Snowden (the one who has yet to be caught in a lie)
You mean other than, just for starters, the lies he told his co-workers in order to get their system credentials? Or the fundamental lie that he told as he swore not to divulge classified information to places like China and Russia? He was lying on that most recent job from the moment he sat down, never mind when he started harvesting other people's passwords so he could gather all of that classified info he's spreading around.
Even the goons admit that Snowden did try those channels and it went directly into the round file, so no.
Citation needed. I've seen only one mention of a very luke-warm single email exchange that could even begin to be Snowden attempting any such thing. Cite your "admit" event, in detail.
You don't need extraordinary proof. It's the basic bones of the NSA's charter. They monitor overseas communications with an eye on collecting information that can help people in this country make informed security, military, and foreign policy decisions and actions. That's their entire reason for existing. It's why they're separate from the FBI.
Why did Obama promise not to spy on Merkel if that's what "we instructed our Congress to" do?
Because, as he's caught red handed doing on a regular basis about all sorts of things, he was once again lying. Of course our intelligence operations will continue to try to learn what other governments are up to, just like they do to us and everyone else.
And that is why using the Espionage Act to prosecute an American revealing illegal government actions to the American people is unconstitutional.
But it's perfectly reasonable as a vehicle to prosecute someone who provides sensitive information about overseas surveillance methods to people who pronounce themselves to be enemies of the country. Handing material to the Chinese, and then to the Russians, is bad enough. Spreading it around to make absolutely sure that Pakistan is helping the Taliban and Al Queda to make good, constructive use of it - exactly why he's a fool, and a traitor. All of his vague hand-waving and his holier-than-thou I'm-more-patriotic-than-you road show is laughable. Just ask his current host.
So, you're still pretending that it wasn't Richard Armitage that disclosed her name, and that the matter on which Libby was convicted had words in it that weren't shown to the public? What is your point? That you know things that nobody else, including hundreds of reporters who wrote about the case, knew? Please.
No, he escaped doing time for disclosing Valerie Plame's name to the press because it turns out that someone else is the person who did it. Try to keep up.
No, whatever news source you got that idea from is completely incorrect. Karl Rove outed Valerie Plame for political retribution.
How's that Koolaide tasting? Richard Armitage not only was the guy the reporter got her name from, he sat down for interviews and said as much. Then, the reporter conceded as much. If you're going to revise history, pick a topic that isn't so well documented - you'll still look like an anonymous coward, but perhaps like a slightly less foolish one.
The last person to out an operative was Scooter Libby. His sentence was commuted so that he served no jail time.
Are you really that misinformed, or are you just trying to deceive?
The person who disclosed Valerie Plame's name was Richard Armitage, not Libby. Libby's legal trouble revolved around how cooperative he was during one round of questioning, and his prosecution had nothing whatsoever to do with her name getting out. Because... it was a guy in the State Department, not the White House, who told the reporter her name. And Armitage never got any grief during the witch hunt.
Of course, Armitage was NOT the last person to "out" an operative. Just a few days ago, the White House stupidly disclosed the name of the top CIA official in Kabul. You know, a guy actually out dealing with dangerous ground, rather than occupying a desk in Virginia like Plame was.
Right, because only a Republican would refer to a facial tissue as a Kleenex, right?
The political douche here is you. The GP's comment had nothing to do with ads or money, that's entirely you projecting your own twisted, vitriolic world view into the situation, coward.
Serious academic research has gone into that topic, and studies from the CDC contribute as well. Let's say that those studies' numbers are over estimating the number of times that self defense brandishment has turned away an assault, a home invasion, etc., by a factor of a couple hundred percent. So we'll chop their numbers by 75%. That still leaves well over 100,000 times a year. And you're right, we can't know about the rest of them because most people don't report such stuff. I didn't, on the occasion of a violent person trying to break down our back door in the middle of the night, but I guarantee that there would have been a violent outcome if he hadn't been run off. But that's just another anecdote that you don't have to worry about, since the formal studies wouldn't have it in their large numbers.
The people who are most vocal about gun ownership are also the most unhinged.
Classic lazy ad hominem. The usual method of "argument" resorted to by the intellectually lazy and craven nanny statist. An assertion without any evidence, pure empty rhetorical BS. Which you know, which is why you're posting as the coward you are.
