We had a 17 year old kid banned for life from the US for sending a drunken e-mail to Obama. We've had people turned away from the US for making jokes that weren't to the taste of TSA agents.
As reasons go, this guy teaching people specifically to kill using hand to hand combat isn't any worse an excuse than those of people being turned away from the US.
People get turned away all the time, even when I went to Canada once I was threatened with being turned away seemingly for no reason other than the customers officers in question were just complete cocks - I'd done absolutely nothing wrong, no criminal history, not there for work, just there for nothing more than a holiday and they felt like interrogating someone for 3 hours. They eventually just let me through but the fact is customs officers seem to be able to just weild this power randomly and at will whenever they want and for seemingly no valid reason at all.
This needs to be seen in context, the UK's border agency is under attack right now, it's being used as a political pawn in the run up to the olympics in a battle over whether the government's management of it is competent enough to support the influx we'll see at the Olympics. Had this happened at any other time I doubt very much it would have even made the news. People get this sort of treatment all the time in all countries, it really isn't newsworthy full stop - not even the reason they used.
It's worth keeping this in context - it's a US only decision now that European Courts have confirmed the contrary.
So even in the worst case, it just means no more tech companies in the US, which is pretty tragic all the same, but it's at least not world ending, and I suspect would be a pretty quick way of getting the US government to do something about this when it's such a vital component of the US economy.
"but why blame Microsoft? Have they been knowing for astroturfing here before?"
Yes, that's why people see them as the most likely culprit.
I'm actually pretty pro-Microsoft, I'm a big fan of C# and.NET, I like SQL Server, I like The Xbox 360, I even like the ribbon UI, but in the past we've seen a number of posts posted the second the article appears but paragraphs long implying they're pre-written defending Microsoft on a number of issues that are simply indefensible, and talking about Microsoft products in a way that only a marketing drone could, and by accounts that are brand new, and often never seen again afterwards.
This isn't to say it is Microsoft, perhaps there's a number of companies doing it, but the pattern is pretty clear - these sorts of user accounts are always used to attack Google, and defend Microsoft. Now we do know that Facebook has engaged in this - they did get caught red handed (Google/Bing for the original story) so it's possible it's actually them as they do have strong ties to Microsoft in both policy and financially due to Microsoft having sizable shares in Facebook.
Realistically though one has to question why, if it is Facebook, they would spend their own money to also defend Microsoft, unless as said it is more than one company playing this game. Of course, to throw a conspiracy theory out there it could be misdirection, it could be neither of these - it could be Apple and part of Steve Job's vow to destroy Android, but weighing the odds, Microsoft still seems the most likely culprit because again, would Apple really want to spin a positive image of Microsoft for the sake of misdirection?
Either way my view on Google issue in general is simple - there's a hell of a lot of astroturf out there about them, about how they're evil, how they invade privacy, and it's been put out there a lot, but despite this I find it hard to hate Google for the simple fact that whatever they have done, has never caused me any greif or problems in terms of unwanted advertising etc. Contrast this to Facebook, who broke the UK's data protection act and illegaly passed my data onto third party companies, or Microsoft who sold my MSN contact list information without my knowledge or acceptance to companies like Facebook/LinkedIn and for whatever Google has done, I've still to this day yet to see any negative consequence of that, and the same just can't be said for Microsoft and Facebook.
Whatever the case, to me it looks like money down the drain anyway, these shills nearly always end up as -1 troll, and no one on Slashdot ever seems to really agree with them, so ultimately whoever is spending this money on shills is pretty dumb, because they're throwing money away on nothing when it comes to paying for Slashdot posters, though their news campaigns are much more succesful - i.e. getting Florian Mueller listed as a source on the BBC, getting anti-Google stories that are outright FUD posted on Slashdot, The Register etc. Either way, if I was the manager in charge of this campaign I'd want to know why the fuck people were so openly aware of it on Slashdot, and what exactly I was paying for when the shill accounts are constantly just modded right down, it's a pretty amateurish job.
Congratulations on being part of the driving force in elevating shit staff well beyond their competence.
I've seen many many really bad staff in positions that they just aren't fit for, but have got where they have because they are expert blaggers.
It is thanks to people like you who do not properly call them out and just give them the job based no, not on their work experience, but what they claim is their work experience (which may or may not be any less of a lie than their qualifications).
If he's lied about his degree there's a pretty good chance he's lied about other aspects of his employment history. Where he says he left a company he may have been pushed out for being inept, where he says he did some project he may well not have. If he can't be truthful about his basic qualifications then why would you assume he can be truthful about his employment history?
The world is full of these wastes of space who manage to lie their way up the chain and depending on people excusing these lies is precisely how they do it.
I think it's a more prolonged and complex campaign than that, the reason I call it Russian occupied Georgian territory is because it's recognised as Georgian territory but there has been a long running campaign to turf out native Georgians who didn't want to separate, whilst simultaneously handing out Russian passports to South Ossetians who did want to separate so that Russia could increase it's prescence there under the justification it was protecting it's "citizens".
This is the fundamental problem, and I do agree Georgia has a problem with nationalism, and I completed agree he was bated into a trap, but I still sincerely believe that much of the troubles in South Ossetia are Russian manufactured problems to the extent Russia has strengthened the South Ossetian nationalists, and eliminated the opposition whilst basically telling them "Look, harass Georgia all you want, will back you up with our guns if they dare bite back". It's part of a bigger issue for Russia, because of course to the North of Georgia are a number of areas that want to separate from Russia, if these areas had neutral territory to the south this would be easier for them, but Russia stirs pro-Russian sentiment in separatist areas of Georgia to create a buffer zone making it harder for those areas of Russia to break away. Russia's problem is that if places like Chechnya do manage to break away, how many other parts of Russia will follow? It effectively comes down to avoiding further fragmentation of Russian territory beyond that that effectively occured with the break down of the USSR.
"Also, how do you know that it was filmed before 08/08/08, and not during the war?"
Because it was in the news well before the war. Russia even admitted it with their only defence being a claim it was above their territory, but radar mappings, and experts who were able to place the location of the footage from the video disagreed. It seems by Russian territory what Russia actually meant was Russian occupied Georgian territory. It seemed to mostly come down to the fact Russia didn't want the Georgians knowing much about Russian positions only a few months before the war started, and when Georgia had already vocally raised concerns about Russian military build up. I'm not usually one to jump to conclusions on this sort of thing, but that does all just seem a bit too convenient with the timing of events etc.
"We all recall how Georgian TV showed Russian tanks going through the tunnel and saying that it was filmed the evening before Georgian forces entered Tskhinvali, while in practice it was a day after (and U.S. grudgingly confirmed it from its satellite feeds)."
Agreed, I don't pretend that Georgia was sometimes just a bit too shit at the propaganda thing meaning they just embarass themselves. Certainly they aren't as good at it as the likes of Russia, the US etc. and hence make the same kind of braindead mistakes in their propaganda that the likes of Iran are famous for.
For what it's worth if you haven't seen the documentary I mentioned in my last post I'd recommend watching it if you can, I suspect it's the sort of documentary you'd find particularly interesting, and it had some quite amusing moments and actually gave a good background as to why Russia is pissed at the West (and quite reasonably so!). I was impressed by the people they'd actually managed to get interviews with and the frankness of them, you don't tend to find many documentaries where politicians etc. are quite that open and honest about how the world works. It talks about for example how Russia felt screwed by the West after they gave a lot of support to them post 9/11 then got fuck all back in return, and how Obama recognised there was major political stalemate with Putin on the missile defence issue and so basically went behind his back and made the deal with Medvedev. It's definetely one of the best documentaries on global politics I've seen and acts as an excellent background to this particular story.
