we do have natural rights. Perhaps I've just been fooled. Or perhaps I'm just using convenient terminology for what you call an appropriate level of support.
It usually seems to work out okay, but sometimes it doesn't. Vietnam would be a very good example of that potential for failure.
As I've said (perhaps in this thread), whether or not it is smart to exercise those rights is another question entirely. And whether or not we had a right to get involved in Vietnam in the first place, well, I tend to believe we didn't, although I really don't know enough of the facts to say that's my final opinion on the matter.
Well, I'm in the process of recompiling everything with all the default optimizations. For now, that'll be good enough (hopefully it'll work), and I'll play with the optimizations once I've grown more comfortable with gentoo. Thanks for your post, it's nice to at least know that I'm not the only one having this trouble.
You said: If your country doesn't agree that bin Laden is a murderer, and it tries to protect him from us, then my country has every right to come in there and capture him anyway, and we have every right to use force against anyone trying to stop us.
Correct.
Later, you said: I never said we have a right to go to war for our principles.
Also correct.
Gotcha! Do I win a prize?
Umm, you didn't get me. We have the right to come in there and capture bin Laden because he is a dangerous murdering terrorist, not because of our principles.
Seriously though - murder is not a universally defined term (as far as people and cultures are concerned, not bloated world bodies that can't even decide whether or not to open or close a window).
I don't care if murder is a universally defined term or not. It's completely irrelevant.
We believe it was pure butchery that nearly 3000 people were cut down on 9/11. Al Queada believes everyone is a valid target because they're at war with an entire culture, so they see it as soldiers fighting soldiers (sort of... in a sick, twisted way).
Al Quada can believe whatever they want. They're wrong. The fact that they believe that innocent US citizens are valid targets and are willing to act on that belief is exactly why we are justified in killing or capturing them.
Vegetarians believe it's murder to kill a cow.
Not all vegetarians believe that.
Therefore, it's not murder or crime to them. Most of the rest of the world sided with us, however, so we got the nod to go blow stuff up. We didn't have a "right" to do it, we just could and most of the world felt that our principles in the matter were correct and that we were justified in doing it.
It was a straw man fallacy because you were implying that I didn't think we should go after bin Laden.
No I wasn't. In fact, I presumed that you did think that we should go after him. I was showing why your statement that "A country's laws should not reach into another country" was wrong.
It would be like me saying that I didn't think that a country should force their laws on another and thus shouldn't be able to enforce our spam laws over there, and then having you ask whether or not we should enforce our murder laws if they support the mass slaughter of babies.
Yes, that's exactly what it's like. Sometimes a country should force their laws on another.
Also, you didn't disprove my statement, you just stated your opinion.
I showed that your own opinion contradicts your statement.
No, we declare war on al Quaeda, although with George W. Bush's thinking it wouldn't be that stupid to declare war on a person considering that we're declaring war on a practice.
Al Quaeda is not a country. It is as ridiculous for congress to declare war on it as it is for congress to declare war on bin Laden. And we only declared war on terrorism in a colloquial sense. Congress did not officially declare war on terrorism, and GWB was against them doing so.
And I'm not saying that we wait for another terrorist attack. We knew going in that there would be casualties, so, you take bin Laden as a war criminal, find some rule that he violated, and take care of him that way.
What if bin Laden didn't violate any war crimes after the declaration of war?
And you're willing to go with just a maybe when it comes to the internet?
No. If it were up to me I would insist that rules be put in place to make sure that censorship didn't happen.
I understand what you're saying, but that governing body that the UN would be creating would still be the UN's. They would only have as much power as the UN gave them, not as much power as we give them.
You're the one using the straw man analogies. Is it possible that the UN will give them too much power? Of course. But is it possible that they won't. Yes. I say wait and see the details of the proposal before dismissing it.
We can't just grant ourselves rights that nobody else is allowed to have (although, Americans are obsessed with doing just that lately). If we have an inherent right to go to war for our principles, so does everyone else.
I never said we have a right to go to war for our principles. If bin Laden was merely a tax evader, or if all he did was steal some bread from a Kwik-e-mart, then we wouldn't have the right to go to war over it. But because he is a cold-blooded murdering terrorist, we do have the right to go to war over it. And so does anyone else.
