Did you actually read my post? I didn't say he deserves to go to jail. I said that he should get a fair trial, and outlined several scenarios in which he could escape serious prison time despite his admitted guilt.
In another post on this story I say that it's a good thing the American people learn of the government doing things the American people doesn't want them to do. I'm glad Snowden revealed PRISM and programs like it. I'm less glad he revealed details about the NSA doing it's job, like spying on foreigners, but that's another issue.
I happen to believe in trials. So did the founding fathers. The alternative is summary judgement or an assassination. Would you prefer those? Certainly some authoritarians and monarchists do.
2) It wasn't an execution, it was an armed conflict on a battlefield. Americans were shot at from and inside the house. There was every reason to believe that Osama would have a suicide vest or otherwise resist violently to capture. Osama made no attempt to surrender and was therefore a combatant. Of course they shot him on sight. If they'd found him face down naked and spread eagle on the floor screaming "I surrender" they would have taken him alive.
3) As you say, it was a military incursion into a neutral country. There was also the fact that the compound was close to a lot of Pakistani military units. Having the Commander-in-Chief in the room to give immediate orders or call up foreign leaders in the event something went wrong with the raid makes a lot of sense. There wasn't any popcorn.
I agree that crossed a line. I'm not sure the line was that of treason or not, but it certainly went against his purported claims of doing this to reveal government wrongdoing against American citizens.
Spy agencies spy on other countries. That's what they're supposed to do. Everyone spies on everybody else, friend or ally. If you disagree or find that surprising you're a naive idealist.
But mass warrantless surveillance of American citizens is not cool, and we need to know about that.
Let's face it though. He is guilty. He admits what he's done. We can argue about what the law should be, but not what the law is. It's illegal to take classified documents like Snowden did, and start giving them away to everybody like Snowden did. His reasons for doing what he did are irrelevant as it pertains to his legal liability. The fact that he or even the public sees himself as a whistle blower over illegal actions by the government are irrelevant as they pertain to his legal liability.
Of course, we do have jury nullification in the common law system. A jury could very well say, okay, well he did the crime, the evidence is overwhelming, but we're not going to say he's guilty because we don't agree with the law. That's quite possible. Sure, the prosecutor and judge will try to tell the jury that's not allowed, but it is, and it can happen. The jury system exists specifically so the people can check the government's power.
This is all a separate matter from trial fairness, of course. If I was Snowden, I might not be so inclined to trust a US federal court with my fate. The judge might disallow evidence or testimony that would give Snowden and his lawyers a chance to argue however subtlety for jury nullification. The judge might not sustain valid objections from the defense. The judge could give a horribly unfair instruction. All kinds of things could happen. Considering the overwhelming political pressures that are sure to be placed on any kind of trial, Snowden might very well find himself screwed. He might also think it was all worth it anyway.
Then of course we have the appeals system and of course the presidential pardon. Even if Snowden doesn't get a jury to nullify, that's hardly the end of it. He might get his case to the Supreme Court and have a fairer chance there. He might also have a groundswell of popular support that results in a pardon or at least a commutation of his sentence.
Personally, I would like to see Snowden prosecuted for the crimes he's accused of and given a trial by his peers. I would very much like to see him get a fair trial, with all the evidence and arguments heard. The outcome of such a trial would be of great interest to me, as well as whatever happens afterwards. We would all learn something from it. It might suck for Snowden, but he thinks he's doing all of this to teach the American people about their government. The way his trial is conducted would certainly teach us all about our government.
Rolls off our backs like water? Men are overwhelmingly the victims of violence and murder. We practically celebrate the prison rape of men in this culture, and certainly don't do anything to stop it. When a young boy is molested or raped by a woman, we blame the victim for "wanting it" and the press talks about how hot she is and how lucky he is. Female health issues like breast cancer research are much better funded and publicized than male health issues like prostate cancer. Men are overwhelmingly the casualties of war.
Women are graduating from college in greater numbers than men. It's a shame that even with their advantages, few can be bothered to get a degree in computer science. But whose fault is that really? In high school there was a single girl in my AP computer science class. In college, my first computer science class had three women. By the second computer science class, there was one. I never saw another after that.
If you want a job in an industry, you have to show up and get qualified for it. I hear a lot of pro diversity folks lamenting about how there's not enough diversity, well either there's something about females that makes them disinclined to go into certain fields and we should accept that, or something wrong is happening long, long before Google starts a round of hiring.