I don't disagree to be quite honest with you. I think even outside the Americas, reaching into parts of Asia and the Middle East America plays the same game. To give Russia some credit it does at least stick to the immediate area around it's border for the most part, but it's most certainly happening.
Wow, way to re-write history, are you a Russian propagandist or something? The very link you posted points out the fact that it wasn't just a clear cut out of the blue assault on South Ossetia, but a response to months of attacks on Georgian territory from South Ossetia by not just separate weaponry but Russian weaponry - there is video showing the blatant shooting down of a Georgian UAV filming over Georgian territory by a MiG 29 for crying out loud, it's kind of hard to dispute that.
Read this section of the very link you posted to see how completely wrong your view on Georgia is:
"Same with Ukraine, it's just local clans fighting for influence, one than the other gaining more power and pushing their people as presidents. It has nothing to do with "evil Moscow hand"."
Seriously? Your lack of knowledge on this topic and the previous is astounding, it's like you've been watching Russia Today a little too much. The fact you use the term "local clans" gives the impression you're confusing the Ukraine with a country like Afghanistan which genuinely does have clans. This implies you don't even have the first clue about the nature of the Ukraine as a nation. It's a very modern country and referring to the people who backed the orange revolution as a "local clan" is equivalent to just writing off all those protesters in Egypt, Tunisia and so forth as a "local clan".
"Stop smoking whatever you are smoking and get your facts straight."
Might I suggest you watch the rather excellent BBC 4 part documentary series Putin, Russia, and the West here? -
It covers all of these episodes and is extremely impartial in that it interviews figures directly from Russia including Putin himself, people from the US such as Colin Powell, Georgian leaders, and Ukrainian leaders - it gives a good background to the events of the last 10 years surrounding Russia and the West straight from the horses mouths in every case. The Russian leadership admit from their very own mouths to some of the political games they played in this documentary so pretending there isn't some "Moscow hand" is comical - those interviews aren't some biased edits being shown out of context, they're pretty clear cut interview questions being answer in a pretty clear cut manner.
Perhaps when you're a bit more educated on the topic and aren't just spouting some shite you read on an extremely one sided blog somewhere or whatever you can come back and rejoin the conversation with something useful and a bit more objective to add?
Still, congratulations on the up mods, at least if nothing else you've proven that many moderators on Slashdot are for the most part as uneducated on topics such as global politics as you are. At very least in future could you please read the links you yourself cite as sources so that you can recognise the fact that your understanding of the situation is actually quite unobjective?
What makes you say all this? from my point of view the EU seems to come up with much saner laws than most individual member states.
Most states have signed up to ACTA for example yet the EU looks set to derail those signings. I suppose you can argue this infringes individual sovereignty but it's certainly not in a bad way - it implies the EU hasn't been corrupted by corporate interests to anywhere near the extent national governments have.
The same goes for things like consumer rights (mandatory 2 year warranties), data protection, privacy protection and so forth - they seem to be way ahead of any individual member state on all these things.
All governments come up with bad ideas but it doesn't meant they get implemented - this is no different, there seems to be no evidence this will actually go through or be the horror people here are suggesting rather than just some single-sign on for online based EU/government services across the EU. If it looks like ACTA can't even get passed in the EU I don't expect something as horrific as the UK's now scrapped ID card database which is what they're implying this will be to get through. People in the EU are just too effective at protesting these sorts of things, just as they were with ACTA.
It's exactly the same as has happened with Georgia and the Ukraine - when Georgia wanted to move towards the Western ideology, Russia invaded them during the 2008 Beijing games. When the Ukraine had it's Orange revolution and voted out the Russian puppet they then used subterfuge and electoral fiddling to push her democratically elected replacement out next election such that she's currently rotting in jail for politically motivated charges. Even during her leadership Russia was regularly cutting off fuel to the Ukraine claiming non-payment etc. punishing the country and her for daring to step outside their sphere of influence. Estonia has also suffered for daring to step away from Russian influence with a number of cyber attacks etc.
We must make a stand now, this is a return to the cold war - Russia is pushing it's influence West, starting with Georgia, Estonia, now the Ukraine, and now they want to remove Western protection from Poland so they can also try and subvert this country too.
This has nothing to do with trying to remove missile defence as you say, it is entirely about removing Western protection from ex-USSR states so that the USSR can manipulate them back into their influence by assassinating people, planting spies, fiddling elections, crippling critical infrastructure like fuel supplies, threatening with military strikes etc.
The best thing the West could've done is stood by Georgia and sent military forces to stand off against the Russians there and nip their expansionist goals in the bud, but we were too politically correct about it and now they're once again creeping further and further West.
This is exactly the issue in the UK, you have ignorant Londoners whinging about rural, when in reality rural in the UK is equivalent to suburbia in the US. Even countries like Norway and Sweden who have much smaller populations than us but just as much distance to cover have better broadband networks - the problem isn't that "rural" in the UK is cost prohibitive, it's that no one wants to spend the money when they can make more investing it in the markets etc.
Realistically BT should be forced to roll it out as part of the condition of being able to maintain a near monopoly in those areas just as the UK's Royal Mail is granted a monopoly on last mile deliveries on the condition they delivery equally to every address in the country. There really needs to be stronger obligations on utility companies in the UK in general regarding equal access and fair pricing as they've been taking the piss for far too long. The UK just isn't big enough or sparsely populated enough for cost viability to be a reasonable excuse.
Yes, I'll remember that argument as I'm sat here in my rural village next to a resevoir that's at 100% capacity and you come crawling because you want some of our water due to the fact those of you in cities like London are consuming more than you've accounted for in your resevoirs and you talk about bringing some from the North. Maybe if some of you moved more rural there'd be enough water to go around.
Don't be suprised when food goes up in cities too as farmers increase prices to pay for their rural broadband whilst the rest of us continue to get it cheap from our local farm shops.
More seriously though it's not even entirely about rural areas anyway. I know plenty of cities where the broadband support is spotty. Very little of the UK is truly rural and those that are get sympathy money from the EU. Most of what is deemed rural in the UK would simply be called suburbia in the US - the place where I live included.
There is a lot of sense to rolling broadband out to "rural" areas though because it means government services can go digital reducing tax burden on physical implementation, it means cities can exploit talent situated in rural areas via telecommuting etc. which in my field - software development, would be a pretty big boost as there are skill shortages in a number of technology/language combinations. Ultimately it's the sort of thing that would pay for itself in the long run, and quite possibly reduce tax needs for rural areas whilst increasing their economic productivity. Believe it or not, broadband isn't just about being able to download the latest movies faster.
We're all in the same country at the end of the day, and I don't really have a problem of some of the water from our full resevoirs being shipped south to parched London etc., nor do I have a problem with a greater portion of the transport budget for example being spent in London being a couple of orders of magnitude higher in some circumstances per head of population elsewhere, providing they're also willing to share when it comes to things like broadband. Divisive arguments like "Well I have my nice shiny broadband, I don't care if anyone else has it, I want the government to buy me a nice rainbow unicorn instead with the money" are frankly quite retarded, ignorant, and short sighted. They don't even make sense, by saying you don't want to pay to put broadband in rural areas you're effectively saying you'd rather tax payers have to keep funding brick and mortar buildings to carry on providing services in a manner that's inherently much more expensive.