The most unhinged people in gun conversations are the ones who have no idea what they're talking about, but do it anyway. Thanks for being today's example.
if the gun literally didn't work half the days out of the year, you would be saving 250 lives at the cost of 25, before you count accidents
Though you're (deliberately, of course) not counting the thousands and thousands of cases each year where defensive brandishment stops an attack. That number hugely exceeds the number of deaths by any method. I'd be more than happy to fetch out a handgun in such a situation, but would not be happy to find that it can't ultimately work because I've got gloves on, or my fingertips are dirty, or a battery is low, or it's too cold out, or I forgot my magic bracelet. Or it happens to be my wife's gun, since her's was handier than mine.
by willingly handing that token over to another person you are assumed to have taken some degree of legal responsibility for what they do with said vehicle
Be specific. What degree of responsibility do you have for the decisions made by another person who is driving your car? Are you talking about handing your keys to someone who tells you in advance that they intend to drive it into a crowd of people at SXSW? Or are you talking about someone who borrows your car to run to the grocery store, but who freaks out along the way and kills some pedestrians? What is your (the car owner's) responsibility for the deaths of those people in the second scenario? What is Ford's or Audi's responsibility for that person's unforeseen irrational act? Be specific.
If mankind or it's decendants ever have access to power like this it isn't going to be in the hands of individuals.
I hope you're right. Individuals can't even learn to use apostrophes or spell correctly, let alone manage upcoming energy/mass-conversion-capable smart phones.
Also note that we invaded a country because of the actions of a few people in that country.
No, we worked with that country's northern alliance to overthrow the defacto government of Afghanistan (at the time, essentially the Taliban) because they harbored and supported Al Queda before and after the attack, refusing to act against them. They wouldn't act against them because, of course, they (the retrograde religious thugocracy that was ruling most of Afghanistan through murder and terror) actually agreed with their world view, and were running Afghanistan in exactly the model that Al Queda said (says, still) that they think is appropriate for the entire world.
The then-government of Afghanistan supported their favorite in-country guest/client organization's careful efforts to use aircraft to kill thousands of people in the US not very long ago. So you don't have to imagine what would happen.
So your saying your idea of intellectualism is star trek? Your not as intellectual as you think you are. The old star trek was hardly intellectual, unless you are 5.
Yes, but at least the screenwriters for the original series knew the difference between "your" and "you're" - an important measure of intellect, don't you think?
Your screed also makes it apparent that you may have some emotional issues that could benefit from therapy. You might want to look into that.
Nah, but your post makes it clear that you may have a sociopathic lack of empathy, or perhaps a strange affection for people like the guy in question - you know, the guy who deliberately raped, tortured, shot, and then buried alive the woman he was using for entertainment. Your pleasure at preferring him alive but in a cage for decades is, Mr. Coward, a surer sign of someone who needs help and some introspection.
Stop projecting. I didn't say anything about "closure." I'm talking about whether or not someone who has made the conscious decision that other known to be innocent people do not deserve to live their lives, and who seeks out an opportunity to rape and torture them to death (and showing no remorse whatsoever, and every indication that he'd do it again) should be the recipient of any of your day's labor or mine, let alone that of the family of the person he decided to rape and torture and murder in front of the shallow grave he made her watch him dig. Keep your pop-psychobabble "closure" crap for people who like to ruminate about such things.
This is about whether or not to reward someone like that with continued life after they've decided that you, or your daughter or wife, don't themselves deserve the same. And that since she doesn't, he's going to end it after some recreational violent rape and torture before blowing big holes in her with a shotgun.
If you can't see that feeding and housing someone like that for decades and asking his victims - among others - to pay the ticket day in and day out... if you process that in your head and arrive somehow at that being a good thing, then you're the one that needs some help. Because you've got a seriously bad case of mixed premises resulting in toxic moral relativism.
I always thought Tolkein (through Gandalf) put it quite well
Don't confuse Gandalf/Tolkien's admonishment about eagerness with ruling out that ultimate punishment when it's appropriate. Not to mention the concept is a little muddled anyway. Of course we can't "give life" to some innocent who was, for example, killed by a violent sexual predator. Our inability to do that sort of magic doesn't mean we should let cruel, predatory violent killers carry on with life, either. Such people have stated - often verbally, but always through their actions - that they consider any social contract regarding the value of other's lives to be out the window. He has said, "I get to decide on a whim - and without any consideration of how you live your life - if you live or die... and when you die, if I get to rape you to death in the process before choosing my next victim."