Is it that little girls are being discouraged from trying math and science at an early age? If that's true, then blame the overwhelming majority of elementary school teachers who are female. One platform issue of early feminism was to take over society's early educational systems. The plan worked brilliantly. Male teachers are now discriminated against teaching any students younger than middle school, and the result has been lower academic performance and achievement by male students, and the now majority of college degrees going to women. But still, girls aren't going into science and math. So that can't be it...
Maybe, the answer is really as obvious as it is to anyone who has actually been in a classroom studying technical subjects like computer science. Women just don't care to be in those jobs. Maybe that's a bad thing, maybe it's a neutral thing, maybe it's a good thing? Certainly plenty of companies have been successful advancing our computer technology without a large number of female employees. Maybe we should just shrug and worry about more important issues, like violence?
I agree they are ineffectual, because they don't understand us and never will. Their ideology is opposed to understanding others. I don't believe they can win.
I also don't believe fascism or communism could have ever won. We still considered those threats to be existential threats. Not because they could actually destroy us, but because it was their stated goal to destroy us. The same is true of fundamental islam. We ignore them at our own peril, of course, because while they can't win the war, they can certainly cause a lot of damage fighting it.
I also agree with you that we need to give the secular and cultural muslims (cultural in the way that there are cultural Christians who exchange presents at Christmas but don't go to church every Sunday) a chance to thrive and suppress their fundamentalist neighbors. Right now our strategy of doing so is by killing the fundamentalists. Can you think of a better strategy? I would really like to hear of one, and I'm sure our military would too. Sadly, when we try to ignore the problem, instead of preempting their attacks, they blow up our embassies, naval ships, and skyscrapers. When all we did was bomb their training camps, they stopped training in camps and started training in civilian centers. When we invaded a country overtly supporting them, they moved across borders into countries that are only covertly supporting them. Should we go to full scale war in a dozen countries? It seems a lot cheaper, and less dangerous, and yes, even less impactful to the civilians in those countries, if we simply launch a small, targeted missile from a drone.
I actually have read the qur'an, and hadith, and the writings of islamic scholars who studied both. Have you?
What I have read, the terrorists have, and the reason they do what they do is because they believe in it. They say as much all the time, have you not been listening?
I believed very much as you do, once. But after seeing how terrorist leaders tend to be more affluent than most, and the foot soldiers come from every economic background, I wanted to find out for myself the actual causes of jihad.
So I'll ask you, have you bought into a narrative? Have you done your own research or are you just listening to what others tell you? Have you read the qur'an and hadith, and the writings of islamic scholars who have studied islamic scripture? Seriously, go do your own studying of the issue and reach your own conclusions. I was surprised by what I found and you will be too.
I am not advocating genocide, here. I recognize that there are secular muslims who do pay only lip service to islam to prevent from getting killed by those who do more than just pay lip service. I would much rather empower them and make them our allies. But I don't think we should do nothing while the fundamentalists are killing us. This is a war that mohammed himself declared on all non-believers, and there will be no peace negotiation because the only acceptable end to them is the extermination of our way of life and all who oppose them. Again, not everyone who calls themselves a muslim thinks that way, but those who don't are considered heretics and the terrorists want to kill them too.
It won't take genocide to win the war. It will take a lot of deaths, but considering they want to wipe out everyone who doesn't follow islam, we should at least acknowledge the stakes.
There are secular muslims. Just like there's secular people in every religion and society. There are cultural muslims just like there are those who put up Christmas trees and talk about Easter bunnies but don't go to church every Sunday. Not everyone in muslim countries is convinced they should slaughter the infidels as their prophet commands. The problem is, those secular muslims are terrified of the practicing muslims, and for good reason. You don't dare speak out against jihad, call yourself an atheist, or suggest that maybe mohammed wasn't right about absolutely everything.
So long as we can prevent nuclear weapons from falling into the hands of the fundamentalists, I'm actually pretty optimistic that this war can be won with a minimum of bloodshed (and by minimum, I think back to the minimum of bloodshed it took to defeat fascism or communism in the last century). The world is becoming more and more interconnected. I certainly believe that, given a real choice, everyone would rather live in a westernized democracy than a fundamentalist theocracy where you can be executed for your beliefs or speaking your mind. The more they know about us, the more they will want to be like us. It's just a matter of getting our message, our ideology, out there for people to hear it.
But, in the meantime, we do need to wage the war that they declared on us. We need to do so with all the tools at our disposal, recognizing that there are, indeed, secular and cultural muslims that would support our ideology if given the opportunity to do so, and can be allies against the fundamentalists in the long term. Killing those individuals would be a mistake. But don't for a second think a lot of those individuals are hanging out with terrorist leaders.
