You might want to take a look at Bush's 2nd inaugural speech and pay attention this time. We're unrolling the old relationships and building up the democrats. We've created a list of priority and are going down that list to the limit of our capabilities. This involves a lot of hard questions about who do we pop 1st (it turns out Saddam) where can we take advantage of targets of opportunity (Lebanon, Ukraine, Georgia), and where can we only pressure for some minor protections for democracy activists(Central Asia, Saudi Arabia).
If we pull the plug wholesale and can't control the chaos, things can end up worse than under the old system, discrediting the fight for liberty for decades. President Bush is, rightly, not taking that path. Rather he's doing it in a controlled fashion and setting things up for his successor (of whatever party) to continue the work and flip even more countries over to liberty.
Specifically about Haiti, we've tried just about every variation with that country from noninterference to long-term occupation. Nothing's worked. Lavalas has lots of fans among the left but are just as uncommitted to the rule of law as the thugs that ousted them. I'm not a fan of coups, thugs, or necklacing. Who does that leave in Haiti that is worthy of my support? No one, that's who.
Well kudos to you. The dominant impulse among realists at that time was to try to wear down and exhaust both Iraq and Iran. There were no real fans of either in those days among US policy elites. It was an ugly, brutal policy that was right in line with every other major power in the world. Nobody tilted too hard as the ayatollahs fought the Baath.
We've already repudiated the policy. Shall we dress in sackcloth and ashes and withdraw from the world? That's just a guarantee of more Darfur genocides. If the US doesn't lead, nobody steps up in our place.
I hope you do realize that Iraq and Al Queda did have a relationship. Ansar Al Islam did Saddam's dirty work for him in the northern no fly zone and Iraqi help and training for Al Queda has been documented in documentary finds in Baghdad. They may or may not (I'm leaning towards may not) have provided some background support for 9/11 but the idea that there was no relationship at all has been pretty thoroughly debunked.
I'm sorry but Hamas is committed, and has long been committed to the kind of islamist government that we can't tolerate, violent and committed to our long-term destruction. They're committed to that ideology for their own reasons that stretch back to before the US was founded, much less Israel. The Islamic world has been on a multi-century slide and crazy movements like Hamas are just a symptom.
As far as respect goes, you really should read up on what kind of respect the islamists demand. It's the respect of the 2nd class inhabitant exhibits to his masters. It's called dhimmitude and no, I won't give that. If you knowingly would, shame on you.
Maybe people won't associate with Hamas if supporting Hamas via affiliation or donation brings with it some cost, like maybe getting your ass thrown in jail or deported. But that's not something that you seem to want to do. I've got my Hamas discouragement idea, what's yours?
Ireland ranks #1 on that list. You might want to look here for a clearer view.
Irish free speech is subject to "public order and morality" limits as well as this gem:
The education of public opinion being, however, a matter of such grave import to the common good, the State shall endeavour to ensure that organs of public opinion, such as the radio, the press, the cinema, while preserving their rightful liberty of expression, including criticism of Government policy, shall not be used to undermine public order or morality or the authority of the State.
The publication or utterance of blasphemous, seditious, or indecent matter is an offence which shall be punishable in accordance with law.
If you think this is better than the US system, that's your perogative. I think you're nuts, though.
It's really funny how these Washington hacks did a decent response both before and after Katrina but only when Louisiana gets hit did they turn incompetent. It's also funny how LA wasn't as hard hit as neighboring Mississippi but the Feds weren't hacks there either.
Katrina was woefully misreported. The US is not slipping into a recession. We lost a city because over 20 years ago they didn't start the 20 year process of upgrading the defenses to handle a Cat 5 storm. For losing a major city, we're actually not doing so bad, only 2/10ths of a point on unemployment and the Fed worried more about inflation than about a weak economy (they'll be raising rates again in November). Wherever you're getting your news, it's not serving you well.
Finally, yeah, we got refugees. That happens when you lose an entire city. People are moving back as the cleanup progresses and a bunch of apartments and houses elsewhere have gotten snapped up as some decide to take the opportunity to relocate. There's no shame in natural disaster refugees. That'll always happen if the storm or the quake's big enough. We don't have camps of them though. I think the last refugee camps we had were for the dust bowl migrants.