Our inability to "give life" back to you after he's raped you to death isn't a sign that we're unable to realize he's waived his own claim on life. We don't have to be "eager," in Tolkein's parlance, to deal with such a person. But nor should we nurse him along in a cage for the next 50 years.
It's called justice. Imagine your (for example) daughter was raped and murdered by this kind of guy. Every morning, you wake up and he wakes up. Your daughter will never wake up, join you for breakfast, or carry on with life. You, on the other hand, get to go to work and spend a little of each day earning some money that will be taken from you and used to feed your daughter's rapist HIS breakfast, clean his teeth, put clothes on him, and the rest. You get to think every day about how the guy who shows no remorse for raping your daughter to death gets to re-adjust to a lousy but very alive new life. He can watch the TV shows she'll never see, read the books she'll never read, correspond with and get visits from family members and other things that your raped, dead daughter will never get to do. Your never to be born grandchildren won't get to do them, either.
A guy who raped her to death, on the other hand, shows every sign of being happy to do exactly the same to the next person that comes into reach, and has no moral qualms about considering the people around him to be fair game. His moral code is that other people's lives are disposable, and that he is entitled to end those lives with his deliberate, purposeful cruelty and violence while getting off on that sexually. Your raped, murdered daughter is just one of his amusements, and lacking physical restraint he'll just do it over an over again. Whole teams of people will spend their waking hours, on your dime, making sure he can't carry out his chosen hobby on the next person's daughter or wife or mother. He will be kept in that cage, alive when your dead sexual plaything of a daughter is not, for decades and decades.
Or, he can be put out of everyone's misery like the savage, deliberately evil, remorseless animal he actually is, and you don't get to think - as you drink your first cup of coffee every morning, missing your murdered daughter - that he's down the road in the facility cafeteria you're buying to feed him, having his morning coffee, too. You're both thinking about your daughter. You, how you miss the life that was stolen from her, and him, how much he enjoyed raping her and taking it away from her and her family.
Slashdot Mirror
Snowden (the one who has yet to be caught in a lie)
You mean other than, just for starters, the lies he told his co-workers in order to get their system credentials? Or the fundamental lie that he told as he swore not to divulge classified information to places like China and Russia? He was lying on that most recent job from the moment he sat down, never mind when he started harvesting other people's passwords so he could gather all of that classified info he's spreading around.
Even the goons admit that Snowden did try those channels and it went directly into the round file, so no.
Citation needed. I've seen only one mention of a very luke-warm single email exchange that could even begin to be Snowden attempting any such thing. Cite your "admit" event, in detail.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof
You don't need extraordinary proof. It's the basic bones of the NSA's charter. They monitor overseas communications with an eye on collecting information that can help people in this country make informed security, military, and foreign policy decisions and actions. That's their entire reason for existing. It's why they're separate from the FBI.
Why did Obama promise not to spy on Merkel if that's what "we instructed our Congress to" do?
Because, as he's caught red handed doing on a regular basis about all sorts of things, he was once again lying. Of course our intelligence operations will continue to try to learn what other governments are up to, just like they do to us and everyone else.
And that is why using the Espionage Act to prosecute an American revealing illegal government actions to the American people is unconstitutional.
But it's perfectly reasonable as a vehicle to prosecute someone who provides sensitive information about overseas surveillance methods to people who pronounce themselves to be enemies of the country. Handing material to the Chinese, and then to the Russians, is bad enough. Spreading it around to make absolutely sure that Pakistan is helping the Taliban and Al Queda to make good, constructive use of it - exactly why he's a fool, and a traitor. All of his vague hand-waving and his holier-than-thou I'm-more-patriotic-than-you road show is laughable. Just ask his current host.
So, you're still pretending that it wasn't Richard Armitage that disclosed her name, and that the matter on which Libby was convicted had words in it that weren't shown to the public? What is your point? That you know things that nobody else, including hundreds of reporters who wrote about the case, knew? Please.
He escaped everything pre-Magna Carta style
No, he escaped doing time for disclosing Valerie Plame's name to the press because it turns out that someone else is the person who did it. Try to keep up.
Libby was charged with the disclosure
No, he wasn't. Where do you get this stuff?
No, whatever news source you got that idea from is completely incorrect. Karl Rove outed Valerie Plame for political retribution.
How's that Koolaide tasting? Richard Armitage not only was the guy the reporter got her name from, he sat down for interviews and said as much. Then, the reporter conceded as much. If you're going to revise history, pick a topic that isn't so well documented - you'll still look like an anonymous coward, but perhaps like a slightly less foolish one.