While I agree they think they're the good guys, they don't have a lot of credibility in this. The fact is, they started this war, and they've been waging it since the very beginning of islam when their warlord prophet told them hundreds of years ago to kill or enslave all the infidels. When they slaughter innocents, they're not thinking, well, the ends justify the means in a war against imperialism. No, they're thinking those are all guilty people because they don't pray to allah, and nothing is a crime if it's committed against somebody who isn't a muslim. They don't see the difference between a soldier and a civilian. All are valid targets in their ideology.
There is no negotiation that will satisfy them, only our complete surrender and enslavement (along with forced conversions and executions) will satisfy them. Western democracy is incompatible with their ideology, and their ideology, like ours, wants to see the entire world following it. We need to treat them like the existential threat that they are, just as we did with fascism and communism in the last century, and defend ourselves with all the tools at our disposal. I'm not saying we need to nuke mecca or anything, but we do need to empower secular muslims so they can police their fundamentalist neighbors. Right now the secular muslims are terrified and can't even speak openly against the actions of jihadists. In the meantime, the fundamentalists have to be battled openly with all our might.
You really think they wouldn't use those weapons regardless? Their religion tells them to kill the infidels, not just the infidels' military. They're following a warlord prophet who slaughtered and raped his way across the whole middle east. Either you convert or you're enslaved or you die. I don't want to convert and I don't want to be a slave, I imagine you don't want to be either, so it's kill or be killed.
We didn't start this war, let's not forget, and I certainly don't want us to have to commit genocide to end it. But they are intent on wiping us out, and there is no peace to be made since their ideology is directly opposed to our ideology. They cannot permit us to exist. They are like communism, or fascism before that. They are an existential threat that cannot be reasoned with. All we can hope for is the secular muslims to gain enough power and numbers so they stop being afraid of the fundamentalist elements of their religion, and police their own. Until they do that, we have to defend ourselves. That means killing terrorists. Sometimes those terrorists hide among civilians. Do we want to tell them that if they do that, we won't ever fight them? Do we want to tell them that we have no stomach for this conflict, and they can take hostages, and blow up civilians, and we'll just surrender?
Let's also not just take their word for it either, when they claim civilians were killed in a drone strike. They have every reason to lie, and they've been caught falsifying evidence before.
I don't see it as some kind of chop-off-the-head attack, when we dronestrike a terrorist leader. I see it as dronestriking a terrorist. We do this all over the place. Not all dronestrikes are against leaders. We've done it against squads of foot soldiers too in pitched combat.
When you have an enemy in your sights, and there's no more intelligence to be gathered, and it's safe to do so, you pull the trigger. Anything less in a war is absurd.
This whole "problem" the FBI has would be solved by legalization. It would solve a lot of other problems, too, like our overcrowded prisons and a fair bit of untaxed organized crime.
I've never smoked marijuana, and I don't think I've ever even smelled it. If it was suddenly legal tomorrow, I probably wouldn't become a major pothead (and neither would anyone else who isn't already). I still support legalization. It is such a waste to keep marijuana illegal. It should just be like alcohol or tobacco, both of which are more dangerous and addictive than marijuana.
We all know how alcohol prohibition turned out. Everybody can see how marijuana prohibition is turning out. Everyone who wants to can still get their hands on it, and it's only encouraged a black market largely run by organized crime. The FBI complaining they can't hire any good cyber security experts is just the latest in a long line of absurdities resulting from this nonsense.
Can we please get whatever equivalent to the twenty-first amendment it'll take to end the madness over reefer?
I'm not the person you asked for a citation from, and I don't have any for anything specific to women, but, more generally:
1,029,615 incidents per year of a gun used in self defense (162,000 incidents a year where the person using a gun believed somebody "almost certainly would have been killed" if they didn't use their gun) Source: "Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun." By Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Fall 1995.
989,883 incidents per year where civilians use guns to defend themselves and others from crime Source: "Measuring Civilian Defensive Firearm Use: A Methodological Experiment." By David McDowall and others. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, March 2000.
498,000 incidents per year where a gun is used to defend a home from an intruder Source: "Estimating intruder-related firearm retrievals in U.S. households, 1994." By Robin M. Ikeda and others. Violence and Victims, Winter 1997.
I never really found him to be all that funny, but then I never found C-3PO funny either. Jar Jar was just the new C-3PO. You'll notice that Jar Jar is most active in movies where C-3PO is not, and vice versa.