That means that if Saudi Arabia decides that they're going to go to war with us tomorrow to go apprehend all those criminal women that bare their faces and *gasp* navels in public, that's their "right".
All I can say is bring it on. It'd be nice to have Saudi Arabia as the 51st state.
I think it's better to look at it as "it's not a right, it's a last resort". I think that, in the case of Afghanistan, that's also how it was used. We waited patiently for, what, 4 weeks? They refused repeated requests to turn him over, so we finally came to an end with the patient requests and went in after him.
Semantics, perhaps. I agree with you that war should be a last resort.
First, when I said unrelated, I meant in the sense that internet regulation isn't related to capturing Osama bin Laden.
OK, so what's your point?
Anyways, it seems that you were trying to use the straw man fallacy on me, which seems to be a tactic growing in popularity on Slashdot.
No, I did not use a straw man fallacy. I used a proof by example. You stated that "A country's laws should not reach into another country." I showed you an example of when a country's laws should reach into another country, thereby disproving your statement.
You don't nail him for the 9/11 attacks, you nail him for anything that he pulls from the war declaration forward.
So we declare war on Osama bin Laden (declare war on a person!?!?!?) and then wait for another terrorist attack to happen? No thanks. We need to kill or capture bin Laden before another terrorist attack happens.
Let's switch to the UN topic.
All they would have to do is amend those procedures to make things easier.
Right, and to amend the amendment procedures would require that you first use the amendment procedures.
Even if they didn't, they still could get those powers that they want.
How? And who is they?
Sure that's how a nation does things, but this is a governing body that has the ability to override a country's laws with their own.
Not necessarily. It would depend on what powers they are given. But in any case, we already have an example of one set of laws overriding those of another. The United States.
All that they need to do is grant themselves that power. What I'm trying to say is that the world has given them too much control.
The world may indeed have given them too much control, but that's irrelevant. Just because they have too much control doesn't mean that they should have no control whatsoever.
Could we just ignore them?
Maybe.
Also, people don't follow their rulings just because they make sense. Many people follow the UN's rulings because they have to. They are afraid of what would happen if they didn't.
I don't think you understand what I'm saying. A governing body for the Internet should be formed by the UN. I'm not saying the UN itself should govern the Internet. That governing body would have whatever powers we choose to give it. I'd argue for very limited powers. At most, they can take away your IP addresses.
That sounds all well and good when you only apply it to yourself forcing your way into someone else's country and in this circumstance.
Yep. It sure does.
Consider people who have been accused of practicing and/or preaching Christianity in a Fundamentalist Muslim country. They flee back to the U.S., their home. However, they still broke the law over there, even though they did nothing wrong from our point of view. Should that other country be allowed to try and remove that "criminal" by force from the United States, shooting down police officers, military, etc. who try to stop them in the process?
No. They shouldn't.
No, unless you can garner the support of the majority of the rest of the world, you shouldn't try something like that. Not too many people in their right minds think that blowing the Taliban and Al Quaeda to bits is a bad idea - they're pretty much universally hated. That doesn't mean that rule should be instituted all the time.
As I said, it should be instituted very rarely. Read my statement:
The internet is international, and one country's laws are rarely able to reach into another country.
Congress did consult technically savvy people when coming up with those laws. And the problems with those laws are not technical. The problem is what the laws intend in the first place.
I didn't say the US shouldn't be able to try and capture bin Laden. I said they shouldn't be able to force another country to give him up.
By capturing him, we force the other country to give him up, don't we?
They also shouldn't be able to invade another country to find him, without an agreement from the foreign government.
That's where I disagree. When a foreign government protects someone like Osama bin Laden, we have no responsibility to respect the wishes of that government.
You disagree because you believe your moral view is the only possible correct view.
Yep. It's wrong to tell people to fly fucking airplanes into two buildings thereby killing lots of innocent victims. That's the only possible correct view. Any other view is incorrect.
We MUST eventually evolve to a state where we can respect others' belief systems.
No. Absolutely not. We must NEVER evolve to a state where we can respect a belief system which allows cold-blooded murder.
There are means of capturing bin Laden other than invading against a governments wishes and tearing their country apart looking for him.
What means would that be?
Just for the record, not that it matters since I am posting anonymously, but I do believe bin Laden should be beaten repeatedly to a painful death. But, why should a countries self governance be overridden just because someone else has a differing moral view and a larger army. That kind of defeats any self governance they may have had.