The last person to out an operative was Scooter Libby. His sentence was commuted so that he served no jail time.
Are you really that misinformed, or are you just trying to deceive?
... it was a guy in the State Department, not the White House, who told the reporter her name. And Armitage never got any grief during the witch hunt.
The person who disclosed Valerie Plame's name was Richard Armitage, not Libby. Libby's legal trouble revolved around how cooperative he was during one round of questioning, and his prosecution had nothing whatsoever to do with her name getting out. Because
Of course, Armitage was NOT the last person to "out" an operative. Just a few days ago, the White House stupidly disclosed the name of the top CIA official in Kabul. You know, a guy actually out dealing with dangerous ground, rather than occupying a desk in Virginia like Plame was.
Right, because only a Republican would refer to a facial tissue as a Kleenex, right? The political douche here is you. The GP's comment had nothing to do with ads or money, that's entirely you projecting your own twisted, vitriolic world view into the situation, coward.
Serious academic research has gone into that topic, and studies from the CDC contribute as well. Let's say that those studies' numbers are over estimating the number of times that self defense brandishment has turned away an assault, a home invasion, etc., by a factor of a couple hundred percent. So we'll chop their numbers by 75%. That still leaves well over 100,000 times a year. And you're right, we can't know about the rest of them because most people don't report such stuff. I didn't, on the occasion of a violent person trying to break down our back door in the middle of the night, but I guarantee that there would have been a violent outcome if he hadn't been run off. But that's just another anecdote that you don't have to worry about, since the formal studies wouldn't have it in their large numbers.
it's certainly an insurance issue
Not really. In the US, each driver has to carry liability insurance.
The people who are most vocal about gun ownership are also the most unhinged.
Classic lazy ad hominem. The usual method of "argument" resorted to by the intellectually lazy and craven nanny statist. An assertion without any evidence, pure empty rhetorical BS. Which you know, which is why you're posting as the coward you are.
The most unhinged people in gun conversations are the ones who have no idea what they're talking about, but do it anyway. Thanks for being today's example.
if the gun literally didn't work half the days out of the year, you would be saving 250 lives at the cost of 25, before you count accidents
Though you're (deliberately, of course) not counting the thousands and thousands of cases each year where defensive brandishment stops an attack. That number hugely exceeds the number of deaths by any method. I'd be more than happy to fetch out a handgun in such a situation, but would not be happy to find that it can't ultimately work because I've got gloves on, or my fingertips are dirty, or a battery is low, or it's too cold out, or I forgot my magic bracelet. Or it happens to be my wife's gun, since her's was handier than mine.
by willingly handing that token over to another person you are assumed to have taken some degree of legal responsibility for what they do with said vehicle
Be specific. What degree of responsibility do you have for the decisions made by another person who is driving your car? Are you talking about handing your keys to someone who tells you in advance that they intend to drive it into a crowd of people at SXSW? Or are you talking about someone who borrows your car to run to the grocery store, but who freaks out along the way and kills some pedestrians? What is your (the car owner's) responsibility for the deaths of those people in the second scenario? What is Ford's or Audi's responsibility for that person's unforeseen irrational act? Be specific.
The rest are shooting at human silhouettes, basically fantasizing about shooting people. It's really sick.
And here, I see another person who is fantasizing that other people want to be murderers. It's really sick.
If you can't draw a moral distinction between murder and self defense, then I sure you never vote and absolutely never serve on a jury.
If mankind or it's decendants ever have access to power like this it isn't going to be in the hands of individuals.
I hope you're right. Individuals can't even learn to use apostrophes or spell correctly, let alone manage upcoming energy/mass-conversion-capable smart phones.
Just like drones were first used for intelligence gathering, search and rescue and communications relays.
And still are. What's your point? Tools are tools.
Also note that we invaded a country because of the actions of a few people in that country.
No, we worked with that country's northern alliance to overthrow the defacto government of Afghanistan (at the time, essentially the Taliban) because they harbored and supported Al Queda before and after the attack, refusing to act against them. They wouldn't act against them because, of course, they (the retrograde religious thugocracy that was ruling most of Afghanistan through murder and terror) actually agreed with their world view, and were running Afghanistan in exactly the model that Al Queda said (says, still) that they think is appropriate for the entire world.
The then-government of Afghanistan supported their favorite in-country guest/client organization's careful efforts to use aircraft to kill thousands of people in the US not very long ago. So you don't have to imagine what would happen.