Fortunately here in South Yorkshire we've rolled out our own fibre network anyway, it still has some way to go, but it's kicked BT into rolling their network out to match too meaning a pretty healthy fibre broadband market. Mostly it was Europe we had to thank for the funding for this though, rather than Westminster.
I agree some European countries are worse than others (i.e. Italy and France) but others are far better (i.e. most of them that aren't Italy/France/Greece) - this is in large part due to a healthy democracy in these countries, i.e. Germany's where politicians are forced to accept the majority will of the people and build coalitions representative of that view, rather than build a one party government that only represents say 30% of the population, screwing the other 70% over.
British transparency maybe a great concept, but it's not helping us in itself is it? even with all these exposures we still have lobbyist led policy. The transparency is useless without the increased accountability to hold those who are corrupt to account that much of European politics offers.
"Nor do you need an European Parliament, and Commission, to decide laws affecting each country."
That's because it's not just about free trade, but utilising Europe's combined resources to make Europe more prosperous as a whole - bringing the poorer Eastern European nations up to the standards of Western Europe and also making sure Europeans share some bare minimum sets of rights. This in itself has an effect on free trade though, as free trade isn't a good thing if one country in the free trade group has no laws on slave Labour and so can jack all the manufacturing business from the others.
"VAT is still all over the place in each country for example"
What do you mean all over the place? there are restrictions on how high and high low it can be so it's only "all over the place" within a fairly narrow boundary of values. I'm not really sure what you're arguing for either, on one hand you seem to think it's bad Europe takes power away from individual nations, yet here you seem to also think it's bad that countries have the freedom to at least change VAT to some extent? It's like you're contradicting your own argument for the sake of having a pop at the EU.
"Many eurosceptics want trade and integration with the rest of Europe"
They don't want integration, they just want to be able to exploit it where it suits them, and ignore it when it doesn't. The problem is that's not a sound basis for a two way relationship and ultimately most Eurosceptic viewpoints tend to boil down to outright xenophobia. UKIP comes up with some good ideas, but the more you watch them, the more you read their policies, the more you realise they're really no that much different to the BNP, they're just only slightly less overtly racist but are certainly at least just as fascist. Ironically they're also the ones who have been most guilty of corruption in terms of stealing expenses and so forth.
Some of the UK's Tories are less xenophobic, but their intentions are no more moral, their arguments come down to the fact they're just demanding more power for themselves, not for a care for the country and the people in it - it's no suprise there is a strong correlation between the Tories that are anti-EU and the Tories that support the undemocratic first past the post system that gives parties like the Tories and Labour grossly more power than the electorate voted them to have. The number of eurosceptics whose position is genuinely based on rationality and a care for the British population rather than a lust for greater power or irrational xenophobia is probably less than 10 out of 650 MPs.
Whilst the European Parliament and Commission is without a doubt nowhere near perfect and has many problems, I find it rather odd when Eurosceptics, complain about corruption as a reason for wanting to get out. Britain is after all the country that has for the last few years seen scandal after scandal after scandal, and not just small ones - we're referring to those that hit right at the heart of democracy, whether it's expenses, peerages for sale, cash for votes, or phone hacking at every level of British society, to Jeremy Hunt not fulfilling his legal obligation to be impartial. There's a good reason Murdoch is himself a Eurosceptic and pushes that agenda in his British media - because he recognises that it's the biggest threat to his immensly corrupt stranglehold on the British establishment.
Europe may well be corrupt, but compared to our government? It's still far better.
That was my first thought but to be fair I guess these things do have a habit of affecting each other - US software patent law is certainly having repercussions in Europe for example.
I guess the point is that if people in Europe are doing things the DMCA would not allow Americans to do, perhaps even creating a software industry around that then it does put strain on the viability of continued enforcement of the DMCA.
I haven't bothered responding to the rest as you're still simply avoiding the facts (i.e. implying the A10 video was released by the US military of their own free will when in fact it was released by The Sun newspaper forcing their hand) etc. But on the following:
"As for sources, you can look to the IBC (Iraqi body count) group, WHO, the leaked documents by Wikileaks (Iraqi War logs), the IRAQI heath surveys, etc. IBC points to 7199 deaths of the approximately 100,000 civilian deaths being related to the US Military, with the vast majority occurring during the initial invasion (2003-2005), and quickly dropping off since then."
The Iraq Body Count data tells a very different story to that which you are telling, their 2003 - 2005 report alone details 37% of the 24,865 civilian casualties in that period being attributable to US led forces - that's 9200 right there (though presumably not all are specifically US - perhaps that's the number you gave) and there's another 5 years of war and 75,000 casualties to pull more from after that. You're also suggesting the 2003 - 2005 period was the initial invasion, this is false, the initial invasion was over by the middle of '03, what followed that was occupation. You're also wrong to suggest most casualties were during the initial invasion and then tapered off, this simply isn't true. Whilst the invasion caused a number of casualties, and this then dropped off in the months immediately after the invasion the toll actually continued to increase, peaking in 2006/2007 before falling again. Is this why you avoided posting sources previously? because you knew you'd have to lie about what they say to justify your nationalistic world view? Even if you were right though you've still completely missed the argument - that you're simply referring to direct kills, so say 7200 in 2003 - 2005 were direct kills straightly attributable to a bullet fired from a US gun, or a bomb dropped from a US plane, this ignores the fact that many thousands more died from disease due to destroyed sanitation systems from US action, from criminal elements who were able to act freely because the US dismantled Iraq's police and military, and from people who only became insurgents because they had family members killed by US troops or similar. The point people have been making to you in this thread is that even if indirectly, arguably all 100,000+ of those civilian casualties are in some way the result of US action - to give an analogy you can hopefully understand, you'd probably agree that if someone shot your father that it was murder, but surely you'd also agree that if someone cut your father's brakes in his car causing him to crash and die it'd still be murder - even if they weren't present at the time of death, even if that action didn't result in him dying for another month because it was only then that he next used his car. The fact is, even indirect death can fairly be attributed to US action.
But there's yet another non-sensical facet to your argument - you're making the implication that 3,000 civilian deaths in the world trade centre was a major tragedy that demanded war, yet saying 7,200 civilian deaths by US soldiers is no big deal? Why is war justified when 3,000 American civilians die, but military action by Iraqi's against Americans not justified when 10s of thousands of Iraqi civilians are killed by Americans?
"And it was the french who vetoed every single thing the rest of NATO wanted to push forward to try and stave off the need for war."
You say this like it's a bad thing. Seeing as said wars have been complete and utter failures history thus far dictates that it seems they were right to do precisely that. This is why the French have a better wins/losses ratio than you, because they don't get themselves involved in wars they know they can't win.
"If it was up to the french, we'd likely still be sending letters written with stern wording right up to today."
To who? Iraq? you know France went into Afghanistan with you? What exactly would be the problem wi
"We're there incidents of gross negligence? Sure. It happens in war, every war, by every side. The fact that there is evidence proves that it isn't being suppressed or silenced. Those responsible will be held accountable in a trial."