Defeating the self-governance of a government which protects murderers is exactly the point.
No. No country should ever be allowed to force its way into another country like that.
To follow such advice would lead to self-destruction.
I have a friend whose father would be put to death if he set foot back in his own country. The USA gladly accepted. This man obviously broke a law in his native country (Iran, if you care), so does that mean you're perfectly OK with Iran attacking the USA to get this man?
Whether or not I'm OK with it depends on the specific details, but I'm sure they're not going to be something I agree with.
Or do you feel that their laws just aren't as important as the USA's?
Important? I feel that many of their laws are not just. Furthermore, I don't think this is one of those rare cases that I was talking about before.
This is so braindead I have a hard time believing it's not a troll. I can't believe anyone actually thinks this way (though sadly, I must, because george "w" bush does as well).
So are you a complete pacifist? Does anyone ever have a moral right to use force? Why does it matter, philosophically, whether the perpetrator is within or without a country's borders?
And for the record, I was born and raised in the USA, and I reside there (here!) currently. I love a lot about this country, but that doesn't mean I agree with everything it does, or that I believe we're somehow exempt from any rules. We have to play fair, just as everyone else does.
And what do you suggest we do when others don't play fair? Do you consider it fair to allow a murderer safe haven from justice?
It's funny how people bring up completely unrelated issues that would seem unarguable when trying to corner somebody.
I don't think you were following the thread closely enough. What I said was completely related. First, I said:
The internet is international, and one country's laws are rarely able to reach into another country.
Notice the word rarely. Then, someone responded:
A country's laws should not reach into another country.
I then responded with an example of one of those rare times when one country's laws should be able to reach into another country:
So the United States shouldn't be able to charge Osama bin Laden with murder?
For one, I don't know what evidence the United States has against him other than what's made available to the public, and how much of that is true is questionable (as with any political statement about anything). Also, I doubt that he himself murdered.
I'm not familiar enough with the laws of this country to say. So let's say conspiracy to commit murder.
It probably would have helped if there was an official war declaration passed by Congress, since there are regulations as far as war crime proceedings go.
It wasn't a war crime. The crime would have been committed before the declaration of war anyway.
But, the UN could make their powers greater.
Only if they followed the procedures for amending their powers.
Since they already gave themselves extremely limited and enumerated power, who would stop them from gaining more power?
The same people who give them the power in the first place. Are you saying what if the people who were elected start going nuts and ignoring the rules they set up? We'd just ignore them. Again, I'm not suggesting we give the UN the power to arrest people and such. Their powers would be more like those of the federal court system in United States. They make their rulings, and people follow them because they make sense.
Slashdot Mirror
It's reasonable that the Employer have some means of validating that the work they are paying for is indeed getting performed. Is there a more cost effective means that you can think of?
Check whether or not the job gets done? Have the police report any problems they encounter while they're cruising around the streets anyway? Ask people at the town meeting if they're satisfied by the job? Actually listen to complaints from people rather than just appeasing them?
And there is more than enough opportunity for the contractor to give the snow job to the State, City, County that is paying for it.
That's what contracts and lawsuits are for. If they don't do the job right, you don't pay them.
What he's looking for is how to establish and maintain ethics...not to just wing it.
There's no formula, though. Certainly not within the framework of a for-profit company. Maybe if you went non-profit you could do it, but for-profit company's exist to make money. That doesn't exclude ethical behavior, but it makes it very difficult to enforce it. Winging it is about all you can do.
I might trust you, and trust is based on individuals, though organizations can (if they have people with ethics) make the whole group more trustworthy.
Trust is not always based on individuals. A well established company with a long history of trustworthiness and the ability to protect itself from hostile takeovers can be trustworthy. Maybe that trust eminated from the individuals, but it's become part of the company culture itself.
'Sok, I'm not a right winger either. And I'm definately not a libertarian. I voted for Nader. I'm basically a pro-freedom liberal, but even with regard to fiscal policy I try to get the government out whenever possible. I guess I'd be a libertarian except for the fact that I think they are unrealistic. Anyway, WHBT.
Larry Lessig already pointed it out, to both Congress and the Supreme Court. They didn't listen to him, so why would they listen to me?
Remember, DSL is not a shared segment like Cable.