I certainly would want to narrow the franchise if the number of people selling their vote hit double digits. The largest cogent power blocks in the UN are dictators and countries whose votes are for sale. That kind of arrangement can't be trusted with real power which is why the General Assembly is already just a talking shop.
If The Bush twins were caught up in a bribery scheme as ugly as Kofi Annan's kid is in actuality, we'd be having impeachment hearings and Cheney might well be president, if not Hastert.
The level of accountability in the UN is mind bogglingly low. This isn't international democracy. This isn't even Chicago Ward politics in Al Capone's day.
You might want to actually read the papers or turn on the news once in awhile. George Bush made several speeches that basically said "we screwed up when we did that sort of thing and we're not going to do it anymore". We're still toppling regimes now but they tend to be dictators and get replaced by representative governments. We're going through the long process of cleaning up the mess we made. We're not supermen. It's going to take awhile.
You know, we used to do a lot of stupid things and then we wised up. We did wage and price controls under Nixon. We ran out of gas at fueling stations because we controlled that price too.
We had this little learning moment that most americans call 9/11. Some apparently learned more than others.
Actually, they can't afford it. They aren't that rich, they *depend* on exporting their manufactured goods to the world, and this just pisses people off and convinces the sober investor that maybe it might be a good idea to start diversifying out of the PRC to manufacturers who aren't quite such idiots about these things.
You know, Libya did recently give up a clandestine nuclear weapons program. That was part of the recent deal they made to get sanctions lifted. I don't know about you but if a country confessed to a clandestine nuke program, I'd be a little less self-righteous about how exporting computers to that nation during the time period when they were working on nuclear weapons illegally is just a tactic of "the man" to keep the muslim down.
As for Hamas, if you want to run a nursery, run a nursery. Don't organizationally affiliate with a group of nuts who make human bombs. You're giving them cover and providing nice conduits for funneling support to the armed wing.
I used to have all sorts of discussions with irish americans who were Sinn Fein supporters on this very theme. They ended up buying bullets used to kill and they knew it. They just had a nice excuse that it was for relief. Deep down, they knew that if they really wanted to make sure the money didn't go to violence, they could have sent a check to a Catholic Parish.
There were north of 20 separate reasons used to justify the invasion of Iraq. WMD ended up being the weakest of the lot. Several of the others have never been challenged, much less debunked. Saddam Hussein was blatantly, publicly supporting each suicide bombing in Israel with $25k to the family. That's simply state sponsored terrorism and it wouldn't have stayed an Israel only tactic any more than beheading the kaffir was something only those Chechens used against russians.
The US and the rest of the world was shocked at the end of Gulf War I at how much closer Iraq was to the bomb than they had estimated. Iraq's history of successfully hiding a nuclear weapons program meant they needed to be on best behavior. They weren't and they paid the price. The alternative is unthinkable.
Absent the US participation in pushing back Nazi Germany from N. Africa, liberating Italy, and invading France, is there any scenario that the available forces in the alliance could have done it? I doubt it. The lend-lease shipments were only the beginning. Had the US decided to go after Japan as a priority over Germany, the armistice lines would likely have been quite different and not in the favor of a free Europe.
Would these be reasonable people like Canada, France, Germany, or Italy? All of these countries have free speech restrictions that would be thrown out in a minute under US law. These are all very fine places and some things they get right better than the US. Free speech isn't one of them.
The british rightly should be proud of their tremendous bravery and martial skill in holding back Nazi Germany from invading. It was a close run thing though, wasn't it. Why if there had been a few less spare parts, bullets, and other war supplies available, things might have gone the other way. It's a good thing you had a steady supplier...
Yes, the british were brave. They still are. The US was there too and should be credited its fair share as we bent our own laws into pretzels to lean towards you and men died running those supplies to keep the Spitfires flying even when we weren't at war with Germany.
Fair's fair, and americans can sometimes bring it up too often. It doesn't excuse airbrushing the US contribution out of the picture though.
It would be an awful mess and increase traffic in practice as people would likely, in practice, check multiple "roots" to see if a missing domain is just being blocked by one administrator.
Once you establish the technical ability to fork DNS at will, how fast do you think the PRC is going to go for its own national roots and block everybody elses? Be careful what you're creating.