What a load of rubbish. The world has long joked about America's higher than average friendly fire rate, and the reason American soldiers are hated so much more than any others is because they do not care about civilians.
Those responsible are not held accountable, they're not even really investigated in cases of negligence - look at the reports of America's task force 343 calling down artillery strikes on civilian compounds they believed Taliban in despite being aware civilians were also likely present. Look at the Iraqi A10 friendly fire incident where the US wouldn't even hand over gun camera footage to the British for their inquiry to find out what went wrong, let alone prosecute the pilot. It doesn't stop there though - even cases where US soldiers have not simply been negligent, but have outright committed murder, the punishment has not even been close to good enough, with some even walking free, like the marine murder squad who killed an entire family in cold blood in Haditha.
"It does show your try intention when you are willing to believe the few cases of what the us did wrong, but you dismiss the work of hundreds of independent/impartial (as close as can be) investigations into the cause of civilian casualties that point out the vast number were not attributable to the us military."
It does show your true intention when you ignore the hundreds of independent/impartial investigations showing US soldiers killing civilians unnecessarily. See how that works? the difference is, one of us has the facts on our side, naming specific example incidents that disproves the others generalising claims about how perfect the US acts in a warzone and how perfectly it carries out justice where necessary, the other is just spouting statistics that may as well be made up for all we know because they don't even cite a source. Guess who is who?
"Do you believe that your country, no matter which, if put in the same war would have done better?"
Yes, I believe a number of countries would. Funnily enough though they're the same country that recognises that an even better option again is to just not engage in said war in the first place.
America is fucking amazing at blowing shit up, it's second to none at doing so, but it completely fails to grasp that winning a war requires much more than that. For what it's worth I believe Afghanistan was actually a good thing originally, and was a perfectly winnable war, but America completely fucked it up when they went into Iraq. They took their eye off the ball with Iraq, which strengthened Iran whilst simultaneously acted as a recruiting mechanism for the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Iran helped train and arm insurgents in Iraq, and that training and arming spilled over into Afghanistan when things in Iraq wound down, such that it now Afghanistan appears more unwinnable than ever. It's no suprise that in Iraq things wound down when the US started talking to militias rather than just trying to fight them and I'm sure Afghanistan will be no different with talks having started already to some extent - the problem is the US is so worn out from it all and has suffered such a dent to it's reputation it's no longer bargaining with the opposition from a position of strength, so once again it simply cannot win.
"Well, except the French because they would have unconditionally surrendered, of course."
It's funny when Americans say this, because they often forget the French have actually won more wars than the Americans, that America was dependent on France to win it's war of indepence, and that France has a better wins:losses ratio than America to boot. Don't let that upset your ultra-patriotic nationalist world view of god awesome America though.
It's worse than that, even if you're one of those xenophobic patriotic American types who doesn't give a fuck about the death of foreigners this was still far and away a tragedy because the death toll of US soldiers and civilians in Iraq/Afghanistan alone at least doubled (probably even trippled now?) the death toll of Americans stemming directly and indirectly from 9/11.
The knock on effects of the post 9/11 actions can't be deemed a success by any measure. A few fold more dead Americans, hundreds of thousands more dead foreign civilians, massively decreased US global political respect and influence, destabilisation/increase destabilisation of other territories - i.e. fall of Iraq led to greater Iranian confidence making them a far bigger problem than ever. More conflict between India/Pakistan than before due to increased terrorism in Pakistan spilling into India and so on.
Post 9/11 actions were just an outright failure all round.
"First collateral damage in a warfront is usually not considered murder."
Yes, except we have mountains of evidence for cases where the damage wasn't collateral, and was just outright murder, or at best, manslaughter due to gross incompetence.
"Also, 86% of the civilian casualties were from those same "innocent" civilians killing each other."
Yeah, and I hear 99% of stats are bullshit too.
"Considering that only 14% were actually from Americans -- in a warfront -- I would say the American military did an outstanding job of limiting civilian casualties."
Yes, that's why the civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan were so desperate for the Americans to stay, because they'd done such an awesome job of just that.
No seriously, American military forces are good at one thing - destruction. The fact they just can't handle hearts and minds operations and limit civilian casualties is why they've failed to achieve their objectives in most military actions they've engaged in since the second world war - from Korea, to Vietnam, to Lebanon, to Somalia, to Iraq, to Afghanistan amongst others.
Anglo-French air strikes in Libya are an example of doing a good job of limiting civilian casualties (regardless of whether you think the action itself was justified).
"Terrorist/Extremists planting pressure trigger bombs in the road, and along comes a civilian does not make the US Military responsible, sorry. Go troll and FUD elsewhere."
Well, it kind of does if the whole reason that IED is in the road in the first place is because they were trying to get Americans the fuck out of the country.
Another problem with that argument is that it assumes those billionaires are uniquely irreplaceable and got where they were through exploitation of their unique abilities, rather than the actual reality of the situation which is that they were either born, or otherwise received through no work of their own the pre-requisite wealth required to make more wealth for themselves, or that they were fortunate enough to be in the right place, at the right time.
The fact is, should these people dissapear there would be many millions willing and capable of replacing them, even for the reduced amounts of wealth available under higher taxation or more sensible levels of pay, however, as you say, these people wont go anywhere despite their threats because the fact is they simply know they're on to a good thing.
It depends how you mean that, if by govt you mean the country then yes, but if by govt you mean the people in govt then no, it'll lose them money because it means no more backhanded bribes and cushy jobs post-political career from the likes of Serco.
Unfortunately for the rest of us the latter definition takes precedent.
"Yes - just change to another, more expensive, ISP because a law is being introduced that makes your current ISP worse for no good technical reason."
Yeah, except those 5 ISPs in question are the ones whose networks are overburned, who have some of the most restrictive caps and throttling as a result, and who aren't cheaper anyway.
"When a bad law is introduced the correct response is to fight it, not to skirt around it. If you do that you are willingly giving up your rights. We are racing towards only having access to a subset of the internet in the UK and the lack of dissent is staggering."
Because those technically inept are the ones who don't care and even support the law, and those who aren't technically inept realise it's trivial to skirt round these laws anyway. As we have an unaccountable electoral system then how do you propose you fight this law other than bypassing it and hence highlighting it's inneffectiveness which is a form of fighting it anyway?
Politicians in the UK play their own game, they don't care what the electorate think, they haven't had to for a long long time, so the best solution is to just let them get on and play their game, whilst we continue to ignore them and play ours. Only when they finally realise people aren't playing their game will they recognise that if they want people to play their game, the rules have to change. It's silly to even vote in the current system, that merely gives them a false claim to legitimacy, better to bring down the voting turnout stats by not voting so that they can't even pretend they have any kind of legitimacy for their little game anymore.
Yeah but this is Apple, and as with everything Apple does it's their innovation and has never been done before. It's also important we all know about it.
In another 2 years I guarantee you Apple will be renowned as the company that invented the workplace caffeteria, it'll have patents on it, and it'll be suing for and extracting royalties out of every other corporation that copies this great innovation of theirs.
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We had a 17 year old kid banned for life from the US for sending a drunken e-mail to Obama. We've had people turned away from the US for making jokes that weren't to the taste of TSA agents.
As reasons go, this guy teaching people specifically to kill using hand to hand combat isn't any worse an excuse than those of people being turned away from the US.