Same bungling comic relief, there to entertain the kids.
Well, okay, true. I know the military wants those sorts of systems to replace minefields. They don't leave any explosives in the ground after the war is over, and they can be smart enough to choose a weapon system based on the threat (tank, launch an armor-piercing missile, squad of soldiers, launch a fragmentation bomb).
Still, that's a lot different than say, some kind of mobile automated killing machine.
Okay, I'll admit, when I read the first sentence of TFS, I figured this was some kind of joke campaign or something. I guess my mind is too much in science fiction, and not really noticing that the future is already here.
Still, do we really think the governments of the world (at least the ones with the resources to build these robots) are actually going to go for fully autonomous killing machines? I would think all of them would want humans in the loop, if for no other reason than to justify their military hierarchies. The USAF, for example, seems determined to keep pilots in planes.
I've spent some time talking to guys who work at MSR. I believe they do want to make things better. I also believe they want to ship them. What I don't believe is MS management wants to make things better or ship anything that MSR comes up with.
Maybe with the new CEO, things will change. Maybe that's just wishful thinking on the part of the MSR guys.
I'm one of those people who doesn't want to join a "climate disruption" religion, either for or against. Science is not about belief. Science is not about consensus, or believing authority. I want to see the scientific method and skepticism applied to hypotheses. I want to see experimental evidence. I want to see rigorous statistical analysis on data that has been collected using proper methodology.
I look at the "climate disruption" folks and don't see a lot of provable hypotheses. The models are consistently and verifiably wrong again and again and I don't see the so-called experts admitting they were wrong and changing their models or methods. All I see is them changing the terminology and shrilly declaring that some absurd percentage of "scientists" agree with what they're saying, whether those scientists are even in the field or not. I see leaked emails from "scientists" who are an embarrassment to the label, willingly adjusting their findings in order to secure funding, rather than following wherever the verifiable truth leads. I see rampant politicization of science to make it an "issue" to win elections over.
I look at the "deniers" and don't see a lot of provable hypotheses, either. I certainly think that skepticism is not something to be shouted down, however, and I would like to see some of the logical arguments "deniers" make tested scientifically. Without skepticism, there can be no science. In that sense, the "deniers" at least may be allied closer to the scientific virtue of rejecting authority and seeking the truth, even if they do so based on a lack of understanding or a political game, and are unwilling to offer up their own experiments or scientific observations.
It's not that I'm rejecting "climate disruption" science, it's that I'm rejecting the label of science for the "climate disruption" religion. Believe what you like about "climate disruption", and wage your holy war against the nonbelievers, just don't mistake anything you're doing for actual science. If everything you predict ends up being disproved by observation, and you then try to change the subject with argumentum ab auctoritate or a terminology switch, it's nothing more or less than a religion. Real scientists would admit they got things wrong, propose new models, and conduct observations and experiments to determine the truth. Instead what we get is "the debate is over." In science, the debate is never over. I hear "gravity is just a theory too", but gravity can be measured verifiably again and again, scientists continue to run experiments to prove Newton right, and scientists can't explain why it exists. Even with gravity, the debate is never over.
Now, since "climate disruption" has become a policy issue, rather than a scientific theory, I do choose to take a political side. In terms of policy, I don't believe we should "disrupt" the economy and spend trillions of dollars on something that may not even be needed, or won't be as bad as some believe. When it comes to policy, any policy, I like to see clearly defined problems, addressed with verifiable, scientifically-derived solutions. Give me a clear problem and a clear solution and I'll be all for it. Anything short of that, and I won't be voting for it. "Climate disruption" is not a clearly defined problem, it has no clearly defined, verifiable and scientifically-derived solution.
Even though I'm not a member of one of the climate religions, I do support the advancement of engineering to gain a greater mastery over our climate, should we ever, for any reason, decide to alter it on Earth or any other planet, and of course I support the science that engineering is based on. By all means, let's fund more climate science. Let's just make sure we're funding actual science that can produce verifiable results, and isn't politicized (either by governments or academia). Let's make our models the best they can be, but let's not rely on those models for anything too serious until they produce accurate predictions. I just fear that in this current political climate, proper scientific study on this matter has become virtually impossible.
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Did you actually read my post? I didn't say he deserves to go to jail. I said that he should get a fair trial, and outlined several scenarios in which he could escape serious prison time despite his admitted guilt.