Actually, the firm had nine employees and five of them were arrested, according to the Register. A little google research led me to the news that at least three were convicted. The charges were sending money and prohibited computers to Hamas, Libya, and Syria.
Somehow, I don't think the whole Hamas thing was an ICANN operation. Not finding another.iq registrar more quickly is something of a legitimate beef. It's really thin, though, really thin.
The ITU is in the UN for convenience sake. They predated the League of Nations and joined that body out of convenience and moved shop to the UN for the same reason. If the UN cratered, the ITU would just go independent and continue functioning merrily along. They might raise dues a bit if they had to pay their own rent...
The UN system put in the sanctions based on Saddam's failure to comply with the cease fire accords, making it impossible to actually, you know, end the war. It's not proper to just look at one section or another. The whole system fed into a monstrous bribery machine that Saddam used to buy up support on the Security Council. It's the bribes, from Kofi Annan's son to the Russian Orthodox Church that's the real problem. You don't put Internet governance in the hands of a group that you know is for sale.
That's what the EU is trying to do and it's idiotic for doing so.
So you'd rather put the Internet under the control of people who have actual violations of free speech on their law books for fear that we can't be trusted because we *might* do the same in the future. Absurd doesn't begin to cover it.
So if I understand correctly, a foreign country electing a head of government that you don't like means that net governance should be reconfigured? That's so far removed from normality and sanity that it simply takes my breath away.
By the time this comes down to the final showdown, most of the current heads of government will no longer be here, aside from the authoritarian ones. Bringing GWB into this is just idiocy.
Well, the whole "forcing" language means that somebody wants to extract the US out of its current role whether this results in a split Internet or not.
Sure we could create a system of treaties to do so. We did that sort of thing because we needed to. It provided some utility. Other than a unilateral middle finger thrust at the US, I fail to see the utility of changing the system. This isn't about standardization. We're already on one standard. This is about changing a world standard without any bad behavior on the part of the current maintainer.
The change will incur costs. The costs will be borne globally, i.e. the US will have to pay too for these new arrangements that are explicitly being raised because we're accused of being untrustworthy without any actual bad behavior. What other changes will be thrust on the Internet by the new order? Why is it going to be any more trustworthy than the current system?
Slashdot Mirror
You might want to take a look at Bush's 2nd inaugural speech and pay attention this time. We're unrolling the old relationships and building up the democrats. We've created a list of priority and are going down that list to the limit of our capabilities. This involves a lot of hard questions about who do we pop 1st (it turns out Saddam) where can we take advantage of targets of opportunity (Lebanon, Ukraine, Georgia), and where can we only pressure for some minor protections for democracy activists(Central Asia, Saudi Arabia).
If we pull the plug wholesale and can't control the chaos, things can end up worse than under the old system, discrediting the fight for liberty for decades. President Bush is, rightly, not taking that path. Rather he's doing it in a controlled fashion and setting things up for his successor (of whatever party) to continue the work and flip even more countries over to liberty.
Specifically about Haiti, we've tried just about every variation with that country from noninterference to long-term occupation. Nothing's worked. Lavalas has lots of fans among the left but are just as uncommitted to the rule of law as the thugs that ousted them. I'm not a fan of coups, thugs, or necklacing. Who does that leave in Haiti that is worthy of my support? No one, that's who.
Well kudos to you. The dominant impulse among realists at that time was to try to wear down and exhaust both Iraq and Iran. There were no real fans of either in those days among US policy elites. It was an ugly, brutal policy that was right in line with every other major power in the world. Nobody tilted too hard as the ayatollahs fought the Baath.
We've already repudiated the policy. Shall we dress in sackcloth and ashes and withdraw from the world? That's just a guarantee of more Darfur genocides. If the US doesn't lead, nobody steps up in our place.
You know, sometimes the US makes mistakes. Sometimes Israel makes mistakes. This one ranks right up there with firing on the USS Liberty.
I hope you do realize that Iraq and Al Queda did have a relationship. Ansar Al Islam did Saddam's dirty work for him in the northern no fly zone and Iraqi help and training for Al Queda has been documented in documentary finds in Baghdad. They may or may not (I'm leaning towards may not) have provided some background support for 9/11 but the idea that there was no relationship at all has been pretty thoroughly debunked.