People get turned away all the time, even when I went to Canada once I was threatened with being turned away seemingly for no reason other than the customers officers in question were just complete cocks - I'd done absolutely nothing wrong, no criminal history, not there for work, just there for nothing more than a holiday and they felt like interrogating someone for 3 hours. They eventually just let me through but the fact is customs officers seem to be able to just weild this power randomly and at will whenever they want and for seemingly no valid reason at all.
This needs to be seen in context, the UK's border agency is under attack right now, it's being used as a political pawn in the run up to the olympics in a battle over whether the government's management of it is competent enough to support the influx we'll see at the Olympics. Had this happened at any other time I doubt very much it would have even made the news. People get this sort of treatment all the time in all countries, it really isn't newsworthy full stop - not even the reason they used.
It's worth keeping this in context - it's a US only decision now that European Courts have confirmed the contrary.
So even in the worst case, it just means no more tech companies in the US, which is pretty tragic all the same, but it's at least not world ending, and I suspect would be a pretty quick way of getting the US government to do something about this when it's such a vital component of the US economy.
"but why blame Microsoft? Have they been knowing for astroturfing here before?"
Yes, that's why people see them as the most likely culprit.
I'm actually pretty pro-Microsoft, I'm a big fan of C# and .NET, I like SQL Server, I like The Xbox 360, I even like the ribbon UI, but in the past we've seen a number of posts posted the second the article appears but paragraphs long implying they're pre-written defending Microsoft on a number of issues that are simply indefensible, and talking about Microsoft products in a way that only a marketing drone could, and by accounts that are brand new, and often never seen again afterwards.
This isn't to say it is Microsoft, perhaps there's a number of companies doing it, but the pattern is pretty clear - these sorts of user accounts are always used to attack Google, and defend Microsoft. Now we do know that Facebook has engaged in this - they did get caught red handed (Google/Bing for the original story) so it's possible it's actually them as they do have strong ties to Microsoft in both policy and financially due to Microsoft having sizable shares in Facebook.
Realistically though one has to question why, if it is Facebook, they would spend their own money to also defend Microsoft, unless as said it is more than one company playing this game. Of course, to throw a conspiracy theory out there it could be misdirection, it could be neither of these - it could be Apple and part of Steve Job's vow to destroy Android, but weighing the odds, Microsoft still seems the most likely culprit because again, would Apple really want to spin a positive image of Microsoft for the sake of misdirection?
Either way my view on Google issue in general is simple - there's a hell of a lot of astroturf out there about them, about how they're evil, how they invade privacy, and it's been put out there a lot, but despite this I find it hard to hate Google for the simple fact that whatever they have done, has never caused me any greif or problems in terms of unwanted advertising etc. Contrast this to Facebook, who broke the UK's data protection act and illegaly passed my data onto third party companies, or Microsoft who sold my MSN contact list information without my knowledge or acceptance to companies like Facebook/LinkedIn and for whatever Google has done, I've still to this day yet to see any negative consequence of that, and the same just can't be said for Microsoft and Facebook.
Whatever the case, to me it looks like money down the drain anyway, these shills nearly always end up as -1 troll, and no one on Slashdot ever seems to really agree with them, so ultimately whoever is spending this money on shills is pretty dumb, because they're throwing money away on nothing when it comes to paying for Slashdot posters, though their news campaigns are much more succesful - i.e. getting Florian Mueller listed as a source on the BBC, getting anti-Google stories that are outright FUD posted on Slashdot, The Register etc. Either way, if I was the manager in charge of this campaign I'd want to know why the fuck people were so openly aware of it on Slashdot, and what exactly I was paying for when the shill accounts are constantly just modded right down, it's a pretty amateurish job.
Congratulations on being part of the driving force in elevating shit staff well beyond their competence.
I've seen many many really bad staff in positions that they just aren't fit for, but have got where they have because they are expert blaggers.
It is thanks to people like you who do not properly call them out and just give them the job based no, not on their work experience, but what they claim is their work experience (which may or may not be any less of a lie than their qualifications).
If he's lied about his degree there's a pretty good chance he's lied about other aspects of his employment history. Where he says he left a company he may have been pushed out for being inept, where he says he did some project he may well not have. If he can't be truthful about his basic qualifications then why would you assume he can be truthful about his employment history?
The world is full of these wastes of space who manage to lie their way up the chain and depending on people excusing these lies is precisely how they do it.
I think it's a more prolonged and complex campaign than that, the reason I call it Russian occupied Georgian territory is because it's recognised as Georgian territory but there has been a long running campaign to turf out native Georgians who didn't want to separate, whilst simultaneously handing out Russian passports to South Ossetians who did want to separate so that Russia could increase it's prescence there under the justification it was protecting it's "citizens".
This is the fundamental problem, and I do agree Georgia has a problem with nationalism, and I completed agree he was bated into a trap, but I still sincerely believe that much of the troubles in South Ossetia are Russian manufactured problems to the extent Russia has strengthened the South Ossetian nationalists, and eliminated the opposition whilst basically telling them "Look, harass Georgia all you want, will back you up with our guns if they dare bite back". It's part of a bigger issue for Russia, because of course to the North of Georgia are a number of areas that want to separate from Russia, if these areas had neutral territory to the south this would be easier for them, but Russia stirs pro-Russian sentiment in separatist areas of Georgia to create a buffer zone making it harder for those areas of Russia to break away. Russia's problem is that if places like Chechnya do manage to break away, how many other parts of Russia will follow? It effectively comes down to avoiding further fragmentation of Russian territory beyond that that effectively occured with the break down of the USSR.
"Can you link to said video?"
Here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U49n1JuWAmc
"Also, how do you know that it was filmed before 08/08/08, and not during the war?"
Because it was in the news well before the war. Russia even admitted it with their only defence being a claim it was above their territory, but radar mappings, and experts who were able to place the location of the footage from the video disagreed. It seems by Russian territory what Russia actually meant was Russian occupied Georgian territory. It seemed to mostly come down to the fact Russia didn't want the Georgians knowing much about Russian positions only a few months before the war started, and when Georgia had already vocally raised concerns about Russian military build up. I'm not usually one to jump to conclusions on this sort of thing, but that does all just seem a bit too convenient with the timing of events etc.
"We all recall how Georgian TV showed Russian tanks going through the tunnel and saying that it was filmed the evening before Georgian forces entered Tskhinvali, while in practice it was a day after (and U.S. grudgingly confirmed it from its satellite feeds)."
Agreed, I don't pretend that Georgia was sometimes just a bit too shit at the propaganda thing meaning they just embarass themselves. Certainly they aren't as good at it as the likes of Russia, the US etc. and hence make the same kind of braindead mistakes in their propaganda that the likes of Iran are famous for.
For what it's worth if you haven't seen the documentary I mentioned in my last post I'd recommend watching it if you can, I suspect it's the sort of documentary you'd find particularly interesting, and it had some quite amusing moments and actually gave a good background as to why Russia is pissed at the West (and quite reasonably so!). I was impressed by the people they'd actually managed to get interviews with and the frankness of them, you don't tend to find many documentaries where politicians etc. are quite that open and honest about how the world works. It talks about for example how Russia felt screwed by the West after they gave a lot of support to them post 9/11 then got fuck all back in return, and how Obama recognised there was major political stalemate with Putin on the missile defence issue and so basically went behind his back and made the deal with Medvedev. It's definetely one of the best documentaries on global politics I've seen and acts as an excellent background to this particular story.