In another post on this story I say that it's a good thing the American people learn of the government doing things the American people doesn't want them to do. I'm glad Snowden revealed PRISM and programs like it. I'm less glad he revealed details about the NSA doing it's job, like spying on foreigners, but that's another issue.
I happen to believe in trials. So did the founding fathers. The alternative is summary judgement or an assassination. Would you prefer those? Certainly some authoritarians and monarchists do.
2) It wasn't an execution, it was an armed conflict on a battlefield. Americans were shot at from and inside the house. There was every reason to believe that Osama would have a suicide vest or otherwise resist violently to capture. Osama made no attempt to surrender and was therefore a combatant. Of course they shot him on sight. If they'd found him face down naked and spread eagle on the floor screaming "I surrender" they would have taken him alive.
3) As you say, it was a military incursion into a neutral country. There was also the fact that the compound was close to a lot of Pakistani military units. Having the Commander-in-Chief in the room to give immediate orders or call up foreign leaders in the event something went wrong with the raid makes a lot of sense. There wasn't any popcorn.
I agree that crossed a line. I'm not sure the line was that of treason or not, but it certainly went against his purported claims of doing this to reveal government wrongdoing against American citizens.
Spy agencies spy on other countries. That's what they're supposed to do. Everyone spies on everybody else, friend or ally. If you disagree or find that surprising you're a naive idealist.
But mass warrantless surveillance of American citizens is not cool, and we need to know about that.
Let's face it though. He is guilty. He admits what he's done. We can argue about what the law should be, but not what the law is. It's illegal to take classified documents like Snowden did, and start giving them away to everybody like Snowden did. His reasons for doing what he did are irrelevant as it pertains to his legal liability. The fact that he or even the public sees himself as a whistle blower over illegal actions by the government are irrelevant as they pertain to his legal liability.
Of course, we do have jury nullification in the common law system. A jury could very well say, okay, well he did the crime, the evidence is overwhelming, but we're not going to say he's guilty because we don't agree with the law. That's quite possible. Sure, the prosecutor and judge will try to tell the jury that's not allowed, but it is, and it can happen. The jury system exists specifically so the people can check the government's power.
This is all a separate matter from trial fairness, of course. If I was Snowden, I might not be so inclined to trust a US federal court with my fate. The judge might disallow evidence or testimony that would give Snowden and his lawyers a chance to argue however subtlety for jury nullification. The judge might not sustain valid objections from the defense. The judge could give a horribly unfair instruction. All kinds of things could happen. Considering the overwhelming political pressures that are sure to be placed on any kind of trial, Snowden might very well find himself screwed. He might also think it was all worth it anyway.
Then of course we have the appeals system and of course the presidential pardon. Even if Snowden doesn't get a jury to nullify, that's hardly the end of it. He might get his case to the Supreme Court and have a fairer chance there. He might also have a groundswell of popular support that results in a pardon or at least a commutation of his sentence.
Personally, I would like to see Snowden prosecuted for the crimes he's accused of and given a trial by his peers. I would very much like to see him get a fair trial, with all the evidence and arguments heard. The outcome of such a trial would be of great interest to me, as well as whatever happens afterwards. We would all learn something from it. It might suck for Snowden, but he thinks he's doing all of this to teach the American people about their government. The way his trial is conducted would certainly teach us all about our government.
Rolls off our backs like water? Men are overwhelmingly the victims of violence and murder. We practically celebrate the prison rape of men in this culture, and certainly don't do anything to stop it. When a young boy is molested or raped by a woman, we blame the victim for "wanting it" and the press talks about how hot she is and how lucky he is. Female health issues like breast cancer research are much better funded and publicized than male health issues like prostate cancer. Men are overwhelmingly the casualties of war.
Women are graduating from college in greater numbers than men. It's a shame that even with their advantages, few can be bothered to get a degree in computer science. But whose fault is that really? In high school there was a single girl in my AP computer science class. In college, my first computer science class had three women. By the second computer science class, there was one. I never saw another after that.
If you want a job in an industry, you have to show up and get qualified for it. I hear a lot of pro diversity folks lamenting about how there's not enough diversity, well either there's something about females that makes them disinclined to go into certain fields and we should accept that, or something wrong is happening long, long before Google starts a round of hiring.
Is it that little girls are being discouraged from trying math and science at an early age? If that's true, then blame the overwhelming majority of elementary school teachers who are female. One platform issue of early feminism was to take over society's early educational systems. The plan worked brilliantly. Male teachers are now discriminated against teaching any students younger than middle school, and the result has been lower academic performance and achievement by male students, and the now majority of college degrees going to women. But still, girls aren't going into science and math. So that can't be it...