I'm sorry but Hamas is committed, and has long been committed to the kind of islamist government that we can't tolerate, violent and committed to our long-term destruction. They're committed to that ideology for their own reasons that stretch back to before the US was founded, much less Israel. The Islamic world has been on a multi-century slide and crazy movements like Hamas are just a symptom.
As far as respect goes, you really should read up on what kind of respect the islamists demand. It's the respect of the 2nd class inhabitant exhibits to his masters. It's called dhimmitude and no, I won't give that. If you knowingly would, shame on you.
Maybe people won't associate with Hamas if supporting Hamas via affiliation or donation brings with it some cost, like maybe getting your ass thrown in jail or deported. But that's not something that you seem to want to do. I've got my Hamas discouragement idea, what's yours?
Irish free speech is subject to "public order and morality" limits as well as this gem:
If you think this is better than the US system, that's your perogative. I think you're nuts, though.
It's really funny how these Washington hacks did a decent response both before and after Katrina but only when Louisiana gets hit did they turn incompetent. It's also funny how LA wasn't as hard hit as neighboring Mississippi but the Feds weren't hacks there either.
Katrina was woefully misreported. The US is not slipping into a recession. We lost a city because over 20 years ago they didn't start the 20 year process of upgrading the defenses to handle a Cat 5 storm. For losing a major city, we're actually not doing so bad, only 2/10ths of a point on unemployment and the Fed worried more about inflation than about a weak economy (they'll be raising rates again in November). Wherever you're getting your news, it's not serving you well.
Finally, yeah, we got refugees. That happens when you lose an entire city. People are moving back as the cleanup progresses and a bunch of apartments and houses elsewhere have gotten snapped up as some decide to take the opportunity to relocate. There's no shame in natural disaster refugees. That'll always happen if the storm or the quake's big enough. We don't have camps of them though. I think the last refugee camps we had were for the dust bowl migrants.
I certainly would want to narrow the franchise if the number of people selling their vote hit double digits. The largest cogent power blocks in the UN are dictators and countries whose votes are for sale. That kind of arrangement can't be trusted with real power which is why the General Assembly is already just a talking shop.
If The Bush twins were caught up in a bribery scheme as ugly as Kofi Annan's kid is in actuality, we'd be having impeachment hearings and Cheney might well be president, if not Hastert.
The level of accountability in the UN is mind bogglingly low. This isn't international democracy. This isn't even Chicago Ward politics in Al Capone's day.
You might want to actually read the papers or turn on the news once in awhile. George Bush made several speeches that basically said "we screwed up when we did that sort of thing and we're not going to do it anymore". We're still toppling regimes now but they tend to be dictators and get replaced by representative governments. We're going through the long process of cleaning up the mess we made. We're not supermen. It's going to take awhile.
You know, we used to do a lot of stupid things and then we wised up. We did wage and price controls under Nixon. We ran out of gas at fueling stations because we controlled that price too.
We had this little learning moment that most americans call 9/11. Some apparently learned more than others.
Actually, they can't afford it. They aren't that rich, they *depend* on exporting their manufactured goods to the world, and this just pisses people off and convinces the sober investor that maybe it might be a good idea to start diversifying out of the PRC to manufacturers who aren't quite such idiots about these things.
You know, Libya did recently give up a clandestine nuclear weapons program. That was part of the recent deal they made to get sanctions lifted. I don't know about you but if a country confessed to a clandestine nuke program, I'd be a little less self-righteous about how exporting computers to that nation during the time period when they were working on nuclear weapons illegally is just a tactic of "the man" to keep the muslim down.
As for Hamas, if you want to run a nursery, run a nursery. Don't organizationally affiliate with a group of nuts who make human bombs. You're giving them cover and providing nice conduits for funneling support to the armed wing.
I used to have all sorts of discussions with irish americans who were Sinn Fein supporters on this very theme. They ended up buying bullets used to kill and they knew it. They just had a nice excuse that it was for relief. Deep down, they knew that if they really wanted to make sure the money didn't go to violence, they could have sent a check to a Catholic Parish.