I don't disagree to be quite honest with you. I think even outside the Americas, reaching into parts of Asia and the Middle East America plays the same game. To give Russia some credit it does at least stick to the immediate area around it's border for the most part, but it's most certainly happening.
Wow, way to re-write history, are you a Russian propagandist or something? The very link you posted points out the fact that it wasn't just a clear cut out of the blue assault on South Ossetia, but a response to months of attacks on Georgian territory from South Ossetia by not just separate weaponry but Russian weaponry - there is video showing the blatant shooting down of a Georgian UAV filming over Georgian territory by a MiG 29 for crying out loud, it's kind of hard to dispute that.
Read this section of the very link you posted to see how completely wrong your view on Georgia is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_South_Ossetia_war#Pre-war_clashes
"Same with Ukraine, it's just local clans fighting for influence, one than the other gaining more power and pushing their people as presidents. It has nothing to do with "evil Moscow hand"."
Seriously? Your lack of knowledge on this topic and the previous is astounding, it's like you've been watching Russia Today a little too much. The fact you use the term "local clans" gives the impression you're confusing the Ukraine with a country like Afghanistan which genuinely does have clans. This implies you don't even have the first clue about the nature of the Ukraine as a nation. It's a very modern country and referring to the people who backed the orange revolution as a "local clan" is equivalent to just writing off all those protesters in Egypt, Tunisia and so forth as a "local clan".
"Stop smoking whatever you are smoking and get your facts straight."
Might I suggest you watch the rather excellent BBC 4 part documentary series Putin, Russia, and the West here? -
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01b434y/episodes/guide
It covers all of these episodes and is extremely impartial in that it interviews figures directly from Russia including Putin himself, people from the US such as Colin Powell, Georgian leaders, and Ukrainian leaders - it gives a good background to the events of the last 10 years surrounding Russia and the West straight from the horses mouths in every case. The Russian leadership admit from their very own mouths to some of the political games they played in this documentary so pretending there isn't some "Moscow hand" is comical - those interviews aren't some biased edits being shown out of context, they're pretty clear cut interview questions being answer in a pretty clear cut manner.
Perhaps when you're a bit more educated on the topic and aren't just spouting some shite you read on an extremely one sided blog somewhere or whatever you can come back and rejoin the conversation with something useful and a bit more objective to add?
Still, congratulations on the up mods, at least if nothing else you've proven that many moderators on Slashdot are for the most part as uneducated on topics such as global politics as you are. At very least in future could you please read the links you yourself cite as sources so that you can recognise the fact that your understanding of the situation is actually quite unobjective?
What makes you say all this? from my point of view the EU seems to come up with much saner laws than most individual member states.
Most states have signed up to ACTA for example yet the EU looks set to derail those signings. I suppose you can argue this infringes individual sovereignty but it's certainly not in a bad way - it implies the EU hasn't been corrupted by corporate interests to anywhere near the extent national governments have.
The same goes for things like consumer rights (mandatory 2 year warranties), data protection, privacy protection and so forth - they seem to be way ahead of any individual member state on all these things.
All governments come up with bad ideas but it doesn't meant they get implemented - this is no different, there seems to be no evidence this will actually go through or be the horror people here are suggesting rather than just some single-sign on for online based EU/government services across the EU. If it looks like ACTA can't even get passed in the EU I don't expect something as horrific as the UK's now scrapped ID card database which is what they're implying this will be to get through. People in the EU are just too effective at protesting these sorts of things, just as they were with ACTA.
Yep, this is precisely about USSR nostalgia.
It's exactly the same as has happened with Georgia and the Ukraine - when Georgia wanted to move towards the Western ideology, Russia invaded them during the 2008 Beijing games. When the Ukraine had it's Orange revolution and voted out the Russian puppet they then used subterfuge and electoral fiddling to push her democratically elected replacement out next election such that she's currently rotting in jail for politically motivated charges. Even during her leadership Russia was regularly cutting off fuel to the Ukraine claiming non-payment etc. punishing the country and her for daring to step outside their sphere of influence. Estonia has also suffered for daring to step away from Russian influence with a number of cyber attacks etc.
We must make a stand now, this is a return to the cold war - Russia is pushing it's influence West, starting with Georgia, Estonia, now the Ukraine, and now they want to remove Western protection from Poland so they can also try and subvert this country too.
This has nothing to do with trying to remove missile defence as you say, it is entirely about removing Western protection from ex-USSR states so that the USSR can manipulate them back into their influence by assassinating people, planting spies, fiddling elections, crippling critical infrastructure like fuel supplies, threatening with military strikes etc.
The best thing the West could've done is stood by Georgia and sent military forces to stand off against the Russians there and nip their expansionist goals in the bud, but we were too politically correct about it and now they're once again creeping further and further West.
This is exactly the issue in the UK, you have ignorant Londoners whinging about rural, when in reality rural in the UK is equivalent to suburbia in the US. Even countries like Norway and Sweden who have much smaller populations than us but just as much distance to cover have better broadband networks - the problem isn't that "rural" in the UK is cost prohibitive, it's that no one wants to spend the money when they can make more investing it in the markets etc.
Realistically BT should be forced to roll it out as part of the condition of being able to maintain a near monopoly in those areas just as the UK's Royal Mail is granted a monopoly on last mile deliveries on the condition they delivery equally to every address in the country. There really needs to be stronger obligations on utility companies in the UK in general regarding equal access and fair pricing as they've been taking the piss for far too long. The UK just isn't big enough or sparsely populated enough for cost viability to be a reasonable excuse.
Yes, I'll remember that argument as I'm sat here in my rural village next to a resevoir that's at 100% capacity and you come crawling because you want some of our water due to the fact those of you in cities like London are consuming more than you've accounted for in your resevoirs and you talk about bringing some from the North. Maybe if some of you moved more rural there'd be enough water to go around.
Don't be suprised when food goes up in cities too as farmers increase prices to pay for their rural broadband whilst the rest of us continue to get it cheap from our local farm shops.
More seriously though it's not even entirely about rural areas anyway. I know plenty of cities where the broadband support is spotty. Very little of the UK is truly rural and those that are get sympathy money from the EU. Most of what is deemed rural in the UK would simply be called suburbia in the US - the place where I live included.
There is a lot of sense to rolling broadband out to "rural" areas though because it means government services can go digital reducing tax burden on physical implementation, it means cities can exploit talent situated in rural areas via telecommuting etc. which in my field - software development, would be a pretty big boost as there are skill shortages in a number of technology/language combinations. Ultimately it's the sort of thing that would pay for itself in the long run, and quite possibly reduce tax needs for rural areas whilst increasing their economic productivity. Believe it or not, broadband isn't just about being able to download the latest movies faster.
We're all in the same country at the end of the day, and I don't really have a problem of some of the water from our full resevoirs being shipped south to parched London etc., nor do I have a problem with a greater portion of the transport budget for example being spent in London being a couple of orders of magnitude higher in some circumstances per head of population elsewhere, providing they're also willing to share when it comes to things like broadband. Divisive arguments like "Well I have my nice shiny broadband, I don't care if anyone else has it, I want the government to buy me a nice rainbow unicorn instead with the money" are frankly quite retarded, ignorant, and short sighted. They don't even make sense, by saying you don't want to pay to put broadband in rural areas you're effectively saying you'd rather tax payers have to keep funding brick and mortar buildings to carry on providing services in a manner that's inherently much more expensive.