Maybe, the answer is really as obvious as it is to anyone who has actually been in a classroom studying technical subjects like computer science. Women just don't care to be in those jobs. Maybe that's a bad thing, maybe it's a neutral thing, maybe it's a good thing? Certainly plenty of companies have been successful advancing our computer technology without a large number of female employees. Maybe we should just shrug and worry about more important issues, like violence?
I agree they are ineffectual, because they don't understand us and never will. Their ideology is opposed to understanding others. I don't believe they can win.
I also don't believe fascism or communism could have ever won. We still considered those threats to be existential threats. Not because they could actually destroy us, but because it was their stated goal to destroy us. The same is true of fundamental islam. We ignore them at our own peril, of course, because while they can't win the war, they can certainly cause a lot of damage fighting it.
I also agree with you that we need to give the secular and cultural muslims (cultural in the way that there are cultural Christians who exchange presents at Christmas but don't go to church every Sunday) a chance to thrive and suppress their fundamentalist neighbors. Right now our strategy of doing so is by killing the fundamentalists. Can you think of a better strategy? I would really like to hear of one, and I'm sure our military would too. Sadly, when we try to ignore the problem, instead of preempting their attacks, they blow up our embassies, naval ships, and skyscrapers. When all we did was bomb their training camps, they stopped training in camps and started training in civilian centers. When we invaded a country overtly supporting them, they moved across borders into countries that are only covertly supporting them. Should we go to full scale war in a dozen countries? It seems a lot cheaper, and less dangerous, and yes, even less impactful to the civilians in those countries, if we simply launch a small, targeted missile from a drone.
But if you have a better idea, please, do tell.
I actually have read the qur'an, and hadith, and the writings of islamic scholars who studied both. Have you?
What I have read, the terrorists have, and the reason they do what they do is because they believe in it. They say as much all the time, have you not been listening?
I believed very much as you do, once. But after seeing how terrorist leaders tend to be more affluent than most, and the foot soldiers come from every economic background, I wanted to find out for myself the actual causes of jihad.
So I'll ask you, have you bought into a narrative? Have you done your own research or are you just listening to what others tell you? Have you read the qur'an and hadith, and the writings of islamic scholars who have studied islamic scripture? Seriously, go do your own studying of the issue and reach your own conclusions. I was surprised by what I found and you will be too.
I am not advocating genocide, here. I recognize that there are secular muslims who do pay only lip service to islam to prevent from getting killed by those who do more than just pay lip service. I would much rather empower them and make them our allies. But I don't think we should do nothing while the fundamentalists are killing us. This is a war that mohammed himself declared on all non-believers, and there will be no peace negotiation because the only acceptable end to them is the extermination of our way of life and all who oppose them. Again, not everyone who calls themselves a muslim thinks that way, but those who don't are considered heretics and the terrorists want to kill them too.
It's only unfounded if you don't think the qur'an and hadith are the foundation of terrorist ideology.
It won't take genocide to win the war. It will take a lot of deaths, but considering they want to wipe out everyone who doesn't follow islam, we should at least acknowledge the stakes.
There are secular muslims. Just like there's secular people in every religion and society. There are cultural muslims just like there are those who put up Christmas trees and talk about Easter bunnies but don't go to church every Sunday. Not everyone in muslim countries is convinced they should slaughter the infidels as their prophet commands. The problem is, those secular muslims are terrified of the practicing muslims, and for good reason. You don't dare speak out against jihad, call yourself an atheist, or suggest that maybe mohammed wasn't right about absolutely everything.
So long as we can prevent nuclear weapons from falling into the hands of the fundamentalists, I'm actually pretty optimistic that this war can be won with a minimum of bloodshed (and by minimum, I think back to the minimum of bloodshed it took to defeat fascism or communism in the last century). The world is becoming more and more interconnected. I certainly believe that, given a real choice, everyone would rather live in a westernized democracy than a fundamentalist theocracy where you can be executed for your beliefs or speaking your mind. The more they know about us, the more they will want to be like us. It's just a matter of getting our message, our ideology, out there for people to hear it.
But, in the meantime, we do need to wage the war that they declared on us. We need to do so with all the tools at our disposal, recognizing that there are, indeed, secular and cultural muslims that would support our ideology if given the opportunity to do so, and can be allies against the fundamentalists in the long term. Killing those individuals would be a mistake. But don't for a second think a lot of those individuals are hanging out with terrorist leaders.