There were north of 20 separate reasons used to justify the invasion of Iraq. WMD ended up being the weakest of the lot. Several of the others have never been challenged, much less debunked. Saddam Hussein was blatantly, publicly supporting each suicide bombing in Israel with $25k to the family. That's simply state sponsored terrorism and it wouldn't have stayed an Israel only tactic any more than beheading the kaffir was something only those Chechens used against russians.
The US and the rest of the world was shocked at the end of Gulf War I at how much closer Iraq was to the bomb than they had estimated. Iraq's history of successfully hiding a nuclear weapons program meant they needed to be on best behavior. They weren't and they paid the price. The alternative is unthinkable.
Absent the US participation in pushing back Nazi Germany from N. Africa, liberating Italy, and invading France, is there any scenario that the available forces in the alliance could have done it? I doubt it. The lend-lease shipments were only the beginning. Had the US decided to go after Japan as a priority over Germany, the armistice lines would likely have been quite different and not in the favor of a free Europe.
Would these be reasonable people like Canada, France, Germany, or Italy? All of these countries have free speech restrictions that would be thrown out in a minute under US law. These are all very fine places and some things they get right better than the US. Free speech isn't one of them.
The british rightly should be proud of their tremendous bravery and martial skill in holding back Nazi Germany from invading. It was a close run thing though, wasn't it. Why if there had been a few less spare parts, bullets, and other war supplies available, things might have gone the other way. It's a good thing you had a steady supplier...
Yes, the british were brave. They still are. The US was there too and should be credited its fair share as we bent our own laws into pretzels to lean towards you and men died running those supplies to keep the Spitfires flying even when we weren't at war with Germany.
Fair's fair, and americans can sometimes bring it up too often. It doesn't excuse airbrushing the US contribution out of the picture though.
It would be an awful mess and increase traffic in practice as people would likely, in practice, check multiple "roots" to see if a missing domain is just being blocked by one administrator.
Once you establish the technical ability to fork DNS at will, how fast do you think the PRC is going to go for its own national roots and block everybody elses? Be careful what you're creating.
Actually, the firm had nine employees and five of them were arrested, according to the Register. A little google research led me to the news that at least three were convicted. The charges were sending money and prohibited computers to Hamas, Libya, and Syria.
.iq registrar more quickly is something of a legitimate beef. It's really thin, though, really thin.
Somehow, I don't think the whole Hamas thing was an ICANN operation. Not finding another
The ITU is in the UN for convenience sake. They predated the League of Nations and joined that body out of convenience and moved shop to the UN for the same reason. If the UN cratered, the ITU would just go independent and continue functioning merrily along. They might raise dues a bit if they had to pay their own rent...
The UN system put in the sanctions based on Saddam's failure to comply with the cease fire accords, making it impossible to actually, you know, end the war. It's not proper to just look at one section or another. The whole system fed into a monstrous bribery machine that Saddam used to buy up support on the Security Council. It's the bribes, from Kofi Annan's son to the Russian Orthodox Church that's the real problem. You don't put Internet governance in the hands of a group that you know is for sale.
That's what the EU is trying to do and it's idiotic for doing so.
So you'd rather put the Internet under the control of people who have actual violations of free speech on their law books for fear that we can't be trusted because we *might* do the same in the future. Absurd doesn't begin to cover it.
So if I understand correctly, a foreign country electing a head of government that you don't like means that net governance should be reconfigured? That's so far removed from normality and sanity that it simply takes my breath away.
By the time this comes down to the final showdown, most of the current heads of government will no longer be here, aside from the authoritarian ones. Bringing GWB into this is just idiocy.
Well, the whole "forcing" language means that somebody wants to extract the US out of its current role whether this results in a split Internet or not.
Sure we could create a system of treaties to do so. We did that sort of thing because we needed to. It provided some utility. Other than a unilateral middle finger thrust at the US, I fail to see the utility of changing the system. This isn't about standardization. We're already on one standard. This is about changing a world standard without any bad behavior on the part of the current maintainer.
The change will incur costs. The costs will be borne globally, i.e. the US will have to pay too for these new arrangements that are explicitly being raised because we're accused of being untrustworthy without any actual bad behavior. What other changes will be thrust on the Internet by the new order? Why is it going to be any more trustworthy than the current system?