Fortunately here in South Yorkshire we've rolled out our own fibre network anyway, it still has some way to go, but it's kicked BT into rolling their network out to match too meaning a pretty healthy fibre broadband market. Mostly it was Europe we had to thank for the funding for this though, rather than Westminster.
I agree some European countries are worse than others (i.e. Italy and France) but others are far better (i.e. most of them that aren't Italy/France/Greece) - this is in large part due to a healthy democracy in these countries, i.e. Germany's where politicians are forced to accept the majority will of the people and build coalitions representative of that view, rather than build a one party government that only represents say 30% of the population, screwing the other 70% over.
British transparency maybe a great concept, but it's not helping us in itself is it? even with all these exposures we still have lobbyist led policy. The transparency is useless without the increased accountability to hold those who are corrupt to account that much of European politics offers.
"Nor do you need an European Parliament, and Commission, to decide laws affecting each country."
That's because it's not just about free trade, but utilising Europe's combined resources to make Europe more prosperous as a whole - bringing the poorer Eastern European nations up to the standards of Western Europe and also making sure Europeans share some bare minimum sets of rights. This in itself has an effect on free trade though, as free trade isn't a good thing if one country in the free trade group has no laws on slave Labour and so can jack all the manufacturing business from the others.
"VAT is still all over the place in each country for example"
What do you mean all over the place? there are restrictions on how high and high low it can be so it's only "all over the place" within a fairly narrow boundary of values. I'm not really sure what you're arguing for either, on one hand you seem to think it's bad Europe takes power away from individual nations, yet here you seem to also think it's bad that countries have the freedom to at least change VAT to some extent? It's like you're contradicting your own argument for the sake of having a pop at the EU.
"Many eurosceptics want trade and integration with the rest of Europe"
They don't want integration, they just want to be able to exploit it where it suits them, and ignore it when it doesn't. The problem is that's not a sound basis for a two way relationship and ultimately most Eurosceptic viewpoints tend to boil down to outright xenophobia. UKIP comes up with some good ideas, but the more you watch them, the more you read their policies, the more you realise they're really no that much different to the BNP, they're just only slightly less overtly racist but are certainly at least just as fascist. Ironically they're also the ones who have been most guilty of corruption in terms of stealing expenses and so forth.
Some of the UK's Tories are less xenophobic, but their intentions are no more moral, their arguments come down to the fact they're just demanding more power for themselves, not for a care for the country and the people in it - it's no suprise there is a strong correlation between the Tories that are anti-EU and the Tories that support the undemocratic first past the post system that gives parties like the Tories and Labour grossly more power than the electorate voted them to have. The number of eurosceptics whose position is genuinely based on rationality and a care for the British population rather than a lust for greater power or irrational xenophobia is probably less than 10 out of 650 MPs.
Whilst the European Parliament and Commission is without a doubt nowhere near perfect and has many problems, I find it rather odd when Eurosceptics, complain about corruption as a reason for wanting to get out. Britain is after all the country that has for the last few years seen scandal after scandal after scandal, and not just small ones - we're referring to those that hit right at the heart of democracy, whether it's expenses, peerages for sale, cash for votes, or phone hacking at every level of British society, to Jeremy Hunt not fulfilling his legal obligation to be impartial. There's a good reason Murdoch is himself a Eurosceptic and pushes that agenda in his British media - because he recognises that it's the biggest threat to his immensly corrupt stranglehold on the British establishment.
Europe may well be corrupt, but compared to our government? It's still far better.
Yeah, cos that's what everyone of a globally used browser wants to see - American centric political issues blasted in their face.
The problem is if Mozilla does this where do they stop? start putting up alerts for every internet related political issue in all major countries?
It's not really the job of the browser to be a news source.
That was my first thought but to be fair I guess these things do have a habit of affecting each other - US software patent law is certainly having repercussions in Europe for example.
I guess the point is that if people in Europe are doing things the DMCA would not allow Americans to do, perhaps even creating a software industry around that then it does put strain on the viability of continued enforcement of the DMCA.
I haven't bothered responding to the rest as you're still simply avoiding the facts (i.e. implying the A10 video was released by the US military of their own free will when in fact it was released by The Sun newspaper forcing their hand) etc. But on the following:
"As for sources, you can look to the IBC (Iraqi body count) group, WHO, the leaked documents by Wikileaks (Iraqi War logs), the IRAQI heath surveys, etc. IBC points to 7199 deaths of the approximately 100,000 civilian deaths being related to the US Military, with the vast majority occurring during the initial invasion (2003-2005), and quickly dropping off since then."
The Iraq Body Count data tells a very different story to that which you are telling, their 2003 - 2005 report alone details 37% of the 24,865 civilian casualties in that period being attributable to US led forces - that's 9200 right there (though presumably not all are specifically US - perhaps that's the number you gave) and there's another 5 years of war and 75,000 casualties to pull more from after that. You're also suggesting the 2003 - 2005 period was the initial invasion, this is false, the initial invasion was over by the middle of '03, what followed that was occupation. You're also wrong to suggest most casualties were during the initial invasion and then tapered off, this simply isn't true. Whilst the invasion caused a number of casualties, and this then dropped off in the months immediately after the invasion the toll actually continued to increase, peaking in 2006/2007 before falling again. Is this why you avoided posting sources previously? because you knew you'd have to lie about what they say to justify your nationalistic world view? Even if you were right though you've still completely missed the argument - that you're simply referring to direct kills, so say 7200 in 2003 - 2005 were direct kills straightly attributable to a bullet fired from a US gun, or a bomb dropped from a US plane, this ignores the fact that many thousands more died from disease due to destroyed sanitation systems from US action, from criminal elements who were able to act freely because the US dismantled Iraq's police and military, and from people who only became insurgents because they had family members killed by US troops or similar. The point people have been making to you in this thread is that even if indirectly, arguably all 100,000+ of those civilian casualties are in some way the result of US action - to give an analogy you can hopefully understand, you'd probably agree that if someone shot your father that it was murder, but surely you'd also agree that if someone cut your father's brakes in his car causing him to crash and die it'd still be murder - even if they weren't present at the time of death, even if that action didn't result in him dying for another month because it was only then that he next used his car. The fact is, even indirect death can fairly be attributed to US action.
But there's yet another non-sensical facet to your argument - you're making the implication that 3,000 civilian deaths in the world trade centre was a major tragedy that demanded war, yet saying 7,200 civilian deaths by US soldiers is no big deal? Why is war justified when 3,000 American civilians die, but military action by Iraqi's against Americans not justified when 10s of thousands of Iraqi civilians are killed by Americans?
"And it was the french who vetoed every single thing the rest of NATO wanted to push forward to try and stave off the need for war."
You say this like it's a bad thing. Seeing as said wars have been complete and utter failures history thus far dictates that it seems they were right to do precisely that. This is why the French have a better wins/losses ratio than you, because they don't get themselves involved in wars they know they can't win.
"If it was up to the french, we'd likely still be sending letters written with stern wording right up to today."
To who? Iraq? you know France went into Afghanistan with you? What exactly would be the problem wi
"We're there incidents of gross negligence? Sure. It happens in war, every war, by every side. The fact that there is evidence proves that it isn't being suppressed or silenced. Those responsible will be held accountable in a trial."