Depends on where you live. Unless you're really close to your CO, you don't have a direct copper line from your house to the CO.
And personally I find them to be about as useful as a pen and paper, and much more expensive. Of course, I felt the same way about our DBA (she was about as useful as a pen and paper, and much more expensive).
Mod up the parent. I dare you. You'll never be allowed to moderate again.
Copyrights on software never expire.
Just be yourself. I'll figure out for myself an appropriate level of trust and respect. I mean, I don't really understand your question. What people want is usually pretty obvious. It's also impossible to give everyone everything they want and remain in business. Figuring out the balance between those two is what management is there to do. It's not something you can sum up in a neat formula.
Uh...you can't have self-defense after the fact. If someone walks up to you and punches you in the eye, then starts to walk away, you can't just walk up and punch them back and claim self-defense. That's revenge and it's not the same thing.
I don't think that accrately describes the situation. It's more like someone tries to kill your brother, then runs away and hides for a few years. Then he successfully kills both your parents and your sister, but your grandmother narrowly escapes. Then he runs away and hides again. To kill him is self-defense, not revenge.
Too many technicalities here. You can't claim someone is wrong for what they believe.
Yes I can (in fact, I just did, but that's not the point). Moral relativism can only be taken so far. Some things are just plain evil, and if you believe they're not, then you're incorrect. This is one of those cases.
If that were true, I could just claim you were wrong and this discussion would be over.
Yep. If you claim that bin Laden is not a bad person, then this discussion would be over. It's not an opinion, it's a fact. If you disagree, you are incorrect.
Again, it's a matter of support, not inherent natural truth.
We fundamentally disagree on this point. But perhaps we can still come to an agreement. When you say that something is a "right," what are you saying? Do you believe that there are inherent natural rights? What are they? What if someone disagrees?
If you don't believe that there are inherent natural rights, then what do you mean by a "right?"
Nobody has an inherent RIGHT to do ANYTHING.
Heh, I must have subconsciously read that before I asked those questions. Anyway, if no one has an inherent "right" to do anything, then why do we have the word (in that context) in the first place? I guess you think everyone else, who uses the word on a regular basis, is wrong, and you are right? I'm going from the base assumption that we do have natural rights. Perhaps I've just been fooled. Or perhaps I'm just using convenient terminology for what you call an appropriate level of support.
It usually seems to work out okay, but sometimes it doesn't. Vietnam would be a very good example of that potential for failure.
As I've said (perhaps in this thread), whether or not it is smart to exercise those rights is another question entirely. And whether or not we had a right to get involved in Vietnam in the first place, well, I tend to believe we didn't, although I really don't know enough of the facts to say that's my final opinion on the matter.
Well, I'm in the process of recompiling everything with all the default optimizations. For now, that'll be good enough (hopefully it'll work), and I'll play with the optimizations once I've grown more comfortable with gentoo. Thanks for your post, it's nice to at least know that I'm not the only one having this trouble.
You said: If your country doesn't agree that bin Laden is a murderer, and it tries to protect him from us, then my country has every right to come in there and capture him anyway, and we have every right to use force against anyone trying to stop us.
Correct.
Later, you said: I never said we have a right to go to war for our principles.
Also correct.
Gotcha! Do I win a prize?
Umm, you didn't get me. We have the right to come in there and capture bin Laden because he is a dangerous murdering terrorist, not because of our principles.
Seriously though - murder is not a universally defined term (as far as people and cultures are concerned, not bloated world bodies that can't even decide whether or not to open or close a window).
I don't care if murder is a universally defined term or not. It's completely irrelevant.
We believe it was pure butchery that nearly 3000 people were cut down on 9/11. Al Queada believes everyone is a valid target because they're at war with an entire culture, so they see it as soldiers fighting soldiers (sort of... in a sick, twisted way).
Al Quada can believe whatever they want. They're wrong. The fact that they believe that innocent US citizens are valid targets and are willing to act on that belief is exactly why we are justified in killing or capturing them.
Vegetarians believe it's murder to kill a cow.
Not all vegetarians believe that.
Therefore, it's not murder or crime to them. Most of the rest of the world sided with us, however, so we got the nod to go blow stuff up. We didn't have a "right" to do it, we just could and most of the world felt that our principles in the matter were correct and that we were justified in doing it.
Nope. We had a right. Self-defense is a right.