While I agree they think they're the good guys, they don't have a lot of credibility in this. The fact is, they started this war, and they've been waging it since the very beginning of islam when their warlord prophet told them hundreds of years ago to kill or enslave all the infidels. When they slaughter innocents, they're not thinking, well, the ends justify the means in a war against imperialism. No, they're thinking those are all guilty people because they don't pray to allah, and nothing is a crime if it's committed against somebody who isn't a muslim. They don't see the difference between a soldier and a civilian. All are valid targets in their ideology.
There is no negotiation that will satisfy them, only our complete surrender and enslavement (along with forced conversions and executions) will satisfy them. Western democracy is incompatible with their ideology, and their ideology, like ours, wants to see the entire world following it. We need to treat them like the existential threat that they are, just as we did with fascism and communism in the last century, and defend ourselves with all the tools at our disposal. I'm not saying we need to nuke mecca or anything, but we do need to empower secular muslims so they can police their fundamentalist neighbors. Right now the secular muslims are terrified and can't even speak openly against the actions of jihadists. In the meantime, the fundamentalists have to be battled openly with all our might.
You really think they wouldn't use those weapons regardless? Their religion tells them to kill the infidels, not just the infidels' military. They're following a warlord prophet who slaughtered and raped his way across the whole middle east. Either you convert or you're enslaved or you die. I don't want to convert and I don't want to be a slave, I imagine you don't want to be either, so it's kill or be killed.
We didn't start this war, let's not forget, and I certainly don't want us to have to commit genocide to end it. But they are intent on wiping us out, and there is no peace to be made since their ideology is directly opposed to our ideology. They cannot permit us to exist. They are like communism, or fascism before that. They are an existential threat that cannot be reasoned with. All we can hope for is the secular muslims to gain enough power and numbers so they stop being afraid of the fundamentalist elements of their religion, and police their own. Until they do that, we have to defend ourselves. That means killing terrorists. Sometimes those terrorists hide among civilians. Do we want to tell them that if they do that, we won't ever fight them? Do we want to tell them that we have no stomach for this conflict, and they can take hostages, and blow up civilians, and we'll just surrender?
Let's also not just take their word for it either, when they claim civilians were killed in a drone strike. They have every reason to lie, and they've been caught falsifying evidence before.
I don't see it as some kind of chop-off-the-head attack, when we dronestrike a terrorist leader. I see it as dronestriking a terrorist. We do this all over the place. Not all dronestrikes are against leaders. We've done it against squads of foot soldiers too in pitched combat.
When you have an enemy in your sights, and there's no more intelligence to be gathered, and it's safe to do so, you pull the trigger. Anything less in a war is absurd.
I would definitely be interested to learn what mammoths tasted like.
This whole "problem" the FBI has would be solved by legalization. It would solve a lot of other problems, too, like our overcrowded prisons and a fair bit of untaxed organized crime.
I've never smoked marijuana, and I don't think I've ever even smelled it. If it was suddenly legal tomorrow, I probably wouldn't become a major pothead (and neither would anyone else who isn't already). I still support legalization. It is such a waste to keep marijuana illegal. It should just be like alcohol or tobacco, both of which are more dangerous and addictive than marijuana.
We all know how alcohol prohibition turned out. Everybody can see how marijuana prohibition is turning out. Everyone who wants to can still get their hands on it, and it's only encouraged a black market largely run by organized crime. The FBI complaining they can't hire any good cyber security experts is just the latest in a long line of absurdities resulting from this nonsense.
Can we please get whatever equivalent to the twenty-first amendment it'll take to end the madness over reefer?
Yes, I went there.
67,000, of course, is larger than the 10,886 (in 2008, according to the FBI) or so murders a year using guns.
I'm not the person you asked for a citation from, and I don't have any for anything specific to women, but, more generally:
1,029,615 incidents per year of a gun used in self defense (162,000 incidents a year where the person using a gun believed somebody "almost certainly would have been killed" if they didn't use their gun)
Source: "Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun." By Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Fall 1995.
989,883 incidents per year where civilians use guns to defend themselves and others from crime
Source: "Measuring Civilian Defensive Firearm Use: A Methodological Experiment." By David McDowall and others. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, March 2000.
498,000 incidents per year where a gun is used to defend a home from an intruder
Source: "Estimating intruder-related firearm retrievals in U.S. households, 1994." By Robin M. Ikeda and others. Violence and Victims, Winter 1997.
I never really found him to be all that funny, but then I never found C-3PO funny either. Jar Jar was just the new C-3PO. You'll notice that Jar Jar is most active in movies where C-3PO is not, and vice versa.