What a load of rubbish. The world has long joked about America's higher than average friendly fire rate, and the reason American soldiers are hated so much more than any others is because they do not care about civilians.
Those responsible are not held accountable, they're not even really investigated in cases of negligence - look at the reports of America's task force 343 calling down artillery strikes on civilian compounds they believed Taliban in despite being aware civilians were also likely present. Look at the Iraqi A10 friendly fire incident where the US wouldn't even hand over gun camera footage to the British for their inquiry to find out what went wrong, let alone prosecute the pilot. It doesn't stop there though - even cases where US soldiers have not simply been negligent, but have outright committed murder, the punishment has not even been close to good enough, with some even walking free, like the marine murder squad who killed an entire family in cold blood in Haditha.
"It does show your try intention when you are willing to believe the few cases of what the us did wrong, but you dismiss the work of hundreds of independent/impartial (as close as can be) investigations into the cause of civilian casualties that point out the vast number were not attributable to the us military."
It does show your true intention when you ignore the hundreds of independent/impartial investigations showing US soldiers killing civilians unnecessarily. See how that works? the difference is, one of us has the facts on our side, naming specific example incidents that disproves the others generalising claims about how perfect the US acts in a warzone and how perfectly it carries out justice where necessary, the other is just spouting statistics that may as well be made up for all we know because they don't even cite a source. Guess who is who?
"Do you believe that your country, no matter which, if put in the same war would have done better?"
Yes, I believe a number of countries would. Funnily enough though they're the same country that recognises that an even better option again is to just not engage in said war in the first place.
America is fucking amazing at blowing shit up, it's second to none at doing so, but it completely fails to grasp that winning a war requires much more than that. For what it's worth I believe Afghanistan was actually a good thing originally, and was a perfectly winnable war, but America completely fucked it up when they went into Iraq. They took their eye off the ball with Iraq, which strengthened Iran whilst simultaneously acted as a recruiting mechanism for the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Iran helped train and arm insurgents in Iraq, and that training and arming spilled over into Afghanistan when things in Iraq wound down, such that it now Afghanistan appears more unwinnable than ever. It's no suprise that in Iraq things wound down when the US started talking to militias rather than just trying to fight them and I'm sure Afghanistan will be no different with talks having started already to some extent - the problem is the US is so worn out from it all and has suffered such a dent to it's reputation it's no longer bargaining with the opposition from a position of strength, so once again it simply cannot win.
"Well, except the French because they would have unconditionally surrendered, of course."
It's funny when Americans say this, because they often forget the French have actually won more wars than the Americans, that America was dependent on France to win it's war of indepence, and that France has a better wins:losses ratio than America to boot. Don't let that upset your ultra-patriotic nationalist world view of god awesome America though.
It's worse than that, even if you're one of those xenophobic patriotic American types who doesn't give a fuck about the death of foreigners this was still far and away a tragedy because the death toll of US soldiers and civilians in Iraq/Afghanistan alone at least doubled (probably even trippled now?) the death toll of Americans stemming directly and indirectly from 9/11.
The knock on effects of the post 9/11 actions can't be deemed a success by any measure. A few fold more dead Americans, hundreds of thousands more dead foreign civilians, massively decreased US global political respect and influence, destabilisation/increase destabilisation of other territories - i.e. fall of Iraq led to greater Iranian confidence making them a far bigger problem than ever. More conflict between India/Pakistan than before due to increased terrorism in Pakistan spilling into India and so on.
Post 9/11 actions were just an outright failure all round.
"First collateral damage in a warfront is usually not considered murder."
Yes, except we have mountains of evidence for cases where the damage wasn't collateral, and was just outright murder, or at best, manslaughter due to gross incompetence.
"Also, 86% of the civilian casualties were from those same "innocent" civilians killing each other."
Yeah, and I hear 99% of stats are bullshit too.
"Considering that only 14% were actually from Americans -- in a warfront -- I would say the American military did an outstanding job of limiting civilian casualties."
Yes, that's why the civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan were so desperate for the Americans to stay, because they'd done such an awesome job of just that.
No seriously, American military forces are good at one thing - destruction. The fact they just can't handle hearts and minds operations and limit civilian casualties is why they've failed to achieve their objectives in most military actions they've engaged in since the second world war - from Korea, to Vietnam, to Lebanon, to Somalia, to Iraq, to Afghanistan amongst others.
Anglo-French air strikes in Libya are an example of doing a good job of limiting civilian casualties (regardless of whether you think the action itself was justified).
"Terrorist/Extremists planting pressure trigger bombs in the road, and along comes a civilian does not make the US Military responsible, sorry. Go troll and FUD elsewhere."
Well, it kind of does if the whole reason that IED is in the road in the first place is because they were trying to get Americans the fuck out of the country.
Another problem with that argument is that it assumes those billionaires are uniquely irreplaceable and got where they were through exploitation of their unique abilities, rather than the actual reality of the situation which is that they were either born, or otherwise received through no work of their own the pre-requisite wealth required to make more wealth for themselves, or that they were fortunate enough to be in the right place, at the right time.
The fact is, should these people dissapear there would be many millions willing and capable of replacing them, even for the reduced amounts of wealth available under higher taxation or more sensible levels of pay, however, as you say, these people wont go anywhere despite their threats because the fact is they simply know they're on to a good thing.
"It could even save money for the govt!"
It depends how you mean that, if by govt you mean the country then yes, but if by govt you mean the people in govt then no, it'll lose them money because it means no more backhanded bribes and cushy jobs post-political career from the likes of Serco.
Unfortunately for the rest of us the latter definition takes precedent.
"Yes - just change to another, more expensive, ISP because a law is being introduced that makes your current ISP worse for no good technical reason."
Yeah, except those 5 ISPs in question are the ones whose networks are overburned, who have some of the most restrictive caps and throttling as a result, and who aren't cheaper anyway.
"When a bad law is introduced the correct response is to fight it, not to skirt around it. If you do that you are willingly giving up your rights. We are racing towards only having access to a subset of the internet in the UK and the lack of dissent is staggering."
Because those technically inept are the ones who don't care and even support the law, and those who aren't technically inept realise it's trivial to skirt round these laws anyway. As we have an unaccountable electoral system then how do you propose you fight this law other than bypassing it and hence highlighting it's inneffectiveness which is a form of fighting it anyway?
Politicians in the UK play their own game, they don't care what the electorate think, they haven't had to for a long long time, so the best solution is to just let them get on and play their game, whilst we continue to ignore them and play ours. Only when they finally realise people aren't playing their game will they recognise that if they want people to play their game, the rules have to change. It's silly to even vote in the current system, that merely gives them a false claim to legitimacy, better to bring down the voting turnout stats by not voting so that they can't even pretend they have any kind of legitimacy for their little game anymore.
"This sort of poorly-though through stunt was also pulled by the Tories in 1997 when the railways were flogged off- that turned out well."
So well that the 21minute train section of my commute this morning took 2hrs.
Yeah but this is Apple, and as with everything Apple does it's their innovation and has never been done before. It's also important we all know about it.
In another 2 years I guarantee you Apple will be renowned as the company that invented the workplace caffeteria, it'll have patents on it, and it'll be suing for and extracting royalties out of every other corporation that copies this great innovation of theirs.