So your saying your idea of intellectualism is star trek? Your not as intellectual as you think you are. The old star trek was hardly intellectual, unless you are 5.
Yes, but at least the screenwriters for the original series knew the difference between "your" and "you're" - an important measure of intellect, don't you think?
Your screed also makes it apparent that you may have some emotional issues that could benefit from therapy. You might want to look into that.
Nah, but your post makes it clear that you may have a sociopathic lack of empathy, or perhaps a strange affection for people like the guy in question - you know, the guy who deliberately raped, tortured, shot, and then buried alive the woman he was using for entertainment. Your pleasure at preferring him alive but in a cage for decades is, Mr. Coward, a surer sign of someone who needs help and some introspection.
Stop projecting. I didn't say anything about "closure." I'm talking about whether or not someone who has made the conscious decision that other known to be innocent people do not deserve to live their lives, and who seeks out an opportunity to rape and torture them to death (and showing no remorse whatsoever, and every indication that he'd do it again) should be the recipient of any of your day's labor or mine, let alone that of the family of the person he decided to rape and torture and murder in front of the shallow grave he made her watch him dig. Keep your pop-psychobabble "closure" crap for people who like to ruminate about such things.
... if you process that in your head and arrive somehow at that being a good thing, then you're the one that needs some help. Because you've got a seriously bad case of mixed premises resulting in toxic moral relativism.
This is about whether or not to reward someone like that with continued life after they've decided that you, or your daughter or wife, don't themselves deserve the same. And that since she doesn't, he's going to end it after some recreational violent rape and torture before blowing big holes in her with a shotgun.
If you can't see that feeding and housing someone like that for decades and asking his victims - among others - to pay the ticket day in and day out
I always thought Tolkein (through Gandalf) put it quite well
Don't confuse Gandalf/Tolkien's admonishment about eagerness with ruling out that ultimate punishment when it's appropriate. Not to mention the concept is a little muddled anyway. Of course we can't "give life" to some innocent who was, for example, killed by a violent sexual predator. Our inability to do that sort of magic doesn't mean we should let cruel, predatory violent killers carry on with life, either. Such people have stated - often verbally, but always through their actions - that they consider any social contract regarding the value of other's lives to be out the window. He has said, "I get to decide on a whim - and without any consideration of how you live your life - if you live or die ... and when you die, if I get to rape you to death in the process before choosing my next victim."
Our inability to "give life" back to you after he's raped you to death isn't a sign that we're unable to realize he's waived his own claim on life. We don't have to be "eager," in Tolkein's parlance, to deal with such a person. But nor should we nurse him along in a cage for the next 50 years.
It's called justice. Imagine your (for example) daughter was raped and murdered by this kind of guy. Every morning, you wake up and he wakes up. Your daughter will never wake up, join you for breakfast, or carry on with life. You, on the other hand, get to go to work and spend a little of each day earning some money that will be taken from you and used to feed your daughter's rapist HIS breakfast, clean his teeth, put clothes on him, and the rest. You get to think every day about how the guy who shows no remorse for raping your daughter to death gets to re-adjust to a lousy but very alive new life. He can watch the TV shows she'll never see, read the books she'll never read, correspond with and get visits from family members and other things that your raped, dead daughter will never get to do. Your never to be born grandchildren won't get to do them, either.
A guy who raped her to death, on the other hand, shows every sign of being happy to do exactly the same to the next person that comes into reach, and has no moral qualms about considering the people around him to be fair game. His moral code is that other people's lives are disposable, and that he is entitled to end those lives with his deliberate, purposeful cruelty and violence while getting off on that sexually. Your raped, murdered daughter is just one of his amusements, and lacking physical restraint he'll just do it over an over again. Whole teams of people will spend their waking hours, on your dime, making sure he can't carry out his chosen hobby on the next person's daughter or wife or mother. He will be kept in that cage, alive when your dead sexual plaything of a daughter is not, for decades and decades.
Or, he can be put out of everyone's misery like the savage, deliberately evil, remorseless animal he actually is, and you don't get to think - as you drink your first cup of coffee every morning, missing your murdered daughter - that he's down the road in the facility cafeteria you're buying to feed him, having his morning coffee, too. You're both thinking about your daughter. You, how you miss the life that was stolen from her, and him, how much he enjoyed raping her and taking it away from her and her family.
That's why we have the death penalty.