You have your opinions, I have mine.
Mine are consistent. Yours aren't.
Have fun with the video games.
Why does ICANN have to give the appearance of caring? And why don't UN Bureaucracies? They both should be run exactly the same way.
It was a straw man fallacy because you were implying that I didn't think we should go after bin Laden.
No I wasn't. In fact, I presumed that you did think that we should go after him. I was showing why your statement that "A country's laws should not reach into another country" was wrong.
It would be like me saying that I didn't think that a country should force their laws on another and thus shouldn't be able to enforce our spam laws over there, and then having you ask whether or not we should enforce our murder laws if they support the mass slaughter of babies.
Yes, that's exactly what it's like. Sometimes a country should force their laws on another.
Also, you didn't disprove my statement, you just stated your opinion.
I showed that your own opinion contradicts your statement.
No, we declare war on al Quaeda, although with George W. Bush's thinking it wouldn't be that stupid to declare war on a person considering that we're declaring war on a practice.
Al Quaeda is not a country. It is as ridiculous for congress to declare war on it as it is for congress to declare war on bin Laden. And we only declared war on terrorism in a colloquial sense. Congress did not officially declare war on terrorism, and GWB was against them doing so.
And I'm not saying that we wait for another terrorist attack. We knew going in that there would be casualties, so, you take bin Laden as a war criminal, find some rule that he violated, and take care of him that way.
What if bin Laden didn't violate any war crimes after the declaration of war?
And you're willing to go with just a maybe when it comes to the internet?
No. If it were up to me I would insist that rules be put in place to make sure that censorship didn't happen.
I understand what you're saying, but that governing body that the UN would be creating would still be the UN's. They would only have as much power as the UN gave them, not as much power as we give them.
You're the one using the straw man analogies. Is it possible that the UN will give them too much power? Of course. But is it possible that they won't. Yes. I say wait and see the details of the proposal before dismissing it.
Because it's hard to do a much worse job than ICANN.
Almost 10 years now and I've never had problems with the Internet.
You've never received a spam, never clicked on a goatse link, never experienced a DOS attack, and never got hit with an internet worm?
If the UN takes all those laws and make them international laws, nobody would be able to do shit.
That's a straw man argument. No one is suggesting that the UN take all the laws of every country and make them international laws.
Yes, I do. And I certainly think they'd do a better job than ICANN.
We can't just grant ourselves rights that nobody else is allowed to have (although, Americans are obsessed with doing just that lately). If we have an inherent right to go to war for our principles, so does everyone else.
I never said we have a right to go to war for our principles. If bin Laden was merely a tax evader, or if all he did was steal some bread from a Kwik-e-mart, then we wouldn't have the right to go to war over it. But because he is a cold-blooded murdering terrorist, we do have the right to go to war over it. And so does anyone else.
That means that if Saudi Arabia decides that they're going to go to war with us tomorrow to go apprehend all those criminal women that bare their faces and *gasp* navels in public, that's their "right".
All I can say is bring it on. It'd be nice to have Saudi Arabia as the 51st state.
I think it's better to look at it as "it's not a right, it's a last resort". I think that, in the case of Afghanistan, that's also how it was used. We waited patiently for, what, 4 weeks? They refused repeated requests to turn him over, so we finally came to an end with the patient requests and went in after him.
Semantics, perhaps. I agree with you that war should be a last resort.
First, when I said unrelated, I meant in the sense that internet regulation isn't related to capturing Osama bin Laden.
OK, so what's your point?
Anyways, it seems that you were trying to use the straw man fallacy on me, which seems to be a tactic growing in popularity on Slashdot.
No, I did not use a straw man fallacy. I used a proof by example. You stated that "A country's laws should not reach into another country." I showed you an example of when a country's laws should reach into another country, thereby disproving your statement.
You don't nail him for the 9/11 attacks, you nail him for anything that he pulls from the war declaration forward.
So we declare war on Osama bin Laden (declare war on a person!?!?!?) and then wait for another terrorist attack to happen? No thanks. We need to kill or capture bin Laden before another terrorist attack happens.
Let's switch to the UN topic.
All they would have to do is amend those procedures to make things easier.
Right, and to amend the amendment procedures would require that you first use the amendment procedures.
Even if they didn't, they still could get those powers that they want.
How? And who is they?