Same bungling comic relief, there to entertain the kids.
Well, okay, true. I know the military wants those sorts of systems to replace minefields. They don't leave any explosives in the ground after the war is over, and they can be smart enough to choose a weapon system based on the threat (tank, launch an armor-piercing missile, squad of soldiers, launch a fragmentation bomb).
Still, that's a lot different than say, some kind of mobile automated killing machine.
Okay, I'll admit, when I read the first sentence of TFS, I figured this was some kind of joke campaign or something. I guess my mind is too much in science fiction, and not really noticing that the future is already here.
Still, do we really think the governments of the world (at least the ones with the resources to build these robots) are actually going to go for fully autonomous killing machines? I would think all of them would want humans in the loop, if for no other reason than to justify their military hierarchies. The USAF, for example, seems determined to keep pilots in planes.
All this talk of robots and automation as relating to television just makes me think of the Network Execubots from Futurama.
I've spent some time talking to guys who work at MSR. I believe they do want to make things better. I also believe they want to ship them. What I don't believe is MS management wants to make things better or ship anything that MSR comes up with.
Maybe with the new CEO, things will change. Maybe that's just wishful thinking on the part of the MSR guys.
You can (effectively) turn any camera off. Just "accidentally" point it the wrong way, or "accidentally" cover it up with something.
I'm one of those people who doesn't want to join a "climate disruption" religion, either for or against. Science is not about belief. Science is not about consensus, or believing authority. I want to see the scientific method and skepticism applied to hypotheses. I want to see experimental evidence. I want to see rigorous statistical analysis on data that has been collected using proper methodology.
I look at the "climate disruption" folks and don't see a lot of provable hypotheses. The models are consistently and verifiably wrong again and again and I don't see the so-called experts admitting they were wrong and changing their models or methods. All I see is them changing the terminology and shrilly declaring that some absurd percentage of "scientists" agree with what they're saying, whether those scientists are even in the field or not. I see leaked emails from "scientists" who are an embarrassment to the label, willingly adjusting their findings in order to secure funding, rather than following wherever the verifiable truth leads. I see rampant politicization of science to make it an "issue" to win elections over.
I look at the "deniers" and don't see a lot of provable hypotheses, either. I certainly think that skepticism is not something to be shouted down, however, and I would like to see some of the logical arguments "deniers" make tested scientifically. Without skepticism, there can be no science. In that sense, the "deniers" at least may be allied closer to the scientific virtue of rejecting authority and seeking the truth, even if they do so based on a lack of understanding or a political game, and are unwilling to offer up their own experiments or scientific observations.
It's not that I'm rejecting "climate disruption" science, it's that I'm rejecting the label of science for the "climate disruption" religion. Believe what you like about "climate disruption", and wage your holy war against the nonbelievers, just don't mistake anything you're doing for actual science. If everything you predict ends up being disproved by observation, and you then try to change the subject with argumentum ab auctoritate or a terminology switch, it's nothing more or less than a religion. Real scientists would admit they got things wrong, propose new models, and conduct observations and experiments to determine the truth. Instead what we get is "the debate is over." In science, the debate is never over. I hear "gravity is just a theory too", but gravity can be measured verifiably again and again, scientists continue to run experiments to prove Newton right, and scientists can't explain why it exists. Even with gravity, the debate is never over.
Now, since "climate disruption" has become a policy issue, rather than a scientific theory, I do choose to take a political side. In terms of policy, I don't believe we should "disrupt" the economy and spend trillions of dollars on something that may not even be needed, or won't be as bad as some believe. When it comes to policy, any policy, I like to see clearly defined problems, addressed with verifiable, scientifically-derived solutions. Give me a clear problem and a clear solution and I'll be all for it. Anything short of that, and I won't be voting for it. "Climate disruption" is not a clearly defined problem, it has no clearly defined, verifiable and scientifically-derived solution.
Even though I'm not a member of one of the climate religions, I do support the advancement of engineering to gain a greater mastery over our climate, should we ever, for any reason, decide to alter it on Earth or any other planet, and of course I support the science that engineering is based on. By all means, let's fund more climate science. Let's just make sure we're funding actual science that can produce verifiable results, and isn't politicized (either by governments or academia). Let's make our models the best they can be, but let's not rely on those models for anything too serious until they produce accurate predictions. I just fear that in this current political climate, proper scientific study on this matter has become virtually impossible.
I'm honestly asking here, but how much typing do you actually need to do on your phone?