Sure that's how a nation does things, but this is a governing body that has the ability to override a country's laws with their own.
Not necessarily. It would depend on what powers they are given. But in any case, we already have an example of one set of laws overriding those of another. The United States.
All that they need to do is grant themselves that power. What I'm trying to say is that the world has given them too much control.
The world may indeed have given them too much control, but that's irrelevant. Just because they have too much control doesn't mean that they should have no control whatsoever.
Could we just ignore them?
Maybe.
Also, people don't follow their rulings just because they make sense. Many people follow the UN's rulings because they have to. They are afraid of what would happen if they didn't.
I don't think you understand what I'm saying. A governing body for the Internet should be formed by the UN. I'm not saying the UN itself should govern the Internet. That governing body would have whatever powers we choose to give it. I'd argue for very limited powers. At most, they can take away your IP addresses.
That sounds all well and good when you only apply it to yourself forcing your way into someone else's country and in this circumstance.
Yep. It sure does.
Consider people who have been accused of practicing and/or preaching Christianity in a Fundamentalist Muslim country. They flee back to the U.S., their home. However, they still broke the law over there, even though they did nothing wrong from our point of view. Should that other country be allowed to try and remove that "criminal" by force from the United States, shooting down police officers, military, etc. who try to stop them in the process?
No. They shouldn't.
No, unless you can garner the support of the majority of the rest of the world, you shouldn't try something like that. Not too many people in their right minds think that blowing the Taliban and Al Quaeda to bits is a bad idea - they're pretty much universally hated. That doesn't mean that rule should be instituted all the time.
As I said, it should be instituted very rarely. Read my statement:
It's rare, but it does happen.
Congress did consult technically savvy people when coming up with those laws. And the problems with those laws are not technical. The problem is what the laws intend in the first place.
I didn't say the US shouldn't be able to try and capture bin Laden. I said they shouldn't be able to force another country to give him up.
By capturing him, we force the other country to give him up, don't we?
They also shouldn't be able to invade another country to find him, without an agreement from the foreign government.
That's where I disagree. When a foreign government protects someone like Osama bin Laden, we have no responsibility to respect the wishes of that government.
You disagree because you believe your moral view is the only possible correct view.
Yep. It's wrong to tell people to fly fucking airplanes into two buildings thereby killing lots of innocent victims. That's the only possible correct view. Any other view is incorrect.
We MUST eventually evolve to a state where we can respect others' belief systems.
No. Absolutely not. We must NEVER evolve to a state where we can respect a belief system which allows cold-blooded murder.
There are means of capturing bin Laden other than invading against a governments wishes and tearing their country apart looking for him.
What means would that be?
Just for the record, not that it matters since I am posting anonymously, but I do believe bin Laden should be beaten repeatedly to a painful death. But, why should a countries self governance be overridden just because someone else has a differing moral view and a larger army. That kind of defeats any self governance they may have had.
Defeating the self-governance of a government which protects murderers is exactly the point.
No. No country should ever be allowed to force its way into another country like that.
To follow such advice would lead to self-destruction.
I have a friend whose father would be put to death if he set foot back in his own country. The USA gladly accepted. This man obviously broke a law in his native country (Iran, if you care), so does that mean you're perfectly OK with Iran attacking the USA to get this man?
Whether or not I'm OK with it depends on the specific details, but I'm sure they're not going to be something I agree with.
Or do you feel that their laws just aren't as important as the USA's?
Important? I feel that many of their laws are not just. Furthermore, I don't think this is one of those rare cases that I was talking about before.
This is so braindead I have a hard time believing it's not a troll. I can't believe anyone actually thinks this way (though sadly, I must, because george "w" bush does as well).
So are you a complete pacifist? Does anyone ever have a moral right to use force? Why does it matter, philosophically, whether the perpetrator is within or without a country's borders?
And for the record, I was born and raised in the USA, and I reside there (here!) currently. I love a lot about this country, but that doesn't mean I agree with everything it does, or that I believe we're somehow exempt from any rules. We have to play fair, just as everyone else does.
And what do you suggest we do when others don't play fair? Do you consider it fair to allow a murderer safe haven from justice?
It's funny how people bring up completely unrelated issues that would seem unarguable when trying to corner somebody.
I don't think you were following the thread closely enough. What I said was completely related. First, I said: